It was not until after Pamela’s wedding, and nearly a month after Mildred’s discovery of the letters in the bookcase, that Miss Fausset made any sign; but one August morning her reply came in the shape of a letter, entreating Mildred to go to her, as an act of charity to one whose sands had nearly run out.
“I will not sue to you in formâ pauperis,” she wrote, “so I do not pretend that I am a dying woman; but I believe I have not very long to live, and before my voice is mute upon earth I want to tell you the history of one year of my girlhood. I want you to know that I am not altogether the kind of sinner you may think me. I will not write that history, and if you refuse to come to me, I must die and leave it untold, and in that case my death-bed will be miserable.”
Mildred’s gentle heart could not harden itself against such an appeal as this. She told her husband only that her aunt was very ill and ardently desired to see her; and after some discussion it was arranged that she should travel quietly to Brighton, he going with her. He suggested that they should stop in Miss Fausset’s house for a night or two, but Mildred told him she would much prefer to stay at an hotel; so it was decided that they should put up at the quiet hotel on the East Cliff, where Mr. Greswold had taken Pamela nearly a year before.
Mildred’s health had improved under the physician’s régime; and her husband felt hopeful as they travelled together through the summer landscape, by that line which she had travelled in her desolation—the level landscape with glimpses of blue sea and stretches of gray beach or yellow sand, bright in the August noontide.
George Greswold had respected Mildred’s reserve, and had never urged her to enlighten him as to the secret of his first wife’s parentage; but he had his ideas upon the subject, and, remembering his interview with the solicitor and that gentleman’s perturbation at the name of Fausset, he was inclined to think that the pious lady of Lewes Crescent might not be unconcerned in the mystery. And now this summons to Brighton seemed to confirm his suspicions.
He went no further than Miss Fausset’s threshold, and allowed his wife to go to her aunt alone.
“I shall walk up and down and wait till you come out again,” he said, “so I hope that you won’t stay too long.”
He was anxious to limit an interview which might involve agitation for Mildred. He parted from her almost reluctantly at the doorway of the gloomy house, with its entrance-hall of the pattern of forty years ago, furnished with barometer, umbrella-stand, and tall chairs, all in Spanish mahogany, and with never a picture or a bust, bronze or porcelain, to give light and colour to the scene.
Miss Fausset had changed for the worse even in the brief interval since Mildred had last seen her. She was sitting in the back drawing-room as usual, but her table and chair had been wheeled into the bay-window, which commanded a garden with a single tree and a variety of house-tops and dead walls.
“So you have come,” she said, without any form of greeting. “I hardly expected so much from you. Sit down there, if you please. I have a good deal to tell you.”