"Yes; she had brain–fever: she recovered from that, but she did not recover strength. Her low spirits alarmed me, and I considered it only right––Mr. Marchmont suggested also––that a medical man should be consulted."
"And what did this man, this Mr. Weston, say?"
"Very little; there was nothing the matter with Mary, he said. He gave her a little medicine, but only in the desire of strengthening her nervous system. He could give her no medicine that would have any very good effect upon her spirits, while she chose to keep herself obstinately apart from every one."
The young man's head sank upon his breast. The image of his desolate young wife arose before him; the image of a pale, sorrowful girl, holding herself apart from her persecutors, abandoned, lonely, despairing. Why had she remained at Marchmont Towers? Why had she ever consented to go there, when she had again and again expressed such terror of her stepmother? Why had she not rather followed her husband down to Devonshire, and thrown herself upon his relatives for protection? Was it like this girl to remain quietly here in Lincolnshire, when the man she loved with such innocent devotion was lying between life and death in the west?
"She is such a child," he thought,––"such a child in her ignorance of the world. I must not reason about her as I would about another woman."
And then a sudden flush of passionate emotion rose to his face, as a new thought flashed into his mind. What if this helpless girl had been detained by force at Marchmont Towers?
"Olivia," he cried, "whatever baseness this man, Paul Marchmont, may be capable of, you at least must be superior to any deliberate sin. I have all my life believed in you, and respected you, as a good woman. Tell me the truth, then, for pity's sake. Nothing that you can tell me will fill up the dead blank that the horrible interval since my accident has made in my life. But you can give me some help. A few words from you may clear away much of this darkness. How did you find my wife? How did you induce her to come back to this place? I know that she had an unreasonable dread of returning here."
"I found her through the agency of Mr. Marchmont," Olivia answered, quietly. "I had some difficulty in inducing her to return here; but after hearing of your accident––"
"How was the news of that broken to her?"
"Unfortunately she saw a paper that had happened to be left in her way."
"By whom?"
"By Mr. Marchmont."
"Where was this?"
"In Hampshire."
"Indeed! Then Paul Marchmont went with you to Hampshire?"
"He did. He was of great service to me in this crisis. After seeing the paper, my stepdaughter was seized with brain–fever. She was unconscious when we brought her back to the Towers. She was nursed by my old servant Barbara, and had the highest medical care. I do not think that anything more could have been done for her."
"No," answered Edward Arundel, bitterly; "unless you could have loved her."
"We cannot force our affections," the widow said, in a hard voice.
Another voice in her breast seemed to whisper, "Why do you reproach me for not having loved this girl? If you had loved me, the whole world would have been different."
"Olivia Marchmont," said Captain Arundel, "by your own avowal there has never been any affection for this orphan girl in your heart. It is not my business to dwell upon the fact, as something almost unnatural under the peculiar circumstances through which that helpless child was cast upon your protection. It is needless to try to understand why you have hardened your heart against my poor wife. Enough that it is so. But I may still believe that, whatever your feelings may be towards your dead husband's daughter, you would not be guilty of any deliberate act of treachery against her. I can afford to believe this of you; but I cannot believe it of Paul Marchmont. That man is my wife's natural enemy. If he has been here during my illness, he has been here to plot against her. When he came here, he came to attempt her destruction. She stands between him and this estate. Long ago, when I was a careless schoolboy, my poor friend, John Marchmont, told me that, if ever the day came upon which Mary's interests should be opposed to the interests of her cousin, that man would be a dire and bitter enemy; so much the more terrible because in all appearance her friend. The day came; and I, to whom the orphan girl had been left as a sacred legacy, was not by to defend her. But I have risen from a bed that many have thought a bed of death; and I come to this place with one indomitable resolution paramount in my breast,––the determination to find my wife, and to bring condign punishment upon the man who has done her wrong."
Captain Arundel spoke in a low voice; but his passion was all the more terrible because of the suppression of those common outward evidences by which anger ordinarily betrays itself. He relapsed into thoughtful silence.
Olivia made no answer to anything that he had said. She sat looking at him steadily, with an admiring awe in her face. How splendid he was––this young hero––even in his sickness and feebleness! How splendid, by reason of the grand courage, the chivalrous devotion, that shone out of his blue eyes!
The clock struck eleven while the cousins sat opposite to each other,––only divided, physically, by the width of the tapestried hearth–rug; but, oh, how many weary miles asunder in spirit!––and Edward Arundel rose, startled from his sorrowful reverie.
"If I were a strong man," he said, "I would see Paul Marchmont to–night. But I must wait till to–morrow morning. At what time does he come to his painting–room?"'
"At eight o'clock, when the mornings are bright; but later when the weather is dull."
"At eight o'clock! I pray Heaven the sun may shine early to–morrow! I pray Heaven I may not have to wait long before I find myself face to face with that man! Good–night, Olivia."
He took a candle from a table near the door, and lit it almost mechanically. He found Mr. Morrison waiting for him, very sleepy and despondent, in a large bedchamber in which Captain Arundel had never slept before,––a dreary apartment, decked out with the faded splendours of the past; a chamber in which the restless sleeper might expect to see a phantom lady in a ghostly sacque, cowering over the embers, and spreading her transparent hands above the red light.
"It isn't particular comfortable, after Dangerfield," the valet muttered in a melancholy voice; "and all I 'ope, Mr. Edward, is, that the sheets are not damp. I've been a stirrin' of the fire and puttin' on fresh coals for the last hour. There's a bed for me in the dressin' room, within call."
Captain Arundel scarcely heard what his servant said to him. He was standing at the door of the spacious chamber, looking out into a long low–roofed corridor, in which he had just encountered Barbara, Mrs. Marchmont's confidential attendant,––the wooden–faced, inscrutable–looking woman, who, according to Olivia, had watched and ministered to his wife.
"Was that the tenderest face that looked down upon my darling as she lay on her sick–bed?" he thought. "I had almost as soon have had a ghoul to watch by my poor dear's pillow."
Edward Arundel lay awake through the best part of that November night, listening to the ceaseless dripping of the rain upon the terrace, and thinking of Paul Marchmont. It was of this man that he must demand an account of his wife. Nothing that Olivia had told him had in any way lessened this determination. The little slipper found by the water's edge; the placard flapping on the moss–grown pillar at the entrance to the park; the story of a possible suicide, or a more probable accident;––all these things were as nothing beside the young man's suspicion of Paul Marchmont. He had pooh–poohed John's dread of his kinsman as weak and unreasonable; and now, with the same unreason, he was ready to condemn this man, whom he had never seen, as a traitor and a plotter against his young wife.
He lay tossing from side to side all that night, weak and feverish, with great drops of cold perspiration rolling down his pale face, sometimes falling into a fitful sleep, in whose distorted dreams Paul Marchmont was for ever present, now one man, now another. There was no sense of fitness in these dreams; for sometimes Edward Arundel and the artist were wrestling together with newly–sharpened daggers in their eager hands, each thirsting for the other's blood; and in the next moment they were friends, and had been friendly––as it seemed––for years.
The young man woke from one of these last dreams, with words of good–fellowship upon his lips, to find the morning light gleaming through the narrow openings in the damask window–curtains, and Mr. Morrison laying out his master's dressing apparatus upon the carved oak toilette–table.
