RISEN FROM THE GRAVE.
The rain dripped ceaselessly upon the dreary earth under a grey
November sky,--a dull and lowering sky, that seemed to brood over this
lower world with some menace of coming down to blot out and destroy it.
The express-train, rushing headlong across the wet flats of
Lincolnshire, glared like a meteor in the gray fog; the dismal shriek
of the engine was like the cry of a bird of prey. The few passengers
who had chosen that dreary winter's day for their travels looked
despondently out at the monotonous prospect, seeking in vain to descry
some spot of hope in the joyless prospect; or made futile attempts to
read their newspapers by the dim light of the lamp in the roof of the
carriage. Sulky passengers shuddered savagely as they wrapped
themselves in huge woollen rugs or ponderous coverings made from the
skins of wild beasts. Melancholy passengers drew grotesque and hideous
travelling-caps over their brows, and, coiling themselves in the corner
of their seats, essayed to sleep away the weary hours. Everything upon
this earth seemed dismal and damp, cold and desolate, incongruous and
uncomfortable.
But there was one first-class passenger in that Lincolnshire express
who made himself especially obnoxious to his fellows by the display of
an amount of restlessness and superabundant energy quite out of keeping
with the lazy despondency of those about him.
This was a young man with a long tawny beard and a white face,--a very
handsome face, though wan and attenuated, as if with some terrible
sickness, and somewhat disfigured by certain strappings of plaister,
which were bound about a patch of his skull a little above the left
temple. This young man had one side of the carriage to himself; and a
sort of bed had been made up for him with extra cushions, upon which he
lay at full length, when he was still, which was never for very long
together. He was enveloped almost to the chin in voluminous
railway-rugs, but, in spite of these coverings, shuddered every now and
then, as if with cold. He had a pocket-pistol amongst his travelling
paraphernalia, which he applied occasionally to his dry lips. Sometimes
drops of perspiration broke suddenly out upon his forehead, and were
brushed away by a tremulous hand, that was scarcely strong enough to
hold a cambric handkerchief. In short, it was sufficiently obvious to
every one that this young man with the tawny beard had only lately
risen from a sick-bed, and had risen therefrom considerably before the
time at which any prudent medical practitioner would have given him
licence to do so.
It was evident that he was very, very ill, but that he was, if
anything, more ill at ease in mind than in body; and that some terrible
gnawing anxiety, some restless care, some horrible uncertainty or
perpetual foreboding of trouble, would not allow him to be at peace. It
was as much as the three fellow-passengers who sat opposite to him
could do to bear with his impatience, his restlessness, his short
half-stifled moans, his long weary sighs; the horror of his fidgety
feet shuffled incessantly upon the cushions; the suddenly convulsive
jerks with which he would lift himself upon his elbow to stare fiercely
into the dismal fog outside the carriage window; the groans that were
wrung from him as he flung himself into new and painful positions; the
frightful aspect of physical agony which came over his face as he
looked at his watch,--and he drew out and consulted that ill-used
chronometer, upon an average, once in a quarter of an hour; his
impatient crumpling of the crisp leaves of a new "Bradshaw," which he
turned over ever and anon, as if, by perpetual reference to that
mysterious time-table, he might hasten the advent of the hour at which
he was to reach his destination. He was, altogether, a most aggravating
and exasperating travelling companion; and it was only out of Christian
forbearance with the weakness of his physical state that his irritated
fellow-passengers refrained from uniting themselves against him, and
casting him bodily out of the window of the carriage; as a clown
sometimes flings a venerable but tiresome pantaloon through a square
trap or pitfall, lurking, undreamed of, in the facade of an honest
tradesman's dwelling.
The three passengers had, in divers manners, expressed their sympathy
with the invalid traveller; but their courtesies had not been responded
to with any evidence of gratitude or heartiness. The young man had
answered his companions in an absent fashion, scarcely deigning to look
at them as he spoke;--speaking altogether with the air of some
sleep-walker, who roams hither and thither absorbed in a dreadful
dream, making a world for himself, and peopling it with horrible images
unknown to those about him.
Had he been ill?--Yes, very ill. He had had a railway accident, and
then brain-fever. He had been ill for a long time.
