CHAPTER II. A NEW PROTECTOR.
CHAPTER III. PAUL'S SISTER.
CHAPTER IV. A STOLEN HONEYMOON.
CHAPTER V. SOUNDING THE DEPTHS.
CHAPTER VI. RISEN FROM THE GRAVE.
CHAPTER VII. FACE TO FACE.
CHAPTER VIII. THE PAINTING-ROOM BY THE RIVER.
CHAPTER IX. IN THE DARK.
CHAPTER X. THE PARAGRAPH IN THE NEWSPAPER.
CHAPTER XI. EDWARD ARUNDEL'S DESPAIR.
CHAPTER XII. EDWARD'S VISITORS.
CHAPTER XIII. ONE MORE SACRIFICE.
CHAPTER XIV. THE CHILD'S VOICE IN THE PAVILION BY THE WATER.
JOHN MARCHMONT'S LEGACY.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
MARY'S LETTER.
It was past twelve o'clock when Edward Arundel strolled into the
dining-room. The windows were open, and the scent of the mignionette
upon the terrace was blown in upon the warm summer breeze.
Mrs. Marchmont was sitting at one end of the long table, reading a
newspaper. She looked up as Edward entered the room. She was pale, but
not much paler than usual. The feverish light had faded out of her
eyes, and they looked dim and heavy.
"Good morning, Livy," the young man said. "Mary is not up yet, I
suppose?"
"I believe not."
"Poor little girl! A long rest will do her good after her first ball.
How pretty and fairy-like she looked in her white gauze dress, and with
that circlet of pearls round her hair! Your taste, I suppose, Olivia?
She looked like a snow-drop among all the other gaudy flowers,--the
roses and tiger-lilies, and peonies and dahlias. That eldest Miss
Hickman is handsome, but she's so terribly conscious of her
attractions. That little girl from Swampington with the black ringlets
is rather pretty; and Laura Filmer is a jolly, dashing girl; she looks
you full in the face, and talks to you about hunting with as much gusto
as an old whipper-in. I don't think much of Major Hawley's three tall
sandy-haired daughters; but Fred Hawley's a capital fellow: it's a pity
he's a civilian. In short, my dear Olivia, take it altogether, I think
your ball was a success, and I hope you'll give us another in the
hunting-season."
Mrs. Marchmont did not condescend to reply to her cousin's meaningless
rattle. She sighed wearily, and began to fill the tea-pot from the
old-fashioned silver urn. Edward loitered in one of the windows,
whistling to a peacock that was stalking solemnly backwards and
forwards upon the stone balustrade.
"I should like to drive you and Mary down to the seashore, Livy, after
breakfast. Will you go?"
Mrs. Marchmont shook her head.
"I am a great deal too tired to think of going out to-day," she said
ungraciously.
"And I never felt fresher in my life," the young man responded,
laughing; "last night's festivities seem to have revivified me. I wish
Mary would come down," he added, with a yawn; "I could give her another
lesson in billiards, at any rate. Poor little girl, I am afraid she'll
never make a cannon."
Captain Arundel sat down to his breakfast, and drank the cup of tea
poured out for him by Olivia. Had she been a sinful woman of another
type, she would have put arsenic into the cup perhaps, and so have made
an end of the young officer and of her own folly. As it was, she only
sat by, with her own untasted breakfast before her, and watched him
while he ate a plateful of raised pie, and drank his cup of tea, with
the healthy appetite which generally accompanies youth and a good
conscience. He sprang up from the table directly he had finished his
meal, and cried out impatiently, "What can make Mary so lazy this
morning? she is usually such an early riser."
Mrs. Marchmont rose as her cousin said this, and a vague feeling of
uneasiness took possession of her mind. She remembered the white face
which had blanched beneath the angry glare of her eyes, the blank look
of despair that had come over Mary's countenance a few hours before.
"I will go and call her myself," she said. "N--no; I'll send Barbara."
She did not wait to ring the bell, but went into the hall, and called
sharply, "Barbara! Barbara!"
