DRIVEN AWAY.
Mary Marchmont and Edward Arundel were happy. They were happy; and how
should they guess the tortures of that desperate woman, whose benighted
soul was plunged in a black gulf of horror by reason of their innocent
love? How should these two--very children in their ignorance of all
stormy passions, all direful emotions--know that in the darkened
chamber where Olivia Marchmont lay, suffering under some vague illness,
for which the Swampington doctor was fain to prescribe quinine, in
utter unconsciousness as to the real nature of the disease which he was
called upon to cure,--how should they know that in that gloomy chamber
a wicked heart was abandoning itself to all the devils that had so long
held patient watch for this day?
Yes; the struggle was over. Olivia Marchmont flung aside the cross she
had borne in dull, mechanical obedience, rather than in Christian love
and truth. Better to have been sorrowful Magdalene, forgiven for her
love and tears, than this cold, haughty, stainless woman, who had never
been able to learn the sublime lessons which so many sinners have taken
meekly to heart. The religion which was wanting in the vital principle
of Christianity, the faith which showed itself only in dogged
obedience, failed this woman in the hour of her agony. Her pride arose;
the defiant spirit of the fallen angel asserted its gloomy grandeur.
"What have I done that I should suffer like this?" she thought. "What
am I that an empty-headed soldier should despise me, and that I should
go mad because of his indifference? Is this the recompense for my long
years of obedience? Is this the reward Heaven bestows upon me for my
life of duty!"
She remembered the histories of other women,--women who had gone their
own way and had been happy; and a darker question arose in her mind;
almost the question which Job asked in his agony.
"Is there neither truth nor justice in the dealings of God?" she
thought. "Is it useless to be obedient and submissive, patient and
untiring? Has all my life been a great mistake, which is to end in
confusion and despair?"
And then she pictured to herself the life that might have been hers if
Edward Arundel had loved her. How good she would have been! The
hardness of her iron nature would have teen melted and subdued. By
force of her love and tenderness for him, she would have learned to be
loving and tender to others. Her wealth of affection for him would have
overflowed in gentleness and consideration for every creature in the
universe. The lurking bitterness which had lain hidden in her heart
ever since she had first loved Edward Arundel, and first discovered his
indifference to her; and the poisonous envy of happier women, who had
loved and were beloved,--would have been blotted away. Her whole nature
would have undergone a wondrous transfiguration, purified and exalted
by the strength of her affection. All this might have come to pass if
he had loved her,--if he had only loved her. But a pale-faced child had
come between her and this redemption; and there was nothing left for
her but despair.
Nothing but despair? Yes; perhaps something further,--revenge.
But this last idea took no tangible shape. She only knew that, in the
black darkness of the gulf into which her soul had gone down, there
was, far away somewhere, one ray of lurid light. She only knew this as
yet, and that she hated Mary Marchmont with a mad and wicked hatred. If
she could have thought meanly of Edward Arundel,--if she could have
believed him to be actuated by mercenary motives in his choice of the
orphan girl,--she might have taken some comfort from the thought of his
unworthiness, and of Mary's probable sorrow in the days to come. But
she _could_ not think this. Little as the young soldier had said in the
summer twilight beside the river, there had been that in his tones and
looks which had convinced the wretched watcher of his truth. Mary might
have been deceived by the shallowest pretender; but Olivia's eyes
devoured every glance; Olivia's greedy ears drank in every tone; and
she _knew_ that Edward Arundel loved her stepdaughter.
She knew this, and she hated Mary Marchmont. What had she done, this
girl, who had never known what it was to fight a battle with her own
rebellious heart? what had she done, that all this wealth of love and
happiness should drop into her lap unsought,--comparatively unvalued,
perhaps?
John Marchmont's widow lay in her darkened chamber thinking over these
things; no longer fighting the battle with her own heart, but utterly
abandoning herself to her desperation,--reckless, hardened, impenitent.
Edward Arundel could not very well remain at the Towers while the
reputed illness of his hostess kept her to her room. He went over to
Swampington, therefore, upon a dutiful visit to his uncle; but rode to
the Towers every day to inquire very particularly after his cousin's
progress, and to dawdle on the sunny western terrace with Mary
Marchmont.
Their innocent happiness needs little description. Edward Arundel
retained a good deal of that boyish chivalry which had made him so
eager to become the little girl's champion in the days gone by. Contact
with the world had not much sullied the freshness of the young man's
spirit. He loved his innocent, childish companion with the purest and
truest devotion; and he was proud of the recollection that in the day
of his poverty John Marchmont had chosen _him_ as the future shelterer
of this tender blossom.
