SHALL SHE BE LESS THAN ANOTHER?
It was in all good faith that Clement Cancellor had gone to Riverdale.
He had not gone there for the fleshpots of Egypt. He was a man of
severely ascetic habits, who ate and drank as temperately as a disciple
of that old faith of the East which is gaining a curious influence upon
our new life of the West. For him the gratification of the senses,
soft raiment, artistic furniture, thoroughbred horses and luxurious
carriages, palm-houses and orchid-houses, offered no temptation. He
stayed in Mrs. Hillersdon’s house because he was her friend, her
friend upon the broadest and soundest basis on which friendship could
be built. He knew all that was to be known about her. He knew her
frailties of the past, her virtues in the present, her exalted hope
in the future. From her own lips he had heard the story of Louise
Lorraine’s life. She had extenuated nothing. She had not withheld from
him either the foulness of her sins or their number—nay, it may be that
she had in somewise exaggerated the blackness of those devils whom he,
Clement Cancellor, had cast out from her, enhancing by just so much the
magnitude of the miracle he had wrought. She had held back nothing; but
over every revelation she had contrived to spread that gloss which a
clever woman knows how to give to the tale of her own wrong-doing. In
every incident of that evil career she had contrived to show herself
more sinned against than sinning; the fragile victim of overmastering
wickedness in others; the martyr of man’s treachery and man’s passion;
the sport of fate and circumstance. Had Mr. Cancellor known the world
he lived in half as well as he knew the world beyond he would hardly
have believed so readily in the lady who had been Louise Lorraine: but
he was too single-minded to doubt a repentant sinner whose conversion
from the ways of evil had been made manifest by so many good works, and
such unflagging zeal in the exercises of the Anglican Church.
Parchment Street, Grosvenor Square, is one of the fashionable streets
of London, and St. Elizabeth’s, Parchment Street, had gradually
developed, in Clement Cancellor’s incumbency, into one of the most
popular tabernacles at the West End. He whose life-desire had been
to carry the lamp of the faith into dark places, to be the friend
and teacher of the friendless and the untaught, found himself almost
in spite of himself a fashionable preacher, and the delight of the
cultured, the wealthy, and the aristocratic. In his parish of St.
Elizabeth’s there was plenty of work for him to do—plenty of that
work which he had chosen as the mission that had been given to him to
fulfil. Behind those patrician streets where only the best-appointed
carriages drew up, where only the best-dressed footmen ever pulled
the bells or rattled long peals on high-art knockers, there were some
of the worst slums in London, and it was in those slums that half
Mr. Cancellor’s life was spent. In narrow alleys between Oxford and
Wigmore Streets, and in the intricate purlieus of Marylebone Lane, the
Anglican priest had ample scope for his labour, a vineyard waiting for
the husbandman. And in the labyrinth hidden in the heart of West End
London Mr. Cancellor’s chief coadjutor for the last twenty years had
been Louise Hillersdon. Thoroughness was the supreme quality of Mrs.
Hillersdon’s mind. Nothing stopped her. It was this temper which had
given her distinction in the days when princes were her cupbearers and
diamonds her daily tribute. There had been other women as beautiful,
other women as fascinating; but there was not one who with beauty and
fascination combined the audacity and resolution of Louise Lorraine.
When Louise Lorraine took possession of a man’s wits and a man’s
fortune that man was doomed. He was as completely gone as the lemon in
the iron squeezer. A twist of the machine, and there is nothing left
but broken rind and crushed pulp. A season of infatuation, and there
was nothing left of Mrs. Lorraine’s admirer but shattered health and
an overdrawn banking account. Estates, houses, friends, position, good
name, all dropped away from the man whom Louise Lorraine brayed in her
mortar. She spoke of him next season with half contemptuous pity. “Did
I know Sir Theodore Barrymore? Yes; he used to come to my parties
sometimes. A nice fellow enough, but such a terrible fool.”
