LIFTING THE CURTAIN.
The charity concert afforded César Castellani just the necessary
excuse for going to Enderby Manor House as often as he liked, and for
staying there as long as he liked. He was now on a familiar footing.
He drove or rode over from Riverdale nearly every day during the three
weeks that intervened between Mr. Cancellor’s sermon and the afternoon
concert. He made himself the curate’s right hand in all the details of
the entertainment. He chose the music, he wrote the programme, he sent
it to his favourite printer to be printed in antique type upon ribbed
paper with ragged edges: a perfect gem in the way of a programme. He
scoured the country round in quest of amateur talent, and was much more
successful than the curate had been in the same quest.
“I’m astounded at your persuading Lady Millborough to show in the
daylight,” said Rollinson, laughing. “You have the tongue of the
serpent to overcome her objection to the glare of the afternoon sun.”
“_Estote prudentes sicuti serpentes_,” said Castellani. “There’s a fine
old ecclesiastic’s motto for you. I know Lady Millborough rather dreads
the effect of sunlight upon her _nacre Bernhardt_. She told me that
she was never equal to singing in the afternoon: the glare of the sun
always gave her a headache. But I assured her in the first place that
there should be no glare—that as an artist I abhorred a crude, white
light—and that it should be my business to see that our concert-room
was lighted upon purely æsthetic principles. We would have the dim
religious light which painters and poets love. In the second place I
assured her that she had as fine a contralto as Madame Alboni, on whose
knees I had often sat as a child, and who gave me the emerald pin I was
wearing.”
“My hat, what a man you are!” exclaimed Rollinson. “But do you mean to
say we are to give our concert in the dark?”
“We will not have the afternoon sun blinding half our audience.
We will have the auditorium in a cool twilight, and we will have
lamp-light on our platform—just that mellow and flattering light in
which elderly women look young and young women angelic.”
“We’ll leave everything to you,” cried the curate. “I think we ought to
leave him free scope; ought we not, Mrs. Greswold?”
Mildred assented. Pamela was enthusiastic. This concert was to be one
of the events of her life. Castellani had discovered that she possessed
a charming mezzo-soprano. She was to sing a duet with him. O, what
rapture! A duet of his own composition, all about roses and love and
death.
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
If I had but lived for thee;
A life as long as the nightingale’s song
Were enough for my heart and me.”
The words and the voices were interwoven in a melodious web; tenor and
soprano entwined together—following and ever following like the phrases
in an anthem.
The preparation of this one duet alone obliged Mr. Castellani to be
nearly every day at Enderby. A musician has inexhaustible patience in
teaching his own music. Castellani hammered at every bar and every note
with Pamela. He did not hesitate at unpleasant truth. She had received
the most expensive instruction from a well-known singing-master, and,
according to Castellani, everything she had been taught was wrong. “If
you had been left alone to sing as the birds sing you would be ever so
much better off,” he said; “the man has murdered a very fine organ. If
I had had the teaching of you, you would have sung as well as Trebelli
by this time.”
Pamela thrilled at the thought. O, to sing like some great singer—to
be able to soar skyward on the wings of music—to sing as _he_ sang!
She had known him a fortnight by this time, and was deeply in love
with him. In moments of confidence by the piano he called her Pamela,
treating her almost as if she were a child, yet with a touch of
gallantry always—an air that said, “You are beautiful, dear child, and
you know it; but I have lived my life.” Before Mrs. Greswold he was
more formal, and called her Miss Ransome.
All barriers were down now between Riverdale and the Manor. Mrs.
Hillersdon was going to make an extra large house-party on purpose
to patronise the concert. It was to be on the 7th of September: the
partridge-shooting would be in full swing, and the shooters assembled.
Mrs. Greswold had been to tea at Riverdale. There seemed to be no help
for it, and George Greswold was apparently indifferent.
“My dearest, your purity of mind will be in no danger from Mrs.
