THE DESERTED CHAMBERS.
Edward Arundel kept his word. He waited for a week and upwards, but
Paul Marchmont made no sign; and after having given him three days'
grace over and above the promised time, the young man abandoned
Kemberling Retreat, for ever, as he thought, and went away from
Lincolnshire.
He had waited; hoping that Paul Marchmont would try to retaliate, and
that some desperate struggle, physical or legal,--he scarcely cared
which,--would occur between them. He would have courted any hazard
which might have given him some chance of revenge. But nothing
happened. He sent out Mr. Morrison to beat up information about the
master of Marchmont Towers; and the factotum came back with the
intelligence that Mr. Marchmont was ill, and would see no
one--"leastways" excepting his mother and Mr. George Weston.
Edward Arundel shrugged his shoulders when he heard these tidings.
"What a contemptible cur the man is!" he thought. "There was a time
when I could have suspected him of any foul play against my lost girl.
I know him better now, and know that he is not even capable of a great
crime. He was only strong enough to stab his victim in the dark, with
lying paragraphs in newspapers, and dastardly hints and inuendoes."
It would have been only perhaps an act of ordinary politeness had
Edward Arundel paid a farewell visit to his friends at the Grange. But
he did not go near the hospitable old house. He contented himself with
writing a cordial letter to Major Lawford, thanking him for his
hospitality and kindness, and referring, vaguely enough, to the hope of
a future meeting.
He despatched this letter by Mr. Morrison, who was in very high spirits
at the prospect of leaving Kemberling, and who went about his work with
almost boyish activity in the exuberance of his delight. The valet
worked so briskly as to complete all necessary arrangements in a couple
of days; and on the 29th of October, late in the afternoon, all was
ready, and he had nothing to do but to superintend the departure of the
two horses from the Kemberling railway-station, under the guardianship
of the lad who had served as Edward's groom.
Throughout that last day Mr. Arundel wandered here and there about the
house and garden that so soon were to be deserted. He was dreadfully at
a loss what to do with himself, and, alas! it was not to-day only that
he felt the burden of his hopeless idleness. He felt it always; a
horrible load, not to be cast away from him. His life had been broken
off short, as it were, by the catastrophe which had left him a widower
before his honeymoon was well over. The story of his existence was
abruptly broken asunder; all the better part of his life was taken away
from him, and he did not know what to do with the blank and useless
remnant. The ravelled threads of a once-harmonious web, suddenly
wrenched in twain, presented a mass of inextricable confusion; and the
young man's brain grew dizzy when he tried to draw them out, or to
consider them separately.
His life was most miserable, most hopeless, by reason of its emptiness.
He had no duty to perform, no task to achieve. That nature must be
utterly selfish, entirely given over to sybarite rest and
self-indulgence, which does not feel a lack of something wanting
these,--a duty or a purpose. Better to be Sisyphus toiling up the
mountain-side, than Sisyphus with the stone taken away from him, and no
hope of ever reaching the top. I heard a man once--a bill-sticker, and
not by any means a sentimental or philosophical person--declare that he
had never known real prosperity until he had thirteen orphan
grandchildren to support; and surely there was a universal moral in
that bill-sticker's confession. He had been a drunkard before,
perhaps,--he didn't say anything about that,--and a reprobate, it may
be; but those thirteen small mouths clamoring for food made him sober
and earnest, brave and true. He had a duty to do, and was happy in its
performance. He was wanted in the world, and he was somebody. From
Napoleon III., holding the destinies of civilised Europe in his hands,
and debating whether he shall re-create Poland or build a new
boulevard, to Paterfamilias in a Government office, working for the
little ones at home,--and from Paterfamilias to the crossing-sweeper,
who craves his diurnal halfpenny from busy citizens, tramping to their
daily toil,--every man has his separate labour and his different
responsibility. For ever and for ever the busy wheel of life turns
round; but duty and ambition are the motive powers that keep it going.
Edward Arundel felt the barrenness of his life, now that he had taken
the only revenge which was possible for him upon the man who had
persecuted his wife. _That_ had been a rapturous but brief enjoyment.
It was over. He could do no more to the man; since there was no lower
depth of humiliation--in these later days, when pillories and
whipping-posts and stocks are exploded from our market-places--to which
a degraded creature could descend. No; there was no more to be done. It
was useless to stop in Lincolnshire. The sad suggestion of the little
slipper found by the water-side was but too true. Paul Marchmont had
not murdered his helpless cousin; he had only tortured her to death. He
was quite safe from the law of the land, which, being of a positive and
arbitrary nature, takes no cognisance of indefinable offences. This
most infamous man was safe; and was free to enjoy his ill-gotten
grandeur--if he could take much pleasure in it, after the scene upon
the stone terrace.
The only joy that had been left for Edward Arundel after his retirement
from the East India Company's service was this fierce delight of
vengeance. He had drained the intoxicating cup to the dregs, and had
been drunken at first in the sense of his triumph. But he was sober
now; and he paced up and down the neglected garden beneath a chill
October sky, crunching the fallen leaves under his feet, with his arms
folded and his head bent, thinking of the barren future. It was all
bare,--a blank stretch of desert land, with no city in the distance; no
purple domes or airy minarets on the horizon. It was in the very nature
of this young man to be a soldier; and he was nothing if not a soldier.
