MARY'S STEPMOTHER.
Perhaps there was never a quieter courtship than that which followed
Olivia's acceptance of John Marchmont's offer. There had been no
pretence of sentiment on either side; yet I doubt if John had been much
more sentimental during his early love-making days, though he had very
tenderly and truly loved his first wife. There were few sparks of the
romantic or emotional fire in his placid nature. His love for his
daughter, though it absorbed his whole being, was a silent and
undemonstrative affection; a thoughtful and almost fearful devotion,
which took the form of intense but hidden anxiety for his child's
future, rather than any outward show of tenderness.
Had his love been of a more impulsive and demonstrative character, he
would scarcely have thought of taking such a step as that he now
contemplated, without first ascertaining whether it would be agreeable
to his daughter.
But he never for a moment dreamt of consulting Mary's will upon this
important matter. He looked with fearful glances towards the dim
future, and saw his darling, a lonely figure upon a barren landscape,
beset by enemies eager to devour her; and he snatched at this one
chance of securing her a protectress, who would be bound to her by a
legal as well as a moral tie; for John Marchmont meant to appoint his
second wife the guardian of his child. He thought only of this; and he
hurried on his suit at the Rectory, fearful lest death should come
between him and his loveless bride, and thus deprive his darling of a
second mother.
This was the history of John Marchmont's marriage. It was not till a
week before the day appointed for the wedding that he told his daughter
what he was about to do. Edward Arundel knew the secret, but he had
been warned not to reveal it to Mary.
The father and daughter sat together late one evening in the first week
of December, in the great western drawing-room. Edward had gone to a
party at Swampington, and was to sleep at the Rectory; so Mary and her
father were alone.
It was nearly eleven o'clock; but Miss Marchmont had insisted upon
sitting up until her father should retire to rest. She had always sat
up in Oakley Street, she had remonstrated, though she was much younger
then. She sat on a velvet-covered hassock at her father's feet, with
her loose hair falling over his knee, as her head lay there in loving
abandonment. She was not talking to him; for neither John nor Mary were
great talkers; but she was with him--that was quite enough.
Mr. Marchmont's thin fingers twined themselves listlessly in and out of
the fair curls upon his knee. Mary was thinking of Edward and the party
at Swampington. Would he enjoy himself very, very much? Would he be
sorry that she was not there? It was a grown-up party, and she wasn't
old enough for grown-up parties yet. Would the pretty girls in blue be
there? and would he dance with them?
Her father's face was clouded by a troubled expression, as he looked
absently at the red embers in the low fireplace. He spoke presently,
but his observation was a very commonplace one. The opening speeches of
a tragedy are seldom remarkable for any ominous or solemn meaning. Two
gentlemen meet each other in a street very near the footlights, and
converse rather flippantly about the aspect of affairs in general;
there is no hint of bloodshed and agony till we get deeper into the
play.
So Mr. Marchmont, bent upon making rather an important communication to
his daughter, and for the first time feeling very fearful as to how she
would take it, began thus:
"You really ought to go to bed earlier, Polly dear; you've been looking
very pale lately, and I know such hours as these must be bad for you."
"Oh, no, papa dear," cried the young lady; "I'm always pale; that's
natural to me. Sitting up late doesn't hurt me, papa. It never did in
Oakley Street, you know."
John Marchmont shook his head sadly.
"I don't know that," he said. "My darling had to suffer many evils
through her father's poverty. If you had some one who loved you, dear,
a lady, you know,--for a man does not understand these sort of
things,--your health would be looked after more carefully,
and--and--your education--and--in short, you would be altogether
happier; wouldn't you, Polly darling?"
He asked the question in an almost piteously appealing tone. A terrible
fear was beginning to take possession of him. His daughter might be
grieved at this second marriage. The very step which he had taken for
her happiness might cause her loving nature pain and sorrow. In the
utter cowardice of his affection he trembled at the thought of causing
his darling any distress in the present, even for her own
welfare,--even for her future good; and he _knew_ that the step he was
about to take would secure that. Mary started from her reclining
position, and looked up into her father's face.
