CHAPTER XIV.LIFTING THE CURTAIN.
Thecharity concert afforded César Castellani just the necessary excuse for going to Enderby Manor House as often as he liked, and for staying there as long as he liked. He was now on a familiar footing. He drove or rode over from Riverdale nearly every day during the three weeks that intervened between Mr. Cancellor’s sermon and the afternoon concert. He made himself the curate’s right hand in all the details of the entertainment. He chose the music, he wrote the programme, he sent it to his favourite printer to be printed in antique type upon ribbed paper with ragged edges: a perfect gem in the way of a programme. He scoured the country round in quest of amateur talent, and was much more successful than the curate had been in the same quest.
“I’m astounded at your persuading Lady Millboroughto show in the daylight,” said Rollinson, laughing. “You have the tongue of the serpent to overcome her objection to the glare of the afternoon sun.”
“Estote prudentes sicuti serpentes,” said Castellani. “There’s a fine old ecclesiastic’s motto for you. I know Lady Millborough rather dreads the effect of sunlight upon hernacre Bernhardt. She told me that she was never equal to singing in the afternoon: the glare of the sun always gave her a headache. But I assured her in the first place that there should be no glare—that as an artist I abhorred a crude, white light—and that it should be my business to see that our concert-room was lighted upon purely æsthetic principles. We would have the dim religious light which painters and poets love. In the second place I assured her that she had as fine a contralto as Madame Alboni, on whose knees I had often sat as a child, and who gave me the emerald pin I was wearing.”
“My hat, what a man you are!” exclaimed Rollinson. “But do you mean to say we are to give our concert in the dark?”
“We will not have the afternoon sun blindinghalf our audience. We will have the auditorium in a cool twilight, and we will have lamp-light on our platform—just that mellow and flattering light in which elderly women look young and young women angelic.”
“We’ll leave everything to you,” cried the curate. “I think we ought to leave him free scope; ought we not, Mrs. Greswold?”
Mildred assented. Pamela was enthusiastic. This concert was to be one of the events of her life. Castellani had discovered that she possessed a charming mezzo-soprano. She was to sing a duet with him. O, what rapture! A duet of his own composition, all about roses and love and death.
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,If I had but lived for thee;A life as long as the nightingale’s songWere enough for my heart and me.”
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,If I had but lived for thee;A life as long as the nightingale’s songWere enough for my heart and me.”
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,If I had but lived for thee;A life as long as the nightingale’s songWere enough for my heart and me.”
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
If I had but lived for thee;
A life as long as the nightingale’s song
Were enough for my heart and me.”
The words and the voices were interwoven in a melodious web; tenor and soprano entwined together—following and ever following like the phrases in an anthem.
The preparation of this one duet alone obligedMr. Castellani to be nearly every day at Enderby. A musician has inexhaustible patience in teaching his own music. Castellani hammered at every bar and every note with Pamela. He did not hesitate at unpleasant truth. She had received the most expensive instruction from a well-known singing-master, and, according to Castellani, everything she had been taught was wrong. “If you had been left alone to sing as the birds sing you would be ever so much better off,” he said; “the man has murdered a very fine organ. If I had had the teaching of you, you would have sung as well as Trebelli by this time.”
Pamela thrilled at the thought. O, to sing like some great singer—to be able to soar skyward on the wings of music—to sing ashesang! She had known him a fortnight by this time, and was deeply in love with him. In moments of confidence by the piano he called her Pamela, treating her almost as if she were a child, yet with a touch of gallantry always—an air that said, “You are beautiful, dear child, and you know it; but I have lived my life.” Before Mrs. Greswold he was more formal, and called her Miss Ransome.
All barriers were down now between Riverdale and the Manor. Mrs. Hillersdon was going to make an extra large house-party on purpose to patronise the concert. It was to be on the 7th of September: the partridge-shooting would be in full swing, and the shooters assembled. Mrs. Greswold had been to tea at Riverdale. There seemed to be no help for it, and George Greswold was apparently indifferent.
“My dearest, your purity of mind will be in no danger from Mrs. Hillersdon. Even were she still Louise Lorraine, she could not harm you—and you know I am not given to consider thequ’on dire t’onin such a case. Let her come here by all means, so long as she is not obnoxious to you.”
“She is far from that. I think she has the most delightful manners of any woman I ever met.”
“So, no doubt, had Circe, yet she changed men into swine.”
