Below the cross stretched the grass mound, without shrub or flower. It was Mildred’s task to beautify this neglected grave. She brought a florist from the neighbourhood to carry out her own idea, and on her instruction he removed the long, rank grass from the mound, and planted a cross of roses, eight feet long, dwarf bush-roses closely planted, Gloire de Dijon and Maréchal Niel.
She remembered how Fay had revelled in the rose-garden at The Hook, where midsummer was a kind of carnival of roses. Here the roses would bloom all the year round, and there would be perpetual perfume and blossom and colour above poor Fay’s cold dust.
CHAPTER VI.
PAMELA CHANGES HER MIND.
Lucifer himself, after his fall, could not have felt worse than César Castellani when he followed Mildred Greswold to Nice, as he did within a week after she left Pallanza.
He went to Nice partly because he was an idle man, and had no desire to go back to English east winds just when the glory of the southern springtide was beginning. He was tolerably well furnished with money, and Nice was as good to him as any other place, while the neighbourhood of Monte Carlo was always an attraction. He followed in Mildred’s footsteps, therefore; but he had no idea of forcing himself upon her presence for some time to come. He knew that his chances were ruined in that quarter for the time being, if not for ever.
This was his first signal overthrow. Easy conquests had so demoralised him that he had grown to consider all conquests easy. He had unlimited faith in the charm of his own personality—his magnetic power, as he called it: and, behold! his magnetic power had failed utterly with this lovely, lonely woman, who should have turned to him in her desolation as the flowers turn to the sun.
For once in his life he had overrated himself and his influence; and in so doing he had lost the chance of a very respectable alliance.
“Fifteen hundred a year would be at least bread and cheese,” he reflected, “and to marry an English heiress of a good old family would solidify my position in society. The girl is pretty enough, and I could twist her round my finger. She would bore me frightfully; but every man must suffer something. There is always a discord somewhere amidst the harmony of life; and if one’s teeth are not too often set on edge by that false note, one should be content.”
He remembered how contemptuously he had rejected the idea of such a marriage in his talk with Miss Fausset, and how she had been set upon it.
“I should stand ever so much better with her if I married well, and solidified myself into British respectability. I might naturalise myself, and go into Parliament perhaps, if that would please the good soul at Brighton. What will she leave me when she dies, I wonder? She is muter than the Sphinx upon that point. And will she ever die? Brighton is famous for pauper females of ninety and upwards. A woman like Miss Fausset, who lives in cotton-wool, and who has long done with the cares and passions of life, might go well into a second century. I don’t see any brilliancy in the prospect there; but so long as I please her and do well in the world she will no doubt be generous.”