The fatal three, vol. II

by M. E. Braddon

His conversation with Bell had brought him little comfort, but it had not convinced him of the evil in which his wife so firmly believed. There was little doubt in his mind that the woman he had married eighteen years ago was identical with Mildred’s young companion and John Fausset’s protégée. But whether that mysterious protégée had been John Fausset’s daughter was a question open to doubt. The suspicions of a jealous wife, the opinions of the servants’ hall, were no conclusive proof.

On the other hand, the weight of evidence leaned to that one solution of the mystery in Mr. Fausset’s conduct. That a man should charge himself with the care of a child of whose parentage and belongings he could give no satisfactory account—about whom, indeed, he seemed to have given no account at all—was a strange thing. Stranger still was his conduct in bringing that child into his own family, to the hazard of his domestic peace. Stranger even yet that he should have gone down to the grave without giving his daughter any explanation of his conduct from first to last—that he should have left the story of his protégée as dark at the end as it had been at the beginning.

Painfully conjuring back to life the phantom forms of a miserable past, George Greswold recalled the few facts which he had ever known of his first wife’s history. She was an orphan, without relations or friends. At eighteen years of age she had been transferred from a finishing-school at Brussels to the care of an English artist and his wife, called Mortimer—middle-aged people, the husband with a small talent, the wife with a small income, both of which went further in Brussels than they would have gone in England. They had an apartment on one of the new boulevards at Brussels and a summer retreat in the Ardennes. When the artist and his wife travelled, Vivien went with them, and it was on one of these occasions that George Greswold met her at Florence. Mr. Mortimer had let his apartment at Brussels for the winter, and had established himself in the Italian city, where he worked assiduously at a classic style of art which nobody ever seemed to buy, though a good many people pretended to admire.

Vivien Faux. It sounded like a nom de fantasie. She told him that she was nobody, and that she belonged to nobody. She had no home, no people, no surroundings, no history, no associations. She had been educated at an expensive school, and her clothes had been made at a fashionable dressmaker’s in the Rue Montagne de la Cour. Everything that a schoolgirl’s fancy could desire had been provided for her.

“So far as such things go, I was as well off as the most fortunate of my companions,” she told him; “but I was a friendless waif all the same, and my schoolfellows despised me. I drank the cup of scorn to the dregs.”

Seeing how painful this idea of her isolation was to her, George Greswold had been careful to avoid all questioning that might gall the open wound. In truth he had no keen curiosity about her past existence. He had taken her for what she was—interesting, clever, and in great need of a disinterested protector. It was enough for him to know that she had been educated as a lady, and that her character was spotless. His marriage had been one of those unions which are of all unions the most fatal—a marriage for pity. A marriage for money, for self-interest, ambition, or family pride may result happily. In a union of mutual interests there is at least a sense of equality, and love may grow with time and custom; but in a marriage for pity the chain galls on both sides, the wife oppressed by a sense of obligation, the husband burdened with a weight of duty.

Of his wife’s resources, all George Greswold knew was that she had a life interest in thirty thousand pounds invested in Consols. The dividends were sent her half-yearly by a firm of solicitors, Messrs. Pergament & Pergament, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She had received a letter from the firm a week before her last birthday, which was her twenty-first, informing her of her life interest in this sum, over which she would have no disposing power, nor the power to anticipate any portion of the interest. The half-yearly dividends, she was informed, would in future be sent directly to her at any address she might appoint.

In acknowledging this communication she begged to be informed from whom she had inherited this money, or whether it was the gift of a living benefactor, and whether the benefactor was a relative. The reply from Messrs. Pergament & Pergament was cold and formal. They regretted their inability to give her any information as to the source of her income. They were pledged to absolute silence upon this point. In any other matter they would be happy to be of service to her.

George Greswold had married without a settlement. The then state of the law, and the conditions of his wife’s income, made her independent of any husband whatever. He could not forestall or rob her of an income of which the capital was in the custody of other people, and over which she had no disposing power. He was a poor man himself at the time, living upon an allowance made him by his mother, eked out by the labour of his pen as a political and philosophical writer; but he had the expectation of the Enderby estate, an expectation which was all but certainty. One fact alone was known to him of his wife’s surroundings which might help him to discover her history, and that was the name of the firm in Lincoln’s Inn, Messrs. Pergament & Pergament, and to them he made up his mind to apply without loss of time.

He went to London on the day after Mildred’s journey to Brighton, taking Pamela and her dog with him to an hotel near Hanover Square where he had occasionally stayed. Pamela had been much disturbed by Mildred’s letter, and was full of wonderment, but very submissive, and ready to do anything she was told.