CHAPTER VI.HIGHER VIEWS.
Afterthat interview with her husband, which in her own mind meant finality, Mildred Greswold’s strength succumbed suddenly, and for more than a week she remained in a state of health for which Miss Fausset’s doctor could find no name more specific than low fever. She was not very feverish, he told her aunt. The pulse was rapid and intermittent, but the temperature was not much above the normal limit. She was very weak and low, and she wanted care. He had evidently not quite made up his mind whether she wanted rousing or letting alone—whether he would recommend her to spend the winter at Chamounix and do a little mountaineering, or to vegetate at Nice or Algiers. “We must watch her,” he said gravely. “She must not be allowed to go into a decline.”
Miss Fausset looked alarmed at this, but herdoctor, an acquaintance of fifteen years, assured her that there was no cause for alarm; there was only need of care and watchfulness.
“Her mother died at six-and-thirty,” said Miss Fausset—“faded away gradually, without any ostensible disease. My brother did everything that care and forethought could do, but he could not save her.”
“Mrs. Greswold must not be allowed to fade away,” replied the doctor, with an air of being infallible.
Directly she was well enough to go down to the drawing-room again, Mildred began to talk of starting for Switzerland or Germany. She had inflicted herself and her surroundings upon Lewes Crescent too long already, she told her aunt; and although Miss Fausset expressed herself delighted to have her niece, and reconciled even to Pamela’s frivolity and the existence of Box in the lower regions, Mildred felt somehow that her presence interfered with the even tenor of life in that orderly mansion. The only person who made light of Miss Fausset’s idiosyncrasies, came to the house at all hours, stayed as late as he chose, disturbed thesymmetry of the bookshelves, left Miss Fausset’s cherished books lying about on chairs and sofas, and acted in all things after his own fancy, was César Castellani. His manner towards Miss Fausset was unalterably deferential; he never wavered in his respect for her as a superior being; he was full of subtle flatteries and delicate attentions; yet in somewise his ways were the ways of a spoiled child, sure of indulgence and favour. He never stayed in the house, but had his room at an hotel on the cliff, and came to Lewes Crescent whenever fancy prompted, for two or three days at a stretch, then went back to London, and was seen no more for a week or so.
Mildred found that Pamela and Mr. Castellani had seen a great deal of each other during her illness. They had sung and played together, they had walked on the cliff—in sight of the drawing-room windows the whole time, Pamela explained, and with Miss Fausset’s severe eye upon them. They had devoted themselves together to the education of Box, who had learnt at least three new tricks under their joint instruction, and who, possibly fromover-pressure, had acquired a habit of trying to bite Mr. Castellani whenever he had an opportunity.
“It is because he is such a horribly unmusical dog,” explained Pamela. “He managed to creep up to the drawing-room the other day when Miss Fausset was at church, and Mr. Castellani came in and began to play, and that dreadful Box planted himself near the piano and howled piteously till I carried him out.”
“My dearest Pamela, I don’t think Box’s opinion of Mr. Castellani or his music matters much,” said Mildred, with gentle gravity, as she lay on the sofa in the back drawing-room, with Pamela’s hand clasped in hers; “but it matters a great deal what you think of him, and I fear you are beginning to think too much about him.”
“Why should I not think of him, aunt, if I like—and he likes? I am my own mistress; there are few girls so independent of all ties; for really nobody cares a straw for me except you and Uncle George. Rosalind is wrapped up in her baby, and Henry is devoted to pigeons, guns, and fishing-tackle. Do you think it can matter to them whom I marry?Why should I be sordid, and say to myself, ‘I have fifteen hundred a year, and I mustn’t marry a man with less than three thousand’? Why should I not marry genius if I like—genius even without a penny?”
“If you could meet with genius, Pamela.”
“You think that Mr. Castellani is not a genius?”
“I think not. He is too versatile and too showy. All his gifts are on the surface. Genius is single-minded, aiming at one great thing. Genius is like still water and runs deep. I admit that Mr. Castellani is highly gifted as a musician of the lighter sort; not a man who will leave music behind him to live for ever. I admit that he has written a strangely attractive book. But I should be sorry to call him a genius. I should be very sorry to see you throw yourself away, as I believe you would if you were to marry him.”
