THE CHILD'S VOICE IN THE PAVILION BY THE WATER.
The year wore slowly on. Letitia Arundel wrote very long letters to her
friend and confidante, Belinda Lawford, and in each letter demanded
particular intelligence of her brother's doings. Had he been to the
Grange? how had he looked? what had he talked about? &c., &c. But to
these questions Miss Lawford could only return one monotonous reply:
Mr. Arundel had not been to the Grange; or Mr. Arundel had called on
papa one morning, but had only stayed a quarter of an hour, and had not
been seen by any female member of the family.
The year wore slowly on. Edward endured his self-appointed solitude,
and waited, waited, with a vengeful hatred for ever brooding in his
breast, for the day of retribution. The year wore on, and the
anniversary of the day upon which Mary ran away from the Towers, the
17th of October, came at last.
Paul Marchmont had declared his intention of taking possession of the
Towers upon the day following this. The twelvemonth's probation which
he had imposed upon himself had expired; every voice was loud in praise
of his conscientious and honourable conduct. He had grown very popular
during his residence at Kemberling. Tenant farmers looked forward to
halcyon days under his dominion; to leases renewed on favourable terms;
to repairs liberally executed; to everything that is delightful between
landlord and tenant. Edward Arundel heard all this through his faithful
servitor, Mr. Morrison, and chafed bitterly at the news. This traitor
was to be happy and prosperous, and to have the good word of honest
men; while Mary lay in her unhallowed grave, and people shrugged their
shoulders, half compassionately, half contemptuously, as they spoke of
the mad heiress who had committed suicide.
Mr. Morrison brought his master tidings of all Paul Marchmont's doings
about this time. He was to take possession of the Towers on the 19th.
He had already made several alterations in the arrangement of the
different rooms. He had ordered new furniture from
Swampington,--another man would have ordered it from London; but Mr.
Marchmont was bent upon being popular, and did not despise even the
good opinion of a local tradesman,--and by several other acts,
insignificant enough in themselves, had asserted his ownership of the
mansion which had been the airy castle of Mary Marchmont's day-dreams
ten years before.
The coming-in of the new master of Marchmont Towers was to be, take it
altogether, a very grand affair. The Chorley-Castle foxhounds were to
meet at eleven o'clock, upon the great grass-flat, or lawn, as it was
popularly called, before the western front. The county gentry from far
and near had been invited to a hunting breakfast. Open house was to be
kept all day for rich and poor. Every male inhabitant of the district
who could muster anything in the way of a mount was likely to join the
friendly gathering. Poor Reynard is decidedly England's most powerful
leveller. All differences of rank and station, all distinctions which
Mammon raises in every other quarter, melt away before the friendly
contact of the hunting-field. The man who rides best is the best man;
and the young butcher who makes light of sunk fences, and skims,
bird-like, over bullfinches and timber, may hold his own with the dandy
heir to half the country-side. The cook at Marchmont Towers had enough
to do to prepare for this great day. It was the first meet of the
season, and in itself a solemn festival. Paul Marchmont knew this; and
though the Cockney artist of Fitzroy Square knew about as much of
fox-hunting as he did of the source of the Nile, he seized upon the
opportunity of making himself popular, and determined to give such a
hunting-breakfast as had never been given within the walls of Marchmont
Towers since the time of a certain rackety Hugh Marchmont, who had
drunk himself to death early in the reign of George III. He spent the
morning of the 17th in the steward's room, looking through the
cellar-book with the old butler, selecting the wines that were to be
drunk the following day, and planning the arrangements for the mass of
visitors, who were to be entertained in the great stone entrance-hall,
in the kitchens, in the housekeeper's room, in the servants' hall, in
almost every chamber that afforded accommodation for a guest.
"You will take care that people get placed according to their rank,"
Paul said to the grey-haired servant. "You know everybody about here, I
dare say, and will be able to manage so that we may give no offence."
The gentry were to breakfast in the long dining-room and in the western
drawing-room. Sparkling hocks and Burgundies, fragrant Moselles,
champagnes of choicest brand and rarest bouquet, were to flow like
water for the benefit of the country gentlemen who should come to do
honour to Paul Marchmont's installation. Great cases of comestibles had
been sent by rail from Fortnum and Mason's; and the science of the cook
at the Towers had been taxed to the utmost, in the struggles which she
made to prove herself equal to the occasion. Twenty-one casks of ale,
every cask containing twenty-one gallons, had been brewed long ago, at
the birth of Arthur Marchmont, and had been laid in the cellar ever
since, waiting for the majority of the young heir who was never to come
of age. This very ale, with a certain sense of triumph, Paul Marchmont
ordered to be brought forth for the refreshment of the commoners.
"Poor young Arthur!" he thought, after he had given this order. "I saw
him once when he was a pretty boy with fair ringlets, dressed in a suit
of black velvet. His father brought him to my studio one day, when he
came to patronise me and buy a picture of me,--out of sheer charity, of
course, for he cared as much for pictures as I care for foxhounds. _I_
was a poor relation then, and never thought to see the inside of
Marchmont Towers. It was a lucky September morning that swept that
bright-faced boy out of my pathway, and left only sickly John Marchmont
and his daughter between me and fortune."
Yes; Mr. Paul Marchmont's year of probation was past. He had asserted
himself to Messrs. Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson, and before the
face of all Lincolnshire, in the character of an honourable and
high-minded man; slow to seize upon the fortune that had fallen to him,
conscientious, punctilious, generous, and unselfish. He had done all
this; and now the trial was over, and the day of triumph had come.
There has been a race of villains of late years very popular with the
novel-writer and the dramatist, but not, I think, quite indigenous to
this honest British soil; a race of pale-faced, dark-eyed, and
all-accomplished scoundrels, whose chiefest attribute is
imperturbability. The imperturbable villain has been guilty of every
iniquity in the black catalogue of crimes; but he has never been guilty
of an emotion. He wins a million of money at _trente et quarante_, to
the terror and astonishment of all Homburg; and by not so much as one
twinkle of his eye or one quiver of his lip does that imperturbable
creature betray a sentiment of satisfaction. Ruin or glory, shame or
triumph, defeat, disgrace, or death,--all are alike to the callous
ruffian of the Anglo-Gallic novel. He smiles, and murders while he
smiles, and smiles while he murders. He kills his adversary, unfairly,
in a duel, and wipes his sword on a cambric handkerchief; and withal he
is so elegant, so fascinating, and so handsome, that the young hero of
the novel has a very poor chance against him; and the reader can
scarcely help being sorry when retribution comes with the last chapter,
and some crushing catastrophe annihilates the well-bred scoundrel.
Paul Marchmont was not this sort of man. He was a hypocrite when it was
essential to his own safety to practice hypocrisy; but he did not
accept life as a drama, in which he was for ever to be acting a part.
Life would scarcely be worth the having to any man upon such terms. It
is all very well to wear heavy plate armour, and a casque that weighs
fourteen pounds or so, when we go into the thick of the fight. But to
wear the armour always, to live in it, to sleep in it, to carry the
ponderous protection about us for ever and ever! Safety would be too
dear if purchased by such a sacrifice of all personal ease. Paul
Marchmont, therefore, being a selfish and self-indulgent man, only wore
his armour of hypocrisy occasionally, and when it was vitally necessary
for his preservation. He had imposed upon himself a penance, and acted
a part in holding back for a year from the enjoyment of a splendid
fortune; and he had made this one great sacrifice in order to give the
lie to Edward Arundel's vague accusations, which might have had an
awkward effect upon the minds of other people, had the artist grasped
too eagerly at his missing cousin's wealth. Paul Marchmont had made
this sacrifice; but he did not intend to act a part all his life. He
meant to enjoy himself, and to get the fullest possible benefit out of
his good fortune. He meant to do this; and upon the 17th of October he
made no effort to restrain his spirits, but laughed and talked joyously
with whoever came in his way, winning golden opinions from all sorts of
men; for happiness is contagious, and everybody likes happy people.
Forty years of poverty is a long apprenticeship to the very hardest of
masters,--an apprenticeship calculated to give the keenest possible
zest to newly-acquired wealth. Paul Marchmont rejoiced in his wealth
with an almost delirious sense of delight. It was his at last. At last!
