“I don’t quite want that; but I want your loyal and loving help in this saddest period of my life—yes, the saddest; sadder even than the sorrow of last year; and yet I thought there could be no greater grief than that.”
“Poor Uncle George!” sighed Pamela, bending over the table to take his hand, and clasping it affectionately; “command me in anything. You know how fond I have always been of you—almost fonder than of my poor father. Perhaps,” she added gravely, “it is because I always respected you more than I did him.”
“I cannot confide in you wholly, Pamela—not yet; but I may tell you this much. Something has happened to part my wife and me—perhaps for life. It is her wish, not mine, that we should live the rest of our lives apart. There has been no wrong-doing on either side, mark you. There is no blame; there has been no angry feeling; there is no falling off in love. We are both the victims of an intolerable fatality. I would willingly struggle against my doom—defy Fate; but my wife has another way of thinking. She deems it her duty to make her own life desolate and to condemn me to a life-long widowhood.”
“Poor Uncle George!”
“She is now at Brighton with her aunt, Miss Fausset. I am going there to-morrow morning to see her, if she will let me—perhaps for the last time. I want to take you with me; and if Mildred carries out her intention of spending the winter abroad, I want you to go with her. I want you to wind yourself into her confidence and into her heart, to cheer and comfort her, and to shield her from the malice of the world. Her position will be at best a painful one—a wife and no wife—separated from her husband for a reason which she will hardly care to tell the world, perhaps will hardly confide to her dearest friend.”
“I will do anything you wish, uncle—go anywhere, to the end of the world. You know how fond I am of Aunt Mildred. I’m afraid I like her better than I do my sister, who is so wrapped up in that absurd baby that she is sometimes unendurable. But it seems so awfully strange that you and aunt should be parted,” continued Pamela, with a puzzled brow. “I can’t make it out one little bit. I—I don’t want to ask questions, Uncle George—at least only just one question: has all this mysterious trouble anything to do with Mr. Castellani?”
She turned crimson as she pronounced the name, but Greswold was too absorbed to notice her embarrassment.
“With Castellani? No. How should it concern him?” he exclaimed; and then, remembering the beginning of evil, he added, “Mr. Castellani has nothing to do with our difficulty in a direct manner; but indirectly his presence at Enderby began the mischief.”
“O, uncle, you were not jealous of him, surely?”
“Jealous of him? I jealous of Castellani or any man living? You must know very little of my wife or of me, Pamela, when you can ask such a question.”