“That is what a girl’s friends always say to her,” exclaimed Pamela. “To marry the man one loves is to throw oneself away.” And then blushing furiously, she added, “Pray don’t suppose that I am in love with Mr. Castellani. There has never been oneword of love between us—except in the clouds, by way of philosophical discussion. But, as a fatherless and motherless girl of advanced opinions, I claim the right to marry genius, if I choose.”
“My dear girl, I cannot dispute your independence; but I think the sooner we leave this house the better. The first thing is to make up our minds where we are to go.”
“I don’t care a bit, aunt; only you must not leave Brighton till you are much stronger. You will want at least three weeks before you will be able to stand the fatigue of travelling,” said Pamela, surveying the invalid with a critical air.
“We can travel by easy stages. I am not afraid of fatigue. Where shall we go, Pamela—Schwalbach, Wiesbaden, Vevay, Montreux?”
“O, not Schwalbach, aunt. They took me there for iron five years ago, when I had outgrown my strength. Switzerland is always lovely, of course; but I went there with Rosalind after her baby was born, and endured the dreariest six weeks of my existence. Brighton is absolutely delicious at this time of the year. It would be absurd to rush awayfrom the place just when people are beginning to come here.”
Mildred saw that the case was hopeless, and she began to think seriously about her responsibilities in this matter: a frank impetuous girl, her husband’s niece, eager to cast in her lot with a man who was obviously an adventurer, living sumptuously with hardly any obvious means, and who might be a scoundrel. She remembered her impression of the face in the church, the Judas face, as she had called it in her own mind: a foolish impression, perhaps, and it might be baseless; yet such first impressions are sometimes warnings not to be lightly set at naught. As yet nothing had come of that warning: no act of Castellani’s had shown him a villain; but his advent had begun the misery of her life. Had she never seen him she never might have known this great sorrow. His presence was a constant source of irritation, tempting her to questioning that might lead to further misery. Fay’s image had been constantly in her mind of late. She had brooded over that wedded life of which she knew nothing—over that early death which for her was shrouded in mystery.
“And he could tell me so much, perhaps,” she said to herself one evening, sitting by the fire in the inner room, while Castellani played in the distance yonder between the tall windows that let in the gray eastern light.
“Her death was infinitely sad.”
Those were the words which he had spoken of George Greswold’s first wife: of Fay, her Fay, the one warm love of her childish years, the love that had stayed with her so long after its object had vanished from her life. That there was something underlying those words, some secret which might add a new bitterness to her sorrow, was the doubt that tortured Mildred as she sat and brooded by the fire, while those lovely strains of Mendelssohn’s “I waited for the Lord” rose in slow solemnity from the distant piano, breathing sounds of peacefulness where there was no peace.
Mr. Castellani had behaved admirably since her convalescence. He had asked no questions about her husband, had taken her presence and Pamela’s for granted, never hinting a curiosity about this sudden change of quarters. Mildred thought thather aunt had told him something about her separation from her husband. It was hardly possible that she could have withheld all information, seeing the familiar terms upon which those two were; and it might be, therefore, that his discretion was the result of knowledge. He had nothing to learn, and could easily seem incurious.
Mildred now discovered that one source of Castellani’s influence with her aunt was the work he had done for the choir of St. Edmund’s. It was to his exertions that the choral services owed their excellence. The Vicar loved music only as a child or a savage loves it, without knowledge or capacity; and it was Castellani who chose the voices for the choir, and helped to train the singers. It was Castellani who assisted the organist in the selection of recondite music, which gave an air of originality to the services at St. Edmund’s, and brought the odour of mediævalism and the fumes of incense into the Gothic chancel. Castellani’s knowledge of music, ancient and modern, was of the widest. It was his musical erudition which gave variety to his improvisations. He could delight an admiring circle withmeandering reminiscences of Lully, Corelli, Dussek, Spohr, Clementi, Cherubini, and Hummel, in which only the modulations were his own.
