OLIVIA'S DESPAIR.
The life which Mary and her stepmother led at Marchmont Towers after
poor John's death was one of those tranquil and monotonous existences
that leave very little to be recorded, except the slow progress of the
weeks and months, the gradual changes of the seasons. Mary bore her
sorrows quietly, as it was her nature to bear all things. The doctor's
advice was taken, and Olivia removed her stepdaughter to Scarborough
soon after the funeral. But the change of scene was slow to effect any
change in the state of dull despairing sorrow into which the girl had
fallen. The sea-breezes brought no colour into her pale cheeks. She
obeyed her stepmother's behests unmurmuringly, and wandered wearily by
the dreary seashore in the dismal November weather, in search of health
and strength. But wherever she went, she carried with her the awful
burden of her grief; and in every changing cadence of the low winter
winds, in every varying murmur of the moaning waves, she seemed to hear
her dead father's funeral dirge.
I think that, young as Mary Marchmont was, this mournful period was the
grand crisis of her life. The past, with its one great affection, had
been swept away from her, and as yet there was no friendly figure to
fill the dismal blank of the future. Had any kindly matron, any gentle
Christian creature been ready to stretch out her arms to the desolate
orphan, Mary's heart would have melted, and she would have crept to the
shelter of that womanly embrace, to nestle there for ever. But there
was no one. Olivia Marchmont obeyed the letter of her husband's solemn
appeal, as she had obeyed the letter of those Gospel sentences that had
been familiar to her from her childhood, but was utterly unable to
comprehend its spirit. She accepted the charge intrusted to her. She
was unflinching in the performance of her duty; but no one glimmer of
the holy light of motherly love and tenderness, the semi-divine
compassion of womanhood, ever illumined the dark chambers of her heart.
Every night she questioned herself upon her knees as to her rigid
performance of the level round of duty she had allotted to herself;
every night--scrupulous and relentless as the hardest judge who ever
pronounced sentence upon a criminal--she took note of her own
shortcomings, and acknowledged her deficiencies.
But, unhappily, this self-devotion of Olivia's pressed no less heavily
upon Mary than on the widow herself. The more rigidly Mrs. Marchmont
performed the duties which she understood to be laid upon her by her
dead husband's last will and testament, the harder became the orphan's
life. The weary treadmill of education worked on, when the young
student was well-nigh fainting upon every step in that hopeless
revolving ladder of knowledge. If Olivia, on communing with herself at
night, found that the day just done had been too easy for both mistress
and pupil, the morrow's allowance of Roman emperors and French grammar
was made to do penance for yesterday's shortcomings.
"This girl has been intrusted to my care, and one of my first duties is
to give her a good education," Olivia Marchmont thought. "She is
inclined to be idle; but I must fight against her inclination, whatever
trouble the struggle entails upon myself. The harder the battle, the
better for me if I am conqueror."
It was only thus that Olivia Marchmont could hope to be a good woman.
It was only by the rigid performance of hard duties, the patient
practice of tedious rites, that she could hope to attain that eternal
crown which simpler Christians seem to win so easily.
Morning and night the widow and her stepdaughter read the Bible
together; morning and night they knelt side by side to join in the same
familiar prayers; yet all these readings and all these prayers failed
to bring them any nearer together. No tender sentence of inspiration,
not the words of Christ himself, ever struck the same chord in these
two women's hearts, bringing both into sudden unison. They went to
church three times upon every dreary Sunday,--dreary from the terrible
uniformity which made one day a mechanical repetition of another,--and
sat together in the same pew; and there were times when some solemn
word, some sublime injunction, seemed to fall with a new meaning upon
the orphan girl's heart; but if she looked at her stepmother's face,
thinking to see some ray of that sudden light which had newly shone
into her own mind reflected _there_, the blank gloom of Olivia's
countenance seemed like a dead wall, across which no glimmer of
radiance ever shone.
They went back to Marchmont Towers in the early spring. People imagined
that the young widow would cultivate the society of her husband's old
friends, and that morning callers would be welcome at the Towers, and
the stately dinner-parties would begin again, when Mrs. Marchmont's
year of mourning was over. But it was not so; Olivia closed her doors
upon almost all society, and devoted herself entirely to the education
of her stepdaughter. The gossips of Swampington and Kemberling, the
county gentry who had talked of her piety and patience, her unflinching
devotion to the poor of her father's parish, talked now of her
self-abnegation, the sacrifices she made for her stepdaughter's sake,
the noble manner in which she justified John Marchmont's confidence in
her goodness. Other women would have intrusted the heiress's education
to some hired governess, people said; other women would have been upon
the look-out for a second husband; other women would have grown weary
of the dulness of that lonely Lincolnshire mansion, the monotonous
society of a girl of sixteen. They were never tired of lauding Mrs.
Marchmont as a model for all stepmothers in time to come.
Did she sacrifice much, this woman, whose spirit was a raging fire, who
had the ambition of a Semiramis, the courage of a Boadicea, the
resolution of a Lady Macbeth? Did she sacrifice much in resigning such
provincial gaieties as might have adorned her life,--a few
dinner-parties, an occasional county ball, a flirtation with some
ponderous landed gentleman or hunting squire?
