THE FATAL THREE

A Novel

BY THE AUTHOR OF

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

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. III.

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

[All rights reserved]

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

CONTENTS OF VOL. III.

Book the Third.

ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.

BOOK THE THIRD.

ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.

CHAPTER I.
A WRECKED LIFE.

Monsieur Leroy was interested in his visitor, and in nowise hastened her departure. He led her through the garden of the asylum, anxious that she should see that sad life of the shattered mind in its milder aspect. The quieter patients were allowed to amuse themselves at liberty in the garden, and here Mildred saw the woman who fancied herself the Blessed Virgin, and who sat apart from the rest, with a crown of withered anemones upon her iron-gray locks.

The doctor stopped to talk to her in the Niçois language, describing her hallucination to Mildred in his broken English between whiles.

“She is one of my oldest cases, and mild as a lamb,” he said. “She is what superstition had made her. She might have been a happy wife as a mother but for that fatal influence. Ah, here comes a lady of a very different temper, and not half so easy a subject!”

A woman of about sixty advanced towards them along the dusty gravel path between the trampled grass and the dust-whitened orange-trees, a woman who carried her head and shoulders with the pride of an empress, and who looked about her with defiant eyes, fanning herself with a large Japanese paper fan as she came along, a fan of vivid scarlet and cheap gilt paper, which seemed to intensify the brightness of her great black eyes, as she waved it to and fro before her haggard face: a woman who must once have been beautiful.

“Would you believe that lady was prima donna at La Scala nearly forty years ago?” asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood beside the path, watching that strange figure, with its theatrical dignity.

The massive plaits of grizzled black hair were wound, coronet-wise, about the woman’s head. Her rusty black velvet gown trailed in the dust, threadbare long ago, almost in tatters to-day: a gown of a strange fashion, which had been worn upon the stage—Leonora’s or Lucrezia’s gown, perhaps, once upon a time.

At sight of the physician she stopped suddenly, and made him a sweeping curtsy, with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre.

“Do you know if they open this month at the Scala?” she asked, in Italian.

“Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing of their doings.”

“They might have begun their season with the new year,” she said, with a dictatorial air. “They always did in my time. Of course you know that they have tried to engage me again. They wanted me for Amina, but I had to remind them that I am not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my own ground. No one can touch me there.”

She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s first scena. The once glorious voice was rough and discordant, but there was power in the tones even yet, and real dramatic fire in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly while she was singing she caught the expression of Mildred’s face watching her, and she stopped at a breath, and grasped the stranger by both hands with an excited air.

“That moves you, does it not?” she exclaimed. “You have a soul for music. I can see that in your face. I should like to know more of you. Come and see me whenever you like, and I will sing to you. The doctor lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is in a good humour.”

“Say rather when you are reasonable, my good Maria,” said Monsieur Leroy, laying a fatherly hand upon her shoulder; “there are days when you are not to be trusted.”

“I am to be trusted to-day. Let me come to your room and sing to her,” pointing to Mildred with her fan. “I like her face. She has the eyes and lips that console. Her husband is lucky to have such a wife. Let me sing to her. I want her to understand what kind of woman I am.”

“Would it bore you too much to indulge her, madame?” asked the doctor in an undertone. “She is a strange creature, and it will wound her if you refuse. She does not often take a fancy to any one; but she frequently takes dislikes, and those are violent.”

“I shall be very happy to hear her,” answered Mildred. “I am in no hurry to return to Nice.”

The doctor led the way back to his house, the singer talking to Mildred with an excited air as they went, talking of the day when she was first soprano at Milan.

“Everybody envied me my success,” she said. “There were those who said I owed everything to him, that he made my voice and my style. Lies, madame, black and bitter lies. I won all the prizes at the Conservatoire. He was one master among many. I owed him nothing—nothing—nothing!”

She reiterated the word with acrid emphasis, and an angry furl of her fan.

“Ah, now you are beginning the old strain!” said the doctor, with a good-humoured shrug of his shoulders. “If this goes on there shall be no piano for you to-day. I will have no grievances; grievances are the bane of social intercourse. If you come to my salon it must be to sing, not to reopen old sores. We all have our wounds as well as you, signorina, but we keep them covered up.”

“I am dumb,” said the singer meekly.

They went into the doctor’s private sitting-room. Three sides of the room were lined with books, chiefly of a professional or scientific character. A cottage piano stood in a recess by the fireplace. The woman flew to the instrument with a rapturous eagerness, and began to play. Her hands were faintly tremulous with excitement, but her touch was that of a master as she played the symphony to the finale of “La Cenerentola.”

“Has she no piano in her own room?” asked Mildred in a whisper.

“No, poor soul. She is one of our pauper patients. The State provides for her, but it does not give her a private room or a piano. I let her come here two or three times a week for an hour or so, when she is reasonable.”

Mildred wondered if it would be possible for her, as a stranger, to provide a room and a piano for this friendless enthusiast. She would have been glad out of her abundance to have lightened a suffering sister’s fate, and she determined to make the proposition to the doctor.

The singer played snatches of familiar music—Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini—operatic airs which Mildred knew by heart. She wandered from one scena to another, and her voice, though it had lost its sweetness and sustaining power, was still brilliantly flexible. She sang with a rapturous unconsciousness of her audience, Mildred and the doctor sitting quietly at each side of the hearth, where a single pine log smouldered on the iron dogs above a heap of white ashes.

Presently the music changed to a gayer, lighter strain, and she began an airy cavatina, all coquetry and grace. That joyous melody was curiously familiar to Mildred’s ear.

“Where did I hear that music?” she said aloud. “It seems as if it were only the other day, and yet it is nearly two years since I was at the opera.”

The singer left the cavatina unfinished, and wandered into another melody.

“Ah, I know now!” exclaimed Mildred; “that is Paolo Castellani’s music!”

The woman started up from the piano as if the name had wounded her.

“Paolo Castellani!” she cried. “What do you know of Paolo Castellani?”

Dr. Leroy went over to her, and laid his hand upon her shoulder heavily.

“Now we are in for a scene,” he muttered to Mildred. “You have mentioned a most unlucky name.”

“What has she to do with Signor Castellani?”

“He was her cousin. He trained her for the stage, and she was the original in several of his operas. She was his slave, his creature, and lived only to please him. I suppose she expected him to marry her, poor soul; but he knew better than that. He contrived to fascinate a French girl, a consumptive, who was travelling in Italy for her health, with a wealthy father. He married the Frenchwoman; and I believe that marriage broke Maria’s heart.”

The singer had seated herself at the piano again, and was playing with rapid and brilliant finger, running up and down the keys in wild excitement. Mildred and the physician were standing by the window, talking in lowered voices, unheeded by Maria Castellani.

“Was it that event which wrecked her mind?” asked Mildred, deeply interested.

“No, it was some years afterwards that her brain gave way. She had a brilliant career before her at the time of Castellani’s desertion; and she bore the blow with the courage of a Roman. So long as her voice lasted, and the public were constant to her, she contrived to bear up against that burning sense of wrong which has been the distinguishing note of her mind ever since she came here. But the first breath of failure froze her. She felt her voice decaying while she was comparatively a young woman. Her glass told her that she was losing her beauty, that she was beginning to look old and haggard. Her managers told her more. They gave her the cold shoulder, and put newer singers above her head. Then despair took hold of her; she became gloomy and irritable, difficult and capricious in her dealings with her fellow-artists; and then came the end, and she was brought here. She had saved no money. She had been reckless even beyond the habits of her profession. She was friendless. There was nobody interested in her fate—”

“Not even Signor Castellani?”

