Transcriber’s Note
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THE FATAL THREE
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
“ISHMAEL,” “MOHAWKS,”
ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
Book the Second.
LACHESIS; OR THE METER OF DESTINY.
CHAP. PAGE
I. A WIFE AND NO WIFE 3
II. THE SINS OF THE FATHERS 33
III. THE VERDICT OF HER CHURCH 45
IV. NO LIGHT 68
V. THE FUTURE MIGHT BE DARKER 108
VI. HIGHER VIEWS 142
VII. THE TIME HAS COME 174
VIII. NOT PROVEN 208
IX. LOOKING BACK 241
BOOK THE SECOND.
LACHESIS; OR THE METER OF DESTINY.
CHAPTER I.
A WIFE AND NO WIFE.
Mr. Castellani’s existence was one of those social problems about
which the idle world loves to speculate. There are a good many people
in London to whom the idea of a fourth dimension is not half so
interesting as the notion of a man who lives by his wits, and yet
contrives to get himself dressed by a good tailor, and to obtain a
footing in some of the best houses at the smart end of the town. This
problem César Castellani had offered to the polite world of London for
the last three seasons.
Who is Mr. Castellani? was a question still asked by a good many people
who invited the gentleman to their houses, and made much of him. He
had not forced his way into society; nobody had the right to describe
him as a pushing person. He had slipped so insidiously into his place
in the social orbit that people had not yet left off wondering how
he came there, or who had been his sponsors. This kind of speculation
always stimulates the invention of the clever people; and these
affected to know a good deal more about Mr. Castellani than he knew
about himself.
“He came with magnificent credentials, and an account was opened for
him at Coutts’s before he arrived,” said Magnus Dudley, the society
poet, flinging back his long hair with a lazy movement of the large
languid head. “Of course, you know that he is a natural son of
Cavour’s?”
“Indeed! No, I never heard _that_. He is not like Cavour.”
“Of course not, but he is the image of his mother—one of the handsomest
women in Italy—a Duchess, and daughter of a Roman Prince, who could
trace his descent in an unbroken line from Germanicus. Castellani has
the blood of Caligula in his veins.”
“He looks like it; but I have heard on pretty good authority that he is
the son of a Milanese music-master.”
“There are people who will tell you his father wheeled a barrow and
sold penny ices in Whitechapel,” retorted Magnus. “People will say
anything.”
Thus and in much otherwise did society speculate; and in the meantime
Mr. Castellani’s circle was always widening. His book had been just
audacious enough and just clever enough to hit the gold in the literary
target. _Nepenthe_ had been one of the successes of the season before
last: and Mr. Castellani was henceforth to be known as the author of
_Nepenthe_. He had touched upon many things below the stars, and some
things beyond them. He had written of other worlds with the confidence
of a man who had been there. He had written of women with the air of a
Café de Paris Solomon; and he had written of men as if he had never met
one.
A man who could write a successful book, and could sing and play
divinely, was a person to be cultivated in feminine society. Very few
men cared to be intimate with Mr. Castellani, but among women his
influence was indisputable. He treated them with a courtly deference
which charmed them, and he made them his slaves. No Oriental despot
ever ruled more completely than César Castellani did in half-a-dozen
of those drawing-rooms which give the tone to scores of other drawing
rooms between Mayfair and Earl’s Court. He contrived to be in request
from the dawn to the close of the London season. He had made a favour
of going to Riverdale; and now, although it suited his purpose to be
there, he made a favour of staying.
“If it were not for the delight of being here, I should be in one of
the remotest valleys in the Tyrol,” he told Mrs. Hillersdon. “I have
never stayed in England so long after the end of the season. A wild
longing to break loose from the bonds of Philistinism generally seizes
me at this time of the year. I want to go away, and away, and ever away
from my fellow-men. I should like to go and live in a tomb, like the
girl in Ouida’s _In Maremma_. My thirst for solitude is a disease.”