Hillersdon. Even were she still Louise Lorraine, she could not harm
you—and you know I am not given to consider the _qu’on dire t’on_ in
such a case. Let her come here by all means, so long as she is not
obnoxious to you.”
“She is far from that. I think she has the most delightful manners of
any woman I ever met.”
“So, no doubt, had Circe, yet she changed men into swine.”
“Mr. Cancellor would not believe in her if she were not a good woman.”
“I should set a higher value on Cancellor’s opinion if he were more of
a man of the world, and less of a bigot. See what nonsense he talked
about the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill.”
“Nonsense! O, George, if you knew how it distressed me to hear you take
the other side—the unchristian side!”
“I can find no word of Christ’s against such marriages, and the Church
of old was always ready with a dispensation for any such union, if it
was made worth the Church’s while to be indulgent. It was the earnest
desire of the Roman Catholic world that Philip should marry Elizabeth.
You are Cancellor’s pupil, Mildred, and I cannot wonder if he has made
you something of a bigot.”
“He is the noblest and most unselfish of men.”
“I admit his unselfishness—the purity of his intentions—the tenderness
of his heart; but I deny his nobility. Ecclesiastic narrow-mindedness
spoils a character that might have been perfect had it been less
hampered by tradition. Cancellor is a couple of centuries behind the
time. His Church is the Church of Laud.”
“I thought you admired and loved him, George,” said Mildred
regretfully.
“I admire his good qualities, I love him for his thoroughness; but our
creeds are wide apart. I cannot even pretend to think as he thinks.”
This confession increased Mildred’s sadness. She would have had her
husband think as she thought, believe as she believed, in all spiritual
things. The beloved child they had lost was waiting for them in heaven;
and she would fain that they should both tread the same path to that
better world where there would be no more tears, no more death—where
day and night would be alike in the light of the great Throne. She
shuddered at the thought of any difference of creed on her husband’s
part, shuddered at that beginning of divergence which might end in
infidelity. She had been educated by Clement Cancellor, and she
thought as he thought. It seemed to her that she was surrounded by an
atmosphere of doubt. In the books she read among the more cultivated
people whom she met, she found the same tendency to speculative
infidelity, pessimism, Darwinism, sociology, Pantheism, anything but
Christian belief. The nearest approach to religious feeling seemed to
be found in the theosophists, with their last fashionable Oriental
improvements upon the teaching of Christ.
Clement Cancellor had trained her in the belief that there was one
Church, one creed, one sovereign rule of life, outside which rigid
boundary-line lay the dominion of Satan. And now, seeing her husband’s
antagonism to her pastor upon this minor point of the marriage law, she
began to ask herself whether those two might not stand as widely apart
upon graver questions—whether George Greswold might not be one of those
half-hearted Christians who attend their parish church and keep Sunday
sacred because it is well to set a good example to their neighbours
and dependants, while their own faith is little more than a memory of
youthful beliefs, the fading reflection of a sun that has sunk below
the horizon.
She had discovered her husband capable of a suppression of truth that
was almost as bad as falsehood; and now having begun to doubt his
conscientiousness, it was not unnatural that she should begin to doubt
his religious feeling.
“Had he been as deeply religious as I thought him, he would not have so
deceived me,” she told herself, still brooding upon that mystery of
his first marriage.
Castellani’s presence in the house was a continual irritation to her.
It tortured her to think that he knew more of her husband’s past life
than was known to her. She longed to question him, yet refrained,
feeling that there would be unspeakable meanness, treachery even, in
obtaining any information about her husband’s past life except from his
own lips. He had chosen to keep silence, he who could so easily have
explained all things; and it was her duty to submit.
She tried to be interested in the concert, which involved a good
deal of work for herself, as she was to play all the accompaniments,
the piano part in a concertante duet by De Bériot with an amateur
violin player, and a Hungarian march by a modern classic by way of
overture. There were rehearsals nearly every day, with much talk and
tea-drinking. Enderby Manor seemed given over to bustle and gaiety—that
grave old house, which to her mind ought to have been silent as a
sepulchre, now that Lola’s voice could sound there never more, except
in dreams.
