The fatal three, vol. II

A WIFE AND NO WIFE.

Mr. Castellani’s existence was one of those social problems about which the idle world loves to speculate. There are a good many people in London to whom the idea of a fourth dimension is not half so interesting as the notion of a man who lives by his wits, and yet contrives to get himself dressed by a good tailor, and to obtain a footing in some of the best houses at the smart end of the town. This problem César Castellani had offered to the polite world of London for the last three seasons.

Who is Mr. Castellani? was a question still asked by a good many people who invited the gentleman to their houses, and made much of him. He had not forced his way into society; nobody had the right to describe him as a pushing person. He had slipped so insidiously into his place in the social orbit that people had not yet left off wondering how he came there, or who had been his sponsors. This kind of speculation always stimulates the invention of the clever people; and these affected to know a good deal more about Mr. Castellani than he knew about himself.

“He came with magnificent credentials, and an account was opened for him at Coutts’s before he arrived,” said Magnus Dudley, the society poet, flinging back his long hair with a lazy movement of the large languid head. “Of course, you know that he is a natural son of Cavour’s?”

“Indeed! No, I never heard that. He is not like Cavour.”

“Of course not, but he is the image of his mother—one of the handsomest women in Italy—a Duchess, and daughter of a Roman Prince, who could trace his descent in an unbroken line from Germanicus. Castellani has the blood of Caligula in his veins.”

“He looks like it; but I have heard on pretty good authority that he is the son of a Milanese music-master.”

“There are people who will tell you his father wheeled a barrow and sold penny ices in Whitechapel,” retorted Magnus. “People will say anything.”

Thus and in much otherwise did society speculate; and in the meantime Mr. Castellani’s circle was always widening. His book had been just audacious enough and just clever enough to hit the gold in the literary target. Nepenthe had been one of the successes of the season before last: and Mr. Castellani was henceforth to be known as the author of Nepenthe. He had touched upon many things below the stars, and some things beyond them. He had written of other worlds with the confidence of a man who had been there. He had written of women with the air of a Café de Paris Solomon; and he had written of men as if he had never met one.

A man who could write a successful book, and could sing and play divinely, was a person to be cultivated in feminine society. Very few men cared to be intimate with Mr. Castellani, but among women his influence was indisputable. He treated them with a courtly deference which charmed them, and he made them his slaves. No Oriental despot ever ruled more completely than César Castellani did in half-a-dozen of those drawing-rooms which give the tone to scores of other drawing rooms between Mayfair and Earl’s Court. He contrived to be in request from the dawn to the close of the London season. He had made a favour of going to Riverdale; and now, although it suited his purpose to be there, he made a favour of staying.

“If it were not for the delight of being here, I should be in one of the remotest valleys in the Tyrol,” he told Mrs. Hillersdon. “I have never stayed in England so long after the end of the season. A wild longing to break loose from the bonds of Philistinism generally seizes me at this time of the year. I want to go away, and away, and ever away from my fellow-men. I should like to go and live in a tomb, like the girl in Ouida’s In Maremma. My thirst for solitude is a disease.”

This from a man who spent the greater part of his existence dawdling in drawing-rooms and boudoirs sounded paradoxical; but paradoxes are accepted graciously from a man who has written the book of the season. Louise Hillersdon treated Castellani like a favourite son. At his bidding she brought out the old guitar which had slumbered in its case for nearly a decade, and sang the old Spanish songs, and struck the strings with the old dashing sweep of a delicate hand, and graceful curve of a rounded arm.

“When you sing I could believe you as young as Helen when Paris stole her,” said Castellani, lolling along the sofa beside the low chair in which she was sitting; “I cease to envy the men who knew you when you were a girl.”

“My dear Castellani, I feel old enough to be your grandmother; unless you are really the person I sometimes take you for—”

“Who may that be?”

“The Wandering Jew.”

“No matter what my creed or where I have wandered, since I am so happy as to find a haven here. Granted that I can remember Nero’s beautiful Empress, and Faustina, and all that procession of fair women who illumine the Dark Ages—and Mary of Scotland, and Emma Hamilton, blonde and brunette, pathetic and espiègle, every type, and every variety. It is enough for me to find perfection here.”

“If you only knew how sick I am of that kind of nonsense!” said Mrs. Hillersdon, smiling at him, half in amusement, half in scorn.

“O, I know that you have drunk the wine of men’s worship to satiety! Yet if you and I had lived upon the same plane, I would have taught you that among a hundred adorers one could love you better than all the rest. But it is too late. Our souls may meet and touch perhaps thousands of years hence in a new incarnation.”

“Do you talk this kind of nonsense to Mrs. Greswold or her niece?”

“No; with them I am all dulness and propriety. Neither lady is simpatica. Miss Ransome is a frank, good-natured girl—much too frank—with all the faults of her species. I find the genus girl universally detestable.”

“Miss Ransome has about fifteen hundred a year. I suppose you know that?”

“Has she really? If ever I marry I hope to do better than that,” answered César with easy insolence. “She would be a very nice match for a country parson; that Mr. Rollinson, for instance, who is getting up the concert.”

“Then Miss Ransome is not your attraction at Enderby? It is Mrs. Greswold who draws you.”

“Why should I be drawn?” he asked, with his languid air. “I go there in sheer idleness. They like me to make music for them; they fool me and praise me; and it is pleasant to be fooled by two pretty women.”

“Does Mrs. Greswold take any part in the fooling? She looks like marble.”

“There is fire under that marble. Mrs. Greswold is romantically in love with her husband: but that is a complaint which is not incurable.”

“He is not an agreeable man,” said Louise, remembering how long George Greswold and his wife had kept aloof from her. “And he does not look a happy man.”

“He is not happy.”

“You know something about him—more than we all know?” asked Louise, with keen curiosity.

“Not much. I met him at Nice before he came into his property. He was not a very fortunate person at that time, and he doesn’t care to be reminded of it now.”

“Was he out-at-elbows, or in debt?”

“Neither. His troubles did not take that form. But I am not a gossip. Let the past be past, as Gœthe says. We can’t change it, and it is charity to forget it. If we are not sure about what we touch and hear and see—or fancy we hear and touch and see—in the present, how much less can we be sure of any reality or external existence in the past! It is all done away with—vanished. How can we know that it ever was? A grave here and there is the only witness; and even the grave and the name on the headstone may be only a projection of our own consciousness. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

“That is a politely circuitous manner of refusing to tell me anything about Mr. Greswold when his name was Ransome. No matter. I shall find other people who know the scandal, I have no doubt. Your prevarication assures me that there was a scandal.”

This was on the eve of the concert at Enderby, at about the same hour when George Greswold showed Mildred his first wife’s portrait. Castellani and his hostess were alone together in the lady’s morning-room, while Hillersdon and his other guests were in the billiard-room on the opposite side of a broad corridor. Mrs. Hillersdon had a way of turning over her visitors to her husband when they bored her. Gusts of loud talk and louder laughter came across the corridor now and again as they played pool. There were times when Louise was too tired of life to endure the burden of commonplace society. She liked to dream over a novel. She liked to talk with a clever young man like Castellani. His flatteries amused her, and brought back a faint flavour of youth and a dim remembrance of the day when all men praised her, when she had known herself without a rival. Now other women were beautiful, and she was only a tradition. She had toiled hard to live down her past, to make the world forget that she had ever been Louise Lorraine: yet there were moments in which she felt angry to find that old personality of hers so utterly forgotten, when she was tempted to cry out, “What rubbish you talk about your Mrs. Egremont, your Mrs. Linley Varden, your professional beauties and fine lady actresses. Have you never heard of ME—Louise Lorraine?”