This from a man who spent the greater part of his existence dawdling
in drawing-rooms and boudoirs sounded paradoxical; but paradoxes are
accepted graciously from a man who has written the book of the season.
Louise Hillersdon treated Castellani like a favourite son. At his
bidding she brought out the old guitar which had slumbered in its case
for nearly a decade, and sang the old Spanish songs, and struck the
strings with the old dashing sweep of a delicate hand, and graceful
curve of a rounded arm.
“When you sing I could believe you as young as Helen when Paris stole
her,” said Castellani, lolling along the sofa beside the low chair in
which she was sitting; “I cease to envy the men who knew you when you
were a girl.”
“My dear Castellani, I feel old enough to be your grandmother; unless
you are really the person I sometimes take you for—”
“Who may that be?”
“The Wandering Jew.”
“No matter what my creed or where I have wandered, since I am so happy
as to find a haven here. Granted that I can remember Nero’s beautiful
Empress, and Faustina, and all that procession of fair women who
illumine the Dark Ages—and Mary of Scotland, and Emma Hamilton, blonde
and brunette, pathetic and _espiègle_, every type, and every variety.
It is enough for me to find perfection here.”
“If you only knew how sick I am of that kind of nonsense!” said Mrs.
Hillersdon, smiling at him, half in amusement, half in scorn.
“O, I know that you have drunk the wine of men’s worship to satiety!
Yet if you and I had lived upon the same plane, I would have taught
you that among a hundred adorers one could love you better than all
the rest. But it is too late. Our souls may meet and touch perhaps
thousands of years hence in a new incarnation.”
“Do you talk this kind of nonsense to Mrs. Greswold or her niece?”
“No; with them I am all dulness and propriety. Neither lady is
_simpatica_. Miss Ransome is a frank, good-natured girl—much too
frank—with all the faults of her species. I find the genus girl
universally detestable.”
“Miss Ransome has about fifteen hundred a year. I suppose you know
that?”
“Has she really? If ever I marry I hope to do better than that,”
answered César with easy insolence. “She would be a very nice match
for a country parson; that Mr. Rollinson, for instance, who is getting
up the concert.”
“Then Miss Ransome is not your attraction at Enderby? It is Mrs.
Greswold who draws you.”
“Why should I be drawn?” he asked, with his languid air. “I go there in
sheer idleness. They like me to make music for them; they fool me and
praise me; and it is pleasant to be fooled by two pretty women.”
“Does Mrs. Greswold take any part in the fooling? She looks like
marble.”
“There is fire under that marble. Mrs. Greswold is romantically in love
with her husband: but that is a complaint which is not incurable.”
“He is not an agreeable man,” said Louise, remembering how long George
Greswold and his wife had kept aloof from her. “And he does not look a
happy man.”
“He is not happy.”
“You know something about him—more than we all know?” asked Louise,
with keen curiosity.
“Not much. I met him at Nice before he came into his property. He was
not a very fortunate person at that time, and he doesn’t care to be
reminded of it now.”
“Was he out-at-elbows, or in debt?”
“Neither. His troubles did not take that form. But I am not a gossip.
Let the past be past, as Gœthe says. We can’t change it, and it is
charity to forget it. If we are not sure about what we touch and
hear and see—or fancy we hear and touch and see—in the present, how
much less can we be sure of any reality or external existence in the
past! It is all done away with—vanished. How can we know that it ever
was? A grave here and there is the only witness; and even the grave
and the name on the headstone may be only a projection of our own
consciousness. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”
“That is a politely circuitous manner of refusing to tell me anything
about Mr. Greswold when his name was Ransome. No matter. I shall find
other people who know the scandal, I have no doubt. Your prevarication
assures me that there was a scandal.”
This was on the eve of the concert at Enderby, at about the same
hour when George Greswold showed Mildred his first wife’s portrait.
