“There is some domestic misery—an intrigue on his part, I fear,” said the glib Cecilia. “Men are such traitors. It would hardly surprise me to-morrow if I was told that Adam was maintaining an expensive ménage in St. John’s Wood. She would tell me nothing, poor darling; but she sent for Mr. Cancellor, and was closeted with him for an hour. No doubt she told him everything. And then she went off to Brighton.”
Castellani followed to Brighton, and his influence with Miss Fausset enabled him to learn something, but not all. Not one word said Miss Fausset about the supposed identity between George Greswold’s first wife and John Fausset’s protégée; but she told Mr. Castellani that she feared her niece’s separation from her husband would be permanent.
“Why does she not divorce him,” he asked, “if he has wronged her?”
“He has not wronged her—in the way you mean. And if he had, she could not divorce him, unless he had beaten her. You men made the law, and framed it in your own favour. It is a very sad case, César, and I am not at liberty to say any more about it. You must ask me no more questions.”
Castellani obeyed for the time being; but he did ask further questions upon other occasions, and he exercised all his subtlety in the endeavour to extract information from Miss Fausset. That lady, however, was inflexible; and he had to wait for time to solve the mystery.
“They have parted on account of that first marriage,” he told himself. “Perhaps she has found out all about the poor lady’s fate, and takes the worst view of the catastrophe. That would account for their separation. She would not stay with a husband she suspected; he would not live with a wife who could so suspect. A very pretty quarrel.”
A quarrel—a life-long severance—but not a divorce. There was the difficulty. César Castellani believed himself invincible with women. The weakest, and in some cases the worst, of the sex had educated him into the belief that no woman lived who could resist him. And here was a woman whom he intensely admired, and whose married life it had been his privilege to wreck. She was a rich woman—and it was essential to his success in life that he should marry wealth. With all his various gifts he was not a money-earning man, he would never attain even lasting renown by his talents. For when the good fairies had endowed him with music and poetry, eloquence and grace, the strong-minded, hard-featured fairy called Perseverance came to his christening feast, and seeing no knife and fork laid for her, doomed him to the curse of idleness. He had all the talents which enable a man to shine in society but he had also the money-spending talent, the elegant tastes and inclinations which require some thousands a year for their sustenance. Hitherto he had lived by his wits—from hand to mouth; but for some years past he had been on the look-out for a rich wife.
He knew that Mildred Greswold was three times richer than Pamela Ramsome. The wealth of the Faussets came within the region of his knowledge; and he knew how large a fortune John Fausset had left his daughter, and how entirely that fortune was at her own disposal. He might have had Pamela for the asking; Pamela, with a paltry fifteen hundred a year; Pamela, who sang false and bored him beyond measure. The higher prize seemed impossible; but it was his nature to attempt the impossible. His belief in his own power was boundless.
“She cannot divorce her husband,” he told himself; “but he may divorce her if she should wrong him, or even seem to wrong him: and the most innocent woman may be compromised if her lover is daring and will risk much for a great coup, as I would.”
He thought himself very near success in these lengthening afternoons in the beginning of February, when he was allowed to spend the lovely hour of sundown in Mrs. Greswold’s salon, watching the sunset from the wide plate-glass window, which commanded a panorama of lake and mountain, with every exquisite change from concentrated light to suffused colour, and then to deepening purple that slowly darkened into night. It was the hour in which it was deemed dangerous to be out of doors; but it was the loveliest hour of the day or the night, and Mildred never wearied of that glorious outlook over lake and sky. She was silent for the most part at such a time, sitting in the shadow of the window-curtains, her face hidden from the other two, sitting apart from the world, thinking of the life that had been and could never be again.