IN THE MORNING OF LIFE.
George Greswold succumbed to Fate. He had done all he could do in the
way of resistance. He had appealed against his wife’s decision; he had
set love against principle or prejudice, and principle, as Mildred
understood it, had been too strong for love; so there was nothing left
for the forsaken husband but submission. He went back to the home in
which he had once been happy, and he sat down amidst the ruins of his
domestic life; he sat by his desolate hearth through the long dull
wintry months, and he made no effort to bring brightness or variety
into his existence. He made no stand against unmerited misfortune.
“I am too old to forget,” he told himself; “that lesson can only be
learnt in youth.”
A young man might have gone out as a wanderer—might have sought
excitement and distraction amidst strange cities and strange races
of men; might have found forgetfulness in danger and hardship, the
perils of unexplored deserts, the hazards of untrodden mountains, the
hairbreadth escapes of savage life, pestilence, famine, warfare. George
Greswold felt no inclination for any such adventure. The mainspring of
life had snapped, and he admitted to himself that he was a broken man.
He sat by the hearth in his gloomy library day after day, and night
after night, until the small hours. Sometimes he took his gun in the
early morning, and went out with a leash of dogs for an hour or two of
solitary shooting among his own covers. He tramped his copses in all
weathers and at all hours, but he rarely went outside his own domain;
nor did he ever visit his cottagers or small tenantry, with whom he had
been once so familiar a friend. All interest in his estate had gone
from him after his daughter’s death. He left everything to the new
steward, who was happily both competent and honest.
His books were his only friends. Those studious habits acquired years
before, when he was comparatively a poor man, stood by him now. His
one distraction, his only solace, was found in the contents of those
capacious bookshelves, three-fourths of which were filled with volumes
of his own selection, the gradual accumulation of his sixteen years of
ownership. His grandfather’s library, which constituted the remaining
fourth, consisted of those admirable standard works, in the largest
possible number of volumes, which formed an item in the furniture
of a respectable house during the last century, and which, from the
stiffness of their bindings and the unblemished appearance of their
paper and print, would seem to have enjoyed an existence of dignified
retirement from the day they left the bookseller’s shop.
But for those long tramps in the wintry copses, where holly and ivy
showed brightly green amidst leafless chestnuts and hazels—but for
those communings with the intellect of past and present in the long
still winter evenings, George Greswold’s brain must have given way
under the burden of an undeserved sorrow. As it was, he contrived to
live on, peacefully, and even with an air of contentment. His servants
surprised him in no paroxysm of grief. He startled them with no strange
exclamations. His manner gave no cause for alarm. He accepted his
lot in silence and submission. His days were ordered with a simple
regularity, so far as the service of the house went. His valet and
butler agreed that he was in all things an admirable master.
The idea in the household was that Mrs. Greswold had “taken to
religion.” That seemed the only possible explanation for a parting
which had been preceded by no domestic storms, for which there was
no apparent cause in the conduct of the husband. That idea of the
wife having discovered an intrigue of her husband’s, which Louisa
had discussed in the housekeeper’s room at Brighton, was no longer
entertained in the servants’-hall at Enderby.
“If there had been anything of that kind, something would have come
out by this time,” said the butler, who had a profound belief in the
ultimate “coming out” of all social mysteries.
George Greswold was not kept in ignorance of his wife’s movements.
Pamela had been shrewd enough to divine that her uncle would be glad
to hear from her in order to hear of Mildred, and she had written to
him from time to time, giving him a graphic account of her own and her
aunt’s existence.
There had been only one suppression. The young lady had not once
alluded to Castellani’s share in their winter life at Pallanza. She
had a horror of arousing that dragon of suspicion which she knew to
lurk in the minds of all uncles with reference to all agreeable young
men. George Greswold had not heard from his niece for more than a
fortnight, when there came a letter, written the day after Mildred’s
visit to the madhouse, and full of praises of Lady Lochinvar and the
climate of Nice. That letter was the greatest shock that Greswold had
received since his wife had left him, for it told him that she was in
a place where she could scarcely fail to discover all the details of
his wretched story. He had kept it locked from her, he had shut himself
behind a wall of iron, he had kept a silence as of the grave; and now
she from whom he had prayed that his fatal story might be for ever
hidden was certain to learn the worst.