“Mr. Cancellor would not believe in her if she were not a good woman.”
“I should set a higher value on Cancellor’s opinion if he were more of a man of the world, andless of a bigot. See what nonsense he talked about the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill.”
“Nonsense! O, George, if you knew how it distressed me to hear you take the other side—the unchristian side!”
“I can find no word of Christ’s against such marriages, and the Church of old was always ready with a dispensation for any such union, if it was made worth the Church’s while to be indulgent. It was the earnest desire of the Roman Catholic world that Philip should marry Elizabeth. You are Cancellor’s pupil, Mildred, and I cannot wonder if he has made you something of a bigot.”
“He is the noblest and most unselfish of men.”
“I admit his unselfishness—the purity of his intentions—the tenderness of his heart; but I deny his nobility. Ecclesiastic narrow-mindedness spoils a character that might have been perfect had it been less hampered by tradition. Cancellor is a couple of centuries behind the time. His Church is the Church of Laud.”
“I thought you admired and loved him, George,” said Mildred regretfully.
“I admire his good qualities, I love him for his thoroughness; but our creeds are wide apart. I cannot even pretend to think as he thinks.”
This confession increased Mildred’s sadness. She would have had her husband think as she thought, believe as she believed, in all spiritual things. The beloved child they had lost was waiting for them in heaven; and she would fain that they should both tread the same path to that better world where there would be no more tears, no more death—where day and night would be alike in the light of the great Throne. She shuddered at the thought of any difference of creed on her husband’s part, shuddered at that beginning of divergence which might end in infidelity. She had been educated by Clement Cancellor, and she thought as he thought. It seemed to her that she was surrounded by an atmosphere of doubt. In the books she read among the more cultivated people whom she met, she found the same tendency to speculative infidelity, pessimism, Darwinism, sociology, Pantheism, anything but Christian belief. The nearest approach to religious feeling seemed to be found in the theosophists, withtheir last fashionable Oriental improvements upon the teaching of Christ.
Clement Cancellor had trained her in the belief that there was one Church, one creed, one sovereign rule of life, outside which rigid boundary-line lay the dominion of Satan. And now, seeing her husband’s antagonism to her pastor upon this minor point of the marriage law, she began to ask herself whether those two might not stand as widely apart upon graver questions—whether George Greswold might not be one of those half-hearted Christians who attend their parish church and keep Sunday sacred because it is well to set a good example to their neighbours and dependants, while their own faith is little more than a memory of youthful beliefs, the fading reflection of a sun that has sunk below the horizon.
She had discovered her husband capable of a suppression of truth that was almost as bad as falsehood; and now having begun to doubt his conscientiousness, it was not unnatural that she should begin to doubt his religious feeling.
“Had he been as deeply religious as I thought him, he would not have so deceived me,” she toldherself, still brooding upon that mystery of his first marriage.
Castellani’s presence in the house was a continual irritation to her. It tortured her to think that he knew more of her husband’s past life than was known to her. She longed to question him, yet refrained, feeling that there would be unspeakable meanness, treachery even, in obtaining any information about her husband’s past life except from his own lips. He had chosen to keep silence, he who could so easily have explained all things; and it was her duty to submit.
She tried to be interested in the concert, which involved a good deal of work for herself, as she was to play all the accompaniments, the piano part in a concertante duet by De Bériot with an amateur violin player, and a Hungarian march by a modern classic by way of overture. There were rehearsals nearly every day, with much talk and tea-drinking. Enderby Manor seemed given over to bustle and gaiety—that grave old house, which to her mind ought to have been silent as a sepulchre, now that Lola’s voice could sound there never more, except in dreams.
“People must think I am forgetting her,” she said to herself with a sigh, when half-a-dozen carriages had driven away from the door, after two hours of bustle and confusion, much discussion as to the choice of songs and the arrangement of the programme, which everybody wanted different.
“I cannot possibly sing ‘The Three Fishers’ after Captain Scobell’s ‘Wanderer,’” protested Lady Millborough. “It would never do to have two dismal songs in succession.”
Yet when it was proposed that her ladyship’s song should succeed Mr. Rollinson’s admirable rendering of George Grossmith’s “He was such a Careless Man,” she distinctly refused to sing immediately after a comic song.
“I am not going to take the taste of Mr. Rollinson’s vulgarity out of people’s mouths,” she told Mildred, in an audible aside.