“People must think I am forgetting her,” she said to herself with a
sigh, when half-a-dozen carriages had driven away from the door, after
two hours of bustle and confusion, much discussion as to the choice
of songs and the arrangement of the programme, which everybody wanted
different.
“I cannot possibly sing ‘The Three Fishers’ after Captain Scobell’s
‘Wanderer,’” protested Lady Millborough. “It would never do to have two
dismal songs in succession.”
Yet when it was proposed that her ladyship’s song should succeed Mr.
Rollinson’s admirable rendering of George Grossmith’s “He was such a
Careless Man,” she distinctly refused to sing immediately after a comic
song.
“I am not going to take the taste of Mr. Rollinson’s vulgarity out of
people’s mouths,” she told Mildred, in an audible aside.
To these God-gifted vocalists the accompanist was as an inferior being,
a person with a mere mechanical gift of playing anything set before her
with taste and style. They treated her as if she had been a machine.
“If you wouldn’t mind going over our duet just once more, I think
we should feel more comfortable in it,” said one of the two Miss
Tadcasters, who were to take the roof off, metaphorically, in the Norma
duet.
Mildred toiled with unwavering good-nature, and suppressed her shudders
at many a false note, and cast oil on the waters when the singers were
inclined to quarrel. She was glad of the drudgery that kept her fingers
and her mind occupied; she was glad of any distraction that changed the
current of her thoughts.
* * * * *
It was the day before the concert. César Castellani had established
himself as _l’ami de la maison_, a person who had the right to come in
and out as he liked, whose coming and going made no difference to the
master of the house. Had George Greswold’s mind been less abstracted
from the business of every-day life he might have seen danger to Pamela
Ransome’s peace of mind in the frequent presence of the Italian, and
he might have considered it his duty, as the young lady’s kinsman, to
have restricted Mr. Castellani’s privileges. But the blow which had
crushed George Greswold’s heart a little more than a year ago had left
him in somewise a broken man. He had lost all interest in the common
joys and occupations of every-day life. His days were spent for the
most part in long walks or rides in the loneliest places he could find,
his only evening amusement was found in books, and those books of a
kind which engrossed his attention and took him out of himself. His
wife’s companionship was always precious to him; but their intercourse
had lost all its old gaiety and much of the old familiarity. There
was an indefinable something which held them asunder even when they
were sitting in the same room, or pacing side by side, just as of old,
upon the lawn in front of the drawing-room, or idling in their summer
parlour in the shade of the cedars.
Again and again in the last three weeks some question about the past
had trembled upon Mildred’s lips as she sat at work by the piano where
Castellani played in dreamy idleness, wandering from one master to
another, or extemporising after his own capricious fancies. Again and
again she had struggled against the temptation and had conquered. No,
she would not stoop to a meanness. She would not be disloyal to her
husband by so much as one idle question.
To-day Castellani was in high spirits, proud of to-morrow’s anticipated
success, in which his own exertions would count for much. He sat at the
piano in a leisure hour after tea. All the performers had gone, after
the final adjustment of every detail. Mildred sat idle with her head
resting against the cushion of a high-backed armchair, exhausted by the
afternoon’s labours. Pamela stood by the piano watching and listening
delightedly as Castellani improvised.
“I will give you my musical transcript of St. Partridge Day,” he said,
smiling down at the notes as he played a lively melody with little
rippling runs in the treble and crisp staccato chords in the bass.