He had waited, and waited patiently; and at last, while his powers of
enjoyment were still in their zenith, it had come. How often he had
dreamed of this; how often he had dreamed of that which was to take
place to-morrow! How often in his dreams he had seen the stone-built
mansion, and heard the voices of the crowd doing him honour. He had
felt all the pride and delight of possession, to awake suddenly in the
midst of his triumph, and gnash his teeth at the remembrance of his
poverty. And now the poverty was a thing to be dreamt about, and the
wealth was his. He had always been a good son and a kind brother; and
his mother and sister were to arrive upon the eve of his installation,
and were to witness his triumph. The rooms that had been altered were
those chosen by Paul for his mother and maiden sister, and the new
furniture had been ordered for their comfort. It was one of his many
pleasures upon this day to inspect these apartments, to see that all
his directions had been faithfully carried out, and to speculate upon
the effect which these spacious and luxurious chambers would have upon
the minds of Mrs. Marchmont and her daughter, newly come from shabby
lodgings in Charlotte Street.
"My poor mother!" thought the artist, as he looked round the pretty
sitting-room. This sitting-room opened into a noble bedchamber, beyond
which there was a dressing-room. "My poor mother!" he thought; "she has
suffered a long time, and she has been patient. She has never ceased to
believe in me; and she will see now that there was some reason for that
belief. I told her long ago, when our fortunes were at the lowest ebb,
when I was painting landscapes for the furniture-brokers at a pound
a-piece,--I told her I was meant for something better than a
tradesman's hack; and I have proved it--I have proved it."
He walked about the room, arranging the furniture with his own hands;
walking a few paces backwards now and then to contemplate such and such
an effect from an artistic point of view; flinging the rich stuff of
the curtains into graceful folds; admiring and examining everything,
always with a smile on his face. He seemed thoroughly happy. If he had
done any wrong; if by any act of treachery he had hastened Mary
Arundel's death, no recollection of that foul work arose in his breast
to disturb the pleasant current of his thoughts. Selfish and
self-indulgent, only attached to those who were necessary to his own
happiness, his thoughts rarely wandered beyond the narrow circle of his
own cares or his own pleasures. He was thoroughly selfish. He could
have sat at a Lord Mayor's feast with a famine-stricken population
clamouring at the door of the banquet-chamber. He believed in himself
as his mother and sister had believed; and he considered that he had a
right to be happy and prosperous, whosoever suffered sorrow or
adversity.
Upon this 17th of October Olivia Marchmont sat in the little study
looking out upon the quadrangle, while the household was busied with
the preparations for the festival of the following day. She was to
remain at Marchmont Towers as a guest of the new master of the mansion.
She would be protected from all scandal, Paul had said, by the presence
of his mother and sister. She could retain the apartments she had been
accustomed to occupy; she could pursue her old mode of life. He himself
was not likely to be very much at the Towers. He was going to travel
and to enjoy life now that he was a rich man.
These were the arguments which Mr. Marchmont used when openly
discussing the widow's residence in his house. But in a private
conversation between Olivia and himself he had only said a very few
words upon the subject.
"You _must_ remain," he said; and Olivia submitted, obeying him with a
sullen indifference that was almost like the mechanical submission of
an irresponsible being.
John Marchmont's widow seemed entirely under the dominion of the new
master of the Towers. It was as if the stormy passions which had arisen
out of a slighted love had worn out this woman's mind, and had left her
helpless to stand against the force of Paul Marchmont's keen and
vigorous intellect. A remarkable change had come over Olivia's
character. A dull apathy had succeeded that fiery energy of soul which
had enfeebled and well-nigh worn out her body. There were no outbursts
of passion now. She bore the miserable monotony of her life
uncomplainingly. Day after day, week after week, month after month,
idle and apathetic, she sat in her lonely room, or wandered slowly in
the grounds about the Towers. She very rarely went beyond those
grounds. She was seldom seen now in her old pew at Kemberling Church;
and when her father went to her and remonstrated with her for her
non-attendance, she told him sullenly that she was too ill to go. She
_was_ ill. George Weston attended her constantly; but he found it very
difficult to administer to such a sickness as hers, and he could only
shake his head despondently when he felt her feeble pulse, or listened
to the slow beating of her heart. Sometimes she would shut herself up
in her room for a month at a time, and see no one but her faithful
servant Barbara, and Mr. Weston--whom, in her utter indifference, she
seemed to regard as a kind of domestic animal, whose going or coming
were alike unimportant.
This stolid, silent Barbara waited upon her mistress with untiring
patience. She bore with every change of Olivia's gloomy temper; she was
a perpetual shield and protection to her. Even upon this day of
preparation and disorder Mrs. Simmons kept guard over the passage
leading to the study, and took care that no one intruded upon her
mistress. At about four o'clock all Paul Marchmont's orders had been
given, and the new master of the house dined for the first time by
himself at the head of the long carved-oak dining-table, waited upon in
solemn state by the old butler. His mother and sister were to arrive by
a train that would reach Swampington at ten o'clock, and one of the
carriages from the Towers was to meet them at the station. The artist
had leisure in the meantime for any other business he might have to
transact.
He ate his dinner slowly, thinking deeply all the time. He did not stop
to drink any wine after dinner; but, as soon as the cloth was removed,
rose from the table, and went straight to Olivia's room.
"I am going down to the painting-room," he said. "Will you come there
presently? I want very much to say a few words to you."
Olivia was sitting near the window, with her hands lying idle in her
lap. She rarely opened a book now, rarely wrote a letter, or occupied
herself in any manner. She scarcely raised her eyes as she answered
him.
"Yes," she said; "I will come."
"Don't be long, then. It will be dark very soon. I am not going down
there to paint; I am going to fetch a landscape that I want to hang in
my mother's room, and to say a few words about--"
He closed the door without stopping to finish the sentence, and went
out into the quadrangle.
Ten minutes afterwards Olivia Marchmont rose, and taking a heavy
woollen shawl from a chair near her, wrapped it loosely about her head
and shoulders.
"I am his slave and his prisoner," she muttered to herself. "I must do
as he bids me."
A cold wind was blowing in the quadrangle, and the stone pavement was
wet with a drizzling rain. The sun had just gone down, and the dull
autumn sky was darkening. The fallen leaves in the wood were sodden
with damp, and rotted slowly on the swampy ground.
Olivia took her way mechanically along the narrow pathway leading to
the river. Half-way between Marchmont Towers and the boat-house she
came suddenly upon the figure of a man walking towards her through the
dusk. This man was Edward Arundel.
The two cousins had not met since the March evening upon which Edward
had gone to seek the widow in Paul Marchmont's painting-room. Olivia's
pale face grew whiter as she recognised the soldier.
"I was coming to the house to speak to you, Mrs. Marchmont," Edward
said sternly. "I am lucky in meeting you here, for I don't want any one
to overhear what I've got to say."
He had turned in the direction in which Olivia had been walking; but
she made a dead stop, and stood looking at him.
"You were going to the boat-house," he said. "I will go there with
you."
She looked at him for a moment, as if doubtful what to do, and then
said,
"Very well. You can say what you have to say to me, and then leave me.
There is no sympathy between us, there is no regard between us; we are
only antagonists."
"I hope not, Olivia. I hope there is some spark of regard still, in
spite of all. I separate you in my own mind from Paul Marchmont. I pity
you; for I believe you to be his tool."
"Is this what you have to say to me?"
"No; I came here, as your kinsman, to ask you what you mean to do now
that Paul Marchmont has taken possession of the Towers?"
"I mean to stay there."
"In spite of the gossip that your remaining will give rise to amongst
these country-people!"
"In spite of everything. Mr. Marchmont wishes me to stay. It suits me
to stay. What does it matter what people say of me? What do I care for
any one's opinion--now?"
"Olivia," cried the young man, "are you mad?"
"Perhaps I am," she answered, coldly.
"Why is it that you shut yourself from the sympathy of those who have a
right to care for you? What is the mystery of your life?"
His cousin laughed bitterly.
"Would you like to know, Edward Arundel?" she said. "You _shall_ know,
perhaps, some day. You have despised me all my life; you will despise
me more then."
They had reached Paul Marchmont's painting-room by this time. Olivia
opened the door and walked in, followed by Edward. Paul was not there.
There was a picture covered with green-baize upon the easel, and the
artist's hat stood upon the table amidst the litter of brushes and
palettes; but the room was empty. The door at the top of the stone
steps leading to the pavilion was ajar.
"Have you anything more to say to me?" Olivia asked, turning upon her
cousin as if she would have demanded why he had followed her.
