“And my cousin––”
“Made a kind of connexion between us. But Mr. Marchmont gave me to understand that you lived at Stanfield, Mrs. Weston.”
“Until last week, positively until last week,” answered the surgeon’s wife. “I see you take very little interest in village gossip, Mrs. Marchmont, or you would have heard of the change at Kemberling.”
“What change?”
“My husband’s purchase of poor old Mr. Dawnfield’s practice. The dear old man died a month ago,––you heard of his death, of course,––and Mr. Weston negotiated the purchase with Mrs. Dawnfield in less than a fortnight. We came here early last week, and already we are making friends in the neighbourhood. How strange that you should not have heard of our coming!”
“I do not see much society,” Olivia answered indifferently, “and I hear nothing of the Kemberling people.”
“Indeed!” cried Mrs. Weston; “and we hear so much of Marchmont Towers at Kemberling.”
She looked full in the widow’s face as she spoke, her stereotyped smile subsiding into a look of greedy curiosity; a look whose intense eagerness could not be concealed.
That look, and the tone in which her last sentence had been spoken, said as plainly as the plainest words could have done, “I have heard of Mary Marchmont’s flight.”
Olivia understood this; but in the passionate depth of her own madness she had no power to fathom the meanings or the motives of other people. She revolted against this Mrs. Weston, and disliked her because the woman intruded upon her in her desolation; but she never once thought of Lavinia Weston’s interest in Mary’s movements; she never once remembered that the frail life of that orphan girl only stood between this woman’s brother and the rich heritage of Marchmont Towers.
Blind and forgetful of everything in the hideous egotism of her despair, what was Olivia Marchmont but a fitting tool, a plastic and easily–moulded instrument, in the hands of unscrupulous people, whose hard intellects had never been beaten into confused shapelessness in the fiery furnace of passion?
Mrs. Weston had heard of Mary Marchmont’s flight; but she had heard half a dozen different reports of that event, as widely diversified in their details as if half a dozen heiresses had fled from Marchmont Towers. Every gossip in the place had a separate story as to the circumstances which had led to the girl’s running away from her home. The accounts vied with each other in graphic force and minute elaboration; the conversations that had taken place between Mary and her stepmother, between Edward Arundel and Mrs. Marchmont, between the Rector of Swampington and nobody in particular, would have filled a volume, as related by the gossips of Kemberling; but as everybody assigned a different cause for the terrible misunderstanding at the Towers, and a different direction for Mary’s flight,––and as the railway official at the station, who could have thrown some light on the subject, was a stern and moody man, who had little sympathy with his kind, and held his tongue persistently,––it was not easy to get very near the truth. Under these circumstances, then, Mrs. Weston determined upon seeking information at the fountain–head, and approaching the cruel stepmother, who, according to some of the reports, had starved and beaten her dead husband’s child.
“Yes, dear Mrs. Marchmont,” said Lavinia Weston, seeing that it was necessary to come direct to the point if she wished to wring the truth from Olivia; “yes, we hear of everything at Kemberling; and I need scarcely tell you, that we heard of the sad trouble which you have had to endure since your ball––the ball that is spoken of as the most chy–arming entertainment remembered in the neighbourhood for a long time. We heard of this sad girl’s flight.”
Mrs. Marchmont looked up with a dark frown, but made no answer.
“Was she––it really is such a very painful question, that I almost shrink from––but was Miss Marchmont at all––eccentric––a little mentally deficient? Pray pardon me, if I have given you pain by such a question; but––––”
Olivia started, and looked sharply at her visitor. “Mentally deficient? No!” she said. But as she spoke her eyes dilated, her pale cheeks grew paler, her upper lip quivered with a faint convulsive movement. It seemed as if some idea presented itself to her with a sudden force that almost took away her breath.
“Not mentally deficient!” repeated Lavinia Weston; “dee–ar me! It’s a great comfort to hear that. Of course Paul saw very little of his cousin, and he was not therefore in a position to judge,––though his opinions, however rapidly arrived at, are generally so very accurate;––but he gave me to understand that he thought Miss Marchmont appeared a little––just a little––weak in her intellect. I am very glad to find he was mistaken.”