When Louise Lorraine married Tom Hillersdon, and took it into her head
to break away altogether from her past career, and to pose before the
world as a beautiful Magdalen, she was clever enough to know that, to
achieve any place in society, she must have a very powerful influence
to help her. She was clever enough to discover that the one influence
which a woman in her position could count upon was the influence of
the Church. She was beautiful enough and refined enough to win friends
among the clergy by the charm of her personality. She was rich enough
to secure such friends, and bind them to herself by the splendour of
her gifts, by her substantial aid in those good works which are to
the priest as the very breath of his life. One man she could win by
an organ; another lived only to complete a steeple; the third had
been yearning for a decade for that golden hour when the cracked
tintinabulation which now summoned his flock should be exchanged for a
fine peal of bells. Such men as these were only too easily won, and
the drawing-rooms of Mr. Hillersdon’s house in Park Lane were rarely
without the grace of some clerical figure in long frock-coat and Roman
collar.
Clement Cancellor was of a sterner stuff, and not to be bought by bell
or reredos, rood-screen or pulpit. Him Louise Hillersdon won by larger
measures: to him she offered all that was spiritual in her nature: and
this woman of strange memories was not without spiritual aspirations
and real striving after godliness. Clement Cancellor was no pious
simpleton, to be won by sentimental cant and crocodile tears. He knew
truth from falsehood, had never in his life been duped by the jingle
of false coin. He knew that Mrs. Hillersdon’s repentance had the true
ring, albeit she was in some things still of the earth earthy. She had
worked for him and with him in that wilderness of London as not one
other woman in his congregation had ever worked. To the lost of her own
sex she had been as a redeeming angel. Wretched women had blessed her
with their expiring breath, had died full of hopes that might never
have been awakened had not Louise Lorraine sat beside their beds. Few
other women had ever so influenced the erring of her sex. She who had
waded deep in the slough of sin knew how to talk to sinners.
Mr. Cancellor never forgot her as he had seen her by the bed of death
and in the haunts of iniquity. She could never be to him as the herd
of women. To the mind of the preacher she had a higher value than one
in twenty of those women of his flock whose unstained lives had never
needed the cleansing of self-sacrifice and difficult works.
Thus it was that the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s had never shrunk from
acknowledging Mrs. Hillersdon as his personal friend, had never feared
to sit at her board, or to be seen with her in public; and in the work
of Louise Lorraine’s rehabilitation Clement Cancellor had been a tower
of strength. And now this latest mark of friendship, this visit to her
country home, and this appearance in the noble old Abbey Church at her
solicitation, filled her cup of pride. These starched county people
who had shunned her hospitalities were to see that one of the most
distinguished preachers in the High Church party had given her his
friendship and his esteem.
It had been something for her to have the Prince at Riverdale: it was
still more to her to have Clement Cancellor.
* * * * *
Pamela was in a flutter of excitement all Saturday morning, in the
expectation of Castellani’s reappearance in the afternoon. She had
heard Mr. Cancellor preach, and was delighted at the idea of seeing
him in the pleasant intimacy of afternoon tea. Had there been no such
person as Castellani, her spirits would have been on tip-toe at the
idea of conversing with the fashionable preacher—of telling him in
a reverent under-tone of all those deep emotions his eloquence had
inspired in her. But the author of _Nepenthe_ possessed just that
combination of qualities which commands the admiration of such a girl
as Pamela. That exquisite touch on the piano, that perfect tenor voice,
that exotic elegance of dress and figure, all had made their mark upon
the sensitive plate of a girl’s ardent fancy. “If I had pictured to
myself the man who wrote _Nepenthe_, I should have imagined just such
a face, just such a style,” thought Pamela, quite forgetting that when
first she had read the book she had made a very vivid picture of the
author altogether the opposite of César Castellani—a dark man, lean as
a whipping-post, grave as philosophy itself, with sombre black eyes,
and ebon hair, and a complexion of antique marble. And now she was
ready to accept the Italian, sleek, supple, essentially modern in every
grace and attribute, in place of that sage of antique mould.