“Castellani—Paolo Castellani? Pas si bête. The man was a compound of selfishness and treachery. She was not likely to get pity from him. The very fact that he had used her badly made her loathsome to him. I doubt if he ever inquired what became of her. If any one had asked him about her, he would have said that she had dropped through—a worn-out voice, a faded beauty—que voulez-vous?”

“She had no other friends—no ties?”

“None. She was an orphan at twelve years old, without a son. Castellani paid for her education, and traded upon her talent. He trained her to sing in his own operas, and in that light, fanciful music she was at her best; though it is her delusion now that she excelled in the grand style. I believe he absorbed the greater part of her earnings, until they quarrelled. Some time after his marriage there was a kind of reconciliation between them. She appeared in a new opera—his last and worst. Her voice was going, his talent had began to fail. It was the beginning of the end.”

“Has Signor Castellani’s son shown no interest in this poor creature’s fate?”

“No; the son lives in England, I believe, for the most part. I doubt if he knows anything about Maria.”

The singer had reverted to that familiar music. She sang the first part of an aria, a melody disguised with over-much fioritura, light, graceful, unmeaning.

“That is in his last opera,” she said, rising from the piano, with a more rational air. “The opera was almost a failure; but I was applauded to the echo. His genius had forsaken him. Follies, follies, falsehoods, crimes. He could not be true to any one or anything. He was as false to his wife as he had been false to me, and to his proud young English signorina; ah, well! who can doubt that he lied to her?”

She fell into a meditative mood, standing by the piano, touching a note now and then.

“Young and handsome and rich. Would she have accepted degradation with open eyes? No, no, no. He lied to her as he had lied to me. He was made up of lies.”

Her eyes grew troubled, and her lips worked convulsively. Again the doctor laid his strong broad hand upon her shoulder.

“Come, Maria,” he said in Italian; “enough for to-day. Madame has been pleased with your singing.”

“Yes, indeed, signora. You have a noble voice. I should be very glad if I could do anything to be of use to you; if I could contribute to your comfort in any way.”

“O, Maria is happy enough with us, I hope,” said the doctor cheerily. “We are all fond of her when she is reasonable. But it is time she went to her dinner. A rivederci, signora.”

Maria accepted her dismissal with a good grace, saluted Mildred and the doctor with her stage curtsy, and withdrew. One side of Monsieur Leroy’s house opened into the garden, the other into a courtyard adjoining the high-road.

“Poor soul! I should be so glad to pay for a piano and a private sitting-room for her, if I might be allowed to do so,” said Mildred, when the singer was gone.

“You are too generous, madame; but I doubt if it would be good for her to accept your bounty. She enjoys the occasional use of my piano intensely. If she had one always at her command, she would give up her life to music, which exercises too strong an influence upon her disordered brain to be indulged in ad libitum. Nor would a private apartment be an advantage in her case. She is too much given to brooding over past griefs; and the society of her fellow-sufferers, the friction and movement of the public life, are good for her.”

“What did she mean by her talk of an English girl—some story of wrong-doing? Was it all imaginary?”

“I believe there was some scandal at Milan; some flirtation, or possibly an intrigue, between Castellani and one of his English pupils; but I never heard the details. Maria’s jealousy would be likely to exaggerate the circumstances; for I believe she adored her cousin to the last, long after she knew that he had never cared for her, except as an element in his success.”

Mildred took leave of the doctor, after thanking him for his politeness. She left a handful of gold for the benefit of the poor patients, and left Dr. Leroy under the impression that she was one of the sweetest women he had ever met. Her pensive beauty, her low and musical voice, the clear and resolute purpose of every word and look, were in his mind indications of the perfection of womanhood.

“It is not often that Nature achieves such excellence,” mused the doctor. “It is a pity that perfection should be short-lived; yet I cannot prognosticate length of years for this lady.”

Pamela’s spirits were decidedly improving. She talked all dinner-time, and gave a graphic description of her afternoon in the tennis-court behind the Cercle de la Méditerranée.

“I am to see the club-house some morning before the members begin to arrive,” she said. “It is a perfectly charming club. There is a theatre, which serves as a ballroom on grand occasions. There is to be a dance next week; and Lady Lochinvar will chaperon me, if you don’t mind.”

“I shall be most grateful to Lady Lochinvar, dear. Believe me, if I am a hermit, I don’t want to keep you in melancholy seclusion. I am very glad for you to have pleasant friends.”

“Mrs. Murray is delightful. She begged me to call her Jessie. She is going to take me for a drive before lunch to-morrow, and we are to do some shopping in the afternoon. The shops here are simply lovely.”

“Almost as nice as Brighton?”

“Better. They have more chic; and I am told they are twice as dear.”

“Was Mr. Stuart at the tennis-court?”

“Yes, he plays there every afternoon when he is not at Monte Carlo.”

“That does not sound like a very useful existence.”

“Perhaps you will say he is an adventurer,” exclaimed Pamela, with a flash of temper; and then repenting in a moment, she added: “I beg your pardon, aunt; but you are really wrong about Mr. Stuart. He looks after Lady Lochinvar’s estate. He is invaluable to her.”

“But he cannot do much for the estate when he is playing tennis here or gambling at Monte Carlo.”

“O, but he does. He answers no end of letters every morning. Lady Lochinvar says he is a most wonderful young man. He attends to her house accounts here. I am afraid she would be very extravagant if she were not well looked after. She has no idea of business. Mr. Stuart has even to manage her dressmakers.”

“Then one may suppose he is really useful—even at Nice. Has he any means of his own, or is he entirely dependent on his aunt?”

“O, he has an income of his own—a modest income, Mrs. Murray says, hardly enough for him to get along easily in a cavalry regiment, but quite enough for him as a civilian; and his aunt will leave him everything. His expectations are splendid.”

“Well, Pamela, I will not call him an adventurer, and I shall be pleased to make his acquaintance, if he will call upon me.”

“He is dying to know you. May Mrs. Murray bring him to tea to-morrow afternoon?”

“With pleasure.”

CHAPTER II
IN THE MORNING OF LIFE.

George Greswold succumbed to Fate. He had done all he could do in the way of resistance. He had appealed against his wife’s decision; he had set love against principle or prejudice, and principle, as Mildred understood it, had been too strong for love; so there was nothing left for the forsaken husband but submission. He went back to the home in which he had once been happy, and he sat down amidst the ruins of his domestic life; he sat by his desolate hearth through the long dull wintry months, and he made no effort to bring brightness or variety into his existence. He made no stand against unmerited misfortune.

“I am too old to forget,” he told himself; “that lesson can only be learnt in youth.”

A young man might have gone out as a wanderer—might have sought excitement and distraction amidst strange cities and strange races of men; might have found forgetfulness in danger and hardship, the perils of unexplored deserts, the hazards of untrodden mountains, the hairbreadth escapes of savage life, pestilence, famine, warfare. George Greswold felt no inclination for any such adventure. The mainspring of life had snapped, and he admitted to himself that he was a broken man.

He sat by the hearth in his gloomy library day after day, and night after night, until the small hours. Sometimes he took his gun in the early morning, and went out with a leash of dogs for an hour or two of solitary shooting among his own covers. He tramped his copses in all weathers and at all hours, but he rarely went outside his own domain; nor did he ever visit his cottagers or small tenantry, with whom he had been once so familiar a friend. All interest in his estate had gone from him after his daughter’s death. He left everything to the new steward, who was happily both competent and honest.