“Aunt went to lunch with Lady Lochinvar the day after our arrival,”
wrote Pamela. “She spent a long morning with her, and then went for a
drive somewhere in the environs, and was out till nearly dinner-time.
She looked so white and fagged when she came back, poor dear, and I
am sure she had done too much for one day. Lady Lochinvar asked me to
dinner, and took me to the new Opera-house, which is lovely. Her nephew
was with us—rather plain, and with no taste for music (he said he
preferred _Madame Angot_ to _Lohengrin_), but enormously clever, I am
told, in a solid, practical kind of way.”
_Und so weiter_, for three more pages.
Mildred had been with Lady Lochinvar—with Lady Lochinvar, who knew all;
who had seen him and his wife together; had received them both as her
friends; had been confided in, he knew, by that fond, jealous wife;
made the recipient of tearful doubts and hysterical accusations. Vivien
had owned as much to him.
She had been with Lady Lochinvar, who must know the history of his
wife’s death and the dreadful charge brought against him; who must know
that he had been an inmate of the great white barrack on the road to
St. André; who in all probability thought him guilty of murder. All the
barriers had fallen now; all the floodgates had opened. He saw himself
hateful, monstrous, inhuman, in the eyes of the woman he adored.
“She loved her sister with an inextinguishable love,” he thought,
“and she sees me now as her sister’s murderer—the cold-blooded, cruel
husband, who made his wife’s existence miserable, and ended by killing
her in a paroxysm of brutal rage: that is the kind of monster I must
seem in my Mildred’s eyes. She will look back upon my stubborn silence,
my gloomy reserve, and she will see all the indications of guilt. My
own conduct will condemn me.”
As he sat by his solitary hearth in the cold March evening, the
large reading-lamp making a circle of light amidst the gloom, George
Greswold’s mind travelled over the days of his youth, and the period of
that fatal marriage which had blighted him in the morning of his life,
which blighted him now in life’s meridian, when, but for this dark
influence, all the elements of happiness were in his hand.
He looked back to the morning of life, and saw himself full of
ambitions plans and aspiring dreams, well content to be the younger
son, to whom it was given to make his own position in the world,
scorning the idle days of a fox-hunting squire, resolute to become
an influence for good among his fellow-men. He had never envied his
brother the inheritance of the soil; he had thought but little of his
own promised inheritance of Enderby.
Unhappily that question of the succession to the Enderby estate had
been a sore point with Squire Ransome. He adored his elder son, who
was like him in character and person, and he cared very little for
George, whom he considered a bookish and unsympathetic individual; a
young man who hardly cared whether there were few or many foxes in the
district, whether the young partridges throve, or perished by foul
weather or epidemic disease—a young man who took no interest in the
things that filled the lives of other people. In a word, George was not
a sportsman; and that deficiency made him an alien to his father’s
race. There had never been a Ransome who was not “sporting” to the core
of his heart until the appearance of this pragmatical Oxonian.
Without being in any manner scientific or a student of evolution,
Mr. Ransome had a fixed belief in heredity. It was the duty of the
son to resemble the father; and a son who was in all his tastes and
inclinations a distinct variety stamped himself as undutiful.
“I don’t suppose the fellow can help it,” said Mr. Ransome testily;
“but there’s hardly a remark he makes which doesn’t act upon my nerves
like a nutmeg-grater.”
Nobody would have given the Squire credit for possessing very sensitive
nerves, but everybody knew he had a temper, and a temper which
occasionally showed itself in violent outbreaks—the kind of temper
which will dismiss a household at one fell swoop, send a stud of horses
to Tattersall’s on the spur of the moment, tear up a lease on the point
of signature, or turn a son out of doors.
