EDWARD'S VISITORS.
Perhaps no greater sacrifice had ever been made by an English gentleman
than that which Edward Arundel willingly offered up as an atonement for
his broken trust, as a tribute to his lost wife. Brave, ardent,
generous, and sanguine, this young soldier saw before him a brilliant
career in the profession which he loved. He saw glory and distinction
beckoning to him from afar, and turned his back upon those shining
sirens. He gave up all, in the vague hope of, sooner or later, avenging
Mary's wrongs upon Paul Marchmont.
He made no boast, even to himself, of that which he had done. Again and
again memory brought back to him the day upon which he breakfasted in
Oakley Street, and walked across Waterloo Bridge with the Drury Lane
supernumerary. Every word that John Marchmont had spoken; every look of
the meek and trusting eyes, the pale and thoughtful face; every
pressure of the thin hand which had grasped his in grateful affection,
in friendly confidence,--came back to Edward Arundel after an interval
of nearly ten years, and brought with it a bitter sense of
self-reproach.
"He trusted his daughter to me," the young man thought. "Those last
words in the poor fellow's letter are always in my mind: 'The only
bequest which I can leave to the only friend I have is the legacy of a
child's helplessness.' And I have slighted his solemn warning: and I
have been false to my trust."
In his scrupulous sense of honour, the soldier reproached himself as
bitterly for that imprudence, out of which so much evil had arisen, as
another man might have done after a wilful betrayal of his trust. He
could not forgive himself. He was for ever and ever repeating in his
own mind that one brief phase which is the universal chorus of erring
men's regret: "If I had acted differently, if I had done otherwise,
this or that would not have come to pass." We are perpetually wandering
amid the hopeless deviations of a maze, finding pitfalls and
precipices, quicksands and morasses, at every turn in the painful way;
and we look back at the end of our journey to discover a straight and
pleasant roadway by which, had we been wise enough to choose it, we
might have travelled safely and comfortably to our destination.
But Wisdom waits for us at the goal instead of accompanying us upon our
journey. She is a divinity whom we meet very late in life; when we are
too near the end of our troublesome march to derive much profit from
her counsels. We can only retail them to our juniors, who, not getting
them from the fountain-head, have very small appreciation of their
value.
The young captain of East Indian cavalry suffered very cruelly from the
sacrifice which he had made. Day after day, day after day, the slow,
dreary, changeless, eventless, and unbroken life dragged itself out;
and nothing happened to bring him any nearer to the purpose of this
monotonous existence; no promise of even ultimate success rewarded his
heroic self-devotion. Afar, he heard of the rush and clamour of war, of
dangers and terror, of conquest and glory. His own regiment was in the
thick of the strife, his brothers in arms were doing wonders. Every
mail brought some new record of triumph and glory.
The soldier's heart sickened as he read the story of each new
encounter; his heart sickened with that terrible yearning,--that
yearning which seems physically palpable in its perpetual pain; the
yearning with which a child at a hard school, lying broad awake in the
long, gloomy, rush-lit bedchamber in the dead of the silent night,
remembers the soft resting-place of his mother's bosom; the yearning
with which a faithful husband far away from home sighs for the presence
of the wife he loves. Even with such a heart-sickness as this Edward
Arundel pined to be amongst the familiar faces yonder in the East,--to
hear the triumphant yell of his men as they swarmed after him through
the breach in an Affghan wall,--to see the dark heathens blanch under
the terror of Christian swords.
He read the records of the war again and again, again and again, till
every scene arose before him,--a picture, flaming and lurid, grandly
beautiful, horribly sublime. The very words of those newspaper reports
seemed to blaze upon the paper on which they were written, so palpable
were the images which they evoked in the soldier's mind. He was frantic
in his eager impatience for the arrival of every mail, for the coming
of every new record of that Indian warfare. He was like a devourer of
romances, who reads a thrilling story link by link, and who is
impatient for every new chapter of the fiction. His dreams were of
nothing but battle and victory, danger, triumph, and death; and he
often woke in the morning exhausted by the excitement of those
visionary struggles, those phantom terrors.