"You're not going to engage a governess for me, papa?" she cried
eagerly. "Oh, please don't. We are so much better as it is. A governess
would keep me away from you, papa; I know she would. The Miss Llandels,
at Impley Grange, have a governess; and they only come down to dessert
for half an hour, or go out for a drive sometimes, so that they very
seldom see their papa. Lucy told me so; and they said they'd give the
world to be always with their papa, as I am with you. Oh, pray, pray,
papa darling, don't let me have a governess."
The tears were in her eyes as she pleaded to him. The sight of those
tears made him terribly nervous.
"My own dear Polly," he said, "I'm not going to engage a governess.
I--; Polly, Polly dear, you must be reasonable. You mustn't grieve your
poor father. You are old enough to understand these things now, dear.
You know what the doctors have said. I may die, Polly, and leave you
alone in the world."
She clung closely to her father, and looked up, pale and trembling, as
she answered him.
"When you die, papa, I shall die too. I could never, never live without
you."
"Yes, yes, my darling, you would. You will live to lead a happy life,
please God, and a safe one; but if I die, and leave you very young,
very inexperienced, and innocent, as I may do, my dear, you must not be
without a friend to watch over you, to advise, to protect you. I have
thought of this long and earnestly, Polly; and I believe that what I am
going to do is right."
"What you are going to do!" Mary cried, repeating her father's words,
and looking at him in sudden terror. "What do you mean, papa? What are
you going to do? Nothing that will part us! O papa, papa, you will
never do anything to part us!"
"No, Polly darling," answered Mr. Marchmont. "Whatever I do, I do for
your sake, and for that alone. I'm going to be married, my dear."
Mary burst into a low wail, more pitiful than any ordinary weeping.
"O papa, papa," she cried, "you never will, you never will!"
The sound of that piteous voice for a few moments quite unmanned John
Marchmont; but he armed himself with a desperate courage. He determined
not to be influenced by this child to relinquish the purpose which he
believed was to achieve her future welfare.
"Mary, Mary dear," he said reproachfully, "this is very cruel of you.
Do you think I haven't consulted your happiness before my own? Do you
think I shall love you less because I take this step for your sake? You
are very cruel to me, Mary."
The little girl rose from her kneeling attitude, and stood before her
father, with the tears streaming down her white cheeks, but with a
certain air of resolution about her. She had been a child for a few
moments; a child, with no power to look beyond the sudden pang of that
new sorrow which had come to her. She was a woman now, able to rise
superior to her sorrow in the strength of her womanhood.
"I won't be cruel, papa," she said; "I was selfish and wicked to talk
like that. If it will make you happy to have another wife, papa, I'll
not be sorry. No, I won't be sorry, even if your new wife separates
us--a little."
"But, my darling," John remonstrated, "I don't mean that she should
separate us at all. I wish you to have a second friend, Polly; some one
who can understand you better than I do, who may love you perhaps
almost as well." Mary Marchmont shook her head; she could not realise
this possibility. "Do you understand me, my dear?" her father continued
earnestly. "I want you to have some one who will be a mother to you;
and I hope--I am sure that Olivia--"
Mary interrupted him by a sudden exclamation, that was almost like a
cry of pain.
"Not Miss Arundel!" she said. "O papa, it is not Miss Arundel you're
going to marry!"
Her father bent his head in assent.
"What is the matter with you, Mary?" he said, almost fretfully, as he
saw the look of mingled grief and terror in his daughter's face. "You
are really quite unreasonable to-night. If I am to marry at all, who
should I choose for a wife? Who could be better than Olivia Arundel?
Everybody knows how good she is. Everybody talks of her goodness."
In these two sentences Mr. Marchmont made confession of a fact he had
never himself considered. It was not his own impulse, it was no
instinctive belief in her goodness, that had led him to choose Olivia
Arundel for his wife. He had been influenced solely by the reiterated
opinions of other people.
"I know she is very good, papa," Mary cried; "but, oh, why, why do you
marry her? Do you love her so very, very much?"
"Love her!" exclaimed Mr. Marchmont naively; "no, Polly dear; you know
I never loved any one but you."
"Why do you marry her then?"
"For your sake, Polly; for your sake."
"But don't then, papa; oh, pray, pray don't. I don't want her. I don't
like her. I could never be happy with her."
"Mary! Mary!"