The knowledge that this unsportsmanlike son of his would inherit the
fine estate of Enderby was a constant source of vexation to Squire
Ransome of Mapledown. The dream of his life was that Mapledown and
Enderby should be united in the possession of his son Randolph. The two
properties would have made Randolph rich enough to hope for a peerage,
and that idea of a possible peerage dazzled the Tory squire. His family
had done the State some service; had sat for important boroughs; had
squandered much money upon contested elections; had been staunch in
times of change and difficulty. There was no reason why a Ransome
should not ascend to the Upper House, in these days when peerages are
bestowed so much more freely than in the time of Pitt and Fox. The two
estates would have made an important property under one ownership;
divided, they were only respectable. And what the Squire most keenly
felt was the fact that Enderby was by far the finer property, and that
his younger son must ultimately be a much richer man than his brother.
The Sussex estate had dwindled considerably in those glorious days
of contested elections and party feeling; the Hampshire estate was
intact. Mr. Ransome could not forgive his wife for her determination
that the younger son should be her heir. He always shuffled uneasily
upon his seat in the old family pew when the 27th chapter of Genesis
was read in the Sunday morning service. He compared his wife to
Rebecca. He asked the Vicar at luncheon on one of those Sundays what
he thought of the conduct of Rebecca and Jacob in that very shady
transaction, and the Vicar replied in the orthodox fashion, favouring
Jacob just as Rebecca had favoured him.
“I can’t understand it,” exclaimed the Squire testily; “the whole
business is against my idea of honour and honesty. I wouldn’t have
such a fellow as Jacob for my steward if he were the cleverest man
in Sussex. And look you here, Vicar. If Jacob was right, and knew he
was right, why the deuce was he so frightened the first time he met
Esau after that ugly business? Take my word for it, Jacob was a sneak,
and Providence punished him rightly with a desolate old age and a
quarrelsome family.”
The Vicar looked down at his plate, sighed gently, and held his peace.
The time came when the growing feeling of aversion on the father’s part
showed itself in outrage and insult which the son could not endure.
George remonstrated against certain acts of injustice in the management
of the estate. He pleaded the cause of tenant against landlord—a dire
offence in the eyes of the Tory Squire. There came an open rupture; and
it was impossible for the younger son to remain any longer under the
father’s roof. His mother loved him devotedly, but she felt that it was
better for him to go; and so it was settled, in loving consultation
between mother and son, that he should carry out a long-cherished wish
of his Oxford days, and explore all that was historical and interesting
in Southern Europe, seeing men and cities in a leisurely way, and
devoting himself to literature in the meantime. He had already written
for some of the high-class magazines; and he felt that it was in him to
do well as a writer of the serious order—critic, essayist, and thinker.
His mother gave him three hundred a year, which, for a young man of
his simple habits, was ample. He told himself that he should be able
to earn as much again by his pen; and so, after a farewell of decent
friendliness to his father and his brother Randolph, and tenderest
parting with his mother, he set out upon his pilgrimage, a free agent,
with the world all before him. He explored Greece—dwelling fondly upon
all the old traditions, the old histories. He made the acquaintance
of Dr. Schliemann, and entered heart and soul into that gentleman’s
views. This occupied him more than a year, for those scenes exercised
a potent fascination upon a mind to which Greek literature was the
supreme delight. He spent a month at Constantinople, and a winter in
Corfu and Cyprus; he devoted a summer to Switzerland, and did a little
mountaineering; and during all his wanderings he contrived to give a
considerable portion of his time to literature.
It was after his Swiss travels that he went to Italy, and established
himself in Florence for a quiet winter. He hired an apartment on a
fourth floor of a palace overlooking the Arno, and here, for the first
time since he had left England, he went a little into general society.
His mother had sent him letters of introduction to old friends of her
own, English and Florentine; he was young, handsome, and a gentleman,
and he was received with enthusiasm. Had he been fond of society he
might have been at parties every night; but he was fonder of books and
of solitude, and he took very little advantage of people’s friendliness.
The few houses to which he went were houses famous for good music, and
it was in one of these houses that he met Vivien Faux.
It was in the midst of a symphony by Beethoven, while he was standing
on the edge of the crowd which surrounded the open space given to the
instrumentalists, that he first saw the woman who was to be his wife.