Olivia made no reply to this speech. She had seated herself in her chair by the window; she looked straight before her into the flagged quadrangle, with her hands lying idle in her lap. It seemed as if she were actually unconscious of her visitor’s presence, or as if, in her scornful indifference, she did not even care to affect any interest in that visitor’s conversation.
Lavinia Weston returned again to the attack.
“Pray, Mrs. Marchmont, do not think me intrusive or impertinent,” she said pleadingly, “if I ask you to favour me with the true particulars of this sad event. I am sure you will be good enough to remember that my brother Paul, my sister, and myself are Mary Marchmont’s nearest relatives on her father’s side, and that we have therefore some right to feel interested in her?”
By this very polite speech Lavinia Weston plainly reminded the widow of the insignificance of her own position at Marchmont Towers. In her ordinary frame of mind Olivia would have resented the ladylike slight, but to–day she neither heard nor heeded it; she was brooding with a stupid, unreasonable persistency over the words “mental deficiency,” “weak intellect.” She only roused herself by a great effort to answer Mrs. Weston’s question, when that lady had repeated it in very plain words.
“I can tell you nothing about Miss Marchmont’s flight,” she said, coldly, “except that she chose to run away from her home. I found reason to object to her conduct upon the night of the ball; and the next morning she left the house, assigning no reason––to me, at any rate––for her absurd and improper behaviour.”
“She assigned no reason to you, my dear Mrs. Marchmont; but she assigned a reason to somebody, I infer, from what you say?”
“Yes; she wrote a letter to my cousin, Captain Arundel.”
“Telling him the reason of her departure?”
“I don’t know––I forget. The letter told nothing clearly; it was wild and incoherent.”
Mrs. Weston sighed,––a long–drawn, desponding sigh.
“Wild and incoherent!” she murmured, in a pensive tone. “How grieved Paul will be to hear of this! He took such an interest in his cousin––a delicate and fragile–looking young creature, he told me. Yes, he took a very great interest in her, Mrs. Marchmont, though you may perhaps scarcely believe me when I say so. He kept himself purposely aloof from this place; his sensitive nature led him to abstain from even revealing his interest in Miss Marchmont. His position, you must remember, with regard to this poor dear girl, is a very delicate––I may say a very painful––one.”
Olivia remembered nothing of the kind. The value of the Marchmont estates; the sordid worth of those wide–stretching farms, spreading far–away into Yorkshire; the pitiful, closely–calculated revenue, which made Mary a wealthy heiress,––were so far from the dark thoughts of this woman’s desperate heart, that she no more suspected Mrs. Weston of any mercenary design in coming to the Towers, than of burglarious intentions with regard to the silver spoons in the plate–room. She only thought that the surgeon’s wife was a tiresome woman, against whose pertinacious civility her angry spirit chafed and rebelled, until she was almost driven to order her from the room.
In this cruel weariness of spirit Mrs. Marchmont gave a short impatient sigh, which afforded a sufficient hint to such an accomplished tactician as her visit
or.
“I know I have tired you, my dear Mrs. Marchmont,” the doctor’s wife said, rising and arranging her muslin scarf as she spoke, in token of her immediate departure. “I am so sorry to find you a sufferer from that nasty hacking cough; but of course you have the best advice,––Mr. Barlow from Swampington, I think you said?”––Olivia had said nothing of the kind;––”and I trust the warm weather will prevent the cough taking any hold of your chest. If I might venture to suggest flannels––so many young women quite ridicule the idea of flannels––but, as the wife of a humble provincial practitioner, I have learned their value. Good–bye, dear Mrs. Marchmont. I may come again, may I not, now that the ice is broken, and we are so well acquainted with each other? Good–bye.”
Olivia could not refuse to take at least one of the two plump and tightly–gloved hands which were held out to her with an air of frank cordiality; but the widow’s grasp was loose and nerveless, and, inasmuch as two consentient parties are required to the shaking of hands as well as to the getting up of a quarrel, the salutation was not a very hearty one.
