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 care 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 naïvely. “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 ca
me 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.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 190