She was sitting in the recess of a lofty window, quite apart from the
throng—a pale, dark-eyed girl, with roughened hair carelessly heaped
above her low, broad forehead. Her slender figure and sloping shoulders
showed to advantage in a low-necked black gown, without a vestige of
ornament. She wore neither jewels nor flowers, at an assembly where
gems were sparkling and flowers breathing sweetness upon every feminine
bosom. Her thin, white arms hung loosely in her lap; her back was
turned to the performers, and her eyes were averted from the crowd. She
looked the image of _ennui_ and indifference.
He found his hostess directly the symphony was over, and asked her to
introduce him to the young lady in black velvet yonder, sitting alone
in the window.
“Have you been struck by Miss Faux’s rather singular appearance?” asked
Signora Vicenti. “She is not so handsome as many young ladies who are
here to-night.”
“No, she is not handsome, but her face interests me. She looks as if
she had suffered some great disappointment.”
“I believe her whole life has been a disappointment. She is an orphan,
and, as far as I can ascertain, a friendless orphan. She has good
means, but there is a mystery about her position which places her in
a manner apart from other girls of her age. She has no relations to
whom to refer, no family home to which to return. She is here with some
rather foolish people—an English artist and his wife, who cannot do
very much for her, and I believe she keenly feels her isolation. It
makes her bitter against other girls, and she loses friends as fast as
she makes them. People won’t put up with her tongue. Well, Mr. Ransome,
do you change your mind after that?”
“On the contrary, I feel so much the more interested in the young lady.”
“Ah, your interest will not last. However, I shall be charmed to
introduce you.”
They went across the room to that distant recess where Miss Faux was
still seated, her hair and attitude unchanged since George Ransome
first observed her. She started with a little look of surprise when
Signora Vicenti and her companion approached; but she accepted the
introduction with a nonchalant air, and she replied to Ransome’s
opening remarks with manifest indifference. Then by degrees she grew
more animated, and talked about the people in the room, ridiculing
their pretensions, their eccentricities, their costume.
“You are not an _habitué_ here?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing
you before to-night.”
“No; it is the first of Signora Vicenti’s parties that I have seen.”
“Then I conclude it will be the last.”
“Why?”
“O, no sensible person would come a second time. The music is tolerable
if one could hear it anywhere else, but the people are odious.”
“Yet I conclude this is not your first evening here?”
“No; I come every week. I have nothing else to do with myself but to go
about to houses I hate, and mix with people who hate me.”
“Why should they hate you?”
“O, we all hate each other, and want to overreach one another. Envy and
malice are in the air. Picture to yourself fifty manœuvring mothers
with a hundred marriageable daughters, most of them portionless, and
about twenty eligible men. Think how ferocious the competition must be!”
“But you are independent of all that; you are outside the arena.”
“Yes; I have nothing to do with their slavemarket, but they hate me
all the same; perhaps because I have a little more money than most
of them; perhaps because I am nobody—a waif and stray—able to give no
account of my existence.”
She spoke of her position with a reckless candour that shocked him.
“There is something to bear in every lot,” he said, trying to be
philosophical.
“I suppose so, but I only care about my own burden. Please, don’t
pretend that you do either. I should despise a man who pretended not to
be selfish.”
“Do you think that all men are selfish?”
“I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. The man I thought the
noblest and the best did me the greatest wrong it was possible to do
me, in order to spare himself trouble.”
Ransome was silent. He would not enter into the discussion of a past
history of which he was ignorant, and which was doubtless full of pain.
After this he met her very often, and while other young men avoided
her on account of her bitter tongue, he showed a preference for her
society, and encouraged her to confide in him. She went everywhere,
chaperoned by Mr. Mortimer, a dreary twaddler, who was for ever
expounding theories of art which he had picked up, parrot-wise, in a
London art-school thirty years before. His latest ideas were coeval
with Maclise and Mulready. Mrs. Mortimer was by way of being an
invalid, and sat and nursed her neuralgia at home, while her husband
and Miss Faux went into society.