"Only this: I want to know your determination; whether you will be
advised by me--and by your father,--I saw my uncle Hubert this morning,
and his opinion exactly coincides with mine,--or whether you mean
obstinately to take your own course in defiance of everybody?"
"I do," Olivia answered. "I shall take my own course. I defy everybody.
I have not been gifted with the power of winning people's affection.
Other women possess that power, and trifle with it, and turn it to bad
account. I have prayed, Edward Arundel,--yes, I have prayed upon my
knees to the God who made me, that He would give me some poor measure
of that gift which Nature has lavished upon other women; but He would
not hear me, He would not hear me! I was not made to be loved. Why,
then, should I make myself a slave for the sake of winning people's
esteem? If they have despised me, I can despise them."
"Who has despised you, Olivia?" Edward asked, perplexed by his cousin's
manner.
"YOU HAVE!" she cried, with flashing eyes; "you have! From first to
last--from first to last!" She turned away from him impatiently. "Go,"
she said; "why should we keep up a mockery of friendliness and
cousinship? We are nothing to each other."
Edward walked towards the door; but he paused upon the threshold, with
his hat in his hand, undecided as to what he ought to do.
As he stood thus, perplexed and irresolute, a cry, the feeble cry of a
child, sounded within the pavilion.
The young man started, and looked at his cousin. Even in the dusk he
could see that her face had suddenly grown livid.
"There is a child in that place," he said pointing to the door at the
top of the steps.
The cry was repeated as he spoke,--the low, complaining wail of a
child. There was no other voice to be heard,--no mother's voice
soothing a helpless little one. The cry of the child was followed by a
dead silence.
"There is a child in that pavilion," Edward Arundel repeated.
"There is," Olivia answered.
"Whose child?"
"What does it matter to you?"
"Whose child?"
"I cannot tell you, Edward Arundel."
The soldier strode towards the steps, but before he could reach them,
Olivia flung herself across his pathway.
"I will see whose child is hidden in that place," he said. "Scandalous
things have been said of you, Olivia. I will know the reason of your
visits to this place."
She clung about his knees, and hindered him from moving; half kneeling,
half crouching on the lowest of the stone steps, she blocked his
pathway, and prevented him from reaching the door of the pavilion. It
had been ajar a few minutes ago; it was shut now. But Edward had not
noticed this.
"No, no, no!" shrieked Olivia; "you shall trample me to death before
you enter that place. You shall walk over my corpse before you cross
that threshold."
The young man struggled with her for a few moments; then he suddenly
flung her from him; not violently, but with a contemptuous gesture.
"You are a wicked woman, Olivia Marchmont," he said; "and it matters
very little to me what you do, or what becomes of you. I know now the
secret of the mystery between you and Paul Marchmont. I can guess your
motive for perpetually haunting this place."
He left the solitary building by the river, and walked slowly back
through the wood.
His mind--predisposed to think ill of Olivia by the dark rumours he had
heard through his servant, and which had had a certain amount of
influence upon him, as all scandals have, however baseless--could
imagine only one solution to the mystery of a child's presence in the
lonely building by the river. Outraged and indignant at the discovery
he had made, he turned his back upon Marchmont Towers.
"I will stay in this hateful place no longer," he thought, as he went
back to his solitary home; "but before I leave Lincolnshire the whole
county shall know what I think of Paul Marchmont."
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I.
CAPTAIN ARUNDEL'S REVENGE.
Edward Arundel went back to his lonely home with a settled purpose in
his mind. He would leave Lincolnshire,--and immediately. He had no
motive for remaining. It may be, indeed, that he had a strong motive
for going away from the neighbourhood of Lawford Grange. There was a
lurking danger in the close vicinage of that pleasant, old-fashioned
country mansion, and the bright band of blue-eyed damsels who inhabited
there.
"I will turn my back upon Lincolnshire for ever," Edward Arundel said
to himself once more, upon his way homeward through the October
twilight; "but before I go, the whole country shall know what I think
of Paul Marchmont."
He clenched his fists and ground his teeth involuntarily as he thought
this.
It was quite dark when he let himself in at the old-fashioned
half-glass door that led into his humble sitting-room at Kemberling
Retreat. He looked round the little chamber, which had been furnished
forty years before by the proprietor of the cottage, and had served for
one tenant after another, until it seemed as if the spindle-legged
chairs and tables had grown attenuated and shadowy by much service. He
looked at the simple room, lighted by a bright fire and a pair of
wax-candles in antique silver candlesticks. The red firelight flickered
and trembled upon the painted roses on the walls, on the obsolete
engravings in clumsy frames of imitation-ebony and tarnished gilt. A
silver tea-service and a Sevres china cup and saucer, which Mrs.
Arundel had sent to the cottage for her son's use, stood upon the small
oval table: and a brown setter, a favourite of the young man's, lay
upon the hearth-rug, with his chin upon his outstretched paws, blinking
at the blaze.
As Mr. Arundel lingered in the doorway, looking at these things, an
image rose before him, as vivid and distinct as any apparition of
Professor Pepper's manufacture; and he thought of what that commonplace
cottage-chamber might have been if his young wife had lived. He could
fancy her bending over the low silver teapot,--the sprawling inartistic
teapot, that stood upon quaint knobs like gouty feet, and had been long
ago banished from the Dangerfield breakfast-table as utterly rococo and
ridiculous. He conjured up the dear dead face, with faint blushes
flickering amidst its lily pallor, and soft hazel eyes looking up at
him through the misty steam of the tea-table, innocent and virginal as
the eyes of that mythic nymph who was wont to appear to the old Roman
king. How happy she would have been! How willing to give up fortune and
station, and to have lived for ever and ever in that queer old cottage,
ministering to him and loving him!
Presently the face changed. The hazel-brown hair was suddenly lit up
with a glitter of barbaric gold; the hazel eyes grew blue and bright;
and the cheeks blushed rosy red. The young man frowned at this new and
brighter vision; but he contemplated it gravely for some moments, and
then breathed a long sigh, which was somehow or other expressive of
relief.
"No," he said to himself, "I am _not_ false to my poor lost girl; I do
_not_ forget her. Her image is dearer to me than any living creature.
The mournful shadow of her face is more precious to me than the
brightest reality."
He sat down in one of the spindle-legged arm-chairs, and poured out a
cup of tea. He drank it slowly, brooding over the fire as he sipped the
innocuous beverage, and did not deign to notice the caresses of the
brown setter, who laid his cold wet nose in his master's hand, and
performed a species of spirit-rapping upon the carpet with his tail.
After tea the young man rang the bell, which was answered by Mr.
Morrison.
"Have I any clothes that I can hunt in, Morrison?" Mr. Arundel asked.
His factotum stared aghast at this question.
"You ain't a-goin' to 'unt, are you, Mr. Edward?" he inquired,
anxiously.
"Never mind that. I asked you a question about my clothes, and I want a
straightforward answer."
"But, Mr. Edward," remonstrated the old servant, "I don't mean no
offence; and the 'orses is very tidy animals in their way; but if
you're thinkin' of goin' across country,--and a pretty stiffish country
too, as I've heard, in the way of bulfinches and timber,--neither of
them 'orses has any more of a 'unter in him than I have."
"I know that as well as you do," Edward Arundel answered coolly; "but I
am going to the meet at Marchmont Towers to-morrow morning, and I want
you to look me out a decent suit of clothes--that's all. You can have
Desperado saddled ready for me a little after eleven o'clock."
Mr. Morrison looked even more astonished than before. He knew his
master's savage enmity towards Paul Marchmont; and yet that very master
now deliberately talked of joining in an assembly which was to gather
together for the special purpose of doing the same Paul Marchmont
honour. However, as he afterwards remarked to the two fellow-servants
with whom he sometimes condescended to be familiar, it wasn't his place
to interfere or to ask any questions, and he had held his tongue
accordingly.
Perhaps this respectful reticence was rather the result of prudence
than of inclination; for there was a dangerous light in Edward
Arundel's eyes upon this particular evening which Mr. Morrison never
had observed before.
The factotum said something about this later in the evening.
"I do really think," he remarked, "that, what with that young 'ooman's
death, and the solitood of this most dismal place, and the rainy
weather,--which those as says it always rains in Lincolnshire ain't far
out,--my poor young master is not the man he were."
He tapped his forehead ominously to give significance to his words, and
sighed heavily over his supper-beer.