No; these things would very soon have grown odious to her--more odious
than the monotony of her empty life, more wearisome even than the
perpetual weariness of her own spirit. I said, that when she accepted a
new life by becoming the wife of John Marchmont, she acted in the
spirit of a prisoner, who is glad to exchange his old dungeon for a new
one. But, alas! the novelty of the prison-house had very speedily worn
off, and that which Olivia Arundel had been at Swampington Rectory,
Olivia Marchmont was now in the gaunt country mansion,--a wretched
woman, weary of herself and all the world, devoured by a slow-consuming
and perpetual fire.
This woman was, for two long melancholy years, Mary Marchmont's sole
companion and instructress. I say sole companion advisedly; for the
girl was not allowed to become intimate with the younger members of
such few county families as still called occasionally at the Towers,
lest she should become empty-headed and frivolous by their
companionship. Alas, there was little fear of Mary becoming
empty-headed! As she grew taller, and more slender, she seemed to get
weaker and paler; and her heavy head drooped wearily under the load of
knowledge which it had been made to carry, like some poor sickly flower
oppressed by the weight of the dew-drops, which would have revivified a
hardier blossom.
Heaven knows to what end Mrs. Marchmont educated her stepdaughter! Poor
Mary could have told the precise date of any event in universal
history, ancient or modern; she could have named the exact latitude and
longitude of the remotest island in the least navigable ocean, and
might have given an accurate account of the manners and customs of its
inhabitants, had she been called upon to do so. She was alarmingly
learned upon the subject of tertiary and old red sandstone, and could
have told you almost as much as Mr. Charles Kingsley himself about the
history of a gravel-pit,--though I doubt if she could have conveyed her
information in quite such a pleasant manner; she could have pointed out
every star in the broad heavens above Lincolnshire, and could have told
the history of its discovery; she knew the hardest names that science
had given to the familiar field-flowers she met in her daily
walks;--yet I cannot say that her conversation was any the more
brilliant because of this, or that her spirits grew lighter under the
influence of this general mental illumination.
But Mrs. Marchmont did most earnestly believe that this laborious
educationary process was one of the duties she owed her stepdaughter;
and when, at seventeen years of age, Mary emerged from the struggle,
laden with such intellectual spoils as I have described above, the
widow felt a quiet satisfaction as she contemplated her work, and said
to herself, "In this, at least, I have done my duty."
Amongst all the dreary mass of instruction beneath which her health had
very nearly succumbed, the girl had learned one thing that was a source
of pleasure to herself; she had learned to become a very brilliant
musician. She was not a musical genius, remember; for no such vivid
flame as the fire of genius had ever burned in her gentle breast; but
all the tenderness of her nature, all the poetry of a hyper-poetical
mind, centred in this one accomplishment, and, condemned to perpetual
silence in every other tongue, found a new and glorious language here.
The girl had been forbidden to read Byron and Scott; but she was not
forbidden to sit at her piano, when the day's toils were over, and the
twilight was dusky in her quiet room, playing dreamy melodies by
Beethoven and Mozart, and making her own poetry to Mendelssohn's
wordless songs. I think her soul must have shrunk and withered away
altogether had it not been for this one resource, this one refuge, in
which her mind regained its elasticity, springing up, like a trampled
flower, into new life and beauty.
Olivia was well pleased to see the girl sit hour after hour at her
piano. She had learned to play well and brilliantly herself, mastering
all difficulties with the proud determination which was a part of her
strong nature; but she had no special love for music. All things that
compose the poetry and beauty of life had been denied to this woman, in
common with the tenderness which makes the chief loveliness of
womankind. She sat by the piano and listened while Mary's slight hands
wandered over the keys, carrying the player's soul away into trackless
regions of dream-land and beauty; but she heard nothing in the music
except so many chords, so many tones and semitones, played in such or
such a time.
It would have been scarcely natural for Mary Marchmont, reserved and
self-contained though she had been ever since her father's death, to
have had no yearning for more genial companionship than that of her
stepmother. The girl who had kept watch in her room, by the doctor's
suggestion, was the one friend and confidante whom the young mistress
of Marchmont Towers fain would have chosen. But here Olivia interposed,
sternly forbidding any intimacy between the two girls. Hester Pollard
was the daughter of a small tenant-farmer, and no fit associate for
Mrs. Marchmont's stepdaughter. Olivia thought that this taste for
obscure company was the fruit of Mary's early training--the taint left
by those bitter, debasing days of poverty, in which John Marchmont and
his daughter had lived in some wretched Lambeth lodging.
"But Hester Pollard is fond of me, mamma," the girl pleaded; "and I
feel so happy at the old farm house! They are all so kind to me when I
go there,--Hester's father and mother, and little brothers and sisters,
you know; and the poultry-yard, and the pigs and horses, and the green
pond, with the geese cackling round it, remind me of my aunt's, in
Berkshire. I went there once with poor papa for a day or two; it was
_such_ a change after Oakley Street."
But Mrs. Marchmont was inflexible upon this point. She would allow her
stepdaughter to pay a ceremonial visit now and then to Farmer
Pollard's, and to be entertained with cowslip-wine and pound-cake in
the low, old-fashioned parlour, where all the polished mahogany chairs
were so shining and slippery that it was a marvel how anybody ever
contrived to sit down upon them. Olivia allowed such solemn visits as
these now and then, and she permitted Mary to renew the farmer's lease
upon sufficiently advantageous terms, and to make occasional presents
to her favourite, Hester. But all stolen visits to the farmyard, all
evening rambles with the farmer's daughter in the apple orchard at the
back of the low white farmhouse, were sternly interdicted; and though
Mary and Hester were friends still, they were fain to be content with a
chance meeting once in the course of a dreary interval of months, and a
silent pressure of the hand.
