CHAPTER XII.

“SHE CANNOT BE UNWORTHY.”

Mr. Castellani did not wait long before he availed himself of Mrs. Greswold’s permission to repeat his visit. He appeared on Friday afternoon, at the orthodox hour of half-past three, when Mildred and her niece were sitting in the drawing-room, exhausted by a long morning at Salisbury, where they had explored the cathedral, and lunched in the Close with a clever friend of George Greswold’s, who had made his mark on modern literature.

“I adore Salisbury Close,” said Pamela, as she looked through the old-fashioned window to the old-fashioned garden; “it reminds me of Honoria.”

She did not deem it necessary to explain what Honoria she meant, presuming a universal acquaintance with Coventry Patmore’s gentle heroine.

The morning had been sultry, the homeward drive long, and both ladies were resting in comfortable silence, each with a book, when Castellani was announced.

Mildred received him rather coldly, trying her uttermost to seem thoroughly at ease. She introduced him to her niece, Miss Ransome.

“The daughter of the late Mr. Randolph Ransome and the sister of Lady Mountford?” Castellani inquired presently, when Pamela had run out on the lawn to speak to Box.

“Yes. You seem to know everybody’s belongings.”

“Why not? It is the duty of every man of the world, more especially of a foreigner. I know Mr. Ransome’s place in the Sussex Weald—a very fine property—and I know that the two ladies are coheiresses, but that the Sussex estate is to descend to the eldest son of the elder daughter, or failing male issue there, to the son of the younger. Lady Mountford has a baby-son, I believe.”

“Your information is altogether correct.”

“Why should it be otherwise? Mr. Hillersdon and his wife discussed the family history to-day at luncheon, _apropos_ to Miss Ransome’s appearance in Romsey Church at the Saint’s Day service yesterday.”

His frankness apologised for his impertinence, and he was a foreigner, which seems always to excuse a great deal.

Pamela came back again, after rescuing Box from a rough-and-tumble game with Kassandra. She looked rosy and breathless, and very pretty, in her pale-blue gown and girlish sash flying in the wind, and flaxen hair fluffed into a feathery pile on the top of her head, and honest brown eyes. She resumed her seat in the deep old window behind the end of the piano, and made believe to go on with some work, which she took in a tangled heap from a very untidy basket. Already Pamela had set the sign of her presence upon the drawing-rooms at Enderby, a trail of heterogeneous litter which was a part of her individuality. Screened by the piano, she was able to observe Castellani, as he stood leaning over the large central ottoman, with his knee on the cushioned seat, talking to Mrs. Greswold.

He was the author of _Nepenthe_. It was in that character he interested her. She looked at him with the thought of his book full in her mind. It was one of those half-mad, wholly artificial compositions which delight girls and young men, and which are just clever enough, and have just enough originality to get talked about and written about by the cultured few. It was a love-story, ending tragically; a story of ruined lives and broken hearts, told in the autobiographical form, with a studied avoidance of all conventional ornament, which gave an air of reality where all was inherently false. Pamela thought it must be Castellani’s own story. She fancied she could see the traces of those heartbreaking experiences, those crushing disappointments in his countenance, in his bearing even, and in the tones of his voice, which gave an impression of mental fatigue, as of a man worn out by a fatal passion.

The story of _Nepenthe_ was as old as the hills—or at least as old as the Boulevard des Capucines and the Palais Royal. It was the story of a virtuous young man’s love for an unvirtuous woman—the story of Demetrius and Lamia—the story of a man’s demoralisation under the influence of incarnate falsehood, of the gradual lapse from good to evil, the gradual extinction of every belief and every scruple, the final destruction of a soul.

The wicked siren was taken, her victim was left; but left to expiate that miserable infatuation by an after-life of misery; left without a joy in the present or a hope in the future.

“He looks like it,” thought Pamela, remembering that final chapter.

Mrs. Greswold was putting a few slow stitches into the azalea-leaves on her embroidery-frame, and listening to Mr. Castellani with an air of polite indifference.

“Do you know that Riverdale is quite the most delightful house I have ever stayed in?” he said; “and I have stayed in a great many. And do you know that Mrs. Hillersdon is heart-broken at your never having called upon her?”

“I am sorry so small a matter should touch Mrs. Hillersdon’s heart.”

“She feels it intensely. She told me so yesterday. Perfect candour is one of the charms of her character. She is as emotional and as transparent as a child. Why have you not called on her?”

“You forget that Riverdale is seven miles from this house.”

“Does not your charity extend so far? Are people who live seven miles off beyond the pale? I think you must visit a little further afield than seven miles. There must be some other reason.”

“There is another reason, which I had rather not talk about.”

“I understand. You consider Mrs. Hillersdon a person not to be visited. Long ago, when you were a child in the nursery, Mrs. Hillersdon was an undisciplined, inexperienced girl, and the world used her hardly. Is that old history never to be forgotten? Men, who know it all, have agreed to forget it: why should women, who only know a fragment, so obstinately remember?”

“I know nothing, and remember nothing, about Mrs. Hillersdon. My friends are, for the most part, those of my husband’s choice, and I pay no visits without his approval. He does not wish me to visit at Riverdale. You have forced me to give you a plain answer, Mr. Castellani.”