His sabre hung over the chimney-piece in his simple bedchamber. He took
it down sometimes, and drew it from the sheath. He could have almost
wept aloud over that idle sword. He raised his arm, and the weapon
vibrated with a whirring noise as he swept the glittering steel in a
wide circle through the empty air. An infidel's head should have been
swept from his vile carcass in that rapid circle of the keen-edged
blade. The soldier's arm was as strong as ever, his wrist as supple,
his muscular force unwasted by mental suffering. Thank Heaven for that!
But after that brief thanksgiving his arm dropped inertly, and the idle
sword fell out of his relaxing grasp.
"I seem a craven to myself," he cried; "I have no right to be here--I
have no right to be here while those other fellows are fighting for
their lives out yonder. O God, have mercy upon me! My brain gets dazed
sometimes; and I begin to wonder whether I am most bound to remain here
and watch Paul Marchmont, or to go yonder and fight for my country and
my Queen."
There were many phases in this mental fever. At one time the young man
was seized with a savage jealousy of the officer who had succeeded to
his captaincy. He watched this man's name, and every record of his
movements, and was constantly taking objection to his conduct. He was
grudgingly envious of this particular officer's triumphs, however
small. He could not feel generously towards this happy successor, in
the bitterness of his own enforced idleness.
"What opportunities this man has!" he thought; "_I_ never had such
chances."
It is almost impossible for me to faithfully describe the tortures
which this monotonous existence inflicted upon the impetuous young man.
It is the speciality of a soldier's career that it unfits most men for
any other life. They cannot throw off the old habitudes. They cannot
turn from the noisy stir of war to the tame quiet of every-day life;
and even when they fancy themselves wearied and worn out, and willingly
retire from service, their souls are stirred by every sound of the
distant contest, as the war-steed is aroused by the blast of a trumpet.
But Edward Arundel's career had been cut suddenly short at the very
hour in which it was brightest with the promise of future glory. It was
as if a torrent rushing madly down a mountain-side had been dammed up,
and its waters bidden to stagnate upon a level plain. The rebellious
waters boiled and foamed in a sullen fury. The soldier could not submit
himself contentedly to his fate. He might strip off his uniform, and
accept sordid coin as the price of the epaulettes he had won so dearly;
but he was at heart a soldier still. When he received the sum which had
been raised amongst his juniors as the price of his captaincy, it
seemed to him almost as if he had sold his brother's blood.
It was summer-time now. Ten months had elapsed since his marriage with
Mary Marchmont, and no new light had been thrown upon the disappearance
of his young wife. No one could feel a moment's doubt as to her fate.
She had perished in that lonely river which flowed behind Marchmont
Towers, and far away down to the sea.
The artist had kept his word, and had as yet taken no step towards
entering into possession of the estate which he inherited by his
cousin's death. But Mr. Paul Marchmont spent a great deal of time at
the Towers, and a great deal more time in the painting-room by the
river-side, sometimes accompanied by his sister, sometimes alone.
The Kemberling gossips had grown by no means less talkative upon the
subject of Olivia and the new owner of Marchmont Towers. On the
contrary, the voices that discussed Mrs. Marchmont's conduct were a
great deal more numerous than heretofore; in other words, John
Marchmont's widow was "talked about." Everything is said in this
phrase. It was scarcely that people said bad things of her; it was
rather that they talked more about her than any woman can suffer to be
talked of with safety to her fair fame. They began by saying that she
was going to marry Paul Marchmont; they went on to wonder _whether_ she
was going to marry him; then they wondered _why_ she didn't marry him.
From this they changed the venue, and began to wonder whether Paul
Marchmont meant to marry her,--there was an essential difference in
this new wonderment,--and next, why Paul Marchmont didn't marry her.
And by this time Olivia's reputation was overshadowed by a terrible
cloud, which had arisen no bigger than a man's hand, in the first
conjecturings of a few ignorant villagers.
People made it their business first to wonder about Mrs. Marchmont, and
then to set up their own theories about her; to which theories they
clung with a stupid persistence, forgetting, as people generally do
forget, that there might be some hidden clue, some secret key, to the
widow's conduct, for want of which the cleverest reasoning respecting
her was only so much groping in the dark.
