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.”