“Why not? Plain truth is always best. I am sorry Mr. Greswold has interdicted my charming friend. You can have no idea how excellent a woman she is, or how admirable a wife. Tom Hillersdon might have searched the county from border to border and not have found as good a woman—looked at as the woman best calculated to make him happy. And what delightful people she has brought about him! One of the most interesting men I ever met arrived yesterday, and is to preach the hospital sermon at Romsey next Sunday. He is an old friend of yours.”

“A clergyman, and an old friend of mine, at Riverdale!”

“A man of ascetic life and exceptional culture. I never heard any man talk of Dante better than he talked to me last night in a moonlight stroll on the terrace, while the other men were in the smokingroom.”

“Surely you do not mean Mr. Cancellor, the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s, Parchment Street?”

“That is the man—Clement Cancellor, Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He looks like a mediæval monk just stepped out of one of Bellini’s altar-pieces.”

“He is the noblest, most unselfish of men,” said Mildred warmly; “he has given his life to doing good among rich and poor. It is so long since I have seen him. We have asked him to Enderby very often, but he has always been too busy to come. And to think that he should be in this neighbourhood and I know nothing about it; and to think that he should go to Riverdale rather than come here!”

“He had hardly any option. It was Mrs. Hillersdon who asked him to preach on Hospital Sunday. She extorted a promise from him three months ago in London. The Vicar of Romsey was enchanted. ‘You are the cleverest woman I know,’ he said. ‘No one else could have got me such a great gun.’”

“A great gun—Mr. Cancellor a great gun! I can only think of him as I knew him when I was twelve years old: a tall, thin young man, in a very shabby coat—he was curate at St. Elizabeth’s then—very gaunt and hollow-cheeked, but with such a sweet smile. He used to come twice a week to teach me the history of the Bible and the Church. He made me love both.”

“He is gaunt and hollow-cheeked still, tall and bony and sallow, and he still wears a shabby coat. You will not find much difference in him, I fancy—only so many more years of hard work and self-sacrifice, ascetic living and nightly study. A man to know Dante as he does must have given years of his life to that one poet—and I am told that in literature Cancellor is an all-round man. His monograph on Pascal is said to be the best of a brilliant series of such studies.”

“I hope he will come to see his old pupil before he leaves the neighbourhood.”

“He means to do so. He was talking of it yesterday evening—asking Mrs. Hillersdon if she was intimate with you—so awkward for poor Mrs. Hillersdon.”

“I shall be very glad to see him again.”

“May I drive him over to tea to-morrow afternoon?”

“He will be welcome here at any time.”

“Or with any one? If Mrs. Hillersdon were to bring him, would you still refuse to receive her?”

“I have never refused to receive her. We have met and talked to each other on public occasions. If Mr. Cancellor likes her she cannot be unworthy.”

“May she come with him to-morrow?” persisted Castellani.

“If she likes,” faltered Mildred, wondering that any woman could so force an entrance to another woman’s house.

She did not know that it was by such forced entrances Mrs. Hillersdon had made her way in society until some of the best houses in London had been opened to her.

“If you are not in a hurry to leave us, I know my niece would much like to hear you play,” she said, feeling that the talk about Riverdale had been dull work for Pamela.

Miss Ransome murmured assent.

“If you will play something of Beethoven’s,” she entreated.

“Do you object to Mozart?” he asked, forgetting his depreciation of the valet-musician’s son a few days before, “I feel more in the humour for that prince of dramatists. I will give you the supper in _Don Giovanni_. You shall see Leporello trembling. You shall hear the tramp of ghostly feet.”

And then, improvising upon a familiar theme, he gave his own version of that wonderful scene, and that music so played conjured up a picture as vivid as ever opera-house furnished to an enthralled audience.

Pamela listened in silent rapture. What a God-gifted creature this was, who had so deeply moved her by his pen, who moved her even more intensely by that magical touch upon the piano!

When he had played those last crashing chords which consigned the profligate to his doom, he waited for a minute or so, and then, softly, as if almost unawares, in mere absent-minded idleness, his hands wandered into the staccato accompaniment of the serenade, and, with the finest tenor Mildred had heard since she heard Sim Reeves, he sang those delicate and dainty phrases with which the seducer woos his last divinity.

He rose from the piano at the close of that lovely air, smiling at his hearers.

“I had no idea that you were a singer as well as a pianist,” said Mildred.

“You forget that music is my native tongue. My father taught me to play before he taught me to read, and I knew harmony before I knew my alphabet. I was brought up in the house of a man who lived only for music—to whom all stringed instruments were as his mother tongue. It was by a caprice that he made me play the piano—which he rarely touched himself.”

“He must have been a great genius,” said Pamela, with girlish fervour.

“Alas! no, he just missed greatness, and he just missed genius. He was a highly-gifted man—various—capricious—volatile—and he married a woman with just enough money to ruin him. Had he been obliged to earn his bread, he might have been great. Who can say? Hunger is the slave-driver, with his whip of steel, who peoples the Valhalla of nations. If Homer had not been a beggar—as well as blind—we might have had no story of Troy. Good-bye, Mrs. Greswold. Good-bye,” shaking hands with Pamela. “I _may_ bring my hostess to-morrow?”

“I—I—suppose so,” Mildred answered feebly, wondering what her husband would think of such an invasion.

Yet, if Clement Cancellor, who to Mildred’s mind had always seemed the ideal Christian priest, if he could tolerate and consort with her, could she, Mildred Greswold, persist in the Pharisee’s part, and hold herself aloof from this neighbour, to whose good works and kindly disposition many voices had testified in her hearing?