The fatal three, vol. III

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.