“He was still at Enderby up to the end of November, and I believe he was well. I spent three days at Riverdale, and heard of him from Mrs. Hillersdon.”
Mildred asked no further question, nor did she invite Mr. Castellani to repeat his visit. Happily for his own success in life, he was not the kind of person to wait for invitations.
“I am staying in the hotel,” he said. “I hope I may drop in sometimes—to-morrow even. Miss Ransome is good enough to say she would like to sing some duets with me.”
“Miss Ransome knows I have not been receiving any visitors,” Mildred answered, with a touch of reproachfulness.
“O, but Mr. Castellani is an old friend! The people you avoided were strangers,” said Pamela eagerly.
Mildred made no further protest. Few men would have accepted a permission so grudgingly given; but Castellani stopped at no obstacle when he had a serious purpose to serve: and in this case his purpose was very serious; for life or death, he told himself.
He came next day, and the day after that, and every day for four or five weeks, till the first flush of precocious spring lent beauty to the landscape and softness to the sky. Mildred submitted to his visits as an inevitable consequence of Pamela’s folly; submitted, and by and by fell into the habit of being amused by Castellani; interested in his talk of men and women and of books, of which he seemed to have read all of any mark that had ever been written. She allowed herself to be interested; she allowed herself to be soothed by his music; she let him become an influence in her life, unawares, caught by a subtlety that had never been surpassed by anybody of lesser gifts than Satan: but never did this presumptuous wooer beguile her into one single thought that wronged her absent husband. Her intellect acknowledged the tempter’s intellectual sway, but her heart knew no wavering.
César Castellani had seen a good deal of life, but as he had assiduously cultivated the seamy side, it was hardly strange if he lacked the power of understanding a pure-minded woman. To his mind every woman was a citadel, better or worse defended, but always assailable by treason or strategy, force or art, and never impregnable. Mrs. Greswold was his Troy, his Thebes, his ideal of majesty and strength in woman. So far as virtue went upon this earth he believed Mildred Greswold to be virtuous; proud, too; not a woman to lower her crest to the illicit conqueror, or stain her name with the disgrace of a runaway wife. But it had been given to him to disturb a union that had existed happily for fourteen years. It had been given to him to awaken the baneful passion of jealousy, to sow the seeds of suspicion, to part husband and wife. He had gone to work carelessly enough in the first instance, struck with Mildred’s beauty and sweetness—full of sentimental recollections of the fair child-face and the bright streaming hair that had passed him like a vision in the sunlight of Hyde Park. He had envied the husband so fair a wife, so luxurious a home, with its air of old-world respectability, that deep-rooted English aristocracy of landed estate, which to the foreign adventurer seemed of all conditions in life the most enviable. He had been impelled by sheer malice when he uttered his careless allusion to George Greswold’s past life, and with a word blighted two hearts.
He saw the effect of the speech in the face of the wife, and in the manner of the husband saw that he had launched a thunderbolt. It was with deepest interest he followed up his advantage; watched and waited for further evidence of the evil he had done. He was a close student of the faces of women; above all, when the face was lovely. He saw all the marks of secret care in Mrs. Greswold’s countenance during the weeks that elapsed between his first visit to Enderby and the charity concert. He saw the deepening shadows, the growing grief, and on the day of the concert he saw the traces of a still keener pain in those pale features and haggard eyes; but for an immediate separation between husband and wife he was not prepared.
He heard at Riverdale of Mrs. Greswold’s departure from home. The suddenness and strangeness of her journey had set all the servants talking. He found out where she had gone, and hastened at once to call upon his devoted friend Mrs. Tomkison, who told him all she had to tell.