* * * * *
The sun shone upon Paul Marchmont on the morning of the 18th of
October. The autumn sunshine streamed into his bedchamber, and awoke
the new master of Marchmont Towers. He opened his eyes and looked about
him. He raised himself amongst the down pillows, and contemplated the
figures upon the tapestry in a drowsy reverie. He had been dreaming of
his poverty, and had been disputing a poor-rate summons with an
impertinent tax-collector in the dingy passage of the house in
Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Ah! that horrible house had so long
been the only scene of his life, that it had grown almost a part of his
mind, and haunted him perpetually in his sleep, like a nightmare of
brick and mortar, now that he was rich, and had done with it for ever.
Mr. Marchmont gave a faint shudder, and shook off the influence of the
bad dream. Then, propped up by the pillows, he amused himself by
admiring his new bedchamber.
It was a handsome room, certainly--the very room for an artist and a
sybarite. Mr. Marchmont had not chosen it without due consideration. It
was situated in an angle of the house; and though its chief windows
looked westward, being immediately above those of the western
drawing-room, there was another casement, a great oriel window, facing
the east, and admitting all the grandeur of the morning sun through
painted glass, on which the Marchmont escutcheon was represented in
gorgeous hues of sapphire and ruby, emerald and topaz, amethyst and
aqua-marine. Bright splashes of these colours flashed and sparkled on
the polished oaken floor, and mixed themselves with the Oriental
gaudiness of a Persian carpet, stretched beneath the low Arabian bed,
which was hung with ruby-coloured draperies that trailed upon the
ground. Paul Marchmont was fond of splendour, and meant to have as much
of it as money could buy. There was a voluptuous pleasure in all this
finery, which only a parvenu could feel; it was the sharpness of the
contrast between the magnificence of the present and the shabby
miseries of the past that gave a piquancy to the artist's enjoyment of
his new habitation.
All the furniture and draperies of the chamber had been made by Paul
Marchmont's direction; but its chief beauty was the tapestry that
covered the walls, which had been worked, two hundred and fifty years
before, by a patient chatelaine of the House of Marchmont. This
tapestry lined the room on every side. The low door had been cut in it;
so that a stranger going into that apartment at night, a little under
the influence of the Marchmont cellars, and unable to register the
topography of the chamber upon the tablet of his memory, might have
been sorely puzzled to find an exit the next morning. Most tapestried
chambers have a certain dismal grimness about them, which is more
pleasant to the sightseer than to the constant inhabitant; but in this
tapestry the colours were almost as bright and glowing to-day as when
the fingers that had handled the variegated worsteds were still warm
and flexible. The subjects, too, were of a more pleasant order than
usual. No mailed ruffians or drapery-clad barbarians menaced the
unoffending sleeper with uplifted clubs, or horrible bolts, in the very
act of being launched from ponderous crossbows; no wicked-looking
Saracens, with ferocious eyes and copper-coloured visages, brandished
murderous scimitars above their turbaned heads. No; here all was
pastoral gaiety and peaceful delight. Maidens, with flowing kirtles and
crisped yellow hair, danced before great wagons loaded with golden
wheat. Youths, in red and purple jerkins, frisked as they played the
pipe and tabor. The Flemish horses dragging the heavy wain were hung
with bells and garlands as for a rustic festival, and tossed their
untrimmed manes into the air, and frisked and gamboled with their
awkward legs, in ponderous imitation of the youths and maidens. Afar
off, in the distance, wonderful villages, very queer as to perspective,
but all a-bloom with gaudy flowers and quaint roofs of bright-red
tiles, stood boldly out against a bluer sky than the most enthusiastic
pre-Raphaelite of to-day would care to send to the Academy in Trafalgar
Square.
Paul Marchmont smiled at the youths and maidens, the laden wagons, the
revellers, and the impossible village. He was in a humour to be pleased
with everything to-day. He looked at his dressing-table, which stood
opposite to him, in the deep oriel window. His valet--he had a valet
now--had opened the great inlaid dressing-case, and the silver-gilt
fittings reflected the crimson hues of the velvet lining, as if the
gold had been flecked with blood. Glittering bottles of diamond-cut
glass, that presented a thousand facets to the morning light, stood
like crystal obelisks amid the litter of carved-ivory brushes and
Sevres boxes of pomatum; and one rare hothouse flower, white and
fragile, peeped out of a slender crystal vase, against a background of
dark shining leaves.
"It's better than Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square," said Mr.
Marchmont, throwing himself back amongst the pillows until such time as
his valet should bring him a cup of strong tea to refresh and
invigorate his nerves withal. "I remember the paper in my room: drab
hexagons and yellow spots upon a brown ground. _So_ pretty! And then
the dressing-table: deal, gracefully designed; with a shallow drawer,
in which my razors used to rattle like castanets when I tried to pull
it open; a most delicious table, exquisitely painted in stripes,
olive-green upon stone colour, picked out with the favourite brown. Oh,
it was a most delightful life; but it's over, thank Providence; it's
over!"
Mr. Paul Marchmont thanked Providence as devoutly as if he had been the
most patient attendant upon the Divine pleasure, and had never for one
moment dreamed of intruding his own impious handiwork amid the
mysterious designs of Omnipotence.
The sun shone upon the new master of Marchmont Towers. This bright
October morning was not the very best for hunting purposes; for there
was a fresh breeze blowing from the north, and a blue unclouded sky.
But it was most delightful weather for the breakfast, and the
assembling on the lawn, and all the pleasant preliminaries of the day's
sport. Mr. Paul Marchmont, who was a thorough-bred Cockney, troubled
himself very little about the hunt as he basked in that morning light.
He only thought that the sun was shining upon him, and that he had come
at last--no matter by what crooked ways--to the realisation of his
great day-dream, and that he was to be happy and prosperous for the
rest of his life.
He drank his tea, and then got up and dressed himself. He wore the
conventional "pink," the whitest buckskins, the most approved boots and
tops; and he admired himself very much in the cheval glass when this
toilet was complete. He had put on the dress for the gratification of
his vanity, rather than from any serious intention of doing what he was
about as incapable of doing, as he was of becoming a modern Rubens or a
new Raphael. He would receive his friends in this costume, and ride to
cover, and follow the hounds, perhaps,--a little way. At any rate, it
was very delightful to him to play the country gentleman; and he had
never felt so much a country gentleman as at this moment, when he
contemplated himself from head to heel in his hunting costume.
At ten o'clock the guests began to assemble; the meet was not to take
place until twelve, so that there might be plenty of time for the
breakfast.
I don't think Paul Marchmont ever really knew what took place at that
long table, at which he sat for the first time in the place of host and
master. He was intoxicated from the first with the sense of triumph and
delight in his new position; and he drank a great deal, for he drank
unconsciously, emptying his glass every time it was filled, and never
knowing who filled it, or what was put into it. By this means he took a
very considerable quantity of various sparkling and effervescing wines;
sometimes hock, sometimes Moselle, very often champagne, to say nothing
of a steady undercurrent of unpronounceable German hocks and crusted
Burgundies. But he was not drunk after the common fashion of mortals;
he could not be upon this particular day. He was not stupid, or drowsy,
or unsteady upon his legs; he was only preternaturally excited, looking
at everything through a haze of dazzling light, as if all the gold of
his newly-acquired fortune had been melted into the atmosphere.
He knew that the breakfast was a great success; that the long table was
spread with every delicious comestible that the science of a first-rate
cook, to say nothing of Fortnum and Mason, could devise; that the
profusion of splendid silver, the costly china, the hothouse flowers,
and the sunshine, made a confused mass of restless glitter and glowing
colour that dazzled his eyes as he looked at it. He knew that everybody
courted and flattered him, and that he was almost stifled by the
overpowering sense of his own grandeur. Perhaps he felt this most when
a certain county magnate, a baronet, member of Parliament, and great
landowner, rose,--primed with champagne, and rather thicker of
utterance than a man should be who means to be in at the death,
by-and-by,--and took the opportunity of--hum--expressing, in a few
words,--haw--the very great pleasure which he--aw, yes--and he thought
he might venture to remark,--aw--everybody about him--ha--felt on this
most--arrah, arrah--interesting--er--occasion; and said a great deal
more, which took a very long time to say, but the gist of which was,
that all these country gentlemen were so enraptured by the new addition
to their circle, and so altogether delighted with Mr. Paul Marchmont,
that they really were at a loss to understand how it was they had ever
managed to endure existence without him.
