MARCHMONT TOWERS.
There is a lapse of three years and a half between the acts; and the
curtain rises to reveal a widely-different picture:--the picture of a
noble mansion in the flat Lincolnshire country; a stately pile of
building, standing proudly forth against a background of black
woodland; a noble building, supported upon either side by an octagon
tower, whose solid masonry is half-hidden by the ivy which clings about
the stonework, trailing here and there, and flapping restlessly with
every breath of wind against the narrow casements.
A broad stone terrace stretches the entire length of the grim facade,
from tower to tower; and three flights of steps lead from the terrace
to the broad lawn, which loses itself in a vast grassy flat, only
broken by a few clumps of trees and a dismal pool of black water, but
called by courtesy a park. Grim stone griffins surmount the
terrace-steps, and griffins' heads and other architectural
monstrosities, worn and moss-grown, keep watch and ward over every door
and window, every archway and abutment--frowning threat and defiance
upon the daring visitor who approaches the great house by this, the
formidable chief entrance.
The mansion looks westward: but there is another approach, a low
archway on the southern side, which leads into a quadrangle, where
there is a quaint little door under a stone portico, ivy-covered like
the rest; a comfortable little door of massive oak, studded with knobs
of rusty iron,--a door generally affected by visitors familiar with the
house.
This is Marchmont Towers,--a grand and stately mansion, which had been
a monastery in the days when England and the Pope were friends and
allies; and which had been bestowed upon Hugh Marchmont, gentleman, by
his Sovereign Lord and Most Christian Majesty the King Henry VIII, of
blessed memory, and by that gentleman-commoner extended and improved at
considerable outlay. This is Marchmont Towers,--a splendid and a
princely habitation truly, but perhaps scarcely the kind of dwelling
one would choose for the holy resting-place we call home. The great
mansion is a little too dismal in its lonely grandeur: it lacks shelter
when the dreary winds come sweeping across the grassy flats in the
bleak winter weather; it lacks shade when the western sun blazes on
every window-pane in the stifling summer evening. It is at all times
rather too stony in its aspect; and is apt to remind one almost
painfully of every weird and sorrowful story treasured in the
storehouse of memory. Ancient tales of enchantment, dark German
legends, wild Scottish fancies, grim fragments of half-forgotten
demonology, strange stories of murder, violence, mystery, and wrong,
vaguely intermingle in the stranger's mind as he looks, for the first
time, at Marchmont Towers.
But of course these feelings wear off in time. So invincible is the
power of custom, that we might make ourselves comfortable in the Castle
of Otranto, after a reasonable sojourn within its mysterious walls:
familiarity would breed contempt for the giant helmet, and all the
other grim apparitions of the haunted dwelling. The commonplace and
ignoble wants of every-day life must surely bring disenchantment with
them. The ghost and the butcher's boy cannot well exist
contemporaneously; and the avenging shade can scarcely continue to lurk
beneath the portal which is visited by the matutinal milkman. Indeed,
this is doubtless the reason that the most restless and impatient
spirit, bent on early vengeance and immediate retribution, will yet
wait until the shades of night have fallen before he reveals himself,
rather than run the risk of an ignominious encounter with the postman
or the parlour-maid. Be it how it might, the phantoms of Marchmont
Towers were not intrusive. They may have perambulated the long
tapestried corridors, the tenantless chambers, the broad black
staircase of shining oak; but, happily, no dweller in the mansion was
ever scared by the sight of their pale faces. All the dead-and-gone
beauties, and soldiers, and lawyers, and parsons, and simple
country-squires of the Marchmont race may have descended from their
picture-frames to hold a witches' sabbath in the old mansion; but as
the Lincolnshire servants were hearty eaters and heavy sleepers, the
ghosts had it all to themselves. I believe there was one dismal story
attached to the house,--the story of a Marchmont of the time of Charles
I, who had murdered his coachman in a fit of insensate rage; and it was
even asserted, upon the authority of an old housekeeper, that John
Marchmont's grandmother, when a young woman and lately come as a bride
to the Towers, had beheld the murdered coachman stalk into her chamber,
ghastly and blood-bedabbled, in the dim summer twilight. But as this
story was not particularly romantic, and possessed none of the elements
likely to insure popularity,--such as love, jealousy, revenge, mystery,
youth, and beauty,--it had never been very widely disseminated.
I should think that the new owner of Marchmont Towers--new within the
last six months--was about the last person in Christendom to be
hypercritical, or to raise fanciful objections to his dwelling; for
inasmuch as he had come straight from a wretched transpontine lodging
to this splendid Lincolnshire mansion, and had at the same time
exchanged a stipend of thirty shillings a week for an income of eleven
thousand a year (derivable from lands that spread far away, over fenny
flats and low-lying farms, to the solitary seashore), he had ample
reason to be grateful to Providence, and well pleased with his new
abode.