She went dancing about with the dogs all the morning, inciting the
grave Kassandra to unwonted exertions, running in and out of the
drawing-room, making an atmosphere of gaiety in the grave old house.
Mildred’s heart ached as she watched that flying figure in the white
gown, youth, health, joyousness, personified.
“O, if my darling were but here, life might be full of happiness
again,” she thought. “I should cease to weary myself with wondering
about that hidden past.”
Do what she would her thoughts still dwelt upon the image of that wife
who had possessed George Greswold’s heart before her. She knew that he
must have loved that other woman whom he had sworn before God’s altar
to cherish. He was not the kind of man to marry for any motive but a
disinterested love. That he had loved passionately, and that he had
been wronged deeply, was Mildred’s reading of the mystery. There had
been a look of agony in his countenance when he spoke of the past that
told of a sorrow too deep for words.
“He has never loved me as he once loved her,” thought Mildred, who
out of the wealth of her own love had developed the capacity for that
self-torture called jealousy.
It seemed to her that her husband had taken pains to avoid the old
opportunities of confidential talk since that revelation of last
Sunday. He had been more than usually engaged by the business details
of his estate; and she fancied that he made the most of all those
duties which he used once to perform with the utmost despatch, grudging
every hour that was spent away from the home circle. He now complained
of the new steward’s ignorance, which threw so much extra work upon
himself.
“After jogging on for years in the same groove with a man who knew
every rood of my land, and the idiosyncrasies of every tenant, I find
it hard work teaching a new man,” he told his wife.
This sounded reasonable enough, yet she could but think that since
Sunday he had studiously avoided being alone with her. If he asked
her to drive or walk with him, he secured Pamela’s company before the
excursion was planned.
“We must show you the country,” he said to his niece.
Mildred told him of the threatened incursion from Riverdale as they sat
at luncheon with Pamela.
“I hope you don’t mind my receiving Mrs. Hillersdon,” she said.
“No, my dear Mildred, I think it would take a much worse woman than
Mrs. Hillersdon to do you any harm, or Pamela either. Whatever her
early history may have been, she has made Tom Hillersdon an excellent
wife, and she has been a very good friend to the poor. I should not
have cared for you to cultivate Mrs. Hillersdon, or the society she
brings round her, at Riverdale—”
“Sir Henry says they have people from the music-halls,” interjected
Pamela, in an awe-stricken voice.
“But if Mrs. Hillersdon likes to come here with her clerical star—”
“Don’t call him a star, George. He is highly gifted, and people have
chosen to make him the fashion, but he is the most single-hearted and
simple-minded man I ever met. No popularity could spoil him. I feel
that if he holds out the hand of friendship to Mrs. Hillersdon, she
must be a good woman.”
“Let her come, Mildred, only don’t let her coming open the door to
intimacy. I would not have my wife the friend of any woman with a
history.”
“And yet there are histories in most lives, George, and there is
sometimes a mystery.”
She could not refrain from this little touch of bitterness, yet she
was sorry the instant she had spoken, deeply penitent, when she saw
the look of pain in the thoughtful face opposite her. Why should she
wilfully wound him, purposely, needlessly, she who so fondly loved him,
whose keenest pain was to think that he had loved any woman upon earth
before he loved her?
“Will you be at home to help me to receive my old friend, George?” she
said, as they rose from the table.
“Yes, I will be at home to welcome Cancellor, and to protect you from
his _protégée’s_ influence, if I can.”
They were all three in the drawing-room when the Riverdale party
arrived. Mildred and Mrs. Hillersdon met in somewise as old
acquaintances, having been thrown together on numerous occasions, at
hunt balls, charity bazaars, and other public assemblies. Pamela was
the only stranger.