Castellani and his hostess were alone together in the lady’s
morning-room, while Hillersdon and his other guests were in the
billiard-room on the opposite side of a broad corridor. Mrs. Hillersdon
had a way of turning over her visitors to her husband when they bored
her. Gusts of loud talk and louder laughter came across the corridor
now and again as they played pool. There were times when Louise was
too tired of life to endure the burden of commonplace society. She
liked to dream over a novel. She liked to talk with a clever young man
like Castellani. His flatteries amused her, and brought back a faint
flavour of youth and a dim remembrance of the day when all men praised
her, when she had known herself without a rival. Now other women were
beautiful, and she was only a tradition. She had toiled hard to live
down her past, to make the world forget that she had ever been Louise
Lorraine: yet there were moments in which she felt angry to find that
old personality of hers so utterly forgotten, when she was tempted to
cry out, “What rubbish you talk about your Mrs. Egremont, your Mrs.
Linley Varden, your professional beauties and fine lady actresses. Have
you never heard of ME—Louise Lorraine?”
* * * * *
The drawing-rooms at Enderby Manor had been so transformed under Mr.
Castellani’s superintendence, and with the help of his own dexterous
hands, that there was a unanimous expression of surprise from the
county families as they entered that region of subdued light and
æsthetic draperies between three and half-past three o’clock on the
afternoon of the concert.
The Broadwood grand stood on a platform in front of a large bay-window,
draped as no other hand could drape a piano, with embroidered Persian
curtains and many-hued Algerian stuffs, striped with gold; and against
the sweeping folds of drapery rose a group of tall golden lilies out
of a shallow yellow vase. A cluster of gloxinias were massed near the
end of the piano, and a few of the most artistic chairs in the house
were placed about for the performers. The platform, instead of being
as other platforms, in a straight line across one side of the room,
was placed diagonally, so as to present the picturesque effect of an
angle in the background, an angle lighted with clusters of wax-candles,
against a forest of palms.
All the windows had been darkened save those in the further
drawing-room, which opened into the garden, and even these were shaded
by Spanish hoods, letting in coolness and the scent of flowers, with
but little daylight. Thus the only bright light was on the platform.
The auditorium was arranged with a certain artistic carelessness:
the chairs in curved lines to accommodate the diagonal line of the
platform; and this fact, in conjunction with the prettiness of the
stage, put every one in good temper before the concert began.
The concert was as other concerts: clever amateur singing, excellent
amateur playing, fine voices cultivated to a certain point, and
stopping just short of perfect training.
César Castellani’s three little songs—words by Heine—music, Schubert
and Jensen—were the hit of the afternoon. There were few eyes that
were unclouded by tears, even among those listeners to whom the words
were in an unknown language. The pathos was in the voice of the singer.
The duet was performed with _aplomb_, and elicited an encore, on which
Pamela and Castellani sang the old-fashioned “Flow on, thou shining
river,” which pleased elderly people, moving them like a reminiscence
of long-vanished youth.
Pamela’s heart beat furiously as she heard the applause, and she
curtsied herself off the platform in a whirl of delight. She felt
that it was in her to be a great public singer—a second Patti—if—if
she could be taught and trained by Castellani. Her head was full of
vague ideas—a life devoted to music—three years’ hard study in Italy—a
_début_ at La Scala—a world-wide renown achieved in a single night. She
even wondered how to Italianise her name. Ransomini? No, that would
hardly do. Pamelani—Pameletta? What awkward names they were—christian
and surname both!
And then, crimsoning at the mere thought, she saw in large letters,
“MADAME CASTELLANI.”
How much easier to make a great name in the operatic world with a
husband to fight one’s battles and get the better of managers!
“With an income of one’s own it ought to be easy to make one’s way,”
thought Pamela, as she stood behind the long table in the dining-room,
dispensing tea and coffee, with the assistance of maids and footmen.
