CHAPTER VIII.NOT PROVEN.
Mildredstood speechless for some moments after those words of Castellani’s, looking at him with kindling eyes.
“How dare you?” she cried at last. “How dare you accuse my husband—the noblest of men?”
“The noblest of men do strange things sometimes upon an evil impulse, and when they are not quite right here,” touching his forehead.
“My husband, George Greswold, is too high a mark for your malignity. Do you think you can make me believe evil of him after fourteen years of married life? His intellect is the clearest and the soundest I have ever found in man or woman. You can no more shake my faith in his power of brain than in his goodness of heart.”
“Perhaps not. The George Greswold you know is a gentleman of commanding intellect and unblemishedcharacter. But the George Ransome whom I knew seventeen years ago was a gentleman who was shrewdly suspected of having made away with his wife; and who was confined in a public asylum in the environs of Nice as a dangerous lunatic. If you doubt these facts, you have only to go to Nice, or to St. Jean, where Mr. Ransome and his wife lived for some time in a turtle-dove retirement, which ended tragically. Seventeen years does not obliterate the evidence of such a tragedy as that in which your husband was chief actor.”
“I do not believe one word—and I hope I may never hear your voice again,” said Mildred, with her hand on the electric bell.
She did not remove her hand till her servant, the courier, opened the door. A look told him his duty. Castellani took up his hat without a word; and Albrecht deferentially attended him to the landing, and politely whistled for the lift to convey him to the vestibule below.
Castellani made the descent, feeling like Lucifer when he fell from heaven.
“Too soon!” he muttered to himself. “Shetook the cards out of my hands—she forced my play, and spoiled my game. But I have given her something to think about. She will not forget to-day’s interview in a hurry.”
Albrecht, the handiest of men, was standing beside him, working the lift.
“Where is your next move to be, Albrecht?” he asked in German.
The noble-born lady had not yet decided, Albrecht told him; but he thought the move would be either to Venice or to Posilippo.
“If I pretended to be a prophet, Albrecht, I should tell thee that the honourable lady will go to neither Venice nor Posilippo; but that thy next move will be to the Riviera, perhaps to Nice.”
Albrecht shrugged his shoulders in polite indifference.
“Look here, my friend, come thou to me when madame gives the order for Nice, and I will give thee a louis for assuring me that I prophesied right,” said Castellani, as he stepped out of the lift.
Mildred walked up and down the room, trying tocontrol the confusion of her thoughts, trying to reason calmly upon that hideous accusation which she had affected to despise, but which yet had struck terror to her soul. Would he dare to bring such a charge—villain and traitor as he was—if there were not some ground for the accusation, some glimmer of truth amidst a cloud of falsehood?
And her husband’s manner: his refusal to tell her the history of his first marriage; his reticence, his secrecy—reticence so out of harmony with his boldly truthful nature; the gloom upon his face when she forced him to speak of that past life: all these things came back upon her with appalling force, and even trifles assumed a direful significance.
“O, my beloved!whatwas that dark story, and why did you leave me to hear it from such false lips as those?”
And then with passionate tears she thought how easy it would have been to forgive and pity even a tale of guilt—unpremeditated guilt, doubtless, fatality rather than crime—if her husband had laid his weary head upon her breast and told her all; holding back nothing; confident in the strength of a greatlove to understand and to pardon. How much easier would it have been to bear the burden of a guilty secret, so shared, in the supreme trustfulness of her husband’s love! How light a burden compared with this which was laid upon her! this horror of groping backward into the black night of the past.
“I must know the worst,” she said to herself; “I will test that scoundrel’s accusation. I must know all. I will take no step to injure my dear love. I will seek no help, trust no friend. I must act alone.”
Then came a more agonising thought of the hapless wife—the victim.
“My sister! What was your fate? Imustknow.”
Her thoughts came back always to that point—“I must know all.”
