CHAPTER VIII.

“SUCH THINGS WERE.”

Mildred had been motherless for a year when that new love began to grow which was to be stronger and closer than the love of mother or father, and which was to take possession of her life hereafter and transplant her to a new soil.

How well she remembered that summer afternoon on which she and George Greswold met for the first time!—she a girl of seventeen, fresh, simple-minded, untainted by that life of fashion and frivolity which she had seen only from the outside, looking on as a child at the follies of men and women—he her senior by thirteen years, and serious beyond his age. Her father and his father had been companions at the University, as undergraduates, with full purses and a mutual delight in fox-hunting and tandem-driving; and it was this old Oxford friendship which was the cause of George Greswold’s appearance at The Hook on that particular summer afternoon. Mr. Fausset had met him on a house-boat at Henley Regatta, had been moved by the memory of the past on discovering that Greswold was the son of George Ransome of Magdalen, and had brought his friend’s son home to introduce to his daughter. It was not altogether without ulterior thought, perhaps, that he introduced George Greswold into his home. He had a theory that the young men of this latter day were for the most part a weak-kneed and degenerate race; and it had seemed to him that this tall, broad-shouldered young man with the marked features, dark eyes, and powerful brow was of a stronger type than the average bachelor.

“A pity that he is rather too old for Mildred,” he said to himself, supposing that his daughter would hardly feel interested in a man who was more than five-and-twenty.

Mildred could recall his face as she saw it for the first time, to-day in her desolation, sitting idly beside the lake, while the rhythmical beat of the paddle-wheels died away in the distance. That grave dark face impressed her at once with a sense of power. She did not think the stranger handsome, or fascinating, or aristocratic, or elegant; but she thought of him a great deal, and she was silent and shy in his presence, let him come as often as he might.

He was in mourning for his mother, to whom he had been deeply attached, and who had died within the last three months, leaving him Enderby Manor and a large fortune. His home life had not been happy. There had been an antagonism between him and his father from his boyhood upwards, and he had shaken the dust of the paternal house off his feet, and had left England to wander aimlessly, living on a small income allowed him by his mother, and making a little money by literature. He was a second son, a person of no importance, except to the mother, who doated upon him.

Happily for this younger son his mother was a woman of fortune, and on her death George Ransome inherited Enderby Manor, the old house in which generations of Greswolds had come and gone since Dutch William was King of England. There had been a much older house pulled down to make room for that red brick mansion, and the Greswolds had been lords of the soil since the Wars of the Roses—red-rose to the heart’s core, and loyal to an unfortunate king, whether Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart.

By the conditions of his mother’s will, George Ransome assumed her family name and arms, and became George Ransome Greswold in all legal documents henceforward; but he signed himself George Greswold, and was known to his friends by that name. He had not loved his father nor his father’s race.

He came to The Hook often in that glorious summer weather. At the first he was grave and silent, and seemed oppressed by sad memories; but this seemed natural in one who had so lately lost a beloved parent. Gradually the ice melted, and his manner brightened. He came without being bidden. He contrived to make himself, as it were, a member of the family, whose appearance surprised nobody. He bought a steam-launch, which was always at Mr. Fausset’s disposal, and Miss Fausset went everywhere with her father. She recalled those sunlit days now, with every impression of the moment; the ever-growing sense of happiness; the silent delight in knowing herself beloved; the deepening reverence for the man who loved her; the limitless faith in his power of heart and brain; the confiding love which felt a protection in the very sound of his voice. Yes, those had been happy days—the rosy dawning of a great joy that was to last until the grave, Mildred Fausset had thought; and now, after thirteen years of wedded love, they had drifted apart. Sorrow, which should have drawn them nearer together, had served only to divide them.

“O, my lamb, if you could know in your heavenly home how much your loss has cost us!” thought the mother, with the image of that beloved child before her eyes.

There had been a gloomy reserve in George Greswold’s grief which had held his wife at a distance, and had wounded her sorrowful heart. He was selfish in his sorrow, forgetting that her loss was as great as his. He had bowed his head before inexorable Fate, had sat down in dust and ashes, and brooded over his bereavement, solitary, despairing. If he did not curse God in his anguish, it was because early teaching still prevailed, and the habits of thought he had learned in childhood were not lightly to be flung off. Upon one side of his character he was a Pagan, seeing in this affliction the hand of Nemesis, the blind Avenger.

They left Switzerland in the late autumn, and wintered in Vienna, where Mr. Greswold gave himself up to study, and where neither he nor his wife took any part in the gaieties of the capital. Here they lived until the spring, and then, even in the depths of his gloom, a yearning came upon George Greswold to see the home of his race, the manor which he had loved as if it were a living thing.

“Mildred, do you think you could bear to be in the old home again?” he asked his wife suddenly, one morning at breakfast.

“I could bear anything better than the life we lead here,” she answered, her eyes filling with tears.

“We will go back, then—yes, even if it is only to look upon our daughter’s grave.”

They went back to England and to Enderby Manor within a week after that conversation. They arrived at Romsey Station one bright May afternoon, and found the gray horses waiting to carry them to the old house. How sad and strange it seemed to be coming home without Lola! She had always been their companion in such journeys, and her eager face and glad young voice, on the alert to recognise the first familiar points of the landscape, hill-top, or tree, or cottage that indicated home, had given an air of gaiety to every-day life.