“This is morning, and all the shooters are on tip-toe with delight—a
misty morning,” gliding into a dreamy legato movement as he spoke. “You
can scarcely see the hills yonder, and the sun is not yet up. See
there he leaps above that bank of purple cloud, and all is brightness,”
changing to crashing chords in the bass and brilliant arpeggios in the
treble. “Hark! there is chanticleer. How shrill he peals in the morning
air! The dogs are leaving the kennel—and now the gates are open, dogs
and men are in the road. You can hear the steady tramp of the clumsy
shooting-boots—your dreadful English boots—and the merry music of the
dogs. Pointers, setters, spaniels, smooth beasts and curly beasts,
shaking the dew from the hedgerows as they scramble along the banks,
flying over the ditches—creatures of lightning swiftness; yes, even
those fat heavy spaniels which seem made to sprawl and snap at flies in
the sunshine or snore beside the fire.”
He talked in brief snatches, playing all the time—playing with the
easy brilliancy, the unerring grace of one to whom music is a native
tongue—as natural a mode of thought-expression as speech itself. His
father had trained him to improvise, weaving reminiscences of all his
favourite composers into those dreamy reveries. They had sat side by
side, father and son, each following the bent of his own fancy, yet
quick to adapt it to the other, now leading, now following. They had
played together as Moscheles and Mendelssohn used to play, delighting
in each other’s caprices.
“I hope I don’t bore you very much,” said Castellani, looking up at
Mildred as she sat silent, the fair face and pale gold hair defined
against the olive brocade of the chair cushion.
He looked up at her in wondering admiration, as at a beautiful picture.
How lovely she was, with a loveliness that grew upon him, and took
possession of his fancy and his senses with a strengthening hold day by
day. It was a melancholy loveliness, the beauty of a woman whose life
had come to a dead stop, in whose breast hope and love were dead—or
dormant.
“Not dead,” he told himself, “only sleeping. Whose shall be the spell
to awaken the sleepers. Who shall be the Orpheus to bring this sweet
Eurydice from the realms of Death?”
Such thoughts were in his mind as he sat looking at her, waiting for
her answer, playing all the while, telling her how fair she was in the
tenderest variations of an old German air whose every note breathed
passionate love.
“How sweet!” murmured Pamela; “what an exquisite melody!” taking some
of the sweetness to herself. “How could such sweetness weary any one
with the ghost of an ear? You are not bored by it, are you, aunt?”
“Bored? no, it is delightful,” answered Mildred, rousing herself from a
reverie. “My thoughts went back to my childhood while you were playing.
I never knew but one other person who had that gift of improvisation,
and she used to play to me when I was a child. She was almost a child
herself, and of course she was very inferior to you as a pianist; but
she would sit and play to me for an hour in the twilight, inventing
new melodies, or playing recollections of old melodies, describing in
music. The old fairy tales are for ever associated with music in my
mind, because of those memories. I believe she was highly gifted in
music.”
“Music of a high order is not an uncommon gift among women of sensitive
temperament,” said Castellani musingly. “I take it to be only another
name for sympathy. Want of musical feeling is want of sympathy.
Shakespeare knew that when he declared the non-musical man to be by
nature a villain. I could no more imagine _you_ without the gift of
music than I could imagine the stars without the quality of light. Mr.
Greswold’s first wife was a good musician, as no doubt you know.”
“You heard her play—and sing?” faltered Mildred, avoiding a direct
reply.
The sudden mention of her dead rival’s name had quickened the beating
of her heart. She had longed to question him and had refrained; and
now, without any act of hers, he had spoken, and she was going to hear
something about that woman whose existence was a mystery to her, whose
Christian name she had never heard.
“Yes, I heard her several times at parties at Nice. She was much
admired for her musical talents. She was not a grand singer, but she
had been well taught, and she had exquisite taste, and knew exactly the
kind of music that suited her best. She was one of the attractions at
the Palais Montano, where one heard only the best music.”
“I think you said the other day that you did not meet her often,”
said Mildred. “My husband could hardly have forgotten you had you met
frequently.”
“I can scarcely say that we met frequently, and our meetings were
such as Mr. Greswold would not be very likely to remember. I am not a
remarkable man now, and I was a very insignificant person fifteen years
ago. I was only asked to people’s houses because I could sing a little,
and because my father had a reputation in the South as a composer.