"Yes, I know it's very wicked to say so, but it's true, papa; I never,
never, never could be happy with her. I know she is good, but I don't
like her. If I did anything wrong, I should never expect her to forgive
me for it; I should never expect her to have mercy upon me. Don't marry
her, papa; pray, pray don't marry her."
"Mary," said Mr. Marchmont resolutely, "this is very wrong of you. I
have given my word, my dear, and I cannot recall it. I believe that I
am acting for the best. You must not be childish now, Mary. You have
been my comfort ever since you were a baby; you mustn't make me unhappy
now."
Her father's appeal went straight to her heart. Yes, she had been his
help and comfort since her earliest infancy, and she was not unused to
self-sacrifice: why should she fail him now? She had read of martyrs,
patient and holy creatures, to whom suffering was glory; she would be a
martyr, if need were, for his sake. She would stand steadfast amid the
blazing fagots, or walk unflinchingly across the white-hot ploughshare,
for his sake, for his sake.
"Papa, papa," she cried, flinging herself upon her father's neck, "I
will not make you sorry. I will be good and obedient to Miss Arundel,
if you wish it."
Mr. Marchmont carried his little girl up to her comfortable bedchamber,
close at hand to his own. She was very calm when she bade him good
night, and she kissed him with a smile upon her face; but all through
the long hours before the late winter morning Mary Marchmont lay awake,
weeping silently and incessantly in her new sorrow; and all through the
same weary hours the master of that noble Lincolnshire mansion slept a
fitful and troubled slumber, rendered hideous by confused and horrible
dreams, in which the black shadow that came between him and his child,
and the cruel hand that thrust him for ever from his darling, were
Olivia Arundel's.
But the morning light brought relief to John Marchmont and his child.
Mary arose with the determination to submit patiently to her father's
choice, and to conceal from him all traces of her foolish and
unreasoning sorrow. John awoke from troubled dreams to believe in the
wisdom of the step he had taken, and to take comfort from the thought
that in the far-away future his daughter would have reason to thank and
bless him for the choice he had made.
So the few days before the marriage passed away--miserably short days,
that flitted by with terrible speed; and the last day of all was made
still more dismal by the departure of Edward Arundel, who left
Marchmont Towers to go to Dangerfield Park, whence he was most likely
to start once more for India.
Mary felt that her narrow world of love was indeed crumbling away from
her. Edward was lost, and to-morrow her father would belong to another.
Mr. Marchmont dined at the Rectory upon that last evening; for there
were settlements to be signed, and other matters to be arranged; and
Mary was alone--quite alone--weeping over her lost happiness.
"This would never have happened," she thought, "if we hadn't come to
Marchmont Towers. I wish papa had never had the fortune; we were so
happy in Oakley Street,--so very happy. I wouldn't mind a bit being
poor again, if I could be always with papa."
Mr. Marchmont had not been able to make himself quite comfortable in
his mind, after that unpleasant interview with his daughter in which he
had broken to her the news of his approaching marriage. Argue with
himself as he might upon the advisability of the step he was about to
take, he could not argue away the fact that he had grieved the child he
loved so intensely. He could not blot away from his memory the pitiful
aspect of her terror-stricken face as she had turned it towards him
when he uttered the name of Olivia Arundel.
No; he had grieved and distressed her. The future might reconcile her
to that grief, perhaps, as a bygone sorrow which she had been allowed
to suffer for her own ultimate advantage. But the future was a long way
off: and in the meantime there was Mary's altered face, calm and
resigned, but bearing upon it a settled look of sorrow, very close at
hand; and John Marchmont could not be otherwise than unhappy in the
knowledge of his darling's grief.
I do not believe that any man or woman is ever suffered to take a fatal
step upon the roadway of life without receiving ample warning by the
way. The stumbling-blocks are placed in the fatal path by a merciful
hand; but we insist upon clambering over them, and surmounting them in
our blind obstinacy, to reach that shadowy something beyond, which we
have in our ignorance appointed to be our goal. A thousand ominous
whispers in his own breast warned John Marchmont that the step he
considered so wise was not a wise one: and yet, in spite of all these
subtle warnings, in spite of the ever-present reproach of his
daughter's altered face, this man, who was too weak to trust blindly in
his God, went on persistently upon his way, trusting, with a thousand
times more fatal blindness, in his own wisdom.