"You mustn't think that I am proud of my money, Hester," Mary said to
her friend, "or that I forget you now that we see each other so seldom.
Papa used to let me come to the farm whenever I liked; but papa had
seen a great deal of poverty. Mamma keeps me almost always at home at
my studies; but she is very good to me, and of course I am bound to
obey her; papa wished me to obey her."
The orphan girl never for a moment forgot the terms of her father's
will. _He_ had wished her to obey; what should she do, then, but be
obedient? Her submission to Olivia's lightest wish was only a part of
the homage which she paid to that beloved father's memory.
It was thus she grew to early womanhood; a child in gentle obedience
and docility; a woman by reason of that grave and thoughtful character
which had been peculiar to her from her very infancy. It was in a life
such as this, narrow, monotonous, joyless, that her seventeenth
birthday came and went, scarcely noticed, scarcely remembered, in the
dull uniformity of the days which left no track behind them; and Mary
Marchmont was a woman,--a woman with all the tragedy of life before
her; infantine in her innocence and inexperience of the world outside
Marchmont Towers.
The passage of time had been so long unmarked by any break in its
tranquil course, the dull routine of life had been so long undisturbed
by change, that I believe the two women thought their lives would go on
for ever and ever. Mary, at least, had never looked beyond the dull
horizon of the present. Her habit of castle-building had died out with
her father's death. What need had she to build castles, now that he
could no longer inhabit them? Edward Arundel, the bright boy she
remembered in Oakley Street, the dashing young officer who had come to
Marchmont Towers, had dropped back into the chaos of the past. Her
father had been the keystone in the arch of Mary's existence: he was
gone, and a mass of chaotic ruins alone remained of the familiar
visions which had once beguiled her. The world had ended with John
Marchmont's death, and his daughter's life since that great sorrow had
been at best only a passive endurance of existence. They had heard very
little of the young soldier at Marchmont Towers. Now and then a letter
from some member of the family at Dangerfield had come to the Rector of
Swampington. The warfare was still raging far away in the East, cruel
and desperate battles were being fought, and brave Englishmen were
winning loot and laurels, or perishing under the scimitars of Sikhs and
Affghans, as the case might be. Squire Arundel's youngest son was not
doing less than his duty, the letters said. He had gained his
captaincy, and was well spoken of by great soldiers, whose very names
were like the sound of the war-trumpet to English ears.
Olivia heard all this. She sat by her father, sometimes looking over
his shoulder at the crumpled letter, as he read aloud to her of her
cousin's exploits. The familiar name seemed to be all ablaze with lurid
light as the widow's greedy eyes devoured it. How commonplace the
letters were! What frivolous nonsense Letitia Arundel intermingled with
the news of her brother!--"You'll be glad to hear that my grey pony has
got the better of his lameness. Papa gave a hunting-breakfast on
Tuesday week. Lord Mountlitchcombe was present; but the hunting-men are
very much aggravated about the frost, and I fear we shall have no
crocuses. Edward has got his captaincy, papa told me to tell you. Sir
Charles Napier and Major Outram have spoken very highly of him; but
he--Edward, I mean--got a sabre-cut on his left arm, besides a wound on
his forehead, and was laid up for nearly a month. I daresay you
remember old Colonel Tollesly, at Halburton Lodge? He died last
November; and has left all his money to----" and the young lady ran on
thus, with such gossip as she thought might be pleasing to her uncle;
and there were no more tidings of the young soldier, whose life-blood
had so nearly been spilt for his country's glory.
Olivia thought of him as she rode back to Marchmont Towers. She thought
of the sabre-cut upon his arm, and pictured him wounded and bleeding,
lying beneath the canvass-shelter of a tent, comfortless, lonely,
forsaken.
"Better for me if he had died," she thought; "better for me if I were
to hear of his death to-morrow!"
And with the idea the picture of such a calamity arose before her so
vividly and hideously distinct, that she thought for one brief moment
of agony, "This is not a fancy, it is a presentiment; it is second
sight; the thing will occur."
She imagined herself going to see her father as she had gone that
morning. All would be the same: the low grey garden-wall of the
Rectory; the ceaseless surging of the sea; the prim servant-maid; the
familiar study, with its litter of books and papers; the smell of stale
cigar-smoke; the chintz curtains flapping in the open window; the dry
leaves fluttering in the garden without. There would be nothing changed
except her father's face, which would be a little graver than usual.
And then, after a little hesitation--after a brief preamble about the
uncertainty of life, the necessity for looking always beyond this
world, the horrors of war,--the dreadful words would be upon his lips,
when she would read all the hideous truth in his face, and fall prone
to the ground, before he could say, "Edward Arundel is dead!"
Yes; she felt all the anguish. It would be this--this sudden paralysis
of black despair. She tested the strength of her endurance by this
imaginary torture,--scarcely imaginary, surely, when it seemed so
real,--and asked herself a strange question: "Am I strong enough to
bear this, or would it be less terrible to go on, suffering for
ever--for ever abased and humiliated by the degradation of my love for
a man who does not care for me?"