Although the scandalous romance of Louise Lorraine’s career was
called ancient history, she was still a beautiful woman. The delicate
features, the pure tones of the alabaster skin, and the large Irish
gray eyes, had been kindly dealt with by time. On the verge of fifty,
Mrs. Hillersdon might have owned only to forty, had she cared so far to
palter with truth. Her charm was, however, now more in a fascinating
personality than in the remains of a once dazzling loveliness. There
was mind in the keen, bright face, with its sharply-cut lines, and
those traces of intellectual wear which give a new grace, instead of
the old one of youthful softness and faultless colouring. The bloom
was gone from the peach, the brilliancy of youth had faded from those
speaking eyes, but there was all the old sweetness of expression which
had made Louise Lorraine’s smile irresistible as the song of the lurlei
in the days that were gone. Her dress was perfect, as it had always
been from the day when she threw away her last cotton stocking, darned
by her own fair hands, and took to dressing like a leader of the great
world, and with perhaps even less concern for cost. She dressed in
perfect harmony with her age and position. Her gown was of softest
black silk, draped with some semi-diaphanous fabric and clouded with
Chantilly lace. Her bonnet was of the same lace and gauze, and her
tapering hand and slender wrist were fitted to perfection in a long
black glove which met a cloud of lace just below the elbow.
At a period when almost every woman who wore black glittered with
beads and bugles from head to foot, Mrs. Hillersdon’s costume was
unembellished by a single ornament. The Parisian milliner had known how
to obey her orders to the letter when she stipulated—_surtout point de
jais_—and the effect was at once distinguished and refined.
Clement Cancellor greeted his old pupil with warm friendliness, and
meekly accepted her reproaches for all those invitations which he had
refused in the past ten years.
“You told me so often that it was impossible for you to come to
Enderby, and yet you can go to my neighbour,” she said.
“My dear Mildred, I went to Riverdale because I was wanted at Romsey.”
“And do you think you were not wanted at Romsey before to-day?—do you
think we should not have been proud to have you preach in our church
here? People would have flocked from far and wide to hear you—yes, even
to Enderby Church—and you might have aided some good work, as you are
going to do to-morrow. How clever of Mrs. Hillersdon to know how to
tempt you down here!”
“You may be sure it is not the first time I have tried, Mrs.
Greswold,” said that lady, with her fascinating smile. “Your influence
would have gone further than mine, I daresay, had you taken half as
much trouble as I have done.”
Mr. Rollinson, the curate of Enderby, was announced at this moment.
The Vicar was a rich man with another parish in his cure, and his own
comfortable vicarage and his brother’s family mansion being adjacent to
the other church, Enderby saw him but seldom, whereby Mr. Rollinson was
a person of much more weight in the parish than the average clerical
subaltern. Mildred liked him for his plain-sailing Christianity and
unfailing kindness to the poor, and she had asked him to tea this
afternoon, knowing that he would like to meet Clement Cancellor.
Castellani looked curiously unlike those three other men, with their
grave countenances and unstudied dress; George Greswold roughly clad
in shooting jacket and knickerbockers; the two priests in well-worn
black. The Italian made a spot of brightness in that sombre assembly,
the sunlight touching his hair and moustache with glints of gold, his
brown velvet coat and light gray trousers suggestive of the studio
rather than of rustic lanes, a gardenia in his button-hole, a valuable
old intaglio fastening his white silk scarf, and withal a half-insolent
look of amusement at those two priests and the sombre-visaged master
of the house. He slipped with serpentine grace to the further side of
the piano, where he contrived his first _tête-à-tête_ with Pamela,
comfortably sheltered by the great Henri Deux vase of gloxinias on the
instrument.
Pamela was shy at first, and would hardly speak; then taking courage,
told him how she had wondered and wept over _Nepenthe_, and thereupon
they began to talk as if they were two kindred souls that had been kept
too long apart by adverse fate, and thrilled with the new delight of
union.
