“I need not excuse myself, my dear friend, for making Mr. Castellani known to you in the flesh, as I have no doubt he is already familiar to you in the spirit. He is the anonymous author of Nepenthe, the book that almost every one has been reading and quite every one has been talking about this season. Only the few can understand it; but you are of those few, and I feel assured your deepest feelings have been stirred by that most exceptional work. How delicious it must be with you among green lanes and English meadows! We are just rushing off to a land of extinct volcanoes for my poor husband’s annual cure. A vous de cœur,
Diana Tomkison.”
“Pray sit down,” said Mildred, as she finished her gushing friend’s note; “my husband will be in presently—I hope in time to see you.”
“Pardon me if, in all humility, I say it is you I was especially anxious to see, to know, if it were possible—delightful as it will be also to know Mr. Greswold. It is with your name that my past associations are interwoven.”
“Indeed! How is that?”
“It is a long story, Mrs. Greswold. To explain the association I must refer to the remote past. My grandfather was in the silk trade, like your grandfather.”
Mildred blushed; the assertion came upon her like an unpleasant surprise. It was a shock. That great house of silk merchants from which her father’s wealth had been derived had hardly ever been mentioned in her presence. Lord Castle-Connell’s daughter had never grown out of the idea that all trade is odious, and her daughter had almost forgotten that her father had ever been in trade.
“Yes, when the house of Fausset was in its infancy the house of Felix & Sons, silk manufacturers and silk merchants, was one of the largest on the hillside of old Lyons. My great-grandfather was one of the richest men in Lyons, and he was able to help the clever young Englishman, your grandfather, who came into his house as corresponding clerk, to perfect himself in the French language, and to find out what the silk trade was like. He had a small capital, and when he had learnt something about the trade, he established himself near St. Paul’s Churchyard as a wholesale trader in a very small way. He had no looms of his own in those days; and it was the great house of Felix, and the credit given him by that house, which enabled him to hold his own, and to make a fortune. When your father began life the house of Felix was on the wane. Your grandfather had established a manufactory of his own at Lyons. Felix & Sons had grown old-fashioned. They had forgotten to march with the times. They had allowed themselves to go to sleep; and they were on the verge of bankruptcy when your father came to their rescue with a loan which enabled them to tide over their difficulties. They had had a lesson, and they profited by it. The house of Felix recovered its ascendency, and the loan was repaid before your father retired from business.”
“I am not surprised to hear that my father was generous. I should have been slow to believe that he could have been ungrateful,” said Mildred softly.
“Your name is among my earliest recollections,” pursued Castellani. “My mother was educated at a convent at Roehampton, and she was very fond of England and English people. The first journey I can distinctly remember was a journey to London, which occurred when I was ten years old. I remember my father and mother talking about Mr. Fausset. She had known him when she was a little girl. He used to stay in her father’s house when he came to Lyons on business. She would like to have seen him and his wife and daughter, for old times’ sake; but she had been told that his wife was a lady of rank, and that he had broken off all associations with his trading career. She was too diffident to intrude herself upon her father’s old ally. One day our carriage passed yours in the Park. Yes, I saw you, a golden-haired child—yes, madam, saw you with these eyes—and the vision has stayed with me, a sunny remembrance of my own childhood. I can see that fair child’s face in this room to-day.”