A woman came out of a passage leading to the housekeeper's room, in
answer to Mrs. Marchmont's call; a woman of about fifty years of age,
dressed in gray stuff, and with a grave inscrutable face, a wooden
countenance that gave no token of its owner's character. Barbara
Simmons might have been the best or the worst of women, a Mrs. Fry or a
Mrs. Brownrigg, for any evidence her face afforded against either
hypothesis.
"I want you to go up-stairs, Barbara, and call Miss Marchmont," Olivia
said. "Captain Arundel and I have finished breakfast."
The woman obeyed, and Mrs. Marchmont returned to the dining-room, where
Edward was trying to amuse himself with the "Times" of the previous
day.
Ten minutes afterwards Barbara Simmons came into the room carrying a
letter on a silver waiter. Had the document been a death-warrant, or a
telegraphic announcement of the landing of the French at Dover, the
well-trained servant would have placed it upon a salver before
presenting it to her mistress.
"Miss Marchmont is not in her room, ma'am," she said; "the bed has not
been slept on; and I found this letter, addressed to Captain Arundel,
upon the table."
Olivia's face grew livid; a horrible dread rushed into her mind. Edward
snatched the letter which the servant held towards him.
"Mary not in her room! What, in Heaven's name, can it mean?" he cried.
He tore open the letter. The writing was not easily decipherable for
the tears which the orphan girl had shed over it.
"MY OWN DEAR EDWARD,--I have loved you so dearly and so foolishly, and
you have been so kind to me, that I have quite forgotten how unworthy I
am of your affection. But I am forgetful no longer. Something has
happened which has opened my eyes to my own folly,--I know now that you
did not love me; that I had no claim to your love; no charms or
attractions such as so many other women possess, and for which you
might have loved me. I know this now, dear Edward, and that all my
happiness has been a foolish dream; but do not think that I blame any
one but myself for what has happened. Take my fortune: long ago, when I
was a little girl, I asked my father to let me share it with you. I ask
you now to take it all, dear friend; and I go away for ever from a
house in which I have learnt how little happiness riches can give. Do
not be unhappy about me. I shall pray for you always,--always
remembering your goodness to my dead father; always looking back to the
day upon which you came to see us in our poor lodging. I am very
ignorant of all worldly business, but I hope the law will let me give
you Marchmont Towers, and all my fortune, whatever it may be. Let Mr.
Paulette see this latter part of my letter, and let him fully
understand that I abandon all my rights to you from this day. Good-bye,
dear friend; think of me sometimes, but never think of me sorrowfully.
"MARY MARCHMONT."
This was all. This was the letter which the heart-broken girl had
written to her lover. It was in no manner different from the letter she
might have written to him nine years before in Oakley Street. It was as
childish in its ignorance and inexperience; as womanly in its tender
self-abnegation.
Edward Arundel stared at the simple lines like a man in a dream,
doubtful of his own identity, doubtful of the reality of the world
about him, in his hopeless wonderment. He read the letter line by line
again and again, first in dull stupefaction, and muttering the words
mechanically as he read them, then with the full light of their meaning
dawning gradually upon him.
Her fortune! He had never loved her! She had discovered her own folly!
What did it all mean? What was the clue to the mystery of this letter,
which had stunned and bewildered him, until the very power of
reflection seemed lost? The dawning of that day had seen their parting,
and the innocent face had been lifted to his, beaming with love and
trust. And now--? The letter dropped from his hand, and fluttered
slowly to the ground. Olivia Marchmont stooped to pick it up. Her
movement aroused the young man from his stupor, and in that moment he
caught the sight of his cousin's livid face.
He started as if a thunderbolt had burst at his feet. An idea, sudden
as some inspired revelation, rushed into his mind.
"Read that letter, Olivia Marchmont!" he said.
The woman obeyed. Slowly and deliberately she read the childish epistle
which Mary had written to her lover. In every line, in every word, the
widow saw the effect of her own deadly work; she saw how deeply the
poison, dropped from her own envenomed tongue, had sunk into the
innocent heart of the girl.
Edward Arundel watched her with flaming eyes. His tall soldierly frame
trembled in the intensity of his passion. He followed his cousin's eyes
along the lines in Mary Marchmont's letter, waiting till she should
come to the end. Then the tumultuous storm of indignation burst forth,
until Olivia cowered beneath the lightning of her cousin's glance.