Captain Arundel dressed himself as fast as he could, with the assistance of the valet, and then made his way down the broad staircase, with the help of his cane, upon which he had need to lean pretty heavily, for he was as weak as a child.
"You had better give me the brandy–flask, Morrison," he said. "I am going out before breakfast. You may as well come with me, by–the–by; for I doubt if I could walk as far as I want to go, without the help of your arm."
In the hall Captain Arundel found one of the servants. The western door was open, and the man was standing on the threshold looking out at the morning. The rain had ceased; but the day did not yet promise to be very bright, for the sun gleamed like a ball of burnished copper through a pale November mist.
"Do you know if Mr. Paul Marchmont has gone down to the boat–house?" Edward asked.
"Yes, sir," the man answered; "I met him just now in the quadrangle. He'd been having a cup of coffee with my mistress."
Edward started. They were friends, then, Paul Marchmont and Olivia!––friends, but surely not allies! Whatever villany this man might be capable of committing, Olivia must at least be guiltless of any deliberate treachery?
Captain Arundel took his servant's arm and walked out into the quadrangle, and from the quadrangle to the low–lying woody swamp, where the stunted trees looked grim and weird–like in their leafless ugliness. Weak as the young man was, he walked rapidly across the sloppy ground, which had been almost flooded by the continual rains. He was borne up by his fierce desire to be face to face with Paul Marchmont. The savage energy of his mind was stronger than any physical debility. He dismissed Mr. Morrison as soon as he was within sight of the boat–house, and went on alone, leaning on his stick, and pausing now and then to draw breath, angry with himself for his weakness.
The boat–house, and the pavilion above it, had been patched up by some country workmen. A handful of plaster here and there, a little new brickwork, and a mended window–frame bore witness of this. The ponderous old–fashioned wooden shutters had been repaired, and a good deal of the work which had been begun in John Marchmont's lifetime had now, in a certain rough manner, been completed. The place, which had hitherto appeared likely to fall into utter decay, had been rendered weather–tight and habitable; the black smoke creeping slowly upward from the ivy–covered chimney, gave evidence of occupation. Beyond this, a large wooden shed, with a wide window fronting the north, had been erected close against the boat–house. This rough shed Edward Arundel at once understood to be the painting–room which the artist had built for himself.
He paused a moment outside the door of this shed. A man's voice––a tenor voice, rather thin and metallic in quality––was singing a scrap of Rossini upon the other side of the frail woodwork.
Edward Arundel knocked with the handle of his stick upon the door. The voice left off singing, to say "Come in."
The soldier opened the door, crossed the threshold, and stood face to face with Paul Marchmont in the bare wooden shed. The painter had dressed himself for his work. His coat and waistcoat lay upon a chair near the door. He had put on a canvas jacket, and had drawn a loose pair of linen trousers over those which belonged to his usual costume. So far as this paint–besmeared coat and trousers went, nothing could have been more slovenly than Paul Marchmont's appearance; but some tincture of foppery exhibited itself in the black velvet smoking–cap, which contrasted with and set off the silvery whiteness of his hair, as well as in the delicate curve of his amber moustache. A moustache was not a very common adornment in the year 1848. It was rather an eccentricity affected by artists, and permitted as the wild caprice of irresponsible beings, not amenable to the laws that govern rational and respectable people.
Edward Arundel sharply scrutinised the face and figure of the artist. He cast a rapid glance round the bare whitewashed walls of the shed, trying to read even in those bare walls some chance clue to the painter's character. But there was not much to be gleaned from the details of that almost empty chamber. A dismal, black–looking iron stove, with a crooked chimney, stood in one corner. A great easel occupied the centre of the room. A sheet of tin, nailed upon a wooden shutter, swung backwards and forwards against the northern window, blown to and fro by the damp wind that crept in through the crevices in the framework of the roughly–fashioned casement. A heap of canvases were piled against the walls, and here and there a half–finished picture––a lurid Turneresque landscape; a black stormy sky; or a rocky mountain–pass, dyed blood–red by the setting sun––was propped up against the whitewashed background. Scattered scraps of water–colour, crayon, old engravings, sketches torn and tumbled, bits of rockwork and foliage, lay littered about the floor; and on a paint–stained deal–table of the roughest and plainest fashion were gathered the colour–tubes and palettes, the brushes and sponges and dirty cloths, the greasy and sticky tin–cans, which form the paraphernalia of an artist. Opposite the northern window was the moss–grown stone–staircase leading up to the pavilion over the boat–house. Mr. Marchmont had built his painting–room against the side of the pavilion, in such a manner as to shut in the staircase and doorway which formed the only entrance to it. His excuse for the awkwardness of this piece of architecture was the impossibility of otherwise getting the all–desirable northern light for the illumination of his rough studio.
This was the chamber in which Edward Arundel found the man from whom he came to demand an account of his wife's disappearance. The artist was evidently quite prepared to receive his visitor. He made no pretence of being taken off his guard, as a meaner pretender might have done. One of Paul Marchmont's theories was, that as it is only a fool who would use brass where he could as easily employ gold, so it is only a fool who tells a lie when he can conveniently tell the truth.
"Captain Arundel, I believe?" he said, pushing a chair forward for his visitor. "I am sorry to say I recognise you by your appearance of ill health. Mrs. Marchmont told me you wanted to see me. Does my meerschaum annoy you? I'll put it out if it does. No? Then, if you'll allow me, I'll go on smoking. Some people say tobacco–smoke gives a tone to one's pictures. If so, mine ought to be Rembrandts in depth of colour."
Edward Arundel dropped into the chair that had been offered to him. If he could by any possibility have rejected even this amount of hospitality from Paul Marchmont, he would have done so; but he was a great deal too weak to stand, and he knew that his interview with the artist must be a long one.
"Mr. Marchmont," he said, "if my cousin Olivia told you that you might expect to see me here to–day, she most likely told you a great deal more. Did she tell you that I looked to you to account to me for the disappearance of my wife?"
Paul Marchmont shrugged his shoulders, as who should say, "This young man is an invalid. I must not suffer myself to be aggravated by his absurdity." Then taking his meerschaum from his lips, he set it down, and seated himself at a few paces from Edward Arundel on the lowest of the moss–grown steps leading up to the pavilion.
"My dear Captain Arundel," he said, very gravely, "your cousin did repeat to me a great deal of last night's conversation. She told me that you had spoken of me with a degree of violence, natural enough perhaps to a hot–tempered young soldier, but in no manner justified by our relations. When you call upon me to account for the disappearance of Mary Marchmont, you act about as rationally as if you declared me answerable for the pulmonary complaint that carried away her father. If, on the other hand, you call upon me to assist you in the endeavour to fathom the mystery of her disappearance, you will find me ready and willing to aid you to the very uttermost. It is to my interest as much as to yours that this mystery should be cleared up."
"And in the meantime you take possession of this estate?"
"No, Captain Arundel. The law would allow me to do so; but I decline to touch one farthing of the revenue which this estate yields, or to commit one act of ownership, until the mystery of Mary Marchmont's disappearance, or of her death, is cleared up."
"The mystery of her death?" said Edward Arundel; "you believe, then, that she is dead?"