She recalled the image of that unacknowledged sister, the face bending over her bed when she started up out of a feverish dream, frightened and in tears, to take instant comfort from that loving presence, to fling her arms round Fay’s neck, and nestle upon her bosom. Never had that sisterly love failed her.The quiet watcher was always near. A sigh, a faint little murmur, and the volunteer nurse was at her side. Often on waking she had found Fay sitting by her bed, in the dead of the night, motionless and watchful, sleepless from loving care.
Her love for Fay had been one of the strongest feelings of her life. She, who had been ever dutiful to the frivolous, capricious mother, had yet unconsciously given a stronger affection to the companion who had loved her with an unselfish love, which the mother had never shown. Her regard for Fay had been the one romance of her childhood, and had continued the strongest sentiment of her mind until the hour when, for the first time, she knew the deeper love of womanhood, and gave her heart to George Greswold.
And now these two supreme affections rose up before her in dreadful conflict; and in the sister so faithfully loved and so fondly regretted she saw the victim of her still dearer husband.
Pamela’s footsteps and Pamela’s voice in the corridor startled her in the midst of those dark thoughts. She hurriedly withdrew to her ownroom, where the maid Louisa was sitting, intent upon one of those infinitesimal repairs which served as an excuse for her existence.
“Go and tell Miss Ransome that I cannot dine with her. My headache is worse than it was when she went out. Ask her to excuse me.”
Louisa obeyed, and Mildred locked the door upon her grief. She sat all through the long evening brooding over the past and the future, impatient to know the worst.
She was on her way to Genoa with Pamela and their attendants before the following noon. Albrecht, the courier, had scarcely time to claim the promised coin from Mr. Castellani.
Miss Ransome repined at this sudden departure.
“Just as we were going to be engaged,” she sobbed, when she and Mildred were alone in a railway compartment. “It is really unkind of you to whisk one off in such a way, aunt.”
“My dear Pamela, you have had a lucky escape; and I hope you will never mention Mr. Castellani’s name again. He is an utterly bad man.”
“How cruel to say such a thing!—behind his back, too! What has he done that is bad, I should like to know?”
“I cannot enter into details; but I can tell you one thing, Pamela: he has never had any idea of asking you to be his wife. He told me that in the plainest language.”
“Do you mean to say that you questioned him about his feelings—for me?”
“I did what I felt was my duty, Pamela—my duty to you and to your uncle.”
“Duty!” ejaculated Pamela, with such an air that Box began to growl, imagining his mistress in want of protection. “Duty! It is the most hateful word in the whole of the English language. You asked him when he was going to propose to me—you lowered and humiliated me beyond all that words can say—you—you spoilt everything.”
“Pamela, is this reasonable or just?”
“To be asked when he was going to propose to a girl—with his artistic temperament—the very thing to disgust him,” said Pamela, in a series ofgasps. “If you hadWANTEDto part us for ever you could not have gone to work better.”
“Whatever I wanted yesterday, I am quite clear about my feelings to-day, Pamela. It is my earnest hope that you and Mr. Castellani will never meet again.”
“You are very cruel, then—heartless—inhuman. Becauseyouhave done with love—because you have left my poor Uncle George—Heaven alone knows why—is no one else to be happy?”
“You could not be happy with César Castellani, Pamela. Happiness does not lie that way. I tell you again, he is a bad man.”
“And I tell you again I don’t believe you. In what way is he bad? Does he rob, murder, forge, set fire to people’s houses? What has he done that is bad?”
“He has traduced your uncle—to me, his wife.”
Pamela’s countenance fell.
“You—you may have misunderstood him,” she faltered.
“No, there was no possibility of mistake. He slandered my husband. He let me see in the plainestway that he had no real regard for you, that he did not care how far his frequent visits compromised either you or me. He is utterly base, Pamela—a man without rectitude or conscience. He would have clung to us like some poisonous burr if I had not shaken him off. My dear, dear child,” said Mildred, putting her arm round Pamela’s reluctant waist, and drawing the girlish figure nearer to her side, to the relief of Box, who leaped upon their shoulders and licked their faces in a rapture of sympathetic feeling; “my dear, you have been treated very badly, but I am not to blame. You have had a lucky escape, Pamela. Why be angry about it?”
