“I don’t care a bit, aunt; only you must not leave Brighton till you are much stronger. You will want at least three weeks before you will be able to stand the fatigue of travelling,” said Pamela, surveying the invalid with a critical air.
“We can travel by easy stages. I am not afraid of fatigue. Where shall we go, Pamela—Schwalbach, Wiesbaden, Vevay, Montreux?”
“O, not Schwalbach, aunt. They took me there for iron five years ago, when I had outgrown my strength. Switzerland is always lovely, of course; but I went there with Rosalind after her baby was born, and endured the dreariest six weeks of my existence. Brighton is absolutely delicious at this time of the year. It would be absurd to rush away from the place just when people are beginning to come here.”
Mildred saw that the case was hopeless, and she began to think seriously about her responsibilities in this matter: a frank impetuous girl, her husband’s niece, eager to cast in her lot with a man who was obviously an adventurer, living sumptuously with hardly any obvious means, and who might be a scoundrel. She remembered her impression of the face in the church, the Judas face, as she had called it in her own mind: a foolish impression, perhaps, and it might be baseless; yet such first impressions are sometimes warnings not to be lightly set at naught. As yet nothing had come of that warning: no act of Castellani’s had shown him a villain; but his advent had begun the misery of her life. Had she never seen him she never might have known this great sorrow. His presence was a constant source of irritation, tempting her to questioning that might lead to further misery. Fay’s image had been constantly in her mind of late. She had brooded over that wedded life of which she knew nothing—over that early death which for her was shrouded in mystery.
“And he could tell me so much, perhaps,” she said to herself one evening, sitting by the fire in the inner room, while Castellani played in the distance yonder between the tall windows that let in the gray eastern light.
“Her death was infinitely sad.”
Those were the words which he had spoken of George Greswold’s first wife: of Fay, her Fay, the one warm love of her childish years, the love that had stayed with her so long after its object had vanished from her life. That there was something underlying those words, some secret which might add a new bitterness to her sorrow, was the doubt that tortured Mildred as she sat and brooded by the fire, while those lovely strains of Mendelssohn’s “I waited for the Lord” rose in slow solemnity from the distant piano, breathing sounds of peacefulness where there was no peace.
Mr. Castellani had behaved admirably since her convalescence. He had asked no questions about her husband, had taken her presence and Pamela’s for granted, never hinting a curiosity about this sudden change of quarters. Mildred thought that her aunt had told him something about her separation from her husband. It was hardly possible that she could have withheld all information, seeing the familiar terms upon which those two were; and it might be, therefore, that his discretion was the result of knowledge. He had nothing to learn, and could easily seem incurious.
Mildred now discovered that one source of Castellani’s influence with her aunt was the work he had done for the choir of St. Edmund’s. It was to his exertions that the choral services owed their excellence. The Vicar loved music only as a child or a savage loves it, without knowledge or capacity; and it was Castellani who chose the voices for the choir, and helped to train the singers. It was Castellani who assisted the organist in the selection of recondite music, which gave an air of originality to the services at St. Edmund’s, and brought the odour of mediævalism and the fumes of incense into the Gothic chancel. Castellani’s knowledge of music, ancient and modern, was of the widest. It was his musical erudition which gave variety to his improvisations. He could delight an admiring circle with meandering reminiscences of Lully, Corelli, Dussek, Spohr, Clementi, Cherubini, and Hummel, in which only the modulations were his own.
In this interval of convalescence Mrs. Greswold’s life fell into a mechanical monotony which suited her as well as any other kind of life would have done. For the greater part of the day she sat in the low armchair by the fire, a table with books at her side, and her work-basket at her feet. Those who cared to observe her saw that she neither worked nor read. She took up a volume now and again, opened it, looked at a page with dreamy eyes for a little while, and then laid it aside. She took up the frame with the azaleas, worked half-a-dozen stitches, and put the frame down again. Her days were given to long and melancholy reveries. She lived over her married life, with all its happiness, with its one great pain. She contemplated her husband’s character—such a perfect character it had always seemed to her; and yet his one weak act, his one suppression of truth, had wrought misery for them both. And then with ever-recurring persistency she thought of Fay, and Fay’s unexplained fate.