Round the tea-table the conversation was of a graver cast. After a
general discussion of the threatening clouds upon the political and
ecclesiastical horizon, the talk had drifted to a question which at
this time was uppermost in the minds of men. The Deceased Wife’s
Sister’s Bill had been thrown out by the Upper House during the last
session, and everybody had been talking of that debate in which three
princes of the blood royal had been attentive auditors. They had
recorded their vote on the side of liberty of conscience, but in vain.
Time-honoured prejudices had prevailed against modern enlightenment.
Clement Cancellor was a man who would have suffered martyrdom for his
faith; he was generous, he was merciful, gentle, self-sacrificing,
pure in spirit; but he was not liberal-minded. The old shackles hung
heavily upon him. He could not love Wycliffe; and he could not forgive
Cranmer. He was an ecclesiastic after the antique pattern. To him the
marriage of a priest was a base paltering with the lusts of the flesh;
and to him a layman’s marriage with a dead wife’s sister was unholy
and abominable. He had been moved to indignation by the words that
had been spoken and the pamphlets that had been written of late upon
this question; and now, carried away by George Greswold’s denunciation
of that prejudiced majority by which the Bill had been rejected, Mr.
Cancellor gave his indignation full vent, and forgot that he was
speaking in a lady’s drawing-room, and before feminine hearers.
He spoke of such marriages as unholy and immoral, he spoke of such
households as accursed. Mildred listened to him, and watched him
wonderingly, scared at this unfamiliar aspect of his character. To her
he had ever been the gentlest of teachers; she saw him now pallid with
wrath—she heard him breathing words of fire.
George Greswold took up the glove, not because he had ever felt
any particular interest in this question, but because he hated
narrow-minded opinions and clerical prejudices.
“Why should the sister of his wife be different to a man from all other
women?” he asked. “You may call her different—you may set her apart—you
may say she must be to him as his own sister—her beauty must not touch
him, the attractions that fascinate other men must have no influence
over him. You may lay this down as a law—civil—canonical—what you
will—but the common law of nature will override your clerical code,
will burst your shackles of prejudice and tradition. Shall Rachel be
withheld from him who was true and loyal to Leah? She has dwelt in his
house as his friend, the favourite and playmate of his children. He
has respected her as he would have respected any other of his wife’s
girl-friends; but he has seen that she was fair; and if God takes the
wife, and he, remembering the sweetness of that old friendship, and his
children’s love, turns to her as the one woman who can give him back
his lost happiness—is he to be told that this one woman can never be
his, because she was the sister of his first chosen? She has come out
of the same stock whose loyalty he has proved, she would bring to his
hearth all the old sweet associations—”
“And she would _not_ bring him a second mother-in-law. What a
stupendous superiority she would have _there_!” interjected the jovial
Rollinson, who had been wallowing in hot-buttered cakes and strong tea,
until his usually roseate visage had become startlingly rubicund.
He was in all things the opposite of the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He
wrote poetry, made puns, played billiards, dined out at all the houses
in the neighbourhood that were worth dining at, and was only waiting
to marry until Tom Hillersdon should be able to give him a living.
Mr. Cancellor reproved the ribald jester with a scathing look before he
took up the argument against his host.
“If this Bill were to pass, no virtuous woman could live in the house
of a married sister,” he said.
“That is as much as to say that no honest woman can live in the house
of any married man,” retorted Greswold hotly. “Do you think if a man is
weak enough to fall in love with another woman under his wife’s roof
he is less likely to sin because your canonical law stares him in the
face, telling him, ‘Thou canst never wed her’? The married man who is
inconstant to his wife is not influenced by the chances of the future.