He could not be content to confide his darling and her altered fortunes
to the Providence which had watched over her in her poverty, and
sheltered her from every harm. He could not trust his child to the
mercy of God; but he cast her upon the love of Olivia Arundel.
A new life began for Mary Marchmont after the quiet wedding at
Swampington Church. The bride and bridegroom went upon a brief
honeymoon excursion far away amongst snow-clad Scottish mountains and
frozen streams, upon whose bloomless margins poor John shivered
dismally. I fear that Mr. Marchmont, having been, by the hard pressure
of poverty, compelled to lead a Cockney life for the better half of his
existence, had but slight relish for the grand and sublime in nature. I
do not think he looked at the ruined walls which had once sheltered
Macbeth and his strong-minded partner with all the enthusiasm which
might have been expected of him. He had but one idea about Macbeth, and
he was rather glad to get out of the neighbourhood associated with the
warlike Thane; for his memories of the past presented King Duncan's
murderer as a very stern and uncompromising gentleman, who was utterly
intolerant of banners held awry, or turned with the blank and ignoble
side towards the audience, and who objected vehemently to a violent fit
of coughing on the part of any one of his guests during the blank
barmecide feast of pasteboard and Dutch metal with which he was wont to
entertain them. No; John Marchmont had had quite enough of Macbeth, and
rather wondered at the hot enthusiasm of other red-nosed tourists,
apparently indifferent to the frosty weather.
I fear that the master of Marchmont Towers would have preferred Oakley
Street, Lambeth, to Princes Street, Edinburgh; for the nipping and
eager airs of the Modern Athens nearly blew him across the gulf between
the new town and the old. A visit to the Calton Hill produced an attack
of that chronic cough which had so severely tormented the weak-kneed
supernumerary in the draughty corridors of Drury Lane. Melrose and
Abbotsford fatigued this poor feeble tourist; he tried to be interested
in the stereotyped round of associations beloved by other travellers,
but he had a weary craving for rest, which was stronger than any
hero-worship; and he discovered, before long, that he had done a very
foolish thing in coming to Scotland in December and January, without
having consulted his physician as to the propriety of such a step.
But above all personal inconvenience, above all personal suffering,
there was one feeling ever present in his heart--a sick yearning for
the little girl he had left behind him; a mournful longing to be back
with his child. Already Mary's sad forebodings had been in some way
realised; already his new wife had separated him, unintentionally of
course, from his daughter. The aches and pains he endured in the bleak
Scottish atmosphere reminded him only too forcibly of the warnings he
had received from his physicians. He was seized with a panic, almost,
when he remembered his own imprudence. What if he had needlessly
curtailed the short span of his life? What if he were to die
soon--before Olivia had learned to love her stepdaughter; before Mary
had grown affectionately familiar with her new guardian? Again and
again he appealed to his wife, imploring her to be tender to the orphan
child, if he should be snatched away suddenly.
"I know you will love her by-and-by, Olivia," he said; "as much as I
do, perhaps; for you will discover how good she is, how patient and
unselfish. But just at first, and before you know her very well, you
will be kind to her, won't you, Olivia? She has been used to great
indulgence; she has been spoiled, perhaps; but you'll remember all
that, and be very kind to her?"
"I will try and do my duty," Mrs. Marchmont answered. "I pray that I
never may do less."
There was no tender yearning in Olivia Marchmont's heart towards the
motherless girl. She herself felt that such a sentiment was wanting,
and comprehended that it should have been there. She would have loved
her stepdaughter in those early days, if she could have done so; but
_she could not_--she could not. All that was tender or womanly in her
nature had been wasted upon her hopeless love for Edward Arundel. The
utter wreck of that small freight of affection had left her nature
warped and stunted, soured, disappointed, unwomanly.
How was she to love this child, this hazel-haired, dove-eyed girl,
before whom woman's life, with all its natural wealth of affection,
stretched far away, a bright and fairy vista? How was _she_ to love
her,--she, whose black future was unchequered by one ray of light; who
stood, dissevered from the past, alone in the dismal, dreamless
monotony of the present?
