CHAPTER IX.LOOKING BACK.
Lady Lochinvaroffered to drive Mrs. Greswold to St. Jean that afternoon. Her villa was half-way between Nice and Villefranche, and half-an-hour’s drive would have taken them to the Bout du Monde; but Mildred preferred to make her explorations alone. There was too much heart-ache in such an investigation to admit of sympathy or companionship.
“You are all goodness to me, dear Lady Lochinvar,” she said, “and I may come to you again for help before I have done; but I would rather visit the scene of my husband’s tragedy alone—quite alone. You cannot tell how sad the story is to me, even apart from my love for him. I may be able to confide in you more fully some day, perhaps.”
Lady Lochinvar kissed her at parting. She did not care for commonplace troubles; she could not sympathise with stupid family quarrels or shortnessof money, or any of the vulgar trivialities about which people worry their friends; but a romantic sorrow, a tragedy with a touch of mystery in it, was full of interest for her. And then, Mildred was a graceful sufferer, not hysterical or tiresome in any way.
“I will do anything in the world that I can for you,” she said.
“Will you let me bring my husband’s niece to see you?” asked Mildred. “She has a dull time with me, poor girl, and I think you would like her.”
“She shall come to me this evening, if she has nothing better to do,” said Lady Lochinvar. “I am fond of young people, and will do my best to amuse her. I will send my carriage for her at half-past seven.”
“That is more than kind. I shall be glad for the poor girl to get a glimpse of something brighter than our perpetualtête-à-tête. But there is one thing I ought to speak about before you see her. I think you know something of an Italian called Castellani, a man who is both musical and literary.”
“Yes, I have heard of Mr. Castellani’s growing fame. He is the author of that delightful storyNepenthe, is he not? I knew him years ago—it was in the same winter we have been talking about. He used to come to my parties. Do you know him?”
“He has been a visitor at Enderby—my husband’s house—and I have seen something of him in Italy of late. I am sorry to say he has made a very strong impression upon my niece’s heart—or upon her imagination—but as I know him to be a worthless person, I am deeply anxious that her liking for him should—”
“Die a natural death. I understand,” interrupted Lady Lochinvar. “You may be sure I will not encourage the young lady to talk about Mr. Castellani.”
Mildred explained her responsibility with regard to Pamela and the young lady’s position, with its substantial attraction for the adventurer in search of a wife. She had deemed it her duty to confide thus much in Lady Lochinvar, lest Castellani should change his tactics, and pursue Pamela with addresses which might be only too readily accepted.
She left the Palais Montano at two o’clock, and drove round the bay to St. Jean, where the rose-hedges were in flower, and where the gardens were bright with bloom under a sky which suggested an English June.
She left the fly at the little inn where the holiday people go to eat bouillabaisse on Sundays and fête-days, but which was silent and solitary to-day, and then walked slowly along the winding road, looking for the Bout du Monde. The place was prettier and more rustic, after an almost English fashion, than any spot she had seen since she left Enderby. Villas and cottages were scattered in a desultory way upon different levels, under the shelter of precipitous cliffs, and on every bit of rising ground and in every hollow there were orange and lemon groves, with here and there a peach or a cherry in full bloom, and here and there a vivid patch of flowers, and here and there a wall covered with the glowing purple of the Bougainvilliers. Great carouba-trees rose tall and dark amidst all this brightness, and through every opening in the foliage the changeful colour of the Mediterranean shonein the distance, like the jasper sea of the Apocalypse.
Mildred went slowly along the dusty road, looking at all the villas, lingering here and there at a garden gate, and asking any intelligent-looking person who passed to direct her to the Bout du Monde. It was not till she had made the inquiry half-a-dozen times that she obtained any information; but at last she met with a bright-faced market-woman, tramping home with empty baskets after a long morning at Nice, and white with the dust of the hillside.
“Le Bout du Monde? But that was the villa where the poor young English lady lived whose husband threw her over the cliff,” said the woman cheerily. “The proprietor changed the name of the house next season, for fear people should fancy it was haunted if the story got about. It is called Montfleuri now.”
“Is there any one living there?” Mildred asked.
