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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75412 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber’s Note
+  Italic text displayed as: _italic_
+
+
+
+
+  THE FATAL THREE
+
+  A Novel
+
+  BY THE AUTHOR OF
+
+  “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
+  “ISHMAEL,” “MOHAWKS,”
+  ETC.
+
+
+  IN THREE VOLUMES
+  VOL. III.
+
+
+  LONDON
+  SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
+  STATIONERS’ HALL COURT
+
+  [_All rights reserved_]
+
+
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. III.
+
+Book the Third.
+
+ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.
+
+
+  CHAP.                                                             PAGE
+
+     I. A WRECKED LIFE                                                 3
+
+    II. IN THE MORNING OF LIFE                                        20
+
+   III. THE RIFT IN THE LUTE                                          44
+
+    IV. DARKNESS                                                      62
+
+     V. THE GRAVE ON THE HILL                                         82
+
+    VI. PAMELA CHANGES HER MIND                                       95
+
+   VII. AS THE SANDS RUN DOWN                                        117
+
+  VIII. “HOW SHOULD I GREET THEE?”                                   152
+
+    IX. LITERA SCRIPTA MANET                                         188
+
+     X. MARKED BY FATE                                               217
+
+    XI. LIKE A TALE THAT IS TOLD                                     232
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD.
+
+ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+A WRECKED LIFE.
+
+
+Monsieur Leroy was interested in his visitor, and in nowise hastened
+her departure. He led her through the garden of the asylum, anxious
+that she should see that sad life of the shattered mind in its milder
+aspect. The quieter patients were allowed to amuse themselves at
+liberty in the garden, and here Mildred saw the woman who fancied
+herself the Blessed Virgin, and who sat apart from the rest, with a
+crown of withered anemones upon her iron-gray locks.
+
+The doctor stopped to talk to her in the Niçois language, describing
+her hallucination to Mildred in his broken English between whiles.
+
+“She is one of my oldest cases, and mild as a lamb,” he said. “She is
+what superstition had made her. She might have been a happy wife as a
+mother but for that fatal influence. Ah, here comes a lady of a very
+different temper, and not half so easy a subject!”
+
+A woman of about sixty advanced towards them along the dusty gravel
+path between the trampled grass and the dust-whitened orange-trees, a
+woman who carried her head and shoulders with the pride of an empress,
+and who looked about her with defiant eyes, fanning herself with a
+large Japanese paper fan as she came along, a fan of vivid scarlet and
+cheap gilt paper, which seemed to intensify the brightness of her great
+black eyes, as she waved it to and fro before her haggard face: a woman
+who must once have been beautiful.
+
+“Would you believe that lady was prima donna at La Scala nearly forty
+years ago?” asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood beside the path,
+watching that strange figure, with its theatrical dignity.
+
+The massive plaits of grizzled black hair were wound, coronet-wise,
+about the woman’s head. Her rusty black velvet gown trailed in the
+dust, threadbare long ago, almost in tatters to-day: a gown of a
+strange fashion, which had been worn upon the stage—Leonora’s or
+Lucrezia’s gown, perhaps, once upon a time.
+
+At sight of the physician she stopped suddenly, and made him a sweeping
+curtsy, with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre.
+
+“Do you know if they open this month at the Scala?” she asked, in
+Italian.
+
+“Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing of their doings.”
+
+“They might have begun their season with the new year,” she said, with
+a dictatorial air. “They always did in my time. Of course you know that
+they have tried to engage me again. They wanted me for Amina, but I had
+to remind them that I am not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall
+be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my own ground. No one can touch
+me there.”
+
+She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s first scena. The once glorious
+voice was rough and discordant, but there was power in the tones even
+yet, and real dramatic fire in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly
+while she was singing she caught the expression of Mildred’s face
+watching her, and she stopped at a breath, and grasped the stranger by
+both hands with an excited air.
+
+“That moves you, does it not?” she exclaimed. “You have a soul for
+music. I can see that in your face. I should like to know more of you.
+Come and see me whenever you like, and I will sing to you. The doctor
+lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is in a good humour.”
+
+“Say rather when you are reasonable, my good Maria,” said Monsieur
+Leroy, laying a fatherly hand upon her shoulder; “there are days when
+you are not to be trusted.”
+
+“I am to be trusted to-day. Let me come to your room and sing to her,”
+pointing to Mildred with her fan. “I like her face. She has the eyes
+and lips that console. Her husband is lucky to have such a wife. Let me
+sing to her. I want her to understand what kind of woman I am.”
+
+“Would it bore you too much to indulge her, madame?” asked the doctor
+in an undertone. “She is a strange creature, and it will wound her
+if you refuse. She does not often take a fancy to any one; but she
+frequently takes dislikes, and those are violent.”
+
+“I shall be very happy to hear her,” answered Mildred. “I am in no
+hurry to return to Nice.”
+
+The doctor led the way back to his house, the singer talking to Mildred
+with an excited air as they went, talking of the day when she was first
+soprano at Milan.
+
+“Everybody envied me my success,” she said. “There were those who
+said I owed everything to _him_, that he made my voice and my
+style. Lies, madame, black and bitter lies. I won all the prizes
+at the Conservatoire. He was one master among many. I owed him
+nothing—nothing—nothing!”
+
+She reiterated the word with acrid emphasis, and an angry furl of her
+fan.
+
+“Ah, now you are beginning the old strain!” said the doctor, with a
+good-humoured shrug of his shoulders. “If this goes on there shall be
+no piano for you to-day. I will have no grievances; grievances are the
+bane of social intercourse. If you come to my _salon_ it must be to
+sing, not to reopen old sores. We all have our wounds as well as you,
+signorina, but we keep them covered up.”
+
+“I am dumb,” said the singer meekly.
+
+They went into the doctor’s private sitting-room. Three sides of the
+room were lined with books, chiefly of a professional or scientific
+character. A cottage piano stood in a recess by the fireplace. The
+woman flew to the instrument with a rapturous eagerness, and began to
+play. Her hands were faintly tremulous with excitement, but her touch
+was that of a master as she played the symphony to the finale of “La
+Cenerentola.”
+
+“Has she no piano in her own room?” asked Mildred in a whisper.
+
+“No, poor soul. She is one of our pauper patients. The State provides
+for her, but it does not give her a private room or a piano. I let her
+come here two or three times a week for an hour or so, when she is
+reasonable.”
+
+Mildred wondered if it would be possible for her, as a stranger, to
+provide a room and a piano for this friendless enthusiast. She would
+have been glad out of her abundance to have lightened a suffering
+sister’s fate, and she determined to make the proposition to the doctor.
+
+The singer played snatches of familiar music—Rossini, Donizetti,
+Bellini—operatic airs which Mildred knew by heart. She wandered from
+one scena to another, and her voice, though it had lost its sweetness
+and sustaining power, was still brilliantly flexible. She sang with
+a rapturous unconsciousness of her audience, Mildred and the doctor
+sitting quietly at each side of the hearth, where a single pine log
+smouldered on the iron dogs above a heap of white ashes.
+
+Presently the music changed to a gayer, lighter strain, and she began
+an airy cavatina, all coquetry and grace. That joyous melody was
+curiously familiar to Mildred’s ear.
+
+“Where did I hear that music?” she said aloud. “It seems as if it were
+only the other day, and yet it is nearly two years since I was at the
+opera.”
+
+The singer left the cavatina unfinished, and wandered into another
+melody.
+
+“Ah, I know now!” exclaimed Mildred; “that is Paolo Castellani’s
+music!”
+
+The woman started up from the piano as if the name had wounded her.
+
+“Paolo Castellani!” she cried. “What do you know of Paolo Castellani?”
+
+Dr. Leroy went over to her, and laid his hand upon her shoulder heavily.
+
+“Now we are in for a scene,” he muttered to Mildred. “You have
+mentioned a most unlucky name.”
+
+“What has she to do with Signor Castellani?”
+
+“He was her cousin. He trained her for the stage, and she was the
+original in several of his operas. She was his slave, his creature, and
+lived only to please him. I suppose she expected him to marry her, poor
+soul; but he knew better than that. He contrived to fascinate a French
+girl, a consumptive, who was travelling in Italy for her health, with a
+wealthy father. He married the Frenchwoman; and I believe that marriage
+broke Maria’s heart.”
+
+The singer had seated herself at the piano again, and was playing
+with rapid and brilliant finger, running up and down the keys in wild
+excitement. Mildred and the physician were standing by the window,
+talking in lowered voices, unheeded by Maria Castellani.
+
+“Was it that event which wrecked her mind?” asked Mildred, deeply
+interested.
+
+“No, it was some years afterwards that her brain gave way. She had a
+brilliant career before her at the time of Castellani’s desertion;
+and she bore the blow with the courage of a Roman. So long as her
+voice lasted, and the public were constant to her, she contrived
+to bear up against that burning sense of wrong which has been the
+distinguishing note of her mind ever since she came here. But the
+first breath of failure froze her. She felt her voice decaying while
+she was comparatively a young woman. Her glass told her that she was
+losing her beauty, that she was beginning to look old and haggard.
+Her managers told her more. They gave her the cold shoulder, and put
+newer singers above her head. Then despair took hold of her; she became
+gloomy and irritable, difficult and capricious in her dealings with her
+fellow-artists; and then came the end, and she was brought here. She
+had saved no money. She had been reckless even beyond the habits of
+her profession. She was friendless. There was nobody interested in her
+fate—”
+
+“Not even Signor Castellani?”
+
+“Castellani—Paolo Castellani? _Pas si bête._ The man was a compound of
+selfishness and treachery. She was not likely to get pity from him. The
+very fact that he had used her badly made her loathsome to him. I doubt
+if he ever inquired what became of her. If any one had asked him about
+her, he would have said that she had dropped through—a worn-out voice,
+a faded beauty—_que voulez-vous_?”
+
+“She had no other friends—no ties?”
+
+“None. She was an orphan at twelve years old, without a son. Castellani
+paid for her education, and traded upon her talent. He trained her to
+sing in his own operas, and in that light, fanciful music she was at
+her best; though it is her delusion now that she excelled in the grand
+style. I believe he absorbed the greater part of her earnings, until
+they quarrelled. Some time after his marriage there was a kind of
+reconciliation between them. She appeared in a new opera—his last and
+worst. Her voice was going, his talent had began to fail. It was the
+beginning of the end.”
+
+“Has Signor Castellani’s son shown no interest in this poor creature’s
+fate?”
+
+“No; the son lives in England, I believe, for the most part. I doubt if
+he knows anything about Maria.”
+
+The singer had reverted to that familiar music. She sang the first
+part of an aria, a melody disguised with over-much fioritura, light,
+graceful, unmeaning.
+
+“That is in his last opera,” she said, rising from the piano, with a
+more rational air. “The opera was almost a failure; but I was applauded
+to the echo. His genius had forsaken him. Follies, follies, falsehoods,
+crimes. He could not be true to any one or anything. He was as false
+to his wife as he had been false to me, and to his proud young English
+signorina; ah, well! who can doubt that he lied to _her_?”
+
+She fell into a meditative mood, standing by the piano, touching a note
+now and then.
+
+“Young and handsome and rich. Would she have accepted degradation with
+open eyes? No, no, no. He lied to her as he had lied to me. He was made
+up of lies.”
+
+Her eyes grew troubled, and her lips worked convulsively. Again the
+doctor laid his strong broad hand upon her shoulder.
+
+“Come, Maria,” he said in Italian; “enough for to-day. Madame has been
+pleased with your singing.”
+
+“Yes, indeed, signora. You have a noble voice. I should be very glad if
+I could do anything to be of use to you; if I could contribute to your
+comfort in any way.”
+
+“O, Maria is happy enough with us, I hope,” said the doctor cheerily.
+“We are all fond of her when she is reasonable. But it is time she went
+to her dinner. _A rivederci, signora._”
+
+Maria accepted her dismissal with a good grace, saluted Mildred and
+the doctor with her stage curtsy, and withdrew. One side of Monsieur
+Leroy’s house opened into the garden, the other into a courtyard
+adjoining the high-road.
+
+“Poor soul! I should be so glad to pay for a piano and a private
+sitting-room for her, if I might be allowed to do so,” said Mildred,
+when the singer was gone.
+
+“You are too generous, madame; but I doubt if it would be good for
+her to accept your bounty. She enjoys the occasional use of my piano
+intensely. If she had one always at her command, she would give up
+her life to music, which exercises too strong an influence upon her
+disordered brain to be indulged in _ad libitum_. Nor would a private
+apartment be an advantage in her case. She is too much given to
+brooding over past griefs; and the society of her fellow-sufferers, the
+friction and movement of the public life, are good for her.”
+
+“What did she mean by her talk of an English girl—some story of
+wrong-doing? Was it all imaginary?”
+
+“I believe there was some scandal at Milan; some flirtation, or
+possibly an intrigue, between Castellani and one of his English pupils;
+but I never heard the details. Maria’s jealousy would be likely to
+exaggerate the circumstances; for I believe she adored her cousin to
+the last, long after she knew that he had never cared for her, except
+as an element in his success.”
+
+Mildred took leave of the doctor, after thanking him for his
+politeness. She left a handful of gold for the benefit of the poor
+patients, and left Dr. Leroy under the impression that she was one of
+the sweetest women he had ever met. Her pensive beauty, her low and
+musical voice, the clear and resolute purpose of every word and look,
+were in his mind indications of the perfection of womanhood.
+
+“It is not often that Nature achieves such excellence,” mused the
+doctor. “It is a pity that perfection should be short-lived; yet I
+cannot prognosticate length of years for this lady.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pamela’s spirits were decidedly improving. She talked all dinner-time,
+and gave a graphic description of her afternoon in the tennis-court
+behind the Cercle de la Méditerranée.
+
+“I am to see the club-house some morning before the members begin
+to arrive,” she said. “It is a perfectly charming club. There is a
+theatre, which serves as a ballroom on grand occasions. There is to be
+a dance next week; and Lady Lochinvar will chaperon me, if you don’t
+mind.”
+
+“I shall be most grateful to Lady Lochinvar, dear. Believe me, if I am
+a hermit, I don’t want to keep you in melancholy seclusion. I am very
+glad for you to have pleasant friends.”
+
+“Mrs. Murray is delightful. She begged me to call her Jessie. She is
+going to take me for a drive before lunch to-morrow, and we are to do
+some shopping in the afternoon. The shops here are simply lovely.”
+
+“Almost as nice as Brighton?”
+
+“Better. They have more _chic_; and I am told they are twice as dear.”
+
+“Was Mr. Stuart at the tennis-court?”
+
+“Yes, he plays there every afternoon when he is not at Monte Carlo.”
+
+“That does not sound like a very useful existence.”
+
+“Perhaps you will say _he_ is an adventurer,” exclaimed Pamela, with
+a flash of temper; and then repenting in a moment, she added: “I beg
+your pardon, aunt; but you are really wrong about Mr. Stuart. He looks
+after Lady Lochinvar’s estate. He is invaluable to her.”
+
+“But he cannot do much for the estate when he is playing tennis here or
+gambling at Monte Carlo.”
+
+“O, but he does. He answers no end of letters every morning. Lady
+Lochinvar says he is a most wonderful young man. He attends to her
+house accounts here. I am afraid she would be very extravagant if she
+were not well looked after. She has no idea of business. Mr. Stuart has
+even to manage her dressmakers.”
+
+“Then one may suppose he is really useful—even at Nice. Has he any
+means of his own, or is he entirely dependent on his aunt?”
+
+“O, he has an income of his own—a modest income, Mrs. Murray says,
+hardly enough for him to get along easily in a cavalry regiment,
+but quite enough for him as a civilian; and his aunt will leave him
+everything. His expectations are splendid.”
+
+“Well, Pamela, I will not call _him_ an adventurer, and I shall be
+pleased to make his acquaintance, if he will call upon me.”
+
+“He is dying to know you. May Mrs. Murray bring him to tea to-morrow
+afternoon?”
+
+“With pleasure.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IN THE MORNING OF LIFE.
+
+
+George Greswold succumbed to Fate. He had done all he could do in the
+way of resistance. He had appealed against his wife’s decision; he had
+set love against principle or prejudice, and principle, as Mildred
+understood it, had been too strong for love; so there was nothing left
+for the forsaken husband but submission. He went back to the home in
+which he had once been happy, and he sat down amidst the ruins of his
+domestic life; he sat by his desolate hearth through the long dull
+wintry months, and he made no effort to bring brightness or variety
+into his existence. He made no stand against unmerited misfortune.
+
+“I am too old to forget,” he told himself; “that lesson can only be
+learnt in youth.”
+
+A young man might have gone out as a wanderer—might have sought
+excitement and distraction amidst strange cities and strange races
+of men; might have found forgetfulness in danger and hardship, the
+perils of unexplored deserts, the hazards of untrodden mountains, the
+hairbreadth escapes of savage life, pestilence, famine, warfare. George
+Greswold felt no inclination for any such adventure. The mainspring of
+life had snapped, and he admitted to himself that he was a broken man.
+
+He sat by the hearth in his gloomy library day after day, and night
+after night, until the small hours. Sometimes he took his gun in the
+early morning, and went out with a leash of dogs for an hour or two of
+solitary shooting among his own covers. He tramped his copses in all
+weathers and at all hours, but he rarely went outside his own domain;
+nor did he ever visit his cottagers or small tenantry, with whom he had
+been once so familiar a friend. All interest in his estate had gone
+from him after his daughter’s death. He left everything to the new
+steward, who was happily both competent and honest.
+
+His books were his only friends. Those studious habits acquired years
+before, when he was comparatively a poor man, stood by him now. His
+one distraction, his only solace, was found in the contents of those
+capacious bookshelves, three-fourths of which were filled with volumes
+of his own selection, the gradual accumulation of his sixteen years of
+ownership. His grandfather’s library, which constituted the remaining
+fourth, consisted of those admirable standard works, in the largest
+possible number of volumes, which formed an item in the furniture
+of a respectable house during the last century, and which, from the
+stiffness of their bindings and the unblemished appearance of their
+paper and print, would seem to have enjoyed an existence of dignified
+retirement from the day they left the bookseller’s shop.
+
+But for those long tramps in the wintry copses, where holly and ivy
+showed brightly green amidst leafless chestnuts and hazels—but for
+those communings with the intellect of past and present in the long
+still winter evenings, George Greswold’s brain must have given way
+under the burden of an undeserved sorrow. As it was, he contrived to
+live on, peacefully, and even with an air of contentment. His servants
+surprised him in no paroxysm of grief. He startled them with no strange
+exclamations. His manner gave no cause for alarm. He accepted his
+lot in silence and submission. His days were ordered with a simple
+regularity, so far as the service of the house went. His valet and
+butler agreed that he was in all things an admirable master.
+
+The idea in the household was that Mrs. Greswold had “taken to
+religion.” That seemed the only possible explanation for a parting
+which had been preceded by no domestic storms, for which there was
+no apparent cause in the conduct of the husband. That idea of the
+wife having discovered an intrigue of her husband’s, which Louisa
+had discussed in the housekeeper’s room at Brighton, was no longer
+entertained in the servants’-hall at Enderby.
+
+“If there had been anything of that kind, something would have come
+out by this time,” said the butler, who had a profound belief in the
+ultimate “coming out” of all social mysteries.
+
+George Greswold was not kept in ignorance of his wife’s movements.
+Pamela had been shrewd enough to divine that her uncle would be glad
+to hear from her in order to hear of Mildred, and she had written to
+him from time to time, giving him a graphic account of her own and her
+aunt’s existence.
+
+There had been only one suppression. The young lady had not once
+alluded to Castellani’s share in their winter life at Pallanza. She
+had a horror of arousing that dragon of suspicion which she knew to
+lurk in the minds of all uncles with reference to all agreeable young
+men. George Greswold had not heard from his niece for more than a
+fortnight, when there came a letter, written the day after Mildred’s
+visit to the madhouse, and full of praises of Lady Lochinvar and the
+climate of Nice. That letter was the greatest shock that Greswold had
+received since his wife had left him, for it told him that she was in
+a place where she could scarcely fail to discover all the details of
+his wretched story. He had kept it locked from her, he had shut himself
+behind a wall of iron, he had kept a silence as of the grave; and now
+she from whom he had prayed that his fatal story might be for ever
+hidden was certain to learn the worst.
+
+“Aunt went to lunch with Lady Lochinvar the day after our arrival,”
+wrote Pamela. “She spent a long morning with her, and then went for a
+drive somewhere in the environs, and was out till nearly dinner-time.
+She looked so white and fagged when she came back, poor dear, and I
+am sure she had done too much for one day. Lady Lochinvar asked me to
+dinner, and took me to the new Opera-house, which is lovely. Her nephew
+was with us—rather plain, and with no taste for music (he said he
+preferred _Madame Angot_ to _Lohengrin_), but enormously clever, I am
+told, in a solid, practical kind of way.”
+
+_Und so weiter_, for three more pages.
+
+Mildred had been with Lady Lochinvar—with Lady Lochinvar, who knew all;
+who had seen him and his wife together; had received them both as her
+friends; had been confided in, he knew, by that fond, jealous wife;
+made the recipient of tearful doubts and hysterical accusations. Vivien
+had owned as much to him.
+
+She had been with Lady Lochinvar, who must know the history of his
+wife’s death and the dreadful charge brought against him; who must know
+that he had been an inmate of the great white barrack on the road to
+St. André; who in all probability thought him guilty of murder. All the
+barriers had fallen now; all the floodgates had opened. He saw himself
+hateful, monstrous, inhuman, in the eyes of the woman he adored.
+
+“She loved her sister with an inextinguishable love,” he thought,
+“and she sees me now as her sister’s murderer—the cold-blooded, cruel
+husband, who made his wife’s existence miserable, and ended by killing
+her in a paroxysm of brutal rage: that is the kind of monster I must
+seem in my Mildred’s eyes. She will look back upon my stubborn silence,
+my gloomy reserve, and she will see all the indications of guilt. My
+own conduct will condemn me.”
+
+As he sat by his solitary hearth in the cold March evening, the
+large reading-lamp making a circle of light amidst the gloom, George
+Greswold’s mind travelled over the days of his youth, and the period of
+that fatal marriage which had blighted him in the morning of his life,
+which blighted him now in life’s meridian, when, but for this dark
+influence, all the elements of happiness were in his hand.
+
+He looked back to the morning of life, and saw himself full of
+ambitions plans and aspiring dreams, well content to be the younger
+son, to whom it was given to make his own position in the world,
+scorning the idle days of a fox-hunting squire, resolute to become
+an influence for good among his fellow-men. He had never envied his
+brother the inheritance of the soil; he had thought but little of his
+own promised inheritance of Enderby.
+
+Unhappily that question of the succession to the Enderby estate had
+been a sore point with Squire Ransome. He adored his elder son, who
+was like him in character and person, and he cared very little for
+George, whom he considered a bookish and unsympathetic individual; a
+young man who hardly cared whether there were few or many foxes in the
+district, whether the young partridges throve, or perished by foul
+weather or epidemic disease—a young man who took no interest in the
+things that filled the lives of other people. In a word, George was not
+a sportsman; and that deficiency made him an alien to his father’s
+race. There had never been a Ransome who was not “sporting” to the core
+of his heart until the appearance of this pragmatical Oxonian.
+
+Without being in any manner scientific or a student of evolution,
+Mr. Ransome had a fixed belief in heredity. It was the duty of the
+son to resemble the father; and a son who was in all his tastes and
+inclinations a distinct variety stamped himself as undutiful.
+
+“I don’t suppose the fellow can help it,” said Mr. Ransome testily;
+“but there’s hardly a remark he makes which doesn’t act upon my nerves
+like a nutmeg-grater.”
+
+Nobody would have given the Squire credit for possessing very sensitive
+nerves, but everybody knew he had a temper, and a temper which
+occasionally showed itself in violent outbreaks—the kind of temper
+which will dismiss a household at one fell swoop, send a stud of horses
+to Tattersall’s on the spur of the moment, tear up a lease on the point
+of signature, or turn a son out of doors.
+
+The knowledge that this unsportsmanlike son of his would inherit the
+fine estate of Enderby was a constant source of vexation to Squire
+Ransome of Mapledown. The dream of his life was that Mapledown and
+Enderby should be united in the possession of his son Randolph. The two
+properties would have made Randolph rich enough to hope for a peerage,
+and that idea of a possible peerage dazzled the Tory squire. His family
+had done the State some service; had sat for important boroughs; had
+squandered much money upon contested elections; had been staunch in
+times of change and difficulty. There was no reason why a Ransome
+should not ascend to the Upper House, in these days when peerages are
+bestowed so much more freely than in the time of Pitt and Fox. The two
+estates would have made an important property under one ownership;
+divided, they were only respectable. And what the Squire most keenly
+felt was the fact that Enderby was by far the finer property, and that
+his younger son must ultimately be a much richer man than his brother.
+The Sussex estate had dwindled considerably in those glorious days
+of contested elections and party feeling; the Hampshire estate was
+intact. Mr. Ransome could not forgive his wife for her determination
+that the younger son should be her heir. He always shuffled uneasily
+upon his seat in the old family pew when the 27th chapter of Genesis
+was read in the Sunday morning service. He compared his wife to
+Rebecca. He asked the Vicar at luncheon on one of those Sundays what
+he thought of the conduct of Rebecca and Jacob in that very shady
+transaction, and the Vicar replied in the orthodox fashion, favouring
+Jacob just as Rebecca had favoured him.
+
+“I can’t understand it,” exclaimed the Squire testily; “the whole
+business is against my idea of honour and honesty. I wouldn’t have
+such a fellow as Jacob for my steward if he were the cleverest man
+in Sussex. And look you here, Vicar. If Jacob was right, and knew he
+was right, why the deuce was he so frightened the first time he met
+Esau after that ugly business? Take my word for it, Jacob was a sneak,
+and Providence punished him rightly with a desolate old age and a
+quarrelsome family.”
+
+The Vicar looked down at his plate, sighed gently, and held his peace.
+
+The time came when the growing feeling of aversion on the father’s part
+showed itself in outrage and insult which the son could not endure.
+George remonstrated against certain acts of injustice in the management
+of the estate. He pleaded the cause of tenant against landlord—a dire
+offence in the eyes of the Tory Squire. There came an open rupture; and
+it was impossible for the younger son to remain any longer under the
+father’s roof. His mother loved him devotedly, but she felt that it was
+better for him to go; and so it was settled, in loving consultation
+between mother and son, that he should carry out a long-cherished wish
+of his Oxford days, and explore all that was historical and interesting
+in Southern Europe, seeing men and cities in a leisurely way, and
+devoting himself to literature in the meantime. He had already written
+for some of the high-class magazines; and he felt that it was in him to
+do well as a writer of the serious order—critic, essayist, and thinker.
+
+His mother gave him three hundred a year, which, for a young man of
+his simple habits, was ample. He told himself that he should be able
+to earn as much again by his pen; and so, after a farewell of decent
+friendliness to his father and his brother Randolph, and tenderest
+parting with his mother, he set out upon his pilgrimage, a free agent,
+with the world all before him. He explored Greece—dwelling fondly upon
+all the old traditions, the old histories. He made the acquaintance
+of Dr. Schliemann, and entered heart and soul into that gentleman’s
+views. This occupied him more than a year, for those scenes exercised
+a potent fascination upon a mind to which Greek literature was the
+supreme delight. He spent a month at Constantinople, and a winter in
+Corfu and Cyprus; he devoted a summer to Switzerland, and did a little
+mountaineering; and during all his wanderings he contrived to give a
+considerable portion of his time to literature.
+
+It was after his Swiss travels that he went to Italy, and established
+himself in Florence for a quiet winter. He hired an apartment on a
+fourth floor of a palace overlooking the Arno, and here, for the first
+time since he had left England, he went a little into general society.
+His mother had sent him letters of introduction to old friends of her
+own, English and Florentine; he was young, handsome, and a gentleman,
+and he was received with enthusiasm. Had he been fond of society he
+might have been at parties every night; but he was fonder of books and
+of solitude, and he took very little advantage of people’s friendliness.
+
+The few houses to which he went were houses famous for good music, and
+it was in one of these houses that he met Vivien Faux.
+
+It was in the midst of a symphony by Beethoven, while he was standing
+on the edge of the crowd which surrounded the open space given to the
+instrumentalists, that he first saw the woman who was to be his wife.
+She was sitting in the recess of a lofty window, quite apart from the
+throng—a pale, dark-eyed girl, with roughened hair carelessly heaped
+above her low, broad forehead. Her slender figure and sloping shoulders
+showed to advantage in a low-necked black gown, without a vestige of
+ornament. She wore neither jewels nor flowers, at an assembly where
+gems were sparkling and flowers breathing sweetness upon every feminine
+bosom. Her thin, white arms hung loosely in her lap; her back was
+turned to the performers, and her eyes were averted from the crowd. She
+looked the image of _ennui_ and indifference.
+
+He found his hostess directly the symphony was over, and asked her to
+introduce him to the young lady in black velvet yonder, sitting alone
+in the window.
+
+“Have you been struck by Miss Faux’s rather singular appearance?” asked
+Signora Vicenti. “She is not so handsome as many young ladies who are
+here to-night.”
+
+“No, she is not handsome, but her face interests me. She looks as if
+she had suffered some great disappointment.”
+
+“I believe her whole life has been a disappointment. She is an orphan,
+and, as far as I can ascertain, a friendless orphan. She has good
+means, but there is a mystery about her position which places her in
+a manner apart from other girls of her age. She has no relations to
+whom to refer, no family home to which to return. She is here with some
+rather foolish people—an English artist and his wife, who cannot do
+very much for her, and I believe she keenly feels her isolation. It
+makes her bitter against other girls, and she loses friends as fast as
+she makes them. People won’t put up with her tongue. Well, Mr. Ransome,
+do you change your mind after that?”