"No" she thought; "beggars and princes can never love one another. When
this girl and I are equals,--when she, like me, stands alone upon a
barren rock, far out amid the waste of waters, with not one memory to
hold her to the past, with not one hope to lure her onward to the
future, with nothing but the black sky above and the black waters
around,--_then_ we may grow fond of each other."
But always more or less steadfast to the standard she had set up for
herself, Olivia Marchmont intended to do her duty to her stepdaughter.
She had not failed in other duties, though no glimmer of love had
brightened them, no natural affection had made them pleasant. Why
should she fail in this?
If this belief in her own power should appear to be somewhat arrogant,
let it be remembered that she had set herself hard tasks before now,
and had performed them. Would the new furnace through which she was to
pass be more terrible than the old fires? She had gone to God's altar
with a man for whom she had no more love than she felt for the lowest
or most insignificant of the miserable sinners in her father's flock.
She had sworn to honour and obey him, meaning at least faithfully to
perform that portion of her vow; and on the night before her loveless
bridal she had grovelled, white, writhing, mad, and desperate, upon the
ground, and had plucked out of her lacerated heart her hopeless love
for another man.
Yes; she had done this. Another woman might have spent that bridal eve
in vain tears and lamentations, in feeble prayers, and such weak
struggles as might have been evidenced by the destruction of a few
letters, a tress of hair, some fragile foolish tokens of a wasted love.
She would have burnt five out of six letters, perhaps, that helpless,
ordinary sinner, and would have kept the sixth, to hoard away hidden
among her matrimonial trousseau; she would have thrown away
fifteen-sixteenths of that tress of hair, and would have kept the
sixteenth portion,--one delicate curl of gold, slender as the thread by
which her shattered hopes had hung,--to be wept over and kissed in the
days that were to come. An ordinary woman would have played fast and
loose with love and duty; and so would have been true to neither.
But Olivia Arundel did none of these things. She battled with her
weakness as St George battled with the fiery dragon. She plucked the
rooted serpent from her heart, reckless as to how much of that
desperate heart was to be wrenched away with its roots. A cowardly
woman would have killed herself, perhaps, rather than endure this
mortal agony. Olivia Arundel killed more than herself; she killed the
passion that had become stronger than herself.
"Alone she did it;" unaided by any human sympathy or compassion,
unsupported by any human counsel, not upheld by her God; for the
religion she had made for herself was a hard creed, and the many words
of tender comfort which must have been familiar to her were
unremembered in that long night of anguish.
It was the Roman's stern endurance, rather than the meek faithfulness
of the Christian, which upheld this unhappy girl under her torture. She
did not do this thing because it pleased her to be obedient to her God.
She did not do it because she believed in the mercy of Him who
inflicted the suffering, and looked forward hopefully, even amid her
passionate grief, to the day when she should better comprehend that
which she now saw so darkly. No; she fought the terrible fight, and she
came forth out of it a conqueror, by reason of her own indomitable
power of suffering, by reason of her own extraordinary strength of
will.
But she did conquer. If her weapon was the classic sword and not the
Christian cross, she was nevertheless a conqueror. When she stood
before the altar and gave her hand to John Marchmont, Edward Arundel
was dead to her. The fatal habit of looking at him as the one centre of
her narrow life was cured. In all her Scottish wanderings, her thoughts
never once went back to him; though a hundred chance words and
associations tempted her, though a thousand memories assailed her,
though some trick of his face in the faces of other people, though some
tone of his voice in the voices of strangers, perpetually offered to
entrap her. No; she was steadfast.
Dutiful as a wife as she had been dutiful as a daughter, she bore with
her husband when his feeble health made him a wearisome companion. She
waited upon him when pain made him fretful, and her duties became
little less arduous than those of a hospital nurse. When, at the
bidding of the Scotch physician who had been called in at Edinburgh,
John Marchmont turned homewards, travelling slowly and resting often on
the way, his wife was more devoted to him than his experienced servant,
more watchful than the best-trained sick-nurse. She recoiled from
nothing, she neglected nothing; she gave him full measure of the honour
and obedience which she had promised upon her wedding-day. And when she
reached Marchmont Towers upon a dreary evening in January, she passed
beneath the solemn portal of the western front, carrying in her heart
the full determination to hold as steadfastly to the other half of her
bargain, and to do her duty to her stepchild.
