“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.