Somebody asked him how long.
He shuffled about upon the cushions, and groaned aloud at this
question, to the alarm of the man who had asked it.
"How long?" he cried, in a fierce agony of mental or bodily
uneasiness;--"how long? Two months,--three months,--ever since the 15th
of August."
Then another passenger, looking at the young man's very evident
sufferings from a commercial point of view, asked him whether he had
had any compensation.
"Compensation!" cried the invalid. "What compensation?"
"Compensation from the Railway Company. I hope you've a strong case
against them, for you've evidently been a terrible sufferer."
It was dreadful to see the way in which the sick man writhed under this
question.
"Compensation!" he cried. "What compensation can they give me for an
accident that shut me in a living grave for three months, that
separated me from----? You don't know what you're talking about, sir,"
he added suddenly; "I can't think of this business patiently; I can't
be reasonable. If they'd hacked _me_ to pieces, I shouldn't have cared.
I've been under a red-hot Indian sun, when we fellows couldn't see the
sky above us for the smoke of the cannons and the flashing of the
sabres about our heads, and I'm not afraid of a little cutting and
smashing more or less; but when I think what others may have suffered
through----I'm almost mad, and----!"
He couldn't say any more, for the intensity of his passion had shaken
him as a leaf is shaken by a whirlwind; and he fell back upon the
cushions, trembling in every limb, and groaning aloud. His
fellow-passengers looked at each other rather nervously, and two out of
the three entertained serious thoughts of changing carriages when the
express stopped midway between London and Lincoln.
But they were reassured by-and-by; for the invalid, who was Captain
Edward Arundel, or that pale shadow of the dashing young cavalry
officer which had risen from a sick-bed, relapsed into silence, and
displayed no more alarming symptoms than that perpetual restlessness
and disquietude which is cruelly wearying even to the strongest nerves.
He only spoke once more, and that was when the short day, in which
there had been no actual daylight, was closing in, and the journey
nearly finished, when he startled his companions by crying out
suddenly,--
"O my God! will this journey never come to an end? Shall I never be put
out of this horrible suspense?"
The journey, or at any rate Captain Arundel's share of it, came to an
end almost immediately afterwards, for the train stopped at
Swampington; and while the invalid was staggering feebly to his feet,
eager to scramble out of the carriage, his servant came to the door to
assist and support him.
"You seem to have borne the journey wonderful, sir," the man said
respectfully, as he tried to rearrange his master's wrappings, and to
do as much as circumstances, and the young man's restless impatience,
would allow of being done for his comfort.
"I have suffered the tortures of the infernal regions, Morrison,"
Captain Arundel ejaculated, in answer to his attendant's congratulatory
address. "Get me a fly directly; I must go to the Towers at once."
"Not to-night, sir, surely?" the servant remonstrated, in a tone of
alarm. "Your Mar and the doctors said you _must_ rest at Swampington
for a night."
"I'll rest nowhere till I've been to Marchmont Towers," answered the
young soldier passionately. "If I must walk there,--if I'm to drop down
dead on the road,--I'll go. If the cornfields between this and the
Towers were a blazing prairie or a raging sea, I'd go. Get me a fly,
man; and don't talk to me of my mother or the doctors. I'm going to
look for my wife. Get me a fly."
This demand for a commonplace hackney vehicle sounded rather like an
anti-climax, after the young man's talk of blazing prairies and raging
seas; but passionate reality has no ridiculous side, and Edward
Arundel's most foolish words were sublime by reason of their
earnestness.
"Get me a fly, Morrison," he said, grinding his heel upon the platform
in the intensity of his impatience. "Or, stay; we should gain more in
the end if you were to go to the George--it's not ten minutes' walk
from here; one of the porters will take you--the people there know me,
and they'll let you have some vehicle, with a pair of horses and a
clever driver. Tell them it's for an errand of life and death, and that
Captain Arundel will pay them three times their usual price, or six
times, if they wish. Tell them anything, so long as you get what we
want."
The valet, an old servant of Edward Arundel's father, was carried away
by the young man's mad impetuosity. The vitality of this broken-down
invalid, whose physical weakness contrasted strangely with his mental
energy, bore down upon the grave man-servant like an avalanche, and
carried him whither it would. He was fain to abandon all hope of being
true to the promises which he had given to Mrs. Arundel and the medical
men, and to yield himself to the will of the fiery young soldier.