"I anticipate nothing; I think nothing," answered the artist; "I only wait. The mysteries of life are so many and so incomprehensible,––the stories, which are every day to be read by any man who takes the trouble to look through a newspaper, are so strange, and savour so much of the improbabilities of a novel–writer's first wild fiction,––that I am ready to believe everything and anything. Mary Marchmont struck me, from the first moment in which I saw her, as sadly deficient in mental power. Nothing she could do would astonish me. She may be hiding herself away from us, prompted only by some eccentric fancy of her own. She may have fallen into the power of designing people. She may have purposely placed her slipper by the water–side, in order to give the idea of an accident or a suicide; or she may have dropped it there by chance, and walked barefoot to the nearest railway–station. She acted unreasonably before when she ran away from Marchmont Towers; she may have acted unreasonably again."
"You do not think, then, that she is dead?"
"I hesitate to form any opinion; I positively decline to express one."
Edward Arundel gnawed savagely at the ends of his moustache. This man's cool imperturbability, which had none of the studied smoothness of hypocrisy, but which seemed rather the plain candour of a thorough man of the world, who had no wish to pretend to any sentiment he did not feel, baffled and infuriated the passionate young soldier. Was it possible that this man, who met him with such cool self–assertion, who in no manner avoided any discussion of Mary Marchmont's disappearance,––was it possible that he could have had any treacherous and guilty part in that calamity? Olivia's manner looked like guilt; but Paul Marchmont's seemed the personification of innocence. Not angry innocence, indignant that its purity should have been suspected; but the matter–of–fact, commonplace innocence of a man of the world, who is a great deal too clever to play any hazardous and villanous game.
"You can perhaps answer me this question, Mr. Marchmont," said Edward Arundel. "Why was my wife doubted when she told the story of her marriage?"
The artist smiled, and rising from his seat upon the stone step, took a pocket–book from one of the pockets of the coat that he had been wearing.
"I can answer that question," he said, selecting a paper from amongst others in the pocket–book. "This will answer it."
He handed Edward Arundel the paper, which was a letter folded lengthways, and indorsed, "From Mrs. Arundel, August 31st." Within this letter was another paper, indorsed, "Copy of letter to Mrs. Arundel, August 28th."
"You had better read the copy first," Mr. Marchmont said, as Edward looked doubtfully at the inner paper.
The copy was very brief, and ran thus:
"Marchmont Towers, August 28, 1848.
"MADAM,––I have been given to understand that your son, Captain Arundel, within a fortnight of his sad accident, contracted a secret marriage with a young lady, whose name I, for several reasons, prefer to withhold. If you can oblige me by informing me whether there is any foundation for this statement, you will confer a very great favour upon
"Your obedient servant,
"PAUL MARCHMONT."
The answer to this letter, in the hand of Edward Arundel's mother, was equally brief:
"Dangerfield Park, August 31, 1848.
"SIR,––In reply to your inquiry, I beg to state that there can be no foundation whatever for the report to which you allude. My son is too honourable to contract a secret marriage; and although his present unhappy state renders it impossible for me to receive the assurance from his own lips, my confidence in his high principles justifies me in contradicting any such report as that which forms the subject of your letter.
"I am, sir,
"Yours obediently,
"LETITIA ARUNDEL."
The soldier stood, mute and confounded, with his mother's letter in his hand. It seemed as if every creature had been against the helpless girl whom he had made his wife. Every hand had been lifted to drive her from the house that was her own; to drive her out upon the world, of which she was ignorant, a wanderer and an outcast; perhaps to drive her to a cruel death.
"You can scarcely wonder if the receipt of that letter confirmed me in my previous belief that Mary Marchmont's story of a marriage arose out of the weakness of a brain, never too strong, and at that time very much enfeebled by the effect of a fever."
Edward Arundel was silent. He crushed his mother's letter in his hand. Even his mother––even his mother––that tender and compassionate woman, whose protection he had so freely promised, ten years before, in the lobby of Drury Lane, to John Marchmont's motherless child,––even she, by some hideous fatality, had helped to bring grief and shame upon the lonely girl. All this story of his young wife's disappearance seemed enveloped in a wretched obscurity, through whose thick darkness he could not penetrate. He felt himself encompassed by a web of mystery, athwart which it was impossible to cut his way to the truth. He asked question after question, and received answers which seemed freely given; but the story remained as dark as ever. What did it all mean? What was the clue to the mystery? Was this man, Paul Marchmont,––busy amongst his unfinished pictures, and bearing in his every action, in his every word, the stamp of an easy–going, free–spoken soldier of fortune,––likely to have been guilty of any dark and subtle villany against the missing girl? He had disbelieved in the marriage; but he had had some reason for his doubt of a fact that could not very well be welcome to him.
The young man rose from his chair, and stood irresolute, brooding over these things.
"Come, Captain Arundel," cried Paul Marchmont, heartily, "believe me, though I have not much superfluous sentimentality left in my composition after a pretty long encounter with the world, still I can truly sympathise with your regret for this poor silly child. I hope, for your sake, that she still lives, and is foolishly hiding herself from us all. Perhaps, now you are able to act in the business, there may be a better chance of finding her. I am old enough to be your father, and am ready to give you the help of any knowledge of the world which I may have gathered in the experience of a lifetime. Will you accept my help?"
Edward Arundel paused for a moment, with his head still bent, and his eyes fixed upon the ground. Then suddenly lifting his head, he looked full in the artist's face as he answered him.
"No!" he cried. "Your offer may be made in all good faith, and if so, I thank you for it; but no one loves this missing girl as I love her; no one has so good a right as I have to protect and shelter her. I will look for my wife, alone, unaided; except by such help as I pray that God may give me."
Edward Arundel walked slowly back to the Towers, shaken in body, perplexed in mind, baffled, disappointed, and most miserable; the young husband, whose married life had been shut within the compass of a brief honeymoon, went back to that dark and gloomy mansion within whose encircling walls Mary had pined and despaired.
"Why did she stop here?" he thought; "why didn't she come to me? I thought her first impulse would have brought her to me. I thought my poor childish love would have set out on foot to seek her husband, if need were."
He groped his way feebly and wearily amidst the leafless wood, and through the rotting vegetation decaying in oozy slime beneath the black shelter of the naked trees. He groped his way towards the dismal eastern front of the great stone dwelling–house, his face always turned towards the blank windows, that stared down at him from the discoloured walls.
"Oh, if they could speak!" he exclaimed, almost beside himself in his perplexity and desperation; "if they could speak! If those cruel walls could find a voice, and tell me what my darling suffered within their shadow! If they could tell me why she despaired, and ran away to hide herself from her husband and protector! If they could speak!"
He ground his teeth in a passion of sorrowful rage.
"I should gain as much by questioning yonder stone wall as by talking to my cousin, Olivia Marchmont," he thought, presently. "Why is that woman so venomous a creature in her hatred of my innocent wife? Why is it that, whether I threaten, or whether I appeal, I can gain nothing from her––nothing? She baffles me as completely by her measured answers, which seem to reply to my questions, and which yet tell me nothing, as if she were a brazen image set up by the dark ignorance of a heathen people, and dumb in the absence of an impostor–priest. She baffles me, question her how I will. And Paul Marchmont, again,––what have I learned from him? Am I a fool, that people can prevaricate and lie to me like this? Has my brain no sense, and my arm no strength, that I cannot wring the truth from the false throats of these wretches?"
