Mildred received him rather coldly, trying her uttermost to seem thoroughly at ease. She introduced him to her niece, Miss Ransome.
“The daughter of the late Mr. Randolph Ransome and the sister of Lady Mountford?” Castellani inquired presently, when Pamela had run out on the lawn to speak to Box.
“Yes. You seem to know everybody’s belongings.”
“Why not? It is the duty of every man of the world, more especially of a foreigner. I know Mr. Ransome’s place in the Sussex Weald—a very fine property—and I know that the two ladies are coheiresses, but that the Sussex estate is to descend to the eldest son of the elder daughter, or failing male issue there, to the son of the younger. Lady Mountford has a baby-son, I believe.”
“Your information is altogether correct.”
“Why should it be otherwise? Mr. Hillersdon and his wife discussed the family history to-day at luncheon, apropos to Miss Ransome’s appearance in Romsey Church at the Saint’s Day service yesterday.”
His frankness apologised for his impertinence, and he was a foreigner, which seems always to excuse a great deal.
Pamela came back again, after rescuing Box from a rough-and-tumble game with Kassandra. She looked rosy and breathless, and very pretty, in her pale-blue gown and girlish sash flying in the wind, and flaxen hair fluffed into a feathery pile on the top of her head, and honest brown eyes. She resumed her seat in the deep old window behind the end of the piano, and made believe to go on with some work, which she took in a tangled heap from a very untidy basket. Already Pamela had set the sign of her presence upon the drawing-rooms at Enderby, a trail of heterogeneous litter which was a part of her individuality. Screened by the piano, she was able to observe Castellani, as he stood leaning over the large central ottoman, with his knee on the cushioned seat, talking to Mrs. Greswold.
He was the author of Nepenthe. It was in that character he interested her. She looked at him with the thought of his book full in her mind. It was one of those half-mad, wholly artificial compositions which delight girls and young men, and which are just clever enough, and have just enough originality to get talked about and written about by the cultured few. It was a love-story, ending tragically; a story of ruined lives and broken hearts, told in the autobiographical form, with a studied avoidance of all conventional ornament, which gave an air of reality where all was inherently false. Pamela thought it must be Castellani’s own story. She fancied she could see the traces of those heartbreaking experiences, those crushing disappointments in his countenance, in his bearing even, and in the tones of his voice, which gave an impression of mental fatigue, as of a man worn out by a fatal passion.
The story of Nepenthe was as old as the hills—or at least as old as the Boulevard des Capucines and the Palais Royal. It was the story of a virtuous young man’s love for an unvirtuous woman—the story of Demetrius and Lamia—the story of a man’s demoralisation under the influence of incarnate falsehood, of the gradual lapse from good to evil, the gradual extinction of every belief and every scruple, the final destruction of a soul.