He left Edward Arundel sitting upon a chair in the solitary
waiting-room, and hurried after the porter who had volunteered to show
him the way to the George Inn, the most prosperous hotel in
Swampington.
The valet had good reason to be astonished by his young master's energy
and determination; for Mary Marchmont's husband was as one rescued from
the very jaws of death. For eleven weeks after that terrible concussion
upon the South-Western Railway, Edward Arundel had lain in a state of
coma,--helpless, mindless; all the story of his life blotted away, and
his brain transformed into as blank a page as if he had been an infant
lying on his mother's knees. A fractured skull had been the young
Captain's chief share in those injuries which were dealt out pretty
freely to the travellers in the Exeter mail on the 15th of August; and
the young man had been conveyed to Dangerfield Park, whilst his
father's corpse lay in stately solemnity in one of the chief rooms,
almost as much a corpse as that dead father.
Mrs. Arundel's troubles had come, as the troubles of rich and
prosperous people often do come, in a sudden avalanche, that threatened
to overwhelm the tender-hearted matron. She had been summoned from
Germany to attend her husband's deathbed; and she was called away from
her faithful watch beside that deathbed, to hear tidings of the
accident that had befallen her younger son.
Neither the Dorsetshire doctor who attended the stricken traveller upon
his homeward journey, and brought the strong man, helpless as a child,
to claim the same tender devotion that had watched over his infancy,
nor the Devonshire doctors who were summoned to Dangerfield, gave any
hope of their patient's recovery. The sufferer might linger for years,
they said; but his existence would be only a living death, a horrible
blank, which it was a cruelty to wish prolonged. But when a great
London surgeon appeared upon the scene, a new light, a wonderful gleam
of hope, shone in upon the blackness of the mother's despair.
This great London surgeon, who was a very unassuming and matter-of-fact
little man, and who seemed in a great hurry to earn his fee and run
back to Saville Row by the next express, made a brief examination of
the patient, asked a very few sharp and trenchant questions of the
reverential provincial medical practitioners, and then declared that
the chief cause of Edward Arundel's state lay in the fact that a
portion of the skull was depressed,--a splinter pressed upon the brain.
The provincial practitioners opened their eyes very wide; and one of
them ventured to mutter something to the effect that he had thought as
much for a long time. The London surgeon further stated, that until the
pressure was removed from the patient's brain, Captain Edward Arundel
would remain in precisely the same state as that into which he had
fallen immediately upon the accident. The splinter could only be
removed by a very critical operation, and this operation must be
deferred until the patient's bodily strength was in some measure
restored.
The surgeon gave brief but decisive directions to the provincial
medical men as to the treatment of their patient during this
interregnum, and then departed, after promising to return as soon as
Captain Arundel was in a fit state for the operation. This period did
not arrive till the first week in November, when the Devonshire doctors
ventured to declare their patient's shattered frame in a great measure
renovated by their devoted attention, and the tender care of the best
of mothers.
The great surgeon came. The critical operation was performed, with such
eminent success as to merit a very long description, which afterwards
appeared in the _Lancet_; and slowly, like the gradual lifting of a
curtain, the black shadows passed away from Edward Arundel's mind, and
the memory of the past returned to him.
It was then that he raved madly about his young wife, perpetually
demanding that she might be summoned to him; continually declaring that
some great misfortune would befall her if she were not brought to his
side, that, even in his feebleness, he might defend and protect her.
His mother mistook his vehemence for the raving of delirium. The
doctors fell into the same error, and treated him for brain-fever. It
was only when the young soldier demonstrated to them that he could, by
making an effort over himself, be as reasonable as they were, that he
convinced them of their mistake. Then he begged to be left alone with
his mother; and, with his feverish hands clasped in hers, asked her the
meaning of her black dress, and the reason why his young wife had not
come to him. He learned that his mother's mourning garments were worn
in memory of his dead father. He learned also, after much bewilderment
and passionate questioning, that no tidings of Mary Marchmont had ever
come to Dangerfield.