Edward Arundel heard of the cloud which shadowed his cousin's name. Her
father heard of it, and went to remonstrate with her, imploring her to
come to him at Swampington, and to leave Marchmont Towers to the new
lord of the mansion. But she only answered him with gloomy, obstinate
reiteration, and almost in the same terms as she had answered Edward
Arundel; declaring that she would stay at the Towers till her death;
that she would never leave the place till she was carried thence in her
coffin.
Hubert Arundel, always afraid of his daughter, was more than ever
afraid of her now; and he was as powerless to contend against her
sullen determination as he would have been to float up the stream of a
rushing river.
So Olivia was talked about. She had scared away all visitors, after the
ball at the Towers, by the strangeness of her manner and the settled
gloom in her face; and she lived unvisited and alone in the gaunt stony
mansion; and people said that Paul Marchmont was almost perpetually
with her, and that she went to meet him in the painting-room by the
river.
Edward Arundel sickened of his wearisome life, and no one helped him to
endure his sufferings. His mother wrote to him imploring him to resign
himself to the loss of his young wife, to return to Dangerfield, to
begin a new existence, and to blot out the memory of the past.
"You have done all that the most devoted affection could prompt you to
do," Mrs. Arundel wrote. "Come back to me, my dearest boy. I gave you
up to the service of your country because it was my duty to resign you
then. But I cannot afford to lose you now; I cannot bear to see you
sacrificing yourself to a chimera. Return to me; and let me see you
make a new and happier choice. Let me see my son the father of little
children who will gather round my knees when I grow old and feeble."
"A new and happier choice!" Edward Arundel repeated the words with a
melancholy bitterness. "No, my poor lost girl; no, my blighted wife; I
will not be false to you. The smiles of happy women can have no
sunlight for me while I cherish the memory of the sad eyes that watched
me when I drove away from Milldale, the sweet sorrowful face that I was
never to look upon again."
The dull empty days succeeded each other, and _did_ resemble each
other, with a wearisome similitude that well-nigh exhausted the
patience of the impetuous young man. His fiery nature chafed against
this miserable delay. It was so hard to have to wait for his vengeance.
Sometimes he could scarcely refrain from planting himself somewhere in
Paul Marchmont's way, with the idea of a hand-to-hand struggle in which
either he or his enemy must perish.
Once he wrote the artist a desperate letter, denouncing him as an
arch-plotter and villain; calling upon him, if his evil nature was
redeemed by one spark of manliness, to fight as men had been in the
habit of fighting only a few years before, with a hundred times less
reason than these two men had for their quarrel.
"I have called you a villain and traitor; in India we fellows would
kill each other for smaller words than those," wrote the soldier. "But
I have no wish to take any advantage of my military experience. I may
be a better shot than you. Let us have only one pistol, and draw lots
for it. Let us fire at each other across a dinner-table. Let us do
anything; so that we bring this miserable business to an end."
Mr. Marchmont read this letter slowly and thoughtfully, more than once;
smiling as he read.
"He's getting tired," thought the artist. "Poor young man, I thought he
would be the first to grow tired of this sort of work."
He wrote Edward Arundel a long letter; a friendly but rather facetious
letter; such as he might have written to a child who had asked him to
jump over the moon. He ridiculed the idea of a duel, as something
utterly Quixotic and absurd.
"I am fifteen years older than you, my dear Mr. Arundel," he wrote,
"and a great deal too old to have any inclination to fight with
windmills; or to represent the windmill which a high-spirited young
Quixote may choose to mistake for a villanous knight, and run his hot
head against in that delusion. I am not offended with you for calling
me bad names, and I take your anger merely as a kind of romantic manner
you have of showing your love for my poor cousin. We are not enemies,
and we never shall be enemies; for I will never suffer myself to be so
foolish as to get into a passion with a brave and generous-hearted
young soldier, whose only error is an unfortunate hallucination with
regard to
"Your very humble servant,
"PAUL MARCHMONT."
Edward ground his teeth with savage fury as he read this letter.
"Is there no making this man answer for his infamy?" he muttered. "Is
there no way of making him suffer?"