“It is all very well to talk like that,” sighed the girl, wrinkling her white forehead in painful perplexity. “He was my day-dream. One cannot renounce one’s day-dream at a moment’s warning. If you knew the castles I have built—a life spent with him—a life devoted to the cultivation of art! He would havemademy voice; and we could have had a flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, and a brougham and victoria, and lived within ourincome,” concluded Pamela, following her own train of thought.
“My dearest, there are so many worthier to share your life. You will have new day-dreams.”
“Perhaps when I am sixty. It will take me a lifetime to forget him. Do you think I could marry a country bumpkin, or any one who was not artistic?”
“You shall not be asked to marry a rustic. The artistic temperament is common enough nowadays. Almost every one is artistic.”
Pamela shrugged her shoulders petulantly, and turned to the window in token that she had said her say. She grieved like a child who has been disappointed of some jaunt looked forward to for long days of expectation. She tried to think herself ill-used by her uncle’s wife; and yet that common sense of which she possessed a considerable share told her that she had only herself to blame. She had chosen to fall in love with a showy, versatile adventurer, without waiting for evidence that he cared for her. Proud in the strength of her position as an independent young woman with a handsome fortune and a fairly attractive person, she hadimagined that Mr. Castellani could look no higher, hope for nothing better than to obtain her hand and heart. She had ascribed his reticence to delicacy. She had accepted his frequent visits as an evidence of his attachment and of his ulterior views.
And now she sat in a sulky attitude, coiled up in a corner of the carriage, with her face to the window, meditating upon her fool’s paradise. For seven happy weeks she had seen the man she admired almost daily; and her own intense sympathy with him had made her imagine an equal sympathy on his part. When their hands touched the thrilling vibration seemed mutual; and yet it had been on her side only, poor fool, she told herself now, abased in her own self-consciousness, drinking the cup of humiliation to the dregs.
He had slandered her uncle—yes, that was villany, that was iniquity. She began to think that he was utterly black. She remembered how coldly cruel he had been about the anemone hunt yesterday; how deaf to her girlish hints; never offering his company: colder, crueller than marble. She felt as if she had squandered her love upon Satan. Yet shewas not the less angry with Mildred. That kind of interference was unpardonable.
She arrived at Genoa worn out with a fatiguing journey, and in a worse temper than she had ever sustained for so long a period, she whose worst tempers hitherto had been like April showers. Mildred had reciprocated her silence, and Box had been the only animated passenger.
The clever courier had made all his arrangements by telegraph: they spent a night at Genoa; drove round the city next morning; explored churches, palaces, and picture-galleries; and went on to Nice in the afternoon. They arrived at the great bustling station late in the evening, and were driven to one of the hotels on the Promenade des Anglais, where all preparations had been made for their reception: a glowing hearth in a spacious drawing-room opening on to a balcony, lamps and candles lighted, roses on all the tables, maid and man on the alert to receive travellers of distinction. So far as a place which is not home can put on an aspect of homeliness the hotel had succeeded; but Mildred looked round upon the white and gold walls, and the satinfauteuils, with an aching heart, remembering those old rooms at Enderby, and the familiar presence that had first made them dear to her, before the habit of years had made those inanimate things a part of her life.
She was at Nice; she had taken the slanderer’s advice, and had gone to the city by the sea, to try and trace out for herself the mystery of the past, to violate her husband’s secret, kept so long and so closely, only to rise up after years of happiness, like a murdered corpse exhumed from a forgotten grave.
She was here, on the scene of her husband’s first marriage, and for three or four days she walked and drove about the strange busy place aimlessly, hopelessly, no nearer the knowledge of that dark history than she had been at Enderby Manor. Not for worlds would she injure the man she loved. She wanted to know all; but the knowledge must be obtained in such a way as could not harm him. This necessitated diplomacy, which was foreign to her nature, and patience, in which womanly quality she excelled. She had learnt patience in her tenderministrations to a fretful invalid, during those sad slow years in which pretty Mrs. Fausset had faded into the grave. Yes, she had learnt to be patient, and to submit to sorrow. She knew how to wait.