The surgeon’s pony must have been weary of standing before the flight of shallow steps leading to the western portico, when Mrs. Weston took her seat by her husband’s side in the gig, which had been newly painted and varnished since the worthy couple’s hegira from Stanfield.
The surgeon was not an ambitious man, nor a designing man; he was simply stupid and lazy––lazy although, in spite of himself, he led an active and hard–working life; but there are many square men whose sides are cruelly tortured by the pressure of the round holes into which they are ill–advisedly thrust, and if our destinies were meted out to us in strict accordance with our temperaments, Mr. Weston should have been a lotus–eater. As it was, he was content to drudge on, mildly complying with every desire of his wife; doing what she told him, because it was less trouble to do the hardest work at her bidding than to oppose her. It would have been surely less painful for Macbeth to have finished that ugly business of the murder than to have endured my lady’s black contemptuous scowl, and the bitter scorn and contumely concentrated in those four words, “Give me the daggers.”
Mr. Weston asked one or two commonplace questions about his wife’s interview with John Marchmont’s widow; but, slowly apprehending that Lavinia did not care to discuss the matter, he relapsed into meek silence, and devoted all his intellectual powers to the task of keeping the pony out of the deeper ruts in the rugged road between Marchmont Towers and Kemberling High Street.
“What is the secret of that woman’s life?” thought Lavinia Weston during that homeward drive. “Has she ill–treated the girl, or is she plotting in some way or other to get hold of the Marchmont fortune? Pshaw! that’s impossible. And yet she may be making a purse, somehow or other, out of the estate. Anyhow, there is bad blood between the two women.”
CHAPTER IV. A STOLEN HONEYMOON.
The village to which Edward Arundel took his bride was within a few miles of Winchester. The young soldier had become familiar with the place in his early boyhood, when he had gone to spend a part of one bright midsummer holiday at the house of a schoolfellow; and had ever since cherished a friendly remembrance of the winding trout–streams, the rich verdure of the valleys, and the sheltering hills that shut in the pleasant little cluster of thatched cottages, the pretty white–walled villas, and the grey old church.
But to Mary, whose experiences of town and country were limited to the dingy purlieus of Oakley Street and the fenny flats of Lincolnshire, this Hampshire village seemed a rustic paradise, which neither trouble nor sorrow could ever approach. She had trembled at the thought of Olivia’s coming in Oakley Street; but here she seemed to lose all terror of her stern stepmother,––here, sheltered and protected by her young husband’s love, she fancied that she might live her life out happy and secure.
She told Edward this one sunny morning, as they sat by the young man’s favourite trout–stream. Captain Arundel’s fishing–tackle lay idle on the turf at his side, for he had been beguiled into forgetfulness of a ponderous trout he had been watching and finessing with for upwards of an hour, and had flung himself at full length upon the mossy margin of the water, with his uncovered head lying in Mary’s lap.
The childish bride would have been content to sit for ever thus in that rural solitude, with her fingers twisted in her husband’s chestnut curls, and her soft eyes keeping timid watch upon his handsome face,––so candid and unclouded in its careless repose. The undulating meadow–land lay half–hidden in a golden haze, only broken here and there by the glitter of the brighter sunlight that lit up the waters of the wandering streams that intersected the low pastures. The massive towers of the cathedral, the grey walls of St. Cross, loomed dimly in the distance; the bubbling plash of a mill–stream sounded like some monotonous lullaby in the drowsy summer atmosphere. Mary looked from the face she loved to the fair landscape about her, and a tender solemnity crept into her mind––a reverent love and admiration for this beautiful earth, which was almost akin to awe.
“How pretty this place is, Edward!” she said. “I had no idea there were such places in all the wide world. Do you know, I think I would rather be a cottage–girl here than an heiress in Lincolnshire. Edward, if I ask you a favour, will you grant it?”
She spoke very earnestly, looking down at her husband’s upturned face; but Captain Arundel only laughed at her question, without even caring to lift the drowsy eyelids that drooped over his blue eyes.
