CHAPTER III.

THE VERDICT OF HER CHURCH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have never thought about her money.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mildred almost thought she was speaking of the grouse.

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

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

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

“Have you known him long?”

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

“And does Mr. Tomkison like him?”

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

The letter was measured almost to coldness:

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

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

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

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

“GEORGE GRESWOLD.”

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

She answered her husband’s letter immediately:

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

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

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

MILDRED.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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