To these God-gifted vocalists the accompanist was as an inferior being, a person with a mere mechanical gift of playing anything set before her with taste and style. They treated her as if she had been a machine.
“If you wouldn’t mind going over our duet just once more, I think we should feel more comfortable in it,” said one of the two Miss Tadcasters, who were to take the roof off, metaphorically, in the Norma duet.
Mildred toiled with unwavering good-nature, and suppressed her shudders at many a false note, and cast oil on the waters when the singers were inclined to quarrel. She was glad of the drudgery that kept her fingers and her mind occupied; she was glad of any distraction that changed the current of her thoughts.
It was the day before the concert. César Castellani had established himself asl’ami de la maison, a person who had the right to come in and out as he liked, whose coming and going made no difference to the master of the house. Had George Greswold’s mind been less abstracted from the business of every-day life he might have seen danger to Pamela Ransome’s peace of mind in the frequent presence of the Italian, and he might have considered it his duty, as the young lady’s kinsman, to haverestricted Mr. Castellani’s privileges. But the blow which had crushed George Greswold’s heart a little more than a year ago had left him in somewise a broken man. He had lost all interest in the common joys and occupations of every-day life. His days were spent for the most part in long walks or rides in the loneliest places he could find, his only evening amusement was found in books, and those books of a kind which engrossed his attention and took him out of himself. His wife’s companionship was always precious to him; but their intercourse had lost all its old gaiety and much of the old familiarity. There was an indefinable something which held them asunder even when they were sitting in the same room, or pacing side by side, just as of old, upon the lawn in front of the drawing-room, or idling in their summer parlour in the shade of the cedars.
Again and again in the last three weeks some question about the past had trembled upon Mildred’s lips as she sat at work by the piano where Castellani played in dreamy idleness, wandering from one master to another, or extemporising after his owncapricious fancies. Again and again she had struggled against the temptation and had conquered. No, she would not stoop to a meanness. She would not be disloyal to her husband by so much as one idle question.
To-day Castellani was in high spirits, proud of to-morrow’s anticipated success, in which his own exertions would count for much. He sat at the piano in a leisure hour after tea. All the performers had gone, after the final adjustment of every detail. Mildred sat idle with her head resting against the cushion of a high-backed armchair, exhausted by the afternoon’s labours. Pamela stood by the piano watching and listening delightedly as Castellani improvised.
“I will give you my musical transcript of St. Partridge Day,” he said, smiling down at the notes as he played a lively melody with little rippling runs in the treble and crisp staccato chords in the bass. “This is morning, and all the shooters are on tip-toe with delight—a misty morning,” gliding into a dreamy legato movement as he spoke. “You can scarcely see the hills yonder, and the sun is not yetup. See there he leaps above that bank of purple cloud, and all is brightness,” changing to crashing chords in the bass and brilliant arpeggios in the treble. “Hark! there is chanticleer. How shrill he peals in the morning air! The dogs are leaving the kennel—and now the gates are open, dogs and men are in the road. You can hear the steady tramp of the clumsy shooting-boots—your dreadful English boots—and the merry music of the dogs. Pointers, setters, spaniels, smooth beasts and curly beasts, shaking the dew from the hedgerows as they scramble along the banks, flying over the ditches—creatures of lightning swiftness; yes, even those fat heavy spaniels which seem made to sprawl and snap at flies in the sunshine or snore beside the fire.”
He talked in brief snatches, playing all the time—playing with the easy brilliancy, the unerring grace of one to whom music is a native tongue—as natural a mode of thought-expression as speech itself. His father had trained him to improvise, weaving reminiscences of all his favourite composers into those dreamy reveries. They had sat side by side, father and son, each following the bent of hisown fancy, yet quick to adapt it to the other, now leading, now following. They had played together as Moscheles and Mendelssohn used to play, delighting in each other’s caprices.
“I hope I don’t bore you very much,” said Castellani, looking up at Mildred as she sat silent, the fair face and pale gold hair defined against the olive brocade of the chair cushion.
He looked up at her in wondering admiration, as at a beautiful picture. How lovely she was, with a loveliness that grew upon him, and took possession of his fancy and his senses with a strengthening hold day by day. It was a melancholy loveliness, the beauty of a woman whose life had come to a dead stop, in whose breast hope and love were dead—or dormant.