Yes; Philip Marchmont, the childless widower, had died six months
before, at the close of the year '43, of a broken heart,--his old
servants said, broken by the loss of his only and idolised son; after
which loss he had never been known to smile. He was one of those
undemonstrative men who can take a great sorrow quietly, and only--die
of it. Philip Marchmont lay in a velvet-covered coffin, above his
son's, in the stone recess set apart for them in the Marchmont vault
beneath Kemberling Church, three miles from the Towers; and John
reigned in his stead. John Marchmont, the supernumerary, the
banner-holder of Drury Lane, the patient, conscientious copying and
outdoor clerk of Lincoln's Inn, was now sole owner of the Lincolnshire
estate, sole master of a household of well-trained old servants, sole
proprietor of a very decent country-gentleman's stud, and of chariots,
barouches, chaises, phaetons, and other vehicles--a little shabby and
out of date it may be, but very comfortable to a man for whom an
omnibus ride had long been a treat and a rarity. Nothing had been
touched or disturbed since Philip Marchmont's death. The rooms he had
used were still the occupied apartments; the chambers he had chosen to
shut up were still kept with locked doors; the servants who had served
him waited upon his successor, whom they declared to be a quiet, easy
gentleman, far too wise to interfere with old servants, every one of
whom knew the ways of the house a great deal better than he did, though
he was the master of it.
There was, therefore, no shadow of change in the stately mansion. The
dinner-bell still rang at the same hour; the same tradespeople left the
same species of wares at the low oaken door; the old housekeeper,
arranging her simple _menu_, planned her narrow round of soups and
roasts, sweets and made-dishes, exactly as she had been wont to do, and
had no new tastes to consult. A grey-haired bachelor, who had been
own-man to Philip, was now own-man to John. The carriage which had
conveyed the late lord every Sunday to morning and afternoon service at
Kemberling conveyed the new lord, who sat in the same seat that his
predecessor had occupied in the great family-pew, and read his prayers
out of the same book,--a noble crimson, morocco-covered volume, in
which George, our most gracious King and Governor, and all manner of
dead-and-gone princes and princesses were prayed for.
The presence of Mary Marchmont made the only change in the old house;
and even that change was a very trifling one. Mary and her father were
as closely united at Marchmont Towers as they had been in Oakley
Street. The little girl clung to her father as tenderly as ever--more
tenderly than ever perhaps; for she knew something of that which the
physicians had said, and she knew that John Marchmont's lease of life
was not a long one. Perhaps it would be better to say that he had no
lease at all. His soul was a tenant on sufferance in its frail earthly
habitation, receiving a respite now and again, when the flicker of the
lamp was very low--every chance breath of wind threatening to
extinguish it for ever. It was only those who knew John Marchmont very
intimately who were fully acquainted with the extent of his danger. He
no longer bore any of those fatal outward signs of consumption, which
fatigue and deprivation had once made painfully conspicuous. The hectic
flush and the unnatural brightness of the eyes had subsided; indeed,
John seemed much stronger and heartier than of old; and it is only
great medical practitioners who can tell to a nicety what is going on
_inside_ a man, when he presents a very fair exterior to the
unprofessional eye. But John was decidedly better than he had been. He
might live three years, five, seven, possibly even ten years; but he
must live the life of a man who holds himself perpetually upon his
defence against death; and he must recognise in every bleak current of
wind, in every chilling damp, or perilous heat, or over-exertion, or
ill-chosen morsel of food, or hasty emotion, or sudden passion, an
insidious ally of his dismal enemy.
Mary Marchmont knew all this,--or divined it, perhaps, rather than knew
it, with the child-woman's subtle power of divination, which is even
stronger than the actual woman's; for her father had done his best to
keep all sorrowful knowledge from her. She knew that he was in danger;
and she loved him all the more dearly, as the one precious thing which
was in constant peril of being snatched away. The child's love for her
father has not grown any less morbid in its intensity since Edward
Arundel's departure for India; nor has Mary become more childlike since
her coming to Marchmont Towers, and her abandonment of all those sordid
cares, those pitiful every-day duties, which had made her womanly.
It may be that the last lingering glamour of childhood had for ever
faded away with the realisation of the day-dream which she had carried
about with her so often in the dingy transpontine thoroughfares around
Oakley Street. Marchmont Towers, that fairy palace, whose lighted
windows had shone upon her far away across a cruel forest of poverty
and trouble, like the enchanted castle which appears to the lost
wanderer of the child's story, was now the home of the father she
loved. The grim enchanter Death, the only magician of our modern
histories, had waved his skeleton hand, more powerful than the
star-gemmed wand of any fairy godmother, and the obstacles which had
stood between John Marchmont and his inheritance had one by one been
swept away.