"You must never grow any older or more womanly, Polly," he said
sometimes to the young mistress of Marchmont Towers. "Remember that I
always love you best when I think of you as the little girl in the
shabby pinafore, who poured out my tea for me one bleak December
morning in Oakley Street."
They talked a great deal of John Marchmont. It was such a happiness to
Mary to be able to talk unreservedly of her father to some one who had
loved and comprehended him.
"My stepmamma was very good to poor papa, you know, Edward," she said,
"and of course he was very grateful to her; but I don't think he ever
loved her quite as he loved you. You were the friend of his poverty,
Edward; he never forgot that."
Once, as they strolled side by side together upon the terrace in the
warm summer noontide, Mary Marchmont put her little hand through her
lover's arm, and looked up shyly in his face.
"Did papa say that, Edward?" she whispered; "did he really say that?"
"Did he really say what, darling?"
"That he left me to you as a legacy?"
"He did indeed, Polly," answered the young man. "I'll bring you the
letter to-morrow."
And the next day he showed Mary Marchmont the yellow sheet of
letter-paper and the faded writing, which had once been black and wet
under her dead father's hand. Mary looked through her tears at the old
familiar Oakley-street address, and the date of the very day upon which
Edward Arundel had breakfasted in the shabby lodging. Yes--there were
the words: "The legacy of a child's helplessness is the only bequest I
can leave to the only friend I have."
"And you shall never know what it is to be helpless while I am near
you, Polly darling," the soldier said, as he refolded his dead friend's
epistle. "You may defy your enemies henceforward, Mary--if you have any
enemies. O, by-the-bye, you have never heard any thing of that Paul
Marchmont, I suppose?"
"Papa's cousin--Mr Marchmont the artist?"
"Yes."
"He came to the reading of papa's will."
"Indeed! and did you see much of him?"
"Oh, no, very little. I was ill, you know," the girl added, the tears
rising to her eyes at the recollection of that bitter time,--"I was
ill, and I didn't notice any thing. I know that Mr. Marchmont talked to
me a little; but I can't remember what he said."
"And he has never been here since?"
"Never."
Edward Arundel shrugged his shoulders. This Paul Marchmont could not be
such a designing villain, after all, or surely he would have tried to
push his acquaintance with his rich cousin!
"I dare say John's suspicion of him was only one of the poor fellow's
morbid fancies," he thought. "He was always full of morbid fancies."
Mrs. Marchmont's rooms were in the western front of the house; and
through her open windows she heard the fresh young voices of the lovers
as they strolled up and down the terrace. The cavalry officer was
content to carry a watering-pot full of water, for the refreshment of
his young mistress's geraniums in the stone vases on the balustrade,
and to do other under-gardener's work for her pleasure. He talked to
her of the Indian campaign; and she asked a hundred questions about
midnight marches and solitary encampments, fainting camels, lurking
tigers in the darkness of the jungle, intercepted supplies of
provisions, stolen ammunition, and all the other details of the war.
Olivia arose at last, before the Swampington surgeon's saline draughts
and quinine mixtures had subdued the fiery light in her eyes, or cooled
the raging fever that devoured her. She arose because she could no
longer lie still in her desolation knowing that, for two hours in each
long summer's day, Edward Arundel and Mary Marchmont could be happy
together in spite of her. She came down stairs, therefore, and renewed
her watch--chaining her stepdaughter to her side, and interposing
herself for ever between the lovers.
The widow arose from her sick-bed an altered woman, as it appeared to
all who knew her. A mad excitement seemed to have taken sudden
possession of her. She flung off her mourning garments, and ordered
silks and laces, velvets and satins, from a London milliner; she
complained of the absence of society, the monotonous dulness of her
Lincolnshire life; and, to the surprise of every one, sent out cards of
invitation for a ball at the Towers in honour of Edward Arundel's
return to England. She seemed to be seized with a desire to do
something, she scarcely cared what, to disturb the even current of her
days.
During the brief interval between Mrs. Marchmont's leaving her room and
the evening appointed for the ball, Edward Arundel found no very
convenient opportunity of informing his cousin of the engagement
entered into between himself and Mary. He had no wish to hurry this
disclosure; for there was something in the orphan girl's childishness
and innocence that kept all definite ideas of an early marriage very
far away from her lover's mind. He wanted to go back to India, and win
more laurels, to lay at the feet of the mistress of Marchmont Towers.
He wanted to make a name for himself, which should cause the world to
forget that he was a younger son,--a name that the vilest tongue would
never dare to blacken with the epithet of fortune-hunter.
The young man was silent therefore, waiting for a fitting opportunity
in which to speak to Mary's stepmother. Perhaps he rather dreaded the
idea of discussing his attachment with Olivia; for she had looked at
him with cold angry eyes, and a brow as black as thunder, upon those
occasions on which she had sounded him as to his feelings for Mary.