I was never introduced to your husband, but I was presented to his
wife—as a precocious youth with some pretensions to a tenor voice—and I
found her very charming—after her own particular style.”
“Was she a beautiful woman?” asked Mildred. “I—I—have never talked
about her to my husband, she died so young, and—”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Castellani, as she hesitated.
“Of course you would not speak of her. There are things that cannot
be spoken about. There is always a skeleton in every life—not more in
Mr. Greswold’s past than in that of other people, perhaps, could we
know all histories. I was wrong to speak of her. Her name escaped me
unawares.”
“Pray don’t apologise,” said Mildred, indignant at something in his
tone, which hinted at wrong-doing on her husband’s part. “There can
be no reason why you should keep silence—to me; though any mention of
an old sorrow might wound him. I know my husband too well not to know
that he must have behaved honourably in every relation of life—before I
married him as well as afterwards. I only asked a very simple question:
was my predecessor as beautiful as she was gifted?”
“No. She was charming, piquant, elegant, spirituelle, but she was not
handsome. I think she was conscious of that want of beauty, and that it
made her sensitive, and even bitter. I have heard her say hard things
of women who were handsomer than herself. She had a scathing tongue
and a capricious temper, and she was not a favourite with her own sex,
though she was very much admired by clever men. I know that as a lad I
thought her one of the brightest women I had ever met.”
“It was sad that she should die so young,” said Mildred.
She would not for worlds that this man should know the extent of her
ignorance about the woman who had borne her husband’s name. She spoke
vaguely, hoping that he would take it for granted she knew all.
“Yes,” assented Castellani with a sigh, “her death was infinitely sad.”
He spoke as of an event of more than common sadness—a calamity that had
been in somewise more tragical than untimely death must needs be.
Mildred kept silence, though her heart ached with shapeless
forebodings, and though it would have been an unspeakable relief to
know the worst rather than to feel the oppression of this mystery.
Castellani rose to take leave. He was paler than he had been before the
conversation began, and he had a troubled air. Pamela looked at him
with sympathetic distress. “I am afraid you are dreadfully tired,” she
said, as they shook hands.
“I am never tired in this house,” he answered; and Pamela appropriated
the compliment by her vivid blush.
Mildred shook hands with him mechanically and in silence. She was
hardly conscious of his leaving the room. She rose and went out into
the garden, while Pamela sat down to the piano and began singing her
part in the everlasting duet. She never sang anything else nowadays. It
was a perpetual carol of admiration for the author of _Nepenthe_.
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
If I had but lived for thee;
’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fades
Over the western sea,”
she warbled, while Mildred paced slowly to and fro in front of the
cedars, brooding over every word Castellani had spoken about her
husband’s first wife.
“Her death was infinitely sad.”
Why infinitely? The significance of the word troubled her. It conjured
up all manner of possibilities. Why infinitely sad? All death is
sad. The death of the young especially so. But to say even of a
young wife’s death that it was infinitely sad would seem to lift it
out of the region of humanity’s common doom. That qualifying word
hinted at a tragical fate rather than a young life cut short by any
ordinary malady. There had been something in Castellani’s manner which
accentuated the meaning of his words. That troubled look, that deep
sigh, that hurried departure, all hinted at a painful story which he
knew and did not wish to reveal.
He had in a manner apologised for speaking of George Greswold’s first
wife. There must have been a reason for that. He was not a man to
say meaningless things out of _gaucherie_; not a man to blunder and
equivocate from either shyness or stupidity. He had implied that Mr.
Greswold was not likely to talk about his first marriage—that he would
naturally avoid any allusion to his first wife.
Why naturally? Why should he not speak of that past life? Men are not
ordinarily reticent upon such subjects. And that a man should suppress
the fact of a first marriage altogether would suggest memories so dark
as to impel an honourable man to stoop to a tacit lie rather than face
the horror of revelation.
