“You—you may have misunderstood him,” she faltered.
“No, there was no possibility of mistake. He slandered my husband. He let me see in the plainest way that he had no real regard for you, that he did not care how far his frequent visits compromised either you or me. He is utterly base, Pamela—a man without rectitude or conscience. He would have clung to us like some poisonous burr if I had not shaken him off. My dear, dear child,” said Mildred, putting her arm round Pamela’s reluctant waist, and drawing the girlish figure nearer to her side, to the relief of Box, who leaped upon their shoulders and licked their faces in a rapture of sympathetic feeling; “my dear, you have been treated very badly, but I am not to blame. You have had a lucky escape, Pamela. Why be angry about it?”
“It is all very well to talk like that,” sighed the girl, wrinkling her white forehead in painful perplexity. “He was my day-dream. One cannot renounce one’s day-dream at a moment’s warning. If you knew the castles I have built—a life spent with him—a life devoted to the cultivation of art! He would have made my voice; and we could have had a flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, and a brougham and victoria, and lived within our income,” concluded Pamela, following her own train of thought.
“My dearest, there are so many worthier to share your life. You will have new day-dreams.”
“Perhaps when I am sixty. It will take me a lifetime to forget him. Do you think I could marry a country bumpkin, or any one who was not artistic?”
“You shall not be asked to marry a rustic. The artistic temperament is common enough nowadays. Almost every one is artistic.”
Pamela shrugged her shoulders petulantly, and turned to the window in token that she had said her say. She grieved like a child who has been disappointed of some jaunt looked forward to for long days of expectation. She tried to think herself ill-used by her uncle’s wife; and yet that common sense of which she possessed a considerable share told her that she had only herself to blame. She had chosen to fall in love with a showy, versatile adventurer, without waiting for evidence that he cared for her. Proud in the strength of her position as an independent young woman with a handsome fortune and a fairly attractive person, she had imagined that Mr. Castellani could look no higher, hope for nothing better than to obtain her hand and heart. She had ascribed his reticence to delicacy. She had accepted his frequent visits as an evidence of his attachment and of his ulterior views.
And now she sat in a sulky attitude, coiled up in a corner of the carriage, with her face to the window, meditating upon her fool’s paradise. For seven happy weeks she had seen the man she admired almost daily; and her own intense sympathy with him had made her imagine an equal sympathy on his part. When their hands touched the thrilling vibration seemed mutual; and yet it had been on her side only, poor fool, she told herself now, abased in her own self-consciousness, drinking the cup of humiliation to the dregs.
He had slandered her uncle—yes, that was villany, that was iniquity. She began to think that he was utterly black. She remembered how coldly cruel he had been about the anemone hunt yesterday; how deaf to her girlish hints; never offering his company: colder, crueller than marble. She felt as if she had squandered her love upon Satan. Yet she was not the less angry with Mildred. That kind of interference was unpardonable.
She arrived at Genoa worn out with a fatiguing journey, and in a worse temper than she had ever sustained for so long a period, she whose worst tempers hitherto had been like April showers. Mildred had reciprocated her silence, and Box had been the only animated passenger.