And then there was a good deal of rather unnecessary but very
enthusiastic thumping of the table, whereat the costly glass shivered,
and the hothouse blossoms trembled, amidst the musical chinking of
silver forks; while the foxhunters declared in chorus that the new
owner of Marchmont Towers was a jolly good fellow, which--_i.e._, the
fact of his jollity--nobody could deny.
It was not a very fine demonstration, but it was a very hearty one.
Moreover, these noisy foxhunters were all men of some standing in the
county; and it is a proof of the artist's inherent snobbery that to him
the husky voices of these half-drunken men were more delicious than the
sweet soprano tones of an equal number of Pattis--penniless and obscure
Pattis, that is to say--sounding his praises. He was lifted at last out
of that poor artist-life, in which he had always been a groveller,--not
so much for lack of talent as by reason of the smallness of his own
soul,--into a new sphere, where everybody was rich and grand and
prosperous, and where the pleasant pathways were upon the necks of
prostrate slaves, in the shape of grooms and hirelings, respectful
servants, and reverential tradespeople.
Yes, Paul Marchmont was more drunken than any of his guests; but his
drunkenness was of a different kind to theirs. It was not the wine, but
his own grandeur that intoxicated and besotted him.
These foxhunters might get the better of their drunkenness in half an
hour or so; but his intoxication was likely to last for a very long
time, unless he should receive some sudden shock, powerful enough to
sober him.
Meanwhile the hounds were yelping and baying upon the lawn, and the
huntsmen and whippers-in were running backwards and forwards from the
lawn to the servants' hall, devouring snacks of beef and ham,--a pound
and a quarter or so at one sitting; or crunching the bones of a
frivolous young chicken,--there were not half a dozen mouthfuls on such
insignificant half-grown fowls; or excavating under the roof of a great
game-pie; or drinking a quart or so of strong ale, or half a tumbler of
raw brandy, _en passant_; and doing a great deal more in the same way,
merely to beguile the time until the gentlefolks should appear upon the
broad stone terrace.
It was half-past twelve o'clock, and Mr. Marchmont's guests were still
drinking and speechifying. They had been on the point of making a move
ever so many times; but it had happened every time that some gentleman,
who had been very quiet until that moment, suddenly got upon his legs,
and began to make swallowing and gasping noises, and to wipe his lips
with a napkin; whereby it was understood that he was going to propose
somebody's health. This had considerably lengthened the entertainment,
and it seemed rather likely that the ostensible business of the day
would be forgotten altogether. But at half-past twelve, the county
magnate, who had bidden Paul Marchmont a stately welcome to
Lincolnshire, remembered that there were twenty couple of impatient
hounds scratching up the turf in front of the long windows of the
banquet-chamber, while as many eager young tenant-farmers, stalwart
yeomen, well-to-do butchers, and a herd of tag-rag and bobtail, were
pining for the sport to begin;--at last, I say, Sir Lionel Boport
remembered this, and led the way to the terrace, leaving the renegades
to repose on the comfortable sofas lurking here and there in the
spacious rooms. Then the grim stone front of the house was suddenly
lighted up into splendour. The long terrace was one blaze of "pink,"
relieved here and there by patches of sober black and forester's green.
Amongst all these stalwart, florid-visaged country gentlemen, Paul
Marchmont, very elegant, very picturesque, but extremely
unsportsmanlike, the hero of the hour, walked slowly down the broad
stone steps amidst the vociferous cheering of the crowd, the snapping
and yelping of impatient hounds, and the distant braying of a horn.
It was the crowning moment of his life; the moment he had dreamed of
again and again in the wretched days of poverty and obscurity. The
scene was scarcely new to him,--he had acted it so often in his
imagination; he had heard the shouts and seen the respectful crowd.
There was a little difference in detail; that was all. There was no
disappointment, no shortcoming in the realisation; as there so often is
when our brightest dreams are fulfilled, and the one great good, the
all-desired, is granted to us. No; the prize was his, and it was worth
all that he had sacrificed to win it.
He looked up, and saw his mother and his sisters in the great window
over the porch. He could see the exultant pride in his mother's pale
face; and the one redeeming sentiment of his nature, his love for the
womankind who depended upon him, stirred faintly in his breast, amid
the tumult of gratified ambition and selfish joy.
This one drop of unselfish pleasure filled the cup to the brim. He took
off his hat and waved it high up above his head in answer to the
shouting of the crowd. He had stopped halfway down the flight of steps
to bow his acknowledgment of the cheering. He waved his hat, and the
huzzas grew still louder; and a band upon the other side of the lawn
played that familiar and triumphant march which is supposed to apply to
every living hero, from a Wellington just come home from Waterloo, to
the winner of a boat-race, or a patent-starch proprietor newly elected
by an admiring constituency.
There was nothing wanting. I think that in that supreme moment Paul
Marchmont quite forgot the tortuous and perilous ways by which he had
reached this all-glorious goal. I don't suppose the young princes
smothered in the Tower were ever more palpably present in Tyrant
Richard's memory than when the murderous usurper grovelled in
Bosworth's miry clay, and knew that the great game of life was lost. It
was only when Henry the Eighth took away the Great Seal that Wolsey was
able to see the foolishness of man's ambition. In that moment memory
and conscience, never very wakeful in the breast of Paul Marchmont,
were dead asleep, and only triumph and delight reigned in their stead.
No; there was nothing wanting. This glory and grandeur paid him a
thousandfold for his patience and self-abnegation during the past year.
He turned half round to look up at those eager watchers at the window.
Good God! It was his sister Lavinia's face he saw; no longer full of
triumph and pleasure, but ghastly pale, and staring at someone or
something horrible in the crowd. Paul Marchmont turned to look for this
horrible something the sight of which had power to change his sister's
face; and found himself confronted by a young man,--a young man whose
eyes flamed like coals of fire, whose cheeks were as white as a sheet
of paper, and whose firm lips were locked as tightly as if they had
been chiseled out of a block of granite.
This man was Edward Arundel,--the young widower, the handsome
soldier,--whom everybody remembered as the husband of poor lost Mary
Marchmont.
He had sprung out from amidst the crowd only one moment before, and had
dashed up the steps of the terrace before any one had time to think of
hindering him or interfering with him. It seemed to Paul Marchmont as
if his foe must have leaped out of the solid earth, so sudden and so
unlooked-for was his coming. He stood upon the step immediately below
the artist; but as the terrace-steps were shallow, and as he was taller
by half a foot than Paul, the faces of the two men were level, and they
confronted each other.
The soldier held a heavy hunting-whip in his hand--no foppish toy, with
a golden trinket for its head, but a stout handle of stag-horn, and a
formidable leathern thong. He held this whip in his strong right hand,
with the thong twisted round the handle; and throwing out his left arm,
nervous and muscular as the limb of a young gladiator, he seized Paul
Marchmont by the collar of that fashionably-cut scarlet coat which the
artist had so much admired in the cheval-glass that morning.
There was a shout of surprise and consternation from the gentlemen on
the terrace and the crowd upon the lawn, a shrill scream from the
women; and in the next moment Paul Marchmont was writhing under a
shower of blows from the hunting-whip in Edward Arundel's hand. The
artist was not physically brave, yet he was not such a cur as to submit
unresistingly to this hideous disgrace; but the attack was so sudden
and unexpected as to paralyse him--so rapid in its execution as to
leave him no time for resistance. Before he had recovered his presence
of mind; before he knew the meaning of Edward Arundel's appearance in
that place; even before he could fully realise the mere fact of his
being there,--the thing was done; he was disgraced for ever. He had
sunk in that one moment from the very height of his new grandeur to the
lowest depth of social degradation.
"Gentlemen!" Edward Arundel cried, in a loud voice, which was
distinctly heard by every member of the gaping crowd, "when the law of
the land suffers a scoundrel to prosper, honest men must take the law
into their own hands. I wished you to know my opinion of the new master
of Marchmont Towers; and I think I've expressed it pretty clearly. I
know him to be a most consummate villain; and I give you fair warning
that he is no fit associate for honourable men. Good morning."
Edward Arundel lifted his hat, bowed to the assembly, and then ran down
the steps. Paul Marchmont, livid, and foaming at the mouth, rushed
after him, brandishing his clenched fists, and gesticulating in
impotent rage; but the young man's horse was waiting for him at a few
paces from the terrace, in the care of a butcher's apprentice, and he
was in the saddle before the artist could overtake him.
