The fatal three, vol. I

by M. E. Braddon

“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.