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.