THE BEGINNING OF DOUBT.
Enderby Church clock struck six. They heard every chime, slow and clear
in the summer stillness, as they sat in the broad shadow of the cedar,
silent all three.
It seemed as if the striking of the clock were the breaking of a spell.
“So late?” exclaimed Castellani, in a cheery voice; “and I promised
Mrs. Hillersdon to be back in time to drive to Romsey for the evening
service. The old Abbey Church of Romsey, she tells me, is a thing to
dream about. There is no eight o’clock dinner at Riverdale on Sundays.
Every one goes to church somewhere, and we sup at half-past nine, and
after supper there is sometimes extempore prayer—and sometimes there
are charades or dumb crambo. _C’est selon._ When the Prince was there
they had dumb crambo. Good-bye. I am almost ashamed to ask if I may
ever come again, after having bored you for such an unconscionable
time.”
He had the easiest air possible, and seemed totally unconscious of
any embarrassment caused by his allusions to the past; and yet in
both faces, as he looked from one to the other, he must have seen the
strongest indications of trouble.
Mrs. Greswold murmured something to the effect that she would be glad
to see him at any time, a speech obviously conventional and unmeaning.
Mr. Greswold rose hastily and accompanied him to the hall-door,
where the cart still waited for him, the groom fixed as a statue of
despondency.
Mr. Castellani was inclined to be loquacious to the last. Greswold was
brief almost to incivility. He stood watching the light cart roll away,
and then went slowly back to the garden and to his seat under the cedar.
He seated himself without a word, looking earnestly at his wife,
whose drooping head and fixed attitude told of deepest thought. So
they sat for some minutes in dead silence, Kassandra licking her
master’s pendant hand, as he leaned forward with his elbow on his knee,
infinitely sorry for him.
Mildred was the first to break that silence.
“George, why did you not tell me,” she began in a low faltering
voice, “that I was not your first wife? What reason could there be
for concealment between you and me? I so trusted you; I so loved you.
Nothing you could have told would have changed me.”
“Dearest, there was one reason, and a powerful one,” answered George
Greswold firmly, meeting the appealing look of her eyes with a clear
and steady gaze. “My first marriage is a sad remembrance for me—full
of trouble. I did not care to tell you that miserable story, to call a
dreaded ghost out of the grave of the past. My first marriage was the
one great sorrow of my life, but it was only an episode in my life. It
left me as lonely as it found me. There are very few who know anything
about it. I am sorry that young man should have come here to trouble us
with his uninvited reminiscences. For my own part, I cannot remember
having ever seen his face before.”
“I am sorry you should have kept such a secret from me,” said Mildred.
“It would have been so much wiser to have been candid. Do you think I
should not have respected your sad memories? You had only to say to me
‘Such things were; but let us not talk of them.’ It would have been
more manly; it would have been kinder to me.”
“Say that I was a coward, if you like; that I am still a coward, where
those memories are concerned,” said Greswold.
The look of agony in his face melted her in a moment. She threw herself
on her knees beside his chair, she and the dog fawning upon him
together.
“Forgive me, forgive me, dearest,” she pleaded, “I will never speak to
you of this again. Women are so jealous—of the past most of all.”
“Is that all?” he said: “God knows you have little need. Let us say no
more, Mildred. The past is past: neither you nor I can alter it. Memory
is inexorable. God Himself cannot change it.”
“I will contrive that Mr. Castellani shall not come here again, George,
if you object to see him.”
“Pray don’t trouble yourself. I would not have such a worm suppose that
he could be obnoxious to me.”
“Tell me what you think of him,” she asked, in a lighter tone, anxious
to bring back the easy mood of every-day life. “He seems very clever,
and he is rather handsome.”
“What do I think of the trumpet-ash on the verandah yonder? A beautiful
parasite, which will hold on anywhere in the sunshine. Mr. Castellani
is of the same family, I take it—studies his own interests first, and
chooses his friends afterwards. He will do admirably for Riverdale.”
“He plays divinely. His touch transformed my piano.”
“He looks the kind of man who would play the piano,” said Greswold,
with ineffable contempt, looking down at his own sunburnt hands,
hardened by exposure to all weathers, broadened by handling gun and
punt-pole, and by half-a-dozen other forms of out-door exercise.
“However, I have no objection to him, if he serve to amuse you and
Pamela.”
He spoke with a kind of weary indifference, as of a man who cared for
very little in life; and then he rose slowly, took up his stick, and
strolled off to the shrubbery.