"She wants poor Polly to marry some grandee, I dare say," he thought,
"and will do all she can to oppose my suit. But her trust will cease
with Mary's majority; and I don't want my confiding little darling to
marry me until she is old enough to choose for herself, and to choose
wisely. She will be one-and-twenty in three years; and what are three
years? I would wait as long as Jacob for my pet, and serve my fourteen
years' apprenticeship under Sir Charles Napier, and be true to her all
the time."
Olivia Marchmont hated her stepdaughter. Mary was not slow to perceive
the change in the widow's manner towards her. It had always been cold,
and sometimes severe; but it was now almost abhorrent. The girl shrank
appalled from the sinister light in her stepmother's gray eyes, as they
followed her unceasingly, dogging her footsteps with a hungry and evil
gaze. The gentle girl wondered what she had done to offend her
guardian, and then, being unable to think of any possible delinquency
by which she might have incurred Mrs. Marchmont's displeasure, was fain
to attribute the change in Olivia's manner to the irritation consequent
upon her illness, and was thus more gentle and more submissive than of
old; enduring cruel looks, returning no answer to bitter speeches, but
striving to conciliate the supposed invalid by her sweetness and
obedience.
But the girl's amiability only irritated the despairing woman. Her
jealousy fed upon every charm of the rival who had supplanted her. That
fatal passion fed upon Edward Arundel's every look and tone, upon the
quiet smile which rested on Mary's face as the girl sat over her
embroidery, in meek silence, thinking of her lover. The self-tortures
which Olivia Marchmont inflicted upon herself were so horrible to bear,
that she turned, with a mad desire for relief, upon those she had the
power to torture. Day by day, and hour by hour, she contrived to
distress the gentle girl, who had so long obeyed her, now by a word,
now by a look, but always with that subtle power of aggravation which
some women possess in such an eminent degree--until Mary Marchmont's
life became a burden to her, or would have so become, but for that
inexpressible happiness, of which her tormentor could not deprive
her,--the joy she felt in her knowledge of Edward Arundel's love.
She was very careful to keep the secret of her stepmother's altered
manner from the young soldier. Olivia was his cousin, and he had said
long ago that she was to love her. Heaven knows she had tried to do so,
and had failed most miserably; but her belief in Olivia's goodness was
still unshaken. If Mrs. Marchmont was now irritable, capricious, and
even cruel, there was doubtless some good reason for the alteration in
her conduct; and it was Mary's duty to be patient. The orphan girl had
learned to suffer quietly when the great affliction of her father's
death had fallen upon her; and she suffered so quietly now, that even
her lover failed to perceive any symptoms of her distress. How could
she grieve him by telling him of her sorrows, when his very presence
brought such unutterable joy to her?
So, on the morning of the ball at Marchmont Towers,--the first
entertainment of the kind that had been given in that grim Lincolnshire
mansion since young Arthur Marchmont's untimely death,--Mary sat in her
room, with her old friend Farmer Pollard's daughter, who was now Mrs.
Jobson, the wife of the most prosperous carpenter in Kemberling. Hester
had come up to the Towers to pay a dutiful visit to her young
patroness; and upon this particular occasion Olivia had not cared to
prevent Mary and her humble friend spending half an hour together. Mrs.
Marchmont roamed from room to room upon this day, with a perpetual
restlessness. Edward Arundel was to dine at the Towers, and was to
sleep there after the ball. He was to drive his uncle over from
Swampington, as the Rector had promised to show himself for an hour or
two at his daughter's entertainment. Mary had met her stepmother
several times that morning, in the corridors and on the staircase; but
the widow had passed her in silence, with a dark face, and a shivering,
almost abhorrent gesture.
The bright July day dragged itself out at last, with hideous slowness
for the desperate woman, who could not find peace or rest in all those
splendid rooms, on all that grassy flat, dry and burning under the
blazing summer sun. She had wandered out upon the waste of barren turf,
with her head bared to the hot sky, and had loitered here and there by
the still pools, looking gloomily at the black tideless water, and
wondering what the agony of drowning was like. Not that she had any
thought of killing herself. No: the idea of death was horrible to her;
for after her death Edward and Mary would be happy. Could she ever find
rest in the grave, knowing this? Could there be any possible extinction
that would blot out her jealous fury? Surely the fire of her hate--it
was no longer love, but hate, that raged in her heart--would defy
annihilation, eternal by reason of its intensity. When the dinner-hour
came, and Edward and his uncle arrived at the Towers, Olivia
Marchmont's pale face was lit up with eyes that flamed like fire; but
she took her accustomed place very quietly, with her father opposite to
her, and Mary and Edward upon either side.