His books were his only friends. Those studious habits acquired years before, when he was comparatively a poor man, stood by him now. His one distraction, his only solace, was found in the contents of those capacious bookshelves, three-fourths of which were filled with volumes of his own selection, the gradual accumulation of his sixteen years of ownership. His grandfather’s library, which constituted the remaining fourth, consisted of those admirable standard works, in the largest possible number of volumes, which formed an item in the furniture of a respectable house during the last century, and which, from the stiffness of their bindings and the unblemished appearance of their paper and print, would seem to have enjoyed an existence of dignified retirement from the day they left the bookseller’s shop.

But for those long tramps in the wintry copses, where holly and ivy showed brightly green amidst leafless chestnuts and hazels—but for those communings with the intellect of past and present in the long still winter evenings, George Greswold’s brain must have given way under the burden of an undeserved sorrow. As it was, he contrived to live on, peacefully, and even with an air of contentment. His servants surprised him in no paroxysm of grief. He startled them with no strange exclamations. His manner gave no cause for alarm. He accepted his lot in silence and submission. His days were ordered with a simple regularity, so far as the service of the house went. His valet and butler agreed that he was in all things an admirable master.

The idea in the household was that Mrs. Greswold had “taken to religion.” That seemed the only possible explanation for a parting which had been preceded by no domestic storms, for which there was no apparent cause in the conduct of the husband. That idea of the wife having discovered an intrigue of her husband’s, which Louisa had discussed in the housekeeper’s room at Brighton, was no longer entertained in the servants’-hall at Enderby.

“If there had been anything of that kind, something would have come out by this time,” said the butler, who had a profound belief in the ultimate “coming out” of all social mysteries.

George Greswold was not kept in ignorance of his wife’s movements. Pamela had been shrewd enough to divine that her uncle would be glad to hear from her in order to hear of Mildred, and she had written to him from time to time, giving him a graphic account of her own and her aunt’s existence.

There had been only one suppression. The young lady had not once alluded to Castellani’s share in their winter life at Pallanza. She had a horror of arousing that dragon of suspicion which she knew to lurk in the minds of all uncles with reference to all agreeable young men. George Greswold had not heard from his niece for more than a fortnight, when there came a letter, written the day after Mildred’s visit to the madhouse, and full of praises of Lady Lochinvar and the climate of Nice. That letter was the greatest shock that Greswold had received since his wife had left him, for it told him that she was in a place where she could scarcely fail to discover all the details of his wretched story. He had kept it locked from her, he had shut himself behind a wall of iron, he had kept a silence as of the grave; and now she from whom he had prayed that his fatal story might be for ever hidden was certain to learn the worst.

“Aunt went to lunch with Lady Lochinvar the day after our arrival,” wrote Pamela. “She spent a long morning with her, and then went for a drive somewhere in the environs, and was out till nearly dinner-time. She looked so white and fagged when she came back, poor dear, and I am sure she had done too much for one day. Lady Lochinvar asked me to dinner, and took me to the new Opera-house, which is lovely. Her nephew was with us—rather plain, and with no taste for music (he said he preferred Madame Angot to Lohengrin), but enormously clever, I am told, in a solid, practical kind of way.”

Und so weiter, for three more pages.

Mildred had been with Lady Lochinvar—with Lady Lochinvar, who knew all; who had seen him and his wife together; had received them both as her friends; had been confided in, he knew, by that fond, jealous wife; made the recipient of tearful doubts and hysterical accusations. Vivien had owned as much to him.

She had been with Lady Lochinvar, who must know the history of his wife’s death and the dreadful charge brought against him; who must know that he had been an inmate of the great white barrack on the road to St. André; who in all probability thought him guilty of murder. All the barriers had fallen now; all the floodgates had opened. He saw himself hateful, monstrous, inhuman, in the eyes of the woman he adored.

“She loved her sister with an inextinguishable love,” he thought, “and she sees me now as her sister’s murderer—the cold-blooded, cruel husband, who made his wife’s existence miserable, and ended by killing her in a paroxysm of brutal rage: that is the kind of monster I must seem in my Mildred’s eyes. She will look back upon my stubborn silence, my gloomy reserve, and she will see all the indications of guilt. My own conduct will condemn me.”

As he sat by his solitary hearth in the cold March evening, the large reading-lamp making a circle of light amidst the gloom, George Greswold’s mind travelled over the days of his youth, and the period of that fatal marriage which had blighted him in the morning of his life, which blighted him now in life’s meridian, when, but for this dark influence, all the elements of happiness were in his hand.

He looked back to the morning of life, and saw himself full of ambitions plans and aspiring dreams, well content to be the younger son, to whom it was given to make his own position in the world, scorning the idle days of a fox-hunting squire, resolute to become an influence for good among his fellow-men. He had never envied his brother the inheritance of the soil; he had thought but little of his own promised inheritance of Enderby.

Unhappily that question of the succession to the Enderby estate had been a sore point with Squire Ransome. He adored his elder son, who was like him in character and person, and he cared very little for George, whom he considered a bookish and unsympathetic individual; a young man who hardly cared whether there were few or many foxes in the district, whether the young partridges throve, or perished by foul weather or epidemic disease—a young man who took no interest in the things that filled the lives of other people. In a word, George was not a sportsman; and that deficiency made him an alien to his father’s race. There had never been a Ransome who was not “sporting” to the core of his heart until the appearance of this pragmatical Oxonian.

Without being in any manner scientific or a student of evolution, Mr. Ransome had a fixed belief in heredity. It was the duty of the son to resemble the father; and a son who was in all his tastes and inclinations a distinct variety stamped himself as undutiful.

“I don’t suppose the fellow can help it,” said Mr. Ransome testily; “but there’s hardly a remark he makes which doesn’t act upon my nerves like a nutmeg-grater.”

Nobody would have given the Squire credit for possessing very sensitive nerves, but everybody knew he had a temper, and a temper which occasionally showed itself in violent outbreaks—the kind of temper which will dismiss a household at one fell swoop, send a stud of horses to Tattersall’s on the spur of the moment, tear up a lease on the point of signature, or turn a son out of doors.

The knowledge that this unsportsmanlike son of his would inherit the fine estate of Enderby was a constant source of vexation to Squire Ransome of Mapledown. The dream of his life was that Mapledown and Enderby should be united in the possession of his son Randolph. The two properties would have made Randolph rich enough to hope for a peerage, and that idea of a possible peerage dazzled the Tory squire. His family had done the State some service; had sat for important boroughs; had squandered much money upon contested elections; had been staunch in times of change and difficulty. There was no reason why a Ransome should not ascend to the Upper House, in these days when peerages are bestowed so much more freely than in the time of Pitt and Fox. The two estates would have made an important property under one ownership; divided, they were only respectable. And what the Squire most keenly felt was the fact that Enderby was by far the finer property, and that his younger son must ultimately be a much richer man than his brother. The Sussex estate had dwindled considerably in those glorious days of contested elections and party feeling; the Hampshire estate was intact. Mr. Ransome could not forgive his wife for her determination that the younger son should be her heir. He always shuffled uneasily upon his seat in the old family pew when the 27th chapter of Genesis was read in the Sunday morning service. He compared his wife to Rebecca. He asked the Vicar at luncheon on one of those Sundays what he thought of the conduct of Rebecca and Jacob in that very shady transaction, and the Vicar replied in the orthodox fashion, favouring Jacob just as Rebecca had favoured him.