“Not dead,” he told himself, “only sleeping. Whose shall be the spell to awaken the sleepers. Who shall be the Orpheus to bring this sweet Eurydice from the realms of Death?”
Such thoughts were in his mind as he sat looking at her, waiting for her answer, playing all the while, telling her how fair she was in the tenderestvariations of an old German air whose every note breathed passionate love.
“How sweet!” murmured Pamela; “what an exquisite melody!” taking some of the sweetness to herself. “How could such sweetness weary any one with the ghost of an ear? You are not bored by it, are you, aunt?”
“Bored? no, it is delightful,” answered Mildred, rousing herself from a reverie. “My thoughts went back to my childhood while you were playing. I never knew but one other person who had that gift of improvisation, and she used to play to me when I was a child. She was almost a child herself, and of course she was very inferior to you as a pianist; but she would sit and play to me for an hour in the twilight, inventing new melodies, or playing recollections of old melodies, describing in music. The old fairy tales are for ever associated with music in my mind, because of those memories. I believe she was highly gifted in music.”
“Music of a high order is not an uncommon gift among women of sensitive temperament,” said Castellani musingly. “I take it to be only anothername for sympathy. Want of musical feeling is want of sympathy. Shakespeare knew that when he declared the non-musical man to be by nature a villain. I could no more imagineyouwithout the gift of music than I could imagine the stars without the quality of light. Mr. Greswold’s first wife was a good musician, as no doubt you know.”
“You heard her play—and sing?” faltered Mildred, avoiding a direct reply.
The sudden mention of her dead rival’s name had quickened the beating of her heart. She had longed to question him and had refrained; and now, without any act of hers, he had spoken, and she was going to hear something about that woman whose existence was a mystery to her, whose Christian name she had never heard.
“Yes, I heard her several times at parties at Nice. She was much admired for her musical talents. She was not a grand singer, but she had been well taught, and she had exquisite taste, and knew exactly the kind of music that suited her best. She was one of the attractions at the Palais Montano, where one heard only the best music.”
“I think you said the other day that you did not meet her often,” said Mildred. “My husband could hardly have forgotten you had you met frequently.”
“I can scarcely say that we met frequently, and our meetings were such as Mr. Greswold would not be very likely to remember. I am not a remarkable man now, and I was a very insignificant person fifteen years ago. I was only asked to people’s houses because I could sing a little, and because my father had a reputation in the South as a composer. I was never introduced to your husband, but I was presented to his wife—as a precocious youth with some pretensions to a tenor voice—and I found her very charming—after her own particular style.”
“Was she a beautiful woman?” asked Mildred. “I—I—have never talked about her to my husband, she died so young, and—”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Castellani, as she hesitated. “Of course you would not speak of her. There are things that cannot be spoken about. There is always a skeleton in every life—not more in Mr. Greswold’s past than in that ofother people, perhaps, could we know all histories. I was wrong to speak of her. Her name escaped me unawares.”
“Pray don’t apologise,” said Mildred, indignant at something in his tone, which hinted at wrong-doing on her husband’s part. “There can be no reason why you should keep silence—to me; though any mention of an old sorrow might wound him. I know my husband too well not to know that he must have behaved honourably in every relation of life—before I married him as well as afterwards. I only asked a very simple question: was my predecessor as beautiful as she was gifted?”
“No. She was charming, piquant, elegant, spirituelle, but she was not handsome. I think she was conscious of that want of beauty, and that it made her sensitive, and even bitter. I have heard her say hard things of women who were handsomer than herself. She had a scathing tongue and a capricious temper, and she was not a favourite with her own sex, though she was very much admired by clever men. I know that as a lad I thought her one of the brightest women I had ever met.”
“It was sad that she should die so young,” said Mildred.
She would not for worlds that this man should know the extent of her ignorance about the woman who had borne her husband’s name. She spoke vaguely, hoping that he would take it for granted she knew all.
“Yes,” assented Castellani with a sigh, “her death was infinitely sad.”
He spoke as of an event of more than common sadness—a calamity that had been in somewise more tragical than untimely death must needs be.
Mildred kept silence, though her heart ached with shapeless forebodings, and though it would have been an unspeakable relief to know the worst rather than to feel the oppression of this mystery.
Castellani rose to take leave. He was paler than he had been before the conversation began, and he had a troubled air. Pamela looked at him with sympathetic distress. “I am afraid you are dreadfully tired,” she said, as they shook hands.