No, it was let last year to an English family. O, but an amiable family, rich, ah, butrichissime, who had bought flowers in heaps of the speaker.But they had left,malheureusement. They had returned to their property near London, a great and stupendous property in a district which the flower-woman described as le Crommu-elle Rodd. There had never been such a family in St. Jean—five English servants, three English mees who mounted on horseback daily: a benefaction for the whole village. Now, alas! there was no one living at Montfleuri but an old woman in charge.
“Could you take me to the house?” asked Mildred, opening her purse.
The woman would have been all politeness and good-nature without the stimulant offered by that open purse. She had all the southern kindliness and alacrity to oblige, but when the lady dropped half-a-dozen francs into her broad brown hand she almost sank to the earth in a rapture of gratitude.
“Madame shall see the house from garret to cellar if she wishes,” she exclaimed. “I know the old woman in charge. She is as deaf as one of those stones yonder,” pointing to a block of blue-gray stone lying amidst the long rank grass upon the shelving ground between the road and the sea; “butif madame will permitIwill show her the house. Madame is perhaps interested in the story of that poor lady who was murdered.”
“Why do you say that she was murdered?” asked Mildred indignantly. “You cannot know.”
The woman shrugged her shoulders with a dubious air.
“Mais, madame. Nobody but the good God can know: but most of us thought that the Englishman pushed his wife over the cliff. They did not live happily together. Their cook was a cousin of mine, a young woman who went regularly to confession, and would not have spoken falsely for all the world, and she told me there was great unhappiness between them. The wife was often in tears; the husband was often angry.”
“But he was never unkind. Your cousin must know that he was never unkind.”
“Alas! my cousin lies in the same burial-ground yonder with the poor lady,” answered the woman, pointing to the white crest of the hill above Villefranche, where the soldiers were being drilled in the dusty barrack-yard under the cloudless blue. “Sheis no more here to tell the story. But no, she did not say the husband was unkind; he was grave and sad; he was not happy. Tears, tears and reproaches, sad words from her, day after day; and from him silence and gloom. Poor people like us, who work for our bread, have no leisure for that kind of unhappiness. ‘I would rather stand over mycasserolesthan sit in asalonand cry,’ said my cousin.”
“It is cruel to say he caused her death, when you know he was never unkind to her,” said Mildred, as they walked side by side; “a patient, forbearing husband does not become a murderer all at once.”
“Ah, but continual dropping will wear a stone, madame. She may have tried him too much with her tears. He went out of his mind after her death. Would he have gone mad, do you think, if he had not been guilty?”
“He was all the more likely to go mad, knowing himself innocent, and finding himself accused of a dreadful crime.”
“Well, I cannot tell; I know most of us thought he had pushed her over the cliff. I know the young man who was their gardener said if he had had awife with that kind of temper he would have thrown her down the well in his garden.”
They were at the Villa Montfleuri by this time, a long, low white house, with a stone terrace overlooking the harbour of Villefranche. The woman opened the gate, and Mildred followed her into the garden and to the terrace upon which the principal rooms opened. There was a latticed verandah in front of thesalonand dining-room, over which roses and geraniums were trained, and above which the purple Bougainvilliers spread its vivid bloom. The orange-trees grew thick in the orchard, and in their midst stood the stone well down which the gardener said he would have thrown a discontented wife.
The caretaker was not in the house, but all the doors were open. Mildred went from room to room. The furniture was the same as it had been seventeen years ago, the woman told Mildred—furniture of the period of the First Empire, shabby, and with the air of a house that is let to strangers year after year, and in which nobody takes any interest. The clocks on the mantelpieces were all silent, the vases were all empty: everything had a dead look. Only theview from the windows was beautiful with an inexhaustible beauty.
Mildred lingered in the fadedsalon, looking at everything with a melancholy interest. Those two familiar figures were with her in the room. She pictured them sitting there together, yet so far apart in the bitter lack of sympathy—a wife, tormented by jealous suspicions, no less agonising because they were groundless; a husband, long-suffering, weary, with his little stock of marital love worn out under slow torture. She could see them as they might have been in those bygone years. George Greswold’s dark, strong face, younger than she had ever known it; for when he first came to her father’s house there had been threads of gray in his dark hair and premature lines upon the brow which told of corroding care. She could understand now how those touches of gray had come in the thick wavy hair that clustered close on the broad, strongly-marked brow.
Poor Fay! poor, loving, impulsive Fay!