“I can’t understand it,” exclaimed the Squire testily; “the whole business is against my idea of honour and honesty. I wouldn’t have such a fellow as Jacob for my steward if he were the cleverest man in Sussex. And look you here, Vicar. If Jacob was right, and knew he was right, why the deuce was he so frightened the first time he met Esau after that ugly business? Take my word for it, Jacob was a sneak, and Providence punished him rightly with a desolate old age and a quarrelsome family.”

The Vicar looked down at his plate, sighed gently, and held his peace.

The time came when the growing feeling of aversion on the father’s part showed itself in outrage and insult which the son could not endure. George remonstrated against certain acts of injustice in the management of the estate. He pleaded the cause of tenant against landlord—a dire offence in the eyes of the Tory Squire. There came an open rupture; and it was impossible for the younger son to remain any longer under the father’s roof. His mother loved him devotedly, but she felt that it was better for him to go; and so it was settled, in loving consultation between mother and son, that he should carry out a long-cherished wish of his Oxford days, and explore all that was historical and interesting in Southern Europe, seeing men and cities in a leisurely way, and devoting himself to literature in the meantime. He had already written for some of the high-class magazines; and he felt that it was in him to do well as a writer of the serious order—critic, essayist, and thinker.

His mother gave him three hundred a year, which, for a young man of his simple habits, was ample. He told himself that he should be able to earn as much again by his pen; and so, after a farewell of decent friendliness to his father and his brother Randolph, and tenderest parting with his mother, he set out upon his pilgrimage, a free agent, with the world all before him. He explored Greece—dwelling fondly upon all the old traditions, the old histories. He made the acquaintance of Dr. Schliemann, and entered heart and soul into that gentleman’s views. This occupied him more than a year, for those scenes exercised a potent fascination upon a mind to which Greek literature was the supreme delight. He spent a month at Constantinople, and a winter in Corfu and Cyprus; he devoted a summer to Switzerland, and did a little mountaineering; and during all his wanderings he contrived to give a considerable portion of his time to literature.

It was after his Swiss travels that he went to Italy, and established himself in Florence for a quiet winter. He hired an apartment on a fourth floor of a palace overlooking the Arno, and here, for the first time since he had left England, he went a little into general society. His mother had sent him letters of introduction to old friends of her own, English and Florentine; he was young, handsome, and a gentleman, and he was received with enthusiasm. Had he been fond of society he might have been at parties every night; but he was fonder of books and of solitude, and he took very little advantage of people’s friendliness.

The few houses to which he went were houses famous for good music, and it was in one of these houses that he met Vivien Faux.

It was in the midst of a symphony by Beethoven, while he was standing on the edge of the crowd which surrounded the open space given to the instrumentalists, that he first saw the woman who was to be his wife. She was sitting in the recess of a lofty window, quite apart from the throng—a pale, dark-eyed girl, with roughened hair carelessly heaped above her low, broad forehead. Her slender figure and sloping shoulders showed to advantage in a low-necked black gown, without a vestige of ornament. She wore neither jewels nor flowers, at an assembly where gems were sparkling and flowers breathing sweetness upon every feminine bosom. Her thin, white arms hung loosely in her lap; her back was turned to the performers, and her eyes were averted from the crowd. She looked the image of ennui and indifference.

He found his hostess directly the symphony was over, and asked her to introduce him to the young lady in black velvet yonder, sitting alone in the window.

“Have you been struck by Miss Faux’s rather singular appearance?” asked Signora Vicenti. “She is not so handsome as many young ladies who are here to-night.”

“No, she is not handsome, but her face interests me. She looks as if she had suffered some great disappointment.”

“I believe her whole life has been a disappointment. She is an orphan, and, as far as I can ascertain, a friendless orphan. She has good means, but there is a mystery about her position which places her in a manner apart from other girls of her age. She has no relations to whom to refer, no family home to which to return. She is here with some rather foolish people—an English artist and his wife, who cannot do very much for her, and I believe she keenly feels her isolation. It makes her bitter against other girls, and she loses friends as fast as she makes them. People won’t put up with her tongue. Well, Mr. Ransome, do you change your mind after that?”

“On the contrary, I feel so much the more interested in the young lady.”

“Ah, your interest will not last. However, I shall be charmed to introduce you.”

They went across the room to that distant recess where Miss Faux was still seated, her hair and attitude unchanged since George Ransome first observed her. She started with a little look of surprise when Signora Vicenti and her companion approached; but she accepted the introduction with a nonchalant air, and she replied to Ransome’s opening remarks with manifest indifference. Then by degrees she grew more animated, and talked about the people in the room, ridiculing their pretensions, their eccentricities, their costume.

“You are not an habitué here?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing you before to-night.”

“No; it is the first of Signora Vicenti’s parties that I have seen.”

“Then I conclude it will be the last.”

“Why?”

“O, no sensible person would come a second time. The music is tolerable if one could hear it anywhere else, but the people are odious.”

“Yet I conclude this is not your first evening here?”

“No; I come every week. I have nothing else to do with myself but to go about to houses I hate, and mix with people who hate me.”

“Why should they hate you?”

“O, we all hate each other, and want to overreach one another. Envy and malice are in the air. Picture to yourself fifty manœuvring mothers with a hundred marriageable daughters, most of them portionless, and about twenty eligible men. Think how ferocious the competition must be!”

“But you are independent of all that; you are outside the arena.”

“Yes; I have nothing to do with their slavemarket, but they hate me all the same; perhaps because I have a little more money than most of them; perhaps because I am nobody—a waif and stray—able to give no account of my existence.”

She spoke of her position with a reckless candour that shocked him.

“There is something to bear in every lot,” he said, trying to be philosophical.

“I suppose so, but I only care about my own burden. Please, don’t pretend that you do either. I should despise a man who pretended not to be selfish.”

“Do you think that all men are selfish?”

“I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. The man I thought the noblest and the best did me the greatest wrong it was possible to do me, in order to spare himself trouble.”

Ransome was silent. He would not enter into the discussion of a past history of which he was ignorant, and which was doubtless full of pain.

After this he met her very often, and while other young men avoided her on account of her bitter tongue, he showed a preference for her society, and encouraged her to confide in him. She went everywhere, chaperoned by Mr. Mortimer, a dreary twaddler, who was for ever expounding theories of art which he had picked up, parrot-wise, in a London art-school thirty years before. His latest ideas were coeval with Maclise and Mulready. Mrs. Mortimer was by way of being an invalid, and sat and nursed her neuralgia at home, while her husband and Miss Faux went into society.

It was at the beginning of spring that an American lady of wealth and standing invited the Mortimers and their protégée to a picnic, to which Mr. Ransome was also bidden; and it was this picnic which sealed George Ransome’s fate. Pity for Vivien’s lonely position had grown into a sincere regard. He had discovered warm feelings under that cynical manner, a heart capable of a profound affection. She had talked to him of a child, a kind of adopted sister, whom she had passionately loved, and from whom she had been parted by the selfish cruelty of the little girl’s parents.

“My school-life in England had soured me before then,” she said, “and I was not a very amiable person even at fifteen years old; but that cruelty finished me. I have hated my fellow-creatures ever since.”

He pleaded against this wholesale condemnation.

“You were unlucky,” he said, “in encountering unworthy people.”

“Ah, but one of those people, the child’s father, had seemed to me the best of men. I had believed in him as second only to God in benevolence and generosity. When he failed I renounced my belief in human goodness.”

Unawares, George Ransome had fallen into the position of her confidant and friend. From friendship to love was an easy transition; and a few words, spoken at random during a ramble on an olive-clad hill, bound him to her for ever. Those unpremeditated words loosed the fountain of tears, and he saw the most scornful of women, the woman who affected an absolute aversion for his sex, and a contempt for those weaker sisters who waste their love upon such vile clay—he saw her abandon herself to a passion of tears at the first word of affection which he had ever addressed to her. He had spoken as a friend rather than as a lover; but those tears bound him to her for life. He put his arm round her, and pillowed the small pale face upon his breast, the dark impassioned eyes looking up at him drowned in tears.