* * * * *
Pamela appeared on the following afternoon with boxes, bags,
music-books, raquets, and parasols, in a proportion which gave promise
of a long visit. She had asked as a tremendous favour to be allowed
to bring Box—otherwise Fitz-Box—her fox-terrier, son of Sir Henry
Mountford’s Box, great-grandson of Brockenhurst Joe, through that
distinguished animal’s daughter Lyndhurst Jessie, and on the paternal
side a lineal descendant of Mr. Murchison’s Cracknel.
“I hope you won’t mind very much,” she wrote; “but it would be death to
him if I were to leave him behind. To begin with, his brother Fitz-Cox,
who has a villanous temper, would inevitably kill him; and besides
that, he would pine to death at not sleeping in my room at night, which
he has done ever since he was a puppy. If you will let me bring him, I
will answer for his good manners, and that he shall not be a trouble to
any one.”
The descendant of Brockenhurst Joe rushed out into the garden, and made
a lightning circuit of lawn and shrubberies, while his young mistress
was kissing her Aunt Mildred, as she called her uncle’s wife in the
fulness of her affection.
“It is so very good of you to have me, and I am so delighted to come!”
she said.
Mildred would have much preferred that she were anywhere else, yet
could not help feeling kindly to her. She was a frank, bright-looking
girl, with brown eyes, and almost flaxen hair; a piquant contrast, for
the hair was genuine, and carried out in the eyebrows, which were only
just a shade darker. Her complexion was fair to transparency, and she
had just enough soft rosy bloom to light up the delicate skin. Her nose
was slightly _retroussé_, her mouth was a little wider than she herself
approved, and her teeth were perfection. She had a charming figure of
the plump order, but its plumpness was a distress to her.
“Don’t you think I get horribly stout?” she asked Mildred, when she was
sitting at tea in the garden presently.
“You may be a little stouter than you were at sixteen, perhaps, but not
at all too stout.”
“O, but I am! I know it, I feel it. Don’t endeavour to spare my
feelings, aunt. It is useless. I know I am fat. Rosalind says I ought
to marry; but I tell her it’s absurd. How can anybody ever care for me
now I am fat? They would only want my money if they asked me to marry
them,” concluded Pamela, clinging to the plural.
“My dear Pamela, do you wish me to tell you that you are charming, and
all that you ought to be?” asked Mildred, laughing.
“O, no, no! I don’t want you to spare my feelings. Everybody spares
one’s feelings. One grows up in ignorance of the horrors in one’s
appearance, because people _will_ spare one’s feelings. And then one
sees oneself in a strange glass; or a boy in the street says something,
and one knows the worst. I think I know the worst about myself. That
is one comfort. How lovely it is here!” said Pamela, with a sudden
change of mood, glancing at Mildred with a little pathetic look as she
remembered the childish figure that must be for ever missing from that
home picture.
“I am so glad to be with you,” she murmured softly, nestling up to
Mildred’s side, as they sat together on a rustic bench; “let me be
useful to you, let me be a companion to you, if you can.”
“You shall be both, dear.”
“How good to say that! And you won’t mind Box?”
“Not the least. If he will be amiable to Kassandra.”
“He will. He has been brought up among other dogs. We are a very doggy
family at the Hall. Would you think he was worth a hundred and fifty
guineas?” asked Pamela with ill-concealed pride, as the scion of
illustrious progenitors came up and put his long lean head in her hand,
and conversed with her in a series of expressive snorts, as it were a
conversational code.
“I hardly know what constitutes perfection in a fox-terrier.”
“No more do I; but I know he is perfect. He is said to be the image of
Cracknel, only better. I tremble when I think that my possession of
him hangs by a thread. He might be stolen at any moment.”
“You must be careful.”
“Yes, I cannot be too careful. Here comes Uncle George,” said Pamela,
rising and running to meet Mr. Greswold. “O, Uncle George, _how_
altered you are!”
She was always saying the wrong thing, after the manner of impulsive
girls; and she was quickwitted enough to discover her mistake the
instant after.
Happily the dogs furnished a ready diversion. She introduced Box, and
expatiated upon his grand qualities. She admired and made friends with
Kassandra, and then settled down almost as lightly as a butterfly, in
spite of her plumpness, on a Japanese stool, to take her teacup from
Mildred’s hands.
She was perfectly at her ease by this time, and told her uncle and
aunt all about her sister Rosalind, and Rosalind’s husband, Sir Henry
Mountford, whom she summed up lightly as a nice old thing, and no end
of fun. It was easy to divine from her discourse that Rainham Hall was
not an especially intellectual atmosphere, not a school of advanced
thought, or of any other kind of thought. Pamela’s talk was of tennis,
yachting, fishing, and shooting, and of the people who shared in those
sports. She seemed to belong to a world in which nobody ever sat down
except to eat, or stayed indoors except under stress of weather.