Child as she had been in those old days in Parchment Street, Mildred had a vivid conception of heryoung companion’s character. She remembered the quick temper, the sensitive self-esteem, which had taken offence at the mere suggestion of slight; she remembered dark hours of brooding melancholy when the girl had felt the sting of her isolated position, had fancied herself a creature apart, neglected and scorned by Mrs. Fausset and her butterfly visitors. For Mildred she had been always overflowing with love, and she had never doubted the sincerity of Mildred’s affection; but with all the rest of the household, with every visitor who noticed her coldly, or frankly ignored her, she was on the alert for insult and offence. Remembering all this, Mildred could fully realise Lady Lochinvar’s account of that unhappy union. A woman so constituted would be satisfied with nothing less than a passionate, all-absorbing love from the man she loved.
The rooms and the garden were haunted by those mournful shades—two faces pale with pain. She, too, had suffered those sharp stings of jealousy; jealousy of a past love, jealousy of the dead; and she knew how keener than all common anguish is that agony of a woman’s heart which yearns for sovereignpossession over past, present, and future in the life of the man she loves.
The market-woman sat out in the sunshine on the terrace, and waited while Mildred roamed about the garden, picturing that vanished life at every step. There was theberceau, the delight of a southern garden, a long, green alley, arched with osiers, over which the brown vine-branches made a network, open to the sunlight and the blue sky now, while the vine was still leafless, but in summer-time a place of coolness and whispering leaves. There was the fountain—or the place where a fountain had once been, and a stone bench beside it. They had sat there perhaps on sunny mornings, sat there and talked of their future, full of hope. They could not have been always unhappy. Fay must have had her bright hours; and then, no doubt, she was dear to him, full of a strange fascination, a creature of quick wit and vivid imagination, light and fire embodied in a fragile earthly tenement.
The sun was nearing the dark edge of the promontory when Mildred left the garden, the woman accompanying her, waiting upon her footsteps,sympathising with her pensive mood, with that instinctive politeness of the southern, which is almost as great a delight to the stranger from the hard, cold, practical north, as the colour of the southern sea, or the ever-varying beauty of the hills.
“Will you show me the place where the English lady fell over the cliff?” Mildred asked; and the woman went with her along the winding road, and then upward to a path along the crest of a cliff, a cliff that seemed low on account of those bolder heights which rose above it, and which screened this eastward-fronting shore of the little peninsula from all the world of the west. The carriage-road wound southward up to the higher ground, but Mildred and her guide followed a footpath which had been trodden on the long rank grass beside the cliff. The rosemary bushes were full of flower: pale, cold gray blossoms, as befitted the herb of death, and a great yellow weed made patches of vivid colour among the blue-gray stones scattered in the long grass on the slope of the hill.
“It was somewhere along this pathway, madame,” said the woman. “I cannot tell you the exact spot.Some fishermen from Beaulieu picked her up,” pointing across the blue water of the bay to a semicircle of yellow sand, with a few white houses scattered along the curving road, and some boats lying keel upward on the beach. “She never spoke again. She was dead when they found her there.”
“Did they see her fall?”
“No, madame.”
“And yet people have dared to call her husband a murderer.”
“Ah, but, madame, it was the general opinion. Was it not his guilty conscience that drove him mad? He came here once only after he left the madhouse, wandered about the village for an hour or two, went up to the cemetery and looked once—but once only—at the poor lady’s grave, and then drove away as if devils were hunting him. Who can doubt that it was his hand that sent her to her death?”
“No one would believe it who knew him.”
“Everybody at St. Jean believed it, even the people who liked him best.”
Mildred turned from her sick at heart. She gave the woman some more money, and then withbriefest adieu walked back to the inn where she had left the carriage, and where the horse was dozing with his nose in a bag of dried locust fruit, while his driver sprawled half asleep upon the rough stone parapet between the inn and the bay.
Pamela received her aunt graciously on her return to the hotel, and seemed in better spirits than she had been since she left Pallanza.
“Your Lady Lochinvar has written me the sweetest little note, asking me to dine with her and go to the opera afterwards,” she said. “I feel sure this must be your doing, aunt.”
“No, dear. I only told her that I had a very nice niece moping at the hotel, and very tired of my dismal company.”