"I'm sure you're ill, Livy," the young man said; "you're as pale as
death, and your hand is dry and burning. I'm afraid you've not been
obedient to the Swampington doctor."
Mrs. Marchmont shrugged her shoulders with a short contemptuous laugh.
"I am well enough," she said. "Who cares whether I am well or ill?"
Her father looked up at her in mute surprise. The bitterness of her
tone startled and alarmed him; but Mary never lifted her eyes. It was
in such a tone as this that her stepmother had spoken constantly of
late.
But two or three hours afterwards, when the flats before the house were
silvered by the moonlight, and the long ranges of windows glittered
with the lamps within, Mrs. Marchmont emerged from her dressing-room
another creature, as it seemed.
Edward and his uncle were walking up and down the great oaken
banqueting-hall, which had been decorated and fitted up as a ballroom
for the occasion, when Olivia crossed the wide threshold of the
chamber. The young officer looked up with an involuntary expression of
surprise. In all his acquaintance with his cousin, he had never seen
her thus. The gloomy black-robed woman was transformed into a
Semiramis. She wore a voluminous dress of a deep claret-coloured
velvet, that glowed with the warm hues of rich wine in the lamplight.
Her massive hair was coiled in a knot at the back of her head, and
diamonds glittered amidst the thick bands that framed her broad white
brow. Her stern classical beauty was lit up by the unwonted splendour
of her dress, and asserted itself as obviously as if she had said, "Am
I a woman to be despised for the love of a pale-faced child?"
Mary Marchmont came into the room a few minutes after her stepmother.
Her lover ran to welcome her, and looked fondly at her simple dress of
shadowy white crape, and the pearl circlet that crowned her soft brown
hair. The pearls she wore upon this night had been given to her by her
father on her fourteenth birthday.
Olivia watched the young man as he bent over Mary Marchmont.
He wore his uniform to-night for the special gratification of his young
mistress, and he was looking down with a tender smile at her childish
admiration of the bullion ornaments upon his coat, and the decoration
he had won in India.
The widow looked from the two lovers to an antique glass upon an ebony
bureau in a niche opposite to her, which reflected her own face,--her
own face, more beautiful than she had ever seen it before, with a
feverish glow of vivid crimson lighting up her hollow cheeks.
"I might have been beautiful if he had loved me," she thought; and then
she turned to her father, and began to talk to him of his parishioners,
the old pensioners upon her bounty, whose little histories were so
hatefully familiar to her. Once more she made a feeble effort to tread
the old hackneyed pathway, which she had toiled upon with such weary
feet; but she could not,--she could not. After a few minutes she turned
abruptly from the Rector, and seated herself in a recess of the window,
from which she could see Edward and Mary.
But Mrs. Marchmont's duties as hostess soon demanded her attention. The
county families began to arrive; the sound of carriage-wheels seemed
perpetual upon the crisp gravel-drive before the western front; the
names of half the great people in Lincolnshire were shouted by the old
servants in the hall. The band in the music-gallery struck up a
quadrille, and Edward Arundel led the youthful mistress of the mansion
to her place in the dance.
To Olivia that long night seemed all glare and noise and confusion. She
did the honours of the ballroom, she received her guests, she meted out
due attention to all; for she had been accustomed from her earliest
girlhood to the stereotyped round of country society. She neglected no
duty; but she did all mechanically, scarcely knowing what she said or
did in the feverish tumult of her soul.
Yet, amidst all the bewilderment of her senses, in all the confusion of
her thoughts, two figures were always before her. Wherever Edward
Arundel and Mary Marchmont went, her eyes followed them--her fevered
imagination pursued them. Once, and once only, in the course of that
long night she spoke to her stepdaughter.
"How often do you mean to dance with Captain Arundel, Miss Marchmont?"
she said.
But before Mary could answer, her stepmother had moved away upon the
arm of a portly country squire, and the girl was left in sorrowful
wonderment as to the reason of Mrs. Marchmont's angry tone.
Edward and Mary were standing in one of the deep embayed windows of the
banqueting-hall, when the dancers began to disperse, long after supper.
The girl had been very happy that evening, in spite of her stepmother's
bitter words and disdainful glances. For almost the first time in her
life, the young mistress of Marchmont Towers had felt the contagious
influence of other people's happiness. The brilliantly-lighted
ballroom, the fluttering dresses of the dancers, the joyous music, the
low sound of suppressed laughter, the bright faces which smiled at each
other upon every side, were as new as any thing in fairyland to this
girl, whose narrow life had been overshadowed by the gloomy figure of
her stepmother, for ever interposed between her and the outer world.
The young spirit arose and shook off its fetters, fresh and radiant as
the butterfly that escapes from its chrysalis. The new light of
happiness illumined the orphan's delicate face, until Edward Arundel
began to wonder at her loveliness, as he had wondered once before that
night at the fiery splendour of his cousin Olivia.