+
+“On the contrary, I feel so much the more interested in the young lady.”
+
+“Ah, your interest will not last. However, I shall be charmed to
+introduce you.”
+
+They went across the room to that distant recess where Miss Faux was
+still seated, her hair and attitude unchanged since George Ransome
+first observed her. She started with a little look of surprise when
+Signora Vicenti and her companion approached; but she accepted the
+introduction with a nonchalant air, and she replied to Ransome’s
+opening remarks with manifest indifference. Then by degrees she grew
+more animated, and talked about the people in the room, ridiculing
+their pretensions, their eccentricities, their costume.
+
+“You are not an _habitué_ here?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing
+you before to-night.”
+
+“No; it is the first of Signora Vicenti’s parties that I have seen.”
+
+“Then I conclude it will be the last.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“O, no sensible person would come a second time. The music is tolerable
+if one could hear it anywhere else, but the people are odious.”
+
+“Yet I conclude this is not your first evening here?”
+
+“No; I come every week. I have nothing else to do with myself but to go
+about to houses I hate, and mix with people who hate me.”
+
+“Why should they hate you?”
+
+“O, we all hate each other, and want to overreach one another. Envy and
+malice are in the air. Picture to yourself fifty manœuvring mothers
+with a hundred marriageable daughters, most of them portionless, and
+about twenty eligible men. Think how ferocious the competition must be!”
+
+“But you are independent of all that; you are outside the arena.”
+
+“Yes; I have nothing to do with their slavemarket, but they hate me
+all the same; perhaps because I have a little more money than most
+of them; perhaps because I am nobody—a waif and stray—able to give no
+account of my existence.”
+
+She spoke of her position with a reckless candour that shocked him.
+
+“There is something to bear in every lot,” he said, trying to be
+philosophical.
+
+“I suppose so, but I only care about my own burden. Please, don’t
+pretend that you do either. I should despise a man who pretended not to
+be selfish.”
+
+“Do you think that all men are selfish?”
+
+“I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. The man I thought the
+noblest and the best did me the greatest wrong it was possible to do
+me, in order to spare himself trouble.”
+
+Ransome was silent. He would not enter into the discussion of a past
+history of which he was ignorant, and which was doubtless full of pain.
+
+After this he met her very often, and while other young men avoided
+her on account of her bitter tongue, he showed a preference for her
+society, and encouraged her to confide in him. She went everywhere,
+chaperoned by Mr. Mortimer, a dreary twaddler, who was for ever
+expounding theories of art which he had picked up, parrot-wise, in a
+London art-school thirty years before. His latest ideas were coeval
+with Maclise and Mulready. Mrs. Mortimer was by way of being an
+invalid, and sat and nursed her neuralgia at home, while her husband
+and Miss Faux went into society.
+
+It was at the beginning of spring that an American lady of wealth and
+standing invited the Mortimers and their _protégée_ to a picnic, to
+which Mr. Ransome was also bidden; and it was this picnic which sealed
+George Ransome’s fate. Pity for Vivien’s lonely position had grown into
+a sincere regard. He had discovered warm feelings under that cynical
+manner, a heart capable of a profound affection. She had talked to him
+of a child, a kind of adopted sister, whom she had passionately loved,
+and from whom she had been parted by the selfish cruelty of the little
+girl’s parents.
+
+“My school-life in England had soured me before then,” she said, “and
+I was not a very amiable person even at fifteen years old; but _that_
+cruelty finished me. I have hated my fellow-creatures ever since.”
+
+He pleaded against this wholesale condemnation.
+
+“You were unlucky,” he said, “in encountering unworthy people.”
+
+“Ah, but one of those people, the child’s father, had seemed to me the
+best of men. I had believed in him as second only to God in benevolence
+and generosity. When _he_ failed I renounced my belief in human
+goodness.”
+
+Unawares, George Ransome had fallen into the position of her confidant
+and friend. From friendship to love was an easy transition; and a few
+words, spoken at random during a ramble on an olive-clad hill, bound
+him to her for ever. Those unpremeditated words loosed the fountain of
+tears, and he saw the most scornful of women, the woman who affected an
+absolute aversion for his sex, and a contempt for those weaker sisters
+who waste their love upon such vile clay—he saw her abandon herself to
+a passion of tears at the first word of affection which he had ever
+addressed to her. He had spoken as a friend rather than as a lover; but
+those tears bound him to her for life. He put his arm round her, and
+pillowed the small pale face upon his breast, the dark impassioned eyes
+looking up at him drowned in tears.
+
+“You should not have said those words,” she sobbed. “You cannot
+understand what it is to have lived as I have lived—a creature
+apart—unloved—unvalued. O, is it true?—do you really care for me?”
+
+“With all my heart,” he answered, and in good faith.
+
+His profound compassion took the place of love; and in that moment
+he believed that he loved her as a man should love the woman whom he
+chooses for his wife.
+
+They were married within a month from that March afternoon; and for
+some time their married life was happy. He wished to take her to
+England, but she implored him to abandon that idea.
+
+“In England everybody would want to know who I am,” she said. “I should
+be tortured by questions about ‘my people.’ Abroad, society is less
+exacting.”
+
+He deferred to her in this, as he would have done in any other matter
+which involved her happiness. They spent the first half-year of their
+married life in desultory wanderings in the Oberland and the Engadine,
+and then settled at Nice for the winter.
+
+Here Mrs. Ransome met Lady Lochinvar, whom she had known at Florence,
+and was at once invited to the Palais Montano; and here for the first
+time appeared those clouds which were too soon to darken George
+Ransome’s domestic horizon.
+
+There were many beautiful women at Nice that winter: handsome Irish
+girls, vivacious Americans, Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen; and among
+so many who were charming there were some whom George Ransome did not
+scruple to admire, with as much frankness as he would have admired
+a face by Guido or Raffaelle. He was slow to perceive his wife’s
+distrust, could hardly bring himself to believe that she could be
+jealous of him; but he was not suffered to remain long in this happy
+ignorance. A hysterical outburst one night after their return from a
+ball at the Club-house opened the husband’s eyes. The demon of jealousy
+stood revealed; and from that hour the angel of domestic peace was
+banished from George Ransome’s hearth.
+
+He struggled against that evil influence. He exercised patience,
+common sense, forbearance; but in vain. There were lulls in the
+storm sometimes, delusive calms; and he hoped the demon was
+exorcised. And then came a worse outbreak; more hysterics; despairing
+self-abandonment; threats of suicide. He bore it as long as he could,
+and ultimately, his wife’s health offering an excuse for such a step,
+he proposed that they should leave Nice, and take a villa in the
+environs, in some quiet spot where they might live apart from all
+society.
+
+Vivien accepted the proposition with rapture; she flung herself at her
+husband’s feet, and covered his hands with tearful kisses.
+
+“O, if I could but believe that you still love me, that you are not
+weary of me,” she exclaimed, “I should be the happiest woman in the
+universe.”
+
+They spent a week of halcyon peace, driving about in quest of their
+new home. They explored the villages within ten miles of Nice, they
+breakfasted at village restaurants, in the sunny March noontide, and
+finally they settled upon a villa at St. Jean, within an hour’s drive
+of the great white city, and to this new home they went at the end of
+the month, after bidding adieu to their friends in Nice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE RIFT IN THE LUTE.
+
+
+The villa was built on a ledge of ground between the road and the
+sea. There was a stone terrace in front of the windows of _salon_ and
+dining-room, below which the ground shelved steeply down to the rocks
+and the blue water. The low irregular-shaped house was screened from
+the road by a grove of orange and lemon trees, with a peach or a cherry
+here and there to give variety of colour. In one corner there was a
+whole cluster of peach-trees, which made a mass of purplish-pinky
+bloom. The ridges of garden sloping down from the stone terrace were
+full of white stocks and scarlet anemones. Clusters of red ranunculus
+made spots of flame in the sun, and the young leaves in the long hedge
+of Dijon roses wove an interlacing screen of crimson, through which the
+sun shone as through old ruby glass in a cathedral window. Everywhere
+there was a feast of perfume and colour and beauty. The little bay,
+the curving pier, the white-sailed boats, which, seen from the height
+above, looked no bigger than the gulls skimming across the blue; the
+quaint old houses of Villefranche on a level with the water, and rising
+tier above tier to the crest of the hill—pink and blue houses, white
+and cream-coloured houses, with pea-green shutters and red roofs. Far
+away to the left, the jutting promontory and the tall white lighthouse;
+and away southward, the sapphire sea, touched with every changing light
+and shadow. And this lovely little world at George Ransome’s feet, this
+paradise in miniature, was all the lovelier because of the great rugged
+mountain-wall behind it, the bare red and yellow hills baked in the
+sunlight of ages, the strange old-world villages yonder high up on the
+stony flanks of the hills, the far-away church towers, from which faint
+sound of bells came now and again as if from fairyland.
+
+It was a delicious spot this little village of St. Jean, to which
+the Niçois came on Sundays and holidays, to eat bouillabaisse at the
+rustic tavern or to picnic in the shade of century-old olives and old
+carouba-trees, which made dark masses of foliage between the road and
+the sea. George Ransome loved the place, and could have been happy
+there if his wife would only have allowed him; but those halcyon days
+which marked the beginning of their retirement were too soon ended; and
+clouds lowered again over the horizon—clouds of doubt and discontent.
+There are women to whom domestic peace, a calm and rational happiness,
+is an impossibility, and Vivien was one of these women.
+
+From the beginning her suspicious nature had been on the watch for some
+hidden evil. She had a fixed idea that the Fates had marked her for
+misery, and she would not open her heart to the sunlight of happiness.
+
+Was her husband unkind to her? No, he was all kindness; but to her
+his kindness seemed only a gentleman-like form of toleration. He had
+married her out of pity; and it was pity that made him kind. Other
+women were worshipped. It was her fate to be tolerated by a man she
+adored.
+
+She could never forget her own passionate folly, her own unwomanly
+forwardness. She had thrown herself into his arms—she who should
+have waited to be wooed, and should have made herself precious by the
+difficulty with which she was won.
+
+“How can he help holding me cheap?” she asked herself—“I who cost him
+nothing, not even an hour of doubt? From the hour we first met he must
+have known that I adored him.”
+
+Once when he was rowing her about the bay in the westering sunlight,
+while the fishermen were laying down their lines, or taking up their
+baskets here and there by the rocks, she asked him suddenly,
+
+“What did you think of me, George, the first time you saw me—that night
+at Signora Vicenti’s party? Come, be candid. You can afford to tell
+me the truth now. Your fate is sealed; you have nothing to lose or to
+gain.”
+
+“Do you think I would tell you less or more than the truth under any
+circumstances, Viva?” he asked gravely.
+
+“O, you are horribly exact, I know!” she answered, with an impatient
+movement of her slender sloping shoulders, not looking at him, but
+with her dark dreamy eyes gazing far off across the bay towards the
+distant point where the twin towers of Monaco Cathedral showed faint
+in the distance, “but perhaps if the truth sounded very rude you might
+suppress it—out of pity.”
+
+“I don’t think the truth need sound rude.”
+
+“Well,” still more impatiently, “what impression did I make upon you?”
+
+“You must consider that there were at least fifty young ladies in
+Signora Vicenti’s _salons_ that evening.”
+
+“And about thirty old women; and I was lost in the crowd.”
+
+“Not quite lost. I remember being attracted by a young lady who sat in
+a window niche apart—”
+
+“Like ‘Brunswick’s fated chieftain.’ Pray go on.”
+
+“And who seemed a little out of harmony with the rest of the company.
+Her manner struck me as unpleasantly ironical, but her small pale face
+interested me, and I even liked the mass of towzled hair brushed up
+from her low square forehead. I liked her black velvet gown, without
+any colour or ornament. It set off the thin white shoulders and long
+slender throat.”
+
+“Did you think I was rich or poor, somebody or nobody?”
+
+“I thought you were a clever girl, soured by some kind of
+disappointment.”
+
+“And you felt sorry for me. Say you felt sorry for me!” she cried, her
+eyes coming back from the distant promontory, and fixing him suddenly,
+bright, keen, imperious in their eager questioning.
+
+“Yes, I confess to feeling very sorry for you.”
+
+“Did I not know as much? From the very first you pitied me. Pity, pity!
+What an intolerable burden it is! I have bent under it all my life.”
+
+“My dear Viva, what nonsense you talk! Because I had mistaken ideas
+about you that first night, when we were strangers—”
+
+“You were not mistaken. I was soured. I had been disappointed. My
+thoughts were bitter as gall. I had no patience with other girls who
+had so many blessings that I had never known. I saw them making light
+of their advantages, peevish, ill-tempered, self-indulgent; and I
+scorned them. Contempt for others was the only comfort of my barren
+life. And so my vinegar tongue disgusted you, did it not?”
+
+“I was not disgusted—concerned and interested, rather. Your
+conversation was original. I wanted to know more of you.”
+
+“Did you think me pretty?”
+
+“I was more impressed by your mental gifts than your physical—”
+
+“That is only a polite way of saying you thought me plain.”
+
+“Viva, you know better than that. If I thought of your appearance
+at all during that first meeting, be assured I thought you
+interesting—yes, and pretty. Only prettiness is a poor word to express
+a face that is full of intellect and originality.”
+
+“You thought me pale, faded, haggard, old for my age,” she said
+decisively. “Don’t deny it. You must have seen what my glass had been
+telling me for the last year.”
+
+“I thought your face showed traces of suffering.”
+
+This was one of many such conversations, full of keen questioning on
+her part, with an assumed lightness of manner which thinly veiled the
+irritability of her mind. She had changed for the worse since they left
+Nice; she had grown more sensitive, more suspicious, more irritable.
+She was in a condition of health in which many women are despondent or
+irritable—in which with some women life seems one long disgust, and all
+things are irksome, even the things that have been pleasantest and most
+valued before—even the aspect of a lovely landscape, the phrases of a
+familiar melody, the perfume of a once favourite flower. He tried to
+cheer her by talking of their future, the time to come when there would
+be a new bond between them, a new interest in their lives; but she saw
+all things in a gloomy atmosphere.
+
+“Who knows?” she said. “I may die, perhaps; or you may love your child
+better than you have ever loved me, and then I should hate it.”
+
+“Viva, you cannot doubt that my love for our child will strengthen my
+love for you.”
+
+“Will it?” she asked incredulously. “God knows it needs strengthening.”
+
+This was hard upon a man whose tenderness and indulgence had been
+boundless, who had done all that chivalry and a sense of duty can do to
+atone for the lack of love. He had tried his uttermost to conceal the
+one bitter truth that love was wanting: but those keen eyes of hers had
+seen the gap between them, that sensitive ear had discovered the rift
+in the lute.
+
+One afternoon they climbed the hill to the breezy common on which the
+lighthouse stands, and dawdled about in the sunshine, gathering the
+pale gray rosemary bloom and the perfumed thyme which grow among those
+hollows and hillocks in such wild luxuriance. They were sauntering near
+the carriage-road, talking very little—she feeble and tired, although
+it was her own fancy to have walked so far—when they saw a carriage
+driving towards them—a large landau, with the usual bony horses and
+shabby jingling harness, and the usual sunburnt good-tempered driver.
+
+Two girls in white gowns and Leghorn hats were in the carriage, with
+an elderly woman in black. Their laps were full of wild flowers, and
+branches of wild cherry and pear blossom filled the leather hood
+at the back of the carriage. They were talking and laughing gaily,
+all animation and high spirits, as they drew near; and at sight of
+George Ransome one of them waved her hand in greeting, and called to
+the driver to stop. They were two handsome Irish girls who had made a
+sensation at the Battle of Flowers six weeks before. They were spoken
+of by some people as the belles of Nice. Mr. Ransome had pelted them
+with Parma violets and yellow rosebuds on the Promenade des Anglais,
+as they drove up and down in a victoria embowered in white stocks and
+narcissi. He had waltzed with them at the Cercle de la Méditerranée and
+the Palais Montano; had admired them frankly and openly, not afraid to
+own even to a jealous wife that he thought them beautiful.
+
+Delia Darcy, the elder and handsomer of the two, leaned over the
+carriage-door to shake hands with him, while Vivien stood aloof, on a
+grassy knoll above the road, looking daggers. What right had they to
+stop their carriage and waylay her husband?
+
+“Who would have thought of finding you in this out-of-the-way spot?”
+exclaimed Miss Darcy; “we fancied you had left the Riviera. Are you
+stopping at Monte Carlo?”
+
+“No, I have taken a villa at St. Jean.”
+
+“Is that near here?”
+
+“Very near. You must have skirted the village in driving up here. And
+has Nice been very gay since we left?”
+
+“No; people have been going away, and we have missed you dreadfully at
+the opera, and at dances, and at Rumpelmeyer’s. What could have induced
+you to bury yourself alive in a village?” she asked vivaciously, with
+that sparkling manner which gives an air of flirtation to the most
+commonplace talk.
+
+“My wife has been out of health, and it has suited us both to live
+quietly.”
+
+“Poor Mrs. Ransome—poor you!” exclaimed Miss Darcy, with a sigh. “O,
+there she is! How do you do, Mrs. Ransome?” gesticulating with a pretty
+little hand in a long wrinkled tan glove. “Do come and talk to us.”
+
+Mrs. Ransome bowed stiffly, but did not move an inch. She stood
+picking a branch of rosemary to shreds with nervous restless fingers,
+scattering the poor pale blue-gray blossoms as if she were sprinkling
+them upon a corpse. The two girls took no further notice of her, but
+both bent forward, talking to Ransome, rattling on about this ball and
+the other ball, and a breakfast, and sundry afternoon teas, and the
+goings-on—audacious for the most part—of all the smart people at Nice.
+They had worlds to tell him, having taken it into their heads that he
+was a humorist, a cynic, who delighted in hearing of the follies of
+his fellow-man. He stood with his hat off, waiting for the carriage
+to drive on, inwardly impatient of delay, knowing with what jealous
+feelings Vivien had always regarded Delia Darcy, dreading a fit of
+ill-temper when the Irish girls should have vanished by and by below
+the sandy edge of the common. He listened almost in silence, giving
+their loquacity no more encouragement than good manners obliged.
+
+“Why don’t you come to the next dance at the Cercle de la
+Méditerranée?” said Delia coaxingly; “there are so few good dancers
+left, and your step is just the one that suits me best. There are to
+be amateur theatricals to begin with—scenes from _Much Ado_; and I am
+to be Beatrice. Won’t that tempt you?” she asked, with the insolence
+of an acknowledged beauty, spoiled by the laxer manners of a foreign
+settlement, lolling back in the carriage, and smiling at him with
+brilliant Irish gray eyes, under the shadow of her Leghorn hat, with a
+great cluster of daffodils just above her forehead, the yellow bloom
+showing vividly against her dark hair.
+
+The other sister was only a paler reflection of this one, and echoed
+her speeches, laughing when she laughed.
+
+“Surely you will come to see Delia act Beatrice?” she said. “I can’t
+tell you how well she does it. Sir Randall Spofforth is the Benedict.”
+
+“My dears, we shall have no time to dress for dinner!” expostulated the
+duenna, feeling that this kind of thing had lasted long enough. “_En
+avant, cocher._”
+
+“Won’t you come?” pleaded the pertinacious Delia; “it is on the
+twenty-ninth, remember—next Thursday week.”
+
+The carriage rolled slowly onward.
+
+“I regret that I shall not be there,” said Ransome decisively.
+
+Delia shook her parasol at him in pretended anger.
+
+He rejoined his wife. She stood surrounded by the shreds of rosemary
+and thyme which she had plucked and scattered while he was talking. She
+was very pale; and he knew only too well that she was very angry.
+
+“Come, Viva, it is time we turned homeward,” he said.
+
+“Yes, the sun has gone down, has it not?” she exclaimed mockingly, as
+she looked after the carriage, which sank below the ragged edge of
+heather and thyme yonder, as if it had dropped over the cliff.
+
+“Why, my love, the sun is above our heads!”
+
+“Is it? _Your_ sun is gone down, anyhow. She is very lovely, is she
+not?”
+
+The question was asked with sudden eagerness, as if her life depended
+upon the reply. She was walking quickly in her agitation, going down
+the hill much faster than she had mounted it.
+
+“Yes, they are both handsome girls, feather-headed, but remarkably
+handsome,” her husband answered carelessly.
+
+“But Delia is the lovelier. _She_ is your divinity.”
+
+“Yes, she is the lovelier. The other seems a copy by an inferior hand.”
+
+“And she is so fond of you. It was cruel to refuse her request, when
+she pleaded so hard.”
+
+“How can you be so foolish or so petty, Vivien? Is it impossible for
+me to talk for five minutes with a handsome girl without unreasonable
+anger on your part?”
+
+“Do you expect me to be pleased or happy when I see your admiration of
+another woman—admiration you do not even take the trouble to conceal?
+Do you suppose I can ever forget last winter—how I have seen you
+dancing with that girl night after night? Yes, I have had to sit and
+watch you. I was not popular, I had few partners; and it is bad form to
+dance more than once with one’s husband. I have seen her in your arms,
+with her head almost lying on your shoulder, again and again, as if it
+were her natural place. ‘What a handsome couple!’ I have heard people
+say; ‘are they engaged?’ Do you think _that_ was pleasant for me?”
+
+“You had but to say one word, and I would have left off dancing for
+ever.”
+
+“Another sacrifice—like your marriage.”
+
+“Vivien, you would provoke a saint.”
+
+“Yes, it is provoking to be chained to one woman when you are dying for
+another.”
+
+“How much oftener am I to swear to you that I don’t care a straw for
+Miss Darcy?”
+
+“Never again,” she answered. “I love you too well to wish you to swear
+a lie.”
+
+They had come down from the common by this time, and were now upon a
+pathway nearer home—a narrow footpath on the edge of the cliff opposite
+Beaulieu; the gently-curving bay below them, and behind and above them
+orchards and gardens, hill and lighthouse. It was one of their chosen
+walks. They had paced the narrow path many an afternoon when the twin
+towers of Monaco showed dark in the shadow of sundown.
+
+“Vivien, I think you are the most difficult creature to live with that
+ever a man had for his wife,” said Ransome, stung to the quick by her
+persistent perversity.
+
+“I am difficult to live with, am I?” she cried. “Why don’t you go a
+step further—why don’t you say at once that you wish I were dead?” she
+cried, with a wild burst of passion. “Say that you wish me dead.”
+
+“I own that when you torment me, as you are doing to-day, I have
+sometimes thought of death—yours or mine—as the only escape from mutual
+misery,” he answered gloomily.
+
+He had been sauntering a few paces in front of her along the narrow
+path between the olive-garden and the edge of the cliff, she following
+slowly—both in a desultory way, and talking to each other without
+seeing each other’s face. The cliff sank sheer below the pathway, with
+only a narrow margin of rushy grass between the footpath and the brink
+of the precipice. It was no stupendous depth, no giddy height from
+which the eye glanced downward, sickening at the horror of the gulf.
+One looked down at the jewel-bright waves and the many-hued rocks, the
+fir-trees growing out of the crags, without a thought of danger; and
+yet a false step upon those sunburnt rushes might mean instant death.
+
+He came to a sudden standstill after that last speech, and stood
+leaning with both hands upon his stick, angry, full of gloom, feeling
+that he had said a cruel thing, yet not repenting of his cruelty. He
+stood there expectant of her angry answer; but there was only silence.
+
+Silence, and then a swift rushing sound, like the flight of a great
+bird. He looked round, and saw that he was alone!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+DARKNESS.
+
+
+She had flung herself over the cliff. That rustling noise was the
+sound of her gown as it brushed against the rushes and seedling firs
+that clothed the precipice with verdure. He looked over the cliff, and
+saw her lying among the rocks, a white motionless figure, mangled and
+crushed, dumb and dead, his victim and his accuser.
+
+His first impulse was to fling himself over the edge where she had cast
+away her life a minute ago; but common sense overcame that movement of
+despair. A few yards further towards the point the side of the cliff
+was less precipitous. There were jutting ledges of rock and straggling
+bushes by which a good climber might let himself down to the beach,
+not without hazard, but with a fair chance of safety. As he scrambled
+downward he saw a fisherman’s boat shooting across the bay, and he
+thought that his wife’s fall had been seen from the narrow strip of
+sandy shore yonder towards Beaulieu.
+
+She was lying on her side among the low wet slabs of rock, the blue
+water lapping round her. There was blood upon her face, and on one
+mangled arm, from which the muslin sleeve was ripped. Her gown had
+caught in the bushes, and was torn to shreds; and the water flowing so
+gently in and out among her loosened hair was tinged with blood.
+
+Her eyes were wide open, staring wildly, and they had a glassy look
+already. He knew that she was dead.
+
+“Did you see her fall?” he asked the men in the boat, as they came near.
+
+“No,” said one. “I heard the gulls scream, and I knew there was
+something. And then I looked about and saw something white lying there,
+under the cliff.”
+
+They lifted her gently into the boat, and laid her on a folded sail
+at the bottom, as gently and as tenderly as if she were still capable
+of feeling, as if she were not past cure. George Ransome asked no
+question, invited no opinion. He sat in the stern of the boat, dumb
+and quiet. The horror of this sudden doom had paralysed him. What had
+he done that this thing should happen, this wild revenge of a woman’s
+passionate heart which made him a murderer? What had he done? Had he
+not been patient and forbearing, indulgent beyond the common indulgence
+of husbands to fretful wives? Had he not blunted the edge of wrath
+with soft answers? Had he not been affectionate and considerate even
+when love was dead? And yet because of one hard speech, wrung from his
+irritated nerves, this wild creature had slain herself.
+
+The two fishermen looked at him curiously. He saw the dark southern
+eyes watching him; saw gravity and restraint upon those fine olive
+faces which had been wont to beam with friendly smiles. He knew that
+they suspected evil, but he was in no mood to undeceive them. He sat in
+an apathetic silence, motionless, stupefied almost, while the men rowed
+slowly round the point in the golden light of sundown. He scarcely
+looked at that white still figure lying at the bottom of the boat, the
+face hidden under a scarlet kerchief which one of the men had taken
+from his neck. He sat staring at the rocky shore, the white gleaming
+lighthouse, the long ridge of heathy ground on the crest of the hill,
+the villas, the gardens with their glow of light and colour, the dark
+masses of foliage clustering here and there amidst the bright-hued
+rocks. He looked at everything except his dead wife, lying almost at
+his feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was an inquiry that evening before the Juge d’Instruction at
+Villefranche, and he was made to give an account of his wife’s death.
+He proved a very bad witness. The minute and seemingly frivolous
+questions addled his brain. He told the magistrate how he had looked
+round and found the path empty: but he could not say how his wife
+had fallen—whether she had flung herself over the edge or had fallen
+accidentally, whether her foot had slipped unawares, whether she had
+fallen face forward, or whether she had dropped backwards from the edge
+of the cliff.
+
+“I tell you again that I did not see her fall,” he protested
+impatiently.
+
+“Did you usually walk in advance of your wife?” asked the Frenchman.
+“It was not very polite to turn your back upon a lady.”
+
+“I was worried, and out of temper.”
+
+“For what reason?”
+
+“My wife’s unhappy jealousy created reasons where there were none. The
+people who know me know that I was not habitually unkind to her.”
+
+“Yet you gave her an answer which so maddened her that she flung
+herself over the cliff in her despair?”
+
+“I fear that it was so,” he answered, with the deepest distress
+depicted in his haggard face. “She was in a nervous and irritable
+condition. I had always borne that fact in mind until that moment.
+She stung me past endurance by her groundless jealousies. I had been
+a true and loyal husband to her from the hour of our marriage. I had
+never wronged her by so much as a thought; and yet I could not talk
+to a pretty peasant-girl, or confess my admiration for any woman I
+met in society, without causing an outbreak of temper that was almost
+madness. I bore with her long and patiently. I remembered that the
+circumstances of her childhood and youth had been adverse, that her
+nature had been warped and perverted; I forgave all faults of temper in
+a wife who loved me; but this afternoon—almost for the first time since
+our marriage—I spoke unkindly, cruelly perhaps. I have no wish to avoid
+interrogation, or to conceal any portion of the truth.”
+
+“You did not push her over the cliff?”
+
+“I did not. Do I look like a murderer, or bear the character of a man
+likely to commit murder?”
+
+The examination went on, with cruel reiteration of almost the same
+questions. The Juge d’Instruction was a hard-headed legal machine,
+who believed that the truth might be wrung out of any criminal by
+persistent questioning. He suspected Ransome, or deemed it his duty to
+suspect him, and he ordered him to be arrested on leaving the court; so
+George Ransome passed the night after his wife’s death in the lock-up
+at Villefranche.
+
+What a night that was for a man to live through! He sat on a stone
+bench, listening to the level plish-plash of that tideless sea ever so
+far beneath him. He heard the footsteps going up and down the steep
+stony street of that wonderful old seaport; he heard the scream of the
+gulls and the striking of the clock on the crest of the hill as he sat
+motionless, with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands,
+brooding over that swift, sudden horror of yesterday.
+
+Could it have been an accident? Did she step backwards unawares and
+slip over the edge? No; he remembered where she was standing when he
+last looked at her, some distance from the side of the cliff, standing
+among the heather and wild thyme which grew down to the edge of the
+little path. She must have made a rapid rush to the brink after that
+fatal speech of his. She had flung her life away in a single impulse
+of blind, mad anger—or despair. She had not paused for an instant to
+take thought. Alas! he knew her so well; he had so often seen those
+sudden gusts of passion; the rush of crimson to the pale small face;
+the quivering lips striving impotently for speech; the fury in the
+dark eyes, and the small nervous hands clenched convulsively. He had
+seen her struggle with the demon of anger, and had seen the storm pass
+swifter than a tempest-driven cloud across the moon. Another moment
+and she would burst into tears, fling her arms round his neck, and
+implore him to forgive her.