But was Marchmont Towers quite as beautiful as that fairy palace of
Mary's day-dream? No, not quite--not quite. The rooms were
handsome,--handsomer and larger, even, than the rooms she had dreamed
of; but perhaps none the better for that. They were grand and gloomy
and magnificent; but they were not the sunlit chambers which her fancy
had built up, and decorated with such shreds and patches of splendour
as her narrow experience enabled her to devise. Perhaps it was rather a
disappointment to Miss Marchmont to discover that the mansion was
completely furnished, and that there was no room in it for any of those
splendours which she had so often contemplated in the New Cut. The
parrot at the greengrocer's was a vulgar bird, and not by any means
admissible in Lincolnshire. The carrying away and providing for Mary's
favourite tradespeople was not practicable; and John Marchmont had
demurred to her proposal of adopting the butcher's daughter.
There is always something to be given up even when our brightest
visions are realised; there is always some one figure (a low one
perhaps) missing in the fullest sum of earthly happiness. I dare say if
Alnaschar had married the Vizier's daughter, he would have found her a
shrew, and would have looked back yearningly to the humble days in
which he had been an itinerant vendor of crockery-ware.
If, therefore, Mary Marchmont found her sunlit fancies not quite
realised by the great stony mansion that frowned upon the fenny
countryside, the wide grassy flat, the black pool, with its dismal
shelter of weird pollard-willows, whose ugly reflections, distorted on
the bosom of the quiet water, looked like the shadows of hump-backed
men;--if these things did not compose as beautiful a picture as that
which the little girl had carried so long in her mind, she had no more
reason to be sorry than the rest of us, and had been no more foolish
than other dreamers. I think she had built her airy castle too much
after the model of a last scene in a pantomime, and that she expected
to find spangled waters twinkling in perpetual sunshine, revolving
fountains, ever-expanding sunflowers, and gilded clouds of
rose-coloured gauze,--every thing except the fairies, in short,--at
Marchmont Towers. Well, the dream was over: and she was quite a woman
now, and very grateful to Providence when she remembered that her
father had no longer need to toil for his daily bread, and that he was
luxuriously lodged, and could have the first physicians in the land at
his beck and call.
"Oh, papa, it is so nice to be rich!" the young lady would exclaim now
and then, in a fleeting transport of enthusiasm. "How good we ought to
be to the poor people, when we remember how poor we once were!"
And the little girl did not forget to be good to the poor about
Kemberling and Marchmont Towers. There were plenty of poor, of
course--free-and-easy pensioners, who came to the Towers for brandy,
and wine, and milk, and woollen stuffs, and grocery, precisely as they
would have gone to a shop, except that there was to be no bill. The
housekeeper doled out her bounties with many short homilies upon the
depravity and ingratitude of the recipients, and gave tracts of an
awful and denunciatory nature to the pitiful petitioners--tracts
interrogatory, and tracts fiercely imperative; tracts that asked,
"Where are you going?" "Why are you wicked?" "What will become of you?"
and other tracts which cried, "Stop, and think!" "Pause, while there is
time!" "Sinner, consider!" "Evil-doer, beware!" Perhaps it may not be
the wisest possible plan to begin the work of reformation by
frightening, threatening, and otherwise disheartening the wretched
sinner to be reformed. There is a certain sermon in the New Testament,
containing sacred and comforting words which were spoken upon a
mountain near at hand to Jerusalem, and spoken to an auditory amongst
which there must have been many sinful creatures; but there is more of
blessing than cursing in that sublime discourse, and it might be rather
a tender father pleading gently with his wayward children than an
offended Deity dealing out denunciation upon a stubborn and refractory
race. But the authors of the tracts may have never read this sermon,
perhaps; and they may take their ideas of composition from that
comforting service which we read on Ash-Wednesday, cowering in fear and
trembling in our pews, and calling down curses upon ourselves and our
neighbours. Be it as it might, the tracts were not popular amongst the
pensioners of Marchmont Towers. They infinitely preferred to hear Mary
read a chapter in the New Testament, or some pretty patriarchal story
of primitive obedience and faith. The little girl would discourse upon
the Scripture histories in her simple, old-fashioned manner; and many a
stout Lincolnshire farm-labourer was content to sit over his hearth,
with a pipe of shag-tobacco and a mug of fettled beer, while Miss
Marchmont read and expounded the history of Abraham and Isaac, or
Joseph and his brethren.