He is either a bold, bad man, whose only thought is to win the woman
whom he loves at any cost of honour or conscience; or he is a weak
fool, who drifts hopelessly to destruction, and in whom the resolution
of to-day yields to the temptation of to-morrow. Neither the bold
sinner nor the weak one is influenced by the consideration whether he
can or cannot marry the woman he loves under the unlikely circumstance
of his wife’s untimely death. The man who does so calculate is the
one man in so many thousands of men who will poison his wife to clear
the way for his new fancy. I don’t think we ought to legislate for
poisoners. In plain words, if a married man is weak enough or wicked
enough to be seduced by the charms of any woman who dwells beneath his
roof, he will not be the less likely to fall because the law of the
land has made that woman anathema maranatha, or because he has been
warned from the pulpit that she is to be to him as his own flesh and
blood, no dearer and no less dear than the sister beside whom he grew
from infancy to manhood, and whom he has loved all his life, hardly
knowing whether she is as beautiful as Hebe or as hideous as Tisyphone.”
“You are a disciple of the New Learning, Mr. Greswold,” Cancellor said
bitterly; “the learning which breaks down all barriers and annihilates
the Creator of all things—the learning which has degraded God from
infinite power to infinitesimal insignificance, and which explains the
genius of Plato and Shakespeare, Luther and Newton, as the ultimate
outcome of an unconscious primeval mist.”
“I am no Darwinian,” replied Greswold coldly, “but I would rather
belong to his school of speculative inquiry than to the Calvinism which
slew Servetus, or the Romanism which lit the death-pile of the Oxford
martyrs.”
Mildred was not more anxious than Mrs. Hillersdon to end a discussion
which threatened angry feeling. They looked at each other in an agony,
and then with a sudden inspiration Mildred exclaimed,
“If we could only persuade Mr. Castellani to play to us! We are growing
so terribly serious;” and then she went to Clement Cancellor, who was
standing by the open window, and took her place beside him, while Mrs.
Hillersdon talked with Pamela and Castellani at the piano. “You know
what a privilege it is to _me_ always to hear you talk,” she murmured
in her sweet, subdued voice. “You know how I have followed your
teaching in all things. And be assured my husband is no materialist.
We both cling to the old faith, the old hopes, the old promises. You
must not misjudge him because of a single difference of opinion.”
“Forgive me, my dear Mildred,” replied Cancellor, touched by her
submission. “I did wrong to be angry. I know that to many good
Christians this question of marriage with a sister-in-law is a
stumbling-block. I have taken the subject too deeply to heart
perhaps—I, to whom marriage altogether seems outside the Christian
priest’s horizon. Perhaps I may exaggerate the peril of a wider
liberty; but I, who look upon Henry VIII. as the arch-enemy of the
one vital Church—of which he might have been the wise and enlightened
reformer—I, who trace to his unhallowed union with his brother’s widow
all the after evils of his career—must needs lift up my voice against a
threatened danger.”
Castellani began Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” with a triumphant burst
that sounded like mockery. Do what the preacher might to assimilate
earth to heaven, here there would still be marrying and giving in
marriage.
After the march Mildred went over to the piano and asked Castellani to
sing.
He smiled assent, and played the brief symphony to a ballad of Heine’s,
set by Jensen. The exquisite tenor voice, the perfect taste of the
singer, held his audience spellbound. They listened in silence, and
entreated him to sing again, and then again, till he had sung four of
these jewel-like ballads, and they felt that it was impertinence to ask
for more.
Mildred had stolen round to her own sheltered corner, half hidden by
a group of tall palms. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap,
her head bent. She could not see the singer. She only heard the low
pathetic voice, slightly veiled. It touched her like no other voice
that she had ever heard since, in her girlhood, she burst into a
passion of sobs at first hearing Sims Reeves, when that divine voice
touched some hyper-sensitive chord in her own organisation and moved
her almost to hysteria. And now, in this voice of the man who of all
other men she instinctively disliked, the same tones touched the same
chord, and loosened the floodgates of her tears. She sat with streaming
eyes, grateful for the sheltering foliage which screened her from
observation.