+
+“I love you too well ever to know happiness,” she said.
+
+That was her favourite apology.
+
+“It is only people without passions who can be happy,” she told him
+once. “I sometimes think that you belong to that family.”
+
+And she was dead; she whose undisciplined love had so plagued and tried
+him, she was dead; and he felt himself her murderer.
+
+Alas! doubly a murderer, since she had perished just at that time when
+her life should have been most precious to him, when he should have
+made any sacrifice to secure her peace. He who had seen all the evils
+of a fretful temper exhibited in her character had yet been weak enough
+to yield to a moment of anger, and to insult the woman whom he ought to
+have cherished.
+
+A long-familiar line of Byron’s haunted his brain all through the
+night, and mixed itself with that sound of footsteps on the street of
+stairs, and the scream of the gulls, and the flapping of the waves
+against the stone quay.
+
+  “She died, but not alone—”
+
+She who was to have been the mother of his first-born child was lying
+dead in the white-walled villa where they had once been happy.
+
+Hush! In the soft clear light of an April morning he heard the tolling
+of the church bell, solemn, slow, measured, at agonising intervals,
+which left an age of expectancy between the heavy strokes of the
+clapper.
+
+_Vivos voco, mortuos plango._
+
+They bury their dead at daybreak in that fair land of orange and
+lemon groves. In the early morning of the first day after death, the
+hastily-fashioned coffin was carried out into the sunshine, and the
+funeral procession wound slowly up the hill towards the graveyard
+near the church of Villefranche. George Ransome knew how brief is the
+interval between death and burial on that southern shore, and he had
+little doubt that the bell was tolling for her whose heart was beating
+passionately when the sun began to sink.
+
+So soon! Her grave would be filled in and trodden down before they let
+him out of prison.
+
+It had never seemed to him that he was to stay long in captivity, or
+that there could be any difficulty in proving his innocence of any
+part in the catastrophe, except that fatal part of having upset the
+balance of a weak mind, and provoked a passionate woman to suicide. As
+for the confinement of the past night, he had scarcely thought about
+it. He had a curious semi-consciousness of time and place which was a
+new experience to him. He found himself forgetting where he was and
+what had happened. There were strange gaps in his mind—intervals of
+oblivion—and then there were periods in which he sat looking at the
+slanting shaft of sunlight between the window and the ground, and
+trying to count the motes that danced in that golden haze.
+
+The day passed strangely, too—sometimes at railroad pace, sometimes
+with a ghastly slowness. Then came a night in which sleep never visited
+his eyelids—a night of bodily and mental restlessness, the greater part
+of which he spent in futile efforts to open the heavily-bolted door,
+or to drag the window-bars from their stone sockets. His prison was a
+relic of the Middle Ages, and Hercules himself could not have got out
+of it.
+
+In all those endeavours he was actuated by a blind impulse—a feverish
+desire to be at large again. Not once during that night did he think
+of his dead wife in her new-made grave on the side of the hill. He had
+forgotten why they had shut him up in that stony chamber—or rather had
+imagined another reason for his imprisonment.
+
+He was a political offender—had been deeply concerned in a plot to
+overthrow Victor Emanuel, and to create a Republic for Italy. He
+himself was to be President of that Republic. He felt all the power to
+rule and legislate for a great nation. He compared himself with Solon
+and with Pericles, to the disadvantage of both. There was a greatness
+in him which neither of those had ever attained.
+
+“I should rule them as God Himself,” he thought. “It would be a golden
+age of truth and justice—a millennium of peace and plenty. And while
+the nations are waiting for me I am shut up here by the treachery of
+France.”
+
+Next morning he was taken before the Juge d’Instruction for the second
+time. The two fishermen who picked up his wife’s corpse were present as
+witnesses; also his wife’s maid, and the three other servants; also his
+wife’s doctor.
+
+He was again questioned severely, but this time nothing could induce
+him to give a direct answer to any question. He raved about the Italian
+Republic, of which he was to be chief. He told the French magistrate
+that France had conspired with the Italian tyrant to imprison and
+suppress him.
+
+“Every other pretence is a subterfuge,” he said. “My popularity in
+Italy is at the root of this monstrous charge. There will be a rising
+of the whole nation if you do not instantly release me. For your own
+sake, sir, I warn you to be prompt.”
+
+“This man is pretending to be mad,” said the magistrate.
+
+“I fear there is more reality than pretence about the business,” said
+the doctor.
+
+He took Ransome to the window, and looked at his eyes in the strong
+white light of noon. Then he went over to the magistrate, and they
+whispered together for some minutes, while the prisoner sat staring at
+the floor and muttering to himself.
+
+After that there came a long dark interval in George Ransome’s life—a
+waking dream of intolerable length, but not unalloyed misery; for the
+hallucinations which made his madness buoyed him up and sustained
+him during some part of that dark period. He talked with princes
+and statesmen; he was not alone in the madhouse chamber, or in the
+madhouse garden, or in that great iron cage where even the most
+desperate maniacs were allowed to disport themselves in the air and
+the sunlight as in a gymnasium. He was surrounded by invisible friends
+and flatterers, by public functionaries who quailed before his glance
+and were eager to obey his commands. Sometimes he wrote letters and
+telegrams all day long upon any scraps of paper which his keepers would
+give him; sometimes he passed whole days in a dreamy silence with arms
+folded, and abstracted gaze fixed on the distant hill-tops, like
+Napoleon at St. Helena, brooding over the future of nations.
+
+By and by there came a period of improvement, or what was called
+improvement by the doctors, but which to the patient seemed a time of
+strange blankness and disappointment. All those busy shadows which
+had peopled his life, his senators and flatterers, had abandoned him;
+he was alone in that strange place amidst a strange people, most of
+whom seemed to be somewhat wrong in their heads. He was able to read
+the newspapers now, and was vexed to find that his speeches were
+unreported, his letters and manifestoes unpublished; disappointed to
+find that Victor Emanuel was still King of Italy and the new Republic
+still a web of dreams.
+
+His temper was very fitful at this time, and he had intervals of
+violence. One morning he found himself upon the hills, digging with
+half-a-dozen other men, young and old, dressed pretty much like
+himself. It was in the early summer morning, before the sun had made
+the world too hot for labour. It was rapture to him to be there,
+digging and running about on the dewy hillside, in an amphitheatre of
+mountains, high above the stony bed of the Paillon. The air was full
+of sweet odours, orange and lemon bloom, roses and lilies, from the
+gardens and orchards below. He felt that earth and sky were rapturously
+lovely, that life was a blessing and a privilege beyond all words. He
+had not the consciousness of a single care, or even a troubled memory.
+His quarrel with his father, his self-imposed exile, his marriage and
+its bitter disillusions, his wife’s tragical fate: all were forgotten.
+He felt as a sylph might feel—a creature without earthly obligations,
+revelling in the glory of Nature.
+
+This new phase of being lasted so long as the hills and the sky wore
+their aspect of novelty. It was succeeded by a period of deepest
+depression, a melancholy which weighed him down like a leaden burden.
+He sat in the madhouse garden apart from the rest, brooding over the
+darkness of life. He had no hopes, no desires.
+
+Gradually memory began to return. He asked why his wife did not come to
+see him. “She used to be so fond of me,” he said, “foolishly fond of
+me; and now she deserts me.”
+
+Then he talked of going home again. The image of his latest
+dwelling-place had gradually shaped itself in his mind. He saw the
+hedges of pale amber roses, the carouba-trees, dark against the
+glittering blue of the sea, which shone through every opening in the
+branches like a background of lapis lazuli, and the rugged mountains
+rising above the low curving shore steeply towards the sky, with
+patches of olive here and there on their stony flanks, but for the most
+part bare and barren, reddish-yellow, steeped in sunlight.
+
+Yes, he remembered every feature of that lovely and varied scene. The
+village of Eza yonder on the mountain-road—a cluster of stony dwellings
+perched upon rocky foundations, hardly to be distinguished from the
+rough crags upon which they were built—and higher still, in a cleft
+of those yellow hills, Turbia, and its cloven towers, the birthplace
+of Roman Emperors. How lovely it all was, and how pleasant it had
+been to lounge in his garden, where the light looked dazzling on beds
+of white gilly-flowers, and where the blue summer sea smiled in the
+far distance, with a faint purple cloud yonder on the horizon which
+represented Corsica!
+
+Why had he ever left that familiar home? Why could he not return to it?
+
+“Get me a carriage,” he said to one of the attendants; “I want to go
+home immediately. My wife is waiting for me.”
+
+It is not customary to make explanations to patients even in the
+best-regulated asylums. Nobody answered him; nobody explained anything
+to him. He found himself confronted with a dogged silence. He wore
+himself out in an agony of impatience, like a bird beating itself to
+death against its bars. He languished in a miserable ignorance, piecing
+his past life together bit by bit, with a strange interweaving of
+fancies and realities, until by slow degrees the fancies dropped out of
+the web and left him face to face with the truth.
+
+At last the record of the past was complete. He knew that his wife
+was dead, and remembered how she had died. He knew that he had been a
+prisoner, first in gaol and then in a lunatic asylum; but he did not
+acknowledge to himself that he had been mad. He remembered the bell
+tolling in the saffron light of dawn; he remembered the magistrate’s
+exasperating questions; he remembered everything.
+
+After this he sank into a state of sullen despair, and silence and
+apathy were accepted as the indications of cure. He was told by the
+head physician that he could leave the institution whenever he pleased.
+There was an account against him as a private patient, which had been
+guaranteed by his landlord, who knew him to be a man of some means. His
+German man-servant had been to the asylum many times to inquire about
+him. The doctor recommended him to travel—in Switzerland—until the end
+of the autumn, and to take his servant as his attendant and courier.
+“Change of air and scene will be of inestimable advantage to you,” said
+the doctor; “but it would not be wise for you to travel alone.”
+
+“What month is it?”
+
+“August—the twenty-second.”
+
+“And my wife died early in April,” he said. “Only a few months; and I
+feel as if I had been in this place a century.”
+
+He took the doctor’s advice. He cared very little where he went or
+what became of him. Life and the world, his own individuality, and the
+beautiful earth around and about him were alike indifferent to him. He
+went back to the villa at St. Jean, and to the garden he had loved so
+well in the bright fresh spring-time. All things had an overgrown and
+neglected look in the ripeness of expiring summer; too many flowers,
+a rank luxuriance of large leaves and vivid blossoms—fruit rotting in
+the long grass—an odour of decaying oranges, the waste of the last
+harvest. He went up to the graveyard on the hill above the harbour. It
+was not a picturesque burial-place. The cemetery at Cimies was far more
+beautiful. The cemetery at Nice was in a grander position.
+
+He felt sorry that she should lie here, amidst the graves of sailors
+and fishermen—as even if after death she were slighted and hardly used.
+
+He was summoned back to England early in the following year to his
+mother’s death-bed. Neither she nor any of his family had known the
+miserable end of his married life. They knew only that he had married,
+and had lost his wife after a year of marriage. Hazard had not brought
+any one belonging to him in contact with any of those few people who
+knew the details of that tragical story.
+
+His mother’s death made him rich and independent, but until the hour he
+met Mildred Fausset his life was a blank.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE GRAVE ON THE HILL.
+
+
+After that visit to the great white barrack on the road to St. André,
+Mildred felt that her business at Nice was finished, there was nothing
+more for her to learn. She knew all the sad story now—all, except
+those lights and shadows of the picture which only the unhappy actor
+in that domestic tragedy could have told her. The mystery of the past
+had unfolded itself, stage by stage, from that Sunday afternoon when
+César Castellani came to Enderby Manor, and out of trivial-seeming
+talk launched a thunderbolt. The curtain was lifted. There was no more
+to be done. And yet Mildred lingered at Nice, loving the place and
+its environs a little for their own beauty, and feeling a strange and
+sorrowful interest in the scene of her husband’s misfortunes.
+
+There was another reason for remaining in the gay white city in the
+fact that Lady Lochinvar had taken a fancy to Miss Ransome, and that
+the young lady seemed to be achieving a remarkably rapid cure of her
+infatuation for the Italian. It may have been because at the Palais
+Montano she met a good many Italians, and that the charm of that
+nationality became less potent with familiarity. There was music, too,
+at the Palais, and to spare, according to Mr. Stuart, who was not an
+enthusiast, and was wont to shirk his aunt’s musical reunions.
+
+Mildred was delighted to see her husband’s niece entering society under
+such agreeable auspices. She went out with her occasionally, just
+enough to make people understand that she was not indifferent to her
+niece’s happiness; and for the rest, Lady Lochinvar and Mrs. Murray
+were always ready to chaperon the frank, bright girl, who was much
+admired by the best people, and was never at a loss for partners at
+dances, whoever else might play wallflower.
+
+Mrs. Greswold invited Mr. and Mrs. Murray and Malcolm Stuart to a quiet
+little dinner at the Westminster, and the impression the young man
+made upon Mildred’s mind was altogether favourable. He was certainly
+not handsome, but his plainness was of an honest Scottish type, and
+his freckled complexion and blue eyes, sandy hair and moustache,
+were altogether different from the traditionary Judas colouring of
+Castellani’s auburn beard and hazel eyes. Truth and honesty beamed in
+the Scotchman’s open countenance. He looked every inch a soldier and a
+gentleman.
+
+That he admired Pamela was obvious to the most unobservant eye; that
+she affected to look down upon him was equally obvious; but it might
+be that her good-humoured scorn of him was more pretence than reality.
+She made light of him openly as one of that inferior race of men whose
+minds never soar above the stable, the gunroom, or the home-farm, and
+whose utmost intellectual ingenuity culminates in the invention of a
+salmon-fly or the discovery of a new fertiliser for turnip-fields.
+
+“You are just like my brother-in-law, Henry Mountford,” she told him.
+
+“From the air with which you say that, I conclude Sir Henry Mountford
+must be a very inferior person.”
+
+“Not at all. He is the kind of man whom all other men seem to respect.
+I believe he is one of the best shots in England. His bags are written
+about in the newspapers; and I wonder there are any pigeons left in the
+world, considering the way he has slaughtered them.”
+
+“I saw him shoot at Monte Carlo the year before last.”
+
+“Yes; he went there and back in a week on purpose to shoot. Imagine any
+man coming to this divine Riviera, this land of lemon-groves and palms,
+and roses and violets, just to slaughter pigeons!”
+
+“He won the Grand Prix. It was a pretty big feather in his cap,” said
+Mr. Stuart. “Am I to conclude that you dislike sporting men?”
+
+“I prefer men who cultivate their minds.”
+
+“Ah, but a man who shoots well and rides straight, and can play a
+big salmon, and knows how to manage a farm, cannot be altogether an
+imbecile. I never knew a really fine rider yet who was a fool. Good
+horsemanship needs so many qualities that fools don’t possess; and to
+be a crack shot, I assure you that a man must have some brains and a
+good deal of perseverance; and perseverance is not a bad thing in its
+way, Miss Ransome.”
+
+He looked at her with a certain significance in his frank blue eyes,
+looked at her resolutely, as some bold young Vandal or Visigoth might
+have looked at a Roman maiden whom he meant to subjugate.
+
+“I did not say that sportsmen were fools,” she answered sharply. “I
+only say that the kind of man I respect is the man whose pleasures are
+those of the intellect—who is in the front rank among the thinkers of
+his age—who—”
+
+“Reads Darwin and the German metaphysicians, I suppose. I tried Darwin
+to see if he would help me in my farming, but I can’t say I got very
+much out of him in that line. There’s more in old Virgil for an
+agriculturist. I’m not a reading man, you see, Miss Ransome. I find by
+the time I’ve read the daily papers my thirst for knowledge is pretty
+well satisfied. There’s such a lot of information in the London papers,
+and when you add the _Figaro_ and the _New York Herald_, there’s not
+much left for a man to learn. I generally read the Quarterlies—as a
+duty—to discover how many dull books have enriched the world during the
+previous three months.”
+
+“That’s a great deal more reading than my brother-in-law gets through.
+He makes a great fuss about his _Times_ every morning; but I believe
+he seldom goes beyond the births, marriages, and deaths, or a report
+of a billiard match. He reads the _Field_, as a kind of religion, and
+_Baily’s Magazine_; and I think that’s all.”
+
+“Do you like men who write books, Miss Ransome, as well as men who read
+them?”
+
+Pamela crimsoned to the roots of her hair at this most innocent
+question. Malcolm Stuart marked that blush with much perplexity.
+
+“When one is interested in a book one likes to know the author,” she
+replied, with cautious vagueness.
+
+“Do you know many writers?”
+
+“Not many—in fact, only one.”
+
+“Who is he?”
+
+“Mr. Castellani, the author of _Nepenthe_.”
+
+“_Nepenthe?_—ah, that’s a novel people were talking about some time
+ago. My aunt was full of it, because she fancied it embodied some of
+her own ideas. She wanted me to read it. I tried a few chapters,” said
+Malcolm, making a wry face. “Sickly stuff.”
+
+“People who are not in the habit of reading the literature of
+imagination can hardly understand such a book as _Nepenthe_,” replied
+Pamela severely. “They are out of touch with the spirit and the
+atmosphere of the book.”
+
+“One has to be trained up to that kind of thing, I suppose. One must
+forget that two and two make four, in order to get into the proper
+frame of mind, eh? Is the author of _Nepenthe_ an interesting man?”
+
+He was shrewd enough to interpret the blush aright. The author of
+_Nepenthe_ was a person to be dreaded by any aspirant to Miss Ransome’s
+favour.
+
+“He is like his book,” answered Pamela briefly.
+
+“Is he a young man?”
+
+“I don’t know your idea of youth. He is older than my aunt—about
+five-and-thirty.”
+
+Stuart was just thirty. One point in his favour, anyhow, he told
+himself, not knowing that to a romantic girl years may be interesting.
+
+“Handsome?”
+
+“_That_ is always a matter of opinion. He is just the kind of man who
+ought to have written _Nepenthe_. That is really all I can tell you,”
+said Pamela, with some irritation. “I believe Lady Lochinvar knew Mr.
+Castellani when he was a very young man. She can satisfy your curiosity
+about him.”
+
+“I am not curious. Castellani? An Italian, I suppose, one of my aunt’s
+innumerable geniuses. She has a genius for discovering geniuses. When I
+see her with a new one, I am always reminded of a child with a little
+coloured balloon. So pretty—till it bursts!”
+
+Pamela turned her back upon him in a rage, and went over to the
+piano to talk to Mrs. Murray, who was preparing to sing one of her
+_répertoire_ of five Scotch ballads.
+
+“Shall it be ‘Gin a body’ or ‘Huntingtower’?” she asked meekly; and
+nobody volunteering a decisive opinion, she chirruped the former
+coquettish little ballad, and put a stop to social intercourse for
+exactly four minutes and a half.
+
+After that evening Mr. Stuart knew who his rival was, and with what
+kind of influence he had to contend. An author, a musical man, a
+genius! Well, he had very few weapons with which to fight such an
+antagonist, he who was neither musical, nor literary, nor gifted with
+any of the graces which recommend a lover to a sentimental girl.
+But he was a man, and he meant to win her. He admired her for her
+frank young prettiness, so unsophisticated and girlish, and for that
+perfect freshness and truthfulness of mind which made all her thoughts
+transparent. He was too much a man of the world to ignore the fact
+that Miss Ransome of Mapledown would be a very good match for him,
+or that such a marriage would strengthen his position in his aunt’s
+esteem. Women bow down to success. Encouraged by these considerations,
+Mr. Stuart pursued the even tenor of his way, and was not disheartened
+by the idea of the author of _Nepenthe_, more especially as that
+attractive personage was not on the ground. He had one accomplishment
+over and above the usual outdoor exercises of a country gentleman. He
+could dance, and he was Pamela’s favourite partner wherever she went.
+No one else waltzed as well. Not even the most gifted of her German
+acquaintance; not even the noble Spaniards who were presented to her.
+
+He had another and still greater advantage in the fact that he was
+often in the young lady’s society. She was fond of Lady Lochinvar, and
+spent a good deal of her life at the Palais Montano, where, with Mrs.
+Murray’s indefatigable assistance, there were tennis-parties twice a
+week. That charming garden, with its numerous summer-houses, made a
+kind of club for the privileged few who were permitted _les petites
+entrées_.
+
+While Pamela was enjoying the lovely springtide amongst people whose
+only thought was of making the best of life, and getting the maximum
+of sunshine, Mildred Greswold spent her days in sad musings upon an
+irrevocable past. It was her melancholy pleasure to revisit again and
+again the place in which her husband had lived, the picturesque little
+village under the shadow of the tall cliff, every pathway which he must
+have trodden, every point from which he must have gazed across the bay,
+seaward or landward in his troubled reveries.
+
+She dwelt with morbid persistence on the thought of those two lives,
+both dear to her, yet in their union how terrible a curse! She
+revisited the villa until the old caretaker grew to look upon her as a
+heaven-sent benefactress, and until the village children christened her
+the English Madonna, that pensive look recalling the face of the statue
+in the church yonder, so mildly sad, a look of ineffable sweetness
+tinged with pain. She sat for hours at a stretch in the sunlit garden,
+amongst such flowers as must have been blooming there in those closing
+hours of Fay’s wedded life, when the shadow of her cruel fate was
+darkening round her, though she knew it not. She talked to people
+who had known the English lady. Alas! they were all dubious in their
+opinions. None would answer boldly for the husband’s innocence. They
+shrugged their shoulders—they shook their heads. Who could say? Only
+the good God would ever know the truth about that story.
+
+The place to which she went oftenest in those balmy afternoons was the
+burial-ground on the hill, where Fay’s grave, with its white marble
+cross, occupied one of the highest points in the enclosure, and stood
+out sharp and clear against the cloudless sapphire.
+
+The inscription on that marble was of the briefest:
+
+  “VIVIEN RANSOME.
+  Died April 24th, 1868.
+  Eternally lamented.”
+
+Below the cross stretched the grass mound, without shrub or flower.
+It was Mildred’s task to beautify this neglected grave. She brought a
+florist from the neighbourhood to carry out her own idea, and on her
+instruction he removed the long, rank grass from the mound, and planted
+a cross of roses, eight feet long, dwarf bush-roses closely planted,
+Gloire de Dijon and Maréchal Niel.
+
+She remembered how Fay had revelled in the rose-garden at The Hook,
+where midsummer was a kind of carnival of roses. Here the roses would
+bloom all the year round, and there would be perpetual perfume and
+blossom and colour above poor Fay’s cold dust.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PAMELA CHANGES HER MIND.
+
+
+Lucifer himself, after his fall, could not have felt worse than César
+Castellani when he followed Mildred Greswold to Nice, as he did within
+a week after she left Pallanza.
+
+He went to Nice partly because he was an idle man, and had no desire
+to go back to English east winds just when the glory of the southern
+springtide was beginning. He was tolerably well furnished with money,
+and Nice was as good to him as any other place, while the neighbourhood
+of Monte Carlo was always an attraction. He followed in Mildred’s
+footsteps, therefore; but he had no idea of forcing himself upon her
+presence for some time to come. He knew that his chances were ruined in
+that quarter for the time being, if not for ever.
+
+This was his first signal overthrow. Easy conquests had so demoralised
+him that he had grown to consider all conquests easy. He had unlimited
+faith in the charm of his own personality—his magnetic power, as he
+called it: and, behold! his magnetic power had failed utterly with this
+lovely, lonely woman, who should have turned to him in her desolation
+as the flowers turn to the sun.
+
+For once in his life he had overrated himself and his influence; and in
+so doing he had lost the chance of a very respectable alliance.
+
+“Fifteen hundred a year would be at least bread and cheese,” he
+reflected, “and to marry an English heiress of a good old family would
+solidify my position in society. The girl is pretty enough, and I could
+twist her round my finger. She would bore me frightfully; but every man
+must suffer something. There is always a discord somewhere amidst the
+harmony of life; and if one’s teeth are not too often set on edge by
+that false note, one should be content.”
+
+He remembered how contemptuously he had rejected the idea of such a
+marriage in his talk with Miss Fausset, and how she had been set upon
+it.
+
+“I should stand ever so much better with her if I married well, and
+solidified myself into British respectability. I might naturalise
+myself, and go into Parliament perhaps, if that would please the good
+soul at Brighton. What will she leave me when she dies, I wonder?
+She is muter than the Sphinx upon that point. And will she ever die?
+Brighton is famous for pauper females of ninety and upwards. A woman
+like Miss Fausset, who lives in cotton-wool, and who has long done with
+the cares and passions of life, might go well into a second century.
+I don’t see any brilliancy in the prospect _there_; but so long as I
+please her and do well in the world she will no doubt be generous.”
+
+He told himself that it was essential he should make some concession to
+Miss Fausset’s prejudices now that he had failed with Mildred. So long
+as he had hoped to win that nobler prize he had been careless how he
+jeopardised the favour of his elderly patroness. But now he felt that
+her favour was all in all to him, and that the time for trifling was
+past.
+
+She had been very generous to him during the years that had gone by
+since she first came to his aid almost unasked, and helped him to pay
+his college debts. She had come to the rescue many times since that
+juvenile entanglement, and her patience had been great. Yet she had not
+failed to remonstrate with him at every fresh instance of folly and
+self-indulgent extravagance. She had talked to him with an unflinching
+directness; she had refused further help; but somehow she had always
+given way, and the cheque had been written.
+
+Again and again she had warned him that there were limits even to her
+forbearance.
+
+“If I saw you working earnestly and industriously, I should not mind,
+even if you were a failure,” said his benefactress severely.
+
+“I have worked, and I have produced a book which was _not_ a failure,”
+replied César, with his silkiest air.
+
+“One book in a decade of so-called literary life! Did the success of
+that book result in the payment of one single debt?”
+
+“Dearest lady, would you have a man waste his own earnings—the
+first-fruits of his pen—the grains of fairy gold that filtered through
+the mystic web of his fancy—would you have him fritter away that sacred
+product upon importunate hosiers or vindictive bootmakers? _That_
+money was altogether precious to me. I kept it in my waistcoat pocket
+as long as ever I could. The very touch of the coin thrilled me. I
+believe cabmen and crossing-sweepers had most of it in the long-run,”
+he concluded, with a remorseful sigh.
+
+Miss Fausset had borne with his idleness and his vanity, as indulgent
+mothers bear with their sons; but he felt that she was beginning
+to tire of him. There were reasons why she should always continue
+forbearing; but he wanted to insure himself something better than
+reluctant subsidies.
+
+These considerations being taken into account, Mr. Castellani was fain
+to own to himself that he had been a fool in rejecting the substance
+for the shadow, however alluring the lovely shade might be.
+
+“But I loved her,” he sighed; “I loved her as I had never loved until I
+saw her fair Madonna face amidst the century-old peace of her home. She
+filled my life with a new element. She purified and exalted my whole
+being. And she is thrice as rich as that prattling girl!”
+
+He ground his teeth at the remembrance of his failure. There had
+been no room for doubt. Those soft violet eyes had been transformed
+by indignation, and had flashed upon him with angry fire. That fair
+Madonna face had whitened to marble with suppressed passion. Not by one
+glance, not by one tremor in the contemptuous voice, had the woman he
+loved acknowledged his influence.
+
+He put up at the Cosmopolitan, got in half-a-dozen French novels of
+the most advanced school from Galignani’s Library, and kept himself
+very close for a week or two; but he contrived to find out what the
+ladies at the Westminster were doing through Albrecht the courier,
+who believed him to be Miss Ransome’s suitor, and was inclined to be
+communicative, after being copiously treated to bocks, or _petits
+verres_, as the case might be.
+
+From Albrecht, Castellani heard how Miss Ransome spent most of her
+time at the Palais Montano, or gadding about with her ladyship and
+Mrs. Murray; how, in Albrecht’s private opinion, the balls and other
+dissipations of Nice were turning that young lady’s head; how Mrs.
+Greswold went for lonely drives day after day, and would not allow
+Albrecht to show her the beauties of the neighbourhood, which it
+would have been alike his duty and pleasure to have done. He had
+ascertained that her favourite, and, indeed, habitual, drive was to
+St. Jean, where she was in the habit of leaving the fly at the little
+inn while she strolled about the village in a purposeless manner. All
+this appeared to Albrecht as eccentric and absurd, and beneath a lady
+of Mrs. Greswold’s position. She would have employed her time to more
+advantage in going on distant excursions in a carriage and pair, and
+in lunching at remote hotels, where Albrecht would have been sure of a
+_bonne main_ from a gratified landlord, as well as his commission from
+the livery-stable.
+
+Castellani heard with displeasure of Pamela’s dancings and junketings,
+and he told himself that it was time to throw himself across her
+pathway. He had not been prepared to find that she could enjoy life
+without him. Her admiration of him had been so transparent, her
+sentimental fancy so naïvely revealed, that he had believed himself the
+sultan of her heart, having only to throw the handkerchief whenever it
+might suit him to claim his prey. Much as he prided himself upon his
+knowledge of human nature, as exemplified in the softer sex, he had
+never estimated the fickleness of a shallow sentimental character like
+Pamela’s. No man with a due regard to the value and dignity of his sex
+could conceive the ruthless rapidity with which a young lady of this
+temperament will transfer her affections and her large assortment of
+day-dreams and romantic fancies from one man to another. No man could
+conceive her capacity for admiring in Number Two all those qualities
+which were lacking in Number One. No man could imagine the exquisite
+adaptability of girlhood to surrounding circumstances.
+
+Had Castellani taken Miss Ransome when she was in the humour, he would
+have found her the most amiable and yielding of wives; a model English
+wife, ready to adapt herself in all things to the will and the pleasure
+of her husband; unselfish, devoted, unassailable in her belief in
+her husband as the first and best of men. But he had not seized his
+opportunity. He had allowed nearly a month to go by since his defeat
+at Pallanza, and he had allowed Pamela to discover that life might be
+endurable, nay, even pleasant, without him.
