“I had intended never to enter your house again, aunt. But I could not refuse to hear anything you have to say in your own justification. Only there is one act of yours which you can never justify—either to me or to God.”
“What is that, pray?”
“Your refusal to tell me the secret of Fay’s birth, when my happiness and my husband’s depended upon my knowing it.”
“To tell you that would have been to betray my own secret. Do you think, after keeping it for nine-and-thirty years, I was likely to surrender it lightly? I would sooner have cut my tongue out. I did what I could for you. I told you to ignore idle prejudice and to go back to your husband. I told you what was due from you to him, over and above all sanctimonious scruples. You would not listen to me, and whatever misery you have suffered has been misery of your own creation.”
“Do not let us talk any more about it, aunt. I can never think differently about the wrong you have done me. Had I not found those letters—by the merest accident, remember—I might have gone down to my grave a desolate woman. I might have died in a foreign land, far away from the only voice that could comfort me in my last hours. No; my opinion of your guilty silence can never change. You were willing to break two hearts rather than hazard your own reputation; and yet you must have known that I would keep your secret, that I should sympathise with the sorrow of your girlhood,” added Mildred, in softened tones.
Miss Fausset was slow in replying. Mildred’s reproaches fell almost unheeded upon her ear. It was of herself she was thinking, with all the egotism engendered by a lonely old age, without ties of kindred or friendship, with no society but that of flatterers and parasites.
“I asked you if you had found any letters of your father’s relating to that unhappy girl,” she said. “I always feared his habit of keeping letters—a habit he learnt from my father. Yet I hoped that he would have burnt mine, knowing, as he did, that the one desire of my life was to obliterate that hideous past. Vain hope. I was like the ostrich. If I hid my secret in England, it was known in Italy. The man who destroyed my life was a traitor to the core of his heart, and he betrayed me to his son. He told César how he had fascinated a rich English girl, and fooled her with a mock marriage; and fifteen years ago the young man presented himself to me with the full knowledge of that dark blot upon my life—to me, here, where I had held my head so high. He let me know the full extent of his knowledge in his own subtle fashion; but he always treated me with profound respect—he pretended to be fond of me; and, God help me, there was a charm for me in the very sound of his voice. The man who cheated me out of my life’s happiness was lying in his grave: death lessens the bitterness of hatred, and I could not forget that I had once loved him.”
The tears gathered slowly in the cold gray eyes, and rolled slowly down the hollow cheeks.
“Yes, I loved him, Mildred—loved him with a foolish, inexperienced girl’s romantic love. I asked no questions. I believed all he told me. I flung myself blindfold into the net. His genius, his grace, his fire—ah, you can never imagine the charm of his manner, the variety of his talent, compared with which his son’s accomplishments are paltry. You see me now a hard, elderly woman. As a girl I was warm-hearted and impetuous, full of enthusiasm and imagination, while I loved and believed in my lover. My whole nature changed after that great wrong—my heart was frozen.”
There was a silence of some moments, and then Miss Fausset continued in short agitated sentences, her fingers fidgeting nervously with the double eyeglass which she wore on a slender gold chain: