THE FATAL THREE

A Novel

BY THE AUTHOR OF

“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
“ISHMAEL,” “MOHAWKS,”
ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.

LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT

[All rights reserved]

LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

Book the Second.

LACHESIS; OR THE METER OF DESTINY.

BOOK THE SECOND.

LACHESIS; OR THE METER OF DESTINY.

CHAPTER I.
A WIFE AND NO WIFE.

Mr. Castellani’s existence was one of those social problems about which the idle world loves to speculate. There are a good many people in London to whom the idea of a fourth dimension is not half so interesting as the notion of a man who lives by his wits, and yet contrives to get himself dressed by a good tailor, and to obtain a footing in some of the best houses at the smart end of the town. This problem César Castellani had offered to the polite world of London for the last three seasons.

Who is Mr. Castellani? was a question still asked by a good many people who invited the gentleman to their houses, and made much of him. He had not forced his way into society; nobody had the right to describe him as a pushing person. He had slipped so insidiously into his place in the social orbit that people had not yet left off wondering how he came there, or who had been his sponsors. This kind of speculation always stimulates the invention of the clever people; and these affected to know a good deal more about Mr. Castellani than he knew about himself.

“He came with magnificent credentials, and an account was opened for him at Coutts’s before he arrived,” said Magnus Dudley, the society poet, flinging back his long hair with a lazy movement of the large languid head. “Of course, you know that he is a natural son of Cavour’s?”

“Indeed! No, I never heard that. He is not like Cavour.”

“Of course not, but he is the image of his mother—one of the handsomest women in Italy—a Duchess, and daughter of a Roman Prince, who could trace his descent in an unbroken line from Germanicus. Castellani has the blood of Caligula in his veins.”

“He looks like it; but I have heard on pretty good authority that he is the son of a Milanese music-master.”

“There are people who will tell you his father wheeled a barrow and sold penny ices in Whitechapel,” retorted Magnus. “People will say anything.”

Thus and in much otherwise did society speculate; and in the meantime Mr. Castellani’s circle was always widening. His book had been just audacious enough and just clever enough to hit the gold in the literary target. Nepenthe had been one of the successes of the season before last: and Mr. Castellani was henceforth to be known as the author of Nepenthe. He had touched upon many things below the stars, and some things beyond them. He had written of other worlds with the confidence of a man who had been there. He had written of women with the air of a Café de Paris Solomon; and he had written of men as if he had never met one.

A man who could write a successful book, and could sing and play divinely, was a person to be cultivated in feminine society. Very few men cared to be intimate with Mr. Castellani, but among women his influence was indisputable. He treated them with a courtly deference which charmed them, and he made them his slaves. No Oriental despot ever ruled more completely than César Castellani did in half-a-dozen of those drawing-rooms which give the tone to scores of other drawing rooms between Mayfair and Earl’s Court. He contrived to be in request from the dawn to the close of the London season. He had made a favour of going to Riverdale; and now, although it suited his purpose to be there, he made a favour of staying.

“If it were not for the delight of being here, I should be in one of the remotest valleys in the Tyrol,” he told Mrs. Hillersdon. “I have never stayed in England so long after the end of the season. A wild longing to break loose from the bonds of Philistinism generally seizes me at this time of the year. I want to go away, and away, and ever away from my fellow-men. I should like to go and live in a tomb, like the girl in Ouida’s In Maremma. My thirst for solitude is a disease.”

This from a man who spent the greater part of his existence dawdling in drawing-rooms and boudoirs sounded paradoxical; but paradoxes are accepted graciously from a man who has written the book of the season. Louise Hillersdon treated Castellani like a favourite son. At his bidding she brought out the old guitar which had slumbered in its case for nearly a decade, and sang the old Spanish songs, and struck the strings with the old dashing sweep of a delicate hand, and graceful curve of a rounded arm.

“When you sing I could believe you as young as Helen when Paris stole her,” said Castellani, lolling along the sofa beside the low chair in which she was sitting; “I cease to envy the men who knew you when you were a girl.”

“My dear Castellani, I feel old enough to be your grandmother; unless you are really the person I sometimes take you for—”

“Who may that be?”

“The Wandering Jew.”

“No matter what my creed or where I have wandered, since I am so happy as to find a haven here. Granted that I can remember Nero’s beautiful Empress, and Faustina, and all that procession of fair women who illumine the Dark Ages—and Mary of Scotland, and Emma Hamilton, blonde and brunette, pathetic and espiègle, every type, and every variety. It is enough for me to find perfection here.”

“If you only knew how sick I am of that kind of nonsense!” said Mrs. Hillersdon, smiling at him, half in amusement, half in scorn.

“O, I know that you have drunk the wine of men’s worship to satiety! Yet if you and I had lived upon the same plane, I would have taught you that among a hundred adorers one could love you better than all the rest. But it is too late. Our souls may meet and touch perhaps thousands of years hence in a new incarnation.”

“Do you talk this kind of nonsense to Mrs. Greswold or her niece?”

“No; with them I am all dulness and propriety. Neither lady is simpatica. Miss Ransome is a frank, good-natured girl—much too frank—with all the faults of her species. I find the genus girl universally detestable.”

“Miss Ransome has about fifteen hundred a year. I suppose you know that?”

“Has she really? If ever I marry I hope to do better than that,” answered César with easy insolence. “She would be a very nice match for a country parson; that Mr. Rollinson, for instance, who is getting up the concert.”

“Then Miss Ransome is not your attraction at Enderby? It is Mrs. Greswold who draws you.”

“Why should I be drawn?” he asked, with his languid air. “I go there in sheer idleness. They like me to make music for them; they fool me and praise me; and it is pleasant to be fooled by two pretty women.”

“Does Mrs. Greswold take any part in the fooling? She looks like marble.”

“There is fire under that marble. Mrs. Greswold is romantically in love with her husband: but that is a complaint which is not incurable.”

“He is not an agreeable man,” said Louise, remembering how long George Greswold and his wife had kept aloof from her. “And he does not look a happy man.”

“He is not happy.”

“You know something about him—more than we all know?” asked Louise, with keen curiosity.

“Not much. I met him at Nice before he came into his property. He was not a very fortunate person at that time, and he doesn’t care to be reminded of it now.”

“Was he out-at-elbows, or in debt?”

“Neither. His troubles did not take that form. But I am not a gossip. Let the past be past, as Gœthe says. We can’t change it, and it is charity to forget it. If we are not sure about what we touch and hear and see—or fancy we hear and touch and see—in the present, how much less can we be sure of any reality or external existence in the past! It is all done away with—vanished. How can we know that it ever was? A grave here and there is the only witness; and even the grave and the name on the headstone may be only a projection of our own consciousness. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

“That is a politely circuitous manner of refusing to tell me anything about Mr. Greswold when his name was Ransome. No matter. I shall find other people who know the scandal, I have no doubt. Your prevarication assures me that there was a scandal.”

This was on the eve of the concert at Enderby, at about the same hour when George Greswold showed Mildred his first wife’s portrait. Castellani and his hostess were alone together in the lady’s morning-room, while Hillersdon and his other guests were in the billiard-room on the opposite side of a broad corridor. Mrs. Hillersdon had a way of turning over her visitors to her husband when they bored her. Gusts of loud talk and louder laughter came across the corridor now and again as they played pool. There were times when Louise was too tired of life to endure the burden of commonplace society. She liked to dream over a novel. She liked to talk with a clever young man like Castellani. His flatteries amused her, and brought back a faint flavour of youth and a dim remembrance of the day when all men praised her, when she had known herself without a rival. Now other women were beautiful, and she was only a tradition. She had toiled hard to live down her past, to make the world forget that she had ever been Louise Lorraine: yet there were moments in which she felt angry to find that old personality of hers so utterly forgotten, when she was tempted to cry out, “What rubbish you talk about your Mrs. Egremont, your Mrs. Linley Varden, your professional beauties and fine lady actresses. Have you never heard of ME—Louise Lorraine?”

The drawing-rooms at Enderby Manor had been so transformed under Mr. Castellani’s superintendence, and with the help of his own dexterous hands, that there was a unanimous expression of surprise from the county families as they entered that region of subdued light and æsthetic draperies between three and half-past three o’clock on the afternoon of the concert.

The Broadwood grand stood on a platform in front of a large bay-window, draped as no other hand could drape a piano, with embroidered Persian curtains and many-hued Algerian stuffs, striped with gold; and against the sweeping folds of drapery rose a group of tall golden lilies out of a shallow yellow vase. A cluster of gloxinias were massed near the end of the piano, and a few of the most artistic chairs in the house were placed about for the performers. The platform, instead of being as other platforms, in a straight line across one side of the room, was placed diagonally, so as to present the picturesque effect of an angle in the background, an angle lighted with clusters of wax-candles, against a forest of palms.

All the windows had been darkened save those in the further drawing-room, which opened into the garden, and even these were shaded by Spanish hoods, letting in coolness and the scent of flowers, with but little daylight. Thus the only bright light was on the platform.

The auditorium was arranged with a certain artistic carelessness: the chairs in curved lines to accommodate the diagonal line of the platform; and this fact, in conjunction with the prettiness of the stage, put every one in good temper before the concert began.

The concert was as other concerts: clever amateur singing, excellent amateur playing, fine voices cultivated to a certain point, and stopping just short of perfect training.

César Castellani’s three little songs—words by Heine—music, Schubert and Jensen—were the hit of the afternoon. There were few eyes that were unclouded by tears, even among those listeners to whom the words were in an unknown language. The pathos was in the voice of the singer.

The duet was performed with aplomb, and elicited an encore, on which Pamela and Castellani sang the old-fashioned “Flow on, thou shining river,” which pleased elderly people, moving them like a reminiscence of long-vanished youth.

Pamela’s heart beat furiously as she heard the applause, and she curtsied herself off the platform in a whirl of delight. She felt that it was in her to be a great public singer—a second Patti—if—if she could be taught and trained by Castellani. Her head was full of vague ideas—a life devoted to music—three years’ hard study in Italy—a début at La Scala—a world-wide renown achieved in a single night. She even wondered how to Italianise her name. Ransomini? No, that would hardly do. Pamelani—Pameletta? What awkward names they were—christian and surname both!

And then, crimsoning at the mere thought, she saw in large letters, “Madame Castellani.”

How much easier to make a great name in the operatic world with a husband to fight one’s battles and get the better of managers!

“With an income of one’s own it ought to be easy to make one’s way,” thought Pamela, as she stood behind the long table in the dining-room, dispensing tea and coffee, with the assistance of maids and footmen.

Her head was so full of these bewildering visions that she was a little less on the alert than she ought to have been for shillings and half-crowns, whereby a few elderly ladies got their tea and coffee for nothing, not being asked for payment, and preferring to consider the entertainment gratis.

Mildred’s part of the concert was performed to perfection—not a false note in an accompaniment, or a fault in the tempo. Lady Millborough, a very exacting personage, declared she had never been so well supported in her cheval de bataille, the finale to La Cenerentola. But many among the audience remarked that they had never seen Mrs. Greswold look so ill; and both Rollinson and Castellani were seriously concerned about her.

“You are as white as marble,” said the Italian. “I know you are suffering.”

“I assure you it is nothing. I have not been feeling very well lately, and I had a sleepless night. There is nothing that need give any one the slightest concern. You may be sure I shall not break down. I am very much interested in the painted window,” she added, with a faint smile.

“It is not that I fear,” said Castellani, in a lower voice. “It is of you and your suffering I am thinking.”

George Greswold did not appear at the concert: he was engaged elsewhere.

“I cannot think how Uncle George allowed himself to have an appointment at Salisbury this afternoon,” said Pamela. “I know he doats on music.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t doat upon it quite so well as to like to see his house turned topsy-turvy,” said Lady Millborough, who would have allowed every philanthropic scheme in the country to collapse for want of cash rather than suffer her drawing-room to be pulled about by amateur scene-shifters.

Mrs. Hillersdon and her party occupied a prominent position near the platform; but that lady was too clever to make herself conspicuous. She talked to the people who were disposed to friendliness—their numbers had increased with the advancing years—and she placidly ignored those who still held themselves aloof from “that horrid woman.” Nor did she in any way appropriate Castellani as her special protégé when the people round her were praising him. She took everything that happened with the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere, and may often be found among women whom the Vere de Veres despise.

All was over: the last of the carriages had rolled away. Castellani had been carried off in Mrs. Hillersdon’s barouche, no one inviting him to stay at the Manor House. Rollinson lingered to repeat his effusive thanks for Mrs. Greswold’s help.

“It has been a glorious success,” he exclaimed; “glorious! Who would have thought there was so much amateur talent available within thirty miles? And Castellani was a grand acquisition. We shall clear at least seventy pounds for the window. I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough for giving us the use of your lovely rooms, Mrs. Greswold, and for letting us pull them about as we liked.”

“That did not matter—much,” Mildred said faintly, as she stood by the drawing-room door in the evening light, the curate lingering to reiterate the assurance of his gratitude. “Everything can be arranged again—easily.”

She was thinking, with a dull aching at her heart, that to her the pulling about and disarrangement of those familiar rooms hardly mattered at all. They were her rooms no longer. Enderby was never more to be her home. It had been her happy home for thirteen gracious years—years clouded with but one natural sorrow, in the loss of her beloved father. And now that father’s ghost rose up before her, and said, “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, and because of my sin you must go forth from your happy home and forsake the husband of your heart.”

She gave the curate an icy hand, and turned from him without another word.

“Poor soul, she is dead-beat!” thought Rollinson, as he trudged home to his lodgings over a joiner and builder’s shop: airy and comfortable rooms enough, but odorous of sawdust, and a little too near the noises of the workshop.

He could but think it odd that he had not been asked to dine at the Manor, as he would have been in the ordinary course of events. He had told the builder’s wife that he should most likely dine out, whereupon that friendly soul had answered, “Why, of course they’ll ask you, Mr. Rollinson. You know they’re always glad to see you.”

And now he had to return to solitude and a fresh-killed chop.

It was seven o’clock, and George Greswold had not yet come home from Salisbury. Very few words had passed between him and his wife since she fell fainting at his feet last night. He had summoned her maid, and between them they had brought her back to consciousness, and half carried her to her room. She would give no explanation of her fainting-fit when the maid had left the room, and she was lying on her bed, white and calm, with her husband sitting by her side. She told him that she was tired, and that a sudden giddiness had come upon her. That was all he could get from her.

“If you will ask me no questions, and leave me quite alone, I will try to sleep, so that I may be fit for my work in the concert to-morrow,” she pleaded. “I would not disappoint them for worlds.”

“I don’t think you need be over-anxious about them,” said her husband bitterly. “There is more at stake than a painted window: there is your peace and mine. Answer me only one question,” he said, with intensity of purpose: “had your fainting-fit anything to do with the portrait of my first wife?”

“I will tell you everything—after the concert to-morrow,” she answered; “for God’s sake leave me to myself till then.”

“Let it be as you will,” he answered, rising suddenly, wounded by her reticence.

He left the room without another word. She sprang up from her bed directly he was gone, ran to the door and locked it, and then flung herself on her knees upon the prie-dieu chair at the foot of a large ivory crucifix which hung in a deep recess beside the old-fashioned fireplace.

Here she knelt, in tears and prayer, deep into the night. Then for an hour or more she walked up and down the room, absorbed in thought, by the dim light of the night-lamp.

When the morning light came she went to a bookcase in a little closet of a room opening out of the spacious old bedroom—a case containing only devotional books, and of these she took out volume after volume—Taylor’s Rule of Conscience, Hooker’s Religious Polity, Butler, Paley—one after another, turning over the leaves, looking through the indexes—searching for something which she seemed unable to find anywhere.

“What need have I to see what others have thought?” she said to herself at last, after repeated failure; “Clement Cancellor knows the right. I could have no better guide than his opinion, and he has spoken. What other law do I need? His law is the law of God.”

Not once did her eyes close in sleep all through that night, or in the morning hours before breakfast. She made an excuse for breakfasting in her dressing-room, a large, airy apartment, half boudoir. She was told that Mr. Greswold had gone out early to see some horses at Salisbury, and would not be back till dinner-time. He was to be met at the station at half-past seven.

She had her morning to herself. Pamela was rehearsing her part in the duet, and in “Flow on, thou shining river,” which was to be sung in the event of an encore. That occupation, and the arrangement of her toilet, occupied the young lady till luncheon—allowing for half-hourly rushes about the lawn and shrubberies with Box, whose health required activity, and whose social instincts yearned for companionship.

“He can’t get on with only Kassandra; she hasn’t intellect enough for him,” said Pamela.

It was only ten minutes before the arrival of the performers that Mrs. Greswold went down-stairs, pale as ashes, but ready for the ordeal. She had put on a white gown with a little scarlet ribbon about it, lest black should make her pallor too conspicuous.

And now it was seven o’clock, and she was alone. The curate had been right in pronouncing her dead-beat; but she had some work before her yet. She had been writing letters in the morning. Two of these she now placed on the mantelpiece in her bedroom: one addressed to her husband, the other to Pamela.

She had a bag packed—not one of those formidable dressing-bags which weigh fifteen to twenty pounds—but a light Russia-leather bag, just large enough to contain the essentials of the toilet. She put on a neat little black bonnet and a travelling-cloak, and took her bag and umbrella, and went down to the hall. She had given orders that the carriage should call for her before going to the station, and she was at the door ready to step into it when it came round.

She told the groom that she was to be put down at Ivy Cottage, and was driven off unseen by the household, who were all indulging in a prolonged tea-drinking after the excitement of the concert.

Ivy Cottage was within five minutes’ walk of Romsey Station: a little red cottage, newly built, with three or four ivy plants languishing upon a slack-baked brick wall, and just enough garden for the proverbial cat to disport himself in at his ease—the swinging of cats being no longer a popular English sport. There was nothing strange in Mrs. Greswold alighting at Ivy Cottage—unless it were the hour of her visit—for the small brick box was occupied by two maiden ladies of small means: one a confirmed invalid; the other her patient nurse; whom the lady of Enderby Manor often visited, and in whom she was known to be warmly interested.

The coachman concluded that his mistress was going to spend a quarter of an hour with the two old ladies, while he went on and waited for his master at the station, and that he was to call for her on his return. He did not even ask for her orders upon this point, taking them for granted.

He was ten minutes too soon at the station, as every well-conducted coachman ought to be.

“I’m to call for my mistress, sir,” he said, as Mr. Greswold stepped into the brougham.

“Where?”

“At Ivy Cottage, sir: Miss Fisher’s.”

“Very good.”

The brougham pulled up at Ivy Cottage; and the groom got down and knocked a resounding peal upon the Queen Anne knocker, it being hardly possible nowadays to find a knocker that is not after the style of Queen Anne, or a newly-built twenty-five pound a year cottage in any part of rural England that does not offer a faint reminiscence of Bedford Park.

The groom made his inquiry of the startled little maid-of-all-work, fourteen years old last birthday, and already aspiring to better herself as a vegetable-maid in a nobleman’s family.

Mrs. Greswold had not been at Ivy Cottage that evening.

George Greswold was out of the brougham by this time, hearing the girl’s answer.

“Stop where you are,” he said to the coachman, and ran back to the station, an evil augury in his mind.

He went to the up-platform, the platform at which he had alighted ten minutes before.

“Did you see Mrs. Greswold here just now?” he asked the station-master, with as natural an air as he could command.

“Yes, sir. She got into the up-train, sir; the train by which you came. She came out of the waiting-room, sir, the minute after you left the platform. You must just have missed her.”

“Yes, I have just missed her.”

He walked up and down the length of the platform two or three times in the thickening dusk. Yes, he had missed her. She had left him. Such a departure could mean only severance—some deep wound—which it might take long to heal. It would all come right by and by. There could be no such thing as parting between man and wife who loved each other as they loved—who were incapable of falsehood or wrong.

What was this jealous fancy that had taken possession of her? This unappeasable jealousy of the dead past—a passion so strong that it had prompted her to rush away from him in this clandestine fashion, to torture him by all the evidences of an inconsolable grief. His heart was sick to death as he went back to the carriage, helpless to do anything except go to his deserted home, and see what explanation awaited him there.

It was half-past eight when the carriage drove up to the Manor House. Pamela ran out into the hall to receive him.

“How late you are, uncle!” she cried, “and I can’t find aunt. Everything is at sixes and sevens. The concert was a stupendous success—and—only think!—I was encored.”

“Indeed, dear!”

“Yes, my duet with him: and then we sang the other. They would have liked a third, only we pretended not to understand. It would have made all the others so fearfully savage if we had taken it.”

This speech was not a model of lucidity, but it might have been much clearer and yet unintelligible to George Greswold.

“Do you mind dining alone to-night, my dear Pamela?” he said, trying to speak cheerily. “Your aunt is out—and I—I have some letters to write—and I lunched heavily at Salisbury.”

His heavy luncheon had consisted of a biscuit and a glass of beer at the station. His important business had been a long ramble on Salisbury Plain, alone with his troubled thoughts.

“Did your mistress leave any message for me?” he asked the butler.

“No, sir. Nobody saw my mistress go out. When Louisa went up to dress her for dinner she was gone, sir—but Louisa said there was a letter for you on the bedroom mantelpiece. Shall I send for it, sir?”

“No, no—I will go myself. Serve dinner at once. Miss Ransome will dine alone.”

George Greswold went to the bedroom—that fine old room, the real Queen Anne room, with thick walls and deep-set windows, and old window-seats, and capacious recesses on each side of the high oak chimneypiece, and richly-moulded wainscot, and massive panelled doors, a sober eighteenth-century atmosphere in which it is a privilege to exist—a spacious old room, with old Dutch furniture, of the pre-Chippendale era, and early English china, Worcester simulating Oriental, Chelsea striving after Dresden: a glorious old room, solemn and mysterious as a church in the dim light of a pair of wax-candles which Louisa the maid had lighted on the mantelpiece.

There, between the candles, appeared two letters: “George Greswold, Esq.,” “Miss Ransome.”

The husband’s letter was a thick one, and the style of the penmanship showed how the pen had hurried along, driven by the electric forces of excitement and despair:

“My Beloved,—You asked me last night if the photograph which you showed me had anything to do with my fainting-fit. It had everything to do with it. That photograph is a portrait of my unhappy sister, my cruelly-used, unacknowledged sister; and I, who have been your wife fourteen years, know now that our marriage was against the law of God and man—that I have never been legally your wife—that our union from the first has been an unholy union, and for that unlawful marriage the hand of God has been laid upon us—heavily—heavily—in chastisement, and the darling of our hearts has been taken from us.

“‘Whom He loveth He chasteneth.’ He has chastened us, George—perhaps to draw us nearer to Him. We were too happy, it may be, in this temporal life—too much absorbed by our own happiness, living in a charmed circle of love and gladness, till that awful chastisement came.

“There is but one course possible to me, my dear and honoured husband, and that course lies in life-long separation. I am running away from my dear home like a criminal, because I am not strong enough to stand face to face with you and tell you what must be. We must do our best to live out our lives asunder, George; we must never meet again as wedded lovers, such as we have been for fourteen years. God knows, my affection for you has grown and strengthened with every year of union, and yet it seems to me on looking back that my heart went out to you in all the fulness of an infinite love when first we stood, hand clasped in hand, beside the river. If you are angry with me, George—if you harden your heart against me because I do that which I know to be my duty, at least believe that I never loved you better than in this bitter hour of parting. I spent last night in prayer and thought. If there were any way of escape—any possibility of living my own old happy life with a clear conscience—I think God would have shown it to me in answer to my prayers; but there was no ray of light, no gleam of hope. Conscience answers sternly and plainly. By the law of God I have never been your wife, and His law commands me to break an unhallowed tie, although my heart may break with it.

“Do you remember your argument with Mr. Cancellor? I never saw you so vehement in any such dispute, and you took the side which I can but think the side of the Evil One. That conversation now seems to me like a strange foreshadowing of sorrow—a lesson meant for my guidance. Little did I then think that this question could ever have any bearing on my own life; but I recall every word now, and I remember how earnestly my old master spoke—how ruthlessly he maintained the right. Can I doubt his wisdom, from whose lips I first learnt the Christian law, and in whom I first saw the true Christian life?

“I have written to Pamela, begging her to stay with you, to take my place in the household, and to be to you as an adopted daughter. May God be merciful to us both in this heavy trial, George! Be sure He will deal with us mercifully if we do our duty according to the light that is given to us.

“I shall stay to-night in Queen Anne’s Gate with Mrs. Tomkison. Please send Louisa to me to-morrow with luggage for a considerable absence from home. She will know what to bring. You can tell her that I am going abroad for my health. My intention is to go to some small watering-place in Germany, where I can vegetate, away from all beaten tracks, and from the people who know us. You may rely upon me to bear my own burden, and to seek sympathy and consolation from no earthly comforter.

“Do not follow me, George—should your heart urge you to do so. Respect my solemn resolution, the result of many prayers.—Your ever loving

“Mildred.”

CHAPTER II.
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS.

George Greswold read his wife’s letter a second time with increasing perplexity and trouble of mind. Her sister! What could this mean? She had never told him of the existence of a sister. She had been described by her father, by every one, as an only child. She had inherited the whole of her father’s fortune.

“Her cruelly-used, unacknowledged sister.”

Those words indicated a social mystery, and as he read and re-read those opening lines of his wife’s letter he remembered her reticence about that girl-companion from whom she had been parted so early. He remembered her blushing embarrassment when he questioned her about the girl she called Fay.

The girl had been sent to a finishing-school at Brussels, and Mildred had seen her no more.

His first wife had finished her education at Brussels. She had talked to him often of the fashionable boarding-school in the quaint old street near the Cathedral; and the slights she had endured there from other girls because of her isolation. There was no stint in the expense of her education. She had as many masters as she cared to have. She was as well dressed as the richest of her companions. But she was nobody, and belonged to nobody, could give no account of herself that would satisfy those merciless inquisitors.

His wife, Vivien Faux, the young English lady whom he had met at Florence. She was travelling in the care of an English artist and his wife, who spent their lives on the Continent. She submitted to no authority, had ample means, and was thoroughly independent. She did not get on very well with either the artist or his wife. She had a knack of saying disagreeable things, and a tongue of exceeding bitterness. A difficult subject the painter called her, and imparted to his particular friends in confidence that his wife and Miss Faux were always quarrelling. Vivien Faux, that was the name borne by the girl whom he met nineteen years ago at an evening-party in Florence; that was the name of the girl he had married, after briefest acquaintance, knowing no more about her than that she had a fortune of thirty thousand pounds when she came of age, and that the trustee and custodian of that fortune was a lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn, who affected no authority over her, and put no difficulties in the way of her marrying.

He remembered now when he first saw Mildred Fausset something in her fresh young beauty, some indefinable peculiarity of expression or contour, had evolved the image of his dead wife, that image which never recurred to him without keenest pain. He remembered how strange that vague, indescribable resemblance had seemed to him, and how he had asked himself if it had any real existence, or were only the outcome of his own troubled mind, reverting involuntarily to an agonising memory.

“Her face may come back to me in the faces of other women, as it comes back to me in my miserable dreams,” he told himself.

But as the years went by he became convinced that the likeness was not imaginary. There were points of resemblance—the delicate tracing of the eyebrows, the form of the brow, the way the hair grew above the temples, were curiously alike. He came to accept the likeness as one of those chance resemblances which are common enough in life. It suggested to him nothing more than that.

He went to the library with the letter still in his hand. His lamp was ready lighted, and, the September evening being chilly, there was a wood fire on the low hearth, which gave an air of cheerfulness to the sombre room.

He rang and told the footman to send Mrs. Bell to him.

Bell appeared, erect and severe of aspect as she had been four-and-twenty years before; neatly dressed in black silk, with braided gray hair, and a white lace cap.

“Sit down, Mrs. Bell, I have a good many questions to ask you,” said Greswold, motioning her to a chair on the further side of his desk.

He was sitting with his eyes fixed, looking at the spot where Mildred had fallen senseless at his feet. He sat for some moments in a reverie, and then turned suddenly, unlocked his desk, and took out the photograph which he had shown Mildred last night.

“Did you ever see that face before, Bell?” he asked, handing her the open case.

“Good gracious, sir, yes, indeed, I should think I did! but Miss Fay was younger than that when she came to Parchment Street.”

“Did you see much of her in Parchment Street?”

“Yes, sir, a good deal, and at The Hook, too; a good deal more than I wanted to. I didn’t hold with her being brought into our house, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think it was fair to my mistress.”

“But how was it unfair?”

“Well, sir, I don’t wish to say anything against the dead, and Mr. Fausset was a liberal master to me, and I make no doubt that he died a penitent man. He was a regular church-goer, and an upright man in all his ways while I lived with him; but right is right; and I shall always maintain that it was a cruel thing to a young wife like Mrs. Fausset, who doted on the ground he walked upon, to bring his natural daughter into the house.”

“Mrs. Bell, do you know that this is a serious accusation you are bringing against a dead man?” said George Greswold solemnly. “Now, what grounds have you for saying that this girl”—with his hand upon the photograph—“was Mr. Fausset’s daughter?”

“What grounds, sir? I don’t want any grounds. I’m not a lawyer to put things in that way; but I know what I know. First and foremost, she was the image of him; and next, why did he bring her home and want her to be made one of the family, and treated as a sister by Miss Mildred?”

“She may have been the daughter of a friend.”

“People don’t do that kind of thing—don’t run the risk of making a wife miserable to oblige a friend,” retorted Bell scornfully. “Besides, I say again, if she wasn’t his own flesh and blood, why was she so like him?”

“She may have been the daughter of a near relation.”

“He had but one near relation in the world: his only sister, a young lady who was so difficult to please that she refused no end of good offers, and of such a pious turn that she has devoted her life to doing good for the last five-and-twenty years, to my certain knowledge. I hope, sir, you would not insinuate that she had a natural daughter?”

“She may have made a secret marriage, perhaps, known only to her brother.”

“She couldn’t have done any such thing without my knowledge, sir. She was a girl at school at the time of Miss Fay’s birth. Don’t mix Miss Fausset up in it, pray, sir.”

“Was it you only who suspected Mr. Fausset to be Miss Fay’s father?”

“Only me, sir? Why, it was everybody: and, what was worst of all, my poor mistress knew it, and fretted over it to her dying day.”

“But you never heard Mr. Fausset acknowledge the parentage?”

“No, sir, not to me; but I have no doubt he acknowledged it to his poor dear lady. He was an affectionate husband, and he must have been very much wrapped up in that girl, or he wouldn’t have made his wife unhappy about her.”

With but the slightest encouragement from Mr. Greswold, Bell expatiated on the subject of Fay’s residence in the two houses, and the misery she had wrought there. She unconsciously exaggerated the general conviction about the master’s relationship to his protégée, nor did she hint that it was she who first mooted the notion in the Parchment Street household. She left George Greswold with the belief that this relationship had been known for a fact to a great many people—that the tie between protector and protected was an open secret.

She dwelt much upon the child Mildred’s love for the elder girl, which she seemed to think in itself an evidence of their sisterhood. She gave a graphic account of Mildred’s illness, and described how Fay had watched beside her bed night after night.

“I saw her sitting there in her nightgown many a time when I went in the middle of the night to see if Mildred was asleep. I never liked Miss Fay, but justice is justice, and I must say, looking back upon all things,” said Mrs. Bell, with a virtuous air, “that there was no deception about her love for Miss Mildred. I may have thought it put on then; but looking back upon it now, I know that it was real.”

“I can quite understand that my wife must have been very fond of such a companion—sister or no sister—but she was so young that no doubt she soon forgot her friend. Memory is not tenacious at seven years old,” said Greswold, with an air of quiet thoughtfulness, cutting the leaves of a new book which had lain on his desk, the paper-knife marking the page where he had thrown it down yesterday afternoon.

“Indeed, she didn’t forget, sir. You must not judge Miss Mildred by other girls of seven. She was—she was like Miss Lola, sir”—Bell’s elderly voice faltered here. “She was all love and thoughtfulness. She doted on Miss Fay, and I never saw such grief as she felt when she came back from the sea-side and found her gone. It was done for the best, and it was the only thing my mistress could do with any regard for her own self-respect; but even I felt very sorry Miss Fay had been sent away, when I saw what a blow it was to Miss Mildred. She didn’t get over it for years; and though she was a good and dutiful daughter, I know that she and her mother had words about Miss Fay more than once.”

“She was very fond of her, was she?” murmured George Greswold, in an absent way, steadily cutting the leaves of his book. “Very fond of her. And you have no doubt in your own mind, Mrs. Bell, that the two were sisters?”

“Not the least doubt, sir. I never had,” answered Bell resolutely.

She waited for him to speak again, but he sat silent, cutting his way slowly through the big volume, without making one jagged edge, so steady was the movement of the hand that grasped the paper-knife. His eyes were bent upon the book; his face was in shadow.

“Is that all, sir?” Bell asked at last, when she had grown tired of his silence.

“Yes, Mrs. Bell, that will do. Good-night.”

When the door closed upon her, he flung the book away from him, sprang to his feet, and began to pace the room, up and down its length of forty feet, from hearth to door.

“Sisters!—and so fond of each other!” he muttered. “My God, this is fatality! In this, as in the death of my child, I am helpless. The wanton neglect of my servants cost me the idol of my heart. It was not my fault—not mine—but I lost her. And now I am again the victim of fatality—blind, impotent—groping in the dark web—caught in the inexorable net.”

He went back to his desk, and re-read Mildred’s letter in the light of the lamp.

“She leaves me because our marriage is unholy in her eyes,” he said to himself. “What will she think when she knows all—as she must know, I suppose, sooner or later? Sooner or later all things are known, says one of the wise ones of the earth. Sooner or later! She is on the track now. Sooner or later she must know—everything.”

He flung himself into a low chair in front of the hearth, and sat with his elbows on his knees staring at the fire.

“If it were that question of legality only,” he said to himself, “if it were a question of Church, law, bigotry, prejudice, I should not fear the issue. My love for her, and hers for me, ought to be stronger than any such prejudice. It would need but the first sharp pain of severance to bring her back to me, my fond and faithful wife, willing to submit her judgment to mine, willing to believe, as I believe, that such marriages are just and holy, such bonds pure and true, all over the world, even though one country may allow and another disallow, one colony tie the knot and another loosen it. If it were that alone which parts us, I should not fear. But it is the past, the spectral past, which rises up to thrust us asunder. Her sister! And they loved each other as David and Jonathan loved, with the love whose inheritance is a life-long regret.”

CHAPTER III.
THE VERDICT OF HER CHURCH.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when Mrs. Greswold arrived at Waterloo. There had been half-an-hour’s delay at Bishopstoke, where she changed trains, and the journey had seemed interminable to the over-strained brain of that solitary traveller. Never before had she so journeyed, never during the fourteen years of her married life had she sat behind an engine that was carrying her away from her husband. No words could speak that agony of severance, or express the gloom of the future—stretching before her in one dead-level of desolation—which was to be spent away from him.

“If I were a Roman Catholic I would go into a convent to-morrow; I would lock myself for ever from the outer world,” she thought, feeling that the world could be nothing to her without her husband.

And then she began to ponder seriously upon those sisterhoods in which the Anglican Church is now almost as rich as the Roman. She thought of those women with whom she had been occasionally brought in contact, whom she had been able to help sometimes with her purse and with her sympathy, and she knew that when the hour came for her to renounce the world there would be many homes open to receive her, many a good work worthy of her labour.

“I am not like those good women,” she thought; “the prospect seems to me so dreary. I have loved the world too well. I love it still, even after all that I have lost.”

She had telegraphed to her friend Mrs. Tomkison, and that lady was at the terminus, with her neat little brougham, and with an enthusiastic welcome.

“It is so sweet of you to come to me!” she exclaimed; “but I hope it is not any worrying business that has brought you up to town so suddenly—papers to sign, or anything of that kind.”

Mrs. Tomkison was literary and æsthetic, and had the vaguest notions upon all business details. She was an ardent champion of woman’s rights, sent Mr. Tomkison off to the City every morning to earn money for her milliners, decorators, fads, and protégés of every kind, and reminded him every evening of his intellectual inferiority. She had an idea that women of property were inevitably plundered by their husbands, and that it was one of the conditions of their existence to be wheedled into signing away their fortunes for the benefit of spendthrift partners, she herself being in the impregnable position of never having brought her husband a sixpence.

“No, it is hardly a business matter, Cecilia. I am only in town en passant. I am going to my aunt at Brighton to-morrow. I knew you would give me a night’s shelter; and it is much nicer to be with you than to go to an hotel.”

The fact was, that of two evils Mildred had chosen the lesser. She had shrunk from the idea of meeting her lively friend, and being subjected to the ordeal of that lady’s curiosity; but it had seemed still more terrible to her to enter a strange hotel at night, and alone. She who had never travelled alone, who had been so closely guarded by a husband’s thoughtful love, felt herself helpless as a child in that beginning of widowhood.

“I should have thought it simply detestable of you if you had gone to an hotel,” protested Cecilia, who affected strong language. “We can have a delicious hour of confidential talk. I sent Adam to bed before I came out. He is an excellent devoted creature—has just made what he calls a pot of money on Mexican Street Railways; but he is a dreadful bore when one wants to be alone with one’s dearest friend. I have ordered a cosy little supper—a few natives, only just in, a brace of grouse, and a bottle of the only champagne which smart people will hear of nowadays.”

“I am so sorry you troubled about supper,” said Mildred, not at all curious about the latest fashion in champagne. “I could not take anything, unless it were a cup of tea.”

“But you must have dined early, or hurriedly, at any rate. I hate that kind of dinner—everything huddled over—and the carriage announced before the pièce de résistance. And so you’re going to your aunt. Is she ill? Has she sent for you at a moment’s notice? You will come into all her money, no doubt; and I am told she is immensely rich.”

“I have never thought about her money.”

“I suppose not, you lucky creature. It will be sending coals to Newcastle in your case. Your father left you so rich. I am told Miss Fausset gives no end of money to her church people. She has put in two painted windows at St. Edmund’s: a magnificent rose window over the porch, and a window in the south transept by Burne Jones—a delicious design—St. Cecilia sitting at an organ, with a cloud of cherubs. By the bye, talking of St. Cecilia, how did you like my friend Castellani? He wrote me a dear little note of gratitude for my introduction, so I am sure you were very good to him.”

“I could not dishonour any introduction of yours; besides, Mr. Castellani’s grandfather and my father had been friends. That was a link. He was very obliging in helping us with an amateur concert.”

“How do you like him? But here we are at home. You shall tell me more while we are at supper.”

Mildred had to sit down to the oysters and grouse, whether she would or not. The dining-room was charming in the day-time, with its view of the Park. At night it might have been a room excavated from Vesuvian lava, so strictly classic were its terra-cotta draperies, its butter-boat lamps, and curule chairs.

“How sad to see you unable to eat anything!” protested Mrs. Tomkison, snapping up the natives with gusto; for it may be observed that the people who wait up for travellers, or for friends coming home from the play, are always hungrier than those who so return. “You shall have your tea directly.”

Mildred had eaten nothing since her apology for a breakfast. She was faint with fasting, but had no appetite, and the odour of grouse, fried bread-crumbs, and gravy sickened her. She withdrew to a chair by the fire, and had a dainty little tea-table placed at her side, while Mrs. Tomkison demolished one of the birds, talking all the time.

“Isn’t he a gifted creature?” she asked, helping herself to the second half of the bird.

Mildred almost thought she was speaking of the grouse.

“I mean Castellani,” said Cecilia, in answer to her interrogative look. “Isn’t he a heap of talent? You heard him play, of course, and you heard his divine voice? When I think of his genius for music, and remember that he wrote that book, I am actually wonderstruck.”

“The book is clever, no doubt,” answered Mildred thoughtfully, “almost too clever to be quite sincere. And as for genius—well, I suppose his musical talent does almost reach genius; and yet what more can one say of Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin? I think genius is too large a word for any one less than they.”

“But I say he is a genius,” cried Mrs. Tomkison, elated by grouse and dry sherry (the champagne had been put aside when Mildred refused it). “Does he not carry one out of oneself by his playing? Does not his singing open the floodgates of our hard, battered old hearts? No one ever interested me so much.”

“Have you known him long?”

“For the last three seasons. He is with me three or four times a week when he is in town. He is like a son of the house.”

“And does Mr. Tomkison like him?”

“O, you know Adam,” said Cecilia, with an expressive shrug. “You know Adam’s way. He doesn’t mind. ‘You always must have somebody hanging about you,’ he said, ‘so you may as well have that French fool as any one else.’ Adam calls all foreigners Frenchmen, if they are not obtrusively German. Castellani has been devoted to me; and I daresay I may have got myself talked about on his account,” pursued Cecilia, with the pious resignation of a blameless matron of five-and-forty, who rather likes to be suspected of an intrigue; “but I can’t help that. He is one of the few young men I have ever met who understands me. And then we are such near neighbours, and it is easy for him to run in at any hour. ‘You ought to give him a latchkey,’ says Adam; ‘it would save the servants a lot of trouble.’”

“Yes, I remember; he lives in Queen Anne’s Mansions,” Mildred answered listlessly.

“He has a suite of rooms near the top, looking over half London, and exquisitely furnished. He gives afternoon tea to a few chosen friends who don’t mind the lift; and we have had a Materialisation in his rooms, but it wasn’t a particularly good one,” added Mrs. Tomkison, as if she were talking of something to eat.

The maid Louisa arrived at Queen Anne’s Gate a little before luncheon on the following day. She brought a considerable portion of Mrs. Greswold’s belongings in two large basket-trunks, a portmanteau, and a dressing-bag. These were at once sent on to Victoria in the cab that had brought the young person and the luggage from Waterloo, while the young person herself was accommodated with dinner, table-beer, and gossip in the housekeeper’s room. She also brought a letter for her mistress, a letter written by George Greswold late on the night before.

Mildred could hardly tear open the envelope for the trembling of her hands. How would he write to her? Would he plead against her decision? would he try to make her waver? Would he set love against law, in such irresistible words as love alone can use? She knew her own weakness and his strength, and she opened his letter full of fear for her own resolution: but there was no passionate pleading.

The letter was measured almost to coldness:

“I need not say that your departure, together with your explanation of that departure, has come upon me as a crushing blow. Your reasons in your own mind are doubtless unanswerable. I cannot even endeavour to gainsay them. I could only seem to you as a special pleader, making the worse appear the better reason, for my own selfish ends. You know my opinion upon this hard-fought question of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; and you know how widely it differs from Mr. Cancellor’s view and yours—which, to my mind, is the view of the bigot, and not the Christian. There is no word in Christ’s teaching to forbid such marriages. Your friend and master, Clement Cancellor, is of the school which sets the law-making of a mediæval Church above the wisdom of Christ. Am I to lose my wife because Mr. Cancellor is a better Christian than his Master?

“But granted that you are fixed in this way of thinking, that you deem it your duty to break your husband’s heart, and make his home desolate, rather than tolerate the idea of union with one who was once married to your half-sister, let me ask you at least to consider whether you have sufficient ground for believing that my first wife was verily your father’s daughter. In the first place, your only evidence of the identity between my wife and the girl you call Fay consists of a photograph which bears a striking likeness to the girl you knew, a likeness which I am bound to say Bell saw as instantly as you yourself had seen it. Remember, that the strongest resemblances have been found between those who were of no kin to each other; and that more than one judicial murder has been committed on the strength of just such a likeness.

“The main point at issue, however, is not so much the question of identity as the question whether the girl Fay was actually your father’s daughter; and from my interrogation of Bell, it appears to me that the evidence against your father in this matter is one of impressions only, and, even as circumstantial evidence, too feeble to establish any case against the accused. Is it impossible for a man to be interested in an orphan girl, and to be anxious to establish her in his own home, as a companion for his only child, unless that so-called orphan were his own daughter, the offspring of a hidden intrigue? There may be stronger evidence as to Fay’s parentage than the suspicions of servants or your mother’s jealousy; but as yet I have arrived at none. You possibly may know much more than Bell knows, more than your letter implies. If it is not so, if you are acting on casual suspicions only, I can but say that you are prompt to strike a man whose heart has been sorely tried of late, and who had a special claim upon your tenderness by reason of that recent loss.

“I can write no more, Mildred. My heart is too heavy for many words. I do not reproach you. I only ask you to consider what you are doing before you make our parting irrevocable. You have entreated me not to follow you, and I will obey you, so far as to give you time for reflection before I force myself upon your presence; but I must see you before you leave England. I ask no answer to this letter until we meet.—Your unhappy husband

“George Greswold.”

The letter chilled her by its calm logic—its absence of passion. There seemed very little of the lover left in a husband who could so write. His contempt for a law which to her was sacred shocked her almost as if it had been an open declaration of infidelity. His sneer at Clement Cancellor wounded her to the quick.

She answered her husband’s letter immediately:

“Alas! my beloved,” she wrote, “my reason for believing Fay to have been my sister is unanswerable. My mother on her death-bed told me of the relationship; told me the sad secret with bitter tears. Her knowledge of that story had cast a shadow on the latter years of her married life. I had seen her unhappy, without knowing the cause. On her death-bed she confided in me. I was almost a woman then, and old enough to understand what she told me. Women are so jealous where they love, George. I suffered many a sharp pang after my discovery of your previous marriage; jealous of that unknown rival who had gone before me, little dreaming that fatal marriage was to cancel my own.

“My mother’s evidence is indisputable. She must have known. As I grew older I saw that there was that in my father’s manner when Fay was mentioned which indicated some painful secret. The time came when I was careful to avoid the slightest allusion to my lost sister; but in my own mind and in my own heart I cherished her image as the image of a sister.

“I am grieved that you should despise Mr. Cancellor and his opinions. My religious education was derived entirely from him. My father and mother were both careless, though neither was unbelieving. He taught me to care for spiritual things. He taught me to look to a better life than the best we can lead here; and in this dark hour I thank and bless him for having so taught me. What should I be now, adrift on a sea of trouble, without the compass of faith? I will steer by that, George, even though it carry me away from him I shall always devotedly love.—Ever, in severance as in union, your own

Mildred.”

She had written to Mr. Cancellor early that morning, asking him to call upon her before three o’clock. He was announced a few minutes after she finished her letter, and she went to the drawing-room to receive him.

His rusty black coat and slouched hat, crumpled carelessly in his ungloved hand, looked curiously out of harmony with Mrs. Tomkison’s drawing-room, which was the passion of her life, the shrine to which she carried gold and frankincense and myrrh, in the shape of rose du Barri and bleue du Roi Sèvres, veritable old Sherraton tables and chairs, and commodes and cabinets from the boudoir of Marie Antoinette, a lady who must assuredly have sat at more tables and written at more escritoires than any other woman in the world. Give her Majesty only five minutes for every table and ten for every bonheur du jour attributed to her possession, and her married life must have been a good deal longer than the span which she was granted of joy and grief between the passing of the ring and the fall of the axe.

Unsightly as that dark figure showed amidst the delicate tertiaries of Lyons brocade and the bright colouring of satin-wood tables and Sèvres porcelain, Mr. Cancellor was perfectly at his ease in Mrs. Tomkison’s drawing-room. He wasted very few of his hours in such rooms, albeit there were many such in which his presence was courted; but seldom as he appeared amidst such surroundings he was never disconcerted by them. He was not easily impressed by externals. The filth and squalor of a London slum troubled him no more than the artistic intricacies of a West End drawing-room, in which the culte of beauty left him no room to put down his hat. It was humanity for which he cared—persons, not things. His soul went straight to the souls he was anxious to save. He was narrow, perhaps; but in that narrowness there was a concentrative power that could work wonders.

One glance at Mildred’s face showed him that she was distressed, and that her trouble was no small thing. He held her hand in his long lean fingers, and looked at her earnestly as he said:

“You have something to tell me—some sorrow?”

“Yes,” she answered, “an incurable sorrow.”

She burst into tears, the first she had shed since she left her home, and sobbed passionately for some moments, leaning against the Trianon spinet, raining her tears upon the Vernis Martin in a way that would have made Mrs. Tomkison’s blood run cold.

“How weak I am!” she said impatiently, as she dried her eyes and choked back her sobs. “I thought I was accustomed to my sorrow by this time. God knows it is no new thing! It seems a century old already.”

“Sit down, and tell me all about it,” said Clement Cancellor quietly, drawing forward a chair for her, and then seating himself by her side. “I cannot help you till you have told me all your trouble; and you know I shall help you if I can. I can sympathise with you, in any case.”

“Yes, I am sure of that,” she answered sadly; and then, falteringly but clearly, she told him the whole story, from its beginning in the days of her childhood till the end yesterday. She held back nothing, she spared no one. Freely, as to her father confessor, she told all. “I have left him for ever,” she concluded. “Have I done right?”

“Yes, you have done right. Anything less than that would have been less than right. If you are sure of your facts as to the relationship—if Mr. Greswold’s first wife was your father’s daughter—there was no other course open to you. There was no alternative.”

“And my marriage is invalid in law?” questioned Mildred.

“I do not think so. Law does not always mean justice. If this young lady was your father’s natural daughter she had no status in the eye of the law. She was not your sister—she belonged to no one, in the eye of the law. She had no right to bear your father’s name. So, if you accept the civil law for your guide, you may still be George Greswold’s wife—you may ignore the tie between you and his first wife. Legally it has no existence.”

Mildred crimsoned, and then grew deadly pale. In the eye of the law her marriage was valid. She was not a dishonoured woman—a wife and no wife. She might still stand by her husband’s side—go down to the grave as his companion and sweetheart. They who so short a time ago were wedded lovers might be lovers again, all clouds dispersed, the sunshine of domestic peace upon their pathway—if she were content to be guided by the law.

“Should you think me justified if I were to accept my legal position, and shut my eyes to all the rest?” she asked, knowing but too well what the answer would be.

“Should I so think! O Mildred, do you know me so little that you need ask such a question? When have I ever taken the law for my guide? Have I not defied that law when it stood between me and my faith? Am I not ready to defy it again were the choice between conscience and law forced upon me? To my mind your half-sister’s position makes not one jot of difference. She was not the less your sister because of her parent’s sin, and your marriage with the man who was her husband is not the less an incestuous marriage.”

The word struck Mildred like a whip—stung the wounded heart like the sharp cut of a lash.

“Not one word more,” she cried, holding up her hands as if to ward off a blow. “If my union with my—very dear—husband was a sinful union, I was an unconscious sinner. The bond is broken for ever. I shall sin no more.”

Her tears came again; but this time they gathered slowly on the heavy lids, and rolled slowly down the pale cheeks, while she sat with her eyes fixed, looking straight before her, in dumb despair.

“Be sure all will be well with you if you cleave to the right,” said the priest, with grave tenderness, feeling for her as acutely as an ascetic can feel for the grief that springs from earthly passions and temporal loves, sympathising as a mother sympathises with a child that sobs over a broken toy. The toy is a futile thing, but to the child priceless.

“What are you going to do with your life?” he asked gently, after a long pause, in which he had given her time to recover her self-possession.

“I hardly know. I shall go to the Tyrol next month, I think, and choose some out-of-the-way nook, where I can live quietly; and then for the winter I may go to Italy or the south of France. A year hence perhaps I may enter a sisterhood; but I do not want to take such a step hurriedly.”

“No, not hurriedly,” said Mr. Cancellor, his face lighting up suddenly as that pale, thin, irregular-featured face could lighten with the divine radiance from within; “not hurriedly, not too soon; but I feel assured that it would be a good thing for you to do—the sovereign cure for a broken life. You think now that happiness would be impossible for you, anywhere, anyhow. Believe me, my dear Mildred, you would find it in doing good to others. A vulgar remedy, an old woman’s recipe, perhaps, but infallible. A life lived for the good of others is always a happy life. You know the glory of the sky at sunset—there is nothing like it, no such splendour, no such beauty—and yet it is only a reflected light. So it is with the human heart, Mildred. The sun of individual love has sunk below life’s horizon, but the reflected glory of the Christian’s love for sinners brightens that horizon with a far lovelier light.”

“If I could feel like you; if I were as unselfish as you—” faltered Mildred.

“You have seen Louise Hillersdon—a frivolous, pleasure-loving woman, you think, perhaps; one who was once an abject sinner, whom you are tempted to despise. I have seen that woman kneeling by the bed of death; I have seen her ministering with unflinching courage to the sufferers from the most loathsome diseases humanity knows; and I firmly believe that those hours of unselfish love have been the brightest spots in her chequered life. Believe me, Mildred, self-sacrifice is the shortest road to happiness. No, I would not urge you to make your election hurriedly. Give yourself leisure for thought and prayer, and then, if you decide on devoting your life to good works, command my help, my counsel—all that is mine to give.”

“I know, I know that I have a sure friend in you, and that under heaven I have no better friend,” she answered quietly, glancing at the clock as she spoke. “I am going to Brighton this afternoon, to spend a few days with my aunt, and to—tell her what has happened. She must know all about Fay. If there is any room for doubt she will tell me. My last hope is there.”

CHAPTER IV.
NO LIGHT.

Miss Fausset—Gertrude Fausset—occupied a large house in Lewes Crescent—with windows commanding all that there is of bold coast-line and open sea within sight of Brighton. Her windows looked eastward, and her large substantial mansion turned its back upon all the frivolities of the popular watering-place—upon its Cockney visitors of summer and its November smartness, its aquarium and theatre, its London stars and Pavilion concerts, its carriages and horsemen—few of whom ever went so far east as Lewes Crescent; its brazen bands and brazen faces—upon everything except its church bells, which were borne up to Miss Fausset’s windows by every west wind, and which sounded with but little intermission from no less than three tabernacles within half a mile of the crescent.

Happily Miss Fausset loved the sound of church bells, loved all things connected with her own particular church with the ardour which a woman who has few ties of kindred or friendship can afford to give to clerical matters. Nothing except serious indisposition would have prevented her attending matins at St. Edmund’s, the picturesque and semi-fashionable Gothic temple in a narrow side street within ten minutes’ walk of her house; nor was she often absent from afternoon prayers, which were read daily at five o’clock to a small and select congregation. The somewhat stately figure of the elderly spinster was familiar to most of the worshippers at St. Edmund’s. All old Brightonians knew the history of that tall, slim maiden lady, richly clad after a style of her own, which succeeded in reconciling Puritanism with the fashion of the day; very dignified in her carriage and manners, with a touch of hauteur, as of a miserable sinner who knew that she belonged to the salt of the earth. Brightonians knew that she was Miss Fausset, sole survivor of the great house of Fausset & Company, silk merchants and manufacturers, St. Paul’s Churchyard and Lyons; that she had inherited a handsome fortune from her father before she was twenty, that she had refused a good many advantageous offers, had ranked as a beauty, and had been much admired in her time, that she had occupied the house in Lewes Crescent for more than a quarter of a century, and that she had taken a prominent part in philanthropic associations and clerical matters during the greater number of those years. No charity bazaar was considered in the way of success until Miss Fausset had promised to hold a stall; no new light in the ecclesiastical firmament of Brighton ranked as a veritable star until Miss Fausset had taken notice of him. She received everybody connected with Church and charitable matters. Afternoon tea in her drawing-room was a social distinction, and strangers were taken to her as to a Royal personage. Her occasional dinners—very rare, and never large—were talked of as perfection in the way of dining.

“It is easy for her to do things well,” sighed an overweighted matron, “with her means, and no family. She must be inordinately rich.”

“Did she come into a very large fortune at her father’s death?”

“O, I believe old Fausset was almost a millionaire, and he had only a son and a daughter. But it is not so much the amount she inherited as the amount she must have saved. Think how she must have nursed her income, with her quiet way of living! Only four indoor servants and a coachman; no garden, and one fat brougham horse. She must be rolling in money.”

“She gives away a great deal.”

“Nothing compared with what other people spend. Money goes a long way in charity. Ten pounds makes a good show on a subscription list; but what is it in a butcher’s book? I daresay my three boys have spent as much at Oxford in the last six years as Miss Fausset has given in charity within the same time; and we are poor people.”

It pleased Miss Fausset to live quietly, and to spend very little money upon splendours of any kind. There was distinction enough for her in the intellectual ascendency she had acquired among those church-going Brightonians who thought exactly as she thought. Her spacious, well-appointed house; her experienced servants—cook, housemaid, lady’s-maid, and butler; her neat little brougham and perfect brougham horse realised all her desires in the way of luxury. Her own diet was of an almost ascetic simplicity, and her servants were on boardwages; but she gave her visitors the best that the season or the fashion could suggest to an experienced cook. Even her afternoon tea was considered superior to everybody else’s tea, and her table was provided with daintier cakes and biscuits than were to be seen elsewhere.

Her house had been decorated and furnished under her own direction, and was marked in all particulars by that grain of Puritanism which was noticeable in the lady’s attire. The carpets and curtains in the two drawing-rooms were silver-gray; the furniture was French, and belonged to the period of the Directory, when the graceful lightness of the Louis Seize style was merging into the classicism of the Empire. In Miss Fausset’s drawing-room there were none of those charming futilities which cumber the tables of more frivolous women. Here Mr. Cancellor would have found room, and to spare, for his hat—room for a committee meeting, or a mission service, indeed—on that ample expanse of silvery velvet pile, a small arabesque pattern in different shades of gray.

The grand piano was the principal feature of the larger room, but it was not draped or disguised, sophisticated by flower-vases, or made glorious with plush, after the manner of fashionable pianos. It stood forth—a concert grand, in unsophisticated bulk of richly carved rosewood, a Broadwood piano, and nothing more. The inner room was lined with bookshelves, and had the air of a room that was meant for usefulness rather than hospitality. A large, old-fashioned rosewood secrétaire, of the Directory period, occupied the space at the side of the wide single window, which commanded a view of dead walls covered with Virginia creeper, and in the distance a glimpse of the crocketed spire of St. Edmund’s, a reproduction in little of one of the turrets of the Sainte Chapelle.

Two-thirds of the volumes in those tall bookcases were of a theological character; the remaining third consisted of those standard works which everybody likes to possess, but which only the superior few care to read.

Mildred had telegraphed in the morning to announce her visit, and she found her aunt’s confidential man-servant, a German Swiss, and her aunt’s neat little brougham waiting for her at the station. Miss Fausset herself was in the inner drawing-room ready to receive her.

There was something in the chastened colouring and perfect order of that house in Lewes Crescent which always chilled Mildred upon entering it after a long interval. It was more than three years since she had visited her aunt, and this afternoon in the fading light the silver-gray drawing-rooms looked colder and emptier than usual.

Miss Fausset rose to welcome her niece, and imprinted a stately kiss on each cheek.

“My dear Mildred, you have given me a very agreeable surprise,” she said; “but I hope it is no family trouble that has brought you to me—so suddenly.”

She looked at her niece searchingly with her cold gray eyes. She was a handsome woman still, at fifty-seven years of age. Her features were faultless, and the oval of her face was nearly as perfect as it had been at seven-and-twenty. Her abundant hair was silvery gray, and worn à la Marie Antoinette, a style which lent dignity to her appearance. Her dinner-gown of dark gray silk fitted her tall, upright figure to perfection, and her one ornament, an antique diamond cross, half hidden by the folds of her lace fichu, was worthy of the rich Miss Fausset.

“Yes, aunt, it is trouble that has brought me to you—very bitter trouble; but it is just possible that you can help me to conquer it. I have come to you for help, if you can give it.”

“My dear child, you must know I would do anything in my power—” Miss Fausset began, with gentle deliberation.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Mildred answered, almost impatiently. “I know that you will be sorry for me, but you may not be able to do anything. It is a forlorn hope. In such a strait as mine one catches at any hope.”

Her aunt’s measured accents jarred upon her overstrung nerves. Her grief raged within her like a fever, and the grave placidity of the elder woman tortured her. There seemed no capacity for sympathy in this stately spinster who stood and scanned her with coldly inquisitive eyes.

“Can we be quite alone for a little while, aunt? Are you sure of no one interrupting us while I am telling you my troubles?”

“I will give an order. It is only half-past six, and we do not dine till eight. There is no reason we should be disturbed. Come and sit over here, Mildred, on this sofa. Your maid can take your hat and jacket to your room.”

Stray garments lying about in those orderly drawing-rooms would have been agony to Miss Fausset. She rang the bell, and told the servant to send Mrs. Greswold’s maid, and to take particular care that no visitor was admitted.

“I can see nobody this evening,” she said. “If any one calls you will say I have my niece with me, and cannot be disturbed.”

Franz, the Swiss butler, bowed with an air of understanding the finest shades of feeling in that honoured mistress. He brought out a tea-table, and placed it conveniently near the sofa on which Mildred was sitting, and he placed upon it the neatest of salvers, with tiny silver teapot and Worcester cup and saucer, and bread and butter such as Titania herself might have eaten with an “apricock” or a bunch of dewberries. Then he discreetly retired, and sent Louisa, who smelt of tea and toast already, though she could not have been more than ten minutes in the great stony basement, which would have accommodated a company of infantry just as easily as the spinster’s small establishment.

Louisa took the jacket and hat and her mistress’s keys, and withdrew to finish her tea and to discuss the motive and meaning of this extraordinary journey from Enderby to Brighton. The gossips over the housekeeper’s tea-table inclined to the idea that Mrs. Greswold had found a letter—a compromising letter—addressed to her husband by some lady with whom he had been carrying on an intrigue, in all probability Mrs. Hillersdon of Riverdale.

“We all know who she was before Mr. Hillersdon married her,” said Louisa; “and don’t tell me that a woman who has behaved liked that while she was young would ever be really prudent. Mrs. Hillersdon must be fifty if she’s a day; but she is a handsome woman still, and who knows?—she may have been an old flame of my master’s.”

“That’s it,” sighed Franz assentingly. “It’s generally an old flame that does the mischief. Wir sind armer Thieren.”

“And now, my dear, tell me what has gone wrong with you,” said Miss Fausset, seating herself on the capacious sofa—low, broad, luxurious, one of Crunden’s masterpieces—beside her niece.

The rooms were growing shadowy. A small fire burned in the bright steel grate, and made the one cheerful spot in the room, touching the rich bindings of the books with gleams of light.

“O, it is a long story, aunt! I must begin at the beginning. I have a question to ask you, and your answer means life or death to me.”

“A question—to—ask—me?”

Miss Fausset uttered the words slowly, spacing them out, one by one, in her clear, calm voice—the voice that had spoken at committee meetings, and had laid down the law in matters charitable and ecclesiastical many times in that good town of Brighton.

“I must go back to my childhood, aunt, in the first place,” began Mildred, in her low, earnest voice, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed upon her aunt’s coldly correct profile, between her and the light of the fire, the wide window behind her, with the day gradually darkening after the autumnal sunset. The three eastward-looking windows in the large room beyond had a ghostly look, with their long guipure curtains closely drawn against the dying light.

“I must go back to the time when I was seven years old, and my dear father,” falteringly, and with tears in her voice, “brought home his adopted daughter, Fay—Fay Fausset, he called her. She was fourteen and I was only seven, but I was very fond of her all the same. We took to each other from the beginning. When we left London and went to The Hook, Fay went with us. I was ill there, and she helped to nurse me. She was very good to me—kinder than I can say, and I loved her as if she had been my sister. But when I got well she was sent away—sent to a finishing-school at Brussels, and I never saw her again. She had only lived with us one short summer. Yet it seemed as if she and I had been together all my life. I missed her sorely. I missed her for years afterwards.”

“My tender-hearted Mildred!” said Miss Fausset gently. “It was like you to give your love to a stranger, and to be so faithful to her memory!”

“O, but she was not a stranger! she was something nearer and dearer. I could hardly have been so fond of her if there had not been some link between us.”