+
+And now, hearing that the young lady was gadding about, and divining
+that such gadding was the high-road to forgetfulness, Mr. Castellani
+made up his mind to resume his sway over Miss Ransome’s fancy without
+loss of time. He called upon a dashing American matron whom he had
+visited in London and Paris, and who was now the occupant of a villa
+on the Promenade des Anglais, and in her drawing-room he fell in with
+several of his London acquaintances. He found, however, that his
+American friend, Mrs. Montagu W. Brown, had not yet succeeded in being
+invited to the Palais Montano, and only knew Lady Lochinvar and Miss
+Ransome by sight.
+
+“Her ladyship is too stand-offish for my taste,” said Mrs. Montagu
+Brown, “but the girl seems friendly enough—no style—not as we Americans
+understand style. I am told she ranks as an heiress on this side, but
+at the last ball at the Cercle she wore a frock that I should call dear
+at forty dollars. That young Stuart is after her, evidently. I hope you
+are going to the dance next Tuesday, Mr. Castellani? I want some one
+nice to talk to now my waltzing days are over.”
+
+Castellani protested that Mrs. Montagu Brown was in the very heyday of
+a dancer’s age, and would be guilty of gross cruelty to terpsichorean
+society in abandoning that delightful art.
+
+“You make me tired,” said Mrs. Montagu Brown, with perfect good-humour.
+“There are plenty of women who don’t know when they’re old, but I
+calculate every woman knows when she weighs a hundred and sixty pounds.
+When my waist came to twenty-six inches I knew it was time to leave off
+waltzing; and I was pretty good at it, too, in my day, I can tell you.”
+
+“With that carriage you must have been divine,” replied César; “and I
+believe the cestus of the Venus de Milo must measure over twenty-six
+inches.”
+
+“The Venus de Milo has no more figure than the peasant-women one sees
+on the promenade, women who seem as if they set their faces against
+the very idea of a waist. Be sure you get a card for Tuesday. I hate a
+dude; but I love to have some smart men about me wherever I go.”
+
+“I shall be there,” said Castellani, bending over his hostess and
+imparting a confidential pressure to her fat white hand by way of
+leave-taking, before he slipped silently from the room.
+
+He had studied the art of departure as if it were a science: never
+lingered, never hummed and hawed; never said he must go and didn’t;
+never apologised for going so soon while everybody was pining to get
+rid of him.
+
+The next day there was a battle of flowers; not the great floral fête
+before the sugar-plum carnival, but an altogether secondary affair,
+pleasant enough in the balmy weather of advancing spring.
+
+Every one of any importance was on the promenade, and among the best
+carriages appeared Lady Lochinvar’s barouche, decorated with white
+camellias and carmine carnations. She had carefully eschewed that
+favourite mixture of camellias and Parma violets which has always a
+half-mourning or funereal air. Malcolm Stuart and Miss Ransome sat side
+by side on the front seat with a great basket of carnations on their
+knees, with which they pelted their acquaintance, while Lady Lochinvar,
+in brown velvet and ostrich plumage, reposed at her ease in the back
+of the spacious carriage, and enjoyed the fun without any active
+participation.
+
+It was Pamela’s first experience in flower-fights, and to her the scene
+seemed enchanting. The afternoon was peerless. She wore a white gown,
+as if it had been midsummer, and white gowns were the rule in most of
+the carriages. The sea was at its bluest, the pink walls and green
+shutters, white walls and red roofs, the orange-trees, cactus and palm,
+made up a picture of a city in fairyland, taken as a background to a
+triple procession of carriages all smothered in Parma violets, Dijon
+roses, camellias, and narcissus, with here and there some picturesque
+coach festooned with oranges and lemons amidst tropical foliage.
+
+The carriages moved at a foot-pace; the pavements were crowded with
+smart people, who joined in the contest. Pamela’s lap was full of
+bouquets, which fell from her in showers as she stood up every now and
+then to fling a handful of carnations into a passing carriage.
+
+Presently, while she was standing thus, flushed and sparkling, she saw
+a familiar figure on the footpath by the sea, and paled suddenly at the
+sight.
+
+It was César Castellani, sauntering slowly along, in a short coat of
+light-coloured cloth, and a felt hat of exactly the same delicate
+shade. He came to the carriage-door. There was a block at the moment,
+and he had time to talk to the occupants.
+
+“How do you do, Lady Lochinvar? You have not forgotten me, I hope—César
+Castellani—though it is such ages since we met?”
+
+He only lifted his hat to Lady Lochinvar, waiting for her recognition,
+but he held out his hand to Pamela.
+
+“How do you like Nice, Miss Ransome? As well as Pallanza, I hope?”
+
+“Ever so much better than Pallanza.”
+
+There was a time when that coat and hat, the _soupçon_ of dark blue
+velvet waistcoat just showing underneath the pale buff collar, the
+loose China silk handkerchief carelessly fastened with a priceless
+intaglio, the gardenia and pearl-gray gloves, would have ensnared
+Pamela’s fancy: but that time was past. She thought that César’s
+costume looked effeminate and underbred beside the stern simplicity of
+Mr. Stuart’s heather-mixture _complet_. The scales had fallen from her
+eyes; and she recognised the bad taste and the vanity involved in that
+studied carelessness, that artistic combination of colour.
+
+She remembered what Mildred had said of Mr. Castellani, and she was
+deliberately cold. Lady Lochinvar was gracious, knowing nothing to the
+Italian’s discredit.
+
+“I remember you perfectly,” she said. “You have changed very little
+in all these years. Be sure you come and see me. I am at home at five
+almost every afternoon.”
+
+The carriage moved on, and Pamela sat in an idle reverie for the next
+ten minutes, although the basket of carnations was only half empty.
+
+She was thinking how strange it was that her heart beat no faster.
+Could it be that she was cured—and so soon? It was even worse than
+a cure; it was a positive revulsion of feeling. She was vexed with
+herself for ever having exalted that over-dressed foreigner into
+a hero. She felt she had been un-English, unwomanly even, in her
+exaggerated admiration of an exotic. And then she glanced at Malcolm
+Stuart, and averted her eyes with a conscious blush on seeing him
+earnestly observant of her.
+
+He was plain, certainly. His features had been moulded roughly, but
+they were not bad features. The lines were rather good, in fact, and
+it was a fine manly countenance. He was fair and slightly freckled, as
+became a Scotchman; his eyes were clear and blue, but could be compared
+to neither sapphires nor violets, and his eyelashes were lighter than
+any cultivated young lady could approve. The general tone of his
+hair and complexion was ginger; and ginger, taken in connection with
+masculine beauty, is not all one would wish. But then ginger is not
+uncommon in the service, and it is a hue which harmonises agreeably
+with Highland bonnets and tartan. No doubt Mr. Stuart had looked
+really nice in his uniform. He had certainly appeared to advantage in
+a Highland costume at the fancy ball the other night. Some people had
+pronounced him the finest-looking man in the room.
+
+And, again, good looks are of little importance in a man. A plainish
+man, possessed of all the manly accomplishments, a dead shot and a
+crack rider, can always appear to advantage in English society. Pamela
+was beginning to think more kindly of sporting men, and even of Sir
+Henry Mountford.
+
+“I’m sure Mr. Stuart would get on with him,” she thought, dimly
+foreseeing a day when Sir Henry and her new acquaintance would be
+brought together somehow.
+
+César Castellani took immediate advantage of Lady Lochinvar’s
+invitation. He presented himself at the Palais Montano on the following
+afternoon, and he found Pamela established there as if she belonged to
+the house. It was she who poured out the tea, and dispensed those airy
+little hot cakes, which were a kind of idealised galette, served in
+the daintiest of doyleys, embroidered with Lady Lochinvar’s cipher and
+coronet.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Murray were there, and Malcolm Stuart, the chief charm of
+whose society seemed to consist in his exhibition of an accomplished
+Dandie Dinmont which usurped the conversation, and which Castellani
+would have liked to inocculate then and there with the most virulent
+form of rabies. Pamela squatted on a little stool at the creature’s
+feet, and assisted in showing him off. She had acquired a power over
+him which indicated an acquaintance of some standing.
+
+“What fools girls are!” thought Castellani.
+
+His conquests among women of maturer years had been built upon rock as
+compared with the shifting quicksand of a girl’s fancy. He began to
+think the genus girl utterly contemptible.
+
+“He has but one fault,” said Pamela, when the terrier had gone through
+various clumsy evolutions in which the bandiness of his legs and the
+length of his body had been shown off to the uttermost. “He cannot
+endure Box, and Box detests him. They never meet without trying to
+murder each other, and I’m very much afraid,” bending down to kiss the
+broad hairy head, “that Dandie is the stronger.”
+
+“Of course he is. Box is splendid for muscle, but weight must tell in
+the long-run,” replied Mr. Stuart.
+
+“My grandmother had a Dandie whose father belonged to Sir Walter
+Scott,” began Mrs. Murray: “he was simply a per-r-r-fect dog, and my
+mamma—”
+
+Castellani fled from this inanity. He went to the other end of the
+room, where Lady Lochinvar was listening listlessly to Mr. Murray, laid
+himself out to amuse her ladyship for the next ten minutes, and then
+departed without so much as a look at Pamela.
+
+“The spell is broken,” he said to himself, as he drove away. “The girl
+is next door to an idiot. No doubt she will marry that sandy Scotchman.
+Lady Lochinvar means it, and a silly-pated miss like that can be led
+with a thread of floss silk. _Moi je m’en fiche._”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About a week after Mr. Castellani’s reappearance Mildred Greswold
+received a letter from Brighton, which made a sudden change in her
+plans.
+
+It was from Mr. Maltravers the Incumbent of St. Edmund’s:
+
+  “St. Edmund’s Vicarage.
+
+ “Dear Mrs. Greswold,—After our thoroughly confidential conversations
+ last autumn I feel justified in addressing you upon a subject which
+ I know is very near to your heart, namely, the health and welfare,
+ spiritual as well as bodily, of your dear aunt and my most valued
+ parishioner, Miss Fausset. The condition of that dear lady has given
+ me considerable uneasiness during the last few months. She has refused
+ to take her hand from the plough; she labours as faithfully as ever
+ in the Lord’s vineyard; but I see with deepest regret that she is no
+ longer the woman she was, even a year ago. The decay has been sudden,
+ and it has been rapid. Her strength begins to fail her, though she
+ will hardly admit as much, even to her medical attendant, and her
+ spirits are less equable than of old. She has intervals of extreme
+ depression, against which the efforts of friendship, the power of
+ spiritual consolation, are unavailing.
+
+ “I feel it my duty to inform you, as one who has a right to be
+ interested in the disposal of Miss Fausset’s wealth, that my
+ benefactress has consummated the generosity of past years by a
+ magnificent gift. She has endowed her beloved Church of St. Edmund
+ with an income which, taken in conjunction with the pew-rents, an
+ institution which I hope hereafter to abolish, raises the priest
+ of the temple from penury to comfort, and affords him the means of
+ helping the poor of his parish with his alms as well as with his
+ prayers and ministrations. This munificent gift closes the long
+ account of beneficence betwixt your dear aunt and me. I have nothing
+ further to expect from her for my church or for myself. It is fully
+ understood between us that this gift is final. You will understand,
+ therefore, that I am disinterested in my anxiety for this precious
+ life.
+
+ “You, dear Mrs. Greswold, are your aunt’s only near relative, and
+ it is but right you should be the companion and comforter of her
+ declining days. That the shadow of the grave is upon her I can but
+ fear, although medical science sees but slight cause for alarm. A
+ year ago she was a vigorous woman, spare of habit certainly, but with
+ a hardness of bearing and manner which promised a long life. To-day
+ she is a broken woman, nervous, fitful, and, I fear, unhappy, though I
+ can conceive no cause for sadness in the closing years of such a noble
+ life as hers has been, unselfish, devoted to good works and exalted
+ thoughts. If you can find it compatible with your other ties to come
+ to Brighton, I would strongly recommend you to come without loss of
+ time, and I believe that the change which you will yourself perceive
+ in my valued friend will fully justify the course I take in thus
+ addressing you.—I am ever, dear Mrs. Greswold, your friend and servant,
+
+  “SAMUEL MALTRAVERS.”
+
+Mildred gave immediate orders to courier and maid, her trunks were
+to be packed that afternoon, a _coupé_ was to be taken in the Rapide
+for the following day, and the travellers were to go straight through
+to Paris. But when she announced this fact to Pamela the damsel’s
+countenance expressed utmost despondency.
+
+“Upon my word, aunt, you have a genius for taking one away from a place
+just when one is beginning to be happy!” she exclaimed in irrepressible
+vexation.
+
+She apologised directly after upon hearing of Miss Fausset’s illness.
+
+“I am a horrid ill-tempered creature,” she said; “but I really am
+beginning to adore Nice. It is a place that grows upon one.”
+
+“What if I were to leave you with Lady Lochinvar? She told me the other
+day that she would like very much to have you to stay with her. You
+might stay till she leaves Nice, which will be in about three weeks’
+time, and you could travel with her to Paris. You could go from Paris
+to Brighton very comfortably, with Peterson to take care of you.
+Perhaps you would not mind leaving Nice when Lady Lochinvar goes?”
+
+Pamela sparkled and blushed at the suggestion.
+
+“I should like it very much, if Lady Lochinvar is in earnest in asking
+to have me.”
+
+“I am sure she is in earnest. There is only one stipulation I must
+make, Pamela. You must promise me not to renew your intimacy with Mr.
+Castellani.”
+
+“With all my heart, aunt. My eyes have been opened. He is thoroughly
+bad style.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+AS THE SANDS RUN DOWN.
+
+
+Mildred was in Brighton upon the third day after she left Nice. She had
+sent no intimation of her coming to her aunt, lest her visit should
+be forbidden. A nervous invalid is apt to have fancies, and to resent
+anything that looks like being taken care of. She arrived, therefore,
+unannounced, left her luggage at the station, and drove straight to
+Lewes Crescent, where the butler received her with every appearance of
+surprise.
+
+It was early in the afternoon, and Miss Fausset was sitting in her
+accustomed chair in the back drawing-room, near the fire, with her
+book-table on her right hand. The balmy spring-time which Mildred had
+left at Nice had not yet visited Brighton, where the season had been
+exceptionally cold, and where a jovial north-easter was holding his
+revels all over Kemp Town, and enlivening the cold gray sea. A pleasant
+bracing day for robust health and animal spirits; but not altogether
+the kind of atmosphere to suit an elderly spinster suffering from
+nervous depression.
+
+Miss Fausset started up, flushed with surprise, at Mildred’s entrance.
+Her niece had kept her acquainted with her movements, but had told her
+nothing of the drama of her existence since she left Brighton.
+
+“My dear child, I am very glad to see you back,” she said gently. “You
+are come to stay with me for a little while, I hope, before—”
+
+She hesitated, and looked at Mildred earnestly.
+
+“Are you reconciled to your husband?” she asked abruptly, as if with
+irrepressible anxiety.
+
+“Reconciled?” echoed Mildred; “we have never quarrelled. He is as dear
+to me to-day as he was the day I married him—dearer for all the years
+we spent together. But we are parted for ever. You know that it must be
+so, and you know why.”
+
+“I hoped that time would have taught you common sense.”
+
+“Time has only confirmed my resolution. Do not let us argue the point,
+aunt. I know that you mean kindly, but I know that you are false to
+your own principles—to all the teaching of your life—when you argue on
+the side of wrong.”
+
+Miss Fausset turned her head aside impatiently. She had sunk back into
+her chair after greeting Mildred, and her niece perceived that she, who
+used to sit erect as a dart, in the most uncompromising attitude, was
+now propped up with cushions, against which her wasted figure leaned
+heavily.
+
+“How have you got through the winter, aunt?” Mildred asked presently.
+
+“Not very well. It has tried me more than any other winter I can
+remember. It has been a long weary winter. I have been obliged to give
+up the greater part of my district work. I held on as long as ever I
+could, till my strength failed me. And now I have to trust the work to
+others. I have my lieutenants—Emily Newton and her sister—who work for
+me. You remember them, perhaps. Earnest good girls. They keep me _en
+rapport_ with my poor people; but it is not like personal intercourse.
+I begin to feel what it is to be useless—to cumber the ground.”
+
+“My dear aunt, how can you talk so? Your life has been so full of
+usefulness that you may well afford to take rest now that your health
+is not quite so good as it has been. Even in your drawing-room here
+you are doing good. It is only right that young people should carry
+out your instructions, and work for you. I have heard, too, of your
+munificent gift to St. Edmund’s.”
+
+“It is nothing, my dear. When all is counted, it is nothing. I have
+tried to lead a righteous life. I have tried to do good; but now
+sitting alone by this fire day after day, night after night, it all
+seems vain and empty. There is no comfort in the thought of it all,
+Mildred. I have had the praise of men, but never the approval of my own
+conscience.”
+
+There was a brief silence, Mildred feeling it vain to argue against
+her aunt’s tone of self-upbraiding, unable to fathom the mind which
+prompted the words.
+
+“Then you are not going back to your husband?” Miss Fausset asked
+abruptly, as if in utter forgetfulness of all that had been said; and
+then suddenly recollecting herself, “you have made up your mind, you
+say. Well, in that case you can stay with me—make this your home. You
+may take up my work, perhaps—by and by.”
+
+“Yes, aunt, I hope I may be able to do so. My life has been idle and
+useless since my great sorrow. I want to learn to be of more use in the
+world; and you can teach me, if you will.”
+
+“I will, Mildred. I want you to be happy. I have made my will. You will
+inherit the greater part of my fortune.”
+
+“My dear aunt, I don’t want—”
+
+“No, you are rich enough already, I know; but I should like you to have
+still larger means, to profit by my death. You will use your wealth
+for the good of others, as I have tried—feebly tried—to use mine. You
+will be rich enough to found a sisterhood, if you like—the Sisters of
+St. Edmund. I have done all I mean to do for the Church. Mr. Maltravers
+knows that.”
+
+“Dear aunt, why should we talk of these things? You have many years of
+life before you, I hope.”
+
+“No, Mildred, the end is not far off. I feel worn out and broken. I am
+a doomed woman.”
+
+“But you have had no serious illness since I was here?”
+
+“No, no, nothing specific; only languor and shattered nerves, want of
+appetite, want of sleep: the sure indications of decay. My doctor can
+find no name for my malady. He tries one remedy after another, until I
+weary of his experiments. I am glad you have come to me, Mildred; but I
+should be gladder if you were going back to your husband.”
+
+“O, aunt, why do you say things which you know must torture me?”
+
+“Because I am worried by your folly. Well, I will say no more. You
+will stay with me and comfort me, if you can. What have you done with
+Pamela?”
+
+Mildred told her aunt about Lady Lochinvar’s invitation.
+
+“Ah! she is with Lady Lochinvar. A very frivolous person, I suppose.
+Your husband’s niece is a well-meaning silly girl; sure to get into
+mischief of some kind. Is she still in love with César Castellani?”
+
+“I think not—I hope not. I believe she is cured of that folly.”
+
+“You call it a folly? Well, perhaps you are right. It may be
+foolishness for a girl to follow the blind instinct of her heart.”
+
+“For an impulsive girl like Pamela.”
+
+“Yes, no doubt she is impulsive, generous, and uncalculating; a girl
+hardly to be trusted with her own fate,” said Miss Fausset, with a
+sigh, and then she lapsed into silence.
+
+Mr. Maltravers had not exaggerated the change in her. It was only too
+painfully evident. Her manner and bearing had altered since Mildred
+had seen her last. Physically and mentally her nature seemed to have
+relaxed and broken down. It was as if the springs that sustained the
+human machine had snapped. The whole mechanism was out of gear. She who
+had been so firm of speech and meaning, who had been wont to express
+herself with a cold and cutting decisiveness, was now feeble and
+wailing, repeating herself, harping upon the same old string, obviously
+forgetful of that which had gone before.
+
+Mildred felt that she would be only doing her duty in taking up her
+abode in the great dull house, and trying to soothe the tedium of
+decay. She could do very little, perhaps, but the fact of near kindred
+would be in itself a solace, and for her own part she would have the
+sense of duty done.
+
+“I will stay with you as long as you will have me, aunt,” she said
+gently. “Albrecht is below. May I send to the station for my luggage?”
+
+“Of course, and your rooms shall be got ready immediately. The house
+will be yours before very long, perhaps. It would be strange if you
+could not make it your home!”
+
+She touched a spring on her book-table, which communicated with the
+electric-bell, and Franz appeared promptly.
+
+“Tell them to get Mrs. Greswold’s old rooms ready at once, and send
+Albrecht to the station for the luggage,” ordered Miss Fausset, with
+something of her old decisiveness. “Louisa is with you, I suppose?” she
+added to her niece.
+
+“Louisa is at the station, looking after my things. Albrecht leaves me
+to-day. He has been a good servant, and I think he has had an easy
+place. I have not been an eager traveller.”
+
+“No; you seem to have taken life at a slow pace. What took you to Nice?
+It is not a place I should have chosen if I wanted quiet.”
+
+Mildred hesitated for some moments before she replied to this question.
+
+“You know one part of my sorrow, aunt; and I think I might trust you
+with the whole of that sad story. I went to Nice because it was the
+place where my husband lived with his first wife—where my unhappy
+sister died.”
+
+“She died at Nice?” repeated Miss Fausset, with an abstracted air, as
+if her power of attention, which had revived for a little just now,
+were beginning to flag.
+
+“She died there, under the saddest circumstances. I am heart-broken
+when I think of her and that sad fate. My own dear Fay, how hard that
+your loving heart should be an instrument of self-torture! She was
+jealous of her husband—causelessly, unreasonably jealous—and she killed
+herself in a paroxysm of despair!”
+
+The awfulness of this fact roused Miss Fausset from her apathy. She
+started up from amongst her cushions, staring at Mildred in mute
+horror, and her wasted hands trembled as they grasped the arm of her
+chair.
+
+“Surely, surely that can’t be true!” she faltered. “It is too dreadful!
+People tell such lies—an accident, perhaps, exaggerated into a suicide.
+An overdose of an opiate!”
+
+“No, no; it was nothing like that. There is no doubt. I heard it from
+those who knew. She flung herself over the edge of the cliff; she
+was walking with her husband—my husband, George Greswold—then George
+Ransome; they were walking together; they quarrelled; he said something
+that stung her to the quick, and she threw herself over the cliff. It
+was the wild impulse of a moment, for which an all-merciful God would
+not hold her accountable. She was in very delicate health, nervous,
+hysterical, and she fancied herself unloved, betrayed, perhaps. Ah,
+aunt, think how hardly she had been used—cast off, disowned, sent out
+alone into the world—by those who should have loved and protected her.
+Poor, poor Fay! My mother sent her away from The Hook where she was so
+happy. My mother’s jealousy drove her out—a young girl, so friendless,
+so lonely, so much in need of love. It was my mother’s doing; but my
+father ought not to have allowed it. If she was weak he was strong, and
+Fay was his daughter. It was his duty to protect her against all the
+world. You know how I loved my father; you know that I reverence his
+memory; but he played a coward’s part when he sent Fay out of his house
+to please my mother.”
+
+She was carried away by her passionate regret for that ill-used girl
+whose image had never lost its hold upon her heart.
+
+“Not a word against your father, Mildred. He was a good man. He never
+failed in affection or in duty. He acted for the best according to his
+lights in relation to that unhappy girl—unhappy—ill-used—yes, yes, yes.
+He did his best, Mildred. He must not be blamed. But it is dreadful to
+think that she killed herself.”
+
+“Had you heard nothing of her fate, aunt? My father must have been
+told, surely. There must have been some means of communication. He
+must have kept himself informed about her fate, although she was
+banished, given over to the care of strangers. If he had owned a dog
+which other people took care of for him he would have been told when
+the dog died.”
+
+Miss Fausset felt the unspeakable bitterness of this comparison.
+
+“You must not speak like that of your father, Mildred. You ought to
+know that he was a good man. Yes, he knew, of course, when that poor
+girl died, but it was not his business to tell other people. I only
+heard incidentally that she had married, and that she died within a
+year of her marriage. I heard no more. It was the end of a sad story.”
+
+Again there was an interval of silence. It was six o’clock; the sun was
+going down over the sea beyond the West Pier, and the lawn, and the
+fashionable garden where the gay world congregates; and this eastern
+end of the long white seafront was lapsing into grayness, through
+which a star shone dimly here and there. It looked a cold, dull world
+after the pink hotel and the green shutters, the dusty palms and the
+turquoise sea of the Promenade des Anglais; but Mildred was glad to
+be in England, glad to be so much nearer him whose life companion she
+could never be again.
+
+Franz brought her some tea presently, and informed her that her rooms
+were ready, and that Louisa had arrived with the luggage. Albrecht had
+left his humble duty for his honoured mistress, and was gone.
+
+“When your father died, you looked through his papers and letters, no
+doubt?” said Miss Fausset presently, after a pause in the conversation.
+
+“Yes, aunt, I looked through my dear father’s letters, and arranged
+everything with our old family solicitor, Mr. Cresswell,” answered
+Mildred, surprised at a question which seemed to have no bearing upon
+anything that had gone before.
+
+“And you found no documents relating to—that unhappy girl?”
+
+“Not a line—not a word. But I had not expected to find anything. The
+history of her birth was the one dark secret of my father’s life—he
+would naturally leave no trace of the story.”
+
+“Naturally, if he were wiser than most people. But I have observed
+that men of business have a passion for preserving documents, even
+when they are worthless. People keep compromising papers with the idea
+of destroying them on their death-beds, or when they feel the end is
+near; and then death comes without warning, and the papers remain. Your
+father’s end was somewhat sudden.”
+
+“Sadly sudden. When he left Enderby in the autumn he was in excellent
+health. The shooting had been better than usual that year, and I think
+he had enjoyed it as much as the youngest of our party. And then
+he went back to London, and the London fogs—caught cold, neglected
+himself, and we were summoned to Parchment Street to find him dying of
+inflammation of the lungs. It was terrible—such a brief farewell, such
+an irreparable loss.”
+
+“I was not sent for,” said Miss Fausset severely. “And yet I loved your
+father dearly.”
+
+“It was wrong, aunt; but we hoped against hope almost to the last.
+It was only within a few hours of the end that we knew the case was
+hopeless, and to summon you would have been to give him the idea
+that he was dying. George and I pretended that our going to him was
+accidental. We were so fearful of alarming him.”
+
+“Well, I daresay you acted for the best; but it was a heavy blow for me
+to be told that he was gone—my only brother—almost my only friend.”
+
+“Pray don’t say that, aunt. I hope you know that I love you.”
+
+“My dear, you love me because I am your father’s sister. You consider
+it your duty to love me. My brother loved me for my own sake. He was a
+noble-hearted man.”
+
+Miss Fausset and her niece dined together _tête-à-tête_, and spent
+the evening quietly on each side of the hearth, with their books and
+work, the kind of work which encourages pensive brooding, as the needle
+travels slowly over the fabric.
+
+“I wonder you have no pets, aunt—no favourite dog.”
+
+“I have never cared for that kind of affection, Mildred. I am of too
+hard a nature, perhaps. My heart does not open itself to dogs and cats,
+and parrots are my abomination. I am not like the typical spinster.
+My only solace in the long weary years has been in going among people
+who are more unhappy than myself. I have put myself face to face with
+sordid miseries, with heavy life-long burdens; and I have asked myself,
+What is _your_ trouble compared with these?”
+
+“Dear aunt, it seems to me that your life must have been particularly
+free from trouble and care.”
+
+“Perhaps, in its outward aspect. I am rich, and I have been looked
+up to. But do you think those long years of loneliness—the aimless,
+monotonous pilgrimage through life—have not been a burden? Do you think
+I have not—sometimes, at any rate—envied other women their children and
+their husbands—the atmosphere of domestic love, even with its attendant
+cares and sorrows? Do you suppose that I could live for a quarter of
+a century as I have lived, and not feel the burden of my isolation? I
+have made people care for me through their self-interest. I have made
+people honour me, because I have the means of helping them. But who is
+there who cares for me, Gertrude Fausset?”
+
+“You cannot have done so much for others without being sincerely loved
+in return.”
+
+“With a kind of love, perhaps—a love that has been bought.”
+
+“Why did you never marry, aunt?”
+
+“Because I was an heiress and a good match, and distrusted every man
+who wanted to marry me. I made a vow to myself, before my twentieth
+birthday, that I would never listen to words of love or give
+encouragement to a lover; and I most scrupulously kept that vow. I was
+called a handsome woman in those days; but I was not an attractive
+woman at any time. Nature had made me of too hard a clay.”
+
+“It was a pity that you should keep love at arm’s length.”
+
+“Far better than to have been fooled by shams, as I might have been.
+Don’t say any more about it, Mildred. I made my vow, and I kept it.”
+
+Mildred resigned herself quietly to the idea of the dull slow life in
+Lewes Crescent. This duty of solacing her aunt’s declining days was the
+only duty that remained to her, except that wider duty of caring for
+the helpless and the wretched. And she told herself that there could be
+no better school in which to learn how to help others than the house of
+Miss Fausset, who had given so much of her life to the poor.
+
+She had been told to consider her aunt’s house as her own, and that
+she was at liberty to receive Pamela there as much and as often as she
+liked. She did not think that Pamela would be long without a settled
+home. Mr. Stuart’s admiration and Lady Lochinvar’s wishes had been
+obvious; and Mildred daily expected a gushing letter from the fickle
+damsel, announcing her engagement to the Scotchman.
+
+At four o’clock on the day after Mildred’s arrival, Miss Fausset’s
+friends began to drop in for afternoon tea and talk, and Mildred was
+surprised to see how her aunt rallied in that long-familiar society.