Her head was so full of these bewildering visions that she was a
little less on the alert than she ought to have been for shillings and
half-crowns, whereby a few elderly ladies got their tea and coffee for
nothing, not being asked for payment, and preferring to consider the
entertainment gratis.
Mildred’s part of the concert was performed to perfection—not a false
note in an accompaniment, or a fault in the _tempo_. Lady Millborough,
a very exacting personage, declared she had never been so well
supported in her _cheval de bataille_, the finale to _La Cenerentola_.
But many among the audience remarked that they had never seen Mrs.
Greswold look so ill; and both Rollinson and Castellani were seriously
concerned about her.
“You are as white as marble,” said the Italian. “I know you are
suffering.”
“I assure you it is nothing. I have not been feeling very well lately,
and I had a sleepless night. There is nothing that need give any one
the slightest concern. You may be sure I shall not break down. I am
very much interested in the painted window,” she added, with a faint
smile.
“It is not that I fear,” said Castellani, in a lower voice. “It is of
you and your suffering I am thinking.”
George Greswold did not appear at the concert: he was engaged elsewhere.
“I cannot think how Uncle George allowed himself to have an appointment
at Salisbury this afternoon,” said Pamela. “I know he doats on music.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t doat upon it quite so well as to like to see his
house turned topsy-turvy,” said Lady Millborough, who would have
allowed every philanthropic scheme in the country to collapse for want
of cash rather than suffer her drawing-room to be pulled about by
amateur scene-shifters.
Mrs. Hillersdon and her party occupied a prominent position near the
platform; but that lady was too clever to make herself conspicuous. She
talked to the people who were disposed to friendliness—their numbers
had increased with the advancing years—and she placidly ignored those
who still held themselves aloof from “that horrid woman.” Nor did she
in any way appropriate Castellani as her special _protégé_ when the
people round her were praising him. She took everything that happened
with the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere, and may often
be found among women whom the Vere de Veres despise.
* * * * *
All was over: the last of the carriages had rolled away. Castellani had
been carried off in Mrs. Hillersdon’s barouche, no one inviting him
to stay at the Manor House. Rollinson lingered to repeat his effusive
thanks for Mrs. Greswold’s help.
“It has been a glorious success,” he exclaimed; “glorious! Who would
have thought there was so much amateur talent available within thirty
miles? And Castellani was a grand acquisition. We shall clear at least
seventy pounds for the window. I don’t know how I can ever thank you
enough for giving us the use of your lovely rooms, Mrs. Greswold, and
for letting us pull them about as we liked.”
“That did not matter—much,” Mildred said faintly, as she stood by
the drawing-room door in the evening light, the curate lingering to
reiterate the assurance of his gratitude. “Everything can be arranged
again—easily.”
She was thinking, with a dull aching at her heart, that to her the
pulling about and disarrangement of those familiar rooms hardly
mattered at all. They were her rooms no longer. Enderby was never
more to be her home. It had been her happy home for thirteen gracious
years—years clouded with but one natural sorrow, in the loss of her
beloved father. And now that father’s ghost rose up before her, and
said, “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, and
because of my sin you must go forth from your happy home and forsake
the husband of your heart.”
She gave the curate an icy hand, and turned from him without another
word.
“Poor soul, she is dead-beat!” thought Rollinson, as he trudged home
to his lodgings over a joiner and builder’s shop: airy and comfortable
rooms enough, but odorous of sawdust, and a little too near the noises
of the workshop.
He could but think it odd that he had not been asked to dine at the
Manor, as he would have been in the ordinary course of events. He had
told the builder’s wife that he should most likely dine out, whereupon
that friendly soul had answered, “Why, of course they’ll ask you, Mr.
Rollinson. You know they’re always glad to see you.”
And now he had to return to solitude and a fresh-killed chop.