She dried her eyes and recovered herself with difficulty when the
singer rose from the piano and Mrs. Hillersdon began to take leave. Mr.
Rollinson button-holed Castellani on the instant.
“You sing as if you had just come from the seraphic choir,” he said.
“You must sing for us on the seventh.”
“Who are ‘us’?” asked Castellani.
“Our concert in aid of the fund for putting a Burne-Jones window over
the altar.”
“A concert in Enderby village? Is it to be given at the lock-up or in
the pound?”
“It is to be given in this room. Mrs. Greswold has been good enough
to allow us the use of her drawing-room and her piano. Miss Ransome
promises to preside at the buffet for tea and coffee.”
“It will be glorious fun,” exclaimed Pamela; “I shall feel like a
barmaid. I have always envied barmaids.”
“Daudet says there is one effulgent spot in every man’s life—one
supreme moment when he stands on the mountain-top of fortune and
of bliss, and from which all the rest of his existence is a gradual
descent. I wonder whether that afternoon will be your effulgent spot,
Miss Ransome?” said Mrs. Hillersdon laughingly.
“It will—it must. To superintend two great urns of tea and
coffee—_almost_ as nice as those delicious beer-engines one sees at
Salisbury Station—to charge people a shilling for a small cup of tea,
and sixpence for a penny sponge-cake. What splendid fun!”
“Will you help us, Mr. Castleton?” asked the curate, who was not good
at names.
“Mrs. Greswold has only to command me. I am in all things her slave.”
“Then she will command you—she does command you,” cried the curate.
“If you will be so very kind—” began Mildred.
“I am only too proud to obey you,” answered Castellani, with more
earnestness than the occasion required, drawing a little nearer to
Mildred as he spoke; “only too glad of an excuse to return to this
house.”
Mildred looked at him with a half-frightened expression, and then
glanced at Pamela. Did he mean mischief of some kind? Was this the
beginning of an insidious pursuit of that frank girl, whose fortune was
quite enough to tempt the casual adventurer?
“Of all men I have ever seen he is the last to whom I would entrust a
girl’s fate,” thought Mildred, determined to be very much on her guard
against the blandishments of César Castellani.
She took the very worst means to ward off danger. She made the direful
mistake of warning the girl against the possible pursuer that very
evening when they were sitting alone after dinner.
“He is a man I could never trust,” she said.
“No more could I,” replied Pamela; “but O, how exquisitely he sings!”
and excited at the mere memory of that singing, she ran to the piano
and began to pick out the melody of Heine’s “Ich weiss nicht was soll
es bedeuten,” and sang the words softly in her girlish voice; and then
slipped away from the piano with a nervous little laugh.
“Upon my word, Aunt Mildred, I am _traurig_ myself at the very thought
of that exquisite song,” she said. “What a gift it is to sing like
that! How I wish _I_ were César Castellani!”
“What, when we have both agreed that he is not a good man?”
“Who cares about being _good_?” exclaimed Pamela, beside herself;
“three-fourths of the people of this world are good. But to be able to
write a book that can unsettle every one’s religion; to be able to make
everybody miserable when one sings! Those are gifts that place a man
on a level with the Greek gods. If I were Mr. Castellani I should feel
like Mercury or Apollo.”
“Pamela, you frighten me when you rave like that. Remember that, for
all we know to the contrary, this man may be a mere adventurer, and in
every way dangerous.”
“Why should we think him an adventurer? He told me all about himself.
He told me that his grandfather was under obligations to your
grandfather. He told me about his father, the composer, who wrote
operas which are known all over Italy, and who died young, like Mozart
and Mendelssohn. Genius is hereditary with him; he was suckled upon
art. I have no doubt he is bad, irretrievably bad,” said Pamela, with
unction; “but don’t try to persuade me that he is a vulgar adventurer
who would try to borrow five-pound notes, or a fortune-hunter who would
try to marry one for one’s money,” concluded the girl, falling back
upon her favourite form of speech.