Mildred did all she could in the way of excursionising to enliven the dulness of their solitary life; but the beauties of Nature palled upon Pamela’s lively mind. However the day might be occupied in drives to distant scenes of surpassing loveliness, the ever-lengthening evenings had to be spent in the Louis Quatorze salon, where no visitors dropped in to disturb the monotony of books and work, piano and pet-dog.
For Mildred, too, those evening hours seemed unutterably long, and as autumn deepened into winter, her burden seemed heavier to bear. Time brought no consolation, offered no hope. She had lost all that had made life worth living. First, the child who represented all that was brightest and fairest and gayest and most hopeful in her life; next, the husband who was her life itself, the prop and staff, the column around which every tendril of her being was entwined. There was nothing for her in the future but a life of self-abnegation, of working and living for others. The prospect seemed dark and dreary, and she knew now how small a margin of her life had been devoted to God. The idea of devoting herself wholly was too repellent. She knew now that she was very human, wedded to earthly loves and earthly happiness, needing a long purgation before she could attain the saintly attitude.
She thought of Enderby every night as she sat in silent melancholy beside the hearth, where a solitary log crumbled slowly to white ashes on the marble, and where the faint warmth had a perfume of distant pine-woods; she thought of Enderby and its widowed master. Was he living there still, or was he, too, a wanderer? She had heard but little of his movements since she left England. Pamela had written to him, and he had replied, but had said very little about himself. The only news in Rosalind’s letters was of the extraordinary development—intellectual and otherwise—of the baby, and the magnitude of Sir Henry’s bag. Beyond the baby and the bag, Lady Mountford’s pen rarely travelled.
Mildred thought of that absent husband with an aching heart. There were times when she asked herself if she had done well—when she was tempted to total surrender—when the pen was in her hand ready to write a telegram imploring him to come to her—or when she was on the point of giving her orders for an immediate return to England. But pride and principle alike restrained her. She had taken her own course, she had made up her mind deliberately, after long thought and many prayers. She could not tread the backward way, the primrose path of sin. She could but pray for greater strength, for loftier purpose, for that grand power of self-forgetfulness which makes for heaven.
Christmas came and found her in this frame of mind. There were very few tourists now, and the long corridors had a sepulchral air, the snowy mountain-tops were blotted out by mist and rain. For Pamela, Christmastide had been a season of much gaiety hitherto—a season of new frocks and many dances, hunting and hunt-balls, and the change was a severe test of that young lady’s temper. She came through the ordeal admirably, never forgot that she had promised her uncle to be his wife’s faithful companion, and amused herself as best she could with Italian music and desultory studies. She read Mr. Sinnett’s books, studied Bohn’s edition of Plato’s Dialogues, addled her youthful brain with various theories of a far-reaching kind, and fancied herself decidedly mediumistic. That word mediumistic possessed a peculiar fascination for her. She had looked at César Castellani’s eyeballs, which were markedly globular—seeming, as it were, reflecting surfaces for the spirit world, a sure indication of the mediumistic temperament. She had seen other signs; and now in this romantic solitude, sauntering by the lake in the misty winter air, just before sundown, she fancied herself almost in communion with that absent genius. Distance could not separate two people when both were eminently mediumistic.
“I believe he is thinking of me at this very moment,” she said to herself one afternoon at the end of the year, “and I have a kind of feeling that I shall see him—bodily—very soon.”
She forgot to reckon with herself that this kind of feeling could count for very little, since she had experienced it in greater or less degree ever since she had left Brighton. In almost every excursion she had beguiled the tedium of the way with some pleasant day-dream. Castellani would appear in the most unlooked-for manner at the resting-place where they were to lunch. He would have followed them from England at his leisure, and would come upon them unannounced, pleased to startle her by his sudden apparition. In absence she had recalled so many tender speeches, so many indications of regard; and she had taught herself to believe that he really cared for her, and had but been withheld from a declaration by a noble dignity which would not stoop to woo a woman richer than himself.
“He is poor and proud,” she thought.
Poor and proud. How sweet the alliteration sounded!
She had thought of him so incessantly that it was hardly a coincidence, and yet it seemed to her a miracle when his voice sounded behind her in the midst of her reverie.