The young man gnashed his teeth again in the violence of his rage.
Yes, it was like a dream; it was like nothing but a dream. In dreams he had often felt this terrible sense of impotence wrestling with a mad desire to achieve something or other. But never before in his waking hours had the young soldier experienced such a sensation.
He stopped, irresolute, almost bewildered, looking back at the boat–house, a black spot far away down by the sedgy brink of the slow river, and then again turning his face towards the monotonous lines of windows in the eastern frontage of Marchmont Towers.
"I let that man play with me to–day," he thought; "but our reckoning is to come. We have not done with each other yet."
He walked on towards the low archway leading into the quadrangle.
The room which had been John Marchmont's study, and which his widow had been wont to occupy since his death, looked into this quadrangle. Edward Arundel saw his cousin's dark head bending over a book, or a desk perhaps, behind the window.
"Let her beware of me, if she has done any wrong to my wife!" he thought. "To which of these people am I to look for an account of my poor lost girl? To which of these two am I to look! Heaven guide me to find the guilty one; and Heaven have mercy upon that wretched creature when the hour of reckoning comes; for I will have none."
Olivia Marchmont, looking through the window, saw her kinsman's face while this thought was in his mind. The expression which she saw there was so terrible, so merciless, so sublime in its grand and vengeful beauty, that her own face blanched even to a paler hue than that which had lately become habitual to it.
"Am I afraid of him?" she thought, as she pressed her forehead against the cold glass, and by a physical effort restrained the convulsive trembling that had suddenly shaken her frame. "Am I afraid of him? No; what injury can he inflict upon me worse than that which he has done me from the very first? If he could drag me to a scaffold, and deliver me with his own hands into the grasp of the hangman, he would do me no deeper wrong than he has done me from the hour of my earliest remembrance of him. He could inflict no new pangs, no sharper tortures, than I have been accustomed to suffer at his hands. He does not love me. He has never loved me. He never will love me. That is my wrong; and it is for that I take my revenge!"
She lifted her head, which had rested in a sullen attitude against the glass, and looked at the soldier's figure slowly advancing towards the western side of the house.
Then, with a smile,––the same horrible smile which Edward Arundel had seen light up her face on the previous night,––she muttered between her set teeth:––
"Shall I be sorry because this vengeance has fallen across my pathway? Shall I repent, and try to undo what I have done? Shall I thrust myself between others and Mr. Edward Arundel? Shall I make myself the ally and champion of this gallant soldier, who seldom speaks to me except to insult and upbraid me? Shall I take justice into my hands, and interfere for my kinsman's benefit? No; he has chosen to threaten me; he has chosen to believe vile things of me. From the first his indifference has been next kin to insolence. Let him take care of himself."
Edward Arundel took no heed of the grey eyes that watched him with such a vengeful light in their fixed gaze. He was still thinking of his missing wife, still feeling, to a degree that was intolerably painful, that miserable dream–like sense of helplessness and prostration.
"What am I to do?" he thought. "Shall I be for ever going backwards and forwards between my Cousin Olivia and Paul Marchmont; for ever questioning them, first one and then the other, and never getting any nearer to the truth?"
He asked himself this question, because the extreme anguish, the intense anxiety, which he had endured, seemed to have magnified the smallest events, and to have multiplied a hundred–fold the lapse of time. It seemed as if he had already spent half a lifetime in his search after John Marchmont's lost daughter.
"O my friend, my friend!" he thought, as some faint link of association, some memory thrust upon him by the aspect of the place in which he was, brought back the simple–minded tutor who had taught him mathematics eighteen years before,––"my poor friend, if this girl had not been my love and my wife, surely the memory of your trust in me would be enough to make me a desperate and merciless avenger of her wrongs."
He went into the hall, and from the hall to the tenantless western drawing–room,––a dreary chamber, with its grim and faded splendour, its stiff, old–fashioned furniture; a chamber which, unadorned by the presence of youth and innocence, had the aspect of belonging to a day that was gone, and people that were dead. So might have looked one of those sealed–up chambers in the buried cities of Italy, when the doors were opened, and eager living eyes first looked in upon the habitations of the dead.
Edward Arundel walked up and down the empty drawing–room. There were the ivory chessmen that he had brought from India, under a glass shade on an inlaid table in a window. How often he and Mary had played together in that very window; and how she had always lost her pawns, and left bishops and knights undefended, while trying to execute impossible manoeuvres with her queen! The young man paced slowly backwards and forwards across the old–fashioned bordered carpet, trying to think what he should do. He must form some plan of action in his own mind, he thought. There was foul work somewhere, he most implicitly believed; and it was for him to discover the motive of the treachery, and the person of the traitor.
Paul Marchmont! Paul Marchmont!
His mind always travelled back to this point. Paul Marchmont was Mary's natural enemy. Paul Marchmont was therefore surely the man to be suspected, the man to be found out and defeated.
And yet, if there was any truth in appearances, it was Olivia who was most inimical to the missing girl; it was Olivia whom Mary had feared; it was Olivia who had driven John Marchmont's orphan–child from her home once, and who might, by the same power to tyrannise and torture a weak and yielding nature, have so banished her again.
Or these two, Paul and Olivia, might both hate the defenceless girl, and might have between them plotted a wrong against her.
"Who will tell me the truth about my lost darling?" cried Edward Arundel. "Who will help me to look for my missing love?"
His lost darling; his missing love. It was thus that the young man spoke of his wife. That dark thought which had been suggested to him by the words of Olivia, by the mute evidence of the little bronze slipper picked up near the river–brink, had never taken root, or held even a temporary place in his breast. He would not––nay, more, he could not––think that his wife was dead. In all his confused and miserable dreams that dreary November night, no dream had ever shown him that. No image of death had mingled itself with the distorted shadows that had tormented his sleep. No still white face had looked up at him through a veil of murky waters. No moaning sob of a rushing stream had mixed its dismal sound with the many voices of his slumbers. No; he feared all manner of unknown sorrows; he looked vaguely forward to a sea of difficulty, to be waded across in blindness and bewilderment before he could clasp his rescued wife in his arms; but he never thought that she was dead.
Presently the idea came to him that it was outside Marchmont Towers,––away, beyond the walls of this grim, enchanted castle, where evil spirits seemed to hold possession,––that he should seek for the clue to his wife's hiding–place.
"There is Hester, that girl who was fond of Mary," he thought; "she may be able to tell me something, perhaps. I will go to her."
He went out into the hall to look for his servant, the faithful Morrison, who had been eating a very substantial breakfast with the domestics of the Towers––"the sauce to meat" being a prolonged discussion of the facts connected with Mary Marchmont's disappearance and her relations with Edward Arundel––and who came, radiant and greasy from the enjoyment of hot buttered cakes and Lincolnshire bacon, at the sound of his master's voice.
"I want you to get me some vehicle, and a lad who will drive me a few miles, Morrison," the young soldier said; "or you can drive me yourself, perhaps?"
"Certainly, Master Edward; I have driven your pa often, when we was travellin' together. I'll go and see if there's a phee–aton or a shay that will suit you, sir; something that goes easy on its springs."