It was then that the young man told his mother the story of his
marriage: how that marriage had been contracted in haste, but with no
real desire for secrecy; how he had, out of mere idleness, put off
writing to his friends until that last fatal night; and how, at the
very moment when the pen was in his hand and the paper spread out
before him, the different claims of a double duty had torn him asunder,
and he had been summoned from the companionship of his bride to the
deathbed of his father.
Mrs. Arundel tried in vain to set her son's mind at rest upon the
subject of his wife's silence.
"No, mother!" he cried; "it is useless talking to me. You don't know my
poor darling. She has the courage of a heroine, as well as the
simplicity of a child. There has been some foul play at the bottom of
this; it is treachery that has kept my wife from me. She would have
come here on foot, had she been free to come. I know whose hand is in
this business. Olivia Marchmont has kept my poor girl a prisoner;
Olivia Marchmont has set herself between me and my darling!"
"But you don't know this, Edward. I'll write to Mr. Paulette; he will
be able to tell us what has happened."
The young man writhed in a sudden paroxysm of mental agony.
"Write to Mr. Paulette!" he exclaimed. "No, mother; there shall be no
delay, no waiting for return-posts. That sort of torture would kill me
in a few hours. No, mother; I will go to my wife by the first train
that will take me on my way to Lincolnshire."
"You will go! You, Edward! in your state!"
There was a terrible outburst of remonstrance and entreaty on the part
of the poor mother. Mrs. Arundel went down upon her knees before her
son, imploring him not to leave Dangerfield till his strength was
recovered; imploring him to let her telegraph a summons to Richard
Paulette; to let her go herself to Marchmont Towers in search of Mary;
to do anything rather than carry out the one mad purpose that he was
bent on,--the purpose of going himself to look for his wife.
The mother's tears and prayers were vain; no adamant was ever firmer
than the young soldier.
"She is my wife, mother," he said; "I have sworn to protect and cherish
her; and I have reason to think she has fallen into merciless hands. If
I die upon the road, I must go to her. It is not a case in which I can
do my duty by proxy. Every moment I delay is a wrong to that poor
helpless girl. Be reasonable, dear mother, I implore you; I should
suffer fifty times more by the torture of suspense if I stayed here,
than I can possibly suffer in a railroad journey from here to
Lincolnshire."
The soldier's strong will triumphed over every opposition. The
provincial doctors held up their hands, and protested against the
madness of their patient; but without avail. All that either Mrs.
Arundel or the doctors could do, was to make such preparations and
arrangements as would render the weary journey easier; and it was under
the mother's superintendence that the air-cushions, the brandy-flasks,
the hartshorn, sal-volatile, and railway-rugs, had been provided for
the Captain's comfort.
It was thus that, after a blank interval of three months, Edward
Arundel, like some creature newly risen from the grave, returned to
Swampington, upon his way to Marchmont Towers.
The delay seemed endless to this restless passenger, sitting in the
empty waiting-room of the quiet Lincolnshire station, though the ostler
and stable-boys at the "George" were bestirring themselves with
good-will, urged on by Mr. Morrison's promises of liberal reward for
their trouble, and though the man who was to drive the carriage lost no
time in arraying himself for the journey. Captain Arundel looked at his
watch three times while he sat in that dreary Swampington waiting-room.
There was a clock over the mantelpiece, but he would not trust to that.
"Eight o'clock!" he muttered. "It will be ten before I get to the
Towers, if the carriage doesn't come directly."
He got up, and walked from the waiting-room to the platform, and from
the platform to the door of the station. He was so weak as to be
obliged to support himself with his stick; and even with that help he
tottered and reeled sometimes like a drunken man. But, in his eager
impatience, he was almost unconscious of his own weakness.
"Will it never come?" he muttered. "Will it never come?"
At last, after an intolerable delay, as it seemed to the young man, the
carriage-and-pair from the George Inn rattled up to the door of the
station, with Mr. Morrison upon the box, and a postillion loosely
balanced upon one of the long-legged, long-backed, bony grey horses.
Edward Arundel got into the vehicle before his valet could alight to
assist him.
"Marchmont Towers!" he cried to the postillion; "and a five-pound note
if you get there in less than an hour."