So long as John Marchmont had lived, this woman would have been true to
the terrible victory she had won upon the eve of her bridal. She would
have been true to herself and to her marriage-vow; but her husband's
death, in setting her free, had cast her back upon the madness of her
youth. It was no longer a sin to think of Edward Arundel. Having once
suffered this idea to arise in her mind, her idol grew too strong for
her, and she thought of him by night and day.
Yes; she thought of him for ever and ever. The narrow life to which she
doomed herself, the self-immolation which she called duty, left her a
prey to this one thought. Her work was not enough for her. Her powerful
mind wasted and shrivelled for want of worthy employment. It was like
one vast roll of parchment whereon half the wisdom of the world might
have been inscribed, but on which was only written over and over again,
in maddening repetition, the name of Edward Arundel. If Olivia
Marchmont could have gone to America, and entered herself amongst the
feminine professors of law or medicine,--if she could have turned
field-preacher, like simple Dinah Morris, or set up a printing-press in
Bloomsbury, or even written a novel,--I think she might have been
saved. The superabundant energy of her mind would have found a new
object. As it was, she did none of these things. She had only dreamt
one dream, and by force of perpetual repetition the dream had become a
madness.
But the monotonous life was not to go on for ever. The dull, grey,
leaden sky was to be illumined by sudden bursts of sunshine, and swept
by black thunder-clouds, whose stormy violence was to shake the very
universe for these two solitary women.
John Marchmont had been dead nearly three years. Mary's humble friend,
the farmer's daughter, had married a young tradesman in the village of
Kemberling, a mile and a half from the Towers. Mary was a woman now,
and had seen the last of the Roman emperors and all the dry-as-dust
studies of her early girlhood. She had nothing to do but accompany her
stepmother hither and thither amongst the poor cottagers about
Kemberling and two or three other small parishes within a drive of the
Towers, "doing good," after Olivia's fashion, by line and rule. At home
the young lady did what she pleased, sitting for hours together at her
piano, or wading through gigantic achievements in the way of
embroidery-work. She was even allowed to read novels now, but only such
novels as were especially recommended to Olivia, who was one of the
patronesses of a book-club at Swampington: novels in which young ladies
fell in love with curates, and didn't marry them: novels in which
everybody suffered all manner of misery, and rather liked it: novels in
which, if the heroine did marry the man she loved--and this happy
conclusion was the exception, and not the rule--the smallpox swept away
her beauty, or a fatal accident deprived him of his legs, or eyes, or
arms before the wedding-day.
The two women went to Kemberling Church together three times every
Sunday. It was rather monotonous--the same church, the same rector and
curate, the same clerk, the same congregation, the same old organ-tunes
and droning voices of Lincolnshire charity-children, the same sermons
very often. But Mary had grown accustomed to monotony. She had ceased
to hope or care for anything since her father's death, and was very
well contented to be let alone, and allowed to dawdle through a dreary
life which was utterly without aim or purpose. She sat opposite her
stepmother on one particular afternoon in the state-pew at Kemberling,
which was lined with faded red baize, and raised a little above the
pews of meaner worshippers; she was sitting with her listless hands
lying in her lap, looking thoughtfully at her stepmother's stony face,
and listening to the dull droning of the rector's voice above her head.
It was a sunny afternoon in early June, and the church was bright with
a warm yellow radiance; one of the old diamond-paned windows was open,
and the tinkling of a sheep-bell far away in the distance, and the hum
of bees in the churchyard, sounded pleasantly in the quiet of the hot
atmosphere.
The young mistress of Marchmont Towers felt the drowsy influence of
that tranquil summer weather creeping stealthily upon her. The heavy
eyelids drooped over her soft brown eyes, those wistful eyes which had
so long looked wearily out upon a world in which there seemed so little
joy. The rector's sermon was a very long one this warm afternoon, and
there was a low sound of snoring somewhere in one of the shadowy and
sheltered pews beneath the galleries. Mary tried very hard to keep
herself awake. Mrs. Marchmont had frowned darkly at her once or twice
already, for to fall asleep in church was a dire iniquity in Olivia's
rigid creed; but the drowsiness was not easily to be conquered, and the
girl was sinking into a peaceful slumber in spite of her stepmother's
menacing frowns, when the sound of a sharp footfall on one of the
gravel pathways in the churchyard aroused her attention.
Heaven knows why she should have been awoke out of her sleep by the
sound of that step. It was different, perhaps, to the footsteps of the
Kemberling congregation. The brisk, sharp sound of the tread striking
lightly but firmly on the gravel was not compatible with the shuffling
gait of the tradespeople and farmers' men who formed the greater part
of the worshippers at that quiet Lincolnshire church. Again, it would
have been a monstrous sin in that tranquil place for any one member of
the congregation to disturb the devotions of the rest by entering at
such a time as this. It was a stranger, then, evidently. What did it
matter? Miss Marchmont scarcely cared to lift her eyelids to see who or
what the stranger was; but the intruder let in such a flood of June
sunshine when he pushed open the ponderous oaken door under the
church-porch, that she was dazzled by that sudden burst of light, and
involuntarily opened her eyes.
The stranger let the door swing softly to behind him, and stood beneath
the shadow of the porch, not caring to advance any further, or to
disturb the congregation by his presence.
