“I am not curious. Castellani? An Italian, I suppose, one of my aunt’s innumerable geniuses. She has a genius for discovering geniuses. When I see her with a new one, I am always reminded of a child with a little coloured balloon. So pretty—till it bursts!”
Pamela turned her back upon him in a rage, and went over to the piano to talk to Mrs. Murray, who was preparing to sing one of her répertoire of five Scotch ballads.
“Shall it be ‘Gin a body’ or ‘Huntingtower’?” she asked meekly; and nobody volunteering a decisive opinion, she chirruped the former coquettish little ballad, and put a stop to social intercourse for exactly four minutes and a half.
After that evening Mr. Stuart knew who his rival was, and with what kind of influence he had to contend. An author, a musical man, a genius! Well, he had very few weapons with which to fight such an antagonist, he who was neither musical, nor literary, nor gifted with any of the graces which recommend a lover to a sentimental girl. But he was a man, and he meant to win her. He admired her for her frank young prettiness, so unsophisticated and girlish, and for that perfect freshness and truthfulness of mind which made all her thoughts transparent. He was too much a man of the world to ignore the fact that Miss Ransome of Mapledown would be a very good match for him, or that such a marriage would strengthen his position in his aunt’s esteem. Women bow down to success. Encouraged by these considerations, Mr. Stuart pursued the even tenor of his way, and was not disheartened by the idea of the author of Nepenthe, more especially as that attractive personage was not on the ground. He had one accomplishment over and above the usual outdoor exercises of a country gentleman. He could dance, and he was Pamela’s favourite partner wherever she went. No one else waltzed as well. Not even the most gifted of her German acquaintance; not even the noble Spaniards who were presented to her.
He had another and still greater advantage in the fact that he was often in the young lady’s society. She was fond of Lady Lochinvar, and spent a good deal of her life at the Palais Montano, where, with Mrs. Murray’s indefatigable assistance, there were tennis-parties twice a week. That charming garden, with its numerous summer-houses, made a kind of club for the privileged few who were permitted les petites entrées.
While Pamela was enjoying the lovely springtide amongst people whose only thought was of making the best of life, and getting the maximum of sunshine, Mildred Greswold spent her days in sad musings upon an irrevocable past. It was her melancholy pleasure to revisit again and again the place in which her husband had lived, the picturesque little village under the shadow of the tall cliff, every pathway which he must have trodden, every point from which he must have gazed across the bay, seaward or landward in his troubled reveries.
She dwelt with morbid persistence on the thought of those two lives, both dear to her, yet in their union how terrible a curse! She revisited the villa until the old caretaker grew to look upon her as a heaven-sent benefactress, and until the village children christened her the English Madonna, that pensive look recalling the face of the statue in the church yonder, so mildly sad, a look of ineffable sweetness tinged with pain. She sat for hours at a stretch in the sunlit garden, amongst such flowers as must have been blooming there in those closing hours of Fay’s wedded life, when the shadow of her cruel fate was darkening round her, though she knew it not. She talked to people who had known the English lady. Alas! they were all dubious in their opinions. None would answer boldly for the husband’s innocence. They shrugged their shoulders—they shook their heads. Who could say? Only the good God would ever know the truth about that story.
The place to which she went oftenest in those balmy afternoons was the burial-ground on the hill, where Fay’s grave, with its white marble cross, occupied one of the highest points in the enclosure, and stood out sharp and clear against the cloudless sapphire.
The inscription on that marble was of the briefest:
“Vivien Ransome.
Died April 24th, 1868.
Eternally lamented.”