“I am never tired in this house,” he answered;and Pamela appropriated the compliment by her vivid blush.
Mildred shook hands with him mechanically and in silence. She was hardly conscious of his leaving the room. She rose and went out into the garden, while Pamela sat down to the piano and began singing her part in the everlasting duet. She never sang anything else nowadays. It was a perpetual carol of admiration for the author ofNepenthe.
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,If I had but lived for thee;’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fadesOver the western sea,”
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,If I had but lived for thee;’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fadesOver the western sea,”
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,If I had but lived for thee;’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fadesOver the western sea,”
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
If I had but lived for thee;
’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fades
Over the western sea,”
she warbled, while Mildred paced slowly to and fro in front of the cedars, brooding over every word Castellani had spoken about her husband’s first wife.
“Her death was infinitely sad.”
Why infinitely? The significance of the word troubled her. It conjured up all manner of possibilities. Why infinitely sad? All death is sad. The death of the young especially so. But to say even of a young wife’s death that it was infinitely sad would seem to lift it out of the region of humanity’scommon doom. That qualifying word hinted at a tragical fate rather than a young life cut short by any ordinary malady. There had been something in Castellani’s manner which accentuated the meaning of his words. That troubled look, that deep sigh, that hurried departure, all hinted at a painful story which he knew and did not wish to reveal.
He had in a manner apologised for speaking of George Greswold’s first wife. There must have been a reason for that. He was not a man to say meaningless things out ofgaucherie; not a man to blunder and equivocate from either shyness or stupidity. He had implied that Mr. Greswold was not likely to talk about his first marriage—that he would naturally avoid any allusion to his first wife.
Why naturally? Why should he not speak of that past life? Men are not ordinarily reticent upon such subjects. And that a man should suppress the fact of a first marriage altogether would suggest memories so dark as to impel an honourable man to stoop to a tacit lie rather than face the horror of revelation.
She walked up and down that fair stretch ofvelvet turf upon which her feet had trodden so lightly in the happy years that were gone—gone never to be recalled, as it seemed to her, carrying with them all that she had ever known of domestic peace, of wedded bliss. Never again could they two be as they had been. The mystery of the past had risen up between them—like some hooded phantom, a vaguely threatening figure, a hidden face—to hold them apart for evermore.
“If he had only trusted me,” she thought despairingly, “there is hardly any sin that I would not have forgiven for love of him. Why could he not believe in my love well enough to know that I should judge him leniently—if there had been wrong-doing on his side—if—if—”
She had puzzled over that hidden past, trying to penetrate the darkness, imagining the things that might have happened—infidelity on the wife’s part—infidelity on the husband’s side—another and fatal attachment taking the place of loyal love. Sin of some kind there must have been, she thought; for such dark memories could scarcely be sinless. But was husband or wife the sinner?
“Her death was infinitely sad.”
That sentence stood out against the dark background of mystery as if written in fire. That one fact was absolute. George Greswold’s first wife had died under circumstances of peculiar sadness; so painful that Castellani’s countenance grew pale and troubled at the very thought of her death.
“I cannot endure it,” Mildred thought at last, in an agony of doubt. “I will not suffer this torture for another day. I will appeal to him. I will question him. If he values my love and my esteem he will answer faithfully. It must be painful for him, painful for me; but it will be far better for us both in the long-run. Anything will be better than these torturing fears. I am his wife, and I have a right to know the truth.”
The dressing-gong summoned her back to the house. Her husband was in the drawing-room half-an-hour afterwards, when she went down to dinner. He was still in his jacket and knickerbockers, just as he had come in from a long ramble.
“Will you forgive me if I dine with you in these clothes, Mildred, and you, Pamela?” to the damselin white muslin, whom he had just surprised at the piano still warbling her honeyed strain about death and the roses; “I came in five minutes ago—dead beat. I have been in the forest, and had a tramp with the deerhounds over Bramble Hill.”
“You walk too far, George. You are looking dreadfully tired.”
“I’m sure you needn’t apologise for your dress on my account,” said Pamela. “Henry is a perfect disgrace half his time. He hates evening-clothes, and I sometimes fear he hates soap-and-water. He can reconcile his conscience to any amount of dirt so long as he has his cold tub in the morning. He thinks that one sacrifice to decency justifies anything. I have had to sit next him at dinner when he came straight from rats,” concluded Pamela, with a shudder. “But Rosalind is so foolishly indulgent. She would spoil twenty husbands.”