“Tired of you? No, no, aunt. You know better than that. I should no more grow tired of you than I should of Box,” intending to make the most flattering comparison; “only he had made himself a part of our lives at Pallanza, don’t you know, and one could not help missing him.” (The pronoun meant Castellani, and not the dog.) “I am glad I amgoing to the opera after all, even if it does remind me of him; and it’s awfully kind of Lady Lochinvar to send her carriage for me. I only waited to see you before I began to dress.”
“Go, dearest; and take care to look your prettiest.”
“And you won’t mind dining alone?”
“I shall be delighted to know you are enjoying yourself.”
The prospect of an evening’s solitude was an infinite relief to Mildred. She breathed more freely when Pamela had gone dancing off to the lift, a fluffy, feathery mass of whiteness, with hooded head and rosy face peeping from a border of white fox. The tall door of thesalonclosed upon her with a solemn reverberation, and Mildred was alone with her own thoughts, alone with the history of her husband’s past life, now that she had unravelled the tangled skein and knew all.
She was face to face with the past, and how did it seem in her eyes? Was there no doubt, no agonising fear that the man she had loved as a husband might have slain the girl she had loved as a sister?All those people, those simple and disinterested villagers, who had liked George Ransome well enough for his own sake, had yet believed him guilty: they who had been on the spot, and had had the best opportunities for judging the case rightly.
Could she doubt him, she who had seen honour and fine feeling in every act of his life? She remembered the dream—that terrible dream which had occurred at intervals; sometimes once in a year; sometimes oftener; that awe-inspiring dream which had shaken the dreamer’s nerves as nothing but a vision of horror could have shaken them, from which he had awakened more dead than alive, completely unnerved, cold drops upon his pallid brow, his hands convulsed and icy, his eyes glassy as death itself. The horror of that dream even to her, who beheld its effect on the dreamer, was a horror not to be forgotten.
Was it the dream of a murderer, acting his crime over again in that dim world of sleep, living over again the moment of his temptation and his fall? No, no! Another might so interpret the vision, but not his wife.
“I know him,” she repeated to herself passionately; “I know him. I know his noble heart. He is incapable of one cruel impulse. He could not have done such a deed. There is no possible state of feeling, no moment of frenzy, in which he would have been false to his character and his manhood.”
And then she asked herself if Fay had not been her sister, if there had not been that insurmountable bar to her union with George Greswold, would her knowledge of his first wife’s fate, and the suspicion that had darkened his name, have sufficed to part them? Could she, knowing what she now knew, knowing that he had been so suspected, knowing that it was beyond his power ever toprovehis guiltlessness—could she have gone though the rest of her life with him, honouring him and trusting him as she had done in the years that were gone?
She told herself that she could have so trusted him; that she could have honoured and loved him to the end, pitying him for those dark experiences, but with faith unshaken.
“A murderer and a madman,” she said to herself, repeating Castellani’s calumny. “Murderer Iwould never believe him; and shall I honour him less because that sensitive mind was plunged in darkness by the horror of his wife’s fate?”
Pamela came home before midnight. Lady Lochinvar had driven her to the door. She was in high spirits, and charmed with her ladyship, and thought her ladyship’s nephew, Mr. Stuart, late of a famous Highland regiment, a rather agreeable person.
“He is decidedly plain,” said Pamela, “and looks about as intellectual as Sir Henry Mountford, and he evidently doesn’t care a jot for music; but he has very pleasant manners, and he told me a lot about Monte Carlo. A brother officer of his, bronchial, with a very nice wife, came to Lady Lochinvar’s box in the evening, and she is going to call for me to-morrow afternoon, to take me to the tennis-ground at the Cercle de la Méditerranée, if you don’t mind.”
“My dearest, you know I wish only to see you happy and with nice people. I suppose this lady, whose name you have not told me—”
“Mrs. Murray. She is very Scotch, but quitecharming—nothing fast or rowdy about her—and devoted to her invalid husband. He does not play tennis, poor fellow, but he sits in the sun and looks on, which is very nice for him.”
Mrs. Murray made her appearance at two o’clock next day, and Mildred was pleased to find that Pamela had not exaggerated her merits. She was very Scotch, and talked of Lady Lochinvar as “a purpose woman,” with a Caledonian roll of therin purpose which emphasised the word in its adjectival sense. She had very pretty simple manners, and was altogether the kind of young matron with whom a feather-headed girl might be trusted.
