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