IN THE DARK.
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.