He flung some money to the officials who had gathered about the door to
witness his departure, and who had eagerly pressed forward to render
him that assistance which, even in his weakness, he disdained.
These men looked gravely at each other as the carriage dashed off into
the fog, blundering and reeling as it went along the narrow half-made
road, that led from the desert patch of waste ground upon which the
station was built into the high-street of Swampington.
"Marchmont Towers!" said one of the men, in a tone that seemed to imply
that there was something ominous even in the name of the Lincolnshire
mansion. "What does _he_ want at Marchmont Towers, I wonder?"
"Why, don't you know who he is, mate?" responded the other man,
contemptuously.
"No."
"He's Parson Arundel's nevy,--the young officer that some folks said
ran away with the poor young miss oop at the Towers."
"My word! is he now? Why, I shouldn't ha' known him."
"No; he's a'most like the ghost of what he was, poor young chap. I've
heerd as he was in that accident as happened last August on the
Sou'-Western."
The railway official shrugged his shoulders.
"It's all a queer story," he said. "I can't make out naught about it;
but I know _I_ shouldn't care to go up to the Towers after dark."
Marchmont Towers had evidently fallen into rather evil repute amongst
these simple Lincolnshire people.
* * * * *
The carriage in which Edward Arundel rode was a superannuated old
chariot, whose uneasy springs rattled and shook the sick man to pieces.
He groaned aloud every now and then from sheer physical agony; and yet
I almost doubt if he knew that he suffered, so superior in its
intensity was the pain of his mind to every bodily torture. Whatever
consciousness he had of his racked and aching limbs was as nothing in
comparison to the racking anguish of suspense, the intolerable agony of
anxiety, which seemed multiplied by every moment. He sat with his face
turned towards the open window of the carriage, looking out steadily
into the night. There was nothing before him but a blank darkness and
thick fog, and a flat country blotted out by the falling rain; but he
strained his eyes until the pupils dilated painfully, in his desire to
recognise some landmark in the hidden prospect.
"_When_ shall I get there?" he cried aloud, in a paroxysm of rage and
grief. "My own one, my pretty one, my wife, when shall I get to you?"
He clenched his thin hands until the nails cut into his flesh. He
stamped upon the floor of the carriage. He cursed the rusty, creaking
springs, the slow-footed horses, the pools of water through which the
wretched animals floundered pastern-deep. He cursed the darkness of the
night, the stupidity of the postillion, the length of the
way,--everything, and anything, that kept him back from the end which
he wanted to reach.
At last the end came. The carriage drew up before the tall iron gates,
behind which stretched, dreary and desolate as some patch of
common-land, that melancholy waste which was called a park.
A light burned dimly in the lower window of the lodge,--a little spot
that twinkled faintly red and luminous through the darkness and the
rain; but the iron gates were as closely shut as if Marchmont Towers
had been a prison-house. Edward Arundel was in no humour to linger long
for the opening of those gates. He sprang from the carriage, reckless
of the weakness of his cramped limbs, before the valet could descend
from the rickety box-seat, or the postillion could get off his horse,
and shook the wet and rusty iron bars with his own wasted hands. The
gates rattled, but resisted the concussion; they had evidently been
locked for the night. The young man seized an iron ring, dangling at
the end of a chain, which hung beside one of the stone pillars, and
rang a peal that resounded like an alarm-signal through the darkness. A
fierce watchdog far away in the distance howled dismally at the
summons, and the dissonant shriek of a peacock sounded across the flat.
The door of the lodge was opened about five minutes after the bell had
rung, and an old man peered out into the night, holding a candle shaded
by his feeble hand, and looking suspiciously towards the gate.
"Who is it?" he said.
"It is I, Captain Arundel. Open the gate, please."
The man, who was very old, and whose intellect seemed to have grown as
dim and foggy as the night itself, reflected for a few moments, and
then mumbled,--
"Cap'en Arundel! Ay, to be sure, to be sure. Parson Arundel's nevy; ay,
ay."
He went back into the lodge, to the disgust and aggravation of the
young soldier, who rattled fiercely at the gate once more in his
impatience. But the old man emerged presently, as tranquil as if the
blank November night had been some sunshiny noontide in July, carrying
a lantern and a bunch of keys, one of which he proceeded in a leisurely
manner to apply to the great lock of the gate.
