DRIFTING APART.
George Greswold and his wife spent the rest of that fatal year in a
villa on the Lake of Thun, an Italian villa, with a campanello tower,
and a long white colonnade, and stone balconies overhanging lawn and
gardens, where the flowers grew in a riotous profusion. The villa
was midway between two of the boat-stations, and there was no other
house near, and this loneliness was its chief charm for those two
heart-broken mourners. They yearned for no sympathy, they cared for no
companionship—hardly even for that of each other, close as the bond of
love had been till now. Each seemed to desire above all things to be
alone with that great grief—to hug that dear, sad memory in silence
and solitude. Only to see them from a distance, from the boat yonder,
as it glided swiftly past that flowery lawn, an observer would have
guessed at sorrow and bereavement from the mere attitude of either
mourner—the man sitting with his head bent forward, brooding on the
ground, the unread newspaper lying across his knee; the woman on the
other side of the lawn, beyond speaking distance, half reclining in
a low basket-chair, with her hands clasped above her head, gazing
at the distant line of snow mountains in listless vacancy. The huge
tan-coloured St. Bernard, snapping with his great cavern-like jaws at
infinitesimal flies, was the only object that gave life to the picture.
The boats went by in sunshine and cloud, the boats went by under
torrential rain, which seemed to fuse lake and mountains, villas and
gardens, into one watery chaos; the boats went by, and the days passed
like the boats, and made no difference in the lives of those two
mourners. Nothing could ever make any difference to either of them for
evermore, it seemed to Mildred. It was as if some spring had broken in
the machinery of life. Even love seemed dead.
“And yet he was once so fond of me, and I of him,” thought the wife,
watching her husband’s face, with its curious look of absence—the look
of a window with the blind down.
There were times when that look of utter abstraction almost frightened
Mildred Greswold. It was an expression she had seen occasionally during
her daughter’s lifetime, and which had always made her anxious. It
was the look about which Lola used to say when they all met at the
breakfast-table,
“Papa has had his bad dream again.”
That bad dream was no invention of Lola’s, but a stern reality in
George Greswold’s life. He would start up from his pillow in an agony,
muttering broken sentences in that voice of the sleeper which seems
always different from his natural voice—as if he belonged to another
world. Cold beads of sweat would start out upon his forehead, and the
wife would put her arms round him and soothe him as a mother soothes
her frightened child, until the muttering ceased and he sank upon
his pillow exhausted, to lapse into quiet sleep, or else awoke and
recovered calmness in awakening.
The dream—whatever it was—always left its mark upon him next day. It
was a kind of nightmare, he told his wife, when she gently questioned
him, not urging her questions lest there should be pain in the
mere recollection of that horrid vision. He could give no graphic
description of that dream. It was all confusion—a blurred and troubled
picture; but that confusion was in itself agony.
Rarely were his mutterings intelligible; rarely did his wife catch
half-a-dozen consecutive words from those broken sentences; but once
she heard him say,
“The cage—the cage again—iron bars—like a wild beast!”
And now that absent and cloudy look which she had seen in her husband’s
face after the bad dream was there often. She spoke to him sometimes,
and he did not hear. She repeated the same question twice or thrice, in
her soft low voice, standing close beside him, and he did not answer.
There were times when it was difficult to arouse him from that deep
abstraction; and at such times the utter blankness and solitude of her
own life weighed upon her like a dead weight, an almost unbearable
burden.
“What is to become of us both in all the long years before us?” she
thought despairingly. “Are we to be always far apart—living in the same
house, spending all our days together, and yet divided?”
She had married before she was eighteen, and at one-and-thirty was
still in the bloom of womanhood, younger than most women of that age;
for her life had been subject to none of those vicissitudes and fevers
which age women of the world. She had never kept a secret from her
husband, never trembled at opening a milliner’s account, or blushed at
the delivery of a surreptitious letter. The struggles for preëminence,
the social race in which some women waste their energies and strain
their nerves, were unknown to her. She had lived at Enderby Manor as
the flowers lived, rejoicing in the air and the sunshine, drinking
out of a cup of life in which there mingled no drop of poison. Thus
it was that not one line upon the transparent skin marked the passage
of a decade. The violet eyes had the limpid purity, and the emotional
lips had the tender carnation, of girlhood. Mildred Greswold was as
beautiful at thirty-one as Mildred Fausset had been at seventeen.
And yet it seemed to her that life was over, and that her husband had
ceased to care for her.
Many and many an hour in that lovely solitude beside the lake she sat
with hands loosely clasped in her lap or above her head, with her books
lying forgotten at her feet—all the newest books that librarians could
send to tempt the jaded appetite of the reader—and her eyes gazing
vacantly over the blue of the lake or towards the snow-peaks on the
horizon. Often in these silent musings she recalled the past, and
looked at the days that were gone as at a picture.