"I shall not leave Kemberling for a week, Mr. Marchmont," he called
out; and then he walked his horse away, holding himself erect as a
dart, and staring defiance at the crowd.
I am sorry to have to testify to the fickle nature of the British
populace; but I am bound to own that a great many of the stalwart
yeomen who had eaten game-pies and drunk strong liquors at Paul
Marchmont's expense not half an hour before, were base enough to feel
an involuntary admiration for Edward Arundel, as he rode slowly away,
with his head up and his eyes flaming. There is seldom very much
genuine sympathy for a man who has been horsewhipped; and there is a
pretty universal inclination to believe that the man who inflicts
chastisement upon him must be right in the main. It is true that the
tenant-farmers, especially those whose leases were nearly run out, were
very loud in their indignation against Mr. Arundel, and one adventurous
spirit made a dash at the young man's bridle as he went by; but the
general feeling was in favour of the conqueror, and there was a lack of
heartiness even in the loudest expressions of sympathy.
The crowd made a lane for Paul Marchmont as he went back to the house,
white and helpless, and sick with shame.
Several of the gentlemen upon the terrace came forward to shake hands
with him, and to express their indignation, and to offer any friendly
service that he might require of them by-and-by,--such as standing by
to see him shot, if he should choose an old-fashioned mode of
retaliation; or bearing witness against Edward Arundel in a law-court,
if Mr. Marchmont preferred to take legal measures. But even these men
recoiled when they felt the cold dampness of the artist's hands, and
saw that _he had been frightened_. These sturdy, uproarious foxhunters,
who braved the peril of sudden death every time they took a day's
sport, entertained a sovereign contempt for a man who _could_ be
frightened of anybody or anything. They made no allowance for Paul
Marchmont's Cockney education; they were not in the dark secrets of his
life, and knew nothing of his guilty conscience; and it was _that_
which had made him more helpless than a child in the fierce grasp of
Edward Arundel.
So one by one, after this polite show of sympathy, the rich man's
guests fell away from him; and the yelping hounds and the cantering
horses left the lawn before Marchmont Towers; the sound of the brass
band and the voices of the people died away in the distance; and the
glory of the day was done.
Paul Marchmont crawled slowly back to that luxurious bedchamber which
he had left only a few hours before, and, throwing himself at full
length upon the bed, sobbed like a frightened child.
He was panic-stricken; not because of the horsewhipping, but because of
a sentence that Edward Arundel had whispered close to his ear in the
midst of the struggle.
"I know _everything_," the young man had said; "I know the secrets you
hide in the pavilion by the river!"
CHAPTER II.
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.
CHAPTER III.
TAKING IT QUIETLY.
All the county, or at least all that part of the county within a
certain radius of Marchmont Towers, waited very anxiously for Mr. Paul
Marchmont to make some move. The horsewhipping business had given quite
a pleasant zest, a flavour of excitement, a dash of what it is the
fashion nowadays to call "sensation," to the wind-up of the hunting
breakfast. Poor Paul's thrashing had been more racy and appetising than
the finest olives that ever grew, and his late guests looked forward to
a great deal more excitement and "sensation" before the business was
done with. Of course Paul Marchmont would do something. He _must_ make
a stir; and the sooner he made it the better. Matters would have to be
explained. People expected to know the _cause_ of Edward Arundel's
enmity; and of course the new master of the Towers would see the
propriety of setting himself right in the eyes of his influential
acquaintance, his tenantry, and retainers; especially if he
contemplated standing for Swampington at the next general election.
This was what people said to each other. The scene at the
hunting-breakfast was a most fertile topic of conversation. It was
almost as good as a popular murder, and furnished scandalous paragraphs
_ad infinitum_ for the provincial papers, most of them beginning, "It
is understood--," or "It has been whispered in our hearing that--," or
"Rochefoucault has observed that--." Everybody expected that Paul
Marchmont would write to the papers, and that Edward Arundel would
answer him in the papers; and that a brisk and stirring warfare would
be carried on in printer's-ink--at least. But no line written by either
of the gentlemen appeared in any one of the county journals; and by
slow degrees it dawned upon people that there was no further amusement
to be got out of Paul's chastisement, and that the master of the Towers
meant to take the thing quietly, and to swallow the horrible outrage,
taking care to hide any wry faces he made during that operation.
Yes; Paul Marchmont let the matter drop. The report was circulated that
he was very ill, and had suffered from a touch of brain-fever, which
kept him a victim to incessant delirium until after Mr. Arundel had
left the county. This rumour was set afloat by Mr. Weston the surgeon;
and as he was the only person admitted to his brother-in-law's
apartment, it was impossible for any one to contradict his assertion.
The fox-hunting squires shrugged their shoulders; and I am sorry to say
that the epithets, "hound," "cur," "sneak," and "mongrel," were more
often applied to Mr. Marchmont than was consistent with Christian
feeling on the part of the gentlemen who uttered them. But a man who
can swallow a sound thrashing, administered upon his own door-step, has
to contend with the prejudices of society, and must take the
consequences of being in advance of his age.
So, while his new neighbours talked about him, Paul Marchmont lay in
his splendid chamber, with the frisking youths and maidens staring at
him all day long, and simpering at him with their unchanging faces,
until he grew sick at heart, and began to loathe all this new grandeur,
which had so delighted him a little time ago. He no longer laughed at
the recollection of shabby Charlotte Street. He dreamt one night that
he was back again in the old bedroom, with the painted deal furniture,
and the hideous paper on the walls, and that the Marchmont-Towers
magnificence had been only a feverish vision; and he was glad to be
back in that familiar place, and was sorry on awaking to find that
Marchmont Towers was a splendid reality.
There was only one faint red streak upon his shoulders, for the
thrashing had not been a brutal one. It was _disgrace_ Edward Arundel
had wanted to inflict, not physical pain, the commonplace punishment
with which a man corrects his refractory horse. The lash of the
hunting-whip had done very little damage to the artist's flesh; but it
had slashed away his manhood, as the sickle sweeps the flowers amidst
the corn.
He could never look up again. The thought of going out of this house
for the first time, and the horror of confronting the altered faces of
his neighbours, was as dreadful to him as the anticipation of that
awful exit from the Debtor's Door, which is the last step but one into
eternity, must be to the condemned criminal.
"I shall go abroad," he said to his mother, when he made his appearance
in the western drawing-room, a week after Edward's departure. "I shall
go on the Continent, mother; I have taken a dislike to this place,
since that savage attacked me the other day."
Mrs. Marchmont sighed.
"It will seem hard to lose you, Paul, now that you are rich. You were
so constant to us through all our poverty; and we might be so happy
together now."
The artist was walking up and down the room, with his hands in the
pockets of his braided velvet coat. He knew that in the conventional
costume of a well-bred gentleman he showed to a disadvantage amongst
other men; and he affected a picturesque and artistic style of dress,
whose brighter hues and looser outlines lighted up his pale face, and
gave a grace to his spare figure.
"You think it worth something, then, mother?" he said presently, half
kneeling, half lounging in a deep-cushioned easy chair near the table
at which his mother sat. "You think our money is worth something to us?
All these chairs and tables, this great rambling house, the servants
who wait upon us, and the carriages we ride in, are worth something,
are they not? they make us happier, I suppose. I know I always thought
such things made up the sum of happiness when I was poor. I have seen a
hearse going away from a rich man's door, carrying his cherished wife,
or his only son, perhaps; and I've thought, 'Ah, but he has forty
thousand a year!' You are happier here than you were in Charlotte
Street, eh, mother?"
Mrs. Marchmont was a Frenchwoman by birth, though she had lived so long
in London as to become Anglicised. She only retained a slight accent of
her native tongue, and a good deal more vivacity of look and gesture
than is common to Englishwomen. Her elder daughter was sitting on the
other side of the broad fireplace. She was only a quieter and older
likeness of Lavinia Weston.
"_Am_ I happier?" exclaimed Mrs. Marchmont. "Need you ask me the
question, Paul? But it is not so much for myself as for your sake that
I value all this grandeur."
She held out her long thin hand, which was covered with rings, some
old-fashioned and comparatively valueless, others lately purchased by
her devoted son, and very precious. The artist took the shrunken
fingers in his own, and raised them to his lips.
"I'm very glad that I've made you happy, mother," he said; "that's
something gained, at any rate."