* * * * *
It was seven o’clock, and George Greswold had not yet come home from
Salisbury. Very few words had passed between him and his wife since
she fell fainting at his feet last night. He had summoned her maid,
and between them they had brought her back to consciousness, and
half carried her to her room. She would give no explanation of her
fainting-fit when the maid had left the room, and she was lying on her
bed, white and calm, with her husband sitting by her side. She told him
that she was tired, and that a sudden giddiness had come upon her. That
was all he could get from her.
“If you will ask me no questions, and leave me quite alone, I will try
to sleep, so that I may be fit for my work in the concert to-morrow,”
she pleaded. “I would not disappoint them for worlds.”
“I don’t think you need be over-anxious about them,” said her husband
bitterly. “There is more at stake than a painted window: there is your
peace and mine. Answer me only one question,” he said, with intensity
of purpose: “had your fainting-fit anything to do with the portrait of
my first wife?”
“I will tell you everything—after the concert to-morrow,” she answered;
“for God’s sake leave me to myself till then.”
“Let it be as you will,” he answered, rising suddenly, wounded by her
reticence.
He left the room without another word. She sprang up from her bed
directly he was gone, ran to the door and locked it, and then flung
herself on her knees upon the prie-dieu chair at the foot of a large
ivory crucifix which hung in a deep recess beside the old-fashioned
fireplace.
Here she knelt, in tears and prayer, deep into the night. Then for an
hour or more she walked up and down the room, absorbed in thought, by
the dim light of the night-lamp.
When the morning light came she went to a bookcase in a little closet
of a room opening out of the spacious old bedroom—a case containing
only devotional books, and of these she took out volume after
volume—Taylor’s _Rule of Conscience_, Hooker’s _Religious Polity_,
Butler, Paley—one after another, turning over the leaves, looking
through the indexes—searching for something which she seemed unable to
find anywhere.
“What need have I to see what others have thought?” she said to herself
at last, after repeated failure; “Clement Cancellor knows the right. I
could have no better guide than his opinion, and he has spoken. What
other law do I need? His law is the law of God.”
Not once did her eyes close in sleep all through that night, or in the
morning hours before breakfast. She made an excuse for breakfasting in
her dressing-room, a large, airy apartment, half boudoir. She was told
that Mr. Greswold had gone out early to see some horses at Salisbury,
and would not be back till dinner-time. He was to be met at the station
at half-past seven.
She had her morning to herself. Pamela was rehearsing her part in the
duet, and in “Flow on, thou shining river,” which was to be sung in
the event of an encore. That occupation, and the arrangement of her
toilet, occupied the young lady till luncheon—allowing for half-hourly
rushes about the lawn and shrubberies with Box, whose health required
activity, and whose social instincts yearned for companionship.
“He can’t get on with only Kassandra; she hasn’t intellect enough for
him,” said Pamela.
It was only ten minutes before the arrival of the performers that Mrs.
Greswold went down-stairs, pale as ashes, but ready for the ordeal. She
had put on a white gown with a little scarlet ribbon about it, lest
black should make her pallor too conspicuous.
And now it was seven o’clock, and she was alone. The curate had been
right in pronouncing her dead-beat; but she had some work before her
yet. She had been writing letters in the morning. Two of these she now
placed on the mantelpiece in her bedroom: one addressed to her husband,
the other to Pamela.
She had a bag packed—not one of those formidable dressing-bags which
weigh fifteen to twenty pounds—but a light Russia-leather bag, just
large enough to contain the essentials of the toilet. She put on a
neat little black bonnet and a travelling-cloak, and took her bag and
umbrella, and went down to the hall. She had given orders that the
carriage should call for her before going to the station, and she was
at the door ready to step into it when it came round.
She told the groom that she was to be put down at Ivy Cottage, and
was driven off unseen by the household, who were all indulging in a
prolonged tea-drinking after the excitement of the concert.