"Get anything," muttered Captain Arundel, "so long as you can get it without loss of time."
All fuss and anxiety upon the subject of his health worried the young man. He felt his head dizzied with weakness and excitement; his arm––that muscular right arm, which had done him good service two years before in an encounter with a tigress––was weaker than the jewel–bound wrist of a woman. But he chafed against anything like consideration of his weakness; he rebelled against anything that seemed likely to hinder him in that one object upon which all the powers of his mind were bent.
Mr. Morrison went away with some show of briskness, but dropped into a very leisurely pace as soon as he was fairly out of his master's sight. He went straight to the stables, where he had a pleasant gossip with the grooms and hangers–on, and amused himself further by inspecting every bit of horseflesh in the Marchmont stables, prior to selecting a quiet grey cob which he felt himself capable of driving, and an old–fashioned gig with a yellow body and black and yellow wheels, bearing a strong resemblance to a monstrous wooden wasp.
While the faithful attendant to whom Mrs. Arundel had delegated the care of her son was thus employed, the soldier stood in the stone hall, looking out at the dreary wintry landscape, and pining to hurry away across the dismal swamps to the village in which he hoped to hear tidings of her he sought. He was lounging in a deep oaken window–seat, looking hopelessly at that barren prospect, that monotonous expanse of flat morass and leaden sky, when he heard a footstep behind him; and turning round saw Olivia's confidential servant, Barbara Simmons, the woman who had watched by his wife's sick–bed,––the woman whom he had compared to a ghoule.
She was walking slowly across the hall towards Olivia's room, whither a bell had just summoned her. Mrs. Marchmont had lately grown fretful and capricious, and did not care to be waited upon by any one except this woman, who had known her from her childhood, and was no stranger to her darkest moods.
Edward Arundel had determined to appeal to every living creature who was likely to know anything of his wife's disappearance, and he snatched the first opportunity of questioning this woman.
"Stop, Mrs. Simmons," he said, moving away from the window; "I want to speak to you; I want to talk to you about my wife."
The woman turned to him with a blank face, whose expressionless stare might mean either genuine surprise or an obstinate determination not to understand anything that might be said to her.
"Your wife, Captain Arundel!" she said, in cold measured tones, but with an accent of astonishment.
"Yes; my wife. Mary Marchmont, my lawfully–wedded wife. Look here, woman," cried Edward Arundel; "if you cannot accept the word of a soldier, and an honourable man, you can perhaps believe the evidence of your eyes."
He took a morocco memorandum–book from his breast–pocket. It was full of letters, cards, bank–notes, and miscellaneous scraps of paper carelessly stuffed into it, and amongst them Captain Arundel found the certificate of his marriage, which he had put away at random upon his wedding morning, and which had lain unheeded in his pocket–book ever since.
"Look here," he cried, spreading the document before the waiting–woman's eyes, and pointing, with a shaking hand, to the lines. "You believe that, I suppose?"
"O yes, sir," Barbara Simmons answered, after deliberately reading the certificate. "I have no reason to disbelieve it; no wish to disbelieve it."
"No; I suppose not," muttered Edward Arundel, "unless you too are leagued with Paul Marchmont."
The woman did not flinch at this hinted accusation, but answered the young man in that slow and emotionless manner which no change of circumstance seemed to have power to alter.
"I am leagued with no one, sir," she said, coldly. "I serve no one except my mistress, Miss Olivia––I mean Mrs. Marchmont."
The study–bell rang for the second time while she was speaking.
"I must go to my mistress now, sir," she said. "You heard her ringing for me."
"Go, then, and let me see you as you come back. I tell you I must and will speak to you. Everybody in this house tries to avoid me. It seems as if I was not to get a straight answer from any one of you. But I will know all that is to be known about my lost wife. Do you hear, woman? I will know!"
"I will come back to you directly, sir," Barbara Simmons answered quietly.
The leaden calmness of this woman's manner irritated Edward Arundel beyond all power of expression. Before his cousin Olivia's gloomy coldness he had been flung back upon himself as before an iceberg; but every now and then some sudden glow of fiery emotion had shot up amid that frigid mass, lurid and blazing, and the iceberg had been transformed into an angry and passionate woman, who might, in that moment of fierce emotion, betray the dark secrets of her soul. But this woman's manner presented a passive barrier, athwart which the young soldier was as powerless to penetrate as he would have been to walk through a block of solid stone.
Olivia was like some black and stony castle, whose barred windows bade defiance to the besieger, but behind whose narrow casements transient flashes of light gleamed fitfully upon the watchers without, hinting at the mysteries that were hidden within the citadel.
Barbara Simmons resembled a blank stone wall, grimly confronting the eager traveller, and giving no indication whatever of the unknown country on the other side.
She came back almost immediately, after being only a few moments in Olivia's room,––certainly not long enough to consult with her mistress as to what she was to say or to leave unsaid,––and presented herself before Captain Arundel.
"If you have any questions to ask, sir, about Miss Marchmont––about your wife––I shall be happy to answer them," she said.
"I have a hundred questions to ask," exclaimed the young man; "but first answer me this one plainly and truthfully––Where do you think my wife has gone? What do you think has become of her?"
The woman was silent for a few moments, and then answered very gravely,––
"I would rather not say what I think, sir."
"Why not?"
"Because I might say that which would make you unhappy."
"Can anything be more miserable to me than the prevarication which I meet with on every side?" cried Edward Arundel. "If you or any one else will be straightforward with me––remembering that I come to this place like a man who has risen from the grave, depending wholly on the word of others for the knowledge of that which is more vital to me than anything upon this earth––that person will be the best friend I have found since I rose from my sick–bed to come hither. You can have had no motive––if you are not in Paul Marchmont's pay––for being cruel to my poor girl. Tell me the truth, then; speak, and speak fearlessly."
"I have no reason to fear, sir," answered Barbara Simmons, lifting her faded eyes to the young man's eager face, with a gaze that seemed to say, "I have done no wrong, and I do not shrink from justifying myself." "I have no reason to fear, sir; I was piously brought up, and have done my best always to do my duty in the state of life in which Providence has been pleased to place me. I have not had a particularly happy life, sir; for thirty years ago I lost all that made me happy, in them that loved me, and had a claim to love me. I have attached myself to my mistress; but it isn't for me to expect a lady like her would stoop to make me more to her or nearer to her than I have a right to be as a servant."
There was no accent of hypocrisy or cant in any one of these deliberately–spoken words. It seemed as if in this speech the woman had told the history of her life; a brief, unvarnished history of a barren life, out of which all love and sunlight had been early swept away, leaving behind a desolate blank, that was not destined to be filled up by any affection from the young mistress so long and patiently served.
"I am faithful to my mistress, sir," Barbara Simmons added, presently; "and I try my best to do my duty to her. I owe no duty to any one else."
