“Good-bye!” she half sang, half sobbed, in the darkness at the back of the hired landau, as they drove bumping down St. James’s street. “Good-bye, summer; good-bye, everything!”
She did not even glance at Hannington’s autumn fashions as they drove up the hill. She felt that life was no longer worth dressing for.
“He never could have cared for me,” she thought, as she dropped her silent tears upon Box’s thoroughbred neck, “and yet he seemed—he seemed! Does he seem like that to every girl, I wonder? Is he all seeming?”
After this came a leisurely journey, and then long, slow weeks of a luxurious repose amidst fairest surroundings—a life which to those who have lived and fought the great battle, and come wounded but yet alive out of the fray, is the life paradisaic; but for the fresh, strong soul panting for emotions and excitements, like a young bird that yearns to try the strength of his wings, this kind of languid existence seems like a foretaste of death and nothingness. Mountains and lakes were not enough for Pamela—the azure of an Italian sky, the infinite variety of sunset splendours, the brightness of a morning heralded by a roseate flush on snow-capped hills—all these were futile where the heart was empty. Mildred’s maturer grief found some consolation in these exquisite surroundings; but Pamela wanted to live, and those encircling mountains seemed to her as the walls of a gigantic prison.
“It was so nice at Brighton,” she said, looking along the burnished mirror of the lake with despondent eyes, tired of the mystery of those reflected mountains, descending into infinite depths, a world inverted: “so gay, so cheery—always something going on. Don’t you think, aunt, that the air of this place is very relaxing?”
That word relaxing is the keynote of discontent. It is a word that can blight the loveliest spots the sun ever shone upon. It is the speck upon the peach. Be sure that before ever he mentioned the apple, Satan told Eve that Eden was very relaxing.
“I hope you are not unhappy here, my dear Pamela?” said Mildred, evading the question.
“Unhappy? O, no, indeed, dear aunt! I could not be otherwise than happy with you anywhere. There are lots of people who would envy me living on the shore of Lago Maggiore, and seeing those delightful mountains all day long; but I did so enjoy Brighton—the theatre, the Pavilion; always something going on.”
The two ladies had their own suite of apartments in the hotel, and lived in that genteel seclusion which is the privilege of wealth as well as of rank all over the world. Pamela envied the tourists of Cook and Gaze, as she saw them trooping into the table d’hôte, or heard their clatter in the public drawing-room. It was all very well to sit in one’s own balcony, gazing at the placid lake, while the rabble amused themselves below. One felt one’s superior status, and the advantage of being somebody instead of nobody; but when the rabble danced or acted charades, or played dumb crambo, or squabbled over a game at nap, they seemed to have the best of it somehow.
“I almost wish I had been born a vulgarian,” sighed Pamela one evening, when the tourists were revolving to the “Myosotis Waltz” banged out on a cast-iron grand in the salon below.