The place, delightful as it was in the early spring weather, possessed no charms for her. Its gaiety and movement jarred upon her. The sunsets were as lovely here as at Pallanza, and her only pleasure was to watch that ever-varying splendour of declining day behind the long dark promontory of Antibes; or to see the morning dawn in a flush of colour above the white lighthouse yonder at the point of the peninsula of St. Jean. It was in the village of St. Jean that George Greswold had lived with his first wife—with Fay. The bright face, pale, yet brilliant, a face in which light took the place of colour; the eager eyes; the small sharp features and thin sarcastic lips, rose up before her with the thought of that union. He must have loved her. She was so bright, so interesting, so full of vivid fancies and changeful emotions. To this hour Mildred remembered her fascination, her power over a child’s heart.
Pamela was dull and out of spirits. Not all the Tauchnitz novels in Galignani’s shop could interest her. She pronounced Nice distinctly inferior to Brighton; declined even the distraction of the opera.
“Music would only make me miserable,” she exclaimed petulantly. “I wish I might never hear any again. That hateful band in the gardens tortures me every morning.”
This was not hopeful. Mildred was sorry for her, but too deeply absorbed by her own griefs to be altogether sympathetic.
“She will find some one else to admire before long,” she thought somewhat bitterly. “Girls who fall in love so easily are easily consoled.”
She had been at Nice more than a week, and had made no effort—yearning to know more—to know all—yet dreading every new revelation. She had to goad herself to action, to struggle against the weight of a great fear—the fear that she might find the slanderer’s accusations confirmed instead of being refuted.
Her first step was a very simple one, easy enough from a social point of view. Among oldLady Castle-Connell’s intimate friends had been a certain Irish chieftain called The O’Labacolly. The O’Labacolly’s daughter had been one of the reigning beauties of Dublin Castle, had appeared for three seasons in London with considerableéclat, and in due course had married a Scotch peer, who was lord of an extensive territory in the Highlands, strictly entailed, and of a more profitable estate in the neighbourhood of Glasgow at his own disposal. Lord Lochinvar had been laid at rest in the sepulchre of his forebears, and Lady Lochinvar was a rich widow, still handsome, and still young enough to enjoy all the pleasures of society. She had no children of her own, but she had a favourite nephew, whom she had adopted, and who acted as her escort in her travels, which were extensive, and as her steward in the management of the Glasgow property, which had been settled upon her at her marriage. The Highland territory had gone with the title to a distant cousin of Lady Lochinvar’s husband.
Mildred remembered that Castellani had spoken of meeting Mr. Ransome and his wife at Lady Lochinvar’s palace at Nice. Her first step, therefore,was to make herself known to Lady Lochinvar, who had wintered in this fair white city ever since she came there as a young widow twenty years ago, and had bought for herself a fantastic villa, built early in the century by an Italian prince, on the crest of a hill commanding the harbour.
With this view she wrote to Lady Lochinvar, recalling the old friendship between The O’Labacolly and Lady Castle-Connell, and introducing herself on the strength of that friendship. Lady Lochinvar responded with Hibernian warmth. She called at the Hôtel Westminster that afternoon, and not finding Mrs. Greswold at home, left a note inviting her to lunch at the Palais Montano next day.
Mildred promptly accepted the invitation. She was anxious to be alone with Lady Lochinvar, and there seemed a better chance of atête-à têteat the lady’s house than at the hotel, where it would have been difficult to exclude Pamela. She drove to that fair hill on the eastward side of the city, turning her back upon the quaint old Italian town, with its narrow streets of tall white houses with red roofs,and its Cathedral dome embedded in the midst, the red and yellow tiles glistening in the sunlight. The two small horses toiled slowly up the height with the great lumbering landau, carrying Mildred nearer and nearer to the bright blue sky and the snow-line glittering on the edge of the distant hills. They went past villas and flower-gardens, hedges of yellow roses and hedges of coral-hued geranium, cactus and agave, palms and orange-trees, shining majolica tubs and white marble balustrades, statues and fountains, oriel windows and Italian cupolas, turrets and towers of every order; while the sapphire sea dropped lower and lower beneath the chalky winding road, as the jutting promontory that shelters Villefranche from the east came nearer and nearer above the blue.