"Let me in!" cried Edward Arundel. "Man alive! do you think I came down
here to stand all night staring through these iron bars? Is Marchmont
Towers a prison, that you shut your gates as if they were never to be
opened until the Day of Judgment?"
The old man responded with a feeble, chirpy laugh, an audible grin,
senile and conciliatory.
"We've no need to keep t' geates open arter dark," he said; "folk
doan't coome to the Toowers arter dark."
He had succeeded by this time in turning the key in the lock; one of
the gates rolled slowly back upon its rusty hinges, creaking and
groaning as if in hoarse protest against all visitors to the Towers;
and Edward Arundel entered the dreary domain which John Marchmont had
inherited from his kinsman.
The postillion turned his horses from the highroad without the gates
into the broad drive leading up to the mansion. Far away, across the
wet flats, the broad western front of that gaunt stone dwelling-place
frowned upon the travellers, its black grimness only relieved by two or
three dim red patches, that told of lighted windows and human
habitation. It was rather difficult to associate friendly flesh and
blood with Marchmont Towers on this dark November night. The nervous
traveller would have rather expected to find diabolical denizens
lurking within those black and stony walls; hideous enchantments
beneath that rain-bespattered roof; weird and incarnate horrors
brooding by deserted hearths, and fearful shrieks of souls in perpetual
pain breaking upon the stillness of the night.
Edward Arundel had no thought of these things. He knew that the place
was darksome and gloomy, and that, in very spite of himself, he had
always been unpleasantly impressed by it; but he knew nothing more. He
only wanted to reach the house without delay, and to ask for the young
wife whom he had parted with upon a balmy August evening three months
before. He wanted this passionately, almost madly; and every moment
made his impatience wilder, his anxiety more intense. It seemed as if
all the journey from Dangerfield Park to Lincolnshire was as nothing
compared to the space that still lay between him and Marchmont Towers.
"We've done it in double-quick time, sir," the postillion said,
complacently pointing to the steaming sides of his horses. "Master'll
gie it to me for driving the beasts like this."
Edward Arundel looked at the panting animals. They had brought him
quickly, then, though the way had seemed so long.
"You shall have a five-pound note, my lad," he said, "if you get me up
to yonder house in five minutes."
He had his hand upon the door of the carriage, and was leaning against
it for support, while he tried to recover enough strength with which to
clamber into the vehicle, when his eye was caught by some white object
flapping in the rain against the stone pillar of the gate, and made
dimly visible in a flickering patch of light from the lodge-keeper's
lantern.
"What's that?" he cried, pointing to this white spot upon the
moss-grown stone.
The old man slowly raised his eyes to the spot towards which the
soldier's finger pointed.
"That?" he mumbled. "Ay, to be sure, to be sure. Poor young lady!
That's the printed bill as they stook oop. It's the printed bill, to be
sure, to be sure. I'd a'most forgot it. It ain't been much good,
anyhow; and I'd a'most forgot it."
"The printed bill! the young lady!" gasped Edward Arundel, in a hoarse,
choking voice.
He snatched the lantern from the lodge-keeper's hand with a force that
sent the old man reeling and tottering several paces backward; and,
rushing to the stone pillar, held the light up above his head, on a
level with the white placard which had attracted his notice. It was
damp and dilapidated at the edges; but that which was printed upon it
was as visible to the soldier as though each commonplace character had
been a fiery sign inscribed upon a blazing scroll.
This was the announcement which Edward Arundel read upon the gate-post
of Marchmont Towers:--
"ONE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD.--Whereas Miss Mary Marchmont left her home
on Wednesday last, October 17th, and has not since been heard of, this
is to give notice that the above reward will be given to any one who
shall afford such information as will lead to her recovery if she be
alive, or to the discovery of her body if she be dead. The missing
young lady is eighteen years of age, rather below the middle height, of
fair complexion, light-brown hair, and hazel eyes. When she left her
home, she had on a grey silk dress, grey shawl, and straw bonnet. She
was last seen near the river-side upon the afternoon of Wednesday, the
17th instant.
"_Marchmont Towers, October_ 20_th_, 1848."