Was this the man she had called frivolous? Was this the boyish
red-coated dandy she had despised? Was this the curled and perfumed
representative of swelldom, whose talk never soared to higher flights
than the description of a day's snipe-shooting, or a run with the
Burleigh fox-hounds? The wicked woman's eyelids drooped over her
averted eyes; she turned away, shrinking from this fearless accuser.
"This mischief is some of _your_ work, Olivia Marchmont!" Edward
Arundel cried. "It is you who have slandered and traduced me to my dead
friend's daughter! Who else would dare accuse a Dangerfield Arundel of
baseness? who else would be vile enough to call my father's son a liar
and a traitor? It is you who have whispered shameful insinuations into
this poor child's innocent ear! I scarcely need the confirmation of
your ghastly face to tell me this. It is you who have driven Mary
Marchmont from the home in which you should have sheltered and
protected her! You envied her, I suppose,--envied her the thousands
which might have ministered to your wicked pride and ambition;--the
pride which has always held you aloof from those who might have loved
you; the ambition that has made you a soured and discontented woman,
whose gloomy face repels all natural affection. You envied the gentle
girl whom your dead husband committed to your care, and who should have
been most sacred to you. You envied her, and seized the first occasion
upon which you might stab her to the very core of her tender heart.
What other motive could you have had for doing this deadly wrong? None,
so help me Heaven!"
No other motive! Olivia Marchmont dropped down in a heap on the ground
near her cousin's feet; not kneeling, but grovelling upon the carpeted
floor, writhing convulsively, with her hands twisted one in the other,
and her head falling forward on her breast. She uttered no syllable of
self-justification or denial. The pitiless words rained down upon her
provoked no reply. But in the depths of her heart sounded the echo of
Edward Arundel's words: "The pride which has always held you aloof from
those who might have loved you; . . . a discontented woman, whose
gloomy face repels all natural affection."
"O God!" she thought, "he might have loved me, then! He _might_ have
loved me, if I could have locked my anguish in my own heart, and smiled
at him and flattered him."
And then an icy indifference took possession of her. What did it matter
that Edward Arundel repudiated and hated her? He had never loved her.
His careless friendliness had made as wide a gulf between them as his
bitterest hate could ever make. Perhaps, indeed, his new-born hate
would be nearer to love than his indifference had been, for at least he
would think of her now, if he thought ever so bitterly.
"Listen to me, Olivia Marchmont," the young man said, while the woman
still crouched upon the ground near his feet, self-confessed in the
abandonment of her despair. "Wherever this girl may have gone, driven
hence by your wickedness, I will follow her. My answer to the lie you
have insinuated against me shall be my immediate marriage with my old
friend's orphan child. _He_ knew me well enough to know how far I was
above the baseness of a fortune-hunter, and he wished that I should be
his daughter's husband. I should be a coward and a fool were I to be
for one moment influenced by such a slander as that which you have
whispered in Mary Marchmont's ear. It is not the individual only whom
you traduce. You slander the cloth I wear, the family to which I
belong; and my best justification will be the contempt in which I hold
your infamous insinuations. When you hear that I have squandered Mary
Marchmont's fortune, or cheated the children I pray God she may live to
bear me, it will be time enough for you to tell the world that your
kinsman Edward Dangerfield Arundel is a swindler and a traitor."
He strode out into the hall, leaving his cousin on the ground; and she
heard his voice outside the dining-room door making inquiries of the
servants.
They could tell him nothing of Mary's flight. Her bed had not been
slept in; nobody had seen her leave the house; it was most likely,
therefore, that she had stolen away very early, before the servants
were astir.
Where had she gone? Edward Arundel's heart beat wildly as he asked
himself that question. He remembered how often he had heard of women,
as young and innocent as Mary Marchmont, who had rushed to destroy
themselves in a tumult of agony and despair. How easily this poor
child, who believed that her dream of happiness was for ever broken,
might have crept down through the gloomy wood to the edge of the
sluggish river, to drop into the weedy stream, and hide her sorrow
under the quiet water. He could fancy her, a new Ophelia, pale and pure
as the Danish prince's slighted love, floating past the weird branches
of the willows, borne up for a while by the current, to sink in silence
amongst the shadows farther down the stream.