She walked up and down that fair stretch of velvet turf upon which
her feet had trodden so lightly in the happy years that were gone—gone
never to be recalled, as it seemed to her, carrying with them all that
she had ever known of domestic peace, of wedded bliss. Never again
could they two be as they had been. The mystery of the past had risen
up between them—like some hooded phantom, a vaguely threatening figure,
a hidden face—to hold them apart for evermore.
“If he had only trusted me,” she thought despairingly, “there is hardly
any sin that I would not have forgiven for love of him. Why could he
not believe in my love well enough to know that I should judge him
leniently—if there had been wrong-doing on his side—if—if—”
She had puzzled over that hidden past, trying to penetrate the
darkness, imagining the things that might have happened—infidelity on
the wife’s part—infidelity on the husband’s side—another and fatal
attachment taking the place of loyal love. Sin of some kind there
must have been, she thought; for such dark memories could scarcely be
sinless. But was husband or wife the sinner?
“Her death was infinitely sad.”
That sentence stood out against the dark background of mystery as if
written in fire. That one fact was absolute. George Greswold’s first
wife had died under circumstances of peculiar sadness; so painful that
Castellani’s countenance grew pale and troubled at the very thought of
her death.
“I cannot endure it,” Mildred thought at last, in an agony of doubt.
“I will not suffer this torture for another day. I will appeal to him.
I will question him. If he values my love and my esteem he will answer
faithfully. It must be painful for him, painful for me; but it will be
far better for us both in the long-run. Anything will be better than
these torturing fears. I am his wife, and I have a right to know the
truth.”
The dressing-gong summoned her back to the house. Her husband was in
the drawing-room half-an-hour afterwards, when she went down to dinner.
He was still in his jacket and knickerbockers, just as he had come in
from a long ramble.
“Will you forgive me if I dine with you in these clothes, Mildred,
and you, Pamela?” to the damsel in white muslin, whom he had just
surprised at the piano still warbling her honeyed strain about death
and the roses; “I came in five minutes ago—dead beat. I have been in
the forest, and had a tramp with the deerhounds over Bramble Hill.”
“You walk too far, George. You are looking dreadfully tired.”
“I’m sure you needn’t apologise for your dress on my account,”
said Pamela. “Henry is a perfect disgrace half his time. He hates
evening-clothes, and I sometimes fear he hates soap-and-water. He
can reconcile his conscience to any amount of dirt so long as he has
his cold tub in the morning. He thinks that one sacrifice to decency
justifies anything. I have had to sit next him at dinner when he came
straight from rats,” concluded Pamela, with a shudder. “But Rosalind is
so foolishly indulgent. She would spoil twenty husbands.”
“And you, I suppose, would be a martinet to one?” said Greswold,
smiling at the girl’s animated face.
“It would depend. If I were married to an artist I could forgive any
neglect of the proprieties. One does not expect a man of that kind to
be the slave of conventionalities; but a commonplace person like Sir
Henry Mountford has nothing to recommend him but his tailor.”
They went to dinner, and Pamela’s prattle relieved the gloom which had
fallen upon husband and wife. George Greswold saw that there were signs
of a new trouble in his wife’s face. He sat for nearly an hour alone
with the untouched decanters before him, and with Kassandra’s head upon
his knee. The dog always knew when his thoughts were darkest, and would
not be repulsed at such times. She was not obtrusive: she only wanted
to bear him company.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he left the dining-room. He looked in at
the drawing-room door, and saw his wife and his niece sitting at work,
silent both.
“I am going to the library to write some letters, Mildred,” he said:
“don’t sit up for me.”
She rose quickly and went over to him.
“Let me have half-an-hour’s talk with you first, George,” she said, in
an earnest voice: “I want so much to speak to you.”
“My dearest, I am always at your service,” he answered quietly; and
they went across the hall together, to that fine old room which was
essentially the domain of the master of the house.