Mary ran out of the western drawing-room to welcome her father and his
wife. She had cast off her black dresses in honour of Mr. Marchmont's
marriage, and she wore some soft, silken fabric, of a pale shimmering
blue, which contrasted exquisitely with her soft, brown hair, and her
fair, tender face. She uttered a cry of mingled alarm and sorrow when
she saw her father, and perceived the change that had been made in his
looks by the northern journey; but she checked herself at a warning
glance from her stepmother, and bade that dear father welcome, clinging
about him with an almost desperate fondness. She greeted Olivia gently
and respectfully.
"I will try to be very good, mamma," she said, as she took the passive
hand of the lady who had come to rule at Marchmont Towers.
"I believe you will, my dear," Olivia answered, kindly.
She had been startled a little as Mary addressed her by that endearing
corruption of the holy word mother. The child had been so long
motherless, that she felt little of that acute anguish which some
orphans suffer when they have to look up in a strange face and say
"mamma." She had taught herself the lesson of resignation, and she was
prepared to accept this stranger as her new mother, and to look up to
her and obey her henceforward. No thought of her own future position,
as sole owner of that great house and all appertaining to it, ever
crossed Mary Marchmont's mind, womanly as that mind had become in the
sharp experiences of poverty. If her father had told her that he had
cut off the entail, and settled Marchmont Towers upon his new wife, I
think she would have submitted meekly to his will, and would have seen
no injustice in the act. She loved him blindly and confidingly. Indeed,
she could only love after one fashion. The organ of veneration must
have been abnormally developed in Mary Marchmont's head. To believe
that any one she loved was otherwise than perfect, would have been, in
her creed, an infidelity against love. Had any one told her that Edward
Arundel was not eminently qualified for the post of General-in-Chief of
the Army of the Indus; or that her father could by any possible chance
be guilty of a fault or folly: she would have recoiled in horror from
the treasonous slanderer.
A dangerous quality, perhaps, this quality of guilelessness which
thinketh no evil, which cannot be induced to see the evil under its
very nose. But surely, of all the beautiful and pure things upon this
earth, such blind confidence is the purest and most beautiful. I knew a
lady, dead and gone,--alas for this world, which could ill afford to
lose so good a Christian!--who carried this trustfulness of spirit,
this utter incapacity to believe in wrong, through all the strife and
turmoil of a troubled life, unsullied and unlessened, to her grave. She
was cheated and imposed upon, robbed and lied to, by people who loved
her, perhaps, while they wronged her,--for to know her was to love her.
She was robbed systematically by a confidential servant for years, and
for years refused to believe those who told her of his delinquencies.
She _could_ not believe that people were wicked. To the day of her
death she had faith in the scoundrels and scamps who had profited by
her sweet compassion and untiring benevolence; and indignantly defended
them against those who dared to say that they were anything more than
"unfortunate." To go to her was to go to a never-failing fountain of
love and tenderness. To know her goodness was to understand the
goodness of God; for her love approached the Infinite, and might have
taught a sceptic the possibility of Divinity. Three-score years and ten
of worldly experience left her an accomplished lady, a delightful
companion; but in guilelessness a child.
So Mary Marchmont, trusting implicitly in those she loved, submitted to
her father's will, and prepared to obey her stepmother. The new life at
the Towers began very peacefully; a perfect harmony reigned in the
quiet household. Olivia took the reins of management with so little
parade, that the old housekeeper, who had long been paramount in the
Lincolnshire mansion, found herself superseded before she knew where
she was. It was Olivia's nature to govern. Her strength of will
asserted itself almost unconsciously. She took possession of Mary
Marchmont as she had taken possession of her school-children at
Swampington, making her own laws for the government of their narrow
intellects. She planned a routine of study that was actually terrible
to the little girl, whose education had hitherto been conducted in a
somewhat slip-slop manner by a weakly-indulgent father. She came
between Mary and her one amusement,--the reading of novels. The
half-bound romances were snatched ruthlessly from this young devourer
of light literature, and sent back to the shabby circulating library at
Swampington. Even the gloomy old oak book-cases in the library at the
Towers, and the Abbotsford edition of the Waverley Novels, were
forbidden to poor Mary; for, though Sir Walter Scott's morality is
irreproachable, it will not do for a young lady to be weeping over Lucy
Ashton or Amy Robsart when she should be consulting her terrestrial
globe, and informing herself as to the latitude and longitude of the
Fiji Islands.