The Italian prince who built the Palais Montano had aspired after Oriental rather than classic beauty. His house was long and low, with two ranges of Moorish windows, and a dome at each end. There was an open loggia on the first floor, with a balustrade of white and coloured marble; there was a gallery above the spacious tesselated hall, screenedby carved sandal-wood lattices, behind which the beauties of a harem might be supposed to watch the entrances and exits below. The house was fantastic, but fascinating. The garden was the growth of more than half a century, and was supremely beautiful.
Lady Lochinvar received the stranger with a cordiality which would have set Mildred thoroughly at her ease under happier circumstances. As it was, she was too completely engrossed by the object of her visit to feel any of that shyness which a person of retiring disposition might experience on such an occasion. She was grave and preoccupied, and it was with an effort that she responded to Lady Lochinvar’s allusions to the past.
“Your mother and I were girls together,” said the Dowager, “at dear old Castle-Connell. My father’s place was within a drive of the Castle, but away from the river, and one of my first pleasant memories is of your grandfather’s gardens and the broad, bright Shannon. What a river! When I look at our stony torrent-beds here, and remember that glorious Shannon!”
“Yet you like Nice better than county Limerick?”
“Of course I do, my dear Mrs. Greswold. Ireland is a delicious country—to remember. I saw a good deal of your mother in London before his lordship’s death, but after I became a widow, I went very little into English society. I had found English people so narrow-minded. I only endured them for Lochinvar’s sake; and after his death I became a rover. I have an apartment in the Champs Elysées and apied-à-terrein Rome; and now and then, when I want to drink a draught of commonplace, when I want to know what the hard-headed, practical British intellect is making of the world in general, I give myself a fortnight at Claridge’s. A fortnight is always enough. So, you see, I have had no opportunity of looking up old friends.”
“I never remember seeing you in Upper Parchment Street,” said Mildred.
“My dear, you were a baby at the time I knew your mother. I think you were just able to toddle across the drawing-room the day I bade her good-bye,before I went to Scotland with Lochinvar—our last journey, poor dear man. He died the following winter.”
The butler announced luncheon, and they went into an ideal dining-room, purely Oriental, with hangings of a dull pale pink damask interwoven with lustreless gold, its only ornaments old Rhodes salvers shining with prismatic hues, its furniture of cedar inlaid with ivory.
“I am quite alone to-day,” said Lady Lochinvar. “My nephew is driving to Monte Carlo by the Cornice, and will not be back till dinner-time.”
“I am very glad to be alone with you, Lady Lochinvar. I feel myself bound to tell you that I had anarrière-penséein seeking your acquaintance, pleasant as it is to me to meet any friend of my mother’s youth.”
Lady Lochinvar looked surprised, and even a little suspicious. She began to fear some uncomfortable story. This sad-looking woman—such a beautiful face, but with such unmistakable signs of unhappiness. A runaway wife, perhaps; a poor creature who had fallen into disgrace, and whowanted Lady Lochinvar’s help to regain her position, or face her calumniators. Some awkward business, no doubt. Lady Lochinvar was generous to a fault, but she liked showing kindness to happy people, she wanted smiling faces and serenity about her. She had never known any troubles of her own, worse than losing the husband whom she had married for his wealth and position, and saw no reason why she should be plagued with the troubles of other people. Her handsome countenance hardened ever so little as she answered,
“If there is any small matter in which I can be of service to you—” she began.
“It is not a small matter; it is a great matter—to—to a friend of mine,” interrupted Mildred, faltering a little in her first attempt at dissimulation.
Lady Lochinvar breathed more freely.
“I shall be charmed to help your friend if I can.”
The butler came in and out, assisted by another servant, as the conversation went on; but as his mistress spoke to him and to his subordinate only in Italian, Mildred concluded they understood verylittle English, and did not concern herself about their presence.
“I want you to help me with your recollection of the past, Lady Lochinvar. You were at Nice seventeen years ago, I believe?”