"You owe a duty to humanity," answered Edward Arundel. "Woman, do you think duty is a thing to be measured by line and rule? Christ came to save the lost sheep of the children of Israel; but was He less pitiful to the Canaanitish woman when she carried her sorrows to His feet? You and your mistress have made hard precepts for yourselves, and have tried to live by them. You try to circumscribe the area of your Christian charity, and to do good within given limits. The traveller who fell among thieves would have died of his wounds, for any help he might have had from you, if he had lain beyond your radius. Have you yet to learn that Christianity is cosmopolitan, illimitable, inexhaustible, subject to no laws of time or space? The duty you owe to your mistress is a duty that she buys and pays for––a matter of sordid barter, to be settled when you take your wages; the duty you owe to every miserable creature in your pathway is a sacred debt, to be accounted for to God."
As the young soldier spoke thus, carried away by his passionate agitation, suddenly eloquent by reason of the intensity of his feeling, a change came over Barbara's face. There was no very palpable evidence of emotion in that stolid countenance; but across the wooden blankness of the woman's face flitted a transient shadow, which was like the shadow of fear.
"I tried to do my duty to Miss Marchmont as well as to my mistress," she said. "I waited on her faithfully while she was ill. I sat up with her six nights running; I didn't take my clothes off for a week. There are folks in the house who can tell you as much."
"God knows I am grateful to you, and will reward you for any pity you may have shown my poor darling," the young man answered, in a more subdued tone; "only, if you pity me, and wish to help me, speak out, and speak plainly. What do you think has become of my lost girl?"
"I cannot tell you, sir. As God looks down upon me and judges me, I declare to you that I know no more than you know. But I think––––"
"You think what?"
"That you will never see Miss Marchmont again."
Edward Arundel started as violently as if, of all sentences, this was the last he had expected to hear pronounced. His sanguine temperament, fresh in its vigorous and untainted youth, could not grasp the thought of despair. He could be mad with passionate anger against the obstacles that separated him from his wife; but he could not believe those obstacles to be insurmountable. He could not doubt the power of his own devotion and courage to bring him back his lost love.
"Never––see her––again!"
He repeated these words as if they had belonged to a strange language, and he were trying to make out their meaning.
"You think," he gasped hoarsely, after a long pause,––"you think––that––she is––dead?"
"I think that she went out of this house in a desperate state of mind. She was seen––not by me, for I should have thought it my duty to stop her if I had seen her so––she was seen by one of the servants crying and sobbing awfully as she went away upon that last afternoon."
"And she was never seen again?"
"Never by me."
"And––you––you think she went out of this house with the intention of––of––destroying herself?"
The words died away in a hoarse whisper, and it was by the motion of his white lips that Barbara Simmons perceived what the young man meant.
"I do, sir."
"Have you any––particular reason for thinking so?"
"No reason beyond what I have told you, sir."
Edward Arundel bent his head, and walked away to hide his blanched face. He tried instinctively to conceal this mental suffering, as he had sometimes hidden physical torture in an Indian hospital, prompted by the involuntary impulse of a brave man. But though the woman's words had come upon him like a thunderbolt, he had no belief in the opinion they expressed. No; his young spirit wrestled against and rejected the awful conclusion. Other people might think what they chose; but he knew better than they. His wife was not dead. His life had been so smooth, so happy, so prosperous, so unclouded and successful, that it was scarcely strange he should be sceptical of calamity,––that his mind should be incapable of grasping the idea of a catastrophe so terrible as Mary's suicide.
"She was intrusted to me by her father," he thought. "She gave her faith to me before God's altar. She cannot have perished body and soul; she cannot have gone down to destruction for want of my arm outstretched to save her. God is too good to permit such misery."
The young soldier's piety was of the simplest and most unquestioning order, and involved an implicit belief that a right cause must always be ultimately victorious. With the same blind faith in which he had often muttered a hurried prayer before plunging in amidst the mad havoc of an Indian battle–field, confident that the justice of Heaven would never permit heathenish Affghans to triumph over Christian British gentlemen, he now believed that, in the darkest hour of Mary Marchmont's life, God's arm had held her back from the dread horror––the unatonable offence––of self–destruction.
"I thank you for having spoken frankly to me," he said to Barbara Simmons; "I believe that you have spoken in good faith. But I do not think my darling is for ever lost to me. I anticipate trouble and anxiety, disappointment, defeat for a time,––for a long time, perhaps; but I know that I shall find her in the end. The business of my life henceforth is to look for her."
Barbara's dull eyes held earnest watch upon the young man's countenance as he spoke. Anxiety and even fear were in that gaze, palpable to those who knew how to read the faint indications of the woman's stolid face.
Mr. Morrison brought the gig and pony to the western porch while Captain Arundel was talking to his cousin's servant, and presently the invalid was being driven across the flat between the Towers and the high–road to Kemberling.
Mary's old favourite, Farmer Pollard's daughter, came out of a low rustic shop as the gig drew up before her husband's door. This good–natured, tender–hearted Hester, advanced to matronly dignity under the name of Mrs. Jobson, carried a baby in her arms, and wore a white dimity hood, that made a penthouse over her simple rosy face. But at the sight of Captain Arundel nearly all the rosy colour disappeared from the country–woman's plump cheeks, and she stared aghast at the unlooked–for visitor, almost ready to believe that, if anything so substantial as a pony and gig could belong to the spiritual world, it was the phantom only of the soldier that she looked upon.
"O sir!" she said; "O Captain Arundel, is it really you?"
Edward alighted before Hester could recover from the surprise occasioned by his appearance.
"Yes, Mrs. Jobson," he said. "May I come into your house? I wish to speak to you."
Hester curtseyed, and stood aside to allow her visitor to pass her. Her manner was coldly respectful, and she looked at the young officer with a grave, reproachful face, which was strange to him. She ushered her guest into a parlour at the back of the shop; a prim apartment, splendid with varnished mahogany, shell–work boxes––bought during Hester's honeymoon–trip to a Lincolnshire watering–place––and voluminous achievements in the way of crochet–work; a gorgeous and Sabbath–day chamber, looking across a stand of geraniums into a garden that was orderly and trimly kept even in this dull November weather.
Mrs. Jobson drew forward an uneasy easy–chair, covered with horsehair, and veiled by a crochet–work representation of a peacock embowered among roses. She offered this luxurious seat to Captain Arundel, who, in his weakness, was well content to sit down upon the slippery cushions.
"I have come here to ask you to help me in my search for my wife, Hester," Edward Arundel said, in a scarcely audible voice.
It is not given to the bravest mind to be utterly independent and defiant of the body; and the soldier was beginning to feel that he had very nearly run the length of his tether, and must soon submit himself to be prostrated by sheer physical weakness.
"Your wife!" cried Hester eagerly. "O sir, is that true?"
"Is what true?"
"That poor Miss Mary was your lawful wedded wife?"
"She was," replied Edward Arundel sternly, "my true and lawful wife. What else should she have been, Mrs. Jobson?"
The farmer's daughter burst into tears.
"O sir," she said, sobbing violently as she spoke,––"O sir, the things that was said against that poor dear in this place and all about the Towers! The things that was said! It makes my heart bleed to think of them; it makes my heart ready to break when I think what my poor sweet young lady must have suffered. And it set me against you, sir; and I thought you was a bad and cruel–hearted man!"
"What did they say?" cried Edward. "What did they dare to say against her or against me?"
"They said that you had enticed her away from her home, sir, and that––that––there had been no marriage; and that you had deluded that poor innocent dear to run away with you; and that you'd deserted her afterwards, and the railway accident had come upon you as a punishment like; and that Mrs. Marchmont had found poor Miss Mary all alone at a country inn, and had brought her back to the Towers."