+It seemed as if the praises and flatteries of these people acted upon
+her like strong wine. The languid attitude, the weary expression of
+the pale drawn face, were put aside. She sat erect again; her eyes
+brightened, her ear was alert to follow three or four conversations
+at a time; nothing escaped her. Mildred began to think that she
+had lived upon the praises of men rather than upon the approval of
+conscience—that these assiduities and flatteries of a very commonplace
+circle were essential to her happiness.
+
+Mr. Maltravers came after the vesper service, full of life and
+conversation, vigorous, self-satisfied, with an air of Papal dominion
+and Papal infallibility, so implicitly believed in by his flock that
+he had learned to believe as implicitly in himself. The flock was
+chiefly feminine, and worshipped without limit or reservation. There
+were husbands and sons, brothers and nephews, who went to church with
+their womenkind on Sunday; but these were for the most part without
+enthusiasm for Mr. Maltravers. Their idea of public worship went
+scarcely beyond considering Sunday morning service a respectable
+institution, not to be dispensed with lightly.
+
+Mr. Maltravers welcomed Mildred with touching friendliness.
+
+“I knew you would not fail your aunt in the hour of need,” he said;
+“and now I hope you are going to stay with her, and to take up her
+work when she lays it down, so that the golden thread of womanly
+charity may be unbroken.”
+
+“I hope I may be able to take up her work. I shall stay with her as
+long as she needs me.”
+
+“That is well. You found her sadly changed, did you not?”
+
+“Yes, she is much changed. Yet how bright she looks this afternoon!
+what interest she takes in the conversation!”
+
+“The flash of the falchion in the worn-out scabbard,” said Mr.
+Maltravers.
+
+A layman might have said sword, but Mr. Maltravers preferred falchion,
+as a more picturesque word. Half the success of his preaching had lain
+in the choice of picturesque words. There were sceptics among his
+masculine congregation who said there were no ideas in his sermons;
+only fine words, romantic similes—a perpetual recurrence of fountains
+and groves, sunset splendours and roseate dawns, golden gates and
+starry canopies, seas of glass, harps of gold. But if his female
+worshippers felt better and holier after listening to him, what could
+one ask more?—and they all declared that it was so. They came out of
+church spiritualised, overflowing with Christian love, and gave their
+pence eagerly to the crossing-sweepers on their way home.
+
+The dropping in and the tea-drinking went on for nearly two hours.
+Mr. Maltravers took four cups of tea, and consumed a good deal of
+bread-and-butter, abstaining from the chocolate biscuits and the
+poundcake which the ladies of the party affected; abstaining on
+principle, as saints and eremites of old abstained from high living.
+He allowed himself to enjoy the delicate aroma of the tea and the
+delicately-cut bread-and-butter. He was a bachelor, and lived poorly
+upon badly-cooked food at his vicarage. His only personal indulgence
+was in the accumulation of a theological library, in which all the
+books were of a High Church cast.
+
+When the visitors were all gone Miss Fausset sank back into her chair,
+white and weary-looking, and Mildred left her to take a little nap
+while she went up to her own room, half boudoir, half dressing-room, a
+spacious apartment, with a fine seaview. Here she sat in a reverie,
+and watched the fading sky and the slow dim stars creeping out one by
+one.
+
+Was she really to take up her aunt’s work, to live in a luxurious
+home, a lonely loveless woman, and to go out in a methodical, almost
+mechanical way so many times a week, to visit among the poor? Would
+such a life as that satisfy her in all the long slow years?
+
+The time would come, perhaps, when she would find peace in such a
+life—when her heart would know no grief except the griefs of others;
+when she would have cast off the fetters of selfish cares and selfish
+yearnings, and would stand alone, as saints and martyrs and holy
+women of old had stood—alone with God and His poor. There were women
+she knew, even in these degenerate days, who so lived and so worked,
+seeking no guerdon but the knowledge of good done in this world, and
+the hope of the crown immortal. Her day of sacrifice had not yet
+come. She had not been able to dissever her soul from the hopes and
+sorrows of earth. She had not been able to forget the husband she had
+forsaken—even for a single hour. When she knelt down to pray at night,
+when she awoke in the morning, her thoughts were with him. “How does he
+bear his solitude? Has he learnt to forget me and to be happy?” Those
+questions were ever present to her mind.
+
+And now at Brighton, knowing herself so near him, her heart yearned
+more than ever for the sight of the familiar face, for the sound of
+the beloved voice. She pored over the time-table, and calculated the
+length of the journey—the time lost at Portsmouth and Bishopstoke—every
+minute until the arrival at Romsey; and then the drive to Enderby. She
+pictured the lanes in the early May—the hedgerows bursting into leaf,
+the banks where the primroses were opening, the tender young ferns
+just beginning to uncurl their feathery fronds, the spearpoints of the
+hartstongue shooting up amidst rank broad docks, and lords and ladies,
+and the flower on the leafless blackthorn making patches of white
+amongst the green.
+
+How easy it was to reach him! how natural it would seem to hasten to
+him after half a year of exile! and yet she must not. She had pledged
+herself to honour the law; to obey the letter and the spirit of that
+harsh law which decreed that her sister’s husband could not be hers.
+
+She knew that he was at Enderby, and she had some ground for supposing
+that he was well, and even contented. She had seen the letters which
+he had written to his niece. He had written about the shooting, his
+horses, his dogs; and there had been no word to indicate that he was
+out of health, or in low spirits. Mildred had pored over those brief
+letters, forgetting to return them to their rightful owner, cherishing
+them as if they made a kind of link between her and the love she had
+resigned.
+
+How firm the hand was!—that fine and individual penmanship which she
+had so admired in the past—the hand in which her first love-letter
+had been written. It was but little altered in fifteen years. She
+recalled the happy hour when she received that first letter from her
+affianced husband. He had gone to London a day or two after their
+betrothal, eager to make all arrangements for their marriage, impatient
+for settlements and legal machinery which should make their union
+irrevocable, full of plans for immediate improvements at Enderby.
+
+She remembered how she ran out into the garden to read that first
+letter—a long letter, though they had been parted less than a day when
+it was written. She had gone to the remotest nook in that picturesque
+riverside garden, a rustic bower by the water’s edge, an osier arbour
+over which her own hands had trained the Céline Forestieri roses.
+They were in flower on that happy day—clusters of pale yellow bloom,
+breathing perfume round her as she sat beneath the blossoming arch and
+devoured her lover’s fond words. O, how bright life had been then for
+both of them!—for her without a cloud.
+
+He was well—that was something to know; but it was not enough. Her
+heart yearned for fuller knowledge of his life than those letters gave.
+Wounded pride might have prompted that cheerful tone. He might wish her
+to think him happy and at ease without her. He thought that she had
+used him ill. It was natural, perhaps, that he should think so, since
+he could not see things as she saw them. He had not her deep-rooted
+convictions. She thought of him and wondered about him till the desire
+for further knowledge grew into an aching pain. She must write to
+some one; she must do something to quiet this gnawing anxiety. In her
+trouble she thought of all her friends in the neighbourhood of Enderby;
+but there was none in whom she could bring herself to confide except
+Rollinson, the curate. She had thought first of writing to the doctor,
+but he was something of a gossip, and would be likely to prattle to
+his patients about her letter, and her folly in forsaking so good a
+husband. Rollinson she felt she might trust. He was a thoughtful young
+man, despite his cheery manners and some inclination to facetiousness
+of a strictly clerical order. He was one of a large family, and had
+known trouble, and Mildred had been especially kind to him and to
+the sisters who from time to time had shared his apartments at the
+carpenter’s, and had revelled in the gaieties of Enderby parish, the
+penny-reading at the schoolhouse, the sale of work for the benefit of
+the choir, and an occasional afternoon for tea and tennis at the Manor.
+Those maiden sisters of the curate’s had known and admired Lola, and
+Mr. Rollinson had been devoted to her from his first coming to the
+parish, when she was a lovely child of seven.
+
+Mildred wrote fully and frankly to the curate.
+
+ “I cannot enter upon the motive of our separation,” she wrote, “except
+ so far as to tell you that it is a question of principle which
+ has parted us. My husband has been blameless in all his domestic
+ relations, the best of husbands, the noblest of men. Loving him with
+ all my heart, trusting and honouring him as much as on my wedding-day,
+ I yet felt it my duty to leave him. I should not make this explanation
+ to any one else at Enderby, but I wish you to know the truth. If
+ people ever question you about my reasons you can tell them that it
+ is my intention ultimately to enter an Anglican Sisterhood, or it
+ may be to found a Sisterhood, and to devote my declining years to
+ my sorrowing fellow-creatures. This is my fixed intention, but my
+ vocation is yet weak. My heart cleaves to the old home and all that I
+ lost in leaving it.
+
+ “And now, my kind friend, I want you to tell me how my husband fares
+ in his solitude. If he were ill and unhappy he would be too generous
+ to complain to me. Tell me how he is in health and spirits. Tell me
+ of his daily life, his amusements, occupations. There is not the
+ smallest detail which will not interest me. You see him, I hope,
+ often; certainly you are likely to see him oftener than any one else
+ in the parish. Tell me all you can, and be assured of my undying
+ gratitude.—Ever sincerely yours,
+
+  MILDRED GRESWOLD.”
+
+Mr. Rollinson’s reply came by return of post:
+
+ “I am very glad you have written to me, dear Mrs. Greswold. Had I
+ known your address, I think I should have taken the initiative,
+ and written to you. Believe me, I respect your motive for the act
+ which has, I fear, cast a blight upon a good man’s life; and I will
+ venture to say no more than that the motive should be a very strong
+ one which forces you to persevere in a course that has wrecked your
+ husband’s happiness, and desolated one of the most delightful and most
+ thoroughly Christian homes I had ever the privilege of entering. I
+ look back and recall what Enderby Manor was, and I think what it is
+ now, and I can hardly compare those two pictures without tears.
+
+ “You ask me to tell you frankly all I can tell about your husband’s
+ mode of life, his health and spirits. All I can tell is summed up
+ in four words: his heart is broken. In my deep concern about his
+ desolate position, in my heartfelt regard for him, I have ventured
+ to force my society upon him sometimes when I could not doubt it was
+ unwelcome. He received me with all his old kindness of manner; but
+ I am sympathetic enough to know when a man only endures my company,
+ and I know that his feeling was at best endurance. But I believe
+ that he trusts me, and that he was less upon his guard with me than
+ he is with other acquaintances. I have seen him put on an appearance
+ of cheerfulness with other people. I have heard him talk to other
+ people as if life had in nowise lost its interest for him. With me
+ he dropped the mask. I saw him brooding by his hearth, as he broods
+ when he is alone. I heard his involuntary sighs. I saw the image of a
+ shipwrecked existence. Indeed, Mrs. Greswold, there is nothing else
+ that I can tell you if you would have me truthful. You have broken
+ his heart. You have sacrificed your love to a principle, you say. You
+ should be very sure of your principle. You ask me as to his habits
+ and occupations. I believe they are about as monotonous as those of
+ a galley-slave. He walks a great deal—in all weathers and at all
+ hours—but rarely beyond his own land. I don’t think he often rides;
+ and he has not hunted once during the season. He did a little shooting
+ in October and November, quite alone. He has had no staying visitor
+ within his doors since you left him.
+
+ “I have reason to know that he goes to the churchyard every evening
+ at dusk, and spends some time beside your daughter’s grave. I have
+ seen him there several times when it was nearly dark, and he had no
+ apprehension of being observed. You know how rarely any one enters our
+ quiet little burial-ground, and how complete a solitude it is at that
+ twilight hour. I am about the only passer-by, and even I do not pass
+ within sight of the old yew-tree above your darling’s resting-place,
+ unless I go a little out of my way between the vestry-door and the
+ lych-gate. I have often gone out of my way to note that lonely figure
+ by the grave. Be assured, dear Mrs. Greswold, that in sending you this
+ gloomy picture of a widowed life I have had no wish to distress you. I
+ have exaggerated nothing. I wish you to know the truth; and if it lies
+ within your power—without going against your conscience—to undo that
+ which you have done, I entreat you to do so without delay. There may
+ not be much time to be lost.—Believe me, devotedly and gratefully your
+ friend,
+
+  FREDERICK ROLLINSON.”
+
+Mildred shed bitter tears over the curate’s letter. How different the
+picture it offered from that afforded by George Greswold’s own letters,
+in which he had written cheerily of the shooting, the dogs and horses,
+the changes in the seasons, and the events of the outer world! That
+frank easy tone had been part of his armour of pride. He would not
+abase himself by the admission of his misery. He had guessed, no doubt,
+that his wife would read those letters, and he would not have her know
+the extent of the ruin she had wrought.
+
+She thought of him in his solitude, pictured him beside their child’s
+grave, and the longing to look upon him once more—unseen by him, if it
+could be so—became irresistible. She determined to see with her own
+eyes if he were as unhappy as Mr. Rollinson supposed. She, who knew him
+so well, would be better able to judge by his manner and bearing—better
+able to divine the inner workings of his heart and mind. It had been a
+habit of her life to read his face, to guess his thoughts before they
+found expression in words. He had never been able to keep a secret from
+her, except that one long-hidden story of the past; and even there she
+had known that there was something. She had seen the shadow of that
+abiding remorse.
+
+“I am going to leave you for two days, aunt,” she said rather abruptly,
+on the morning after she received Rollinson’s letter. “I want to look
+at Lola’s grave. I shall go from here to Enderby as fast as the train
+will take me; spend an hour in the churchyard; go on to Salisbury for
+the night; and come back to you to-morrow afternoon.”
+
+“You mean that you are going back to your husband?”
+
+“No, no. I may see him, perhaps, by accident. I shall not enter the
+Manor House. I am going to the churchyard—nowhere else.”
+
+“You would be wiser if you went straight home. Remember, years hence,
+when I am dead and gone, that I told you as much. You must do as you
+like—stay at an inn at Salisbury, while your own beautiful home is
+empty, or anything else that is foolish and wrong-headed. You had
+better let Franz go with you.”
+
+“Thanks, aunt; I would not take him away on any account. I can get on
+quite well by myself.”
+
+She left Brighton at midday, lost a good deal of time at the two
+junctions, and drove to within a few hundred yards of Enderby Church
+just as the bright May day was melting into evening. There was a
+path across some meadows at the back of the village that led to the
+churchyard. She stopped the fly by the meadow-gate, and told the man
+to drive round to Mr. Rollinson’s lodgings, and wait for her there;
+and then she walked slowly along the narrow footpath, between the long
+grass, golden with buttercups in the golden evening.
+
+It was a lovely evening. There was a little wood of oaks and chestnuts
+on her left hand as she approached the churchyard, and the shrubberies
+of Enderby Manor were on her right. The trees she knew so well—her own
+trees—the tall mountain-ash and the clump of beeches, rose above the
+lower level of lilacs and laburnums, acacia and rose maple. There was
+a nightingale singing in the thick foliage yonder—there was always a
+nightingale at this season somewhere in the shrubbery. She had lingered
+many a time with her husband to listen to that unmistakable melody.
+
+The dark foliage of the churchyard made an inky blot midst all that
+vernal greenery. Those immemorial yews, which knew no change with the
+changing years, spread their broad shadows over the lowly graves, and
+made night in God’s acre while it was yet day in the world outside.
+Mildred went into the churchyard as if into the realm of death. The
+shadows closed round her on every side, and the change from light to
+gloom chilled her as she walked slowly towards the place where her
+child was lying.
+
+Yes, he was there, just as the curate had told her. He stood leaning
+against the long horizontal branch of the old yew, looking down at the
+marble which bore his daughter’s name. He was very pale, and his sunken
+eyes and hollow cheeks told of failing health. He stood motionless, in
+a gloomy reverie. His wife watched him from a little way off; she stood
+motionless as himself—stood and watched him till the beating of her
+heart sounded so loud in her own ears that she thought he too must hear
+that passionate throbbing.
+
+She had thought when she set out on her journey that it would be
+sufficient for her just to see him, and that having seen him she would
+go away and leave him without his ever knowing that she had looked upon
+him. But now the time had come it was not enough. The impulse to draw
+nearer and to speak to him was too strong to be denied: she went with
+tottering footsteps to the side of the grave, and called him by his
+name:
+
+“George! George!” holding out her hands to him piteously.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+“HOW SHOULD I GREET THEE?”
+
+
+The marble countenance scarcely changed as he looked up at her. He took
+no notice of the outstretched hands.
+
+“What brings you here, Mildred?” he asked coldly.
+
+“I heard that you were ill; I wanted to see for myself,” she faltered.
+
+“I am not ill, and I have not been ill. You were misinformed.”
+
+“I was told you were unhappy.”
+
+“Did you require to be told that? You did not expect to hear that I
+was particularly happy, I suppose? At my age men have forgotten how to
+forget.”
+
+“It would be such a relief to my mind if you could find new
+occupations, new interests, as I hope to do by and by—a wider horizon.
+You are so clever. You have so many gifts, and it is a pity to bury
+them all here.”
+
+“My heart is buried here,” he answered, looking down at the grave.
+
+“Your heart, yes; but you might find work for your mind—a noble career
+before you—in politics, in philanthropy.”
+
+“I am not ambitious, and I am too old to adapt myself to a new life.
+I prefer to live as I am living. Enderby is my hermitage. It suits me
+well enough.”
+
+There was a silence after this—a silence of despair. Mildred knelt on
+the dewy grass, and bent herself over the marble cross, and kissed the
+cold stone. She could reach no nearer than that marble to the child she
+loved. Her lips lingered there. Her heart ached with a dull pain, and
+she felt the utter hopelessness of her life more keenly than she had
+felt it yet. If she could but die there, at his feet, and make an end!
+
+She rose after some minutes. Her husband’s attitude was unchanged; but
+he looked at her now, for the first time, with a direct and earnest
+gaze.
+
+“What took you to Nice?” he asked.
+
+“I wanted to know—all about my unhappy sister.”
+
+“And you are satisfied—you know all; and you think as some of my
+neighbours thought of me. You believe that I killed my wife.”
+
+“George, can you think so meanly of me—your wife of fourteen years?”
+
+“You spare me, then, so far, in spite of circumstantial evidence. You
+do not think of me as a murderer?”
+
+“I have never for a moment doubted your goodness to that unhappy girl,”
+she answered, with a stifled sob. “I am sorry for her with all my
+heart; but I cannot blame you.”
+
+“There you are wrong. I was to blame. You know that I do not easily
+lose my temper—to a woman, least of all; but that day I lost control
+over myself—lost patience with her just when she was in greatest
+need of my forbearance. She was nervous and hysterical. I forgot her
+weakness. I spoke to her cruelly—lashed and goaded by her causeless
+jealousies—so persistent, so irritating—like the continual dropping
+of water. How I have suffered for that moment of anger God alone can
+know. If remorse can be expiation, I have expiated that unpremeditated
+sin!”
+
+“Yes, yes, I know how you have suffered. Your dreams have told me.”
+
+“Ah, those dreams! You can never imagine the agony of them. To fancy
+her walking by my side, bright and happy, as she so seldom was upon
+this earth, and to tell myself that I had never been unkind to her,
+that her suicide was a dream and a delusion, and then to feel the dull
+cold reality creep back into my brain, and to know that I was guilty
+of her death. Yes, I have held myself guilty. I have never paltered
+with my conscience. Had I been patient to the end, she might have
+lived to be the happy mother of my child. Her whole life might have
+been changed. I never loved her, Mildred. Fate and her own impulsive
+nature flung her into my arms; but I accepted the charge; I made myself
+responsible to God and my own conscience for her well-being.”
+
+Mildred’s only answer was a sob. She stretched out her hand, and laid
+it falteringly upon the hand that hung loose across the branch of the
+yew, as if in token of trustfulness.
+
+“Did you find out anything more in your retrospective gropings—at
+Nice?” he asked, with a touch of bitterness.
+
+She was silent.
+
+“Did you hear that I was out of my mind after my wife’s death?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Did that shock you? Did it horrify you to know you had lived fourteen
+years with a _ci-devant_ lunatic?”
+
+“George, how can you say such things! I could perfectly understand
+how your mind was affected by that dreadful event—how the strongest
+brain might be unhinged by such a sorrow. I can sympathise with you,
+and understand you in the past as I can in the present. How can you
+forget that I am your wife, a part of yourself, able to read all your
+thoughts?”
+
+“I cannot forget that you have been my wife; but your sympathy and your
+affection seem very far off now—as remote almost as that tragedy which
+darkened my youth. It is all past and done with—the sorrow and pain,
+the hope and gladness. I have done with everything—except my regret for
+my child.”
+
+“Can you believe that I feel the parting less than you, George?” she
+asked piteously.
+
+“I don’t know. The parting is your work. You have the satisfaction
+of self-sacrifice—the pride which women who go to church twice a day
+have in renouncing earthly happiness. They school themselves first in
+trifles—giving up this and that—theatres, fiction, cheerful society—and
+then their ambition widens. These petty sacrifices are not enough,
+and they renounce a husband and a home. If the husband cannot see the
+necessity, and cannot kiss the rod, so much the worse for him. His
+wife has the perverted pride of an Indian widow who flings her young
+life upon the funeral pile, jubilant at the thought of her own exalted
+virtue.”
+
+“Would you not sacrifice your happiness to your conscience, George, if
+conscience spoke plainly?” Mildred asked reproachfully.
+
+“I don’t know. Human love might be too strong for conscience. God
+knows I would not have sacrificed you to a scruple—to a law made by
+man. God’s laws are different. There is no doubt about them.”
+
+The evening was darkening. The nightingale burst out suddenly into loud
+melody, more joyous than her reputation. Mildred could see the lights
+in the house that had been her home. The lamp-light in the drawing-room
+shone across the intervening space of lawn and shrubberies; the broad
+window shone vividly at the end of a vista, like a star. O lovely room,
+O happy life; so far off, so impossible for evermore!
+
+“Good-night and good-bye,” Mildred sighed, holding out her hand.
+
+“Good-bye,” he answered, taking the small cold hand, only to let it
+drop again.
+
+He made no inquiry as to how she had come there, or whither she was
+going. She had appeared to him suddenly as a spirit in the soft
+eventide, and he let her go from him unquestioned, as if she had been
+a spirit. She felt the coldness of her dismissal, and yet felt that it
+could be no otherwise. She must be all to him or nothing. After love
+so perfect as theirs had been there could be no middle course.
+
+She went across the meadow by the way she had come, and through the
+village street, where all the doors were closed at this hour, and
+paraffin-lamps glowed brightly in parlour-windows. Dear little humble
+street, how her heart yearned over it as she went silently by like a
+ghost, closely veiled, a slender figure dressed in black! She had been
+very fond of her villagers, had entered into their lives and been a
+brightening influence for most of them, she and her child. Lola had
+been familiar with every creature in the place, from the humpbacked
+cobbler at the corner to the gray-haired postmaster in the white
+half-timbered cottage yonder, where the letter-boxes were approached
+by a narrow path across a neat little garden. Lola had entered into
+all their lives, and had been glad and sorry with them with a power of
+sympathy which was the only precocious element in her nature. She had
+been a child in all things except charity; there she had been a woman.
+
+There was a train for Salisbury in half-an-hour, and there was a later
+train at ten o’clock. Mildred had intended to travel at the earlier
+hour, but she felt an irresistible inclination to linger in the beloved
+place where her happiness was buried. She wanted to see some one who
+would talk to her of her husband, and she knew that the curate could
+be trusted; so she determined upon waiting for the later train, in the
+event of her finding Mr. Rollinson at home.
+
+The paraffin-lamp in the parlour over the carpenter’s shop was
+brighter than any other in the village, and Mr. Rollinson’s shadow was
+reflected on the blind, with the usual tendency towards caricature.
+The carpenter’s wife, who opened the door, was an old friend of Mrs.
+Greswold’s, and was not importunate in her expressions of surprise and
+pleasure.
+
+“Please do not mention to any one that I have been at Enderby, Mrs.
+Mason,” Mildred said quietly. “I am only here for an hour or two on
+my way to Salisbury. I should like to see Mr. Rollinson, if he is
+disengaged.”
+
+“Of course he is, ma’am, for you. He’ll be overjoyed to see you, I’m
+sure.”
+
+Mrs. Mason bustled up the steep little staircase, followed closely by
+Mildred. She flung open the door with a flourish, and discovered Mr.
+Rollinson enjoying a tea-dinner, with the _Times_ propped up between
+his plate and the teapot.
+
+He started to his feet at sight of his visitor like a man distraught,
+darted forward and shook hands with Mildred, then glanced despairingly
+at the table. For such a guest he would have liked to have had turtle
+and ortolans; but a tea-dinner, a vulgar tea-dinner—a dish of pig’s
+trotters, a couple of new-laid eggs, and a pile of buttered toast! He
+had thought it a luxurious meal when he sat down to it, five minutes
+ago, very sharp set.
+
+“My dear Mrs. Greswold, I am enchanted. You have been travelling? Yes.
+If—if you would share my humble collation—but you are going to dine at
+the Manor, no doubt.”
+
+“No; I am not going to the Manor. I should be very glad of a cup of
+tea, if I may have one with you.”
+
+“Mrs. Mason, a fresh teapot, directly, if you please.”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“And could you not get some dinner for Mrs. Greswold? A sole and a
+chicken, a little asparagus. I saw a bundle in the village the day
+before yesterday,” suggested the curate feebly.
+
+“On no account. I could not eat any dinner. I will have an egg and
+a little toast, if you please,” said Mildred, seeing the curate’s
+distressed look, and not wishing to reject his hospitality.
+
+“Will you really, now? Mrs. Mason’s eggs are excellent; and she
+makes toast better than any one else in the world, I think,” replied
+Rollinson, flinging his napkin artfully over the trotters, and with a
+side glance at Mrs. Mason which implored their removal.
+
+That admirable woman grasped the situation. She whisked off the dish,
+and the curate’s plate with its litter of bones and mustard. She swept
+away crumbs, tidied the tea-tray, brought a vase of spring flowers from
+a cheffonier to adorn the table, lighted a pair of wax candles on the
+mantelpiece, and gave a touch of elegance to the humble sitting-room,
+while Mildred was taking off her mantle and bonnet, and sinking wearily
+into Mr. Rollinson’s easy-chair by the hearth, where a basket of
+fir-cones replaced the winter fire.
+
+She felt glad to be with this old familiar friend—glad to breathe the
+very air of Enderby after her six months’ exile.
+
+“Your letter frightened me,” she said, when she was alone with the
+curate. “I came to look at my husband. I could not help coming.”
+
+“Ah, dear Mrs. Greswold, if you could only come back for good—nothing
+else is of any use. Have you seen him?”
+
+“Yes,” she sighed.
+
+“And you find him sadly changed?”
+
+“Sadly changed. I wish you would try to rouse him—to interest him in
+farming—building—politics—anything. He is so clever; he ought to have
+so many resources.”
+
+“For his mind, perhaps; but not for his heart. You are doing all you
+can to break that.”
+
+Mildred turned her head aside with a weary movement, as of a creature
+at bay.
+
+“Don’t talk about it. You cannot understand. You look up to Clement
+Cancellor, I think. You would respect his opinion.”
+
+“Yes; he is a good man.”
+
+“He is—and he approves the course I have taken. He is my confidant and
+my counsellor.”
+
+“You could have no better adviser in a case of conscience—yet I can but
+regret my friend’s ruined life, all the same. But I will say no more,
+Mrs. Greswold. I will respect your reserve.”
+
+Mrs. Mason came bustling in with a tea-tray, on which her family
+teapot—the silver teapot that had been handed down from generation to
+generation since the days of King George the Third—and her very best
+pink and gold china sparkled and glittered in the lamp-light. The toast
+and eggs might have tempted an anchorite, and Mildred had eaten nothing
+since her nine-o’clock breakfast. The strong tea revived her like
+good old wine, and she sat resting and listening with interest to Mr.
+Rollinson’s account of his parishioners, and the village chronicle of
+the last six months. How sweet it was to hear the old familiar names,
+to be in the old place, if only for a brief hour!
+
+“I wonder if they miss me?” she speculated. “They never seemed quite
+the same—after—after the fever.”
+
+“Ah, but they know your value now. They have missed you sadly, and they
+have missed your husband’s old friendly interest in their affairs. He
+has given me _carte blanche_, and there has been no one neglected,
+nothing left undone; but they miss the old personal relations, the
+friendship of past days. You must not think that the poor care only for
+creature comforts and substantial benefits.”
+
+“I have never thought so. And now tell me all you can about my husband.
+Does he receive no one?”
+
+“No one. People used to call upon him for a month or two after you
+left, but he never returned their visits, he declined all invitations,
+and he made his friends understand pretty clearly that he had done
+with the outside world. He rarely comes to the eleven-o’clock service
+on Sundays, but he comes to the early services, and I believe he walks
+into Romsey sometimes for the evening service. He has not hardened his
+heart against his God.”
+
+“Do you see him often?”
+
+“About once a week. I take him my report of the sick and poor. I
+believe he is as much interested in that as he can be in anything;
+but I always feel that my society is a burden to him, in spite of his
+courteousness. I borrow a book from him sometimes, so as to have an
+excuse for spending a few minutes with him when I return it.”
+
+“You are a good man, Mr. Rollinson, a true friend,” said Mildred, in a
+low voice.
+
+“Would to God that my friendship could do more for him! Unhappily it
+can do so little.”
+
+The fly came back for Mildred at nine o’clock. She had telegraphed from
+Brighton to the inn at Salisbury where she was to spend the night,
+and her room was ready for her when she arrived there at half-past
+ten: a spacious bedroom with a four-post bed, in which she lay broad
+awake all night, living over and over again that scene beside the
+grave, and seeing her husband’s gloomy face, and its mute reproach.
