“And my wife died early in April,” he said. “Only a few months; and I feel as if I had been in this place a century.”
He took the doctor’s advice. He cared very little where he went or what became of him. Life and the world, his own individuality, and the beautiful earth around and about him were alike indifferent to him. He went back to the villa at St. Jean, and to the garden he had loved so well in the bright fresh spring-time. All things had an overgrown and neglected look in the ripeness of expiring summer; too many flowers, a rank luxuriance of large leaves and vivid blossoms—fruit rotting in the long grass—an odour of decaying oranges, the waste of the last harvest. He went up to the graveyard on the hill above the harbour. It was not a picturesque burial-place. The cemetery at Cimies was far more beautiful. The cemetery at Nice was in a grander position.
He felt sorry that she should lie here, amidst the graves of sailors and fishermen—as even if after death she were slighted and hardly used.
He was summoned back to England early in the following year to his mother’s death-bed. Neither she nor any of his family had known the miserable end of his married life. They knew only that he had married, and had lost his wife after a year of marriage. Hazard had not brought any one belonging to him in contact with any of those few people who knew the details of that tragical story.
His mother’s death made him rich and independent, but until the hour he met Mildred Fausset his life was a blank.
CHAPTER V.
THE GRAVE ON THE HILL.
After that visit to the great white barrack on the road to St. André, Mildred felt that her business at Nice was finished, there was nothing more for her to learn. She knew all the sad story now—all, except those lights and shadows of the picture which only the unhappy actor in that domestic tragedy could have told her. The mystery of the past had unfolded itself, stage by stage, from that Sunday afternoon when César Castellani came to Enderby Manor, and out of trivial-seeming talk launched a thunderbolt. The curtain was lifted. There was no more to be done. And yet Mildred lingered at Nice, loving the place and its environs a little for their own beauty, and feeling a strange and sorrowful interest in the scene of her husband’s misfortunes.
There was another reason for remaining in the gay white city in the fact that Lady Lochinvar had taken a fancy to Miss Ransome, and that the young lady seemed to be achieving a remarkably rapid cure of her infatuation for the Italian. It may have been because at the Palais Montano she met a good many Italians, and that the charm of that nationality became less potent with familiarity. There was music, too, at the Palais, and to spare, according to Mr. Stuart, who was not an enthusiast, and was wont to shirk his aunt’s musical reunions.
Mildred was delighted to see her husband’s niece entering society under such agreeable auspices. She went out with her occasionally, just enough to make people understand that she was not indifferent to her niece’s happiness; and for the rest, Lady Lochinvar and Mrs. Murray were always ready to chaperon the frank, bright girl, who was much admired by the best people, and was never at a loss for partners at dances, whoever else might play wallflower.
Mrs. Greswold invited Mr. and Mrs. Murray and Malcolm Stuart to a quiet little dinner at the Westminster, and the impression the young man made upon Mildred’s mind was altogether favourable. He was certainly not handsome, but his plainness was of an honest Scottish type, and his freckled complexion and blue eyes, sandy hair and moustache, were altogether different from the traditionary Judas colouring of Castellani’s auburn beard and hazel eyes. Truth and honesty beamed in the Scotchman’s open countenance. He looked every inch a soldier and a gentleman.