"I had no idea that Olivia was so handsome, or you so pretty, my
darling," he said, as he stood with Mary in the embrasure of the
window. "You look like Titania, the queen of the fairies, Polly, with
your cloudy draperies and crown of pearls."
The window was open, and Captain Arundel looked wistfully at the broad
flagged quadrangle beautified by the light of the full summer moon. He
glanced back into the room; it was nearly empty now; and Mrs. Marchmont
was standing near the principal doorway, bidding the last of her guests
goodnight.
"Come into the quadrangle, Polly," he said, "and take a turn with me
under the colonnade. It was a cloister once, I dare say, in the good
old days before Harry the Eighth was king; and cowled monks have paced
up and down under its shadow, muttering mechanical aves and
paternosters, as the beads of their rosaries dropped slowly through
their shrivelled old fingers. Come out into the quadrangle, Polly; all
the people we know or case about are gone; and we'll go out and walk in
the moonlight as true lovers ought."
The soldier led his young companion across the threshold of the window,
and out into a cloister-like colonnade that ran along one side of the
house. The shadows of the Gothic pillars were black upon the moonlit
flags of the quadrangle, which was as light now as in the day; but a
pleasant obscurity reigned in the sheltered colonnade.
"I think this little bit of pre-Lutheran masonry is the best of all
your possessions, Polly," the young man said, laughing. "By-and-by,
when I come home from India a general,--as I mean to do, Miss
Marchmont, before I ask you to become Mrs. Arundel,--I shall stroll up
and down here in the still summer evenings, smoking my cheroots. You
will let me smoke out of doors, won't you, Polly? But suppose I should
leave some of my limbs on the banks of the Sutlej, and come limping
home to you with a wooden leg, would you have me then, Mary; or would
you dismiss me with ignominy from your sweet presence, and shut the
doors of your stony mansion upon myself and my calamities? I'm afraid,
from your admiration of my gold epaulettes and silk sash, that glory in
the abstract would have very little attraction for you."
Mary Marchmont looked up at her lover with widely-opened and wondering
eyes, and the clasp of her hand tightened a little upon his arm.
"There is nothing that could ever happen to you that would make me love
you less _now_," she said naively. "I dare say at first I liked you a
little because you were handsome, and different to every one else I had
ever seen. You were so very handsome, you know," she added
apologetically; "but it was not because of that _only_ that I loved
you. I loved you because papa told me you were good and generous, and
his true friend when he was in cruel need of a friend. Yes; you were
his friend at school, when your cousin, Martin Mostyn, and the other
pupils sneered at him and ridiculed him. How can I ever forget that,
Edward? How can I ever love you enough to repay you for that?" In the
enthusiasm of her innocent devotion, she lifted her pure young brow,
and the soldier bent down and kissed that white throne of all virginal
thoughts, as the lovers stood side by side; half in the moonlight, half
in the shadow.
Olivia Marchmont came into the embrasure of the open window, and took
her place there to watch them.
She came again to the torture. From the remotest end of the long
banqueting-room she had seen the two figures glide out into the
moonlight. She had seen them, and had gone on with her courteous
speeches, and had repeated her formula of hospitality, with the fire in
her heart devouring and consuming her. She came again, to watch and to
listen, and to endure her self-imposed agonies--as mad and foolish in
her fatal passion as some besotted wretch who should come willingly to
the wheel upon which his limbs had been well-nigh broken, and
supplicate for a renewal of the torture. She stood rigid and motionless
in the shadow of the arched window, hiding herself, as she had hidden
in the dark cavernous recess by the river; she stood and listened to
all the childish babble of the lovers as they loitered up and down the
vaulted cloister. How she despised them, in the haughty superiority of
an intellect which might have planned a revolution, or saved a sinking
state! What bitter scorn curled her lip, as their foolish talk fell
upon her ear! They talked like Florizel and Perdita, like Romeo and
Juliet, like Paul and Virginia; and they talked a great deal of
nonsense, no doubt--soft harmonious foolishness, with little more
meaning in it than there is in the cooing of doves, but tender and
musical, and more than beautiful, to each other's ears. A tigress,
famished and desolate, and but lately robbed of her whelps, would not
be likely to listen very patiently to the communing of a pair of
prosperous ringdoves. Olivia Marchmont listened with her brain on fire,
and the spirit of a murderess raging in her breast. What was she that
she should be patient? All the world was lost to her. She was thirty
years of age, and she had never yet won the love of any human being.
She was thirty years of age, and all the sublime world of affection was
a dismal blank for her. From the outer darkness in which she stood, she
looked with wild and ignorant yearning into that bright region which
her accursed foot had never trodden, and saw Mary Marchmont wandering
hand-in-hand with the only man _she_ could have loved--the only
creature who had ever had the power to awake the instinct of womanhood
in her soul.