“Between November and April, yes. I have spent those months here for the last twenty years.”
“You remember a Mr. Ransome and his wife, seventeen years ago?”
“Yes, I remember them distinctly. I cannot help remembering them.”
“Have you ever met Mr. Ransome since that time?”
“Never.”
“And you have not heard anything about him?”
“No, I have never heard of him since he left the asylum on the road to St. André. Good heavens, Mrs. Greswold, how white you have turned! Pietro, some brandy this moment—”
“No, no! I am quite well—only a little shocked, that is all. I had heard that Mr. Ransome was out of his mind at one time, but I did not believemy informant. It is really true, then? He was once mad?”
“Yes, he was mad; unless it was all a sham, a clever assumption.”
“Why should he have assumed madness?”
Lady Lochinvar shrugged her portly shoulders, and lifted her finely-arched eyebrows with a little foreign air which had grown upon her in foreign society.
“To escape from a very awkward dilemma. He was arrested on suspicion of having killed his wife. The evidence against him was weak, but the circumstances of the poor thing’s death were very suspicious.”
“How did she die?”
“She threw herself—or she was thrown—from a cliff on the other side of the promontory which you may see from that window.”
Mildred was silent for some moments, while her breath came and went in hurried gasps.
“Might she not have fallen accidentally?” she faltered.
“That would have been hardly possible. It wasa place where she had been in the habit of walking for weeks—a path which anybody might walk upon in the daylight without the slightest danger. And the calamity happened in broad day. She could not have fallen accidentally. Either she threw herself over, or he pushed her over in a moment of ungovernable anger. She was a very provoking woman, and had a tongue which might goad a man to fury. I saw a good deal of her the winter before her death. She was remarkably clever, and she amused me. I had a kind of liking for her, and I used to let her tell me her troubles.”
“What kind of troubles?”
“O, they all began and ended in one subject. She was jealous, intolerably jealous, of her husband; suspected him of inconstancy to herself if he was commonly civil to a handsome woman. She watched him like a lynx, and did her utmost to make his life a burden to him, yet loved him passionately all the time in her vehement, wrong-headed manner.”
“Poor girl! poor girl!” murmured Mildred, with a stifled sob, and then she asked with intense earnestness, “but, Lady Lochinvar, you who knewGeorge Ransome, surelyyounever suspected him of murder?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Greswold. I believe he was a gentleman, and a man of an open, generous nature; but, upon my word, I should be sorry to pledge myself to a positive belief in his innocence as to his wife’s death. Who can tell what a man might do, harassed and tormented as that man may have been by that woman’s tongue? I know what pestilential things she could say—what scorpions and adders dropped out of her mouth when she was in her jealous fits—and she may have gone just one step too far—walking by his side upon that narrow path—and he may have turned upon her, exasperated to madness, and—one push—and the thing was done. The edge of a cliff must be an awful temptation under such circumstances,” added Lady Lochinvar solemnly. “I am sure I would not answer for myself in such a situation.”
“I will answer forhim,” said Mildred firmly.
“You know him, then?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Where is he? What is he doing? Has he prospered in life?”
“Yes, and no. He was a happy man—or seemed to be happy—for thirteen years of married life; and then God’s hand was stretched out to afflict him, and his only child was snatched away.”
“He married again, then?”
“Yes, he married a second wife fourteen years ago. Forgive me, Lady Lochinvar, for having suppressed the truth till now. I wanted you to answer me more freely than you might have done had you known all. George Ransome is my husband; he assumed the name of Greswold when he succeeded to his mother’s property.”
“Then Mr. Greswold, your husband, is my old acquaintance. Is he with you here?”
“No. I have left him—perhaps for ever.”
“On account of that past story?”
“No, for another reason, which is my sad secret, and his—a family secret. It involves no blame to him or me. It is a dismal fatality which parts us. You cannot suppose, Lady Lochinvar, thatIcould think my husband a murderer?”