It was a large room with three long narrow windows—unaltered from
the days of Queen Anne—looking out to the carriage-drive in the
front of the house, and the walls were lined with books, in severely
architectural bookcases. There was a lofty marble chimneypiece, richly
decorated, and in front of the fireplace there was an old-fashioned
knee-hole desk, at which Mr. Greswold was wont to sit. There was a
double reading-lamp ready-lighted for him upon this desk, and there
was no other light in the room. By this dim light the sombre colouring
of oak bookcases and maroon velvet window-curtains deepened to black.
The spacious room had almost a funereal aspect, like that awful
banqueting-hall to which Domitian invited his parasites and straightway
frightened them to death.
“Well, Mildred, what is the matter?” asked Greswold, when his wife had
seated herself beside him in front of the massive oak desk at which
all the business of his estate had been transacted since he came to
Enderby. “There is nothing amiss, love, I hope, to make you so earnest?”
“There is something very much amiss, George,” she answered. “Forgive me
if I pain you by what I have to say—by the questions I am going to ask.
I cannot help giving you pain, truly and dearly as I love you. I cannot
go on suffering as I have suffered since that wretched Sunday afternoon
when I discovered how you had deceived me—you whom I so trusted, so
honoured as the most upright among men.”
“It is a little hard that you should say I deceived you, Mildred. I
suppressed one fact which had no bearing upon my relations with you.”
“You must have signed your name to a falsehood in the register, if you
described yourself as a bachelor.”
“I did not so describe myself. I confided the fact of my first marriage
to your father on the eve of our wedding. I told him why I had been
silent—told him that my past life had been steeped in bitterness. He
was generous enough to accept my confidence and to ask no questions.
My bride was too shy and too agitated to observe what I wrote in the
register, or else she might have noted the word ‘widower’ after my
name.”
“Thank God you did not sign your name to a lie,” said Mildred, with a
sigh of relief.
“I am sorry my wife of fourteen years should think me capable of
falsehood on the document that sealed my fate with hers.”
“O, George, I know how true you are—how true and upright you have
been in every word and act of your life since we two have been one.
It is not in my nature to misjudge you. I cannot think you capable of
wrong-doing to any one under strongest temptation. I cannot believe
that Fate could set such a snare for you as could entrap you into one
dishonourable act; but I am tortured by the thought of a past life of
which I know nothing. Why did you hide your marriage from me when we
were lovers? Why are you silent and secret now, when I am your wife,
the other half of yourself, ready to sympathise with you, to share the
burden of dark memories? Trust me, George. Trust me, dear love, and
let us be again as we have been, united in every thought.”
“You do not know what you are asking me, Mildred,” said George
Greswold, in his deep, grave voice, looking at her with haggard
reproachful eyes. “You cannot measure the torture you are inflicting by
this aimless curiosity.”
“You cannot measure the agony of doubt which I have suffered since I
knew that you loved another woman before you loved me—loved her so well
that you cannot bear even to speak of that past life which you lived
with her—regret her so intensely that now, after fourteen years of
wedded life with me, the mere memory of that lost love can plunge you
into gloom and despair,” said Mildred passionately.
That smothered fire of jealousy which had been smouldering in her
breast for weeks broke out all at once in impetuous speech. She no
longer cared what she said. Her only thought was that the dead love had
been dearer than the living, that she had been cozened by a lover whose
heart had never been wholly hers.