“I hear you have all manner of clever people in your neighbourhood,”
she said by and by, having told all she had to tell about Rainham.
“Have we?” asked Greswold, smiling at her intensity.
“Yes, at Riverdale. They do say the author of _Nepenthe_ is staying
there, and that he is not a Roman Cardinal or an English statesman, but
almost a young man—an Italian by birth—and _very_ handsome. I would
give worlds to see him.”
“It is not unlikely you may be gratified without giving anything,”
answered her uncle. “Mr. Castellani was here yesterday afternoon, and
threatened to repeat his visit.”
“Castellani! Yes, that is the name I heard. What a pretty name! And
what is he like? Do tell me all about him, Aunt Mildred.”
She turned to the woman as the more likely to give her a graphic
description. The average man is an undescribing animal.
Mildred made an effort at self-command before she spoke. Castellani
counted for but little in her recent trouble. His revelation had been
an accident, and its effect entirely dissociated from him. Yet the very
thought of the man troubled her, and the dread of seeing him again was
like a physical pain.
“I do not know what to say about his appearance,” she answered
presently, slowly fanning herself with a great scarlet Japanese fan,
pale and cool looking in her plain white gown with its black ribbons.
The very picture of domestic peace, one would suppose, judging by
externals only. “I suppose there are people who would think him
handsome.”
“Don’t you, aunt?”
“No. I don’t like the colour of his eyes or of his hair. They are
of that reddish-brown which the Venetian painters are so fond of,
but which always gives me an idea of falsehood and treachery. Mr.
Castellani is a very clever man, but he is not a man whom I could ever
trust.”
“How nice!” cried Pamela, her face radiant with enthusiasm; “a creature
with red-brown hair, and eyes with a depth of falsehood in them. That
is just the kind of man who might be the author of _Nepenthe_. If
you had told me he was stout and rosy-cheeked, with pepper-and-salt
whiskers and a fine, benevolent head, I would never have opened his
book again.”
“You seem to admire this _Nepenthe_ prodigiously,” said her uncle,
looking at her with a calmly critical air. “Is it because the book is
the fashion, or from your own unassisted appreciation of it? I did not
think you were a bookish person.”
“I’m not,” cried Pamela. “I am a mass of ignorance. I don’t know
anything about science. I don’t know the name of a single butterfly.
I don’t know one toadstool from another. But when I love a book it
is a passion with me. My Keats has tumbled to pieces; my Shelley is
disgracefully dirty. I have read _Nepenthe_ six times, and I am
waiting for the cheap edition, to keep it under my pillow. It has made
me an Agnostic.”
“Do you know the dictionary meaning of that word?”
“I don’t think I do; but I know I am an Agnostic. _Nepenthe_ has
unsettled all my old beliefs. If I had read it four years ago I should
have refused to be confirmed. I am dying to know the author.”
“You like unbelievers, then?” said Mr. Greswold.
“I adore men who dare to doubt, who are not afraid to stand apart from
their fellow-men.”
“On a bad eminence?”
“Yes, on a bad eminence. What a sweet expression! I can never
understand Goethe’s _Gretchen_.”
“Why not?”
“How could she have cared for _Faust_, when she had the privilege of
knowing _Mephistopheles_?”
* * * * *
Pamela Ransome had established herself in her pretty bedroom and
dressing-room, and had supervised her maid while she unpacked and
arranged all her belongings, before dinner-time. She came down to the
drawing-room, at a quarter to eight, as thoroughly at her ease as if
she had lived half her life at Enderby Manor. She was a kind of visitor
who gives no trouble, and who drops into the right place instinctively.
Mildred Greswold felt cheered by her presence, in spite of that
ever-recurrent pang of memory which associated all young bright things
with the sweet girl-child who should have grown to womanhood under that
roof, and who was lying a little way off, under the ripening berries of
the mountain-ash, and in the deep shadow of a century-old yew.
They were very quiet in the drawing-room after dinner; Greswold reading
in a nook apart, by the light of his own particular lamp; his wife
bending over an embroidery-frame in her corner near the piano, where
she had her own special dwarf bookcase and her work-basket, and the
_bonheur du jour_ at which she sometimes wrote letters, her own little
table scattered with old family miniatures by Angelica Kaufmann,
Cosway, and Ross, and antique watches in enamelled cases, and boxes of
porcelain and gold and silver, every one of which had its history.
Every woman who lives much at home has some such corner, where the very
atmosphere is full of home thoughts. She asked her niece to play, and
to go on playing as long as she liked; and Pamela, pleased with the
touch of the Broadwood grand, rang the changes upon Chopin, Schumann,
Raff, and Brahm, choosing those compositions which least jarred upon
the atmosphere of studious repose.