Mary could not see him very plainly at first. She could only dimly
define the outline of his tall figure, the waving masses of chestnut
hair tinged with gleams of gold; but little by little his face seemed
to grow out of the shadow, until she saw it all,--the handsome
patrician features, the luminous blue eyes, the amber moustache,--the
face which, in Oakley Street eight years ago, she had elected as her
type of all manly perfection, her ideal of heroic grace.
Yes; it was Edward Arundel. Her eyes lighted up with an unwonted
rapture as she looked at him; her lips parted; and her breath came in
faint gasps. All the monotonous years, the terrible agonies of sorrow,
dropped away into the past; and Mary Marchmont was conscious of nothing
except the unutterable happiness of the present.
The one friend of her childhood had come back. The one link, the almost
forgotten link, that bound her to every day-dream of those foolish
early days, was united once more by the presence of the young soldier.
All that happy time, nearly five years ago,--that happy time in which
the tennis-court had been built, and the boat-house by the river
restored,--those sunny autumn days before her father's second
marriage,--returned to her. There was pleasure and joy in the world,
after all; and then the memory of her father came back to her mind, and
her eyes filled with tears. How sorry Edward would be to see his old
friend's empty place in the western drawing-room; how sorry for her,
and for her loss! Olivia Marchmont saw the change in her stepdaughter's
face, and looked at her with stern amazement. But, after the first
shock of that delicious surprise, Mary's training asserted itself. She
folded her hands,--they trembled a little, but Olivia did not see
that,--and waited patiently, with her eyes cast down and a faint flush
lighting up her pale cheeks, until the sermon was finished, and the
congregation began to disperse. She was not impatient. She felt as if
she could have waited thus peacefully and contentedly for ever, knowing
that the only friend she had on earth was near her.
Olivia was slow to leave her pew; but at last she opened the door and
went out into the quiet aisle, followed by Mary, out under the shadowy
porch and into the gravel-walk in the churchyard, where Edward Arundel
was waiting for the two ladies.
John Marchmont's widow uttered no cry of surprise when she saw her
cousin standing a little way apart from the slowly-dispersing
Kemberling congregation. Her dark face faded a little, and her heart
seemed to stop its pulsation suddenly, as if she had been turned into
stone; but this was only for a moment. She held out her hand to Mr.
Arundel in the next instant, and bade him welcome to Lincolnshire.
"I did not know you were in England," she said.
"Scarcely any one knows it yet," the young man answered; "and I have
not even been home. I came to Marchmont Towers at once."
He turned from his cousin to Mary, who was standing a little behind her
stepmother.
"Dear Polly," he said, taking both her hands in his, "I was so sorry
for you, when I heard----"
He stopped, for he saw the tears welling up to her eyes. It was not his
allusion to her father's death that had distressed her. He had called
her Polly, the old familiar name, which she had never heard since that
dead father's lips had last spoken it.
The carriage was waiting at the gate of the churchyard, and Edward
Arundel went back to Marchmont Towers with the two ladies. He had
reached the house a quarter of an hour after they had left it for
afternoon church, and had walked over to Kemberling.
"I was so anxious to see you, Polly," he said, "after all this long
time, that I had no patience to wait until you and Livy came back from
church."
Olivia started as the young man said this. It was Mary Marchmont whom
he had come to see, then--not herself. Was _she_ never to be anything?
Was she to be for ever insulted by this humiliating indifference? A
dark flush came over her face, as she drew her head up with the air of
an offended empress, and looked angrily at her cousin. Alas! he did not
even see that indignant glance. He was bending over Mary, telling her,
in a low tender voice, of the grief he had felt at learning the news of
her father's death.
Olivia Marchmont looked with an eager, scrutinising gaze at her
stepdaughter. Could it be possible that Edward Arundel might ever come
to love this girl? _Could_ such a thing be possible? A hideous depth of
horror and confusion seemed to open before her with the thought. In all
the past, amongst all things she had imagined, amongst all the
calamities she had pictured to herself, she had never thought of
anything like this. Would such a thing ever come to pass? Would she
ever grow to hate this girl--this girl, who had been intrusted to her
by her dead husband--with the most terrible hatred that one woman can
feel towards another?
In the next moment she was angry with herself for the abject folly of
this new terror. She had never yet learned to think of Mary as a woman.
She had never thought of her otherwise than as the pale childlike girl
who had come to her meekly, day after day, to recite difficult lessons,
standing in a submissive attitude before her, and rendering obedience
to her in all things. Was it likely, was it possible, that this
pale-faced girl would enter into the lists against her in the great
battle of her life? Was it likely that she was to find her adversary
and her conqueror here, in the meek child who had been committed to her
charge?
She watched her stepdaughter's face with a jealous, hungry gaze. Was it
beautiful? No! The features were delicate; the brown eyes soft and
dovelike, almost lovely, now that they were irradiated by a new light,
as they looked shyly up at Edward Arundel. But the girl's face was wan
and colourless. It lacked the splendour of beauty. It was only after
you had looked at Mary for a very long time that you began to think her
rather pretty.