In this interval of convalescence Mrs. Greswold’s life fell into a mechanical monotony which suited her as well as any other kind of life would have done. For the greater part of the day she sat in the low armchair by the fire, a table with books at her side, and her work-basket at her feet. Those who cared to observe her saw that she neither worked nor read. She took up a volume now and again, opened it, looked at a page with dreamy eyes for a little while, and then laid it aside. She took up the frame with the azaleas, worked half-a-dozen stitches, and put the frame down again. Her days were given to long and melancholy reveries. She lived over her married life, with all its happiness, with its one great pain. She contemplated her husband’s character—such a perfect character it had always seemed to her; and yet his one weak act, his one suppression of truth, had wrought misery for them both. And then with ever-recurring persistency she thought of Fay, and Fay’s unexplained fate.
“I know him so well, his wife of fourteen years,” she said to herself. “Can I doubt for an instant that he did his duty to her; that he was loyal and kind; that whatever sadness there was in her fate it could have been brought about by no act of his?”
Pamela behaved admirably all this time. She respected Mildred’s silence, and was not overpoweringly gay. She would sit at her aunt’s feet working, wrapped in her own thoughts, or poring over a well-thumbed Shelley, which seemed to her to express all her emotions for her without any trouble on her part. She found her feelings about César Castellani made to measure, as it were, in those mystic pages, and wondered that she and Shelley could be so exactly alike.
When Mildred was well enough to go out of doors Miss Fausset suggested a morning with her poor.
“It will brace your nerves,” she said, “and help you to make up your mind. If you have really a vocation for the higher life, the life of self-abnegation and wide usefulness, the sooner you enter upon it the better. Mind, I sayif. You know I havegiven you my advice conscientiously as a Christian woman, and my advice is that you go back to your husband, and forget everything but your duty to him.”
“Yes, aunt, I know; but you and I think differently upon that point.”
“Very well,” with an impatient sigh. “You are obstinate enough there: you have made up your mind so far. You had better make it up a little further. At present you are halting between two opinions.”
Mildred obeyed with meekness and indifference. She was not interested in Miss Fausset’s district; she had given no thought yet to the merits of life in a Christian community, among a handful of pious women working diligently for the suffering masses. Her only thought had been of that which she had lost, not of what she might gain.
Miss Fausset came in from the morning service at half-past eight, breakfasted sparingly, and at nine thene plus ultrabrougham, the perfection of severity in coach-building, was at the door, and the perfect brown horse was champing his bit and rattling hisbrazen headgear in over-fed impatience to be off. It seemed to be the one aim of this powerful creature’s life to run away with Miss Fausset’s brougham, but up to this point his driver had circumvented him. He made very light of the distance between the aristocratic East Cliff and the shabbiest outlying district of Brighton, at the fag end of the London Road, and here Mildred saw her aunt in active work as a ministering angel to the sick and the wretched.
It was only the old, old story of human misery which she saw repeated under various forms; the old, old evidence of the unequal lots that fall from the urn of Fate—Margaret in her sky-blue boudoir, Peggy staggering under her basket of roses—for some only the flowers, for others only the thorns. She saw that changeless background of sordid poverty which makes every other sorrow harder to bear; and she told herself that the troubles of the poor were heavier than the troubles of the rich. Upon her life sorrow had come, like a thunderbolt out of a summer sky; but sorrow was the warp and woof of these lives; joy or good luck of any kind would have been the thunderclap.
She saw that her aunt knew how to deal with these people, and that underneath Miss Fausset’s hardness there was a great power of sympathy. Her presence seemed everywhere welcome; and people talked freely to her, unbosoming themselves of every trouble, confident in her power to understand.
“Me and my poor husband calls your aunt our father confessor, ma’am,” said a consumptive tailor’s wife to Mildred. “We’re never afraid to tell her anything—even if it seems foolish like—and she always gives us rare good advice—don’t she, Joe?”
The invalid nodded approvingly over his basin of beef-tea, Miss Fausset’s beef-tea, which was as comforting as strong wine.