She stood and waited until the clock in the quadrangle struck the first
quarter after three: the moon was fading out, and the colder light of
early morning glimmered in the eastern sky.
"I mustn't keep you out here any longer, Polly," Captain Arundel said,
pausing near the window. "It's getting cold, my dear, and it's high
time the mistress of Marchmont should retire to her stony bower.
Good-night, and God bless you, my darling! I'll stop in the quadrangle
and smoke a cheroot before I go to my room. Your stepmamma will be
wondering what has become of you, Mary, and we shall have a lecture
upon the proprieties to-morrow; so, once more, good-night."
He kissed the fair young brow under the coronal of pearls, stopped to
watch Mary while she crossed the threshold of the open window, and then
strolled away into the flagged court, with his cigar-case in his hand.
Olivia Marchmont stood a few paces from the window when her
stepdaughter entered the room, and Mary paused involuntarily, terrified
by the cruel aspect of the face that frowned upon her: terrified by
something that she had never seen before,--the horrible darkness that
overshadows the souls of the lost.
"Mamma!" the girl cried, clasping her hands in sudden affright--"mamma!
why do you look at me like that? Why have you been so changed to me
lately? I cannot tell you how unhappy I have been. Mamma, mamma! what
have I done to offend you?"
Olivia Marchmont grasped the trembling hands uplifted entreatingly to
her, and held them in her own,--held them as if in a vice. She stood
thus, with her stepdaughter pinioned in her grasp, and her eyes fixed
upon the girl's face. Two streams of lurid light seemed to emanate from
those dilated gray eyes; two spots of crimson blazed in the widow's
hollow cheeks.
"_What_ have you done?" she cried. "Do you think I have toiled for
nothing to do the duty which I promised my dead husband to perform for
your sake? Has all my care of you been so little, that I am to stand by
now and be silent, when I see what you are? Do you think that I am
blind, or deaf, or besotted; that you defy me and outrage me, day by
day, and hour by hour, by your conduct?"
"Mamma, mamma! what do you mean?"
"Heaven knows how rigidly you have been educated; how carefully you
have been secluded from all society, and sheltered from every
influence, lest harm or danger should come to you. I have done my duty,
and I wash my hands of you. The debasing taint of your mother's low
breeding reveals itself in your every action. You run after my cousin
Edward Arundel, and advertise your admiration of him, to himself, and
every creature who knows you. You fling yourself into his arms, and
offer him yourself and your fortune: and in your low cunning you try to
keep the secret from me, your protectress and guardian, appointed by
the dead father whom you pretend to have loved so dearly."
Olivia Marchmont still held her stepdaughter's wrists in her iron
grasp. The girl stared wildly at her with her trembling lips apart. She
began to think that the widow had gone mad.
"I blush for you--I am ashamed of you!" cried Olivia. It seemed as if
the torrent of her words burst forth almost in spite of herself. "There
is not a village girl in Kemberling, there is not a scullerymaid in
this house, who would have behaved as you have done. I have watched
you, Mary Marchmont, remember, and I know all. I know your wanderings
down by the river-side. I heard you--yes, by the Heaven above me!--I
heard you offer yourself to my cousin."
Mary drew herself up with an indignant gesture, and over the whiteness
of her face there swept a sudden glow of vivid crimson that faded as
quickly as it came. Her submissive nature revolted against her
stepmother's horrible tyranny. The dignity of innocence arose and
asserted itself against Olivia's shameful upbraiding.
"If I offered myself to Edward Arundel, mamma," she said, "it was
because we love each other very truly, and because I think and believe
papa wished me to marry his old friend."
"Because _we_ love each other very truly!" Olivia echoed in a tone of
unmitigated scorn. "You can answer for Captain Arundel's heart, I
suppose, then, as well as for your own? You must have a tolerably good
opinion of yourself, Miss Marchmont, to be able to venture so much.
Bah!" she cried suddenly, with a disdainful gesture of her head; "do
you think your pitiful face has won Edward Arundel? Do you think he has
not had women fifty times your superior, in every quality of mind and
body, at his feet out yonder in India? Are you idiotic and besotted
enough to believe that it is anything but your fortune this man cares
for? Do you know the vile things people will do, the lies they will
tell, the base comedies of guilt and falsehood they will act, for the
love of eleven thousand a year? And you think that he loves you! Child,
dupe, fool! are you weak enough to be deluded by a fortune-hunter's
pretty pastoral flatteries? Are you weak enough to be duped by a man of
the world, worn out and jaded, no doubt, as to the world's
pleasures--in debt perhaps, and in pressing need of money, who comes
here to try and redeem his fortunes by a marriage with a semi-imbecile
heiress?"