“You are very cruel, Mildred,” her husband answered quietly. “You are
probing an old wound, and a deep one, to the quick. You wrong yourself
more than you wrong me by causeless jealousy and unworthy doubts. Yes,
I did conceal the fact of my first marriage—not because I had loved
my wife too well, but because I had not loved her well enough. I was
silent about a period of my life which was one of intense misery—which
it was my duty to myself to forget, if it were possible to forget—which
it was perilous to remember. My only chance of happiness—or peace of
mind—lay in oblivion of that bitter time. It was only when I loved
you that I began to believe forgetfulness was possible. I courted
oblivion by every means in my power. I told myself that the man who
had so suffered was a man who had ceased to exist. George Ransome
was dead. George Greswold stood on the threshold of a new life, with
infinite capacities for happiness. I told myself that I might be a
beloved and honoured husband—which I had never been—a useful member
of society—which I had not been hitherto. Until that hour all things
had been against me. With you for my wife all things would be in my
favour. For thirteen happy years this promise of our marriage morning
was fully realised; then came our child’s death; and now comes your
estrangement.”
“I am not estranged, George. It is only my dread of the beginning of
estrangement which tortures me. Since that man spoke of your first
wife, I have brooded perpetually upon that hidden past. It is weak, I
know, to have done so. I ought to trust unquestioningly: but I cannot,
I cannot. I love you too well to love without jealousy.”
“Well, let the veil be lifted then, since it must be so. Ask what
questions you please, and I will answer them—as best I can.”
“You are very good,” she faltered, drawing a little nearer to him,
leaning her head against his shoulder as she talked to him, and laying
her hand on his as it lay before him on the desk, tightly clenched.
“Tell me, dear, were you happy with your first wife?”
“I was not.”
“Not even in the beginning?”
“Hardly in the beginning. It was an ill-advised union, the result of
impulse.”
“But she loved you very dearly, perhaps.”
“She loved me—dearly—after her manner of loving.”
“And you did not love her?”
“It is a cruel thing you force me to say, Mildred. No, I did not love
her.”
“Had you been married long when she died?”
She felt a quivering movement in the clenched hand on which her own lay
caressingly, and she heard him draw a long and deep breath.
“About a year.”
“Her death was a sad one, I know. Did she go out of her mind before she
died?”
“No.”
“Did she leave you—or do you any great wrong?”
“No.”
“Were you false to her, George—O, forgive me, forgive me—but there must
have been something more sad than common sadness, and it might be that
some new and fatal love—”
“There was no such thing,” he answered sternly. “I was true to my
duties as a husband. It was not a long trial—only a year. Even a
profligate might keep faith for so short a span.”
“I see you will not confide in me. I will ask no more questions,
George. That kind of catechism will not make us more in sympathy with
each other. I will ask you nothing more—except—just one question—a
woman’s question. Was your first wife beautiful in your eyes.”
“She was not beautiful; but she was intellectual, and she had an
interesting countenance—a face that attracted me at first sight. It was
even more attractive to me than the faces of handsomer women. But if
you want to know what your fancied rival was like you need not languish
in ignorance,” with some touch of scorn. “I have her photograph in this
desk. I have kept it for my days of humiliation, to remind me of what I
have been and what I may be again. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes, George, if it will not pain you too much to show it to me.”
“Do not talk of pain. You have stirred the waters of Marah so deeply
that one more bitter drop cannot signify.” He unlocked his desk as he
spoke, lifted the lid, which was sustained by a movable upright, and
groped among the accumulation of papers and parchments inside.
The object for which he was seeking was at the back of the desk, under
all the papers. He found it by touch: a morocco case containing a
cabinet photograph. Mildred stood up beside him, with one hand on his
shoulder as he searched.
He handed her the case without a word. She opened it in silence and
looked at the portrait within. A small, delicately-featured face, with
large dark eyes—eyes almost too large for the face—a slender throat,
thin sloping shoulders—eyes that looked out of the picture with a
strange intensity—a curious alertness in the countenance, as of a woman
made up of nerves and emotions, a nature wanting the element of repose.
Mildred stared at the picture three or four seconds, and then with a
choking sound like a strangled sob fell unconscious at her husband’s
feet.
END OF VOL. I.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 8 Changed: absurb lambs, and more absurd foliage
to: absurd lambs, and more absurd foliage
pg 9 Changed: amidst the icy formalties
to: amidst the icy formalities