He could never remember having had any other aspiration than that eager
thirst for military glory. Before he knew the meaning of the word
"war," in his very infancy, the sound of a trumpet or the sight of a
waving banner, a glittering weapon, a sentinel's scarlet coat, had
moved him to a kind of rapture. The unvarnished schoolroom records of
Greek and Roman warfare had been as delightful to him as the finest
passages of a Macaulay or a Froude, a Thiers or Lamartine. He was a
soldier by the inspiration of Heaven, as all great soldiers are. He had
never known any other ambition, or dreamed any other dream. Other lads
had talked of the bar, and the senate, and _their_ glories. Bah! how
cold and tame they seemed! What was the glory of a parliamentary
triumph, in which words were the only weapons wielded by the
combatants, compared with a hand-to-hand struggle, ankle deep in the
bloody mire of a crowded trench, or a cavalry charge, before which a
phalanx of fierce Affghans fled like frightened sheep upon a moor!
Edward Arundel was a soldier, like the Duke of Wellington or Sir Colin
Campbell,--one writes the old romantic name involuntarily, because one
loves it best,--or Othello. The Moor's first lamentation when he
believes that Desdemona is false, and his life is broken, is that
sublime farewell to all the glories of the battle-field. It was almost
the same with Edward Arundel. The loss of his wife and of his captaincy
were blent and mingled in his mind and he could only bewail the one
great loss which left life most desolate.
He had never felt the full extent of his desolation until now; for
heretofore he had been buoyed up by the hope of vengeance upon Paul
Marchmont; and now that his solitary hope had been realised to the
fullest possible extent, there was nothing left,--nothing but to revoke
the sacrifice he had made, and to regain his place in the Indian army
at any cost.
He tried not to think of the possibility of this. It seemed to him
almost an infidelity towards his dead wife to dream of winning honours
and distinction, now that she, who would have been so proud of any
triumph won by him, was for ever lost.
So, under the grey October sky he paced up and down upon the
grass-grown pathways, amidst the weeds and briars, the brambles and
broken branches that crackled as he trod upon them; and late in the
afternoon, when the day, which had been sunless and cold, was melting
into dusky twilight, he opened the low wooden gateway and went out into
the road. An impulse which he could not resist took him towards the
river-bank and the wood behind Marchmont Towers. Once more, for the
last time in his life perhaps, he went down to that lonely shore. He
went to look at the bleak unlovely place which had been the scene of
his betrothal.
It was not that he had any thought of meeting Olivia Marchmont; he had
dismissed her from his mind ever since his last visit to the lonely
boat-house. Whatever the mystery of her life might be, her secret lay
at the bottom of a black depth which the impetuous soldier did not care
to fathom. He did not want to discover that hideous secret. Tarnished
honour, shame, falsehood, disgrace, lurked in the obscurity in which
John Marchmont's widow had chosen to enshroud her life. Let them rest.
It was not for him to drag away the curtain that sheltered his
kinswoman from the world.
He had no thought, therefore, of prying into any secrets that might be
hidden in the pavilion by the water. The fascination that lured him to
the spot was the memory of the past. He could not go to Mary's grave;
but he went, in as reverent a spirit as he would have gone thither, to
the scene of his betrothal, to pay his farewell visit to the spot which
had been for ever hallowed by the confession of her innocent love.
It was nearly dark when he got to the river-side. He went by a path
which quite avoided the grounds about Marchmont Towers,--a narrow
footpath, which served as a towing-path sometimes, when some black
barge crawled by on its way out to the open sea. To-night the river was
hidden by a mist,--a white fog,--that obscured land and water; and it
was only by the sound of the horses' hoofs that Edward Arundel had
warning to step aside, as a string of them went by, dragging a chain
that grated on the pebbles by the river-side.
"Why should they say my darling committed suicide?" thought Edward
Arundel, as he groped his way along the narrow pathway. "It was on such
an evening as this that she ran away from home. What more likely than
that she lost the track, and wandered into the river? Oh, my own poor
lost one, God grant it was so! God grant it was by His will, and not
your own desperate act, that you were lost to me!"
Sorrowful as the thought of his wife's death was to him, it soothed him
to believe that death might have been accidental. There was all the
difference betwixt sorrow and despair in the alternative.
Wandering ignorantly and helplessly through this autumnal fog, Edward
Arundel found himself at the boat-house before he was aware of its
vicinity.
There was a light gleaming from the broad north window of the
painting-room, and a slanting line of light streamed out of the
half-open door. In this lighted doorway Edward saw the figure of a
girl,--an unkempt, red-headed girl, with a flat freckled face; a girl
who wore a lavender-cotton pinafore and hob-nailed boots, with a good
deal of brass about the leathern fronts, and a redundancy of rusty
leathern boot-lace twisted round the ankles.
The young man remembered having seen this girl once in the village of
Kemberling. She had been in Mrs. Weston's service as a drudge, and was
supposed to have received her education in the Swampington union.