It was at the beginning of spring that an American lady of wealth and
standing invited the Mortimers and their _protégée_ to a picnic, to
which Mr. Ransome was also bidden; and it was this picnic which sealed
George Ransome’s fate. Pity for Vivien’s lonely position had grown into
a sincere regard. He had discovered warm feelings under that cynical
manner, a heart capable of a profound affection. She had talked to him
of a child, a kind of adopted sister, whom she had passionately loved,
and from whom she had been parted by the selfish cruelty of the little
girl’s parents.
“My school-life in England had soured me before then,” she said, “and
I was not a very amiable person even at fifteen years old; but _that_
cruelty finished me. I have hated my fellow-creatures ever since.”
He pleaded against this wholesale condemnation.
“You were unlucky,” he said, “in encountering unworthy people.”
“Ah, but one of those people, the child’s father, had seemed to me the
best of men. I had believed in him as second only to God in benevolence
and generosity. When _he_ failed I renounced my belief in human
goodness.”
Unawares, George Ransome had fallen into the position of her confidant
and friend. From friendship to love was an easy transition; and a few
words, spoken at random during a ramble on an olive-clad hill, bound
him to her for ever. Those unpremeditated words loosed the fountain of
tears, and he saw the most scornful of women, the woman who affected an
absolute aversion for his sex, and a contempt for those weaker sisters
who waste their love upon such vile clay—he saw her abandon herself to
a passion of tears at the first word of affection which he had ever
addressed to her. He had spoken as a friend rather than as a lover; but
those tears bound him to her for life. He put his arm round her, and
pillowed the small pale face upon his breast, the dark impassioned eyes
looking up at him drowned in tears.
“You should not have said those words,” she sobbed. “You cannot
understand what it is to have lived as I have lived—a creature
apart—unloved—unvalued. O, is it true?—do you really care for me?”
“With all my heart,” he answered, and in good faith.
His profound compassion took the place of love; and in that moment
he believed that he loved her as a man should love the woman whom he
chooses for his wife.
They were married within a month from that March afternoon; and for
some time their married life was happy. He wished to take her to
England, but she implored him to abandon that idea.
“In England everybody would want to know who I am,” she said. “I should
be tortured by questions about ‘my people.’ Abroad, society is less
exacting.”
He deferred to her in this, as he would have done in any other matter
which involved her happiness. They spent the first half-year of their
married life in desultory wanderings in the Oberland and the Engadine,
and then settled at Nice for the winter.
Here Mrs. Ransome met Lady Lochinvar, whom she had known at Florence,
and was at once invited to the Palais Montano; and here for the first
time appeared those clouds which were too soon to darken George
Ransome’s domestic horizon.
There were many beautiful women at Nice that winter: handsome Irish
girls, vivacious Americans, Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen; and among
so many who were charming there were some whom George Ransome did not
scruple to admire, with as much frankness as he would have admired
a face by Guido or Raffaelle. He was slow to perceive his wife’s
distrust, could hardly bring himself to believe that she could be
jealous of him; but he was not suffered to remain long in this happy
ignorance. A hysterical outburst one night after their return from a
ball at the Club-house opened the husband’s eyes. The demon of jealousy
stood revealed; and from that hour the angel of domestic peace was
banished from George Ransome’s hearth.
He struggled against that evil influence. He exercised patience,
common sense, forbearance; but in vain. There were lulls in the
storm sometimes, delusive calms; and he hoped the demon was
exorcised. And then came a worse outbreak; more hysterics; despairing
self-abandonment; threats of suicide. He bore it as long as he could,
and ultimately, his wife’s health offering an excuse for such a step,
he proposed that they should leave Nice, and take a villa in the
environs, in some quiet spot where they might live apart from all
society.
Vivien accepted the proposition with rapture; she flung herself at her
husband’s feet, and covered his hands with tearful kisses.
“O, if I could but believe that you still love me, that you are not
weary of me,” she exclaimed, “I should be the happiest woman in the
universe.”
They spent a week of halcyon peace, driving about in quest of their
new home. They explored the villages within ten miles of Nice, they
breakfasted at village restaurants, in the sunny March noontide, and
finally they settled upon a villa at St. Jean, within an hour’s drive
of the great white city, and to this new home they went at the end of
the month, after bidding adieu to their friends in Nice.