“Well, my pet, if you want anything short of the moon, I suppose your devoted husband is scarcely likely to refuse it. Our honeymoon is not a fortnight old yet, Polly dear; you wouldn’t have me turn tyrant quite as soon as this. Speak out, Mrs. Arundel, and assert your dignity as a British matron. What is the favour I am to grant?”
“I want you to live here always, Edward darling,” pleaded the girlish voice. “Not for a fortnight or a month, but for ever and ever. I have never been happy at Marchmont Towers. Papa died there, you know, and I cannot forget that. Perhaps that ought to have made the place sacred to me, and so it has; but it is sacred like papa’s tomb in Kemberling Church, and it seems like profanation to be happy in it, or to forget my dead father even for a moment. Don’t let us go back there, Edward. Let my stepmother live there all her life. It would seem selfish and cruel to turn her out of the house she has so long been mistress of. Mr. Gormby will go on collecting the rents, you know, and can send us as much money as we want; and we can take that pretty house we saw to let on the other side of Milldale,––the house with the rookery, and the dovecotes, and the sloping lawn leading down to the water. You know you don’t like Lincolnshire, Edward, any more than I do, and there’s scarcely any trout–fishing near the Towers.”
Captain Arundel opened his eyes, and lifted himself out of his reclining position before he answered his wife.
“My own precious Polly,” he said, smiling fondly at the gentle childish face turned in such earnestness towards his own; “my runaway little wife, rich people have their duties to perform as well as poor people; and I am afraid it would never do for you to hide in this out–of–the–way Hampshire village, and play absentee from stately Marchmont and all its dependencies. I love that pretty, infantine, unworldly spirit of yours, my darling; and I sometimes wish we were two grown–up babes in the wood, and could wander about gathering wild flowers, and eating blackberries and hazel–nuts, until the shades of evening closed in, and the friendly robins came to bury us. Don’t fancy I am tired of our honeymoon, Polly, or that I care for Marchmont Towers any more than you do; but I fear the non–residence plan would never answer. The world would call my little wife eccentric, if she ran away from her grandeur; and Paul Marchmont the artist,––of whom your poor father had rather a bad opinion, by the way,––would be taking out a statute of lunacy against you.”
“Paul Marchmont!” repeated Mary. “Did papa dislike Mr. Paul Marchmont?”
“Well, poor John had a sort of a prej
udice against the man, I believe; but it was only a prejudice, for he freely confessed that he could assign no reason for it. But whatever Mr. Paul Marchmont may be, you must live at the Towers, Mary, and be Lady Bountiful–in–chief in your neighbourhood, and look after your property, and have long interviews with Mr. Gormby, and become altogether a woman of business; so that when I go back to India––––”
Mary interrupted him with a little cry:
“Go back to India!” she exclaimed. “What do you mean, Edward?”
“I mean, my darling, that my business in life is to fight for my Queen and country, and not to spunge upon my wife’s fortune. You don’t suppose I’m going to lay down my sword at seven–and–twenty years of age, and retire upon my pension? No, Polly; you remember what Lord Nelson said on the deck of the Victory at Trafalgar. That saying can never be so hackneyed as to lose its force. I must do my duty, Polly––I must do my duty, even if duty and love pull different ways, and I have to leave my darling, in the service of my country.”
Mary clasped her hands in despair, and looked piteously at her lover–husband, with the tears streaming down her pale cheeks.
“O Edward,” she cried, “how cruel you are; how very, very cruel you are to me! What is the use of my fortune if you won’t share it with me, if you won’t take it all; for it is yours, my dearest––it is all yours? I remember the words in the Marriage Service, ‘with all my goods I thee endow.’ I have given you Marchmont Towers, Edward; nobody in the world can take it away from you. You never, never, never could be so cruel as to leave me! I know how brave and good you are, and I am proud to think of your noble courage and all the brave deeds you did in India. But you have fought for your country, Edward; you have done your duty. Nobody can expect more of you; nobody shall take you from me. O my darling, my husband, you promised to shelter and defend me while our lives last! You won’t leave me––you won’t leave me, will you?”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 195