In one of the houses they found an Anglican Sister, an elderly woman, in a black hood, to whom Miss Fausset introduced her niece. There was an old man dying by inches in the next room; and the Sister had been sitting up with him all night, and was now going home to the performance of other duties. Mildred talked with her for some time about her life, and heard a great many details ofthat existence which seemed to her still so far off, almost impossible, like a cold pale life beyond the grave. How different from that warm domestic life at Enderby! amidst fairest surroundings, in those fine old rooms, where every detail bore the impress of one’s own fancy, one’s own pursuits: a selfish life, perhaps, albeit tempered with beneficence to one’s immediate surroundings; selfish inasmuch as it was happy and luxurious, while true unselfishness must needs surrender everything, must refuse to wear purple and fine linen and to fare sumptuously, so long as Lazarus lies at the gate shivering and hungry.
Her aunt almost echoed her thoughts presently when she spoke of her goodness to the poor.
“Yes, yes, Mildred, I do some little good,” she said, almost impatiently; “but not enough—not nearly enough. It is only women like that Sister who do enough. What the rich give must count for very little in the eyes of the Great Auditor. But I do my best to make up for a wasted girlhood. I was as foolish and as frivolous as your young friend Pamela once.”
“That reminds me, aunt, I want so much to talk to you about Pamela.”
“What of her?”
“I am afraid that she admires Mr. Castellani.”
“Why should she not admire him?”
“But I suspect she is in danger of falling in love with him.”
“Let her fall in love with him—let her marry him—let her be happy with him if she can.”
There was a recklessness in this counsel which shocked Mildred, coming from such a person as Miss Fausset.
“My dear aunt, it is a very serious matter. George gave Pamela to me for my companion. I feel myself responsible for her happiness.”
“Then don’t interfere with her happiness. Let her marry the man she loves.”
“With all my heart, if he were a good man, and if her uncle had no objection. But I know so little about Mr. Castellani and his surroundings.”
“He has no surroundings—his mother and father are dead. He has no near relatives.”
“And his character, aunt; his conduct? What do you know of those?”
“Only so much as you can see that I know of them. He comes to my house, and makes himself agreeable to me and my friends. He has given valuable help in the formation and management of the choir. If I am interested in a concert for a charity he sings for me, and works for me like a slave. All his talents are at my service always. I suppose I like him as well as I should like a favourite nephew, if I had nephews from whom to choose a favourite. Of his character—outside my house—I know nothing. I do not believe he has a wife hidden away anywhere; and if Pamela marries him, she can make her intention public in good time to prevent any fiasco of that kind.”
“You speak very scornfully, aunt, as if you had a poor opinion of Mr. Castellani.”
“Perhaps I have a poor opinion of mankind in general, Mildred. Your father was a good man, and your husband is another. We ought to think ourselves lucky to have known two such men in our lives. As to César Castellani, I tell you again Iknow no more of him than you—or very little more—though I have known him so much longer.”
“How long have you known him?”
“About fifteen years.”
“And how was he introduced to you?”
“O, he introduced himself, on the strength of the old connection between the Faussets and the Felixes. It was just before he went to the University. He was very handsome, very elegant, and very much in advance of his years in manners and accomplishments. He amused and interested me, and I allowed him to come to my house as often as he liked.”
“Do you know anything about his means?”
“Nothing definite. He came into a small fortune upon his mother’s death, and ran through it. He has earned money by literary work, but I cannot tell you to what extent. If Miss Ransome marry him, I think she may as well make up her mind to keep him. He belongs to the butterfly species.”
“That is rather a humiliating prospect for a wife—rather like buying a husband.”
“That is a point for Miss Ransome to consider.I don’t think she is the kind of girl to care much what her whim costs her.”
The brown horse, panting for more work, drew up in front of Miss Fausset’s house at this juncture, fidgeted impatiently while the two ladies alighted, and then tore round to his mews.
“You’ve had a handful with him to-day, I guess, mate,” said a humble hanger-on, as Miss Fausset’s coachman stretched his aching arms. “He’s a fine ’oss, but I’d rather you drove ’im than me.”