Olivia Marchmont released her hold of the shrinking girl, who seemed to
have become transfixed to the spot upon which she stood, a pale statue
of horror and despair.
The iron will of the strong and resolute woman rode roughshod over the
simple confidence of the ignorant girl. Until this moment, Mary
Marchmont had believed in Edward Arundel as implicitly as she had
trusted in her dead father. But now, for the first time, a dreadful
region of doubt opened before her; the foundations of her world reeled
beneath her feet. Edward Arundel a fortune-hunter! This woman, whom she
had obeyed for five weary years, and who had acquired that ascendancy
over her which a determined and vigorous nature must always exercise
over a morbidly sensitive disposition, told her that she had been
deluded. This woman laughed aloud in bitter scorn of her credulity.
This woman, who could have no possible motive for torturing her, and
who was known to be scrupulously conscientious in all her dealings,
told her, as plainly as the most cruel words could tell a cruel truth,
that her own charms could not have won Edward Arundel's affection.
All the beautiful day-dreams of her life melted away from her. She had
never questioned herself as to her worthiness of her lover's devotion.
She had accepted it as she accepted the sunshine and the starlight--as
something beautiful and incomprehensible, that came to her by the
beneficence of God, and not through any merits of her own. But as the
fabric of her happiness dwindled away, the fatal spell exercised over
the girl's weak nature by Olivia's violent words evoked a hundred
doubts. How should he love her? why should he love her in preference to
every other woman in the world? Set any woman to ask herself this
question, and you fill her mind with a thousand suspicions, a thousand
jealous doubts of her lover, though he were the truest and noblest in
the universe.
Olivia Marchmont stood a few paces from her stepdaughter, watching her
while the black shadow of doubt blotted every joy from her heart, and
utter despair crept slowly into her innocent breast. The widow expected
that the girl's self-esteem would assert itself--that she would
contradict and defy the traducer of her lover's truth; but it was not
so. When Mary spoke again, her voice was low and subdued, her manner as
submissive as it had been two or three years before, when she had stood
before her stepmother, waiting to repeat some difficult lesson.
"I dare say you are right, mamma," she said in a low dreamy tone,
looking not at her stepmother, but straight before her into vacancy, as
if her tearless eyes ware transfixed by the vision of all her shattered
hopes, filling with wreck and ruin the desolate foreground of a blank
future. "I dare say you are right, mamma; it was very foolish of me to
think that Edward--that Captain Arundel could care for me, for--for--my
own sake; but if--if he wants my fortune, I should wish him to have it.
The money will never be any good to me, you know, mamma; and he was so
kind to papa in his poverty--so kind! I will never, never believe
anything against him;--but I couldn't expect him to love me. I
shouldn't have offered to be his wife; I ought only to have offered him
my fortune."
She heard her lover's footstep in the quadrangle without, in the
stillness of the summer morning, and shivered at the sound. It was less
than a quarter of an hour since she had been walking with him up and
down that cloistered way, in which his footsteps were echoing with a
hollow sound; and now----. Even in the confusion of her anguish, Mary
Marchmont could not help wondering, as she thought in how short a time
the happiness of a future might be swept away into chaos.
"Good-night, mamma," she said presently, with an accent of weariness.
She did not look at her stepmother (who had turned away from her now,
and had walked towards the open window), but stole quietly from the
room, crossed the hall, and went up the broad staircase to her own
lonely chamber. Heiress though she was, she had no special attendant of
her own: she had the privilege of summoning Olivia's maid whenever she
had need of assistance; but she retained the simple habits of her early
life, and very rarely troubled Mrs. Marchmont's grim and elderly
Abigail.
Olivia stood looking out into the stony quadrangle. It was broad
daylight now; the cocks were crowing in the distance, and a skylark
singing somewhere in the blue heaven, high up above Marchmont Towers.
The faded garlands in the banqueting-room looked wan in the morning
sunshine; the lamps were burning still, for the servants waited until
Mrs. Marchmont should have retired, before they entered the room.
Edward Arundel was walking up and down the cloister, smoking his second
cigar.
He stopped presently, seeing his cousin at the window.
"What, Livy!" he cried, "not gone to bed yet?"
"No; I am going directly."
"Mary has gone, I hope?"
"Yes; she has gone. Good-night."