* * * * *
June was nearly over, and the year was wearing round to the anniversary
of Edward's wedding-day, the anniversaries of those bright days which
the young bride and bridegroom had loitered away by the trout-streams
in the Hampshire meadows, when some most unlooked-for visitors made
their appearance at Kemberling Retreat.
The cottage lay back behind a pleasant garden, and was hidden from the
dusty high road by a hedge of lilacs and laburnums which grew within
the wooden fence. It was Edward's habit, in this hot summer-time, to
spend a great deal of his time in the garden; walking up and down the
neglected paths, with a cigar in his mouth; or lolling in an easy chair
on the lawn reading the papers. Perhaps the garden was almost prettier,
by reason of the long neglect which it had suffered, than it would have
been if kept in the trimmest order by the industrious hands of a
skilful gardener. Everything grew in a wild and wanton luxuriance, that
was very beautiful in this summer-time, when the earth was gorgeous
with all manner of blossoms. Trailing branches from the espaliered
apple-trees hung across the pathways, intermingled with roses that had
run wild; and made "bits" that a landscape-painter might have delighted
to copy. Even the weeds, which a gardener would have looked upon with
horror, were beautiful. The wild convolvulus flung its tendrils into
fantastic wreaths about the bushes of sweetbrier; the honeysuckle,
untutored by the pruning-knife, mixed its tall branches with seringa
and clematis; the jasmine that crept about the house had mounted to the
very chimney-pots, and strayed in through the open windows; even the
stable-roof was half hidden by hardy monthly roses that had clambered
up to the thatch. But the young soldier took very little interest in
this disorderly garden. He pined to be far away in the thick jungle, or
on the burning plain. He hated the quiet and repose of an existence
which seemed little better than the living death of a cloister.
The sun was low in the west at the close of a long midsummer day, when
Mr. Arundel strolled up and down the neglected pathways, backwards and
forwards amid the long tangled grass of the lawn, smoking a cigar, and
brooding over his sorrows.
He was beginning to despair. He had defied Paul Marchmont, and no good
had come of his defiance. He had watched him, and there had been no
result of his watching. Day after day he had wandered down to the
lonely pathway by the river side; again and again he had reconnoitered
the boat-house, only to hear Paul Marchmont's treble voice singing
scraps out of modern operas as he worked at his easel; or on one or two
occasions to see Mr. George Weston, the surgeon, or Lavinia his wife,
emerge from the artist's painting-room.
Upon one of these occasions Edward Arundel had accosted the surgeon of
Kemberling, and had tried to enter into conversation with him. But Mr.
Weston had exhibited such utterly hopeless stupidity, mingled with a
very evident terror of his brother-in-law's foe, that Edward had been
fain to abandon all hope of any assistance from this quarter.
"I'm sure I'm very sorry for you, Mr. Arundel," the surgeon said,
looking, not at Edward, but about and around him, in a hopeless,
wandering manner, like some hunted animal that looks far and near for a
means of escape from his pursuer,--"I'm very sorry for you--and for all
your trouble--and I was when I attended you at the Black Bull--and you
were the first patient I ever had there--and it led to my having many
more--as I may say--though that's neither here nor there. And I'm very
sorry for you, and for the poor young woman too--particularly for the
poor young woman--and I always tell Paul so--and--and Paul--"
And at this juncture Mr. Weston stopped abruptly, as if appalled by the
hopeless entanglement of his own ideas, and with a brief "Good evening,
Mr. Arundel," shot off in the direction of the Towers, leaving Edward
at a loss to understand his manner.
So, on this midsummer evening, the soldier walked up and down the
neglected grass-plat, thinking of the men who had been his comrades,
and of the career which he had abandoned for the love of his lost wife.
He was aroused from his gloomy reverie by the sound of a fresh girlish
voice calling to him by his name.
"Edward! Edward!"
Who could there be in Lincolnshire with the right to call to him thus
by his Christian name? He was not long left in doubt. While he was
asking himself the question, the same feminine voice cried out again.
"Edward! Edward! Will you come and open the gate for me, please? Or do
you mean to keep me out here for ever?"