"But what if people did say this?" exclaimed Captain Arundel. "You could have contradicted their foul slanders; you could have spoken in defence of my poor helpless girl."
"Me, sir!"
"Yes. You must have heard the truth from my wife's own lips."
Hester Jobson burst into a new flood of tears as Edward Arundel said this.
"O no, sir," she sobbed; "that was the most cruel thing of all. I never could get to see Miss Mary; they wouldn't let me see her."
"Who wouldn't let you?"
"Mrs. Marchmont and Mr. Paul Marchmont. I was laid up, sir, when the report first spread about that Miss Mary had come home. Things was kept very secret, and it was said that Mrs. Marchmont was dreadfully cut up by the disgrace that had come upon her stepdaughter. My baby was born about that time, sir; but as soon as ever I could get about, I went up to the Towers, in the hope of seeing my poor dear miss. But Mrs. Simmons, Mrs. Marchmont's own maid, told me that Miss Mary was ill, very ill, and that no one was allowed to see her except those that waited upon her and that she was used to. And I begged and prayed that I might be allowed to see her, sir, with the tears in my eyes; for my heart bled for her, poor darling dear, when I thought of the cruel things that was said against her, and thought that, with all her riches and her learning, folks could dare to talk of her as they wouldn't dare talk of a poor man's wife like me. And I went again and again, sir; but it was no good; and, the last time I went, Mrs. Marchmont came out into the hall to me, and told me that I was intrusive and impertinent, and that it was me, and such as me, as had set all manner of scandal afloat about her stepdaughter. But I went again, sir, even after that; and I saw Mr. Paul Marchmont, and he was very kind to me, and frank and free–spoken,––almost like you, sir; and he told me that Mrs. Marchmont was rather stern and unforgiving towards the poor young lady,––he spoke very kind and pitiful of poor Miss Mary,––and that he would stand my friend, and he'd contrive that I should see my poor dear as soon as ever she picked up her spirits a bit, and was more fit to see me; and I was to come again in a week's time, he said."
"Well; and when you went––––?"
"When I went, sir," sobbed the carpenter's wife, "it was the 18th of October, and Miss Mary had run away upon the day before, and every body at the Towers was being sent right and left to look for her. I saw Mrs. Marchmont for a minute that afternoon; and she was as white as a sheet, and all of a tremble from head to foot, and she walked about the place as if she was out of her mind like."
"Guilt," thought the young soldier; "guilt of some sort. God only knows what that guilt has been!"
He covered his face with his hands, and waited to hear what more Hester Jobson had to tell him. There was no need of questioning here––no reservation or prevarication. With almost as tender regret as he himself could have felt, the carpenter's wife told him all that she knew of the sad story of Mary's disappearance.
"Nobody took much notice of me, sir, in the confusion of the place," Mrs. Jobson continued; "and there is a parlour–maid at the Towers called Susan Rose, that had been a schoolfellow with me ten years before, and I got her to tell me all about it. And she said that poor dear Miss Mary had been weak and ailing ever since she had recovered from the brain–fever, and that she had shut herself up in her room, and had seen no one except Mrs. Marchmont, and Mr. Paul, and Barbara Simmons; but on the 17th Mrs. Marchmont sent for her, asking her to come to the study. And the poor young lady went; and then Susan Rose thinks that there was high words between Mrs. Marchmont and her stepdaughter; for as Susan was crossing the hall poor Miss came out of the study, and her face was all smothered in tears, and she cried out, as she came into the hall, 'I can't bear it any longer. My life is too miserable; my fate is too wretched!' And then she ran upstairs, and Susan Rose followed up to her room and listened outside the door; and she heard the poor dear sobbing and crying out again and again, 'O papa, papa! If you knew what I suffer! O papa, papa, papa!'––so pitiful, that if Susan Rose had dared she would have gone in to try and comfort her; but Miss Mary had always been very reserved to all the servants, and Susan didn't dare intrude upon her. It was late that evening when my poor young lady was missed, and the servants sent out to look for her."
"And you, Hester,––you knew my wife better than any of these people,––where do you think she went?"
Hester Jobson looked piteously at the questioner.
"O sir!" she cried; "O Captain Arundel, don't ask me; pray, pray don't ask me."
"You think like these other people,––you think that she went away to destroy herself?"
"O sir, what can I think, what can I think except that? She was last seen down by the water–side, and one of her shoes was picked up amongst the rushes; and for all there's been such a search made after her, and a reward offered, and advertisements in the papers, and everything done that mortal could do to find her, there's been no news of her, sir,––not a trace to tell of her being living; not a creature to come forward and speak to her being seen by them after that day. What can I think, sir, what can I think, except––"
"Except that she threw herself into the river behind Marchmont Towers."
"I've tried to think different, sir; I've tried to hope I should see that poor sweet lamb again; but I can't, I can't. I've worn mourning for these three last Sundays, sir; for I seemed to feel as if it was a sin and a disrespectfulness towards her to wear colours, and sit in the church where I have seen her so often, looking so meek and beautiful, Sunday after Sunday."
Edward Arundel bowed his head upon his hands and wept silently. This woman's belief in Mary's death afflicted him more than he dared confess to himself. He had defied Olivia and Paul Marchmont, as enemies, who tried to force a false conviction upon him; but he could neither doubt nor defy this honest, warm–hearted creature, who wept aloud over the memory of his wife's sorrows. He could not doubt her sincerity; but he still refused to accept the belief which on every side was pressed upon him. He still refused to think that his wife was dead.
"The river was dragged for more than a week," he said, presently, "and my wife's body was never found."
Hester Jobson shook her head mournfully.
"That's a poor sign, sir," she answered; "the river's full of holes, I've heard say. My husband had a fellow–'prentice who drowned himself in that river seven year ago, and his body was never found."
Edward Arundel rose and walked towards the door.
"I do not believe that my wife is dead," he cried. He held out his hand to the carpenter's wife. "God bless you!" he said. "I thank you from my heart for your tender feeling towards my lost girl."
He went out to the gig, in which Mr. Morrison waited for him, rather tired of his morning's work.
"There is an inn a little way farther along the street, Morrison," Captain Arundel said. "I shall stop there."
The man stared at his master.
"And not go back to Marchmont Towers, Mr. Edward?"
"No."
Edward Arundel had held Nature in abeyance for more than four–and–twenty hours, and this outraged Nature now took her revenge by flinging the young man prostrate and powerless upon his bed at the simple Kemberling hostelry, and holding him prisoner there for three dreary days; three miserable days, with long, dark interminable evenings, during which the invalid had no better employment than to lie brooding over his sorrows, while Mr. Morrison read the "Times" newspaper in a monotonous and droning voice, for his sick master's entertainment.
How that helpless and prostrate prisoner, bound hand and foot in the stern grasp of retaliative Nature, loathed the leading–articles, the foreign correspondence, in the leviathan journal! How he sickened at the fiery English of Printing–House Square, as expounded by Mr. Morrison! The sound of the valet's voice was like the unbroken flow of a dull river. The great names that surged up every now and then upon that sluggish tide of oratory made no impression upon the sick man's mind. What was it to him if the glory of England were in danger, the freedom of a mighty people wavering in the balance? What was it to him if famine–stricken Ireland were perishing, and the far–away Indian possessions menaced by contumacious and treacherous Sikhs? What was it to him if the heavens were shrivelled like a blazing scroll, and the earth reeling on its shaken foundations? What had he to do with any catastrophe except that which had fallen upon his innocent young wife?