"Good _morning_, my dear Mrs. Marchmont," the young man answered,
laughing. "If the partridges were in, I should be going out shooting,
this lovely morning, instead of crawling ignominiously to bed, like a
worn-out reveller who has drunk too much sparkling hock. I like the
still best, by-the-bye,--the Johannisberger, that poor John's
predecessor imported from the Rhine. But I suppose there is no help for
it, and I must go to bed in the face of all that eastern glory. I
should be mounting for a gallop on the race-course, if I were in
Calcutta. But I'll go to bed, Mrs Marchmont, and humbly await your
breakfast-hour. They're stacking the new hay in the meadows beyond the
park. Don't you smell it?"
Olivia shrugged her shoulders with an impatient frown. Good heavens!
how frivolous and senseless this man's talk seemed to her! She was
plunging her soul into an abyss of sin and ruin for his sake; and she
hated him, and rebelled against him, because he was so little worthy of
the sacrifice.
"Good morning," she said abruptly; "I'm tired to death."
She moved away, and left him.
Five minutes afterwards, he went up the great oak-staircase after her,
whistling a serenade from _Fra Diavolo_ as he went. He was one of those
people to whom life seems all holiday. Younger son though he was, he
had never known any of the pitfalls of debt and difficulty into which
the junior members of rich families are so apt to plunge headlong in
early youth, and from which they emerge enfeebled and crippled, to
endure an after-life embittered by all the shabby miseries which wait
upon aristocratic pauperism. Brave, honourable, and simple-minded,
Edward Arundel had fought the battle of life like a good soldier, and
had carried a stainless shield when the fight was thickest, and victory
hard to win. His sunshiny nature won him friends, and his better
qualities kept them. Young men trusted and respected him; and old men,
gray in the service of their country, spoke well of him. His handsome
face was a pleasant decoration at any festival; his kindly voice and
hearty laugh at a dinner-table were as good as music in the gallery at
the end of the banqueting-chamber.
He had that freshness of spirit which is the peculiar gift of some
natures; and he had as yet never known sorrow, except, indeed, such
tender and compassionate sympathy as he had often felt for the
calamities of others.
Olivia Marchmont heard her cousin's cheery tenor voice as he passed her
chamber. "How happy he is!" she thought. "His very happiness is one
insult the more to me."
The widow paced up and down her room in the morning sunshine, thinking
of the things she had said in the banqueting-hall below, and of her
stepdaughter's white despairing face. What had she done? What was the
extent of the sin she had committed? Olivia Marchmont asked herself
these two questions. The old habit of self-examination was not quite
abandoned yet. She sinned, and then set herself to work to try and
justify her sin.
"How should he love her?" she thought. "What is there in her pale
unmeaning face that should win the love of a man who despises me?"
She stopped before a cheval-glass, and surveyed herself from head to
foot, frowning angrily at her handsome image, hating herself for her
despised beauty. Her white shoulders looked like stainless marble
against the rich ruby darkness of her velvet dress. She had snatched
the diamond ornaments from her head, and her long black hair fell about
her bosom in thick waveless tresses.
"I am handsomer than she is, and cleverer; and I love him better, ten
thousand times, than she loves him," Olivia Marchmont thought, as she
turned contemptuously from the glass. "Is it likely, then, that he
cares for anything but her fortune? Any other woman in the world would
have argued as I argued to-night. Any woman would have believed that
she did her duty in warning this besotted girl against her folly. What
do I know of Edward Arundel that should lead me to think him better or
nobler than other men? and how many men sell themselves for the love of
a woman's wealth! Perhaps good may come of my mad folly, after all; and
I may have saved this girl from a life of misery by the words I have
spoken to-night."
The devils--for ever lying in wait for this woman, whose gloomy pride
rendered her in some manner akin to themselves--may have laughed at her
as she argued thus with herself.
She lay down at last to sleep, worn out by the excitement of the long
night, and to dream horrible dreams. The servants, with the exception
of one who rose betimes to open the great house, slept long after the
unwonted festival. Edward Arundel slumbered as heavily as any member of
that wearied household; and thus it was that there was no one in the
way to see a shrinking, trembling figure creep down the
sunlit-staircase, and steal across the threshold of the wide hall door.
There was no one to see Mary Marchmont's silent flight from the gaunt
Lincolnshire mansion in which she had known so little real happiness.
There was no one to comfort the sorrow-stricken girl in her despair and
desolation of spirit. She crept away, like some escaped prisoner, in
the early morning, from the house which the law called her own.
And the hand of the woman whom John Marchmont had chosen to be his
daughter's friend and counsellor was the hand which drove that daughter
from the shelter of her home. The voice of her whom the weak father had
trusted in, fearful to confide his child into the hand of God, but
blindly confident in his own judgment--was the voice which had uttered
the lying words, whose every syllable had been as a separate dagger
thrust in the orphan girl's lacerated heart. It was her father,--her
father, who had placed this woman over her, and had entailed upon her
the awful agony that drove her out into an unknown world, careless
whither she went in her despair.
END OF VOL. I.