This young lady was supporting herself against the half-open door, with
her arms a-kimbo, and her hands planted upon her hips, in humble
imitation of the matrons whom she had been wont to see lounging at
their cottage-doors in the high street of Kemberling, when the labours
of the day were done.
Edward Arundel started at the sudden apparition of this damsel.
"Who are you, girl?" he asked; "and what brings you to this place?"
He trembled as he spoke. A sudden agitation had seized upon him, which
he had no power to account for. It seemed as if Providence had brought
him to this spot to-night, and had placed this ignorant country-girl in
his way, for some special purpose. Whatever the secrets of this place
might be, he was to know them, it appeared, since he had been led here,
not by the promptings of curiosity, but only by a reverent love for a
scene that was associated with his dead wife.
"Who are you, girl?" he asked again.
"Oi be Betsy Murrel, sir," the damsel answered; "some on 'em calls me
'Wuk-us Bet;' and I be coom here to cle-an oop a bit."
"To clean up what?"
"The paa-intin' room. There's a de-al o' moock aboot, and aw'm to
fettle oop, and make all toidy agen t' squire gets well."
"Are you all alone here?"
"All alo-an? Oh, yes, sir."
"Have you been here long?"
The girl looked at Mr. Arundel with a cunning leer, which was one of
her "wuk-us" acquirements.
"Aw've bin here off an' on ever since t' squire ke-ame," she said.
"There's a deal o' cleanin' down 'ere."
Edward Arundel looked at her sternly; but there was nothing to be
gathered from her stolid countenance after its agreeable leer had
melted away. The young man might have scrutinised the figure-head of
the black barge creeping slowly past upon the hidden river with quite
as much chance of getting any information out of its play of feature.
He walked past the girl into Paul Marchmont's painting-room. Miss Betsy
Murrel made no attempt to hinder him. She had spoken the truth as to
the cleaning of the place, for the room smelt of soapsuds, and a pail
and scrubbing-brush stood in the middle of the floor. The young man
looked at the door behind which he had heard the crying of the child.
It was ajar, and the stone-steps leading up to it were wet, bearing
testimony to Betsy Murrel's industry.
Edward Arundel took the flaming tallow-candle from the table in the
painting-room, and went up the steps into the pavilion. The girl
followed, but she did not try to restrain him, or to interfere with
him. She followed him with her mouth open, staring at him after the
manner of her kind, and she looked the very image of rustic stupidity.
With the flaring candle shaded by his left hand, Edward Arundel
examined the two chambers in the pavilion. There was very little to
reward his scrutiny. The two small rooms were bare and cheerless. The
repairs that had been executed had only gone so far as to make them
tolerably inhabitable, and secure from wind and weather. The furniture
was the same that Edward remembered having seen on his last visit to
the Towers; for Mary had been fond of sitting in one of the little
rooms, looking out at the slow river and the trembling rushes on the
shore. There was no trace of recent occupation in the empty rooms, no
ashes in the grates. The girl grinned maliciously as Mr. Arundel raised
the light above his head, and looked about him. He walked in and out of
the two rooms. He stared at the obsolete chairs, the rickety tables,
the dilapidated damask curtains, flapping every now and then in the
wind that rushed in through the crannies of the doors and windows. He
looked here and there, like a man bewildered; much to the amusement of
Miss Betsy Murrel, who, with her arms crossed, and her elbows in the
palms of her moist hands, followed him backwards and forwards between
the two small chambers.
"There was some one living here a week ago," he said; "some one who had
the care of a----"
He stopped suddenly. If he had guessed rightly at the dark secret, it
was better that it should remain for ever hidden. This girl was perhaps
more ignorant than himself. It was not for him to enlighten her.
"Do you know if anybody has lived here lately?" he asked.
Betsy Murrel shook her head.
"Nobody has lived here--not that _oi_ knows of," she replied; "not to
take their victuals, and such loike. Missus brings her work down
sometimes, and sits in one of these here rooms, while Muster Poll does
his pictur' paa-intin'; that's all _oi_ knows of."
Edward went back to the painting-room, and set down his candle. The
mystery of those empty chambers was no business of his. He began to
think that his cousin Olivia was mad, and that her outbursts of terror
and agitation had been only the raving of a mad woman, after all. There
had been a great deal in her manner during the last year that had
seemed like insanity. The presence of the child might have been purely
accidental; and his cousin's wild vehemence only a paroxysm of
insanity. He sighed as he left Miss Murrel to her scouring. The world
seemed out of joint; and he, whose energetic nature fitted him for the
straightening of crooked things, had no knowledge of the means by which
it might be set right.
"Good-bye, lonely place," he said; "good-bye to the spot where my young
wife first told me of her love."
He walked back to the cottage, where the bustle of packing and
preparation was all over, and where Mr. Morrison was entertaining a
select party of friends in the kitchen. Early the next morning Mr.
Arundel and his servant left Lincolnshire; the key of Kemberling
Retreat was given up to the landlord; and a wooden board, flapping
above the dilapidated trellis-work of the porch, gave notice that the
habitation was to be let.