+She knew that she had done wrong in breaking in upon his solitude, she
+who renounced the tie that bound her to him; and yet there had been
+something gained. He knew now that under no stress of evidence could
+she ever believe him guilty of his wife’s death. He knew that his last
+and saddest secret was revealed to her, and that she was loyal to him
+still—loyal although divided.
+
+She went to the morning service at the Cathedral. She lingered about
+the grave old Close, looking dreamily in at the gardens which had such
+an air of old-world peace. She was reluctant to leave Salisbury. It was
+near all that she had loved and lost. The place had the familiar air of
+the district in which she had lived so long—different in somewise from
+all other places, or seeming different by fond association.
+
+She telegraphed to her aunt that she might be late in returning, and
+lingered on till three o’clock in the afternoon, and then took the
+train, which dawdled at three or four stations before it came to
+Bishopstoke—the familiar junction where the station-master and the
+superintendents knew her, and asked after her husband’s health, giving
+her a pain at her heart with each inquiry. She would have been glad to
+pass to the Portsmouth train unrecognised, but it was not to be.
+
+“You have been in the South all the winter, I hear, ma’am. I hope it
+was not on account of your health?”
+
+“Yes,” she faltered, “partly on that account,” as she hurried on to the
+carriage which the station-master opened for her with his own hand.
+
+His face was among her home faces. She had travelled up and down the
+line very often in the good days that were gone—with her husband and
+Lola, and their comfort had been cared for almost as if they had been
+royal personages.
+
+It was night when she reached Brighton, and Franz was on the platform
+waiting for her, and the irreproachable brougham was drawn up close
+by, the brown horse snorting, and with eyes of fire, not brooking the
+vicinity of the engine, though too grand a creature to know fear.
+
+She found Miss Fausset in low spirits.
+
+“I have missed you terribly,” she said. “I am a poor creature. I used
+to think myself independent of sympathy or companionship—but that is
+all over now. When I am alone for two days at a stretch I feel like a
+child in the dark.”
+
+“You have lived too long in this house, aunt, I think,” Mildred
+answered gently. “Forgive me if I say that it is a dull house.”
+
+“A dull house? Nonsense, Mildred! It is one of the best houses in
+Brighton.”
+
+“Yes, yes, aunt, but it is dull, all the same. The sun does not shine
+into it; the colouring of the furniture is gray and cold—”
+
+“I hate gaudy colours.”
+
+“Yes, but there are beautiful colours that are not gaudy—beautiful
+things that warm and gladden one. The next room,” glancing back at the
+front drawing-room and its single lamp, “is full of ghosts. Those long
+white curtains, those faint gray walls, are enough to kill you.”
+
+“I am not so fanciful as that.”
+
+“Ah, but you are fanciful, perhaps without knowing it. The influence
+of this dull gray house may have crept into your veins and depressed
+you unawares. Will you go to the Italian Lakes with me next September,
+aunt? Or, better, will you go to the West of England with me next
+week—to the north coast of Cornwall, which will be lovely at this
+season? I am sure you want change. This monotonous life is killing you.”
+
+“No, no, Mildred. There is nothing amiss with my life. It suits me well
+enough, and I am able to do good.”
+
+“Your lieutenants could carry on all that while you were away.”
+
+“No; I like to be here; I like to organise, to arrange. I can feel that
+my life is not useless, that my talent is placed at interest.”
+
+“It could all go on, aunt; it could indeed. The change to new scenes
+would revive you.”
+
+“No. I am satisfied where I am. I am among people whom I like, and who
+like and respect me.”
+
+She dwelt upon the last words with unction, as if there were tangible
+comfort in them.
+
+Mildred sighed and was silent. She had felt it her duty to try and
+rouse her aunt from the dull apathy into which she seemed gradually
+sinking, and she thought that the only chance of revival was to remove
+her from the monotony of her present existence.
+
+Later on in the evening the fire had been lighted in the inner
+drawing-room, Miss Fausset feeling chilly, in spite of the approach of
+summer, and aunt and niece drew near the hearth for cheerfulness and
+comfort. The low reading-lamp spread its light only over Miss Fausset’s
+book-table and the circle in which it stood. The faces of both women
+were in shadow, and the lofty room with its walls of books was full of
+shadows.
+
+“You talk so despondently of life sometimes, aunt, as if it had been
+all disappointment,” said Mildred, after a long silence, in which they
+had both sat watching the fire, each absorbed by her own thoughts;
+“yet your girlhood must have been bright. I have heard my dear father
+say how indulgent his father was, how he gave way to his children in
+everything.”
+
+“Yes, he was very indulgent; too indulgent perhaps. I had my own way
+in everything; only—one’s own way does not always lead to happiness.
+Mine did not. I might have been a happier woman if my father had been a
+tyrant.”
+
+“You would have married, perhaps, in that case, to escape from an
+unhappy home. I wish you would tell me more about your girlish years,
+aunt. You must have had many admirers when you were young, and amongst
+them all there must have been some one for whom you cared—just a
+little. Would it hurt you to talk to me about that old time?”
+
+“Yes, Mildred. There are some women who can talk about such
+things—women who can prose for hours to their granddaughters or their
+nieces—simpering over the silliness of the past—boasting of conquests
+which nobody believes in; for it is very difficult to realise the fact
+that an old woman was ever young and lovely. I am not of that temper,
+Mildred. The memory of my girlhood is hateful to me.”
+
+“Ah, then there was some sad story—some unhappy attachment. I was sure
+it must have been so,” said Mildred, in a low voice. “But tell me of
+that happier time before you went into society—the time when you were
+in Italy with your governess, studying at the Conservatoire at Milan. I
+thought of you so much when I was at Milan the other day.”
+
+“I have nothing to tell about that time. I was a foreigner in a strange
+city, with an elderly woman who was paid to take care of me, and whose
+chief occupation was to take care of herself: a solicitor’s widow,
+whose health required that she should winter in the South, and who
+contrived to make my father pay handsomely for her benefit.”
+
+“And you were not happy at Milan?”
+
+“Happy! no. I got on with my musical education—that was all I cared
+for.”
+
+“Had you no friends—no introductions to nice people?”
+
+“No. My chaperon made my father believe that she knew all the best
+families in Milan, but her circle resolved itself into a few third-rate
+musical people who gave shabby little evening-parties. You bore me to
+death, Mildred, when you force me to talk of that time, and of that
+woman, whom I hated.”
+
+“Forgive me, aunt, I will ask no more questions,” said Mildred, with a
+sigh.
+
+She had been trying to get nearer to her kinswoman, to familiarise
+herself with that dim past when this fading life was fresh and full
+of hope. It seemed to her as if there was a dead wall between her
+and Miss Fausset—a barrier of reserve which should not exist between
+those who were so near in blood. She had made up her mind to stay with
+her aunt to the end, to do all that duty and affection could suggest,
+and it troubled her that they should still be strangers. After this
+severe repulse she could make no further attempt. There was evidently
+no softening influence in the memory of the past. Miss Fausset’s
+character, as revealed by that which she concealed rather than by that
+which she told, was not beautiful. Mildred could but think that she had
+been a proud, cold-hearted young woman, valuing herself too highly to
+inspire love or sympathy in others; electing to be alone and unloved.
+
+After this, time went by in a dull monotony. The same people came to
+see Miss Fausset day after day, and she absorbed the same flatteries,
+accepted the same adulation, always with an air of deepest humility.
+She organised her charities, she listened to every detail about the
+circumstances, and even the mental condition and spiritual views of
+her poor. Mildred discovered before long that there was a leaven of
+hardness in her benevolence. She could not tolerate sin, she weighed
+every life in the same balance, she expected exceptional purity amidst
+foulest surroundings. She was liberal of her worldly goods; but her
+mind was as narrow as if she had lived in a remote village a hundred
+years ago. Mildred found herself continually pleading for wrong-doers.
+
+The only event or excitement which the bright June days brought with
+them was the arrival of Pamela Ransome, who was escorted to Brighton by
+Lady Lochinvar herself, and who had been engaged for the space of three
+weeks to Malcolm Stuart, with everybody’s consent and approval.
+
+“I wrote to Uncle George the very day I was engaged, aunt, as well as
+to you; and he answered my letter in the sweetest way, and he is going
+to give me a grand piano,” said Pamela, all in a breath.
+
+Lady Lochinvar explained that, much as she detested London, she
+had felt it her solemn duty to establish herself there during her
+nephew’s engagement, in order that she might become acquainted with
+Pamela’s people, and assist her dear boy in all his arrangements for
+the future. When a young man marries a nice girl with an estate
+worth fifteen hundred a year—allowing for the poor return made by
+land nowadays—everything ought to go upon velvet. Lady Lochinvar was
+prepared to make sacrifices, or, in other words, to contribute a
+handsome portion of that fortune which she intended to bequeath to her
+nephew. She could afford to be generous, having a surplus far beyond
+her possible needs, and she was very fond of Malcolm Stuart, who had
+been to her as a son.
+
+“I was quite alone in the world when my husband died,” she told
+Mildred. “My father and my own people were all gone, and I should
+have been a wretched creature without Malcolm. He was the only son of
+Lochinvar’s favourite sister, who went off in a decline when he was
+eight years old, and he had been brought up at the Castle. So it is
+natural, you see, that I should be fond of him and interested in his
+welfare.”
+
+Pamela kissed her, by way of commentary.
+
+“I think you are quite the dearest thing in the world,” she said,
+“except Aunt Mildred.”
+
+It may be seen from this remark that the elder and younger lady
+were now on very easy terms. Mildred had stayed in Paris with Lady
+Lochinvar, and a considerable part of her trousseau, the outward and
+visible part, had been chosen in the _ateliers_ of fashionable Parisian
+dressmakers and man milliners. The more humdrum portion of the bride’s
+raiment was to be obtained at Brighton, where Pamela was to spend a
+week or two with her aunt before she went to London to stay with the
+Mountfords, who had taken a house in Grosvenor Gardens, from which
+Pamela was to be married.
+
+“And where do you think we are to be married, aunt?” exclaimed Pamela
+excitedly.
+
+“At St. George’s?”
+
+“Nothing so humdrum. We are going to be married in the Abbey—in
+Westminster Abbey—the burial-place of heroes and poets. I happened
+to say one day when Malcolm and I were almost strangers—it was at
+Rumpelmeyer’s, sitting outside in the sun, eating ices—that I had
+never seen a wedding in the Abbey, and that I should love to see one;
+and Malcolm said we must try and manage it some day—meaning anybody’s
+wedding, of course, though he pretends now that he always meant to
+marry me there himself.”
+
+“Presumptious on his part,” said Mildred, smiling.
+
+“O, young men are horribly presumptious; they know they are in a
+minority—there is so little competition—and a plain young man, too,
+like Malcolm. But I suppose he knows he is nice,” added Pamela
+conclusively.
+
+“Don’t you think it will be lovely for me to be married in the Abbey?”
+she asked presently.
+
+“I think, dear, in your case I would rather have been married from my
+own house, and in a village church.”
+
+“What, in that poky little church at Mapledown? I believe it is one
+of the oldest in England, and it is certainly one of the ugliest. Sir
+Henry Mountford suggested making a family business of it; but Rosalind
+and I were both in favour of the Abbey. We shall get much better
+notices in the society papers,” added Pamela, with a business-like air,
+as if she had been talking about the production of a new play.
+
+“Well, dear, as I hope you are only to be married once in your life,
+you have a right to choose your church.”
+
+Pamela was bitterly disappointed presently when her aunt refused to be
+present at her wedding.
+
+“I will spend an hour with you on your wedding morning, and see you in
+your wedding-gown, if you like, Pamela; but I cannot go among a crowd
+of gay people, or share in any festivity. I have done with all those
+things, dear, for ever and ever.”
+
+Pamela’s candid eyes filled with tears. She felt all the more sorry for
+her aunt, because her own cup of happiness was overflowing. She looked
+round the silver-gray drawing-room, and her eyes fixed themselves on
+the piano which _he_ had played, so often, so often, in the tender
+twilight, in the shadowy evening when that larger room was left almost
+without any light save that which came through the undraped archway
+yonder. But Castellani was no longer a person to be thought of in
+italics. From the moment Pamela’s eyes had opened to the excellence of
+Mr. Stuart’s manly and straightforward character, they had also become
+aware of the Italian’s deficiencies. She had realised the fact that he
+was a charlatan; and now she looked wonderingly at the piano, at a loss
+to understand the intensity of bygone emotions, and inclined to excuse
+herself upon the ground of youthful foolishness.
+
+“What a silly romantic wretch I must have been!” she thought; “a
+regular Rosa Matilda! As if the happiness of life depended upon one’s
+husband having an ear for music!”
+
+Mildred was by no means unsympathetic about the trousseau, although
+she herself had done with all interest in fashion and finery. She
+drove about to the pretty Brighton shops with Pamela, and exercised
+a restraining influence upon that young lady’s taste, which inclined
+to the florid. She sympathised with the young lady’s anxiety about
+her wedding-gown, which was to be made by a certain Mr. Smithson, a
+_faiseur_ who held potent sway over the ladies of fashionable London,
+and who gave himself more airs than a Prime Minister. Mr. Smithson
+had consented to make Miss Ransome a wedding-gown—despite her social
+insignificance and the pressure of the season—provided that he were
+not worried about the affair.
+
+“If I have too many people calling upon me, or am pestered with
+letters, I shall throw the thing up,” he told Lady Mountford one
+morning, when she took him some fine old rose-point for the petticoat.
+“Yes, this lace is pretty good. I suppose you got it in Venice. I have
+seen Miss Ransome, and I know what kind of gown she can wear. It will
+be sent home the day before the wedding.”
+
+With this assurance, haughtily given, Lady Mountford and her sister had
+to be contented.
+
+“If I were your sister I would let a woman in Tottenham Court Road make
+my gowns rather than I would stand such treatment,” said Sir Henry;
+at which his wife shrugged her shoulders and told him he knew nothing
+about it.
+
+“The cut is everything,” she said. “It is worth putting up with
+Smithson’s insolence to know that one is the best-dressed woman in the
+room.”
+
+“But if Smithson dresses all the other women—”
+
+“He doesn’t. There are very few who have the courage to go to him. His
+manners are so humiliating—he as good as told me I had a hump—and his
+prices are enormous.”
+
+“And yet you call me extravagant for giving seventy pounds for a barb!”
+cried Sir Henry; “a bird that might bring me a pot of money in prizes.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The grand question of trousseau and wedding-gown being settled, there
+remained only a point of minor importance—the honeymoon. Pamela was in
+favour of that silly season being spent in some rustic spot, far from
+the madding crowd, and Pamela’s lover was of her opinion in everything.
+
+“We have both seen the best part of the Continent,” said Pamela, taking
+tea in Mildred’s upstairs sitting-room, which had assumed a brighter
+and more home-like aspect in her occupation than any other room in
+Miss Fausset’s house; “we don’t want to rush off to Switzerland or the
+Pyrenees; we want just to enjoy each other’s society and to make our
+plans for the future. Besides, travelling is so hideously unbecoming.
+I have seen brides with dusty hats and smuts on their faces who would
+have been miserable if they had only known what objects they were.”
+
+“I think you and Mr. Stuart are very wise in your choice, dear,”
+answered Mildred. “England in July is delicious. Have you decided where
+to go?”
+
+“No, we can’t make up our minds. We want to find a place that is
+exquisitely pretty—yet not too far from London, so that we may run up
+to town occasionally and see about our furnishing. Sir Henry offered
+us Rainham, but as it is both ugly and inconvenient I unhesitatingly
+refused. I don’t want to spend my honeymoon in a place pervaded by
+prize pigeons.”
+
+“What do you think of the neighbourhood of the Thames, Pamela?” asked
+Mildred thoughtfully. “Are you fond of boating?”
+
+“Fond! I adore it. I could live all my life upon the river.”
+
+“Really! I have been thinking that if you and Mr. Stuart would like to
+spend your honeymoon at The Hook it is just the kind of place to suit
+you. The house is bright and pretty, and the gardens are exquisite.”
+
+Pamela’s face kindled with pleasure.
+
+“But, dear aunt, you would never think—” she began.
+
+“The place is at your service, my dear girl. It will be a pleasure
+for me to prepare everything for you. I cannot tell you how dearly I
+love that house, or how full of memories it is for me. The lease of my
+father’s house in Parchment Street was sold after his death, and I only
+kept a few special things out of the furniture, but at The Hook nothing
+has been altered since I was a child.”
+
+Pamela accepted the offer with rapture, and wrote an eight-page letter
+to her lover upon the subject, although he was coming to Brighton next
+day, and was to dine in Lewes Crescent. Mildred was pleased at being
+able to give so much pleasure to her husband’s niece. It may be also
+that she snatched at an excuse for revisiting a spot she fondly loved.
+
+She offered to take Pamela with her, to explore the house and gardens,
+and discuss any small arrangements for the bride’s comfort, but
+against this Miss Ransome protested.
+
+“I want everything to be new to us,” she said, “all untrodden ground,
+a delicious surprise. I am sure the place is lovely; and I want to
+know no more about it than I know of fairyland. I haven’t the faintest
+notion what a Hook can be in connection with the Thames. It may be a
+mountain or a glacier, for anything I know to the contrary; but I am
+assured it is delightful. Please let me know nothing more, dearest
+aunt, till I go there with Malcolm. It is adorable of you to hit
+upon such a splendid idea. And it will look very well in the society
+papers,” added Pamela, waxing business-like. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm
+Stuart!’ (O, how queer that sounds!) ‘are to spend their honeymoon
+at The Hook, the riverside residence of the bride’s aunt.’ I wonder
+whether they will say ‘the well-known residence’?” mused Pamela.
+
+Mildred went up to town with Miss Ransome and her betrothed at the
+end of the young lady’s visit. Miss Fausset had been coldly gracious,
+after her manner, had allowed Mr. Stuart to come to her house whenever
+he pleased, and had given up the rarely-used front drawing-room to
+the lovers, who sat and whispered and tittered over their own little
+witticisms, by the distant piano, and behaved altogether like those
+proverbial children of whom we are told in our childhood, who are
+seen but not heard. Mildred lunched in Grosvenor Gardens, and went to
+Chertsey by an afternoon train. The housekeeper who had once ruled over
+both Mr. Fausset’s houses, subject to interference from Bell, was now
+caretaker at The Hook, with a housemaid under her. She was an elderly
+woman, but considerably Bell’s junior, and she was an admirable cook
+and manager. A telegram two days before had told her to expect her
+mistress, and the house was in perfect order when Mrs. Greswold arrived
+in the summer twilight. All things had been made to look as if the
+place were in family occupation, though no one but the two servants had
+been living there since Mr. Fausset’s death. The familiar aspect of the
+rooms smote Mildred with a sudden unexpected pain. There were the old
+lamps burning on the tables, the well-remembered vases—her mother’s
+choice, and always artistic in form and colour—filled with the old June
+flowers from garden and hothouse. Her father’s chair stood in its old
+place in the bay-window in front of the table at which he used to write
+his letters sometimes, looking out at the river between whiles. Mrs.
+Dawson had put a lamp in his study, a small room opening out of the
+drawing-room, and with windows on two sides, and both looking towards
+the river, which he had loved so well. The windows were open in the
+twilight, and the rose-garden was like a sea of bloom.
+
+In her father’s room nothing was altered. As it had been in the last
+days he had lived there, so it was now.
+
+“I haven’t moved so much as a penholder, ma’am,” said Dawson tearfully.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+LITERA SCRIPTA MANET.
+
+
+The house and grounds were in such perfect order that there was very
+little to be done in the way of preparation for the honeymoon visitors.
+Even the pianos had been periodically tuned, and the clocks had been
+regularly wound. Two or three servants would have to be engaged for the
+period, and that was all; and even this want Mrs. Dawson proposed to
+supply without going off the premises.
+
+The housemaid had a sister, who was an accomplished parlourmaid
+and carver; the under-gardener’s eldest daughter was pining for a
+preliminary canter in the kitchen, and the gardener’s wife was a
+retired cook, and would be delighted to take all the rougher part of
+the cooking, while Mrs. Dawson devoted her art to those pretty tiny
+kickshaws in which she excelled. There were peaches ripening in the
+peach-house, and the apricots were going to be a show. There was wine
+in the cellar that would have satisfied an alderman on his honeymoon.
+Mildred’s business at The Hook might have been completed in a day, yet
+she lingered there for a week, and still lingered on, loving the place
+with a love which was mingled with pain, yet happier there than she
+could have been anywhere else in the world, she thought.
+
+The chief gardener rowed her about the river, never going very far from
+home, but meandering about the summer stream, by flowery meadows, and
+reedy eyots, and sometimes diverging into a tributary stream, where the
+shallow water seemed only an excuse for wild flowers. He had rowed her
+up and down those same streams when she was a child with streaming hair
+and he was the under-gardener. He had rowed her about in that brief
+summer season when Fay was her companion.
+
+She revisited all those spots in which she had wandered with her lover.
+She would land here or there along the island, and as she remembered
+each particular object in the landscape, her feet seemed to grow
+light again, with the lightness of joyous youth, as they touched the
+familiar shore. It was almost as if her youth came back to her.
+
+Thus it was that she lingered from day to day, loth to leave the
+beloved place. She wrote frankly to her aunt, saying how much good
+the change of air and scene had done her, and promising to return to
+Brighton in a few days. She felt that it was her duty to resume her
+place beside that fading existence; and yet it was an infinite relief
+to her to escape from that dull gray house, and the dull gray life.
+She acknowledged to herself that her aunt’s life was a good life, full
+of unselfish work and large charity, and yet there was something that
+repelled her, even while she admired. It was too much like a life lived
+up to a certain model, adjusted line by line to a carefully-studied
+plan. There was a lack of spontaneity, a sense of perpetual effort.
+The benevolence which had made Enderby village like one family in the
+sweet time that was gone had been of a very different character. There
+had been the warmth of love and sympathy in every kindness of George
+Greswold’s, and there had been infinite pity for wrong-doers. Miss
+Fausset’s almsgiving was after the fashion of the Pharisee of old, and
+it was upon the amount given that she held herself justified before
+God, not upon the manner of giving.
+
+In those quiet days, spent alone in her old home, Mildred had chosen to
+occupy Mr. Fausset’s study rather than the large bright drawing-room.
+The smaller room was more completely associated with her father. It
+was here—seated in the chair before the writing-table, where she was
+sitting now—that he had first talked to her of George Greswold, and had
+discussed her future life, questioning his motherless girl with more
+than a father’s tenderness about the promptings of her own heart. She
+loved the room and all that it contained for the sake of the cherished
+hands that had touched these things, and the gentle life that had been
+lived here. There had been but one error in his life, she thought—his
+treatment of Fay.
+
+“He ought not to have sent her away,” she thought; “he saw us happy
+together, his two daughters, and he ought not to have divided us, and
+sent her away to a loveless life among strangers. If he had only been
+frank and straightforward with my mother she might have forgiven all.”
+
+Might, perhaps. Mildred was not sure upon that point; but she felt very
+sure that it was her father’s duty to have braved all consequences
+rather than to have sent his unacknowledged child into exile. That fact
+of not acknowledging her seemed in itself such a tremendous cruelty
+that it intensified every lesser wrong.
+
+Mrs. Dawson understood her mistress’s fancy for her father’s room,
+and Mildred’s meals were served here, at a Sutherland-table in the
+bay-window, from which she could see the boats go by, Mrs. Dawson
+having a profound belief in the efficacy of the boats as a cure for low
+spirits.
+
+“People sometimes tell me it must be dull at The Hook,” she said; “but,
+lor! they don’t know how many boats go by in summer-time. It’s almost
+as gay as Bond Street.”
+
+Mildred lived alone with old memories in the flower-scented room, where
+the Spanish blinds made a cool and shadowy atmosphere, while the roses
+outside were steeped in sunshine. Those few days were just the most
+perfect summer days of the year. She felt sorry that they had not been
+reserved for Pamela’s honeymoon. Such sunshine was almost wasted on
+her, whose heart was so full of sadness.
+
+It was her last afternoon at The Hook, or the afternoon which she meant
+to be her last, having made up her mind to go back to Brighton and duty
+on the following day, and she had a task before her, a task which she
+had delayed from day to day, just as she had delayed her return to her
+aunt.
+
+She had to put away those special and particular objects which had
+belonged to her father and mother, and had been a part of their lives.
+These were too sacred to be left about now that strangers were to
+occupy the rooms of the dead. Hitherto no stranger had entered those
+rooms since John Fausset’s death, nothing had been removed or altered.
+No documents relating to property or business of any kind had been
+kept at The Hook. Mr. Fausset’s affairs had all been put in perfect
+order after his wife’s death, and there had been no ransacking for
+missing title-deeds or papers of any kind. It had been understood that
+all papers and letters of importance were either with Mr. Fausset’s
+solicitors or at the house in Parchment Street, and thus the household
+gods had been undisturbed in the summer retreat by the river.
+
+Mildred had spent the morning in her mother’s rooms, putting away all
+those dainty trifles and prettinesses which had gathered round the
+frivolous, luxurious life, as shells and bright-coloured weeds gather
+among the low rocks on the edge of the sea. She had placed everything
+carefully in a large closet in her mother’s dressing-room, covered
+with much tissue-paper, secure from dust and moth; and now she began
+the same kind of work in her father’s room, the work of removing all
+those objects which had been especially his: the old-fashioned silver
+inkstand, the well-worn scarlet morocco blotting-book, with his crest
+on the cover, and many inkspots on the leather lining inside, his
+penholders and penknives, and a little velvet pen-wiper which she had
+made for him when she was ten years old, and which he had kept on his
+table ever afterwards.
+
+She looked round the room thoughtfully for a place of security for
+these treasures. She had spent a good deal of time in rearranging her
+father’s books, which careful and conscientious dusting had reduced to
+a chaotic condition. Now every volume was in its place, just as he had
+kept them in the old days when it had been her delight to examine the
+shelves and to carry away a book of her father’s choosing.
+
+The bookcases were by Chippendale, with fretwork cornices and mahogany
+panelling. The lower part was devoted to cupboards, which her father
+had always kept under lock and key, but which she supposed to contain
+only old magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers, part of that vast mass
+of literature which is kept with a view to being looked at some day,
+and which finally drifts unread to the bourne of all waste paper, and
+is ground into pulp again, and rolls over the endless web again, and
+comes back upon the world printed with more intellectual food for the
+million of skippers and skimmers.
+
+Yes, one of those mahogany panelled cupboards would serve Mildred’s
+purpose admirably. She selected a key from one of the bunches in her
+key-box, and opened the cupboard nearest the door.
+
+It was packed tight with _Army Lists_, _New Monthly Magazines_,
+and _Edinburgh Reviews_—packed so well that there was scarcely an
+interstice that would hold a pin. She opened the next cupboard.
+_Sporting Magazine_, _Blackwood_, _Ainsworth_, and a pile of pamphlets.
+No room there.
+
+She opened the third, and found it much more loosely packed, with odd
+newspapers, and old Prayer Books and Bibles: shabby, old-fashioned
+books, which had served for the religious exercises of several
+generations of Faussets, and had been piously preserved by the owner
+of The Hook. There was room here perhaps for the things in the
+writing-table, if all these books and papers were rearranged and
+closely packed.
+
+Mildred began her work patiently. She was in no hurry to have done with
+her task; it brought her nearer to her beloved dead. She worked slowly,
+dreamily almost, her thoughts dwelling on the days that were gone.
+
+She took out the Prayer Books and Bibles one by one, looking at a
+fly-leaf now and then. John Fausset, from his loving mother, on the day
+of his confirmation, June 17, 1835; Lucy Jane Fausset, with her sister
+Maria’s love, April 3, 1804; Mark Fausset, in memory of little Charlie,
+December 1, 1807. Such inscriptions as these touched her, with their
+reminiscences of vanished affection, of hearts long mingled with the
+dust.
+
+She put the books on one side in a little pile on the carpet, as she
+knelt before the open cupboard, and then she began to move the loose
+litter of newspapers. The _Morning Herald_, the _Morning Chronicle_,
+the _Sun_. Even _these_ were of the dead.
+
+The cupboard held much more than she had expected. Behind the
+newspapers there were two rows of pigeons-holes, twenty-six in all,
+filled—choke-full, some of them—with letters, folded longwise, in a
+thoroughly business-like manner.
+
+Old letters, old histories of the family heart and mind, how much they
+hold to stir the chords of love and pain! Mildred’s hand trembled as
+she stretched it out to take one of those letters, idly, full of morbid
+curiosity about those relics of a past life.
+
+She never knew whether it had been deliberation or hazard which guided
+her hand to the sixth pigeon-hole, but she thought afterwards that
+her eye must have been caught by a bit of red ribbon—a spot of bright
+colour—and that her hand followed her eye mechanically. However this
+may have been, the first thing that she took from the mass of divers
+correspondence in the twenty-six pigeon-holes was a packet of about
+twenty letters tied with a red ribbon.
+
+Each letter was carefully indorsed “M. F.” and a date. Some were
+on foreign paper, others on thick gilt-edged note. A glance at the
+uppermost letter showed her a familiar handwriting—her aunt’s, but
+very different from Miss Fausset’s present precise penmanship. The
+writing here was more hurried and irregular, bolder, larger, and more
+indicative of impulse and emotion.
+
+No thought of possible wrong to her aunt entered Mildred’s mind as
+she untied the ribbon and seated herself in a low chair in front of
+the bookcase, with the letters loose in her lap. What secrets could
+there be in a girl’s letters to her elder brother which the brother’s
+daughter might not read, nearly forty years after they were written?
+What could there be in that yellow paper, in that faded ink, except
+the pale dim ghosts of vanished fancies, and thoughts which the thinker
+had long outlived?
+
+“I wonder whether my aunt would care to read these old letters?” mused
+Mildred. “It would be like calling up her own ghost. She must have
+almost forgotten what she was like when she wrote them.”