"O my broken trust!" he muttered sometimes, to the alarm of the confidential servant; "O my broken trust!"
But during the three days in which Captain Arundel lay in the best chamber at the Black Bull––the chief inn of Kemberling, and a very splendid place of public entertainment long ago, when all the northward–bound coaches had passed through that quiet Lincolnshire village––he was not without a medical attendant to give him some feeble help in the way of drugs and doctor's stuff, in the battle which he was fighting with offended Nature. I don't know but that the help, however well intended, may have gone rather to strengthen the hand of the enemy; for in those days––the year '48 is very long ago when we take the measure of time by science––country practitioners were apt to place themselves upon the side of the disease rather than of the patient, and to assist grim Death in his siege, by lending the professional aid of purgatives and phlebotomy.
On this principle Mr. George Weston, the surgeon of Kemberling, and the submissive and well–tutored husband of Paul Marchmont's sister, would fain have set to work with the prostrate soldier, on the plea that the patient's skin was hot and dry, and his white lips parched with fever. But Captain Arundel protested vehemently against any such treatment.
"You shall not take an ounce of blood out of my veins," he said, "or give me one drop of medicine that will weaken me. What I want is strength; strength to get up and leave this intolerable room, and go about the business that I have to do. As to fever," he added scornfully, "as long as I have to lie here and am hindered from going about the business of my life, every drop of my blood will boil with a fever that all the drugs in Apothecaries' Hall would have no power to subdue. Give me something to strengthen me. Patch me up somehow or other, Mr. Weston, if you can. But I warn you that, if you keep me long here, I shall leave this place either a corpse or a madman."
The surgeon, drinking tea with his wife and brother–in–law half an hour afterwards, related the conversation that had taken place between himself and his patient, breaking up his narrative with a great many "I said's" and "said he's," and with a good deal of rambling commentary upon the text.
Lavinia Weston looked at her brother while the surgeon told his story.
"He is very desperate about his wife, then, this dashing young captain?" Mr. Marchmont said, presently.
"Awful," answered the surgeon; "regular awful. I never saw anything like it. Really it was enough to cut a man up to hear him go on so. He asked me all sorts of questions about the time when she was ill and I attended upon her, and what did she say to me, and did she seem very unhappy, and all that sort of thing. Upon my word, you know, Mr. Paul,––of course I am very glad to think of your coming into the fortune, and I'm very much obliged to you for the kind promises you've made to me and Lavinia; but I almost felt as if I could have wished the poor young lady hadn't drowned herself."
Mrs. Weston shrugged her shoulders, and looked at her brother.
"Imbécile!" she muttered.
She was accustomed to talk to her brother very freely in rather school–girl French before her husband, to whom that language was as the most recondite of tongues, and who heartily admired her for superior knowledge.
He sat staring at her now, and eating bread–and–butter with a simple relish, which in itself was enough to mark him out as a man to be trampled upon.
* * * * *
On the fourth day after his interview with Hester, Edward Arundel was strong enough to leave his chamber at the Black Bull.
"I shall go to London by to–night's mail, Morrison," he said to his servant; "but before I leave Lincolnshire, I must pay another visit to Marchmont Towers. You can stop here, and pack my portmanteau while I go."
A rumbling old fly––looked upon as a splendid equipage by the inhabitants of Kemberling––was furnished for Captain Arundel's accommodation by the proprietor of the Black Bull; and once more the soldier approached that ill–omened dwelling–place which had been the home of his wife.
He was ushered without any delay to the study in which Olivia spent the greater part of her time.
The dusky afternoon was already closing in. A low fire burned in the old–fashioned grate, and one lighted wax–candle stood upon an open davenport, before which the widow sat amid a confusion of torn papers, cast upon the ground about her.
The open drawers of the davenport, the littered scraps of paper and loosely–tied documents, thrust, without any show of order, into the different compartments of the desk, bore testimony to that state of mental distraction which had been common to Olivia Marchmont for some time past. She herself, the gloomy tenant of the Towers, sat with her elbow resting on her desk, looking hopelessly and absently at the confusion before her.
"I am very tired," she said, with a sigh, as she motioned her cousin to a chair. "I have been trying to sort my papers, and to look for bills that have to be paid, and receipts. They come to me about everything. I am very tired."
Her manner was changed from that stern defiance with which she had last confronted her kinsman to an air of almost piteous feebleness. She rested her head on her hand, repeating, in a low voice,
"Yes, I am very tired."
Edward Arundel looked earnestly at her faded face, so faded from that which he remembered it in its proud young beauty, that, in spite of his doubt of this woman, he could scarcely refrain from some touch of pity for her.
"You are ill, Olivia," he said.
"Yes, I am ill; I am worn out; I am tired of my life. Why does not God have pity upon me, and take the bitter burden away? I have carried it too long."
She said this not so much to her cousin as to herself. She was like Job in his despair, and cried aloud to the Supreme Himself in a gloomy protest against her anguish.
"Olivia," said Edward Arundel very earnestly, "what is it that makes you unhappy? Is the burden that you carry a burden on your conscience? Is the black shadow upon your life a guilty secret? Is the cause of your unhappiness that which I suspect it to be? Is it that, in some hour of passion, you consented to league yourself with Paul Marchmont against my poor innocent girl? For pity's sake, speak, and undo what you have done. You cannot have been guilty of a crime. There has been some foul play, some conspiracy, some suppression; and my darling has been lured away by the machinations of this man. But he could not have got her into his power without your help. You hated her,––Heaven alone knows for what reason,––and in an evil hour you helped him, and now you are sorry for what you have done. But it is not too late, Olivia; Olivia, it is surely not too late. Speak, speak, woman, and undo what you have done. As you hope for mercy and forgiveness from God, undo what you have done. I will exact no atonement from you. Paul Marchmont, this smooth traitor, this frank man of the world, who defied me with a smile,––he only shall be called upon to answer for the wrong done against my darling. Speak, Olivia, for pity's sake," cried the young man, casting himself upon his knees at his cousin's feet. "You are of my own blood; you must have some spark of regard for me; have compassion upon me, then, or have compassion upon your own guilty soul, which must perish everlastingly if you withhold the truth. Have pity, Olivia, and speak!"
The widow had risen to her feet, recoiling from the soldier as he knelt before her, and looking at him with an awful light in the eyes that alone gave life to her corpse–like face.
Suddenly she flung her arms up above her head, stretching her wasted hands towards the ceiling.
"By the God who has renounced and abandoned me," she cried, "I have no more knowledge than you have of Mary Marchmont's fate. From the hour in which she left this house, upon the 17th of October, until this present moment, I have neither seen her nor heard of her. If I have lied to you, Edward Arundel," she added, dropping her extended arms, and turning quietly to her cousin,––"if I have lied to you in saying this, may the tortures which I suffer be doubled to me,––if in the infinite of suffering there is any anguish worse than that I now endure."