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