She remembered just such an autumn as this, a peerless autumn spent
with her father at The Hook—spent for the most part on the river and
in the garden, the sunny days and moonlit nights being far too lovely
for any one to waste indoors. Her seventeenth birthday was not long
past. It was just ten years since she had come home to that house to
find Fay had vanished from it, and to shed bitter tears for the loss
of her companion. Never since that time had she seen Fay’s face. Her
questions had been met coldly or angrily by her mother; and even her
father had answered her with unsatisfactory brevity.
All she could learn was that Fay had been sent to complete her
education at a finishing-school at Brussels.
“At school! O, poor Fay! I hope she is happy.”
“She ought to be,” Mrs. Fausset answered peevishly. “The school is
horridly expensive. I saw one of the bills the other day. Simply
_enormous_. The girls are taken to the opera, and have all sorts of
absurd indulgences.”
“Still, it is only school, mother, not home,” said Mildred
compassionately.
This was two years after Fay had vanished. No letter had ever come
from her to Mildred, though Mildred was able to write now, in her own
sprawling childish fashion, and would have been delighted to answer any
such letter. She had herself indited various epistles to her friend,
but had not succeeded in getting them posted. They had drifted to the
waste-paper basket, mute evidences of wasted affection.
As each holiday time came round the child asked if Fay were coming
home, always to receive the same saddening negative.
One day, when she had been more urgent than usual, Mrs. Fausset lost
temper and answered sharply,
“No, she is not coming. She is never coming. I don’t like her, and I
don’t intend ever to have her in any house of mine, so you may as well
leave off plaguing me about her.”
“But, mother, why don’t you like her?”
“Never mind why. I don’t like her. That is enough for you to know.”
“But, mother, if she is father’s daughter and my sister, you ought to
like her,” pleaded Mildred, very much in earnest.
“How dare you say that! You must never say it again—you are a naughty,
cruel child to say such things!” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, beginning to
cry,
“Why naughty? why cruel? O, mother!” and Mildred cried too.
She clasped her arms round her mother’s neck and sobbed aloud.
“Dear mother, indeed I’m not naughty,” she protested, “but Bell said
Fay was papa’s daughter. ‘Of course she’s his daughter,’ Bell said; and
if she’s father’s daughter, she’s my sister, and it’s wicked not to
love one’s sister. The psalm I was learning yesterday says so, mother.
‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together
in unity!’ And it means sisters just the same, Miss Colville said, when
I asked her; and I do love Fay. I can’t help loving her.”
“You must never speak her name again to me,” said Mrs. Fausset
resolutely. “I shall leave off loving you if you pester me about that
odious girl!”
“Then wasn’t it true what Bell said?”
“Of course not.”
“Mother, would it be wrong for papa to have a daughter?” asked Mildred,
perplexed by this mysterious resentment for which she could understand
no cause,
“Wrong! It would be _infamous_.”
“Would God be angry?” asked the child, with an awe-stricken look.
“Would it be wicked?”
“It would be the worst possible insult to _me_,” said Lord
Castle-Connell’s daughter, ignoring the minor question.
After this Mildred refrained from all further speech about the absent
girl to her mother; but as the years went by she questioned her father
from time to time as to Fay’s whereabouts.
“She is very well off, my dear. You need not make yourself unhappy
about her. She is with a very nice family, and has pleasant
surroundings.”
“Shall I never see her again, father?”
“Never’s a long day, Mildred. I’ll take you to see her by and by when
there is an opportunity. You see, it happens unfortunately that your
mother does not like her, so it is better she should not come here. It
would not be pleasant for her—or for me.”
He said this gravely, with a somewhat dejected look, and Mildred felt
somehow that even to him it would be better to talk no more of her lost
companion.
As the years went by Mrs. Fausset changed from a woman of fashion to a
nervous valetudinarian. It was not that she loved pleasure less, but
her beauty and her health had both begun to dwindle and fade at an age
when other women are in their prime. She fretted at the loss of her
beauty—watched every wrinkle, counted every gray hair, lamented over
every change in the delicate colouring which had been her chief charm.
“How pretty you are growing, Mildred!” she exclaimed once, with a
discontented air, when Mildred was a tall slip of fourteen. “You are
just what I was at your age. And you will grow prettier every day until
you are thirty, and then I daresay you will begin to fade as I have
done, and feel an old woman as I do.”
It seemed to her that her own charms dwindled as her daughter grew.
As the bud unfolded, the flower faded. She felt almost as if Mildred
had robbed her of her beauty. She would not give up the pleasures
and excitement of society. She consulted half-a-dozen fashionable
physicians, and would not obey one of them. They all prescribed the
same repulsive treatment—rest, early hours, country air, with gentle
exercise; no parties, no excitement, no strong tea.
Mrs. Fausset disobeyed them all, and from only fancying herself ill
grew to be really ill; and from chronic lassitude developed organic
disease of the heart.
She lingered nearly two years, a confirmed invalid, suffering a good
deal, and giving other people a great deal of trouble. She died soon
after Mildred’s sixteenth birthday, and on her death-bed she confided
freely in her daughter, who had attended upon her devotedly all through
her illness, neglecting everything else in the world for her mother’s
sake.