He left the fireplace, and walked slowly up and down the room, stopping
now and then to look out at the wintry sky, or the flat expanse of turf
below it; but he was quite a different creature to that which he had
been before his encounter with Edward Arundel. The chairs and tables
palled upon him. The mossy velvet pile of the new carpets seemed to him
like the swampy ground of a morass. The dark-green draperies of Genoa
velvet deepened into black with the growing twilight, and seemed as if
they had been fashioned out of palls.
What was it worth, this fine house, with the broad flat before it?
Nothing, if he had lost the respect and consideration of his
neighbours. He wanted to be a great man as well as a rich one. He
wanted admiration and flattery, reverence and esteem; not from poor
people, whose esteem and admiration were scarcely worth having, but
from wealthy squires, his equals or his superiors by birth and fortune.
He ground his teeth at the thought of his disgrace. He had drunk of the
cup of triumph, and had tasted the very wine of life; and at the moment
when that cup was fullest, it had been snatched away from him by the
ruthless hand of his enemy.
Christmas came, and gave Paul Marchmont a good opportunity of playing
the country gentleman of the olden time. What was the cost of a couple
of bullocks, a few hogsheads of ale, and a waggon-load of coals, if by
such a sacrifice the master of the Towers could secure for himself the
admiration due to a public benefactor? Paul gave _carte blanche_ to the
old servants; and tents were erected on the lawn, and monstrous
bonfires blazed briskly in the frosty air; while the populace, who
would have accepted the bounties of a new Nero fresh from the burning
of a modern Rome, drank to the health of their benefactor, and warmed
themselves by the unlimited consumption of strong beer.
Mrs. Marchmont and her invalid daughter assisted Paul in his attempt to
regain the popularity he had lost upon the steps of the western
terrace. The two women distributed square miles of flannel and
blanketing amongst greedy claimants; they gave scarlet cloaks and
poke-bonnets to old women; they gave an insipid feast, upon temperance
principles, to the children of the National Schools. And they had their
reward; for people began to say that this Paul Marchmont was a very
noble fellow, after all, by Jove, sir and that fellow Arundel must have
been in the wrong, sir; and no doubt Marchmont had his own reasons for
not resenting the outrage, sir; and a great deal more to the like
effect.
After this roasting of the two bullocks the wind changed altogether.
Mr. Marchmont gave a great dinner-party upon New-Year's Day. He sent
out thirty invitations, and had only two refusals. So the long
dining-room was filled with all the notabilities of the district, and
Paul held his head up once more, and rejoiced in his own grandeur.
After all, one horsewhipping cannot annihilate a man with a fine estate
and eleven thousand a year, if he knows how to make a splash with his
money.
Olivia Marchmont shared in none of the festivals that were held. Her
father was very ill this winter; and she spent a good deal of her time
at Swampington Rectory, sitting in Hubert Arundel's room, and reading
to him. But her presence brought very little comfort to the sick man;
for there was something in his daughter's manner that filled him with
inexpressible terror; and he would lie for hours together watching her
blank face, and wondering at its horrible rigidity. What was it? What
was the dreadful secret which had transformed this woman? He tormented
himself perpetually with this question, but he could imagine no answer
to it. He did not know the power which a master-passion has upon these
strong-minded women, whose minds are strong because of their
narrowness, and who are the bonden slaves of one idea. He did not know
that in a breast which holds no pure affection the master-fiend Passion
rages like an all-devouring flame, perpetually consuming its victim. He
did not know that in these violent and concentrative natures the line
that separates reason from madness is so feeble a demarcation, that
very few can perceive the hour in which it is passed.
Olivia Marchmont had never been the most lively or delightful of
companions. The tenderness which is the common attribute of a woman's
nature had not been given to her. She ought to have been a great man.
Nature makes these mistakes now and then, and the victim expiates the
error. Hence comes such imperfect histories as that of English
Elizabeth and Swedish Christina. The fetters that had bound Olivia's
narrow life had eaten into her very soul, and cankered there. If she
could have been Edward Arundel's wife, she would have been the noblest
and truest wife that ever merged her identity into that of another, and
lived upon the refracted glory of her husband's triumphs. She would
have been a Rachel Russell, a Mrs. Hutchinson, a Lady Nithisdale, a
Madame de Lavalette. She would have been great by reason of her power
of self-abnegation; and there would have been a strange charm in the
aspect of this fierce nature attuned to harmonise with its master's
soul, all the barbaric discords melting into melody, all the harsh
combinations softening into perfect music; just as in Mr. Buckstone's
most poetic drama we are bewitched by the wild huntress sitting at the
feet of her lord, and admire her chiefly because we know that only that
one man upon all the earth could have had power to tame her. To any one
who had known Olivia's secret, there could have been no sadder
spectacle than this of her decay. The mind and body decayed together,
bound by a mysterious sympathy. All womanly roundness disappeared from
the spare figure, and Mrs. Marchmont's black dresses hung about her in
loose folds. Her long, dead, black hair was pushed away from her thin
face, and twisted into a heavy knot at the back of her head. Every
charm that she had ever possessed was gone. The oldest women generally
retain some traits of their lost beauty, some faint reflection of the
sun that has gone down, to light up the soft twilight of age, and even
glimmer through the gloom of death. But this woman's face retained no
token of the past. No empty hull, with shattered bulwarks crumbled by
the fury of fierce seas, cast on a desert shore to rot and perish
there, was ever more complete a wreck than she was. Upon her face and
figure, in every look and gesture, in the tone of every word she spoke,
there was an awful something, worse than the seal of death. Little by
little the miserable truth dawned upon Hubert Arundel. His daughter was
mad! He knew this; but he kept the dreadful knowledge hidden in his own
breast,--a hideous secret, whose weight oppressed him like an actual
burden. He kept the secret; for it would have seemed to him the most
cruel treason against his daughter to have confessed his discovery to
any living creature, unless it should be absolutely necessary to do so.
Meanwhile he set himself to watch Olivia, detaining her at the Rectory
for a week together, in order that he might see her in all moods, under
all phases.
He found that there were no violent or outrageous evidences of this
mental decay. The mind had given way under the perpetual pressure of
one set of thoughts. Hubert Arundel, in his ignorance of his daughter's
secrets, could not discover the cause of her decadence; but that cause
was very simple. If the body is a wonderful and complex machine which
must not be tampered with, surely that still more complex machine the
mind must need careful treatment. If such and such a course of diet is
fatal to the body's health, may not some thoughts be equally fatal to
the health of the brain? may not a monotonous recurrence of the same
ideas be above all injurious? If by reason of the peculiar nature of a
man's labour, he uses one limb or one muscle more than the rest,
strange bosses rise up to testify to that ill usage, the idle limbs
wither, and the harmonious perfection of Nature gives place to
deformity. So the brain, perpetually pressed upon, for ever strained to
its utmost tension by the wearisome succession of thoughts, becomes
crooked and one-sided, always leaning one way, continually tripping up
the wretched thinker.
John Marchmont's widow had only one set of ideas. On every subject but
that one which involved Edward Arundel and his fortunes her memory had
decayed. She asked her father the same questions--commonplace questions
relating to his own comfort, or to simple household matters, twenty
times a day, always forgetting that he had answered her. She had that
impatience as to the passage of time which is one of the most painful
signs of madness. She looked at her watch ten times an hour, and would
wander out into the cheerless garden, indifferent to the bitter
weather, in order to look at the clock in the church-steeple, under the
impression that her own watch, and her father's, and all the
time-keepers in the house, were slow.
She was sometimes restless, taking up one occupation after another, to
throw all aside with equal impatience, and sometimes immobile for hours
together. But as she was never violent, never in any way unreasonable,
Hubert Arundel had not the heart to call science to his aid, and to
betray her secret. The thought that his daughter's malady might be
cured never entered his mind as within the range of possibility. There
was nothing to cure; no delusions to be exorcised by medical treatment;
no violent vagaries to be held in check by drugs and nostrums. The
powerful intellect had decayed; its force and clearness were gone. No
drugs that ever grew upon this earth could restore that which was lost.
This was the conviction which kept the Rector silent. It would have
given him unutterable anguish to have told his daughter's secret to any
living being; but he would have endured that misery if she could have
been benefitted thereby. He most firmly believed that she could not,
and that her state was irremediable.
"My poor girl!" he thought to himself; "how proud I was of her ten
years ago! I can do nothing for her; nothing except to love and cherish
her, and hide her humiliation from the world."