"It's joost loike a story-book to hear her," the man would say to his
wife; "and yet she brings it all hoame, too, loike. If she reads about
Abraham, she'll say, maybe, 'That's joost how you gave your only son to
be a soldier, you know, Muster Moggins;'--she allus says Muster
Moggins;--'you gave un into God's hands, and you troosted God would
take care of un; and whatever cam' to un would be the best, even if it
was death.' That's what she'll say, bless her little heart! so gentle
and tender loike. The wust o' chaps couldn't but listen to her."
Mary Marchmont's morbidly sensitive nature adapted her to all
charitable offices. No chance word in her simple talk ever inflicted a
wound upon the listener. She had a subtle and intuitive comprehension
of other people's feelings, derived from the extreme susceptibility of
her own. She had never been vulgarised by the associations of poverty;
for her self-contained nature took no colour from the things that
surrounded her, and she was only at Marchmont Towers that which she had
been from the age of six--a little lady, grave and gentle, dignified,
discreet, and wise.
There was one bright figure missing out of the picture which Mary had
been wont of late years to make of the Lincolnshire mansion, and that
was the figure of the yellow-haired boy who had breakfasted upon
haddocks and hot rolls in Oakley Street. She had imagined Edward
Arundel an inhabitant of that fair Utopia. He would live with them; or,
if he could not live with them, he would be with them as a
visitor,--often--almost always. He would leave off being a soldier, for
of course her papa could give him more money than he could get by being
a soldier--(you see that Mary's experience of poverty had taught her to
take a mercantile and sordid view of military life)--and he would come
to Marchmont Towers, and ride, and drive, and play tennis (what was
tennis? she wondered), and read three-volume novels all day long. But
that part of the dream was at least broken. Marchmont Towers was Mary's
home, but the young soldier was far away; in the Pass of Bolan,
perhaps,--Mary had a picture of that cruel rocky pass almost always in
her mind,--or cutting his way through a black jungle, with the yellow
eyes of hungry tigers glaring out at him through the rank tropical
foliage; or dying of thirst and fever under a scorching sun, with no
better pillow than the neck of a dead camel, with no more tender
watcher than the impatient vulture flapping her wings above his head,
and waiting till he, too, should be carrion. What was the good of
wealth, if it could not bring this young soldier home to a safe shelter
in his native land? John Marchmont smiled when his daughter asked this
question, and implored her father to write to Edward Arundel, recalling
him to England.
"God knows how glad I should be to have the boy here, Polly!" John
said, as he drew his little girl closer to his breast,--she sat on his
knee still, though she was thirteen years of age. "But Edward has a
career before him, my dear, and could not give it up for an inglorious
life in this rambling old house. It isn't as if I could hold out any
inducement to him: you know, Polly, I can't; for I mustn't leave any
money away from my little girl."
"But he might have half my money, papa, or all of it," Mary added
piteously. "What could I do with money, if----?"
She didn't finish the sentence; she never could complete any such
sentence as this; but her father knew what she meant.
So six months had passed since a dreary January day upon which John
Marchmont had read, in the second column of the "Times," that he could
hear of something greatly to his advantage by applying to a certain
solicitor, whose offices were next door but one to those of Messrs.
Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson's. His heart began to beat very
violently when he read that advertisement in the supplement, which it
was one of his duties to air before the fire in the clerks' office; but
he showed no other sign of emotion. He waited until he took the papers
to his employer; and as he laid them at Mr. Mathewson's elbow, murmured
a respectful request to be allowed to go out for half-an-hour, upon his
own business.
"Good gracious me, Marchmont!" cried the lawyer; "what can you want to
go out for at this time in the morning? You've only just come; and
there's that agreement between Higgs and Sandyman must be copied
before----"
"Yes, I know, sir. I'll be back in time to attend to it; but I--I think
I've come into a fortune, sir; and I should like to go and see about
it."
The solicitor turned in his revolving library-chair, and looked aghast
at his clerk. Had this Marchmont--always rather unnaturally reserved
and eccentric--gone suddenly mad? No; the copying-clerk stood by his
employer's side, grave, self-possessed as ever, with his forefinger
upon the advertisement.
"Marchmont--John--call--Messrs. Tindal and Trollam--" gasped Mr.
Mathewson. "Do you mean to tell me it's _you_?"
"Yes, sir."
"Egad, I'll go with you!" cried the solicitor, hooking his arm through
that of his clerk, snatching his hat from an adjacent stand, and
dashing through the outer office, down the great staircase, and into
the next door but one before John Marchmont knew where he was.