Directly Pamela and her new friend had departed Mildred put on her bonnet, and went out on foot. She had made certain inquiries through Albrecht, and she knew the way she had to go upon the pilgrimage on which she was bent, a pilgrimage of sorrowful memory. There was a relief in being quite alone upon the long parade between the palm-trees and the sea, and to know that she was free from notice and sympathy for the rest of the afternoon.
She walked to the Place Massena, and thereaccepted the beseeching offers of one of the numerous flymen, and took her seat in a light victoria behind a horse which looked a little better fed than his neighbours. She told the man to drive along the west bank of the Paillon, on the road to St. André.
Would not Madame go to St. André, and see the wonderful grotto, and the petrifactions?
No, Madame did not wish to go so far as St. André. She would tell the driver where to stop.
The horse rattled off at a brisk pace. They are no crawlers, those flys of the South. They drove past the smart shops and hotels on the quay; past the shabby old inn where the diligences put up, a hostelry with suggestions of the past, when the old Italian town was not a winter rendezvous for all the nations, the beaten track of Yankee and Cockney,calicotand counter-jumper, Russian prince and Hebrew capitalist, millionaire and adventurer. They drove past the shabby purlieus of the town, workmen’s lodging-houses, sordid-looking shops, then an orange-garden here and there within crumbling plaster walls, and here and there a tavern in a shabby garden. To the left of the river, on a sharp pinnacleof hill, stood the Monastery of Cimies, with dome and tower dominating the landscape. Further away, on the other side of the stony torrent-bed, rose the rugged chain of hills stretching away to Mentone and the Italian frontier, and high up against the blue sky glimmered the white domes of the Observatory. They came by and by to a spot where, by the side of the broad high-road, there was a wall enclosing a white dusty yard, and behind it a long white house with many windows, bare and barren, staring blankly at the dry bed of the torrent and the rugged brown hills beyond. At each end of the long white building there was a colonnade with iron bars, open to the sun and the air, and as Mrs. Greswold’s carriage drew near a man’s voice rolled out the opening bars of “Ah, che la morte!” in a tremendous baritone. A cluster of idlers had congregated about the open gate, to stare and listen; for the great white house was a madhouse, and the grated colonnades right and left of the long façade were the recreation-grounds of the insane—of those worst patients who could not be trusted to wander at their ease in the garden, or to dig and delve upon the breezy hills towards St. André.
The singer was a fine-looking man, dressed in loose garments of some white material, and with long white gloves. He flung himself on to an upper bar of the grating with the air of an athlete, and hung upon the bars with his gloved hands, facing that cluster of loafers as if they had been an audience in a theatre, and singing with all the power of a herculean physique. Mildred told her driver to stop at the gate, and she sat listening while the madman sang, in fitful snatches of a few bars at a time, but with never a false note.
That cage, and the patients pacing up and down, or hanging on to the bars, or standing staring at the little crowd round the gate, moved her to deepest pity, touched her with keenest pain. He had been here, her beloved, in that brief interval of darkest night. She recalled how in one of his awakenings from that torturing dream he had spoken words of strange meaning—or of no meaning, as they had seemed to her then.
“The cage—the cage again!” he had cried in an agonised voice; “iron bars—like a wild beast!”
These words had been an enigma to her then. She saw the answer to the riddlehere.
She sat for some time watching that sad spectacle, hearing those broken snatches of song, with intervals of silence, or sometimes a wild peal of laughter.
The loiterers were full of speculations and assertions. The porter at the gate answered some questions, turned a deaf ear to others.
The singer was a Spanish nobleman who had lost a fortune at Monte Carlo the night before, and had been brought here bound hand and foot at early morning. He had tried to kill himself, and now he imagined himself a famous singer, and that the barred colonnade was the stage of the Grand Opéra at Paris.
“He’ll soon be all right again,” said the porter with a careless shrug; “those violent cases mend quickly.”
“But he won’t get his money back again, poor devil,” said one of the loiterers, a flyman whose vehicle was standing by the wall, waiting for a customer. “Hard to recover his senses and find himself without a soul.”