“A murderer? No! I do not believe any one ever thought him guilty of deliberate murder—but that he lost his temper with that unhappy girl, spurned her from him, flung her over the edge of the cliff—”
“O, no, no, no! it is not possible! I know him too well. He is not capable of a brutal act even under the utmost exasperation. No irritation, no sense of injury, could bring about such a change in his nature. Think, Lady Lochinvar. I have been his wife for fourteen years. I must know what his character is like.”
“You know what he is in happy circumstances, with an attached and confiding wife. You cannot imagine him goaded to madness by an unreasonable, hot-headed woman. You remember he was mad for half a year after his wife’s death. There must have been some sufficient reason for his madness.”
“His wife’s wretched death, and the fact that he was accused of having murdered her, were enough to make him mad.”
And then Mildred remembered how she had tortured her husband by her persistent questions aboutthat terrible past; how, in her jealousy of an unknown rival, she, too, had goaded him almost as that first wife had goaded him. She recalled the look of pain, the mute protest against her cruelty, and she hated herself for the selfishness of her love.
Lady Lochinvar was kind and sympathetic. She was not angry at the trap that had been set for her.
“I can understand,” she said. “You wanted to know the worst, and you felt that I should be reticent if I knew you were Mr. Ransome’s wife. Well, I have said all the evil I can say about him. Remember I know nothing except what other people thought and suspected. There was an inquiry about the poor thing’s death before the Juge d’Instruction at Villefranche, and Mr. Ransome was kept in prison between the first and second inquiry, and then it was discovered that the poor fellow had gone off his head, and he was taken to the asylum. He had no relations in the neighbourhood, nobody interested in looking after him. His acquaintances in Nice knew very little about him or his wife, even when they were living at an hotel on the Promenade des Anglais and going into society. After they left Nicethey lived in seclusion at St. Jean, and avoided all their acquaintance. Mrs. Ransome’s health was a reason for retirement; but it may not have been the only reason. There was no one, therefore, to look after the poor man in his misfortunes. He was just hustled away to the madhouse—the inquiry fell through for want of evidence—and for six months George Ransome was buried alive. I was in Paris at the time, and only heard the story when I came back to Nice in the following November. Nobody could tell me what had become of Mr. Ransome, and it was only by accident that I heard of his confinement in the asylum some time after he had been released as a sane man.”
“Did his wife ever talk to you of her own history?”
“Never. She was very fond of talking to me about her husband’s supposed inconstancy and the mistake she had made in marrying a man who had never cared for her; but about her own people and her own antecedents she was silent as the grave. In a place like Nice, where everybody is idle, there is sure to be a good deal of gossip, and we all had ourown ideas about Mrs. Ransome. We put her down as the natural daughter of some person of importance, or, at any rate, of good means. She had her own fortune, and was entirely independent of her husband, who was not a rich man at that time.”
“No, it was his mother’s death that made him rich. But you did not think he had married for money?”
“No; our theory was that he had been worried into marrying her. We thought the lady had thrown herself at his head, and that all her unhappiness sprang from her knowledge that she had in a measure forced him to marry her.”
“Do you remember the name of the house at St. Jean where they lived when they left Nice?”
“Yes, I called there once, but as Mrs. Ransome never returned my call, I concluded that they wished to drop their Nice acquaintance, and I heard afterwards that they were living like hermits in a cave. The house is a low white villa, spread out along the edge of a grassy ridge, with a broad stone terrace on one side and a garden and orchard on the other. It is called Le Bout du Monde.”
“I am very grateful to you, Lady Lochinvar, for having been frank with me. I will go and look at the house where they lived. I may find some one, perhaps, who knew them.”
“You want to make further inquiries?”
“I want to find some one who is as convinced of my husband’s guiltlessness as I am.”
“That will be difficult. There was very little evidence for or against him. The husband and wife went out to walk together one April afternoon. They left the house in peace and amity, as it seemed to their servants; but some ladies who met and talked to them an hour afterwards thought by Mrs. Ransome’s manner that she was on bad terms with her husband. When she was next seen she was lying at the foot of a cliff, dead. That is all that is known of the tragedy. You could hardly hang a man or acquit him upon such evidence. It is a case of not proven.”