So a round of dry and dreary lessons began for poor Miss Marchmont, and
her brain grew almost dazed under that continuous and pelting shower of
hard facts which many worthy people consider the one sovereign method
of education. I have said that her mind was far in advance of her
years; Olivia perceived this, and set her tasks in advance of her mind:
in order that the perfection attained by a sort of steeple-chase of
instruction might not be lost to her. If Mary learned difficult lessons
with surprising rapidity, Mrs. Marchmont plied her with even yet more
difficult lessons, thus keeping the spur perpetually in the side of
this heavily-weighted racer on the road to learning. But it must not be
thought that Olivia wilfully tormented or oppressed her stepdaughter.
It was not so. In all this, John Marchmont's second wife implicitly
believed that she was doing her duty to the child committed to her
care. She fully believed that this dreary routine of education was wise
and right, and would be for Mary's ultimate advantage. If she caused
Miss Marchmont to get up at abnormal hours on bleak wintry mornings,
for the purpose of wrestling with a difficult variation by Hertz or
Schubert, she herself rose also, and sat shivering by the piano,
counting the time of the music which her stepdaughter played.
Whatever pains and trouble she inflicted on Mary, she most
unshrinkingly endured herself. She waded through the dismal slough of
learning side by side with the younger sufferer: Roman emperors,
medieval schisms, early British manufactures, Philippa of Hainault,
Flemish woollen stuffs, Magna Charta, the sidereal heavens, Luther,
Newton, Huss, Galileo, Calvin, Loyola, Sir Robert Walpole, Cardinal
Wolsey, conchology, Arianism in the Early Church, trial by jury, Habeas
Corpus, zoology, Mr. Pitt, the American war, Copernicus, Confucius,
Mahomet, Harvey, Jenner, Lycurgus, and Catherine of Arragon; through a
very diabolical dance of history, science, theology, philosophy, and
instruction of all kinds, did this devoted priestess lead her hapless
victim, struggling onward towards that distant altar at which Pallas
Athene waited, pale and inscrutable, to receive a new disciple.
But Olivia Marchmont did not mean to be unmerciful; she meant to be
good to her stepdaughter. She did not love her; but, on the other hand,
she did not dislike her. Her feelings were simply negative. Mary
understood this, and the submissive obedience she rendered to her
stepmother was untempered by affection. So for nearly two years these
two people led a monotonous life, unbroken by any more important event
than a dinner party at Marchmont Towers, or a brief visit to Harrowgate
or Scarborough.
This monotonous existence was not to go on for ever. The fatal day, so
horribly feared by John Marchmont, was creeping closer and closer. The
sorrow which had been shadowed in every childish dream, in every
childish prayer, came at last; and Mary Marchmont was left an orphan.
Poor John had never quite recovered the effects of his winter excursion
to Scotland; neither his wife's devoted nursing, nor his physician's
care, could avail for ever; and, late in the autumn of the second year
of his marriage, he sank, slowly and peacefully enough as regards
physical suffering, but not without bitter grief of mind.
In vain Hubert Arundel talked to him; in vain did he himself pray for
faith and comfort in this dark hour of trial. He _could_ not bear to
leave his child alone in the world. In the foolishness of his love, he
would have trusted in the strength of his own arm to shield her in the
battle; yet he could not trust her hopefully to the arm of God. He
prayed for her night and day during the last week of his illness; while
she was praying passionately, almost madly, that he might be spared to
her, or that she might die with him. Better for her, according to all
mortal reasoning, if she had. Happier for her, a thousand times, if she
could have died as she wished to die, clinging to her father's breast.
The blow fell at last upon those two loving hearts. These were the
awful shadows of death that shut his child's face from John Marchmont's
fading sight. His feeble arms groped here and there for her in that dim
and awful obscurity.
Yes, this was death. The narrow tract of yellow sand had little by
little grown narrower and narrower. The dark and cruel waters were
closing in; the feeble boat went down into the darkness: and Mary stood
alone, with her dead father's hand clasped in hers,--the last feeble
link which bound her to the Past,--looking blankly forward to an
unknown Future.