But Hubert Arundel was not allowed to do even this much for the
daughter he loved; for when Olivia had been with him a little more than
a week, Paul Marchmont and his mother drove over to Swampington Rectory
one morning and carried her away with them. The Rector then saw for the
first time that his once strong-minded daughter was completely under
the dominion of these two people, and that they knew the nature of her
malady quite as well as he did. He resisted her return to the Towers;
but his resistance was useless. She submitted herself willingly to her
new friends, declaring that she was better in their house than anywhere
else. So she went back to her old suite of apartments, and her old
servant Barbara waited upon her; and she sat alone in dead John
Marchmont's study, listening to the January winds shrieking in the
quadrangle, the distant rooks calling to each other amongst the bare
branches of the poplars, the banging of the doors in the corridor, and
occasional gusts of laughter from the open door of the
dining-room,--while Paul Marchmont and his guests gave a jovial welcome
to the new year.
While the master of the Towers re-asserted his grandeur, and made
stupendous efforts to regain the ground he had lost, Edward Arundel
wandered far away in the depths of Brittany, travelling on foot, and
making himself familiar with the simple peasants, who were ignorant of
his troubles. He had sent Mr. Morrison down to Dangerfield with the
greater part of his luggage; but he had not the heart to go back
himself--yet awhile. He was afraid of his mother's sympathy, and he
went away into the lonely Breton villages, to try and cure himself of
his great grief, before he began life again as a soldier. It was
useless for him to strive against his vocation. Nature had made him a
soldier, and nothing else; and wherever there was a good cause to be
fought for, his place was on the battle-field.
CHAPTER IV.
MISS LAWFORD SPEAKS HER MIND.
Major Lawford and his blue-eyed daughters were not amongst those guests
who accepted Paul Marchmont's princely hospitalities. Belinda Lawford
had never heard the story of Edward's lost bride as he himself could
have told it; but she had heard an imperfect version of the sorrowful
history from Letitia, and that young lady had informed her friend of
Edward's animus against the new master of the Towers.
"The poor dear foolish boy will insist upon thinking that Mr. Marchmont
was at the bottom of it all," she had said in a confidential chat with
Belinda, "somehow or other; but whether he was, or whether he wasn't,
I'm sure I can't say. But if one attempts to take Mr. Marchmont's part
with Edward, he does get so violent and go on so, that one's obliged to
say all sorts of dreadful things about Mary's cousin for the sake of
peace. But really, when I saw him one day in Kemberling, with a black
velvet shooting-coat, and his beautiful smooth white hair and auburn
moustache, I thought him most interesting. And so would you, Belinda,
if you weren't so wrapped up in that doleful brother of mine."
Whereupon, of course, Miss Lawford had been compelled to declare that
she was not "wrapped up" in Edward, whatever state of feeling that
obscure phrase might signify; and to express, by the vehemence of her
denial, that, if anything, she rather detested Miss Arundel's brother.
By-the-by, did you ever know a young lady who could understand the
admiration aroused in the breast of other young ladies for that most
uninteresting object, a _brother_? Or a gentleman who could enter with
any warmth of sympathy into his friend's feelings respecting the auburn
tresses or the Grecian nose of "a sister"? Belinda Lawford, I say, knew
something of the story of Mary Arundel's death, and she implored her
father to reject all hospitalities offered by Paul Marchmont.
"You won't go to the Towers, papa dear?" she said, with her hands
clasped upon her father's arm, her cheeks kindling, and her eyes
filling with tears as she spoke to him; "you won't go and sit at Paul
Marchmont's table, and drink his wine, and shake hands with him? I know
that he had something to do with Mary Arundel's death. He had indeed,
papa. I don't mean anything that the world calls crime; I don't mean
any act of open violence. But he was cruel to her, papa; he was cruel
to her. He tortured her and tormented her until she--" The girl paused
for a moment, and her voice faltered a little. "Oh, how I wish that I
had known her, papa," she cried presently, "that I might have stood by
her, and comforted her, all through that sad time!"
The Major looked down at his daughter with a tender smile,--a smile
that was a little significant, perhaps, but full of love and
admiration.
"You would have stood by Arundel's poor little wife, my dear?" he said.
"You would stand by her _now_, if she were alive, and needed your
friendship?"
"I would indeed, papa," Miss Lawford answered resolutely.
"I believe it, my dear; I believe it with all my heart. You are a good
girl, my Linda; you are a noble girl. You are as good as a son to me,
my dear."
Major Lawford was silent for a few moments, holding his daughter in his
arms and pressing his lips upon her broad forehead.
"You are fit to be a soldier's daughter, my darling," he said, "or--or
a soldier's wife."
He kissed her once more, and then left her, sighing thoughtfully as he
went away.
This is how it was that neither Major Lawford nor any of his family
were present at those splendid entertainments which Paul Marchmont gave
to his new friends. Mr. Marchmont knew almost as well as the Lawfords
themselves why they did not come, and the absence of them at his
glittering board made his bread bitter to him and his wine tasteless.
He wanted these people as much as the others,--more than the others,
perhaps, for they had been Edward Arundel's friends; and he wanted them
to turn their backs upon the young man, and join in the general outcry
against his violence and brutality. The absence of Major Lawford at the
lighted banquet-table tormented this modern rich man as the presence of
Mordecai at the gate tormented Haman. It was not enough that all the
others should come if these stayed away, and by their absence tacitly
testified to their contempt for the master of the Towers.
He met Belinda sometimes on horseback with the old grey-headed groom
behind her, a fearless young amazon, breasting the January winds, with
her blue eyes sparkling, and her auburn hair blowing away from her
candid face: he met her, and looked out at her from the luxurious
barouche in which it was his pleasure to loll by his mother's side,
half-buried amongst soft furry rugs and sleek leopard-skins, making the
chilly atmosphere through which he rode odorous with the scent of
perfumed hair, and smiling over cruelly delicious criticisms in
newly-cut reviews. He looked out at this fearless girl whose friends so
obstinately stood by Edward Arundel; and the cold contempt upon Miss
Lawford's face cut him more keenly than the sharpest wind of that
bitter January.
Then he took counsel with his womankind; not telling them his thoughts,
fears, doubts, or wishes--it was not his habit to do that--but taking
_their_ ideas, and only telling them so much as it was necessary for
them to know in order that they might be useful to him. Paul
Marchmont's life was regulated by a few rules, so simple that a child
might have learned them; indeed I regret to say that some children are
very apt pupils in that school of philosophy to which the master of
Marchmont Towers belonged, and cause astonishment to their elders by
the precocity of their intelligence. Mr. Marchmont might have inscribed
upon a very small scrap of parchment the moral maxims by which he
regulated his dealings with mankind.
"Always conciliate," said this philosopher. "Never tell an unnecessary
lie. Be agreeable and generous to those who serve you. N.B. No good
carpenter would allow his tools to get rusty. Make yourself master of
the opinions of others, but hold your own tongue. Seek to obtain the
maximum of enjoyment with the minimum of risk."
Such golden saws as these did Mr. Marchmont make for his own especial
guidance; and he hoped to pass smoothly onwards upon the railway of
life, riding in a first-class carriage, on the greased wheels of a very
easy conscience. As for any unfortunate fellow-travellers pitched out
of the carriage-window in the course of the journey, or left lonely and
helpless at desolate stations on the way, Providence, and not Mr.
Marchmont, was responsible for _their_ welfare. Paul had a high
appreciation of Providence, and was fond of talking--very piously, as
some people said; very impiously, as others secretly thought--about the
inestimable Wisdom which governed all the affairs of this lower world.
Nowhere, according to the artist, had the hand of Providence been more
clearly visible than in this matter about Paul's poor little cousin
Mary. If Providence had intended John Marchmont's daughter to be a
happy bride, a happy wife, the prosperous mistress of that stately
habitation, why all that sad business of old Mr. Arundel's sudden
illness, Edward's hurried journey, the railway accident, and all the
complications that had thereupon arisen? Nothing would have been easier
than for Providence to have prevented all this; and then he, Paul,
would have been still in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, patiently
waiting for a friendly lift upon the high-road of life. Nobody could
say that he had ever been otherwise than patient. Nobody could say that
he had ever intruded himself upon his rich cousins at the Towers, or
had been heard to speculate upon his possible inheritance of the
estate; or that he had, in short, done any thing but that which the
best, truest, most conscientious and disinterested of mankind should
do.