“It must have been instinct that made me love her,” she said to herself; and then she would wonder idly what the fair sinner who had been Fay’s mother was like, and whether her father had really cared more for that frail woman than for his lawful wife.
“Poor pretty mamma! he seemed to doat upon her,” thought Mildred. “I cannot imagine his ever having loved any one so well. I cannot imagine his ever having cared for any other woman in this world.”
The formless image of that unknown woman haunted the girl’s imagination. She appeared sometimes with one aspect, sometimes another—darkly beautiful, of Oriental type, like Scott’s Rebecca, or fair and lowly-born like Effie Deans—poor fragile Effie, fated to fall at the first temptation. Poetry and fiction were full of suggestions about that unknown influence in her father’s life; but every thought of the past ended in a sigh of pity for that fair wife whose domestic happiness had been clouded over by that half-discovered mystery.
Never a word did she breathe to her father upon this forbidden subject; never a word to Bell, who was still at the head of affairs in both Mr. Fausset’s houses, and who looked like a grim and stony repository of family secrets.
CHAPTER VIII.
“SUCH THINGS WERE.”
Mildred had been motherless for a year when that new love began to grow which was to be stronger and closer than the love of mother or father, and which was to take possession of her life hereafter and transplant her to a new soil.
How well she remembered that summer afternoon on which she and George Greswold met for the first time!—she a girl of seventeen, fresh, simple-minded, untainted by that life of fashion and frivolity which she had seen only from the outside, looking on as a child at the follies of men and women—he her senior by thirteen years, and serious beyond his age. Her father and his father had been companions at the University, as undergraduates, with full purses and a mutual delight in fox-hunting and tandem-driving; and it was this old Oxford friendship which was the cause of George Greswold’s appearance at The Hook on that particular summer afternoon. Mr. Fausset had met him on a house-boat at Henley Regatta, had been moved by the memory of the past on discovering that Greswold was the son of George Ransome of Magdalen, and had brought his friend’s son home to introduce to his daughter. It was not altogether without ulterior thought, perhaps, that he introduced George Greswold into his home. He had a theory that the young men of this latter day were for the most part a weak-kneed and degenerate race; and it had seemed to him that this tall, broad-shouldered young man with the marked features, dark eyes, and powerful brow was of a stronger type than the average bachelor.
“A pity that he is rather too old for Mildred,” he said to himself, supposing that his daughter would hardly feel interested in a man who was more than five-and-twenty.
Mildred could recall his face as she saw it for the first time, to-day in her desolation, sitting idly beside the lake, while the rhythmical beat of the paddle-wheels died away in the distance. That grave dark face impressed her at once with a sense of power. She did not think the stranger handsome, or fascinating, or aristocratic, or elegant; but she thought of him a great deal, and she was silent and shy in his presence, let him come as often as he might.
He was in mourning for his mother, to whom he had been deeply attached, and who had died within the last three months, leaving him Enderby Manor and a large fortune. His home life had not been happy. There had been an antagonism between him and his father from his boyhood upwards, and he had shaken the dust of the paternal house off his feet, and had left England to wander aimlessly, living on a small income allowed him by his mother, and making a little money by literature. He was a second son, a person of no importance, except to the mother, who doated upon him.