“O, he has rich friends, no doubt. Look at his white kid gloves. He is young and handsome, and he has a splendid voice. Somebody will take care of him. Do you see that old woman sitting over there in the garden? You would not think there was anything amiss with her, would you? No more there is, only she thinks she is the Blessed Virgin. She has been here five-and-thirty years. Nobody pitiesher—nobody inquires abouther. My father remembers her when she was a handsome young woman at a flower-shop on the Quai Massena, one of the merriest girls in Nice. Somebody told her she was neglecting her soul and going to hell. This set her thinking too much. She used to be at the Cathedral all day, and at confession as often as the priest would hear her. She neglected her shop, and quarrelled with her mother and sisters. She said she had a vocation; and then one fine day she walked to the Cathedral in a white veil, with a bunch of lilies in her hand, and she told all the people she met that they ought to kneel before her and make the sign of the cross, for she was the Mother of God. Three days afterwards her people brought her here. Shewould neither eat nor drink, and she never closed her eyes, or left off talking about her glorious mission, which was to work the redemption of all the women upon earth.”
“Drive on to the doctor’s house,” Mildred said presently; and the fly went on a few hundred yards, and then drew up at the door of a private house, which marked the boundary of the asylum garden.
Mrs. Greswold had inquired the name of the doctor of longest experience in the asylum, and she had been referred to Monsieur Leroy, the inhabitant of this house, where the flyman informed her some of the more wealthy patients were lodged. She had come prepared with a little note requesting the favour of an interview, and enclosing her card, with the address of Enderby Manor as well as her hotel in Nice. The English manor and the Hôtel Westminster indicated at least respectability in the applicant; and Monsieur Leroy’s reception was both prompt and courteous.
He was a clever-looking man, about sixty years of age, with a fine benevolent head, and an attentive eye, as of one always on the alert. He had spentfive-and-thirty of his sixty years in the society of the deranged, and had devoted all his intellectual power to the study of mental disease.
After briefest preliminary courtesies, Mildred explained the purpose of her visit.
“I am anxious to learn anything you can tell me about a patient who was under your care—or, at least, in this establishment—seventeen years ago, and in whom I am deeply interested,” she said.
“Seventeen years is a long time, madame, but I have a good memory, and I keep notes of all my cases. I may be able to satisfy your curiosity in some measure. What was the name of this patient?”
“He was an Englishman called Ransome—George Ransome. He was placed here under peculiar circumstances.”
“Corpo di Bacco!I should say they were peculiar, very peculiar circumstances!” exclaimed the doctor. “Do you know, madame, that Mr. Ransome came here as a suspected murderer? He came straight from the gaol at Villefranche, where he had been detained on the suspicion of having killed his wife.”
“There was not one jot of evidence to support such a charge. I know all the circumstances. Surely, sir, you, who must have a wide knowledge of human nature, did not think him guilty?”
“I hardly made up my mind upon that point, even after I had seen him almost every day for six months; but there is one thing I do know about this unhappy gentleman: his lunacy was no assumption, put on to save him from the consequences of a crime. He was a man of noble intellect, large brain-power, and for the time being his reason was totally obscured.”
“To what cause did you attribute the attack?”
“A long period of worry, nerves completely shattered, and finally the shock of that catastrophe on the cliff. Whether his hand pushed her to her death, or the woman flung her life away, the shock was too much for Mr. Ransome’s weakened and worried brain. All the indications of his malady, from the most violent stages to the gradual progress of recovery, pointed to the same conclusion. The history of the case revealed its cause and its earlier phases: an unhappy marriage, a jealous wife,patience and forbearance on his part, until patience degenerated into despair, the dull apathy of a wearied intellect. All that is easy to understand.”
“You pitied him, then, monsieur?”
“Madame, I pity all my patients; but I found in Mr. Ransome a man of exceptional characteristics, and his case interested me deeply.”
“You would not have been interested had you believed him guilty?”
“Pardon me, madame, crime is full of interest for the pathologist. The idea that this gentleman might have spurned his wife from him in a moment of aberration would not have lessened my interest in his mental condition. But although I have never made up my mind upon the question of his guilt or innocence, I am bound to tell you, since you seem even painfully interested in his history, that his conduct after his recovery indicated an open and generous nature, a mind of peculiar refinement, and a great deal of chivalrous feeling. I had many conversations with him during the period of returning reason, and I formed a high opinion of his moral character.”
“Did other people think him guilty—the people he had known in Nice, for instance?”