John had not deceived his employer. Marchmont Towers was his, with all
its appurtenances. Messrs. Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson took him
in hand, much to the chagrin of Messrs. Tindal and Trollam, and proved
his identity in less than a week. On a shelf above the high wooden desk
at which John had sat, copying law-papers, with a weary hand and an
aching spine, appeared two bran-new deed-boxes, inscribed, in white
letters, with the name and address of JOHN MARCHMONT, ESQ., MARCHMONT
TOWERS. The copying-clerk's sudden accession to fortune was the talk of
all the _employes_ in "The Fields." Marchmont Towers was exaggerated
into half Lincolnshire, and a tidy slice of Yorkshire; eleven thousand
a year was expanded into an annual million. Everybody expected largesse
from the legatee. How fond people had been of the quiet clerk, and how
magnanimously they had concealed their sentiments during his poverty,
lest they should wound him, as they urged, "which" they knew he was
sensitive; and how expansively they now dilated on their
long-suppressed emotions! Of course, under these circumstances, it is
hardly likely that everybody could be satisfied; so it is a small thing
to say that the dinner which John gave--by his late employers'
suggestion (he was about the last man to think of giving a dinner)--at
the "Albion Tavern," to the legal staff of Messrs. Paulette, Paulette,
and Mathewson, and such acquaintance of the legal profession as they
should choose to invite, was a failure; and that gentlemen who were
pretty well used to dine upon liver and bacon, or beefsteak and onions,
or the joint, vegetables, bread, cheese, and celery for a shilling,
turned up their noses at the turbot, murmured at the paucity of green
fat in the soup, made light of red mullet and ortolans, objected to the
flavour of the truffles, and were contemptuous about the wines.
John knew nothing of this. He had lived a separate and secluded
existence; and his only thought now was of getting away to Marchmont
Towers, which had been familiar to him in his boyhood, when he had been
wont to go there on occasional visits to his grandfather. He wanted to
get away from the turmoil and confusion of the big, heartless city, in
which he had endured so much; he wanted to carry away his little girl
to a quiet country home, and live and die there in peace. He liberally
rewarded all the good people about Oakley Street who had been kind to
little Mary; and there was weeping in the regions of the Ladies'
Wardrobe when Mr. Marchmont and his daughter went away one bitter
winter's morning in a cab, which was to carry them to the hostelry
whence the coach started for Lincoln.
It is strange to think how far those Oakley-street days of privation
and endurance seem to have receded in the memories of both father and
daughter. The impalpable past fades away, and it is difficult for John
and his little girl to believe that they were once so poor and
desolate. It is Oakley Street now that is visionary and unreal. The
stately county families bear down upon Marchmont Towers in great
lumbering chariots, with brazen crests upon the hammer-cloths, and
sulky coachmen in Brown-George wigs. The county mammas patronise and
caress Miss Marchmont--what a match she will be for one of the county
sons by-and-by!--the county daughters discourse with Mary about her
poor, and her fancy-work, and her piano. She is getting on slowly
enough with her piano, poor little girl! under the tuition of the
organist of Swampington, who gives lessons to that part of the county.
And there are solemn dinners now and then at Marchmont Towers--dinners
at which Miss Mary appears when the cloth has been removed, and
reflects in silent wonder upon the change that has come to her father
and herself. Can it be true that she has ever lived in Oakley Street,
whither came no more aristocratic visitors than her Aunt Sophia, who
was the wife of a Berkshire farmer, and always brought hogs' puddings,
and butter, and home-made bread, and other rustic delicacies to her
brother-in-law; or Mrs. Brigsome, the washer-woman, who made a
morning-call every Monday, to fetch John Marchmont's shabby shirts? The
shirts were not shabby now; and it was no longer Mary's duty to watch
them day by day, and manipulate them tenderly when the linen grew
frayed at the sharp edges of the folds, or the buttonholes gave signs
of weakness. Corson, Mr. Marchmont's own-man, had care of the shirts
now: and John wore diamond-studs and a black-satin waistcoat, when he
gave a dinner-party. They were not very lively, those Lincolnshire
dinner-parties; though the dessert was a sight to look upon, in Mary's
eyes. The long shining table, the red and gold and purple Indian china,
the fluffy woollen d'oyleys, the sparkling cut-glass, the sticky
preserved ginger and guava-jelly, and dried orange rings and chips, and
all the stereotyped sweetmeats, were very grand and beautiful, no
doubt; but Mary had seen livelier desserts in Oakley Street, though
there had been nothing better than a brown-paper bag of oranges from
the Westminster Road, and a bottle of two-and-twopenny Marsala from a
licensed victualler's in the Borough, to promote conviviality.