“I’ll tell you what he is,” replied the coachman: “he’s too good for his work. That’s his complaint. Dodging in and out of narrer streets, and makin’ mornin’ calls upon work’ouse paupers, don’t suithim.”
The time had come when Mildred had to make up her mind where she would go, and having all the world to choose from, and just the same hopeless feeling that Eve may have had on leaving Eden, the choice was a matter of no small difficulty. She sat with a Continental “Bradshaw” in her hand, turning the leaves and looking at the maps, irresoluteand miserable. Pamela, who might have decided for her, clearly hankered after no paradise but Brighton. Her idea of Eden was a house in which Castellani was a frequent visitor.
It was too late for most of the summer places, too early for Algiers or the Riviera. Pamela would not hear of the Rhine or any German watering-place. Montreux might do, perhaps, or the Engadine; but Pamela hated Switzerland.
“Would it not do to spend the winter in Bath?” she said. “There is very nice society in Bath, I am told.”
“My dear Pamela, I want to get away from society if I can; and I want to be very far from Enderby.”
“Of course. It was thoughtless of me to suggest a society place. Bath, too, within a stone’s throw. Dearest aunt, I will offer no more suggestions. I will go anywhere you like.”
“Then let us decide at once. We will go to Pallanza, on Lago Maggiore. I have heard that it is a lovely spot, and later we can go on to Milan or Florence.”
“To Italy! That is like the fulfilment of a dream,” said Pamela with a sigh, feeling that Italy without César Castellani would be like a playhouse when the curtain has gone down and all the lights are out.
She was resigned, however, and not without hope. Castellani might propose before they left Brighton, when he found that parting was inevitable. He had said some very tender things, but of that vaguely tender strain which leaves a man uncommitted. His words had been full of poetry, but they might have applied to some absent mistress, or to love in the abstract. Pamela felt that she had no ground for exultation.
It was in vain that Mildred warned her against the danger of such an alliance.
“Consider what a wretched match it would be for you, Pamela,” she said. “Think how different from your sister Rosalind’s marriage.”
“Different! I should hope so, indeed! Can you imagine, Aunt Mildred, thatIwould marry such a man as Sir Henry Mountford, a man who has hardly a thought outside his stable and his gunroom?Do you know that he spends quite a quarter of every day in the saddle-room, allowing for the wet days, on which he almost lives there? I asked him once why he didn’t have his lunch sent over to the stables, instead of keeping us waiting a quarter of an hour, and coming in at last smelling like a saddler’s shop.”
“He is a gentleman, notwithstanding, Pamela, and Rosalind seems to get on very well with him.”
“‘As the husband is the wife is,’ don’t you know, aunt. You and Uncle George suit each other because you are both intellectual. I should be miserable if I married a man who had done nothing to distinguish himself from the common herd.”
“Perhaps. But do you think you could be very happy married to an accomplished idler who would live upon your fortune—who would have everything to gain, from the most sordid point of view, by marrying you, and of whose fidelity you could never be sure?”
“But I should be sure of him. My instinct would tell me if he were really in love with me. You must think me very silly, Aunt Mildred, if youthink I could be deceived in such a matter as that.”
In spite of Pamela’s confidence in her own instinct, or, in other words, in her own wisdom, Mildred was full of anxiety about her, and was very eager to place her charge beyond the reach of César Castellani’s daily visits and musical talent. She felt responsible to her husband for his niece’s peace of mind; doubly responsible in that Pamela’s interest had been subordinated to her own comfort and well-being.
She had other reasons for wishing to escape from Mr. Castellani’s society. That instinctive aversion she had felt at sight of the unknown face in the church was not altogether a sentiment of the past, a prejudice overcome and forgotten. There were occasions when she shrank from the Italian’s gentle touch, a delicate white hand hovering for a moment above her own as he offered her a book or a newspaper; there were times when his low sympathetic voice was a horror to her; there were times when she told herself that her self-respect as a wife hardlypermitted of her breathing the same air that he breathed.