Ivy Cottage was within five minutes’ walk of Romsey Station: a little
red cottage, newly built, with three or four ivy plants languishing
upon a slack-baked brick wall, and just enough garden for the
proverbial cat to disport himself in at his ease—the swinging of cats
being no longer a popular English sport. There was nothing strange in
Mrs. Greswold alighting at Ivy Cottage—unless it were the hour of her
visit—for the small brick box was occupied by two maiden ladies of
small means: one a confirmed invalid; the other her patient nurse; whom
the lady of Enderby Manor often visited, and in whom she was known to
be warmly interested.
The coachman concluded that his mistress was going to spend a quarter
of an hour with the two old ladies, while he went on and waited for his
master at the station, and that he was to call for her on his return.
He did not even ask for her orders upon this point, taking them for
granted.
He was ten minutes too soon at the station, as every well-conducted
coachman ought to be.
“I’m to call for my mistress, sir,” he said, as Mr. Greswold stepped
into the brougham.
“Where?”
“At Ivy Cottage, sir: Miss Fisher’s.”
“Very good.”
The brougham pulled up at Ivy Cottage; and the groom got down and
knocked a resounding peal upon the Queen Anne knocker, it being hardly
possible nowadays to find a knocker that is not after the style of
Queen Anne, or a newly-built twenty-five pound a year cottage in any
part of rural England that does not offer a faint reminiscence of
Bedford Park.
The groom made his inquiry of the startled little maid-of-all-work,
fourteen years old last birthday, and already aspiring to better
herself as a vegetable-maid in a nobleman’s family.
Mrs. Greswold had not been at Ivy Cottage that evening.
George Greswold was out of the brougham by this time, hearing the
girl’s answer.
“Stop where you are,” he said to the coachman, and ran back to the
station, an evil augury in his mind.
He went to the up-platform, the platform at which he had alighted ten
minutes before.
“Did you see Mrs. Greswold here just now?” he asked the
station-master, with as natural an air as he could command.
“Yes, sir. She got into the up-train, sir; the train by which you came.
She came out of the waiting-room, sir, the minute after you left the
platform. You must just have missed her.”
“Yes, I have just missed her.”
He walked up and down the length of the platform two or three times in
the thickening dusk. Yes, he had missed her. She had left him. Such
a departure could mean only severance—some deep wound—which it might
take long to heal. It would all come right by and by. There could be no
such thing as parting between man and wife who loved each other as they
loved—who were incapable of falsehood or wrong.
What was this jealous fancy that had taken possession of her? This
unappeasable jealousy of the dead past—a passion so strong that it
had prompted her to rush away from him in this clandestine fashion,
to torture him by all the evidences of an inconsolable grief. His
heart was sick to death as he went back to the carriage, helpless to
do anything except go to his deserted home, and see what explanation
awaited him there.
It was half-past eight when the carriage drove up to the Manor House.
Pamela ran out into the hall to receive him.
“How late you are, uncle!” she cried, “and I can’t find aunt.
Everything is at sixes and sevens. The concert was a stupendous
success—and—only think!—_I_ was encored.”
“Indeed, dear!”
“Yes, my duet with him: and then we sang the other. They would have
liked a third, only we pretended not to understand. It would have made
all the others so fearfully savage if we had taken it.”
This speech was not a model of lucidity, but it might have been much
clearer and yet unintelligible to George Greswold.
“Do you mind dining alone to-night, my dear Pamela?” he said, trying
to speak cheerily. “Your aunt is out—and I—I have some letters to
write—and I lunched heavily at Salisbury.”
His heavy luncheon had consisted of a biscuit and a glass of beer
at the station. His important business had been a long ramble on
Salisbury Plain, alone with his troubled thoughts.
“Did your mistress leave any message for me?” he asked the butler.
“No, sir. Nobody saw my mistress go out. When Louisa went up to dress
her for dinner she was gone, sir—but Louisa said there was a letter for
you on the bedroom mantelpiece. Shall I send for it, sir?”
“No, no—I will go myself. Serve dinner at once. Miss Ransome will dine
alone.”