The five years during which Edward Arundel had been away had made
little alteration in him. He was rather taller, perhaps; his amber
moustache thicker; his manner more dashing than of old. The mark of a
sabre-cut under the clustering chestnut curls upon the temple gave him
a certain soldierly dignity. He seemed a man of the world now, and Mary
Marchmont was rather afraid of him. He was so different to the
Lincolnshire squires, the bashful younger sons who were to be educated
for the Church: he was so dashing, so elegant, so splendid! From the
waving grace of his hair to the tip of the polished boot peeping out of
his well-cut trouser (there were no pegtops in 1847, and it was _le
genre_ to show very little of the boot), he was a creature to be
wondered at, to be almost reverenced, Mary thought. She could not help
admiring the cut of his coat, the easy _nonchalance_ of his manner, the
waxed ends of his curved moustache, the dangling toys of gold and
enamel that jingled at his watch-chain, the waves of perfume that
floated away from his cambric handkerchief. She was childish enough to
worship all these external attributes in her hero.
"Shall I invite him to Marchmont Towers?" Olivia thought; and while she
was deliberating upon this question, Mary Marchmont cried out, "You
will stop at the Towers, won't you, Mr. Arundel, as you did when poor
papa was alive?"
"Most decidedly, Miss Marchmont," the young man answered. "I mean to
throw myself upon your hospitality as confidingly as I did a long time
ago in Oakley Street, when you gave me hot rolls for my breakfast."
Mary laughed aloud--perhaps for the first time since her father's
death. Olivia bit her lip. She was of so little account, then, she
thought, that they did not care to consult her. A gloomy shadow spread
itself over her face. Already, already she began to hate this
pale-faced, childish orphan girl, who seemed to be transformed into a
new being under the spell of Edward Arundel's presence.
But she made no attempt to prevent his stopping at the Towers, though a
word from her would have effectually hindered his coming. A dull torpor
of despair took possession of her; a black apprehension paralysed her
mind. She felt that a pit of horror was opening before her ignorant
feet. All that she had suffered was as nothing to what she was about to
suffer. Let it be, then! What could she do to keep this torture away
from her? Let it come, since it seemed that it must come in some shape
or other.
She thought all this, while she sat back in a corner of the carriage
watching the two faces opposite to her, as Edward and Mary, seated with
their backs to the horses, talked together in low confidential tones,
which scarcely reached her ear. She thought all this during the short
drive between Kemberling and Marchmont Towers; and when the carriage
drew up before the low Tudor portico, the dark shadow had settled on
her face. Her mind was made up. Let Edward Arundel come; let the worst
come. She had struggled; she had tried to do her duty; she had striven
to be good. But her destiny was stronger than herself, and had brought
this young soldier over land and sea, safe out of every danger, rescued
from every peril, to be her destruction. I think that in this crisis of
her life the last faint ray of Christian light faded out of this lost
woman's soul, leaving utter darkness and desolation. The old landmarks,
dimly descried in the weary desert, sank for ever down into the
quicksands, and she was left alone,--alone with her despair. Her
jealous soul prophesied the evil which she dreaded. This man, whose
indifference to her was almost an insult, would fall in love with Mary
Marchmont,--with Mary Marchmont, whose eyes lit up into new beauty
under the glances of his, whose pale face blushed into faint bloom as
he talked to her. The girl's undisguised admiration would flatter the
young man's vanity, and he would fall in love with her out of very
frivolity and weakness of purpose.
"He is weak and vain, and foolish and frivolous, I daresay," Olivia
thought; "and if I were to fling myself upon my knees at his feet, and
tell him that I loved him, he would be flattered and grateful, and
would be ready to return my affection. If I could tell him what this
girl tells him in every look and word, he would be as pleased with me
as he is with her."
Her lip curled with unutterable scorn as she thought this. She was so
despicable to herself by the deep humiliation of her wasted love, that
the object of that foolish passion seemed despicable also. She was for
ever weighing Edward Arundel against all the tortures she had endured
for his sake, and for ever finding him wanting. He must have been a
demigod if his perfections could have outweighed so much misery; and
for this reason she was unjust to her cousin, and could not accept him
for that which he really was,--a generous-hearted, candid, honourable
young man (not a great man or a wonderful man),--a brave and
honest-minded soldier, very well worthy of a good woman's love.
* * * * *
Mr. Arundel stayed at the Towers, occupying the room which had been his
in John Marchmont's lifetime; and a new existence began for Mary. The
young man was delighted with his old friend's daughter. Among all the
Calcutta belles whom he had danced with at Government-House balls and
flirted with upon the Indian racecourse, he could remember no one as
fascinating as this girl, who seemed as childlike now, in her early
womanhood, as she had been womanly while she was a child. Her naive
tenderness for himself bewitched and enraptured him. Who could have
avoided being charmed by that pure and innocent affection, which was as
freely given by the girl of eighteen as it had been by the child, and
was unchanged in character by the lapse of years? The young officer had
been so much admired and caressed in Calcutta, that perhaps, by reason
of his successes, he had returned to England heart-whole; and he
abandoned himself, without any _arriere-pensee_, to the quiet happiness
which he felt in Mary Marchmont's society. I do not say that he was
intoxicated by her beauty, which was by no means of the intoxicating
order, or that he was madly in love with her. The gentle fascination of
her society crept upon him before he was aware of its influence. He had
never taken the trouble to examine his own feelings; they were
disengaged,--as free as butterflies to settle upon which flower might
seem the fairest; and he had therefore no need to put himself under a
course of rigorous self-examination. As yet he believed that the
pleasure he now felt in Mary's society was the same order of enjoyment
he had experienced five years before, when he had taught her chess, and
promised her long rambles by the seashore.
