“It was his genius I worshipped. He was at the height of his success. The Milanese raved about him as a rival to Donizetti; his operas were the rage. Can you wonder that I, a girl passionately fond of music, was carried away by the excitement which was in the very air I breathed? I went to the opera night after night. I heard that fascinating music till its melodies seemed interwoven with my being. I suppose I was weak enough to let the composer see how much I admired him. He had quarrelled with his wife; and the quarrel—caused by his own misconduct—had resulted in a separation which was supposed to be permanent. There may have been people in Milan who knew that he was a married man, but my chaperon did not; and he was careful to suppress the fact from the beginning of our acquaintance.
“Yes, no doubt he found out that I was madly in love with him. He pretended to be interested in my musical studies. He advised and taught me. He played the violin divinely, and we used to play concertante duets during the long evenings, while my chaperon dozed by the fire, caring very little how I amused myself, so long as I did not interfere with her comfort. She was a sensual, selfish creature, given over to self-indulgence, and she let me have my own way in everything. He used to join me at the Cathedral at vespers. How my heart thrilled when I found him there, sitting in the shadowy chancel in the gray November light! for I knew it was for my sake he went there, not from any religious feeling. Our hands used to meet and clasp each other almost unconsciously when the music moved us as it went soaring up to the gorgeous roof, in the dim light of the hanging lamps before the altar. I have found myself kneeling with my hand in his when I came out of a dream of Paradise to which that exquisite music had lifted me. Yes, I loved him, Mildred; I loved him as well as ever you loved your husband—as passionately and unselfishly as woman ever loved. I rejoiced in the thought that I was rich, for his sake. I planned the life that we were to live together; a life in which I was to be subordinate to him in all things—his adoring slave. I suppose most girls have some such dream. God help them, when it ends as mine did!”
Again there was a silence—a chilling muteness upon Mildred’s part. How could she be sorry for this woman who had never been sorry for others; who had let her child travel from the cradle to the grave without one ray of maternal love to light her dismal journey! She remembered Fay’s desolate life and blighted nature—Fay, who had a heart large enough for a great unselfish love. She remembered her aunt’s impenetrable silence when a word would have restored happiness to a ruined home; she remembered, and her heart was hardened against this proud, selfish woman, whose life had been one long sacrifice to the world’s opinion.
“I loved him, Mildred, and I trusted him as I would have trusted any man who had the right to call himself a gentleman,” pursued Miss Fausset, eager to justify herself in the face of that implacable silence. “I had been brought up, after the fashion of those days, in a state of primeval innocence. I had never, even in fiction, been allowed to come face to face with the cruel realities of life. I was educated in an age which thought Jane Eyre an improper novel, and which restricted a young woman’s education to music and modern languages; the latter taught so badly, for the most part, as to be useless when she travelled. My knowledge of Italian would just enable me to translate a libretto when I had it before me in print, or to ask my way in the streets; but it was hardly enough to make me understand the answer. It never entered into my mind to doubt Paolo Castellani when he told me that, although we could not, as Papist and Protestant, be married in any church in Milan, we could be united by a civil marriage before a Milanese authority, and that such a marriage would be binding all the world over. Had I been a poor girl I might of my own instinct have suspected treachery; but I was rich and he was poor, and he would be a gainer by our marriage. Servants and governesses had impressed me with the sense of my own importance, and I knew that I was what is called a good match. So I fell into the trap, Mildred, as foolishly as a snared bird. I crept out of the house one morning after my music-lesson, found my lover waiting for me with a carriage close by, went with him to a dingy office in a dingy street, but which had a sufficiently official air to satisfy my ignorance, and went through a certain formula, hearing something read over by an elderly man of grave appearance, and signing my name to a document after Paolo had signed his.
“It was all a sham and a cheat, Mildred. The old man was a Milanese attorney, with no more power to marry us than he had to make us immortal. The paper was a deed-of-gift by which Paolo Castellani transferred some imaginary property to me. The whole thing was a farce; but it was so cleverly planned that the cheat was effected without the aid of an accomplice. The old man acted in all good faith, and my blind confidence and ignorance of Italian accepted a common legal formality as a marriage. I went from that dark little office into the spring sunshine happy as ever bride went out of church, kissed and complimented by a throng of approving friends. I cared very little as to what my brother might think of this clandestine marriage. He would have refused his consent beforehand, no doubt, but he would reconcile himself to the inevitable by and by. In any event, I should be independent of his control. My fortune would be at my own disposal after my one-and-twentieth birthday—mine, to throw into my husband’s lap.
“That is nearly the end of my story, Mildred. We went from Milan to Como, and after a few days at Bellagio crossed the St. Gothard, and sauntered from one lovely scene to another till we stopped at Vevay. For just six weeks I lived in a fool’s paradise; but by that time my brother had traced us to Vevay—having learnt all that could be learnt about Castellani at Milan before he started in pursuit of us. He came, and my dream ended. I knew that I was a dishonoured woman, and that all my education, my innate pride in myself, and my fortune had done for me, was to place me as low as the lowest creature in the land. I left Vevay within an hour of that revelation a broken-hearted woman. I never saw my destroyer’s face again. You know all, Mildred, now. Can you wonder that I shrank with abhorrence from the offspring of my disgrace—that I refused ever to see her after I had once released myself from the hateful tie?”
“Yes, I do wonder; I must always wonder that you were merciless to her—that you had no pity for that innocent life.”
“Ah, you are your father’s daughter. He wished me to hide myself in some remote village so that I might taste the sweets of maternal affection, enjoy the blessed privilege of rearing a child who at every instant of her life would remind me of the miserable infatuation that had blighted my own. No, Mildred, I was not made for such an existence as that. I have tried to do good to others; I have laboured for God’s Church and God’s poor. That has been my atonement.”
“It would have been a better atonement to have cared for your own flesh and blood; but with your means and opportunities you might have done both. I loved Fay, remember, aunt. I cannot forget how bright and happy she might have been. I cannot forget the wrongs that warped her nature.”
“You are very hard, Mildred, hard to a woman whose days are numbered.”