“You should not have said those words,” she sobbed. “You cannot understand what it is to have lived as I have lived—a creature apart—unloved—unvalued. O, is it true?—do you really care for me?”

“With all my heart,” he answered, and in good faith.

His profound compassion took the place of love; and in that moment he believed that he loved her as a man should love the woman whom he chooses for his wife.

They were married within a month from that March afternoon; and for some time their married life was happy. He wished to take her to England, but she implored him to abandon that idea.

“In England everybody would want to know who I am,” she said. “I should be tortured by questions about ‘my people.’ Abroad, society is less exacting.”

He deferred to her in this, as he would have done in any other matter which involved her happiness. They spent the first half-year of their married life in desultory wanderings in the Oberland and the Engadine, and then settled at Nice for the winter.

Here Mrs. Ransome met Lady Lochinvar, whom she had known at Florence, and was at once invited to the Palais Montano; and here for the first time appeared those clouds which were too soon to darken George Ransome’s domestic horizon.

There were many beautiful women at Nice that winter: handsome Irish girls, vivacious Americans, Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen; and among so many who were charming there were some whom George Ransome did not scruple to admire, with as much frankness as he would have admired a face by Guido or Raffaelle. He was slow to perceive his wife’s distrust, could hardly bring himself to believe that she could be jealous of him; but he was not suffered to remain long in this happy ignorance. A hysterical outburst one night after their return from a ball at the Club-house opened the husband’s eyes. The demon of jealousy stood revealed; and from that hour the angel of domestic peace was banished from George Ransome’s hearth.

He struggled against that evil influence. He exercised patience, common sense, forbearance; but in vain. There were lulls in the storm sometimes, delusive calms; and he hoped the demon was exorcised. And then came a worse outbreak; more hysterics; despairing self-abandonment; threats of suicide. He bore it as long as he could, and ultimately, his wife’s health offering an excuse for such a step, he proposed that they should leave Nice, and take a villa in the environs, in some quiet spot where they might live apart from all society.

Vivien accepted the proposition with rapture; she flung herself at her husband’s feet, and covered his hands with tearful kisses.

“O, if I could but believe that you still love me, that you are not weary of me,” she exclaimed, “I should be the happiest woman in the universe.”

They spent a week of halcyon peace, driving about in quest of their new home. They explored the villages within ten miles of Nice, they breakfasted at village restaurants, in the sunny March noontide, and finally they settled upon a villa at St. Jean, within an hour’s drive of the great white city, and to this new home they went at the end of the month, after bidding adieu to their friends in Nice.

CHAPTER III.
THE RIFT IN THE LUTE.

The villa was built on a ledge of ground between the road and the sea. There was a stone terrace in front of the windows of salon and dining-room, below which the ground shelved steeply down to the rocks and the blue water. The low irregular-shaped house was screened from the road by a grove of orange and lemon trees, with a peach or a cherry here and there to give variety of colour. In one corner there was a whole cluster of peach-trees, which made a mass of purplish-pinky bloom. The ridges of garden sloping down from the stone terrace were full of white stocks and scarlet anemones. Clusters of red ranunculus made spots of flame in the sun, and the young leaves in the long hedge of Dijon roses wove an interlacing screen of crimson, through which the sun shone as through old ruby glass in a cathedral window. Everywhere there was a feast of perfume and colour and beauty. The little bay, the curving pier, the white-sailed boats, which, seen from the height above, looked no bigger than the gulls skimming across the blue; the quaint old houses of Villefranche on a level with the water, and rising tier above tier to the crest of the hill—pink and blue houses, white and cream-coloured houses, with pea-green shutters and red roofs. Far away to the left, the jutting promontory and the tall white lighthouse; and away southward, the sapphire sea, touched with every changing light and shadow. And this lovely little world at George Ransome’s feet, this paradise in miniature, was all the lovelier because of the great rugged mountain-wall behind it, the bare red and yellow hills baked in the sunlight of ages, the strange old-world villages yonder high up on the stony flanks of the hills, the far-away church towers, from which faint sound of bells came now and again as if from fairyland.

It was a delicious spot this little village of St. Jean, to which the Niçois came on Sundays and holidays, to eat bouillabaisse at the rustic tavern or to picnic in the shade of century-old olives and old carouba-trees, which made dark masses of foliage between the road and the sea. George Ransome loved the place, and could have been happy there if his wife would only have allowed him; but those halcyon days which marked the beginning of their retirement were too soon ended; and clouds lowered again over the horizon—clouds of doubt and discontent. There are women to whom domestic peace, a calm and rational happiness, is an impossibility, and Vivien was one of these women.

From the beginning her suspicious nature had been on the watch for some hidden evil. She had a fixed idea that the Fates had marked her for misery, and she would not open her heart to the sunlight of happiness.

Was her husband unkind to her? No, he was all kindness; but to her his kindness seemed only a gentleman-like form of toleration. He had married her out of pity; and it was pity that made him kind. Other women were worshipped. It was her fate to be tolerated by a man she adored.

She could never forget her own passionate folly, her own unwomanly forwardness. She had thrown herself into his arms—she who should have waited to be wooed, and should have made herself precious by the difficulty with which she was won.

“How can he help holding me cheap?” she asked herself—“I who cost him nothing, not even an hour of doubt? From the hour we first met he must have known that I adored him.”

Once when he was rowing her about the bay in the westering sunlight, while the fishermen were laying down their lines, or taking up their baskets here and there by the rocks, she asked him suddenly,

“What did you think of me, George, the first time you saw me—that night at Signora Vicenti’s party? Come, be candid. You can afford to tell me the truth now. Your fate is sealed; you have nothing to lose or to gain.”

“Do you think I would tell you less or more than the truth under any circumstances, Viva?” he asked gravely.

“O, you are horribly exact, I know!” she answered, with an impatient movement of her slender sloping shoulders, not looking at him, but with her dark dreamy eyes gazing far off across the bay towards the distant point where the twin towers of Monaco Cathedral showed faint in the distance, “but perhaps if the truth sounded very rude you might suppress it—out of pity.”

“I don’t think the truth need sound rude.”

“Well,” still more impatiently, “what impression did I make upon you?”

“You must consider that there were at least fifty young ladies in Signora Vicenti’s salons that evening.”

“And about thirty old women; and I was lost in the crowd.”

“Not quite lost. I remember being attracted by a young lady who sat in a window niche apart—”

“Like ‘Brunswick’s fated chieftain.’ Pray go on.”

“And who seemed a little out of harmony with the rest of the company. Her manner struck me as unpleasantly ironical, but her small pale face interested me, and I even liked the mass of towzled hair brushed up from her low square forehead. I liked her black velvet gown, without any colour or ornament. It set off the thin white shoulders and long slender throat.”

“Did you think I was rich or poor, somebody or nobody?”

“I thought you were a clever girl, soured by some kind of disappointment.”

“And you felt sorry for me. Say you felt sorry for me!” she cried, her eyes coming back from the distant promontory, and fixing him suddenly, bright, keen, imperious in their eager questioning.

“Yes, I confess to feeling very sorry for you.”

“Did I not know as much? From the very first you pitied me. Pity, pity! What an intolerable burden it is! I have bent under it all my life.”