George Greswold went to the bedroom—that fine old room, the real Queen
Anne room, with thick walls and deep-set windows, and old window-seats,
and capacious recesses on each side of the high oak chimneypiece,
and richly-moulded wainscot, and massive panelled doors, a sober
eighteenth-century atmosphere in which it is a privilege to exist—a
spacious old room, with old Dutch furniture, of the pre-Chippendale
era, and early English china, Worcester simulating Oriental, Chelsea
striving after Dresden: a glorious old room, solemn and mysterious as a
church in the dim light of a pair of wax-candles which Louisa the maid
had lighted on the mantelpiece.
There, between the candles, appeared two letters: “George Greswold,
Esq.,” “Miss Ransome.”
The husband’s letter was a thick one, and the style of the penmanship
showed how the pen had hurried along, driven by the electric forces of
excitement and despair:
“MY BELOVED,—You asked me last night if the photograph which you
showed me had anything to do with my fainting-fit. It had everything
to do with it. That photograph is a portrait of my unhappy sister, my
cruelly-used, unacknowledged sister; and I, who have been your wife
fourteen years, know now that our marriage was against the law of God
and man—that I have never been legally your wife—that our union from
the first has been an unholy union, and for that unlawful marriage the
hand of God has been laid upon us—heavily—heavily—in chastisement, and
the darling of our hearts has been taken from us.
“‘Whom He loveth He chasteneth.’ He has chastened us, George—perhaps
to draw us nearer to Him. We were too happy, it may be, in this
temporal life—too much absorbed by our own happiness, living in a
charmed circle of love and gladness, till that awful chastisement came.
“There is but one course possible to me, my dear and honoured husband,
and that course lies in life-long separation. I am running away from
my dear home like a criminal, because I am not strong enough to stand
face to face with you and tell you what must be. We must do our best
to live out our lives asunder, George; we must never meet again as
wedded lovers, such as we have been for fourteen years. God knows, my
affection for you has grown and strengthened with every year of union,
and yet it seems to me on looking back that my heart went out to you
in all the fulness of an infinite love when first we stood, hand
clasped in hand, beside the river. If you are angry with me, George—if
you harden your heart against me because I do that which I know to be
my duty, at least believe that I never loved you better than in this
bitter hour of parting. I spent last night in prayer and thought.
If there were any way of escape—any possibility of living my own old
happy life with a clear conscience—I think God would have shown it to
me in answer to my prayers; but there was no ray of light, no gleam of
hope. Conscience answers sternly and plainly. By the law of God I have
never been your wife, and His law commands me to break an unhallowed
tie, although my heart may break with it.
“Do you remember your argument with Mr. Cancellor? I never saw you
so vehement in any such dispute, and you took the side which I can
but think the side of the Evil One. That conversation now seems to me
like a strange foreshadowing of sorrow—a lesson meant for my guidance.
Little did I then think that this question could ever have any bearing
on my own life; but I recall every word now, and I remember how
earnestly my old master spoke—how ruthlessly he maintained the right.
Can I doubt his wisdom, from whose lips I first learnt the Christian
law, and in whom I first saw the true Christian life?
“I have written to Pamela, begging her to stay with you, to take my
place in the household, and to be to you as an adopted daughter. May
God be merciful to us both in this heavy trial, George! Be sure He
will deal with us mercifully if we do our duty according to the light
that is given to us.
“I shall stay to-night in Queen Anne’s Gate with Mrs. Tomkison.
Please send Louisa to me to-morrow with luggage for a considerable
absence from home. She will know what to bring. You can tell her that
I am going abroad for my health. My intention is to go to some small
watering-place in Germany, where I can vegetate, away from all beaten
tracks, and from the people who know us. You may rely upon me to bear
my own burden, and to seek sympathy and consolation from no earthly
comforter.
“Do not follow me, George—should your heart urge you to do so. Respect
my solemn resolution, the result of many prayers.—Your ever loving
“MILDRED.”