+
+The first letter was from Milan, full of enthusiasm about the Cathedral
+and the Conservatoire, full of schemes for work. She was practising six
+hours a day, and taking nine lessons a week—four for piano, two for
+singing, three for harmony. She was in high spirits, and delighted with
+her life.
+
+ “I should practise eight hours a day if Mrs. Holmby would let me,” she
+ wrote, “but she won’t. She says it would be too much for my health.
+ I believe it is only because my piano annoys her. I get up at five
+ on these summer mornings, and practise from six to half-past eight;
+ then coffee and rolls, and off to the Conservatoire; then a drive
+ with Mrs. Holmby, who is too lazy to walk much; and then lunch. After
+ lunch vespers at the Cathedral, and then two hours at the piano
+ before dinner. An hour and a half between dinner and tea, which we
+ take at nine. Sometimes one of Mrs. Holmby’s friends drops in to tea.
+ You needn’t be afraid: the men are all elderly, and not particularly
+ clean. They take snuff, and their complexions are like mahogany; but
+ there is one old man, with bristly gray hair standing out all over
+ his head like a brush, who plays the ’cello divinely, and who reminds
+ me of Beethoven. I am learning the ‘Sonate Pathétique,’ and I play
+ Bach’s preludes and fugues two hours a day. We went to La Scala the
+ night before last; but I was disappointed to find they were playing
+ a trumpery modern opera by a Milanese composer, who is all the rage
+ here.”
+
+Two or three letters followed, all in the same strain, and then came
+signs of discontent.
+
+ “I have no doubt Mrs. Holmby is a highly respectable person, and I
+ am sure you acted for the best when you chose her for my chaperon,
+ but she is a lump of prejudice. She objects to the Cathedral. ‘We are
+ fully justified in making ourselves familiar with its architectural
+ beauties,’ she said, in her pedantic way, ‘but to attend the services
+ of that benighted church is to worship in the groves of Baal.’ I told
+ her that I had found neither groves nor idols in that magnificent
+ church, and that the music I heard there was the only pleasure which
+ reconciled me to the utter dulness of my life at Milan—I was going
+ to say my life with her, but thought it better to be polite, as I am
+ quite in her power till you come to fetch me.
+
+ “Don’t think that I am tired of the Conservatoire, after teasing you
+ so to let me come here, or even that I am home-sick. I am only tired
+ of Mrs. Holmby; and I daresay, after all, she is no worse than any
+ other chaperon would be. As for the Conservatoire, I adore it, and I
+ feel that I am making rapid strides in my musical education. My master
+ is pleased with my playing of the ‘Pathétique,’ and I am to take the
+ ‘Eroica’ next. What a privilege it is to know Beethoven! He seems to
+ me now like a familiar friend. I have been reading a memoir of him.
+ What a sad life—what a glorious legacy he leaves the world which
+ treated him so badly!
+
+ “I play Diabelli’s exercises for an hour and a half every morning,
+ before I look at any other music.”
+
+In the next letter Mildred started at the appearance of a familiar name.
+
+ “Your kind suggestion about the Opera House has been followed,
+ and we have taken seats at La Scala for two nights a week. Signor
+ Castellani’s opera is really very charming. I have heard it now three
+ times, and liked it better each time. There is not much learning in
+ the orchestration; but there is a great deal of melody all through
+ the opera. The Milanese are mad about it. Signor Castellani came to
+ see Mrs. Holmby one evening last week, introduced by our gray-haired
+ ’cello-player. He is a clever-looking man, about five-and-thirty, with
+ a rather melancholy air. He writes his librettos, and is something of
+ a poet.
+
+ “We have made a compromise about the Cathedral. I am to go to vespers
+ if I like, as my theological opinions are not in Mrs. Holmby’s
+ keeping. She will walk with me to the Cathedral, leave me at the
+ bottom of the steps, do her shopping or take a gentle walk, and return
+ for me when the service is over. It only lasts three-quarters of an
+ hour, and Mrs. Holmby always has shopping of some kind on her hands,
+ as she does all her own marketing, and buys everything in the smallest
+ quantities. I suppose by this means she makes more out of your
+ handsome allowance for my board—or fancies she does.”
+
+There were more letters in the same strain, and Castellani’s name
+appeared often in relation to his operas; but there was no further
+mention of social intercourse. The letters grew somewhat fretful in
+tone, and there were repeated complaints of Mrs. Holmby. There were
+indications of fitful spirits—now enthusiasm, now depression.
+
+ “I have at least discovered that I am no genius,” she wrote. “When
+ I attempt to improvise, the poverty of my ideas freezes me; and yet
+ music with me is a passion. Those vesper services in the Cathedral are
+ my only consolation in this great dull town.
+
+ “No, dear Jack, I am not home-sick. I have to finish my musical
+ education. I am tired of nothing, except Mrs. Holmby.”
+
+After this there was an interval. The next letter was dated six months
+later. It was on a different kind of paper, and it was written from
+Evian, on the Lake of Geneva. Even the character of the penmanship had
+altered. It had lost its girlish dash, and something of its firmness.
+The strokes were heavier, but yet bore traces of hesitation. It was
+altogether a feebler style of writing.
+
+The letter began abruptly:
+
+ “I know that you have been kind to me, John—kinder, more merciful than
+ many brothers would have been under the same miserable circumstances;
+ but nothing you can do can make me anything else than what I have
+ made myself—the most wretched of creatures. When I walk about in this
+ quiet place, alone, and see the beggars holding out their hands to me,
+ maimed, blind, dumb perhaps, the very refuse of humanity, I feel that
+ their misery is less than mine. _They_ were not brought up to think
+ highly of themselves, and to look down upon other people, as I was.
+ _They_ were never petted and admired as I was. They were not brought
+ up to think honour the one thing that makes life worth living—to
+ feel the sting of shame worse than the sting of death. They fall
+ into raptures if I give them a franc—and all the wealth of the world
+ would not give me one hour of happiness. You tell me to forget my
+ misery. Forget—now! No, I have no wish to leave this place. I should
+ be neither better nor happier anywhere else. It is very quiet here.
+ There are no visitors left now in the neighbourhood. There is no one
+ to wonder who I am, or why I am living alone here in my tiny villa.
+ The days go by like a long weary dream, and there are days when the
+ gray lake and the gray mountains are half hidden in mist, and when all
+ Nature seems of the same colour as my own life.
+
+ “I received the books you kindly chose for me, a large parcel. There
+ is a novel among them which tells almost my own story. It made me shed
+ tears for the first time since you left me at Lausanne. Some people
+ say they find a relief in tears, but my tears are not of that kind. I
+ was ill for nearly a week after reading that story. Please don’t send
+ me any more novels. If they are about happy people they irritate me;
+ if they are sorrowful stories they make me just a shade more wretched
+ than I am always. If you send me books again let them be the hardest
+ kind of reading you can get. I hear there is a good book on natural
+ history by a man called Darwin. I should like to read that.—Gratefully
+ and affectionately your sister,
+
+  M. F.”
+
+This letter was dated October. The next was written in November from
+the same address.
+
+ “No, my dear John, your fears were unfounded, I have not been ill. I
+ wish I had been—sick unto death! I have been too wretched to write,
+ that was all. Why should I distress you with a reiteration of my
+ misery—and I _cannot_ write, or think about anything else? I have no
+ doubt Darwin’s book is good, but I could not interest myself in it.
+ The thought of my own misery comes between me and every page I read.
+
+ “You ask me what I mean to do with my life when my dark days are over.
+ To that question there can but be one answer. I mean, so far as it
+ is possible, to forget. I shall go down to my grave burdened with my
+ dismal secret; but I shall exercise every faculty I possess to keep
+ that secret to the end. _He_ is not likely to betray me. The knowledge
+ of his own baseness will seal his lips.
+
+ “Your suggestion of a future home in some quiet village, either in
+ England or abroad, is kindly meant, I know, but I shudder at the mere
+ idea of such a life. To pass as a widow; to have to answer every
+ prying acquaintance—the doctor, the clergyman—people who would force
+ themselves upon me, however secluded my life might be; to devote
+ myself to a duty which in every hour of my existence would remind me
+ of my folly and of my degradation: I should live like the galley-slave
+ who drags his chain at every step.
+
+ “You tell me that the tie which would be a sorrow in the beginning
+ might grow into a blessing. That could never be. You know very little
+ of a woman’s nature when you suggest such a possibility. What _can_
+ your sex know of a woman’s agony under such circumstances as mine?
+ _You_ are never made to feel the sting of dishonour.”
+
+A light began to dawn on Mildred as she read this second letter from
+Evian. The first might mean anything—an engagement broken off, a
+proud girl jilted by a worthless lover, the sense of degradation that
+a woman feels in having loved unwisely—in having wasted confidence and
+affection upon an unworthy object: Mildred had so interpreted that
+despairing letter. But the second revealed a deeper wound, a darker
+misery.
+
+There were sentences that stood out from the context with unmistakable
+meaning. “When my dark days are over”—“to pass as a widow”—“to devote
+myself to a duty which would remind me of my folly and my degradation.”
+
+That suggestion of a secluded life—of a care which should grow into a
+blessing—could mean only one thing. The wretched girl who wrote that
+letter was about to become a mother, under conditions which meant
+life-long dishonour.
+
+White as marble, and with hands that trembled convulsively as they held
+the letter, Mildred Greswold read on, hurriedly, eagerly, breathlessly,
+to the last line of the last letter. She had no scruples, no sense of
+wrong-doing. The secret hidden in that little packet of letters was a
+secret which she had a right to know—she above all other people, she
+who had been cheated and fooled by false imaginings.
+
+The third letter from Evian was dated late in January:
+
+ “I have been very ill—dangerously, I believe—but my doctor took
+ unnecessary trouble to cure me. I am now able to go out of doors
+ again, and I walk by the lake for half-an-hour every day in the
+ morning sun. The child thrives wonderfully, I am told; but if there is
+ to be a change of nurses, as there must be—for this woman here must
+ lose sight of her charge and of me when I leave this place—the change
+ cannot be made too soon. If Boulogne is really the best place you
+ can think of, your plan would be to meet me with the nurse at Dijon,
+ where we can take the rail. We shall post from here to that town. I am
+ very sorry to inflict so much trouble upon you, but it is a part of
+ my misery to be a burden to you as well as to myself. When once this
+ incubus is safely disposed of, I shall be less troublesome to you.
+
+ “No, my dear John, there is no relenting, no awakening of maternal
+ love. For me that must remain for ever a meaningless phrase. For me
+ there can be nothing now or ever more, except a sense of aversion and
+ horror—a shrinking from the very image of the child that must never
+ call me mother, or know the link between us. All that can possibly be
+ done to sever that link I shall do; and I entreat you, by the love of
+ past years, to help me in so doing. My only chance of peace in the
+ future is in total severance. Remember that I am prepared to make any
+ sacrifice that can secure the happiness of this wretched being, that
+ can make up to her—”
+
+“That can make up to _her_!”
+
+Mildred’s clutch tightened upon the letter. This was the first mention
+of the infant’s sex.
+
+ “—For the dishonour to which she is born. I will gladly devote half
+ my fortune to her maintenance and her future establishment in life,
+ if she should grow up and marry. Remember also that I have sworn to
+ myself never to entertain any proposal of marriage, never to listen to
+ words of love from any man upon earth. You need have no fear of future
+ embarrassment on my account. I shall never give a man the right to
+ interrogate my past life. I resign myself to a solitary existence—but
+ not to a life clouded with shame. When I go back to England and resume
+ my place in society, I shall try to think of this last year of agony
+ as if it were a bad dream. You alone know my secret, and you can
+ help me if you will. My prayer is that from the hour I see the child
+ transferred to the new nurse at Dijon, I shall never look upon its
+ face again. The nurse can go back to her home as fast as the train
+ will carry her, and I can go back to London with you.”
+
+The next letter was written seven years later, and addressed from
+Kensington Gore:
+
+ “I suppose I ought to answer your long letter by saying that I am glad
+ the child has good health, that I rejoice in her welfare, and so on.
+ But I cannot be such a hypocrite. It hurts me to write about her; it
+ hurts me to think of her. My heart hardens itself against her at every
+ suggestion of her quickness, or her prettiness, or any other merit. To
+ me she can be nothing except—disgrace. I burnt your letter the instant
+ it was read. I felt as if some one was looking over my shoulder as
+ I read it. I dared not go down to lunch for fear Mrs. Winstanley’s
+ searching eyes should read my secret in my face. I pretended a
+ headache, and stayed in my room till our eight-o’clock dinner, when
+ I knew I should be safe in the dim religious light which my chaperon
+ affects as the most flattering to wrinkles and pearl-powder.
+
+ “But I am not ungrateful, my dear John. I am touched even by your
+ kindly interest in that unfortunate waif. I have no doubt you have
+ done wisely in placing her with the good old lady at Barnes, and that
+ she is very happy running about the Common. I am glad I know where
+ she is, so that I may never drive that way, if I can possibly help
+ it. Your old lady must be rather a foolish woman, I should think, to
+ change Fanny into Fay, on the strength of the child’s airy movements
+ and elfin appearance; but as long as this person knows nothing of her
+ charge’s history her silliness cannot matter.”
+
+A letter of a later date was addressed from Lewes Crescent.
+
+ “I am horrified at what you have done. O, John, how could you be so
+ reckless, so forgetful of my reiterated entreaties to keep that
+ girl’s existence wide apart from mine or yours? And you have actually
+ introduced her into your own house as a relation; and you actually
+ allow her to be called by your name! Was ever such madness? You
+ stultify all that has been done in the past. You open the door to
+ questionings and conjectures of the most dreadful kind. No, I will
+ not see her. You must be mad to suggest such a thing. My feeling
+ about her to-day is exactly the same as my feeling on the day she was
+ born—disgust, horror, dread. I will never—willingly—look upon her face.
+
+ “Do you remember those words in _Bleak House_? ‘Your mother, Esther,
+ is your disgrace, and you were hers.’ So it is with that girl and me.
+ Can love be possible where there is this mutual disgrace?
+
+ “For God’s sake, get the girl out of your house as soon as you can!
+ Send her to some good school abroad—France, Germany, where you like,
+ and save me from the possibility of discovery. My secret has been
+ kept—my friends look up to me. I have outlived the worst part of my
+ misery, and have learnt to take some interest in life. I could not
+ survive the discovery of my wretched story.”
+
+A later letter was briefer and more business-like.
+
+ “I fully concur in the settlement you propose, and would as willingly
+ make the sum 40,000_l._ as 30,000_l._ Remember that, so far as money
+ can go, I am anxious to do the _uttermost_. I hope she will marry
+ soon, and marry well, and that she may lead a happy and honourable
+ life under a new name—a name that she can bear without a blush. I
+ should be much relieved if she could continue to live abroad.”
+
+This was the last letter in the bundle tied with red ribbon. In
+the same pigeon-hole Mildred found the draft of a deed of gift,
+transferring 30,000_l._ India Stock to Fanny Fausset, otherwise Vivien
+Faux, on her twenty-first birthday, and with the draft there were
+several letters from a firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
+relating to the same deed of gift.
+
+The last of the letters fell from Mildred’s lap as she sat with her
+hands clasped before her face, dazed by this sudden light which altered
+the aspect of her life.
+
+“Fool, fool, fool!” she cried.
+
+The thought of all she had suffered, and of the suffering she had
+inflicted on the man she loved, almost maddened her. She had condemned
+her father—her generous, noble-hearted father—upon evidence that had
+seemed to her incontrovertible. She had believed in a stain upon that
+honourable life—had believed him a sinner and a coward. And Miss
+Fausset knew all that she had forfeited by that fatal misapprehension,
+and yet kept her shameful secret, caring for her own reputation more
+than for two blighted lives.
+
+She remembered how she had appealed to her aunt to solve the mystery
+of Fay’s parentage, and how deliberately Miss Fausset had declared her
+ignorance. She had advised her niece to go back to her husband, but
+that was all.
+
+Mildred gathered the letters together, tied them with the faded ribbon,
+and then went to her father’s writing-table and wrote these lines, in a
+hand that trembled with indignation:
+
+ “I know all the enclosed letters can tell me. You have kept your
+ secret at the hazard of breaking two hearts. I know not if the wrong
+ you have done me can ever be set right; but this I know, that I shall
+ never again enter your house, or look upon your face, if I can help
+ it. I am going back to my husband, never again to leave him, if he
+ will let me stay.
+
+  MILDRED GRESWOLD.”
+
+She packed the letters securely in one of the large banker’s envelopes
+out of her father’s desk. She sealed the packet with her father’s
+crest, intending to register and post it with her own hands on her way
+to Romsey; and then, with a heart that beat with almost suffocating
+force, she consulted the time-table, and tried to match trains between
+Reading and Basingstoke.
+
+There was a train from Chertsey to Reading at five. She might catch
+that and be home—home—home—how the word thrilled her! some time before
+midnight. She would have gone back if it had been to arrive in the dead
+of night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MARKED BY FATE.
+
+
+It was nearly ten o’clock when Mildred drove through the village of
+Enderby, and saw the lights burning in the familiar cottage windows,
+the post-office, and the little fancy shop where Lola had been so
+constant a purchaser in the days gone by. Her eyes were full of tears
+as she looked at the humble street: happy tears, for her heart thrilled
+with hope as she drew near home.
+
+“He cannot withhold his forgiveness,” she told herself. “He knows that
+I acted for conscience’ sake.”
+
+Five minutes more and she was standing in the hall, questioning
+the footman, who stared at her with a bewildered air, as the most
+unexpected of visitors.
+
+“Is your master at home?” she asked.
+
+“Yes, ma’am, master’s in the library. Shall I announce you?”
+
+“No, no—I can find him. Help my maid to take my things to my room.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. Have you dined, or shall I tell cook to get something
+ready?”
+
+“No, no. I have dined,” she answered hurriedly, and went on to the
+library, to that very room in which she had made the fatal discovery of
+Fay’s identity with her husband’s first wife.
+
+He was sitting in the lamp-light, just as he was sitting that night
+when she fell fainting at his feet. The windows were open to the summer
+night, books were scattered about on the table, and heaped on the floor
+by his side. Whatever comfort there may be in such company, he had
+surrounded himself with that comfort. He took no notice of the opening
+of the door, and she was kneeling at his feet before he knew that she
+was in the room.
+
+“Mildred, what does this mean? Have we not parted often enough?”
+
+“There was no reason for our parting—except my mistaken belief. I am
+here to stay with you till my death, if you will have me, George. Be
+merciful to me, my dearest! I have acted for conscience’ sake. I have
+been fooled, deluded by appearances which might have deceived any one,
+however wise. Forgive me, George; forgive me for the sake of all I have
+suffered in doing what I thought to be my duty!”
+
+He lifted her from her knees, took her to his heart without a word, and
+kissed her. There was a silence of some moments, in which each could
+hear the throbbing of the other’s heart.
+
+“You were wrong after all, then,” he said at last; “Vivien was not your
+half-sister?”
+
+“She was not.”
+
+“Whose child was she?”
+
+“You must not ask me that, George. It is a secret which I ought not
+to tell even to you. She was cruelly used, poor girl, more cruelly
+even than I thought she had been when I believed she was my father’s
+daughter. I have undeniable evidence as to her parentage. She was my
+blood-relation, but she was not my sister.”
+
+“How did you make the discovery?”
+
+“By accident—this afternoon at The Hook. I found some papers and
+letters of my father’s in a cupboard below the bookcase. I knew
+nothing of their existence—should never have thought of searching for
+private papers there, for I had heard my father often say that he
+kept only magazines and pamphlets—things he called rubbish—in those
+cupboards. I wanted to put away some things, and I stumbled on a packet
+of letters which revealed the secret of Fay’s birth. I can come back to
+my duty with a clear conscience. May I stay with you, George?”
+
+“May you? Well, yes; I suppose so,” with another kiss and a tender
+little laugh. “One cannot make a broken vase new again, but we may pick
+up the pieces and stick them together again somehow. You have taken a
+good many years out of my life, Mildred, and I doubt if you can give
+them back to me. I feel twenty years older than I felt before the
+beginning of this trouble; but now all is known, and you are my wife
+again—well, there may be a few years of gladness for us yet. We will
+make the most of them.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All things dropped back into the old grooves at Enderby Manor. Mrs.
+Greswold and her husband were seen together at church on the Sunday
+morning after Mildred’s return, much to the astonishment of the
+congregation, who immediately began to disbelieve in all their own
+convictions and assertions of the past half-year, and to opine that the
+lady had only been in the South for her health, more especially as it
+was known that Miss Ransome had been her travelling companion.
+
+“If she had quarrelled with her husband, she would hardly have had her
+husband’s niece with her all the time,” said Mrs. Porter, the doctor’s
+wife.
+
+“But if there was no quarrel, why did he shut himself up like a hermit,
+and look so wretched if one happened to meet him?” asked somebody else.
+
+“Well, there she is, anyhow, and she looks out of health, so you may
+depend some London physician ordered her abroad. They might as well
+have consulted Porter, who ought to know her constitution by this time.
+He’d have ordered her to Ventnor for the winter, and saved them both a
+good deal of trouble; but there, people never think they can be cured
+without going to Cavendish Square.”
+
+Mildred’s strength seemed to fail her more in the happiness of that
+unhoped-for reunion than it had ever done during her banishment.
+She wanted to do so much at Enderby: to visit about among her
+shabby-genteel old ladies and her cottagers as in the cloudless time
+before Lola’s death; to superintend her garden; to visit old friends
+whose faces were endeared by fond association with the past; to be
+everywhere with her husband: walking with him in the copses, riding
+about the farms, and on the edge of the forest, in the dewy summer
+mornings. She wanted to do all these things, and she found that her
+strength would not let her.
+
+“I hope that my health is not going to give way, just when I am so
+happy,” she said to her husband one day, when she felt almost fainting
+after their morning ride.
+
+He took alarm instantly, and sent off for Mr. Porter, though Mildred
+made light of her feelings next moment. The family practitioner sounded
+her with the usual professional gravity, but his face grew more serious
+as he listened to the beating of her heart. He affected, however, to
+think very little of her ailments, talked of nerves, and suggested
+bromide of something, as if it were infallible; but when George
+Greswold went out into the hall with him he owned that all was not
+right.
+
+“The heart is weak,” he said. “I hope there may be no organic mischief,
+but—”
+
+“You mean that I shall lose her,” interrupted Greswold, in a husky
+whisper.
+
+His own heart was beating like the tolling of a church bell—beating
+with the dull, heavy stroke of despair.
+
+“No, no. I don’t think there’s any immediate danger, but I should like
+you to take higher advice—Clark or Jenner, perhaps.”
+
+“Of course. I will send for some one at once.”
+
+“The very thing to alarm her. She ought to be kept free from all
+possible anxiety or excitement. Don’t let her ride—except in the
+quietest way—or walk far enough to fatigue herself. You might take her
+up to town for a few days on the pretence of seeing picture-galleries
+or something, and then coax her to consult a physician, just for _your_
+satisfaction. Make as light as you can of her complaint.”
+
+“Yes, yes. I understand. O, God, that it should be so, after all; when
+I thought I had come to the end of sorrow!” This in an undertone. “For
+pity’s sake, Porter, tell me the worst! You think it a bad case?”
+
+Porter shook his head, tried to speak, grasped George Greswold’s hand,
+and made for the door. Mr. and Mrs. Greswold had been his patients and
+friends for the last fifteen years, and in his rough way he was devoted
+to them.
+
+“See Jenner as soon as you can,” he said. “It is a very delicate case.
+I would rather not hazard an opinion.”
+
+George Greswold went out to the lawn where he had sat on the Sunday
+evening before Lola’s death. It had been summer then, and it was summer
+now—the time of roses, before the song of the nightingale had ceased
+amidst the seclusion of twilit branches. He sat down upon the bench
+under the cedar, and gave himself up to his despair. He had tasted
+again the sweet cup of domestic peace—he had been gladdened again by
+the only companionship that had ever filled his heart, and now in the
+near future he saw the prospect of another parting, and this time
+without hope on earth. Once again he told himself that he was marked
+out by Fate.
+
+“I suppose it must always be so,” he thought; “in the lots that fall
+from the urn there must be some that are all of one colour—black—black
+as night.”
+
+Mildred came out to the lawn with him, followed by Kassandra, who had
+deserted the master for the mistress since her return, as if in a
+delight mixed with fear lest she should again depart.
+
+“What has become of you, George? I thought you were coming back to the
+morning-room directly, and it is nearly an hour since Mr. Porter went
+away.”
+
+“I came into the garden—to—to see your new shrubbery.”
+
+“Did you really? how good of you! It is hardly to be called a new
+shrubbery—only a little addition to the old one. It will give an idea
+of distance when the shrubs are good enough to grow tall and thick.
+Will you come with me and tell me what you think of it?”
+
+“Gladly, dear, if it will not tire you.”
+
+“Tire me to walk to the shrubbery! No, I am not quite so bad as that,
+though I find I am a bad walker compared with what I used to be. I
+daresay I am out of training. I could walk any distance at Brighton
+last autumn. A long walk on the road to Rottingdean was my only
+distraction; but at Pallanza I began to flag, and the hotel people were
+always suggesting drives, so I got out of the habit of walking.”
+
+He had his hand through her arm, and drew her near him as they
+sauntered across the lawn, with a hopeless wonder at the thought that
+she was here at his side, close to his heart, all in all to him to-day,
+and that the time might soon come when she would have melted out of
+his life as that fair daughter had done, when the grave under the tree
+should mean a double desolation, an everlasting despair.
+
+“Is there _any_ world where we shall be together again?” he asked
+himself. “What is immortality worth to me if it does not mean reunion?
+To go round upon the endless wheel of eternity, to be fixed into the
+universal life, to be a part of the Creator Himself! Nothing in a life
+to come can be gain to me if it do not give me back what I have lost.”
+
+They dawdled about the shrubbery, man and wife, arm linked with arm,
+looking at the new plantings one by one; she speculating how many years
+each tree would take to come to perfection.
+
+“They will make a very good effect in three or four years, George.
+Don’t you think so? That _Picea nobilis_ will fill the open space
+yonder. We have allowed ten feet clear on every side. The golden brooms
+grow only too quickly. How serious you look! Are you thinking of
+anything that makes you anxious?”
+
+“I am thinking of Pamela and her sweetheart. I should like to make Lady
+Lochinvar’s acquaintance before the marriage.”
+
+“Shall I ask her here?”
+
+“She could hardly come, I fancy, while the wedding is on the _tapis_.
+I propose that you and I should go up to London to-morrow, put up at
+our old hotel—we shall be more independent there than at Grosvenor
+Gardens—and spend a few days quietly, seeing a good deal of the
+picture-galleries, and a little of our new connections—and of Rosalind
+and her husband, whom we don’t often see. Would you like to do that,
+Mildred?”
+
+“I like anything you like. I delight in seeing pictures with you, and
+I shall be glad to see Rosalind; and if Pamela really wishes us to
+be present at her wedding, I think we ought to be there, don’t you,
+George?”
+
+“If you would like it dearest; if—”
+
+He left the sentence unfinished, fearing to betray his apprehension.
+Till he had consulted the highest authorities in the land he felt that
+he could know but little of that hidden malady which paled her cheek
+and gave heaviness to the pathetic eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were in Cavendish Square, husband and wife, on the morning after
+their arrival in town, by special appointment with the physician.
+Mildred submitted meekly to a careful consultation—only for his own
+satisfaction, her husband told her, making light of his anxiety.
+
+“I want you to be governed by the best possible advice, dearest, in the
+care of your health.”
+
+“You don’t think there is danger, George; that I am to be taken away
+from you, just when all our secrets and sorrows are over?”
+
+“Indeed, no, dearest! God grant you may be spared to me for many happy
+years to come!”
+
+“There is no reason, I think, that it should not be so. Mr. Porter said
+my complaint was chiefly nervous. He would not wonder at my nerves
+being in a poor way if he knew how I suffered in those bitter days of
+banishment.”
+
+The examination was long and serious, yet conducted by the physician
+with such gentle _bonhomie_ as not to alarm the patient. When it was
+over, he dismissed her with a kindly smile, after advice given upon
+very broad lines.
+
+“After the question of diet, which I have written for you here,” he
+said, handing her half a sheet of paper, “the only other treatment I
+can counsel is self-indulgence. Never walk far enough to feel tired, or
+fast enough to be out of breath. Live as much as possible in the open
+air, but let your life out of doors be the sweet idleness of the sunny
+South, rather than our ideal bustling, hurrying British existence.
+Court repose—tranquillity for body and mind in all things.”
+
+“You mean that I am to be an invalid for the rest of my life, as my
+poor mother was for five years before her death?”
+
+“At what age did your mother die?”
+
+“Thirty-four. For a long time the doctors would hardly say what was the
+matter with her. She suffered terribly from palpitation of the heart,
+as I have done for the last six months; but the doctors made light of
+it, and told my father there was very little amiss. Towards the end
+they changed their opinion, and owned that there was organic disease.
+Nothing they could do for her seemed of much use.”
+
+Mildred went back to the waiting-room while her husband had an
+interview with the doctor; an interview which left him but the faintest
+hope—only the hope of prolonging a fading life.
+
+“She may last for years, perhaps,” said the physician, pitying the
+husband’s silent agony, “but it would be idle to disguise her state.
+She will never be strong again. She must not ride, or drive, or occupy
+herself in any way that can involve violent exertion, or a shock to the
+nerves. Cherish her as a hothouse flower, and she may be with you for
+some time yet.”
+
+“God bless you, even for that hope,” said Greswold, and then he spoke
+of his niece’s wedding, and the wish for Mildred’s presence.