“My dear Viva, what nonsense you talk! Because I had mistaken ideas about you that first night, when we were strangers—”

“You were not mistaken. I was soured. I had been disappointed. My thoughts were bitter as gall. I had no patience with other girls who had so many blessings that I had never known. I saw them making light of their advantages, peevish, ill-tempered, self-indulgent; and I scorned them. Contempt for others was the only comfort of my barren life. And so my vinegar tongue disgusted you, did it not?”

“I was not disgusted—concerned and interested, rather. Your conversation was original. I wanted to know more of you.”

“Did you think me pretty?”

“I was more impressed by your mental gifts than your physical—”

“That is only a polite way of saying you thought me plain.”

“Viva, you know better than that. If I thought of your appearance at all during that first meeting, be assured I thought you interesting—yes, and pretty. Only prettiness is a poor word to express a face that is full of intellect and originality.”

“You thought me pale, faded, haggard, old for my age,” she said decisively. “Don’t deny it. You must have seen what my glass had been telling me for the last year.”

“I thought your face showed traces of suffering.”

This was one of many such conversations, full of keen questioning on her part, with an assumed lightness of manner which thinly veiled the irritability of her mind. She had changed for the worse since they left Nice; she had grown more sensitive, more suspicious, more irritable. She was in a condition of health in which many women are despondent or irritable—in which with some women life seems one long disgust, and all things are irksome, even the things that have been pleasantest and most valued before—even the aspect of a lovely landscape, the phrases of a familiar melody, the perfume of a once favourite flower. He tried to cheer her by talking of their future, the time to come when there would be a new bond between them, a new interest in their lives; but she saw all things in a gloomy atmosphere.

“Who knows?” she said. “I may die, perhaps; or you may love your child better than you have ever loved me, and then I should hate it.”

“Viva, you cannot doubt that my love for our child will strengthen my love for you.”

“Will it?” she asked incredulously. “God knows it needs strengthening.”

This was hard upon a man whose tenderness and indulgence had been boundless, who had done all that chivalry and a sense of duty can do to atone for the lack of love. He had tried his uttermost to conceal the one bitter truth that love was wanting: but those keen eyes of hers had seen the gap between them, that sensitive ear had discovered the rift in the lute.

One afternoon they climbed the hill to the breezy common on which the lighthouse stands, and dawdled about in the sunshine, gathering the pale gray rosemary bloom and the perfumed thyme which grow among those hollows and hillocks in such wild luxuriance. They were sauntering near the carriage-road, talking very little—she feeble and tired, although it was her own fancy to have walked so far—when they saw a carriage driving towards them—a large landau, with the usual bony horses and shabby jingling harness, and the usual sunburnt good-tempered driver.

Two girls in white gowns and Leghorn hats were in the carriage, with an elderly woman in black. Their laps were full of wild flowers, and branches of wild cherry and pear blossom filled the leather hood at the back of the carriage. They were talking and laughing gaily, all animation and high spirits, as they drew near; and at sight of George Ransome one of them waved her hand in greeting, and called to the driver to stop. They were two handsome Irish girls who had made a sensation at the Battle of Flowers six weeks before. They were spoken of by some people as the belles of Nice. Mr. Ransome had pelted them with Parma violets and yellow rosebuds on the Promenade des Anglais, as they drove up and down in a victoria embowered in white stocks and narcissi. He had waltzed with them at the Cercle de la Méditerranée and the Palais Montano; had admired them frankly and openly, not afraid to own even to a jealous wife that he thought them beautiful.

Delia Darcy, the elder and handsomer of the two, leaned over the carriage-door to shake hands with him, while Vivien stood aloof, on a grassy knoll above the road, looking daggers. What right had they to stop their carriage and waylay her husband?

“Who would have thought of finding you in this out-of-the-way spot?” exclaimed Miss Darcy; “we fancied you had left the Riviera. Are you stopping at Monte Carlo?”

“No, I have taken a villa at St. Jean.”

“Is that near here?”

“Very near. You must have skirted the village in driving up here. And has Nice been very gay since we left?”

“No; people have been going away, and we have missed you dreadfully at the opera, and at dances, and at Rumpelmeyer’s. What could have induced you to bury yourself alive in a village?” she asked vivaciously, with that sparkling manner which gives an air of flirtation to the most commonplace talk.

“My wife has been out of health, and it has suited us both to live quietly.”

“Poor Mrs. Ransome—poor you!” exclaimed Miss Darcy, with a sigh. “O, there she is! How do you do, Mrs. Ransome?” gesticulating with a pretty little hand in a long wrinkled tan glove. “Do come and talk to us.”

Mrs. Ransome bowed stiffly, but did not move an inch. She stood picking a branch of rosemary to shreds with nervous restless fingers, scattering the poor pale blue-gray blossoms as if she were sprinkling them upon a corpse. The two girls took no further notice of her, but both bent forward, talking to Ransome, rattling on about this ball and the other ball, and a breakfast, and sundry afternoon teas, and the goings-on—audacious for the most part—of all the smart people at Nice. They had worlds to tell him, having taken it into their heads that he was a humorist, a cynic, who delighted in hearing of the follies of his fellow-man. He stood with his hat off, waiting for the carriage to drive on, inwardly impatient of delay, knowing with what jealous feelings Vivien had always regarded Delia Darcy, dreading a fit of ill-temper when the Irish girls should have vanished by and by below the sandy edge of the common. He listened almost in silence, giving their loquacity no more encouragement than good manners obliged.

“Why don’t you come to the next dance at the Cercle de la Méditerranée?” said Delia coaxingly; “there are so few good dancers left, and your step is just the one that suits me best. There are to be amateur theatricals to begin with—scenes from Much Ado; and I am to be Beatrice. Won’t that tempt you?” she asked, with the insolence of an acknowledged beauty, spoiled by the laxer manners of a foreign settlement, lolling back in the carriage, and smiling at him with brilliant Irish gray eyes, under the shadow of her Leghorn hat, with a great cluster of daffodils just above her forehead, the yellow bloom showing vividly against her dark hair.

The other sister was only a paler reflection of this one, and echoed her speeches, laughing when she laughed.

“Surely you will come to see Delia act Beatrice?” she said. “I can’t tell you how well she does it. Sir Randall Spofforth is the Benedict.”

“My dears, we shall have no time to dress for dinner!” expostulated the duenna, feeling that this kind of thing had lasted long enough. “En avant, cocher.”

“Won’t you come?” pleaded the pertinacious Delia; “it is on the twenty-ninth, remember—next Thursday week.”

The carriage rolled slowly onward.

“I regret that I shall not be there,” said Ransome decisively.

Delia shook her parasol at him in pretended anger.

He rejoined his wife. She stood surrounded by the shreds of rosemary and thyme which she had plucked and scattered while he was talking. She was very pale; and he knew only too well that she was very angry.

“Come, Viva, it is time we turned homeward,” he said.

“Yes, the sun has gone down, has it not?” she exclaimed mockingly, as she looked after the carriage, which sank below the ragged edge of heather and thyme yonder, as if it had dropped over the cliff.

“Why, my love, the sun is above our heads!”

“Is it? Your sun is gone down, anyhow. She is very lovely, is she not?”

The question was asked with sudden eagerness, as if her life depended upon the reply. She was walking quickly in her agitation, going down the hill much faster than she had mounted it.

“Yes, they are both handsome girls, feather-headed, but remarkably handsome,” her husband answered carelessly.

“But Delia is the lovelier. She is your divinity.”

“Yes, she is the lovelier. The other seems a copy by an inferior hand.”