“And you, I suppose, would be a martinet to one?” said Greswold, smiling at the girl’s animated face.
“It would depend. If I were married to an artist I could forgive any neglect of the proprieties.One does not expect a man of that kind to be the slave of conventionalities; but a commonplace person like Sir Henry Mountford has nothing to recommend him but his tailor.”
They went to dinner, and Pamela’s prattle relieved the gloom which had fallen upon husband and wife. George Greswold saw that there were signs of a new trouble in his wife’s face. He sat for nearly an hour alone with the untouched decanters before him, and with Kassandra’s head upon his knee. The dog always knew when his thoughts were darkest, and would not be repulsed at such times. She was not obtrusive: she only wanted to bear him company.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he left the dining-room. He looked in at the drawing-room door, and saw his wife and his niece sitting at work, silent both.
“I am going to the library to write some letters, Mildred,” he said: “don’t sit up for me.”
She rose quickly and went over to him.
“Let me have half-an-hour’s talk with you first, George,” she said, in an earnest voice: “I want so much to speak to you.”
“My dearest, I am always at your service,” he answered quietly; and they went across the hall together, to that fine old room which was essentially the domain of the master of the house.
It was a large room with three long narrow windows—unaltered from the days of Queen Anne—looking out to the carriage-drive in the front of the house, and the walls were lined with books, in severely architectural bookcases. There was a lofty marble chimneypiece, richly decorated, and in front of the fireplace there was an old-fashioned knee-hole desk, at which Mr. Greswold was wont to sit. There was a double reading-lamp ready-lighted for him upon this desk, and there was no other light in the room. By this dim light the sombre colouring of oak bookcases and maroon velvet window-curtains deepened to black. The spacious room had almost a funereal aspect, like that awful banqueting-hall to which Domitian invited his parasites and straightway frightened them to death.
“Well, Mildred, what is the matter?” asked Greswold, when his wife had seated herself beside him in front of the massive oak desk at which allthe business of his estate had been transacted since he came to Enderby. “There is nothing amiss, love, I hope, to make you so earnest?”
“There is something very much amiss, George,” she answered. “Forgive me if I pain you by what I have to say—by the questions I am going to ask. I cannot help giving you pain, truly and dearly as I love you. I cannot go on suffering as I have suffered since that wretched Sunday afternoon when I discovered how you had deceived me—you whom I so trusted, so honoured as the most upright among men.”
“It is a little hard that you should say I deceived you, Mildred. I suppressed one fact which had no bearing upon my relations with you.”
“You must have signed your name to a falsehood in the register, if you described yourself as a bachelor.”
“I did not so describe myself. I confided the fact of my first marriage to your father on the eve of our wedding. I told him why I had been silent—told him that my past life had been steeped in bitterness. He was generous enough to acceptmy confidence and to ask no questions. My bride was too shy and too agitated to observe what I wrote in the register, or else she might have noted the word ‘widower’ after my name.”
“Thank God you did not sign your name to a lie,” said Mildred, with a sigh of relief.
“I am sorry my wife of fourteen years should think me capable of falsehood on the document that sealed my fate with hers.”
“O, George, I know how true you are—how true and upright you have been in every word and act of your life since we two have been one. It is not in my nature to misjudge you. I cannot think you capable of wrong-doing to any one under strongest temptation. I cannot believe that Fate could set such a snare for you as could entrap you into one dishonourable act; but I am tortured by the thought of a past life of which I know nothing. Why did you hide your marriage from me when we were lovers? Why are you silent and secret now, when I am your wife, the other half of yourself, ready to sympathise with you, to share the burden of dark memories? Trust me, George. Trust me,dear love, and let us be again as we have been, united in every thought.”
“You do not know what you are asking me, Mildred,” said George Greswold, in his deep, grave voice, looking at her with haggard reproachful eyes. “You cannot measure the torture you are inflicting by this aimless curiosity.”
“You cannot measure the agony of doubt which I have suffered since I knew that you loved another woman before you loved me—loved her so well that you cannot bear even to speak of that past life which you lived with her—regret her so intensely that now, after fourteen years of wedded life with me, the mere memory of that lost love can plunge you into gloom and despair,” said Mildred passionately.