They had no long rambles now in solitary lanes and under flowering
hedgerows beside the waving green corn. Olivia watched them with
untiring eyes. The tortures to which a jealous woman may condemn
herself are not much greater than those she can inflict upon others.
Mrs. Marchmont took good care that her ward and her cousin were not
_too_ happy. Wherever they went, she went also; whenever they spoke,
she listened; whatever arrangement was most likely to please them was
opposed by her. Edward was not coxcomb enough to have any suspicion of
the reason of this conduct on his cousin's part. He only smiled and
shrugged his shoulders; and attributed her watchfulness to an
overstrained sense of her responsibility, and the necessity of
_surveillance_.
"Does she think me such a villain and a traitor," he thought, "that she
fears to leave me alone with my dead friend's orphan daughter, lest I
should whisper corruption into her innocent ear? How little these good
women know of us, after all! What vulgar suspicions and narrow-minded
fears influence them against us! Are they honourable and honest towards
one another, I wonder, that they can entertain such pitiful doubts of
our honour and honesty?"
So, hour after hour, and day after day, Olivia Marchmont kept watch and
ward over Edward and Mary. It seems strange that love could blossom in
such an atmosphere; it seems strange that the cruel gaze of those hard
grey eyes did not chill the two innocent hearts, and prevent their free
expansion. But it was not so; the egotism of love was all-omnipotent.
Neither Edward nor Mary was conscious of the evil light in the glance
that so often rested upon them. The universe narrowed itself to the one
spot of earth upon which these two stood side by side.
Edward Arundel had been more than a month at Marchmont Towers when
Olivia went, upon a hot July evening, to Swampington, on a brief visit
to the Rector,--a visit of duty. She would doubtless have taken Mary
Marchmont with her; but the girl had been suffering from a violent
headache throughout the burning summer day, and had kept her room.
Edward Arundel had gone out early in the morning upon a fishing
excursion to a famous trout-stream seven or eight miles from the
Towers, and was not likely to return until after nightfall. There was
no chance, therefore, of a meeting between Mary and the young officer,
Olivia thought--no chance of any confidential talk which she would not
be by to hear.
Did Edward Arundel love the pale-faced girl, who revealed her devotion
to him with such childlike unconsciousness? Olivia Marchmont had not
been able to answer that question. She had sounded the young man
several times upon his feelings towards her stepdaughter; but he had
met her hints and insinuations with perfect frankness, declaring that
Mary seemed as much a child to him now as she had appeared nearly nine
years before in Oakley Street, and that the pleasure he took in her
society was only such as he might have felt in that of any innocent and
confiding child.
"Her simplicity is so bewitching, you know, Livy," he said; "she looks
up in my face, and trusts me with all her little secrets, and tells me
her dreams about her dead father, and all her foolish, innocent
fancies, as confidingly as if I were some playfellow of her own age and
sex. She's so refreshing after the artificial belles of a Calcutta
ballroom, with their stereotyped fascinations and their complete manual
of flirtation, the same for ever and ever. She is such a pretty little
spontaneous darling, with her soft, shy, brown eyes, and her low voice,
which always sounds to me like the cooing of the doves in the
poultry-yard."
I think that Olivia, in the depth of her gloomy despair, took some
comfort from such speeches as these. Was this frank expression of
regard for Mary Marchmont a token of _love_? No; not as the widow
understood the stormy madness. Love to her had been a dark and terrible
passion, a thing to be concealed, as monomaniacs have sometimes
contrived to keep the secret of their mania, until it burst forth at
last, fatal and irrepressible, in some direful work of wreck and ruin.
So Olivia Marchmont took an early dinner alone, and drove away from the
Towers at four o'clock on a blazing summer afternoon, more at peace
perhaps than she had been since Edward Arundel's coming. She paid her
dutiful visit to her father, sat with him for some time, talked to the
two old servants who waited upon him, walked two or three times up and
down the neglected garden, and then drove back to the Towers.
The first object upon which her eyes fell as she entered the hall was
Edward Arundel's fishing-tackle lying in disorder upon an oaken bench
near the broad arched door that opened out into the quadrangle. An
angry flush mounted to her face as she turned upon the servant near
her.
"Mr. Arundel has come home?" she said.
"Yes, ma'am, he came in half an hour ago; but he went out again almost
directly with Miss Marchmont."
"Indeed! I thought Miss Marchmont was in her room?"
"No, ma'am; she came down to the drawing-room about an hour after you
left. Her head was better, ma'am, she said."
"And she went out with Mr. Arundel? Do you know which way they went?"
"Yes, ma'am; I heard Mr. Arundel say he wanted to look at the old
boat-house by the river."
"And they have gone there?"
"I think so, ma'am."
"Very good; I will go down to them. Miss Marchmont must not stop out in
the night-air. The dew is falling already."
The door leading into the quadrangle was open; and Olivia swept across
the broad threshold, haughty and self-possessed, very stately-looking
in her long black garments. She still wore mourning for her dead
husband. What inducement had she ever had to cast off that sombre
attire; what need had she to trick herself out in gay colours? What
loving eyes would be charmed by her splendour? She went out of the
door, across the quadrangle, under a stone archway, and into the low
stunted wood, which was gloomy even in the summer-time. The setting sun
was shining upon the western front of the Towers; but here all seemed
cold and desolate. The damp mists were rising from the sodden ground
beneath the tree; the frogs were croaking down by the river-side. With
her small white teeth set, and her breath coming in fitful gasps,
Olivia Marchmont hurried to the water's edge, winding in and out
between the trees, tearing her black dress amongst the brambles,
scorning all beaten paths, heedless where she trod, so long as she made
her way speedily to the spot she wanted to reach.