He thought of these things in one moment, and in the next dismissed the
thought. Mary's letter breathed the spirit of gentle resignation rather
than of wild despair. "I shall always pray for you; I shall always
remember you," she had written. Her lover remembered how much sorrow
the orphan girl had endured in her brief life. He looked back to her
childish days of poverty and self-denial; her early loss of her mother;
her grief at her father's second marriage; the shock of that beloved
father's death. Her sorrows had followed each other in gloomy
succession, with only narrow intervals of peace between them. She was
accustomed, therefore, to grief. It is the soul untutored by
affliction, the rebellious heart that has never known calamity, which
becomes mad and desperate, and breaks under the first blow. Mary
Marchmont had learned the habit of endurance in the hard school of
sorrow.
Edward Arundel walked out upon the terrace, and re-read the missing
girl's letter. He was calmer now, and able to face the situation with
all its difficulties and perplexities. He was losing time perhaps in
stopping to deliberate; but it was no use to rush off in reckless
haste, undetermined in which direction he should seek for the lost
mistress of Marchmont Towers. One of the grooms was busy in the stables
saddling Captain Arundel's horse, and in the mean time the young man
went out alone upon the sunny terrace to deliberate upon Mary's letter.
Complete resignation was expressed in every line of that childish
epistle. The heiress spoke most decisively as to her abandonment of her
fortune and her home. It was clear, then, that she meant to leave
Lincolnshire; for she would know that immediate steps would be taken to
discover her hiding-place, and bring her back to Marchmont Towers.
Where was she likely to go in her inexperience of the outer world?
where but to those humble relations of her dead mother's, of whom her
father had spoken in his letter to Edward Arundel, and with whom the
young man knew she had kept up an occasional correspondence, sending
them many little gifts out of her pocket-money. These people were small
tenant-farmers, at a place called Marlingford, in Berkshire. Edward
knew their name and the name of the farm.
"I'll make inquiries at the Kemberling station to begin with," he
thought. "There's a through train from the north that stops at
Kemberling at a little before six. My poor darling may have easily
caught that, if she left the house at five."
Captain Arundel went back into the hall, and summoned Barbara Simmons.
The woman replied with rather a sulky air to his numerous questions;
but she told him that Miss Marchmont had left her ball-dress upon the
bed, and had put on a gray cashmere dress trimmed with black ribbon,
which she had worn as half-mourning for her father; a black straw
bonnet, with a crape veil, and a silk mantle trimmed with crape. She
had taken with her a small carpet-bag, some linen,--for the
linen-drawer of her wardrobe was open, and the things scattered
confusedly about,--and the little morocco case in which she kept her
pearl ornaments, and the diamond ring left her by her father.
"Had she any money?" Edward asked.
"Yes, sir; she was never without money. She spent a good deal amongst
the poor people she visited with my mistress; but I dare say she may
have had between ten and twenty pounds in her purse."
"She will go to Berkshire," Edward Arundel thought: "the idea of going
to her humble friends would be the first to present itself to her mind.
She will go to her dead mother's sister, and give her all her jewels,
and ask for shelter in the quiet farmhouse. She will act like one of
the heroines in the old-fashioned novels she used to read in Oakley
Street, the simple-minded damsels of those innocent story-books, who
think nothing of resigning a castle and a coronet, and going out into
the world to work for their daily bread in a white satin gown, and with
a string of pearls to bind their dishevelled locks."
Captain Arundel's horse was brought round to the terrace-steps, as he
stood with Mary's letter in his hand, waiting to hurry away to the
rescue of his sorrowful love.
"Tell Mrs. Marchmont that I shall not return to the Towers till I bring
her stepdaughter with me," he said to the groom; and then, without
stopping to utter another word, he shook the rein on his horse's neck,
and galloped away along the gravelled drive leading to the great iron
gates of Marchmont Towers.
Olivia heard his message, which had been spoken in a clear loud voice,
like some knightly defiance, sounding trumpet-like at a castle-gate.
She stood in one of the windows of the dining-room, hidden by the faded
velvet curtain, and watched her cousin ride away, brave and handsome as
any knight-errant of the chivalrous past, and as true as Bayard
himself.