Innocent and simple-minded as her closely-sheltered life had kept her, in all thoughts, ways, and works unlike the average woman of society, Mildred Greswold was a woman, and she could not but see that César Castellani’s feelings for her were of a deeper kind than any sentiment with which Pamela Ransome’s charms had inspired him. There were moments when his voice, his face, his manner told his secret only too plainly; but these were but glimpses of the truth, hurried liftings of the curtain, which the man of society let drop again before he had too plainly betrayed himself. He had been careful to keep his secret from Pamela. It was only to the object of his worship that he had revealed those presumptuous dreams of his, and to her only in such wise as she must needs ignore. It would have seemed self-conscious prudery to rebuke indications so subtle and so casual; but Mildred could not ignore them in her own mind, and she waited anxiously for the hour in which she would be well enough to travel. She had all her plansmade, had engaged a courier—a friend of Miss Fausset’s Franz—and had arranged her route with him: first Northern Italy, and then the South. She wanted to make Pamela’s exile as bright and as profitable to her as she could. The life she was arranging was by no means the kind of life that Clement Cancellor would have counselled. It would have seemed to that stern labourer a life of self-indulgence and frivolity. But the time for the higher ideal would come by and by, perhaps, when this sense of misery, this benumbed feeling of indifference to all things, had worn off, and she should be strong enough to think a little more about other people’s sorrows and a little less about her own.
Mr. Maltravers urged upon her the duty of staying in Brighton, and working as her aunt worked. He had been told that Mrs. Greswold was a woman of independent fortune, and that she had separated herself from a husband she fondly loved, upon a question of principle. It was just such a woman as this that Samuel Maltravers liked to see in his church. Such women were the elect of the earth, predestined to contribute to the advancement ofclerics and the building of chancels and transepts. The chancel at St. Edmund’s was a noble one, needing no extension, its only fault being that it was too big for the church. But there was room for a transept. The church had been so planned as to allow of its ultimate cruciform shape, and that transept was the dream of Mr. Maltravers’ life. Scarcely had Mrs. Greswold’s story dropped in measured syllables from Miss Fausset’s lips than Mr. Maltravers said to himself, “This lady will build my transept.” A woman who could leave a beloved husband on a question of principle was just the kind of woman to sink a few superfluous thousands upon the improvement of such a fane as St. Edmund’s. Every seat in that fashionable temple was occupied. More seat-room was a necessity. The hour had come, and the—woman.
Mr. Maltravers endeavoured to convince Mrs. Greswold that Brighton was the one most fitting sphere for an enlightened woman’s labours. Brighton cried aloud for a Christian sister’s aid. It had all the elements in which the heaven-born missionary delights. Phenomenal wealth on the one side, abjectpoverty on the other; fashion in the foreground, sin and misery behind the curtain. Brighton was Pagan Rome in little. Together with the advanced civilisation, the over-refinement, the occult pleasures, the art, the luxury, the beauty, the burning of the Seven-hilled City, Brighton had all the corrupting influences of her Pagan sister. Brighton was rotten to the core—a lovely simulacrum—a Dead Sea apple—shining, golden, doomed, damned.
As he uttered that last terrific word Mr. Maltravers sank his voice to that bass depth some of us can remember in Bishop Wilberforce’s climatic syllables; and so spoken, the word seemed permissible in any serious drawing-room, awful rather than profane.
It was in vain, however, that the Vicar of St. Edmund’s strove to convince Mildred that her mission was immediate, and in Brighton; that in his parish, and there alone, could her loftiest dreams find their fulfilment.
“I hope to do some little good to my fellow-creatures by and by,” she said meekly, “but I do not feel that the time has come yet. I am incapableof anything except just existing. I believe my aunt has told you that I have had a great sorrow—”
“Yes, yes, poor wounded heart, I know, I know.”
“I mean to work by and bye—when I have learned to forget myself a little. Sorrow is so selfish. Just now I feel stupid and helpless. I could do no good to any one.”