That smothered fire of jealousy which had been smouldering in her breast for weeks broke out all at once in impetuous speech. She no longer cared what she said. Her only thought was that the dead love had been dearer than the living, that she had been cozened by a lover whose heart had never been wholly hers.
“You are very cruel, Mildred,” her husband answered quietly. “You are probing an old wound, and a deep one, to the quick. You wrong yourself more than you wrong me by causeless jealousy and unworthy doubts. Yes, I did conceal the fact of my first marriage—not because I had loved my wife too well, but because I had not loved her well enough. I was silent about a period of my life which was one of intense misery—which it was my duty to myself to forget, if it were possible to forget—which it was perilous to remember. My only chance of happiness—or peace of mind—lay in oblivion of that bitter time. It was only when I loved you that I began to believe forgetfulness was possible. I courted oblivion by every means in my power. I told myself that the man who had so suffered was a man who had ceased to exist. George Ransome was dead. George Greswold stood on the threshold of a new life, with infinite capacities for happiness. I told myself that I might be a beloved and honoured husband—which I had never been—a useful member of society—which I had not been hitherto. Until that hour all things had beenagainst me. With you for my wife all things would be in my favour. For thirteen happy years this promise of our marriage morning was fully realised; then came our child’s death; and now comes your estrangement.”
“I am not estranged, George. It is only my dread of the beginning of estrangement which tortures me. Since that man spoke of your first wife, I have brooded perpetually upon that hidden past. It is weak, I know, to have done so. I ought to trust unquestioningly: but I cannot, I cannot. I love you too well to love without jealousy.”
“Well, let the veil be lifted then, since it must be so. Ask what questions you please, and I will answer them—as best I can.”
“You are very good,” she faltered, drawing a little nearer to him, leaning her head against his shoulder as she talked to him, and laying her hand on his as it lay before him on the desk, tightly clenched. “Tell me, dear, were you happy with your first wife?”
“I was not.”
“Not even in the beginning?”
“Hardly in the beginning. It was an ill-advised union, the result of impulse.”
“But she loved you very dearly, perhaps.”
“She loved me—dearly—after her manner of loving.”
“And you did not love her?”
“It is a cruel thing you force me to say, Mildred. No, I did not love her.”
“Had you been married long when she died?”
She felt a quivering movement in the clenched hand on which her own lay caressingly, and she heard him draw a long and deep breath.
“About a year.”
“Her death was a sad one, I know. Did she go out of her mind before she died?”
“No.”
“Did she leave you—or do you any great wrong?”
“No.”
“Were you false to her, George—O, forgive me, forgive me—but there must have been something more sad than common sadness, and it might be that some new and fatal love—”
“There was no such thing,” he answered sternly.“I was true to my duties as a husband. It was not a long trial—only a year. Even a profligate might keep faith for so short a span.”
“I see you will not confide in me. I will ask no more questions, George. That kind of catechism will not make us more in sympathy with each other. I will ask you nothing more—except—just one question—a woman’s question. Was your first wife beautiful in your eyes.”
“She was not beautiful; but she was intellectual, and she had an interesting countenance—a face that attracted me at first sight. It was even more attractive to me than the faces of handsomer women. But if you want to know what your fancied rival was like you need not languish in ignorance,” with some touch of scorn. “I have her photograph in this desk. I have kept it for my days of humiliation, to remind me of what I have been and what I may be again. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes, George, if it will not pain you too much to show it to me.”
“Do not talk of pain. You have stirred the waters of Marah so deeply that one more bitter dropcannot signify.” He unlocked his desk as he spoke, lifted the lid, which was sustained by a movable upright, and groped among the accumulation of papers and parchments inside.
The object for which he was seeking was at the back of the desk, under all the papers. He found it by touch: a morocco case containing a cabinet photograph. Mildred stood up beside him, with one hand on his shoulder as he searched.
He handed her the case without a word. She opened it in silence and looked at the portrait within. A small, delicately-featured face, with large dark eyes—eyes almost too large for the face—a slender throat, thin sloping shoulders—eyes that looked out of the picture with a strange intensity—a curious alertness in the countenance, as of a woman made up of nerves and emotions, a nature wanting the element of repose.
Mildred stared at the picture three or four seconds, and then with a choking sound like a strangled sob fell unconscious at her husband’s feet.
END OF VOL. I.