“And she is so fond of you. It was cruel to refuse her request, when she pleaded so hard.”

“How can you be so foolish or so petty, Vivien? Is it impossible for me to talk for five minutes with a handsome girl without unreasonable anger on your part?”

“Do you expect me to be pleased or happy when I see your admiration of another woman—admiration you do not even take the trouble to conceal? Do you suppose I can ever forget last winter—how I have seen you dancing with that girl night after night? Yes, I have had to sit and watch you. I was not popular, I had few partners; and it is bad form to dance more than once with one’s husband. I have seen her in your arms, with her head almost lying on your shoulder, again and again, as if it were her natural place. ‘What a handsome couple!’ I have heard people say; ‘are they engaged?’ Do you think that was pleasant for me?”

“You had but to say one word, and I would have left off dancing for ever.”

“Another sacrifice—like your marriage.”

“Vivien, you would provoke a saint.”

“Yes, it is provoking to be chained to one woman when you are dying for another.”

“How much oftener am I to swear to you that I don’t care a straw for Miss Darcy?”

“Never again,” she answered. “I love you too well to wish you to swear a lie.”

They had come down from the common by this time, and were now upon a pathway nearer home—a narrow footpath on the edge of the cliff opposite Beaulieu; the gently-curving bay below them, and behind and above them orchards and gardens, hill and lighthouse. It was one of their chosen walks. They had paced the narrow path many an afternoon when the twin towers of Monaco showed dark in the shadow of sundown.

“Vivien, I think you are the most difficult creature to live with that ever a man had for his wife,” said Ransome, stung to the quick by her persistent perversity.

“I am difficult to live with, am I?” she cried. “Why don’t you go a step further—why don’t you say at once that you wish I were dead?” she cried, with a wild burst of passion. “Say that you wish me dead.”

“I own that when you torment me, as you are doing to-day, I have sometimes thought of death—yours or mine—as the only escape from mutual misery,” he answered gloomily.

He had been sauntering a few paces in front of her along the narrow path between the olive-garden and the edge of the cliff, she following slowly—both in a desultory way, and talking to each other without seeing each other’s face. The cliff sank sheer below the pathway, with only a narrow margin of rushy grass between the footpath and the brink of the precipice. It was no stupendous depth, no giddy height from which the eye glanced downward, sickening at the horror of the gulf. One looked down at the jewel-bright waves and the many-hued rocks, the fir-trees growing out of the crags, without a thought of danger; and yet a false step upon those sunburnt rushes might mean instant death.

He came to a sudden standstill after that last speech, and stood leaning with both hands upon his stick, angry, full of gloom, feeling that he had said a cruel thing, yet not repenting of his cruelty. He stood there expectant of her angry answer; but there was only silence.

Silence, and then a swift rushing sound, like the flight of a great bird. He looked round, and saw that he was alone!

CHAPTER IV.
DARKNESS.

She had flung herself over the cliff. That rustling noise was the sound of her gown as it brushed against the rushes and seedling firs that clothed the precipice with verdure. He looked over the cliff, and saw her lying among the rocks, a white motionless figure, mangled and crushed, dumb and dead, his victim and his accuser.

His first impulse was to fling himself over the edge where she had cast away her life a minute ago; but common sense overcame that movement of despair. A few yards further towards the point the side of the cliff was less precipitous. There were jutting ledges of rock and straggling bushes by which a good climber might let himself down to the beach, not without hazard, but with a fair chance of safety. As he scrambled downward he saw a fisherman’s boat shooting across the bay, and he thought that his wife’s fall had been seen from the narrow strip of sandy shore yonder towards Beaulieu.

She was lying on her side among the low wet slabs of rock, the blue water lapping round her. There was blood upon her face, and on one mangled arm, from which the muslin sleeve was ripped. Her gown had caught in the bushes, and was torn to shreds; and the water flowing so gently in and out among her loosened hair was tinged with blood.

Her eyes were wide open, staring wildly, and they had a glassy look already. He knew that she was dead.

“Did you see her fall?” he asked the men in the boat, as they came near.

“No,” said one. “I heard the gulls scream, and I knew there was something. And then I looked about and saw something white lying there, under the cliff.”

They lifted her gently into the boat, and laid her on a folded sail at the bottom, as gently and as tenderly as if she were still capable of feeling, as if she were not past cure. George Ransome asked no question, invited no opinion. He sat in the stern of the boat, dumb and quiet. The horror of this sudden doom had paralysed him. What had he done that this thing should happen, this wild revenge of a woman’s passionate heart which made him a murderer? What had he done? Had he not been patient and forbearing, indulgent beyond the common indulgence of husbands to fretful wives? Had he not blunted the edge of wrath with soft answers? Had he not been affectionate and considerate even when love was dead? And yet because of one hard speech, wrung from his irritated nerves, this wild creature had slain herself.

The two fishermen looked at him curiously. He saw the dark southern eyes watching him; saw gravity and restraint upon those fine olive faces which had been wont to beam with friendly smiles. He knew that they suspected evil, but he was in no mood to undeceive them. He sat in an apathetic silence, motionless, stupefied almost, while the men rowed slowly round the point in the golden light of sundown. He scarcely looked at that white still figure lying at the bottom of the boat, the face hidden under a scarlet kerchief which one of the men had taken from his neck. He sat staring at the rocky shore, the white gleaming lighthouse, the long ridge of heathy ground on the crest of the hill, the villas, the gardens with their glow of light and colour, the dark masses of foliage clustering here and there amidst the bright-hued rocks. He looked at everything except his dead wife, lying almost at his feet.

There was an inquiry that evening before the Juge d’Instruction at Villefranche, and he was made to give an account of his wife’s death. He proved a very bad witness. The minute and seemingly frivolous questions addled his brain. He told the magistrate how he had looked round and found the path empty: but he could not say how his wife had fallen—whether she had flung herself over the edge or had fallen accidentally, whether her foot had slipped unawares, whether she had fallen face forward, or whether she had dropped backwards from the edge of the cliff.

“I tell you again that I did not see her fall,” he protested impatiently.

“Did you usually walk in advance of your wife?” asked the Frenchman. “It was not very polite to turn your back upon a lady.”

“I was worried, and out of temper.”

“For what reason?”

“My wife’s unhappy jealousy created reasons where there were none. The people who know me know that I was not habitually unkind to her.”

“Yet you gave her an answer which so maddened her that she flung herself over the cliff in her despair?”

“I fear that it was so,” he answered, with the deepest distress depicted in his haggard face. “She was in a nervous and irritable condition. I had always borne that fact in mind until that moment. She stung me past endurance by her groundless jealousies. I had been a true and loyal husband to her from the hour of our marriage. I had never wronged her by so much as a thought; and yet I could not talk to a pretty peasant-girl, or confess my admiration for any woman I met in society, without causing an outbreak of temper that was almost madness. I bore with her long and patiently. I remembered that the circumstances of her childhood and youth had been adverse, that her nature had been warped and perverted; I forgave all faults of temper in a wife who loved me; but this afternoon—almost for the first time since our marriage—I spoke unkindly, cruelly perhaps. I have no wish to avoid interrogation, or to conceal any portion of the truth.”

“You did not push her over the cliff?”

“I did not. Do I look like a murderer, or bear the character of a man likely to commit murder?”

The examination went on, with cruel reiteration of almost the same questions. The Juge d’Instruction was a hard-headed legal machine, who believed that the truth might be wrung out of any criminal by persistent questioning. He suspected Ransome, or deemed it his duty to suspect him, and he ordered him to be arrested on leaving the court; so George Ransome passed the night after his wife’s death in the lock-up at Villefranche.