Mildred’s needle moved slowly, as she sat in her low chair, with her
hands in the lamp-light and her face in shadow, moved very slowly, and
then stopped altogether, and the white hands lay idle in her lap, and
the embroidery-frame, with its half-finished group of azaleas, slid
from her knee to the ground. She was thinking—thinking of that one
subject which had possessed her thoughts since yesterday afternoon;
which had kept her awake through the brief darkness of the summer night
and in the slow hours betwixt dawn and seven o’clock, when the entrance
of the maid with the early cup of tea marked the beginning of the daily
routine. In all those hours her thoughts had revolved round that one
theme with an intolerable recurrence.
It was of her husband’s first marriage she thought, and of his motive
for silence about that marriage: that he who, in the whole course of
their wedded lives, had been the very spirit of single-minded candour,
should yet have suppressed this all-important event in his past
history, was a fact in itself so startling and mysterious that it might
well be the focus of a wife’s troubled thoughts. He could not so have
acted without some all-sufficient reason; and what manner of reason
could that have been which had influenced him to conduct so entirely at
variance with his own character?
What was there in the history of that marriage which had sealed his
lips, which made it horrible to him to speak about it, even when fair
dealing with the girl who was to be his wife should have constrained
frankness?
Had he been cursed with a wicked wife; some beautiful creature, who had
caught his heart in her toils, as a cat catches a bird, and had won him
only to betray and to dishonour him? Had she blighted his life, branded
him with the shame of a forsaken husband?
And then a hideous dread floated across her mind. What if that
first wife were still living—divorced from him? Had she, Mildred
Fausset, severely trained in the strictest principles of the Anglican
Church—taught her creed by an ascetic who deemed divorce unchristian
and an abomination, and who had always refused to marry those who had
been divorced—had she, in whose life and mind religion and duty were as
one feeling and one principle—had she been trapped into a union with
a man whose wife yet lived, and in the sight of God was yet one with
him—a wife who might crawl penitent to his feet some day, and claim him
as her own again by the right of tears and prayers and a soul cleansed
from sin? Such a sinner must have some hold, some claim even to the
last, upon the man who once was her husband, who once swore to cherish
her and cleave to her, of whom it had once been said, “And they two
shall be one flesh.”
No; again and again, no. She could not believe George Greswold capable
of such deep dishonour as to have concealed the existence of a divorced
wife. No; the reason for that mysterious silence must be another
reason than this.
She had sinned against him, it might be, and had died in her sin, under
circumstances too sad to be told without infinite pain; and he, who had
never in her experience shown himself wanting in moral courage, had
in this one crisis of his life acted as the coward acts. He had kept
silence where conscience should have constrained him to speak.
And then the wife’s vivid fancy conjured up the image of that other
wife. Her jealous fears depicted that wife of past years as a being to
be loved and remembered until death—beautiful, fascinating, gifted with
all the qualities that charm mankind. “He can never care for me as he
once cared for her,” Mildred told herself. “She was his first love.”
His first—the first revelation of what love means to the passionate
heart of youth. What a world there is in that! Mildred remembered how
a new life began for her with the awakening of her love for George
Greswold. What a strange sweet enchantment, what an intoxicating
gladness which glorified the whole face of nature! The river, and the
reedy islets, and the pollard willows, and the autumn sunsets—things so
simple and familiar—had all taken new colours in that magical dawn of
her first love.
She—that unknown woman—had been George Greswold’s first love. Mildred
envied her that brief life, whose sole distinction was to have been
loved by him.
“Why do I imagine a mystery about her?” she argued, after long
brooding. “The only secret was that he loved her as he could never love
me, and he feared to tell me as much lest I should refuse the remnant
of a heart. It was out of kindness to me that he kept silence. It would
have pained me too much to know how _she_ had been loved.”
She knew that her husband was a man of exceeding sensitiveness; she
knew him capable of almost woman-like delicacy. Was it altogether
unnatural that such a man should have held back the history of his
first marriage—with its passionate love, its heart-broken ending—from
the enthusiastic girl who had given him all her heart, and to whom he
could give so little in return?
“He may have seen how I loved him, and may have married me half out of
pity,” she said to herself finally, with unspeakable bitterness.
Yet if this were so, could they have been so happy together, so
completely united—save in that one secret of the past, that one dark
regret which had revealed itself from time to time in an agonising
dream? He had walked that dark labyrinth of sleep alone with his
sorrow: there she could not follow him.
She remembered the awful sound of those broken sentences—spoken to
shadows in a land of shadow. She remembered how acutely she had felt
his remoteness as he sat up in bed, pale as death, his eyes open and
fixed, his lips muttering. He and the dead were face to face in the
halls of the past. _She_ had no part in his life, or in his memory.