+
+“No harm in a wedding, I think, if you are careful of her: no
+over-exertion, no agitating scenes. The wedding may cheer her, and
+prevent her brooding on her own state. Good-day. I shall be glad to
+know the effect of my prescription, and to see Mrs. Greswold again in a
+month or two, if she is strong enough to come to London. If you want me
+at any time in the country—”
+
+“You will come, will you not? Remember she is all that is precious to
+me upon this earth. If I lose her I lose everything.”
+
+“Send for me at any time. If it is possible for me to go to you I will
+go.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+LIKE A TALE THAT IS TOLD.
+
+
+Pamela’s wedding was one of the most successful functions of the London
+season; and the society papers described the ceremony with a fulness
+of detail which satisfied even the bride’s avidity for social fame.
+Mr. Smithson sent her gown just an hour before it had to make its
+reverence before the altar in the Abbey; and Pamela, who had been in an
+almost hysterical agony for an hour-and-a-half, lest she should have
+no gown in which to be married, owned, as she pirouetted before the
+chevalglass, that the fit was worth the suspense.
+
+The ladies who write fashion articles in the two social arbiters
+were rapturous about Mr. Smithson’s _chef-d’œuvre_, and gave glowing
+accounts of certain trousseau gowns which they had been privileged
+to review at an afternoon tea in Grosvenor Gardens a week before the
+event. Pamela’s delight in these paragraphs was intensified by the
+idea that César Castellani would read them, though it is hardly likely
+that listless skimmer of modern literature went so deep as fashion
+articles.
+
+“He will see at least that if he had married me he would not have
+married quite a nobody,” said Pamela, in a summer reverie upon the blue
+water in front of The Hook, where she and her husband dawdled about in
+a punt nearly all day, expatiating upon each other’s merits. And so
+floats this light bark gaily into a safe and placid haven, out of reach
+of privateer or pirate such as the incomparable Castellani.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not until after Pamela’s wedding, and nearly a month after
+Mildred’s discovery of the letters in the bookcase, that Miss Fausset
+made any sign; but one August morning her reply came in the shape of a
+letter, entreating Mildred to go to her, as an act of charity to one
+whose sands had nearly run out.
+
+“I will not sue to you _in formâ pauperis_,” she wrote, “so I do not
+pretend that I am a dying woman; but I believe I have not very long
+to live, and before my voice is mute upon earth I want to tell you
+the history of one year of my girlhood. I want you to know that I am
+not altogether the kind of sinner you may think me. I will not write
+that history, and if you refuse to come to me, I must die and leave it
+untold, and in that case my death-bed will be miserable.”
+
+Mildred’s gentle heart could not harden itself against such an appeal
+as this. She told her husband only that her aunt was very ill and
+ardently desired to see her; and after some discussion it was arranged
+that she should travel quietly to Brighton, he going with her. He
+suggested that they should stop in Miss Fausset’s house for a night or
+two, but Mildred told him she would much prefer to stay at an hotel; so
+it was decided that they should put up at the quiet hotel on the East
+Cliff, where Mr. Greswold had taken Pamela nearly a year before.
+
+Mildred’s health had improved under the physician’s _régime_; and her
+husband felt hopeful as they travelled together through the summer
+landscape, by that line which she had travelled in her desolation—the
+level landscape with glimpses of blue sea and stretches of gray beach
+or yellow sand, bright in the August noontide.
+
+George Greswold had respected Mildred’s reserve, and had never urged
+her to enlighten him as to the secret of his first wife’s parentage;
+but he had his ideas upon the subject, and, remembering his interview
+with the solicitor and that gentleman’s perturbation at the name of
+Fausset, he was inclined to think that the pious lady of Lewes Crescent
+might not be unconcerned in the mystery. And now this summons to
+Brighton seemed to confirm his suspicions.
+
+He went no further than Miss Fausset’s threshold, and allowed his wife
+to go to her aunt alone.
+
+“I shall walk up and down and wait till you come out again,” he said,
+“so I hope that you won’t stay too long.”
+
+He was anxious to limit an interview which might involve agitation for
+Mildred. He parted from her almost reluctantly at the doorway of the
+gloomy house, with its entrance-hall of the pattern of forty years
+ago, furnished with barometer, umbrella-stand, and tall chairs, all
+in Spanish mahogany, and with never a picture or a bust, bronze or
+porcelain, to give light and colour to the scene.
+
+Miss Fausset had changed for the worse even in the brief interval since
+Mildred had last seen her. She was sitting in the back drawing-room as
+usual, but her table and chair had been wheeled into the bay-window,
+which commanded a garden with a single tree and a variety of house-tops
+and dead walls.
+
+“So you have come,” she said, without any form of greeting. “I hardly
+expected so much from you. Sit down there, if you please. I have a good
+deal to tell you.”
+
+“I had intended never to enter your house again, aunt. But I could not
+refuse to hear anything you have to say in your own justification. Only
+there is one act of yours which you can never justify—either to me or
+to God.”
+
+“What is that, pray?”
+
+“Your refusal to tell me the secret of Fay’s birth, when my happiness
+and my husband’s depended upon my knowing it.”
+
+“To tell you that would have been to betray my own secret. Do you
+think, after keeping it for nine-and-thirty years, I was likely to
+surrender it lightly? I would sooner have cut my tongue out. I did what
+I could for you. I told you to ignore idle prejudice and to go back to
+your husband. I told you what was due from you to him, over and above
+all sanctimonious scruples. You would not listen to me, and whatever
+misery you have suffered has been misery of your own creation.”
+
+“Do not let us talk any more about it, aunt. I can never think
+differently about the wrong you have done me. Had I not found those
+letters—by the merest accident, remember—I might have gone down to my
+grave a desolate woman. I might have died in a foreign land, far away
+from the only voice that could comfort me in my last hours. No; my
+opinion of your guilty silence can never change. You were willing to
+break two hearts rather than hazard your own reputation; and yet you
+must have known that I would keep your secret, that I should sympathise
+with the sorrow of your girlhood,” added Mildred, in softened tones.
+
+Miss Fausset was slow in replying. Mildred’s reproaches fell almost
+unheeded upon her ear. It was of herself she was thinking, with all
+the egotism engendered by a lonely old age, without ties of kindred or
+friendship, with no society but that of flatterers and parasites.
+
+“I asked you if you had found any letters of your father’s relating to
+that unhappy girl,” she said. “I always feared his habit of keeping
+letters—a habit he learnt from my father. Yet I hoped that he would
+have burnt mine, knowing, as he did, that the one desire of my life was
+to obliterate that hideous past. Vain hope. I was like the ostrich.
+If I hid my secret in England, it was known in Italy. The man who
+destroyed my life was a traitor to the core of his heart, and he
+betrayed me to his son. He told César how he had fascinated a rich
+English girl, and fooled her with a mock marriage; and fifteen years
+ago the young man presented himself to me with the full knowledge of
+that dark blot upon my life—to me, here, where I had held my head
+so high. He let me know the full extent of his knowledge in his own
+subtle fashion; but he always treated me with profound respect—he
+pretended to be fond of me; and, God help me, there was a charm for
+me in the very sound of his voice. The man who cheated me out of my
+life’s happiness was lying in his grave: death lessens the bitterness
+of hatred, and I could not forget that I had once loved him.”
+
+The tears gathered slowly in the cold gray eyes, and rolled slowly down
+the hollow cheeks.
+
+“Yes, I loved him, Mildred—loved him with a foolish, inexperienced
+girl’s romantic love. I asked no questions. I believed all he told
+me. I flung myself blindfold into the net. His genius, his grace,
+his fire—ah, you can never imagine the charm of _his_ manner, the
+variety of his talent, compared with which his son’s accomplishments
+are paltry. You see me now a hard, elderly woman. As a girl I was
+warm-hearted and impetuous, full of enthusiasm and imagination, while
+I loved and believed in my lover. My whole nature changed after that
+great wrong—my heart was frozen.”
+
+There was a silence of some moments, and then Miss Fausset continued
+in short agitated sentences, her fingers fidgeting nervously with the
+double eyeglass which she wore on a slender gold chain:
+
+“It was his genius I worshipped. He was at the height of his success.
+The Milanese raved about him as a rival to Donizetti; his operas
+were the rage. Can you wonder that I, a girl passionately fond of
+music, was carried away by the excitement which was in the very air
+I breathed? I went to the opera night after night. I heard that
+fascinating music till its melodies seemed interwoven with my being. I
+suppose I was weak enough to let the composer see how much I admired
+him. He had quarrelled with his wife; and the quarrel—caused by his
+own misconduct—had resulted in a separation which was supposed to be
+permanent. There may have been people in Milan who knew that he was a
+married man, but my chaperon did not; and he was careful to suppress
+the fact from the beginning of our acquaintance.
+
+“Yes, no doubt he found out that I was madly in love with him. He
+pretended to be interested in my musical studies. He advised and taught
+me. He played the violin divinely, and we used to play _concertante_
+duets during the long evenings, while my chaperon dozed by the fire,
+caring very little how I amused myself, so long as I did not interfere
+with her comfort. She was a sensual, selfish creature, given over to
+self-indulgence, and she let me have my own way in everything. He
+used to join me at the Cathedral at vespers. How my heart thrilled
+when I found him there, sitting in the shadowy chancel in the gray
+November light! for I knew it was for my sake he went there, not from
+any religious feeling. Our hands used to meet and clasp each other
+almost unconsciously when the music moved us as it went soaring up to
+the gorgeous roof, in the dim light of the hanging lamps before the
+altar. I have found myself kneeling with my hand in his when I came out
+of a dream of Paradise to which that exquisite music had lifted me.
+Yes, I loved him, Mildred; I loved him as well as ever you loved your
+husband—as passionately and unselfishly as woman ever loved. I rejoiced
+in the thought that I was rich, for his sake. I planned the life that
+we were to live together; a life in which I was to be subordinate to
+him in all things—his adoring slave. I suppose most girls have some
+such dream. God help them, when it ends as mine did!”
+
+Again there was a silence—a chilling muteness upon Mildred’s part. How
+could she be sorry for this woman who had never been sorry for others;
+who had let her child travel from the cradle to the grave without one
+ray of maternal love to light her dismal journey! She remembered Fay’s
+desolate life and blighted nature—Fay, who had a heart large enough
+for a great unselfish love. She remembered her aunt’s impenetrable
+silence when a word would have restored happiness to a ruined home;
+she remembered, and her heart was hardened against this proud, selfish
+woman, whose life had been one long sacrifice to the world’s opinion.
+
+“I loved him, Mildred, and I trusted him as I would have trusted any
+man who had the right to call himself a gentleman,” pursued Miss
+Fausset, eager to justify herself in the face of that implacable
+silence. “I had been brought up, after the fashion of those days, in
+a state of primeval innocence. I had never, even in fiction, been
+allowed to come face to face with the cruel realities of life. I
+was educated in an age which thought _Jane Eyre_ an improper novel,
+and which restricted a young woman’s education to music and modern
+languages; the latter taught so badly, for the most part, as to be
+useless when she travelled. My knowledge of Italian would just enable
+me to translate a libretto when I had it before me in print, or to ask
+my way in the streets; but it was hardly enough to make me understand
+the answer. It never entered into my mind to doubt Paolo Castellani
+when he told me that, although we could not, as Papist and Protestant,
+be married in any church in Milan, we could be united by a civil
+marriage before a Milanese authority, and that such a marriage would
+be binding all the world over. Had I been a poor girl I might of my
+own instinct have suspected treachery; but I was rich and he was poor,
+and he would be a gainer by our marriage. Servants and governesses had
+impressed me with the sense of my own importance, and I knew that I
+was what is called a good match. So I fell into the trap, Mildred, as
+foolishly as a snared bird. I crept out of the house one morning after
+my music-lesson, found my lover waiting for me with a carriage close
+by, went with him to a dingy office in a dingy street, but which had a
+sufficiently official air to satisfy my ignorance, and went through a
+certain formula, hearing something read over by an elderly man of grave
+appearance, and signing my name to a document after Paolo had signed
+his.
+
+“It was all a sham and a cheat, Mildred. The old man was a Milanese
+attorney, with no more power to marry us than he had to make us
+immortal. The paper was a deed-of-gift by which Paolo Castellani
+transferred some imaginary property to me. The whole thing was a farce;
+but it was so cleverly planned that the cheat was effected without
+the aid of an accomplice. The old man acted in all good faith, and
+my blind confidence and ignorance of Italian accepted a common legal
+formality as a marriage. I went from that dark little office into the
+spring sunshine happy as ever bride went out of church, kissed and
+complimented by a throng of approving friends. I cared very little
+as to what my brother might think of this clandestine marriage. He
+would have refused his consent beforehand, no doubt, but he would
+reconcile himself to the inevitable by and by. In any event, I should
+be independent of his control. My fortune would be at my own disposal
+after my one-and-twentieth birthday—mine, to throw into my husband’s
+lap.
+
+“That is nearly the end of my story, Mildred. We went from Milan to
+Como, and after a few days at Bellagio crossed the St. Gothard, and
+sauntered from one lovely scene to another till we stopped at Vevay.
+For just six weeks I lived in a fool’s paradise; but by that time my
+brother had traced us to Vevay—having learnt all that could be learnt
+about Castellani at Milan before he started in pursuit of us. He came,
+and my dream ended. I knew that I was a dishonoured woman, and that
+all my education, my innate pride in myself, and my fortune had done
+for me, was to place me as low as the lowest creature in the land. I
+left Vevay within an hour of that revelation a broken-hearted woman.
+I never saw my destroyer’s face again. You know all, Mildred, now.
+Can you wonder that I shrank with abhorrence from the offspring of my
+disgrace—that I refused ever to see her after I had once released
+myself from the hateful tie?”
+
+“Yes, I do wonder; I must always wonder that you were merciless to
+her—that you had no pity for that innocent life.”
+
+“Ah, you are your father’s daughter. He wished me to hide myself in
+some remote village so that I might taste the sweets of maternal
+affection, enjoy the blessed privilege of rearing a child who at every
+instant of her life would remind me of the miserable infatuation that
+had blighted my own. No, Mildred, I was not made for such an existence
+as that. I have tried to do good to others; I have laboured for God’s
+Church and God’s poor. That has been my atonement.”
+
+“It would have been a better atonement to have cared for your own flesh
+and blood; but with your means and opportunities you might have done
+both. I loved Fay, remember, aunt. I cannot forget how bright and happy
+she might have been. I cannot forget the wrongs that warped her nature.”
+
+“You are very hard, Mildred, hard to a woman whose days are numbered.”
+
+“Are not my days numbered, aunt?” cried Mildred, with a sudden burst
+of passion. “Was not my heart broken when I left this house last year
+to go into loneliness and exile, abandoning a husband I adored? That
+parting was my deathblow. In all the long dreary days that have gone by
+since then my hold upon life has been loosening. You might have saved
+me that agony. You might have sent me back to my home rejoicing—and you
+would not. You cared more for your own pride than for my happiness. You
+might have made your daughter’s life happy—and you would not. You cared
+more for the world’s esteem than for her welfare. As you sacrificed
+her, your daughter, you have sacrificed me, your niece. I know that I
+am doomed. Just when God has given me back the love that makes life
+precious, I feel the hand of death upon me, and know that the hour of
+parting is near.”
+
+“I have been a sinner, Mildred; but I have suffered—I have suffered.
+You ought not to judge me. You have never known shame.”
+
+That last appeal softened Mildred’s heart. She went over to her aunt’s
+chair, and leant over her and kissed her.
+
+“Let the past be forgotten,” she said, “and let us part in love.”
+
+And so, a quarter of an hour later, they parted, never to meet again on
+earth.
+
+Miss Fausset died in the early winter, cut off by the first frost,
+like a delicate flower. She had made no change in the disposal of her
+property, and her death made Mildred Greswold a very rich woman.
+
+“My aunt loved the poor,” said Mildred, when she and her husband spoke
+of this increase of wealth. “We are both so much richer than our needs,
+George. We have lived in sunshine for the most part. When I am gone I
+should like you to do some great thing for those who live in shadow.”
+
+“My beloved, I shall remain upon this earth only to obey your will.”
+
+He lived just long enough to keep his promise. The Greswold Hospital
+remains, a monument of thoughtful beneficence, in one of the most
+wretched neighbourhoods south of the Thames; but George Greswold and
+his race are ended like a tale that is told.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+César Castellani, enriched by a legacy from Miss Fausset, contrives
+still to flourish, and still to wear a gardenia in the button-hole of
+an artistic coat; but fashions change quickly in the realm of light
+literature, and the star of the author of _Nepenthe_ is sunk in the
+oblivion that engulfs ephemeral reputations. Castellani is still
+received in certain drawing-rooms; but it is in the silly circles alone
+that he is believed in as a man who has only missed greatness because
+he is too much of an artist to be a steadfast worker.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
+
+
+
+
+CHEAP UNIFORM EDITION
+
+OF
+
+MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS.
+
+
+ At all Booksellers’, price 2s., picture covers; 2s. 6d., cloth gilt,
+ uniform with the Cheap Edition of Miss BRADDON’S other Novels,
+
+
+LIKE AND UNLIKE
+
+BY THE AUTHOR OF
+
+“Lady Audley’s Secret,” “Mohawks,” &c.
+
+
+_OPINIONS OF THE PRESS._
+
+“Everybody who cares about a novel with a good plot so well worked
+out that the excitement is kept up through the three volumes, and
+culminates with the last chapter of the story, must ‘Like’ and can
+never again ‘Unlike’ this the latest and certainly one of the best of
+Miss Braddon’s novels. Miss Braddon is our most dramatic novelist. Her
+method is to interest the reader at once with the very first line, just
+as that Master-Dramatist of our time Dion Boucicault would rivet the
+attention of an audience by the action at the opening of the piece,
+even before a line of the dialogue had been spoken. This authoress
+never wastes her own time and that of her reader by giving up any
+number of pages at the outset to a minute description of scenery, to a
+history of a certain family, to a wearisome account of the habits and
+customs of the natives, or to explaining peculiarities in manners and
+dialect which are to form one of the principal charms of the story.
+No: Miss Braddon is dramatic just as far as the drama can assist
+her, and then she is the genuine novelist. A few touches present her
+characters living before the reader, and the story easily develops
+itself in, apparently, the most natural manner possible. ‘Like and
+Unlike’ will make many people late for dinner, and will keep a number
+of persons up at night when they ought to be soundly sleeping. These
+are two sure tests of a really well-told sensational novel. _Vive_ Miss
+Braddon!”—_Punch_, October 15th, 1887.
+
+“The author of ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ still keeps her place among the
+most thrilling and fascinating writers of sensational fiction. Her new
+novel, ‘Like and Unlike,’ has the best qualities of her best work.
+The style is as clear and nervous as ever, the plot constructed and
+developed with the same admirable skill, the interest as intense, and
+the effect on the imagination as powerful. There is at the same time
+more evident in this than in some former works of Miss Braddon’s a
+higher purpose than merely to amuse and thrill the reader. The dramatic
+element is strong in this tale, but it is the story that speaks; the
+author never for a moment stops in her narrative to offer a word of
+comment or enforce its moral. None the less powerfully does it preach
+the vanity of vanities of the selfish pursuit of pleasure, the misery
+that is the end of heartlessness, the retribution that follows sins
+great and small, and also the omnipotence in noble natures of penitence
+and love. It would not be fair to the reader to take away from that
+ignorance of the future which is necessary to the keenest enjoyment of
+Miss Braddon’s stories. ‘Like and Unlike’ deals with both country and
+town life. There are pure and noble characters in it, and others light
+and vain and vicious, and the currents of life of the two classes are
+intermingled beneficently and tragically. The title has reference to
+the twin brothers, who play a leading—one of them the leading—part in
+the drama. Their characters are admirably ‘delineated and contrasted,’
+and the moral significance of Valentine’s career is as great as its
+interest is absorbing. Madge is also a powerful creation. The Deverill
+girls and the other society characters are vividly portrayed. The story
+begins quietly, and for a time the reader believes that Miss Braddon
+is for once not going to be sensational. He finds by and by that this
+is a mistake, and is intensely interested by the gradual, natural, and
+apparently inevitable way in which, out of very ordinary materials, the
+structure of a powerful plot rises. This will rank among the best of
+Miss Braddon’s novels.”—_Scotsman_, October 3, 1887.
+
+
+ _When announcing a recent Novel (“Phantom Fortune”), Messrs. Tillotson
+ & Son published the following statement in their great coterie of
+ newspapers_:
+
+“In announcing the issue of another story from the pen of this gifted
+author, it seems scarcely necessary to write anything like an elaborate
+notice of her previous successes on the field of light literature. It
+is now many years ago since ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ brought Miss Braddon
+the fame which lasts all time; and numerous as have been the stories
+produced by her facile pen since then, her genius has lost none of
+its brilliance nor her skill its cunning. Years have not weakened her
+marvellous powers of imagination, nor familiarity with her productions
+diminished the sparkling freshness of her infinite variety. Her later
+works, as competent critics readily aver, exhibit higher and better
+qualities than her earlier, because bringing to bear long experience, a
+ripened understanding, and a mature judgment upon her brilliant genius,
+her unrivalled skill in the construction of plots, and her marvellous
+talent for depicting human nature under incessant changes of character
+and circumstances.
+
+“A glance at the earlier chapters of the story upon which Miss Braddon
+is now engaged (‘Phantom Fortune’), and which we shall shortly place
+before our readers, abundantly justifies language of the loftiest
+eulogy. Almost at its very opening we are introduced to characters and
+scenes of absorbing interest. Around distinguished personages in the
+political and diplomatic world gather lords and ladies of the highest
+rank of beauty and fashion. Indian affairs and Indian princes figure
+conspicuously. The Cabinet at home and the India Office are in a
+flutter of excitement consequent upon extraordinary rumours affecting
+an Anglo-Indian official of high rank, who suddenly returns to England,
+another Warren Hastings, to defend himself before the Imperial
+Parliament, but mysteriously dies on his arrival in this country, after
+painful interviews with his accomplished wife, a person of exalted rank
+and station. With a skill all Miss Braddon’s own, she portrays not the
+outer and conventional ways of Society only, but also the inner life of
+the lords and ladies who constitute the leading characters, drawn by
+her masterly hand. As the story proceeds it may be expected to develop
+one of the strongest of Miss Braddon’s strong plots, and to maintain
+her almost boundless sway in the domain of fiction.”
+
+
+_FURTHER OPINIONS OF THE PRESS._
+
+ _From amongst reviews of Miss Braddon’s recent works, which would
+ occupy a large volume if published in extenso, we select the following
+ pithy extracts_:
+
+
+JUST AS I AM.
+
+“Miss Braddon’s novel, ‘Just as I am,’ is as fresh, as wholesome,
+as enthralling, as amusing as any of the stories with which, for a
+series of years, she has proved her title as Queen of the Circulating
+Library.”—_The World._
+
+“Equals in skilful design and powerful execution any of Miss Braddon’s
+previous works.”—_Daily Telegraph._
+
+“The story may be added to her lengthy list of successes.”—_Court
+Journal._
+
+“From the pen of the most accomplished author of the day, a lady who
+is perhaps the most facile and voluminous writer of fiction.”—_Court
+Circular._
+
+
+ASPHODEL.
+
+“The most charming novel that Miss Braddon has ever produced.”—_Vanity
+Fair._
+
+“Deeply interesting and extremely well written.”—_Morning Post._
+
+“A sound and healthy story; in one word, a true woman’s book.”—_Morning
+Advertiser._
+
+“The style is wonderfully easy and fluent; the conversations are
+brilliant, pointed, and vigorous. The early scenes are charming.”—_The
+Athenæum._
+
+“Full of genuine human interest.”—_The Scotsman._
+
+
+MOUNT ROYAL.
+
+“The worthy work of a thorough artist.”—_Morning Post._
+
+“Replete with all the freshness and charm which she has taught the
+public to expect from her.”—_Daily Telegraph._
+
+“Miss Braddon’s romantic spirit has been in no way quenched, but in
+this last novel its brighter rays are tempered by experience.”—_Daily
+Chronicle._
+
+“Miss Braddon has given us a story which, while it adds to her fame as
+an authoress, increases our indebtedness to her; the healthy tone of
+‘Mount Royal’ is not one of its least charms.”—_Pictorial World._
+
+“The story can be followed with the keenest interest.”—_St. James’s
+Gazette._
+
+“Contains many sparkling passages and many happy thoughts.”—_Sheffield
+Daily Telegraph._
+
+“The novel is without doubt a good and a bright one.”—_Manchester
+Courier._
+
+
+TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
+
+“Contains more elements of success than a dozen ordinary
+novels.”—_Bradford Observer._
+
+“The latest addition to Miss Braddon’s unparalleled series of brilliant
+novels.”—_Court Journal._
+
+“Sustains the fame which Miss Braddon has achieved as one of the first
+of living novelists.”—_Newcastle Daily Chronicle._
+
+“Her work, take it for all in all, is the best we get.”—_Sunday Times._
+
+
+A STRANGE WORLD.
+
+“Has a fresh and fascinating interest.”—_Daily Telegraph._
+
+“Brimful of life and movement, and that life and movement of a
+thoroughly healthy kind.”—_World._
+
+“In the construction of a plot Miss Braddon is unrivalled.”—_Court
+Journal._
+
+
+DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
+
+“Bright writing, and a story which never flags.”—_Scotsman._
+
+“A work of good moral purpose and of skilful execution.”—_Pictorial
+World._
+
+“Full of life and interest, vivid in characterisation, abounds in
+pleasant and accurate description.”—_Sunday Times._
+
+
+WEAVERS AND WEFT.
+
+“It is eminently attractive reading.”—_Whitehall Review._
+
+“An undeniable amount of entertaining reading in the book.”—_Athenæum._
+
+“Like a gleam of sunshine in dreary weather.”—_News of the World._
+
+
+LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO.
+
+CHEAP EDITION OF
+
+MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS.
+
+In Two-Shilling Volumes, Uniform.
+
+ALWAYS IN PRINT.
+
+_Also in cloth, 2s. 6d.; and in vellum, 3s. 6d._
+
+   1. LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET.
+   2. HENRY DUNBAR.
+   3. ELEANOR’S VICTORY.
+   4. AURORA FLOYD.
+   5. JOHN MARCHMONT’S LEGACY.
+   6. THE DOCTOR’S WIFE.
+   7. ONLY A CLOD.
+   8. SIR JASPER’S TENANT.
+   9. TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.
+  10. LADY’S MILE.
+  11. LADY LISLE.
+  12. CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE.
+  13. BIRDS OF PREY.
+  14. CHARLOTTE’S INHERITANCE.
+  15. RUPERT GODWIN.
+  16. RUN TO EARTH.
+  17. DEAD SEA FRUIT.
+  18. RALPH THE BAILIFF.
+  19. FENTON’S QUEST.
+  20. LOVELS OF ARDEN.
+  21. ROBERT AINSLEIGH.
+  22. TO THE BITTER END.
+  23. MILLY DARRELL.
+  24. STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS.
+  25. LUCIUS DAVOREN.
+  26. TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
+  27. LOST FOR LOVE.
+  28. A STRANGE WORLD.
+  29. HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE.
+  30. DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
+  31. JOSHUA HAGGARD.
+  32. WEAVERS AND WEFT.
+  33. AN OPEN VERDICT.
+  34. VIXEN.
+  35. THE CLOVEN FOOT.
+  36. THE STORY OF BARBARA.
+  37. JUST AS I AM.
+  38. ASPHODEL.
+  39. MOUNT ROYAL.
+  40. GOLDEN CALF.
+  41. PHANTOM FORTUNE.
+  42. FLOWER AND WEED.
+  43. ISHMAEL.
+  44. WYLLARD’S WEIRD.
+  45. UNDER THE RED FLAG.
+  46. ONE THING NEEDFUL.
+  47. MOHAWKS.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  48. CUT BY THE COUNTY.
+
+  _Price One Shilling._
+
+“No one can be dull who has a novel by Miss Braddon in hand. The
+most tiresome journey is beguiled, and the most wearisome illness is
+brightened, by any one of her books.”
+
+ _Extract from a very eloquent and excellent Sermon preached by the
+ Rev. W. Benham, B.D., on March 4th, 1883, at St. Stephen’s Church,
+ South Kensington._
+
+“I have undertaken to speak freely concerning our social life and
+habits, and therefore I shall not shrink from speaking about two
+subjects not often mentioned within the walls of a church—I mean
+‘sensational novels,’ as they are called, and the drama. great outcry
+is made against the former, which I am afraid is not very sincere,
+considering that those who make the outcry go on reading them. That
+the writers depict startling and sometimes horrible scenes no one will
+deny, but I am not aware that there is any more harm in that than in
+reading the last report of the ‘Dublin Police News.’ What lies at the
+foundation of such novels is the craving after reality as against false
+sentiment. Who is the worse for reading ‘Hamlet,’ or ‘Othello,’ or
+‘Macbeth’? There are horrors enough in these. What young man should
+not be the better for admiring Ophelia or Desdemona? I know an aged
+living prelate, whose praise is widely spread in the Church for his
+contributions to sacred literature, and who is venerated by all who
+love him for his piety and saintliness, who declares that the writings
+of the chief of these novelists—I mean Miss Braddon—are among the best
+of the works of fiction. Judge for yourselves. I hold that her books
+are _the very contrast_ of the few French sensation novels that I have
+read, whose philosophy might be summed up in the scoffer’s words, ‘Let
+us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’”
+
+
+LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO.
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber’s Notes
+
+  pg 113 Changed: my benfactress has consummated the generosity
+              to: my benefactress has consummated the generosity
+
+  pg 218 Changed: He was sittting in the lamp-light
+              to: He was sitting in the lamp-light
+
+  pg 226 Changed: Tire me to walk to the shubbery
+              to: Tire me to walk to the shrubbery
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75412 ***