What a night that was for a man to live through! He sat on a stone bench, listening to the level plish-plash of that tideless sea ever so far beneath him. He heard the footsteps going up and down the steep stony street of that wonderful old seaport; he heard the scream of the gulls and the striking of the clock on the crest of the hill as he sat motionless, with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands, brooding over that swift, sudden horror of yesterday.

Could it have been an accident? Did she step backwards unawares and slip over the edge? No; he remembered where she was standing when he last looked at her, some distance from the side of the cliff, standing among the heather and wild thyme which grew down to the edge of the little path. She must have made a rapid rush to the brink after that fatal speech of his. She had flung her life away in a single impulse of blind, mad anger—or despair. She had not paused for an instant to take thought. Alas! he knew her so well; he had so often seen those sudden gusts of passion; the rush of crimson to the pale small face; the quivering lips striving impotently for speech; the fury in the dark eyes, and the small nervous hands clenched convulsively. He had seen her struggle with the demon of anger, and had seen the storm pass swifter than a tempest-driven cloud across the moon. Another moment and she would burst into tears, fling her arms round his neck, and implore him to forgive her.

“I love you too well ever to know happiness,” she said.

That was her favourite apology.

“It is only people without passions who can be happy,” she told him once. “I sometimes think that you belong to that family.”

And she was dead; she whose undisciplined love had so plagued and tried him, she was dead; and he felt himself her murderer.

Alas! doubly a murderer, since she had perished just at that time when her life should have been most precious to him, when he should have made any sacrifice to secure her peace. He who had seen all the evils of a fretful temper exhibited in her character had yet been weak enough to yield to a moment of anger, and to insult the woman whom he ought to have cherished.

A long-familiar line of Byron’s haunted his brain all through the night, and mixed itself with that sound of footsteps on the street of stairs, and the scream of the gulls, and the flapping of the waves against the stone quay.

“She died, but not alone—”

She who was to have been the mother of his first-born child was lying dead in the white-walled villa where they had once been happy.

Hush! In the soft clear light of an April morning he heard the tolling of the church bell, solemn, slow, measured, at agonising intervals, which left an age of expectancy between the heavy strokes of the clapper.

Vivos voco, mortuos plango.

They bury their dead at daybreak in that fair land of orange and lemon groves. In the early morning of the first day after death, the hastily-fashioned coffin was carried out into the sunshine, and the funeral procession wound slowly up the hill towards the graveyard near the church of Villefranche. George Ransome knew how brief is the interval between death and burial on that southern shore, and he had little doubt that the bell was tolling for her whose heart was beating passionately when the sun began to sink.

So soon! Her grave would be filled in and trodden down before they let him out of prison.

It had never seemed to him that he was to stay long in captivity, or that there could be any difficulty in proving his innocence of any part in the catastrophe, except that fatal part of having upset the balance of a weak mind, and provoked a passionate woman to suicide. As for the confinement of the past night, he had scarcely thought about it. He had a curious semi-consciousness of time and place which was a new experience to him. He found himself forgetting where he was and what had happened. There were strange gaps in his mind—intervals of oblivion—and then there were periods in which he sat looking at the slanting shaft of sunlight between the window and the ground, and trying to count the motes that danced in that golden haze.

The day passed strangely, too—sometimes at railroad pace, sometimes with a ghastly slowness. Then came a night in which sleep never visited his eyelids—a night of bodily and mental restlessness, the greater part of which he spent in futile efforts to open the heavily-bolted door, or to drag the window-bars from their stone sockets. His prison was a relic of the Middle Ages, and Hercules himself could not have got out of it.

In all those endeavours he was actuated by a blind impulse—a feverish desire to be at large again. Not once during that night did he think of his dead wife in her new-made grave on the side of the hill. He had forgotten why they had shut him up in that stony chamber—or rather had imagined another reason for his imprisonment.

He was a political offender—had been deeply concerned in a plot to overthrow Victor Emanuel, and to create a Republic for Italy. He himself was to be President of that Republic. He felt all the power to rule and legislate for a great nation. He compared himself with Solon and with Pericles, to the disadvantage of both. There was a greatness in him which neither of those had ever attained.

“I should rule them as God Himself,” he thought. “It would be a golden age of truth and justice—a millennium of peace and plenty. And while the nations are waiting for me I am shut up here by the treachery of France.”

Next morning he was taken before the Juge d’Instruction for the second time. The two fishermen who picked up his wife’s corpse were present as witnesses; also his wife’s maid, and the three other servants; also his wife’s doctor.

He was again questioned severely, but this time nothing could induce him to give a direct answer to any question. He raved about the Italian Republic, of which he was to be chief. He told the French magistrate that France had conspired with the Italian tyrant to imprison and suppress him.

“Every other pretence is a subterfuge,” he said. “My popularity in Italy is at the root of this monstrous charge. There will be a rising of the whole nation if you do not instantly release me. For your own sake, sir, I warn you to be prompt.”

“This man is pretending to be mad,” said the magistrate.

“I fear there is more reality than pretence about the business,” said the doctor.

He took Ransome to the window, and looked at his eyes in the strong white light of noon. Then he went over to the magistrate, and they whispered together for some minutes, while the prisoner sat staring at the floor and muttering to himself.

After that there came a long dark interval in George Ransome’s life—a waking dream of intolerable length, but not unalloyed misery; for the hallucinations which made his madness buoyed him up and sustained him during some part of that dark period. He talked with princes and statesmen; he was not alone in the madhouse chamber, or in the madhouse garden, or in that great iron cage where even the most desperate maniacs were allowed to disport themselves in the air and the sunlight as in a gymnasium. He was surrounded by invisible friends and flatterers, by public functionaries who quailed before his glance and were eager to obey his commands. Sometimes he wrote letters and telegrams all day long upon any scraps of paper which his keepers would give him; sometimes he passed whole days in a dreamy silence with arms folded, and abstracted gaze fixed on the distant hill-tops, like Napoleon at St. Helena, brooding over the future of nations.

By and by there came a period of improvement, or what was called improvement by the doctors, but which to the patient seemed a time of strange blankness and disappointment. All those busy shadows which had peopled his life, his senators and flatterers, had abandoned him; he was alone in that strange place amidst a strange people, most of whom seemed to be somewhat wrong in their heads. He was able to read the newspapers now, and was vexed to find that his speeches were unreported, his letters and manifestoes unpublished; disappointed to find that Victor Emanuel was still King of Italy and the new Republic still a web of dreams.

His temper was very fitful at this time, and he had intervals of violence. One morning he found himself upon the hills, digging with half-a-dozen other men, young and old, dressed pretty much like himself. It was in the early summer morning, before the sun had made the world too hot for labour. It was rapture to him to be there, digging and running about on the dewy hillside, in an amphitheatre of mountains, high above the stony bed of the Paillon. The air was full of sweet odours, orange and lemon bloom, roses and lilies, from the gardens and orchards below. He felt that earth and sky were rapturously lovely, that life was a blessing and a privilege beyond all words. He had not the consciousness of a single care, or even a troubled memory. His quarrel with his father, his self-imposed exile, his marriage and its bitter disillusions, his wife’s tragical fate: all were forgotten. He felt as a sylph might feel—a creature without earthly obligations, revelling in the glory of Nature.

This new phase of being lasted so long as the hills and the sky wore their aspect of novelty. It was succeeded by a period of deepest depression, a melancholy which weighed him down like a leaden burden. He sat in the madhouse garden apart from the rest, brooding over the darkness of life. He had no hopes, no desires.