CHAPTER II.

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS.

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

“Her cruelly-used, unacknowledged sister.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

“But how was it unfair?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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