“You are old enough to understand things that must once have seemed
very mysterious to you, Mildred,” said Mrs. Fausset, lying half-hidden
in the shadow of guipure bed-curtains, with her daughter’s hand clasped
in hers, perhaps forgetting how young that daughter was in her own
yearning for sympathy. “You couldn’t make out why I disliked that
horrid girl so much, could you?”
“No, indeed, mother.”
“I hated her because she was your father’s daughter, Mildred—his
natural daughter; the child of some woman who was not his wife. You are
old enough now to know what that means. You were reading _The Heart of
Midlothian_ to me last week. You know, Mildred?”
Yes, Mildred knew. She hung her head at the memory of that sad story,
and at the thought that her father might have sinned like George
Staunton.
“Yes, Mildred, she was the child of some woman he loved before he
married me. He must have been desperately in love with the woman, or
he would never have brought her daughter into my house. It was the
greatest insult he could offer to me.”
“Was it, mother?”
“Was it? Why, of course it was. How stupid you are, child!” exclaimed
the invalid peevishly, and the feverish hand grew hotter as she talked.
Mildred blushed crimson at the thought of this story of shame. Poor
Fay! poor, unhappy Fay! And yet her strong common sense told her that
there were two sides to the question.
“It was not Fay’s fault, mother,” she said gently. “No one could blame
Fay, or be angry with _her_. And if the—wicked woman was dead, and
father had repented, and was sorry, was it very wrong for him to bring
my sister home to us?”
“Don’t call her your sister!” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, with a feeble
scream of angry alarm; “she is not your sister—she is no relation—she
is nothing to you. It was an insult to bring her across my threshold.
You must be very stupid, or you must care very little for _me_, if you
can’t understand that. His conduct proved that he had cared for that
low, common woman—Fay’s mother—more than ever he cared for me; perhaps
he thought her prettier than me,” said the invalid in hysterical
parenthesis, “and I have never known a happy hour since.”
“O, mamma dear, not in all the years when you used to wear such lovely
gowns, and go to so many parties?” protested the voice of common sense.
“I only craved for excitement because I was miserable at heart. I
don’t think you can half understand a wife’s feelings, Mildred, or you
wouldn’t say such foolish things. I wanted you to know this before my
death. I want you to remember it always, and if you meet that odious
girl avoid her as you would a pestilence. If your father should attempt
to bring her here, or to Parchment Street, after I am gone——”
“He will not, mother. He will respect your wishes too much—he will be
too sorry,” exclaimed Mildred, bending down to kiss the hot, dry hand,
and moistening it with her tears.
* * * * *
The year of mourning that began soon after this conversation was a very
quiet interval for father and daughter. They travelled a little, spent
six months in Leipsic, where Mildred studied the piano under the most
approved masters, a couple of months in Paris, where her father showed
her all the lions in a tranquil, leisurely way that was very pleasant;
and then they went down to The Hook, and lived there in happy idleness
on the river and in the gardens all through a long and lovely summer.
Both were saddened at the sight of an empty chair—one sacred corner
in all the prettiest rooms—where Maud Fausset had been wont to sit,
a graceful languid figure, robed in white, or some pale delicate
hue even more beautiful than white in contrast with the background
of palms and flowers, Japanese screen or Indian curtain. How pretty
she had looked sitting there, with books and scent-bottles, and
dainty satin-lined basket full of some light frivolous work, which
progressed by stages of half-a-dozen stitches a day! Her fans, her
Tennyson, her palms, and perfumes—all had savoured of her own fragile
bright-coloured loveliness. She was gone; and father and daughter were
alone together—deeply attached to each other, yet with a secret between
them, a secret which made a darkening shadow across the lives of both.
Whenever John Fausset wore a look of troubled thought Mildred fancied
he was brooding upon the past, thinking of that erring woman who had
borne him a child, the child he had tried to fuse into his own family,
and to whom her own childish heart had yearned as to a sister.
“It must have been instinct that made me love her,” she said to
herself; and then she would wonder idly what the fair sinner who had
been Fay’s mother was like, and whether her father had really cared
more for that frail woman than for his lawful wife.
“Poor pretty mamma! he seemed to doat upon her,” thought Mildred. “I
cannot imagine his ever having loved any one so well. I cannot imagine
his ever having cared for any other woman in this world.”
The formless image of that unknown woman haunted the girl’s
imagination. She appeared sometimes with one aspect, sometimes
another—darkly beautiful, of Oriental type, like Scott’s Rebecca, or
fair and lowly-born like Effie Deans—poor fragile Effie, fated to fall
at the first temptation. Poetry and fiction were full of suggestions
about that unknown influence in her father’s life; but every thought
of the past ended in a sigh of pity for that fair wife whose domestic
happiness had been clouded over by that half-discovered mystery.
Never a word did she breathe to her father upon this forbidden subject;
never a word to Bell, who was still at the head of affairs in both Mr.
Fausset’s houses, and who looked like a grim and stony repository of
family secrets.