At last the black sluggish river and the old boat-house came in sight,
between a long vista of ugly distorted trunks and gnarled branches of
pollard oak and willow. The building was dreary and
dilapidated-looking, for the improvements commenced by Edward Arundel
five years ago had never been fully carried out; but it was
sufficiently substantial, and bore no traces of positive decay. Down by
the water's edge there was a great cavernous recess for the shelter of
the boats, and above this there was a pavilion, built of brick and
stone, containing two decent-sized chambers, with latticed windows
overlooking the river. A flight of stone steps with an iron balustrade
led up to the door of this pavilion, which was supported upon the solid
side-walls of the boat-house below.
In the stillness of the summer twilight Olivia heard the voices of
those whom she came to seek. They were standing down by the edge of the
water, upon a narrow pathway that ran along by the sedgy brink of the
river, and only a few paces from the pavilion. The door of the
boat-house was open; a long-disused wherry lay rotting upon the damp
and mossy flags. Olivia crept into the shadowy recess. The door that
faced the river had fallen from its rusty hinges, and the slimy
woodwork lay in ruins upon the shore. Sheltered by the stone archway
that had once been closed by this door, Olivia listened to the voices
beside the still water.
Mary Marchmont was standing close to the river's edge; Edward stood
beside her, leaning against the trunk of a willow that hung over the
water.
"My childish darling," the young man murmured, as if in reply to
something his companion had said, "and so you think, because you are
simple-minded and innocent, I am not to love you. It is your innocence
I love, Polly dear,--let me call you Polly, as I used five years
ago,--and I wouldn't have you otherwise for all the world. Do you know
that sometimes I am almost sorry I ever came back to Marchmont Towers?"
"Sorry you came back?" cried Mary, in a tone of alarm. "Oh, why do you
say that, Mr. Arundel?"
"Because you are heiress to eleven thousand a year, Mary, and the
Moated Grange behind us; and this dreary wood, and the river,--the
river is yours, I daresay, Miss Marchmont;--and I wish you joy of the
possession of so much sluggish water and so many square miles of swamp
and fen."
"But what then?" Mary asked wonderingly.
"What then? Do you know, Polly darling, that if I ask you to marry me
people will call me a fortune-hunter, and declare that I came to
Marchmont Towers bent upon stealing its heiress's innocent heart,
before she had learned the value of the estate that must go along with
it? God knows they'd wrong me, Polly, as cruelly as ever an honest man
was wronged; for, so long as I have money to pay my tailor and
tobacconist,--and I've more than enough for both of them,--I want
nothing further of the world's wealth. What should I do with all this
swamp and fen, Miss Marchmont--with all that horrible complication of
expired leases to be renewed, and income-taxes to be appealed against,
that rich people have to endure? If you were not rich, Polly, I----"
He stopped and laughed, striking the toe of his boot amongst the weeds,
and knocking the pebbles into the water. The woman crouching in the
shadow of the archway listened with whitened cheeks and glaring eyes;
listened as she might have listened to the sentence of her death,
drinking in every syllable, in her ravenous desire to lose no breath
that told her of her anguish.
"If I were not rich!" murmured Mary; "what if I were not rich?"
"I should tell you how dearly I love you, Polly, and ask you to be my
wife by-and-by."
The girl looked up at him for a few moments in silence, shyly at first,
and then more boldly, with a beautiful light kindling in her eyes.
"I love you dearly too, Mr. Arundel," she said at last; "and I would
rather you had my money than any one else in the world; and there was
something in papa's will that made me think--"
"There was something that made you think he would wish this, Polly,"
cried the young man, clasping the trembling little figure to his
breast. "Mr. Paulette sent me a copy of the will, Polly, when he sent
my diamond-ring; and I think there were some words in it that hinted at
such a wish. Your father said he left me this legacy, darling,--I have
his letter still,--the legacy of a helpless girl. God knows I will try
to be worthy of such a trust, Mary dearest; God knows I will be
faithful to my promise, made nine years ago."
The woman listening in the dark archway sank down upon the damp flags
at her feet, amongst the slimy rotten wood and rusty iron nails and
broken bolts and hinges. She sat there for a long time, not
unconscious, but quite motionless, her white face leaning against the
moss-grown arch, staring blankly out of the black shadows. She sat
there and listened, while the lovers talked in low tender murmurs of
the sorrowful past and of the unknown future; that beautiful untrodden
region, in which they were to go hand in hand through all the long
years of quiet happiness between the present moment and the grave. She
sat and listened till the moonlight faintly shimmered upon the water,
and the footsteps of the lovers died away upon the narrow pathway by
which they went back to the house.
Olivia Marchmont did not move until an hour after they had gone. Then
she raised herself with an effort, and walked with stiffened limbs
slowly and painfully to the house, and to her own room, where she
locked her door, and flung herself upon the ground in the darkness.
Mary came to her to ask why she did not come to the drawing-room, and
Mrs. Marchmont answered, with a hoarse voice, that she was ill, and
wished to be alone. Neither Mary, nor the old woman-servant who had
been Olivia's nurse long ago, and who had some little influence over
her, could get any other answer than this.