This time Mr. Arundel had no difficulty in recognising the familiar
tones of his sister Letitia, whom he had believed, until that moment,
to be safe under the maternal wing at Dangerfield. And lo, here she
was, on horseback at his own gate; with a cavalier hat and feathers
overshadowing her girlish face; and with another young Amazon on a
thorough-bred chestnut, and an elderly groom on a thorough-bred bay, in
the background.
Edward Arundel, utterly confounded by the advent of such visitors,
flung away his cigar, and went to the low wooden gate beyond which his
sister's steed was pawing the dusty road, impatient of this stupid
delay, and eager to be cantering stablewards through the scented summer
air.
"Why, Letitia!" cried the young man, "what, in mercy's name, has
brought you here?"
Miss Arundel laughed aloud at her brother's look of surprise.
"You didn't know I was in Lincolnshire, did you?" she asked; and then
answered her own question in the same breath: "Of course you didn't,
because I wouldn't let mamma tell you I was coming; for I wanted to
surprise you, you know. And I think I have surprised you, haven't I? I
never saw such a scared-looking creature in all my life. If I were a
ghost coming here in the gloaming, you couldn't look more frightened
than you did just now. I only came the day before yesterday--and I'm
staying at Major Lawford's, twelve miles away from here--and this is
Miss Lawford, who was at school with me at Bath. You've heard me talk
of Belinda Lawford, my dearest, dearest friend? Miss Lawford, my
brother; my brother, Miss Lawford. Are you going to open the gate and
let us in, or do you mean to keep your citadel closed upon us
altogether, Mr. Edward Arundel?"
At this juncture the young lady in the background drew a little nearer
to her friend, and murmured a remonstrance to the effect that it was
very late, and that they were expected home before dark; but Miss
Arundel refused to hear the voice of wisdom.
"Why, we've only an hour's ride back," she cried; "and if it should be
dark, which I don't think it will be, for it's scarcely dark all night
through at this time of year, we've got Hoskins with us, and Hoskins
will take care of us. Won't you, Hoskins?" demanded the young lady,
turning to the elderly groom.
Of course Hoskins declared that he was ready to achieve all that man
could do or dare in the defence of his liege ladies, or something
pretty nearly to that effect; but delivered in a vile Lincolnshire
patois, not easily rendered in printer's ink.
Miss Arundel waited for no further discussion, but gave her hand to her
brother, and vaulted lightly from her saddle.
Then, of course, Edward Arundel offered his services to his sister's
companion, and then for the first time he looked in Belinda Lawford's
face, and even in that one first glance saw that she was a good and
beautiful creature, and that her hair, of which she had a great
quantity, was of the colour of her horse's chestnut coat; that her eyes
were the bluest he had ever seen, and that her cheeks were like the
neglected roses in his garden. He held out his hand to her. She took it
with a frank smile, and dismounted, and came in amongst the grass-grown
pathways, amid the confusion of trailing branches and bright
garden-flowers growing wild.
* * * * *
In that moment began the second volume of Edward Arundel's life. The
first volume had begun upon the Christmas night on which the boy of
seventeen went to see the pantomime at Drury Lane Theatre. The old
story had been a long, sad story, fall of tenderness and pathos, but
with a cruel and dismal ending. The new story began to-night, in this
fading western sunshine, in this atmosphere of balmy perfume, amidst
these dew-laden garden-flowers growing wild.
* * * * *
But, as I think I observed before at the outset of this story, we are
rarely ourselves aware of the commencement of any new section in our
lives. It is only after the fact that we recognise the awful importance
which actions, in themselves most trivial, assume by reason of their
consequences; and when the action, in itself so unimportant, in its
consequences so fatal, has been in any way a deviation from the right,
how bitterly we reproach ourselves for that false step!
"I am so _glad_ to see you, Edward!" Miss Arundel exclaimed, as she
looked about her, criticising her brother's domain; "but you don't seem
a bit glad to see me, you poor gloomy old dear. And how much better you
look than you did when you left Dangerfield! only a little careworn,
you know, still. And to think of your coming and burying yourself here,
away from all the people who love you, you silly old darling! And
Belinda knows the story, and she's so sorry for you. Ain't you, Linda?
I call her Linda for short, and because it's prettier than _Be_-linda,"
added the young lady aside to her brother, and with a contemptuous
emphasis upon the first syllable of her friend's name.