The old horses took them back to the Manor, but not the old coachman. A great change in the household had come about after Lola’s funeral. George Greswold had been merciless to those servants whose carelessness had brought about that great calamity, which made seven new graves in the churchyard before all was done. He dismissed his bailiff, Mrs. Wadman and her husband, an under-dairymaid and a cowman, and his housekeeper, all of whom he considered accountable for the use of that foul water from the old well—accountable, inasmuch as they had given him no notice of the evil, and had exercised no care or common sense in their management of the dairy. These he dismissed sternly, and that party feeling which rules among servants took this severity amiss, and several other members of the household gave warning.

“Let it be a clean sweep, then,” said Mr. Greswold to Bell, who announced the falling-away of his old servants. “Let there be none of the old faces here when we come back next year—except yours. There will be plenty of time for you to get new people.”

“A clean sweep” suited Bell’s temper admirably. To engage new servants who should owe their places to her, and bow themselves down before her, was a delight to the old Irishwoman.

Thus it was that all things had a strange aspect when Mildred Greswold reëntered her old home. Even the rooms had a different air. The new servants had arranged the furniture upon new lines, not knowing that old order which had been a part of daily life.

“Let us go and look at _her_ rooms first,” said Mildred softly; and husband and wife went silently to the rooms in the south wing—the octagon-room with its dwarf bookcases and bright bindings, its proof-engravings after Landseer—pictures chosen by Lola herself. Here nothing was changed. Bell’s own hands had kept all things in order. No unfamiliar touch had disturbed the relics of the dead.

Mrs. Greswold stayed in that once happy scene for nearly an hour. It was hard to realise that she and her daughter were never to be together again, they who had been almost inseparable—who had sat side by side by yonder window or yonder hearth in all the changes of the seasons. There was the piano at which they had played and sung together. The music-stand still contained the prettily-bound volumes—sonatinas by Hummel and Clementi—easy duets by Mozart, national melodies, Volks Lieder. In music the child had been in advance of her years. With the mother music was a passion, and she had imbued her daughter with her own tastes in all things. The child’s nature had been a carrying on and completing of the mother’s character, a development of all the mother’s gifts.

She was gone, and the mother’s life seemed desolate and empty—the future a blank. Never in her life had she so much needed her husband’s love—active, considerate, sympathetic—and yet never had he seemed so far apart from her. It was not that he was unkind or neglectful, it was only that his heart made no movement towards hers; he was not in sympathy with her. He had wrapped himself in his grief as in a mantle; he stood aloof from her, and seemed never to have understood that her sorrow was as great as his own.

He left her on the threshold of Lola’s room. It might be that he could not endure the sight of those things which she had looked at weeping, in an ecstasy of grief. To her that agony of touch and memory, the aspect of things that belonged to the past, seemed to bring her lost child nearer to her—it was as if she stretched her hands across the gulf and touched those vanished hands.

“Poor piano!” she sighed; “poor piano, that she loved.”

She touched the keys softly, playing the opening bars of _La ci darem la mano_. It was the first melody they had played together, mother and child—arranged easily as a duet. Later they had sung it together, the girl’s voice clear as a bird’s, and seeming to need training no more than a bird’s voice. These things had been, and were all over.

“What shall I do with my life?” cried the mother despairingly; “what shall I do with all the days to come—now she is gone?”

She left those rooms at last, locking the doors behind her, and went out into the garden. The grand old cedars cast their broad shadows on the lawn. The rustic chairs and tables were there, as in the days gone by, when that velvet turf under the cedars had been Mrs. Greswold’s summer parlour. Would she sit there ever again? she wondered: could she endure to sit there without Lola?

There was a private way from the Manor gardens into the churchyard, a short cut to church by which mother and daughter had gone twice on every Sunday ever since Lola was old enough to know what Sunday meant. She went by this path in the evening stillness to visit Lola’s grave.

She gathered a few rosebuds as she went.

“Flowers for my blighted flower,” she murmured softly.

All was still and solemn in the old churchyard shadowed by sombre yews—a churchyard of irregular levels and moss-grown monuments enclosed by rusty iron railings, and humbler headstones of crumbling stone covered over with an orange-coloured lichen which was like vegetable rust.

The names on these were for the most part illegible, the lettering of a fashion that has passed away; but here and there a brand-new stone perked itself up among these old memorials with an assertive statement about the dead.

Lola’s grave was marked by a large white marble cross, carved in _alto relievo_ on the level slab. The inscription was of the simplest:

“Laura, the only child of George and Mildred Greswold, aged twelve.”

There were no words of promise or of consolation upon the stone.

On one side of the grave there was a large mountain-ash, whose white blossoms and delicate leaves made a kind of temple above the marble slab; on the other, an ancient yew cast its denser shade. Mildred knelt down in the shadow, and let her head droop over the cold stone. There was a skylark singing in the blue vault high above the old Norman tower—a carol of joy and glad young life, as it seemed to Mildred, sitting in the dust. What a mockery that joyousness of spring-time and Nature seemed!

She knew not how long she had knelt there in silent grief when the branches rustled suddenly, as if a strong arm had parted them, and a man flung himself down heavily upon a turf-covered mound—a neglected, nameless grave—beside Lola’s monument. She did not stir from her kneeling attitude, or lift her head to look at the new-comer, knowing that the mourner was her husband. She had heard his footsteps approaching, heavy and slow in the stillness of the place.

The trunk of the tree hid her from that other mourner as she knelt there. He thought himself alone; and, in the abandonment of that fancied solitude, he groaned aloud, as Job may have groaned, sitting among ashes.

“Judgment!” he cried, “judgment!” and then, after an interval of silence, he cried again, “judgment!”

That one word, so repeated, seemed to freeze all the blood in her veins. What did it mean, that exceeding bitter cry,

“Judgment!”