“I fancy there were very few who thought much about him,” answered the doctor. “Luckily for him and his belongings—whoever they might be—he had dropped out of society for some time before the catastrophe, and he had never been a person of importance in Nice. He had not occupied a villa, or given parties. He lived with his wife at an hotel, and the man who lives at an hotel counts for very little on the Riviera. He is only a casual visitor, who may come and go as he pleases. His movements—unless he has rank or fashion or inordinate wealth to recommend him—excite no interest. He is not a personage. Hence there was very little talk about the lamentable end of Mr. Ransome’s married life. There were hardly half-a-dozen paragraphs in our local papers, all told; and I doubt if those were quoted in theFigaroorGalignani. My patient might congratulate himself upon his obscurity.”
“Did no one from England visit him during his confinement here?”
“No one. The local authorities looked afterhis interests so far as to take care of the ready money which was found in his house, and which sufficed to pay for the poor lady’s funeral and for my patient’s expenses, leaving a balance to be handed over to him on his recovery. From the hour he left these gates I never heard from him or of him again; but every new year has brought me an anonymous gift from London, such a gift as only a person of refined taste would choose, and I have attributed those annual greetings to Mr. George Ransome.”
“It would be only like him to remember past kindness.”
“You know him well, madame?”
“Very well; so well as to be able to answer with my life for his being incapable of the crime of which even you, who saw so much of him, hesitate to acquit him.”
“It is my misfortune, madame, to have seen the darker sides of the human mind, and to know that in the whitest life there may be one black spot—one moment of sin which stultifies a lifetime of virtue. However, it is possible that your judgment is right in this particular case. Be assured I shouldbe glad to think so, and glad to know that Mr. Ransome’s after days have been all sunshine.”
A sigh was Mildred’s only answer. Monsieur Leroy saw tears in her eyes, and asked no more. He was shrewd enough to guess her connection with his former patient—a second wife, no doubt. No one but a wife would be so intensely interested.
“If there is anything I can do for you, or for my old patient—” he began, seeing that his visitor lingered.
“O, no, there is nothing—except if you would let me see the rooms in which he lived.”
“Assuredly. It is a melancholy pleasure, at best, to recall the sorrows we have outlived, but the association will be less painful in your case since the—friend in whom you are interested was so speedily and so thoroughly restored to mental health. I take it that he has never had a relapse?”
“Never, thank God!”
“It was not likely, from the history of the case.”
He led the way across a vestibule and up-stairs to the second floor, where he showed Mrs. Greswold two airy rooms, sitting-room and bedroom communicating,overlooking the valley towards Cimies, with the white-walled convent on the crest of the hill, and the white temples of the dead clustering near it; cross and column, Athenian pediment and Italian cupola, dazzling white against the cloudless blue. The rooms were neatly furnished, and there was every appearance of comfort; no suggestion of Bedlam, padded walls, or strait-waistcoats.
“Had he these rooms all the time?” asked Mildred.
“Not all the time. He was somewhat difficult to deal with during the first few weeks, and he was in the main building, under the care of one of my subordinates, till improvement began. By that time I had grown interested in his case, and took him into my own house.”
“Pray let me see the rooms he occupied at first, monsieur; I want to know all. I want to be able to understand what his life was like in that dark dream.”
She knew now what his own dream meant.
Monsieur Leroy indulged her whim. He tookher across the dusty garden to the great white house—a house of many windows and long corridors, airy, bare, hopeless-looking, as it seemed to that sad visitor. She saw the two iron-barred enclosures, and the restless creatures roaming about them, clinging to the bars, climbing like monkeys from perch to perch, hanging from the trapeze. The Spaniard had left off singing.
She was shown George Ransome’s room, which was empty. The bare whitewashed walls chilled her as if she had gone into an ice-vault. Here on everything there was the stamp of a State prison—iron bars, white walls, a deadly monotony. She was glad to escape into the open air again, but not until she had knelt for some minutes beside the narrow bed upon which George Ransome had lain seventeen years ago, and thanked God for his restoration of reason, and prayed that his declining days might be blessed. She prayed for him, to whom she might nevermore be the source of happiness, she who until so lately had been his nearest and dearest upon earth.
A law which she recognised as duty had risen up between them, and both must go down to the grave in sadness rather than that law should be broken.
END OF VOL. II.
LONDON:ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.