Miss Lawford, thus abruptly appealed to, blushed, and said nothing.
If Edward Arundel had been told that any other young lady was
acquainted with the sad story of his married life, I think he would
have been inclined to revolt against the very idea of her pity. But
although he had only looked once at Belinda Lawford, that one look
seemed to have told him a great deal. He felt instinctively that she
was as good as she was beautiful, and that her pity must be a most
genuine and tender emotion, not to be despised by the proudest man upon
earth.
The two ladies seated themselves upon a dilapidated rustic bench amid
the long grass, and Mr. Arundel sat in the low basket-chair in which he
was wont to lounge a great deal of his time away.
"Why don't you have a gardener, Ned?" Letitia Arundel asked, after
looking rather contemptuously at the flowery luxuriance around her.
Her brother shrugged his shoulders with a despondent gesture.
"Why should I take any care of the place?" he said. "I only took it
because it was near the spot where--where my poor girl--where I wanted
to be. I have no object in beautifying it. I wish to Heaven I could
leave it, and go back to India."
He turned his face eastward as he spoke, and the two girls saw that
half-eager, half-despairing yearning that was always visible in his
face when he looked to the east. It was over yonder, the scene of
strife, the red field of glory, only separated from him by a patch of
purple ocean and a strip of yellow sand. It was yonder. He could almost
feel the hot blast of the burning air. He could almost hear the shouts
of victory. And he was a prisoner here, bound by a sacred duty,--by a
duty which he owed to the dead.
"Major Lawford--Major Lawford is Belinda's papa; 33rd Foot--Major
Lawford knew that we were coming here, and he begged me to ask you to
dinner; but I said you wouldn't come, for I knew you had shut yourself
out of all society--though the Major's the dearest creature, and the
Grange is a most delightful place to stay at. I was down here in the
midsummer holidays once, you know, while you were in India. But I give
the message as the Major gave it to me; and you are to come to dinner
whenever you like."
Edward Arundel murmured a few polite words of refusal. No; he saw no
society; he was in Lincolnshire to achieve a certain object; he should
remain there no longer than was necessary in order for him to do so.
"And you don't even say that you're glad to see me!" exclaimed Miss
Arundel, with an offended air, "though it's six months since you were
last at Dangerfield! Upon my word, you're a nice brother for an
unfortunate girl to waste her affections upon!"
Edward smiled faintly at his sister's complaint.
"I am very glad to see you, Letitia," he said; "very, very glad."
And indeed the young hermit could not but confess to himself that those
two innocent young faces seemed to bring light and brightness with
them, and to shed a certain transitory glimmer of sunshine upon the
horrible gloom of his life. Mr. Morrison had come out to offer his duty
to the young lady--whom he had been intimate with from a very early
period of her existence, and had carried upon his shoulder some fifteen
years before--under the pretence of bringing wine for the visitors; and
the stable-lad had been sent to a distant corner of the garden to
search for strawberries for their refreshment. Even the solitary
maid-servant had crept into the parlour fronting the lawn, and had
shrouded herself behind the window-curtains, whence she could peep out
at the two Amazons, and gladden her eyes with the sight of something
that was happy and beautiful.
But the young ladies would not stop to drink any wine, though Mr.
Morrison informed Letitia that the sherry was from the Dangerfield
cellar, and had been sent to Master Edward by his ma; nor to eat any
strawberries, though the stable-boy, who made the air odorous with the
scent of hay and oats, brought a little heap of freshly-gathered fruit
piled upon a cabbage-leaf, and surmounted by a rampant caterpillar of
the woolly species. They could not stay any longer, they both declared,
lest there should be terror at Lawford Grange because of their absence.
So they went back to the gate, escorted by Edward and his confidential
servant; and after Letitia had given her brother a kiss, which
resounded almost like the report of a pistol through the still evening
air, the two ladies mounted their horses, and cantered away in the
twilight.
"I shall come and see you again, Ned," Miss Arundel cried, as she shook
the reins upon her horse's neck; "and so will Belinda--won't you,
Belinda?"
Miss Lawford's reply, if she spoke at all, was quite inaudible amidst
the clattering of the horses' hoofs upon the hard highroad.