“You could build my transept,” thought Mr. Maltravers, but he only sighed, and shook his head, and murmured gently, “Well, well, we must wait; we must hope. There is but oneearthlyconsolation for a great grief—I will say nothing of heavenly comfort—and that consolation is to be found in labouring for the good of our sinning, sorrowing fellow-creatures, and for the glory of God—for the glory of God,” repeated Mr. Maltravers, harping on his transept. “There are mourners who have left imperishable monuments of their grief, and of their piety, in some of the finest churches of this land.”
Upon the evening on which Mr. Maltravers had pleaded for Brighton, Miss Fausset and herprotégéwere alone together during the half-hour beforedinner; the lady resting after a long day in her district: a composed, quiet figure, in fawn-coloured silk gown and point lace kerchief, seated erect in the high-backed chair, with folded hands, and eyes gazing thoughtfully at the fire; the gentleman lounging in a low chair on the other side of the hearth in luxurious self-abandonment, his red-brown eyes shining in the fire-glow, and his red-brown hair throwing off glints of light.
They had been talking, and had lapsed into silence; and it was after a long pause that Miss Fausset said,
“I wonder you have not made the young lady an offer before now.”
“Suppose I am not in love with the young lady?”
“You have been too assiduous for that supposition to occur to me. You have haunted this house ever since Miss Ransome has been here.”
“And yet I am not in love with her.”
“She is a pretty and attractive girl, and disposed to think highly of you.”
“And yet I am not in love with her,” he repeated, with a smile which made Miss Fausset angry. “Tothink that you should turn matchmaker, you who have said so many bitter things of the fools who fall in love, and the still greater fools who marry;youwho stand alone like a granite monolith, like Cleopatra’s Needle, or the Matterhorn, or anything grand and solitary and unapproachable; you to counsel the civilised slavery we call marriage!”
“My dear César, I can afford to stand alone; but you cannot afford to surrender your chance of winning an amiable wife with fifteen hundred a year.”
“That for fifteen hundred a year!” exclaimed Castellani, wafting an imaginary fortune from the tips of his fingers with airy insolence. “Do you think I will sell myself—for so little?”
“That high-flown tone is all very well; but there is one fact you seem to ignore.”
“What is that, my kindest and best?”
“The fact that you are a very expensive person, and that you have to be maintained somehow.”
“That fact shall never force me to marry where I cannot love. At the worst, art shall maintain me. When other and dearer friends prove unkind, I will call upon my maiden aunts the Muses.”
“The Muses hitherto have hardly paid for the gardenias in your buttonhole.”
“O, I know I am not a man of business. I lack the faculty of pounds, shillings, and pence, which is an attribute of some minds. I have scattered my flowers of art upon all the highways instead of nailing the blossoms against a wall and waiting for them to bear fruit. I have been reckless, improvident—granted; and you, out of your abundance, have been kind. Your words imply a threat. You wish to remind me that your kindness cannot go on for ever.”
“There are limits to everything.”
“Hardly to your generosity; certainly not to your wealth. As you garner it, that must be inexhaustible. I cannot think that you would ever turn your back upon me. The link between us is too tender a bond.”
Miss Fausset’s face darkened to deepest night.
“Tender do you call it?” she exclaimed. “If the memory of an unpardonable wrong is tender—” and then, interrupting herself, she cried passionately, “César Castellani, I have warned you against theslightest reference to the past. As for my generosity, as you call it, you might be wiser if you gave it a lower name—caprice; caprice which may weary at any moment. You have a chance of making an excellent match, and I strongly advise you to take advantage of it.”
“Forgive me if I disregard your advice, much as I respect your judgment upon all other subjects.”
“You have other views, I suppose, then?”
“Yes, I have other views.”
“You look higher?”
“Infinitely higher,” he answered, with his hands locked above his head in a carelessly graceful attitude, and with his eyes gazing at the fire.
He looked like a dreaming fawn: the large, full eyes, the small peaked beard, and close-cut hair upon the arched forehead were all suggestive of the satyr tribe.
The door opened, and Pamela came smiling in, self-conscious, yet happy, delighted at seeing that picturesque figure by the hearth.