Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  It was Olivia Marchmont, in the mourning–robes that she had worn, with but one brief intermission, ever since her husband’s death. Her profile was turned towards the door by which Edward Arundel entered the room; her eyes were bent steadily upon the low heap of burning ashes in the grate. Even in that doubtful light the young man could see that her features were sharpened, and that a settled frown had contracted her straight black brows.

  In her fixed attitude, in her air of deathlike tranquillity, this woman resembled some sinful vestal sister, set, against her will, to watch a sacred fire, and brooding moodily over her crimes.

  She did not hear the opening of the door; she had not even heard the trampling of the horses’ hoofs, or the crashing of the wheels upon the gravel before the house. There were times when her sense of external things was, as it were, suspended and absorbed in the intensity of her obstinate despair.

  “Olivia!” said the soldier.

  Mrs. Marchmont looked up at the sound of that accusing voice, for there was something in Edward Arundel’s simple enunciation of her name which seemed like an accusation or a menace. She looked up, with a great terror in her face, and stared aghast at her unexpected visitor. Her white cheeks, her trembling lips, and dilated eyes could not have more palpably expressed a great and absorbing horror, had the young man standing quietly before her been a corpse newly risen from its grave.

  “Olivia Marchmont,” said Captain Arundel, after a brief pause, “I have come here to look for my wife.”

  The woman pushed her trembling hands across her forehead, brushing the dead black hair from her temples, and still staring with the same unutterable horror at the face of her cousin. Several times she tried to speak; but the broken syllables died away in her throat in hoarse, inarticulate mutterings. At last, with a great effort, the words came.

  “I––I––never expected to see you,” she said; “I heard that you were very ill; I heard that you––––”

  “You heard that I was dying,” interrupted Edward Arundel; “or that, if I lived, I should drag out the rest of my existence in hopeless idiocy. The doctors thought as much a week ago, when one of them, cleverer than the rest I suppose, had the courage to perform an operation that restored me to consciousness. Sense and memory came back to me by degrees. The thick veil that had shrouded the past was rent asunder; and the first image that came to me was the image of my young wife, as I had seen her upon the night of our parting. For more than three months I had been dead. I was suddenly restored to life. I asked those about me to give me tidings of my wife. Had she sought me out?––had she followed me to Dangerfield? No! They could tell me nothing. They thought that I was delirious, and tried to soothe me with compassionate speeches, merciful falsehoods, promising me that I should see my darling. But I soon read the secret of their scared looks. I saw pity and wonder mingled in my mother’s face, and I entreated her to be merciful to me, and to tell me the truth. She had compassion upon me, and told me all she knew, which was very little. She had never heard from my wife. She had never heard of any marriage between Mary Marchmont and me. The only communication which she had received from any of her Lincolnshire relations had been a letter from my uncle Hubert, in reply to one of hers telling him of my hopeless state.

  “This was the shock that fell upon me when life and memory came back. I could not bear the imprisonment of a sick–bed. I felt that for the second time I must go out into the world to look for my darling; and in defiance of the doctors, in defiance of my poor mother, who thought that my departure from Dangerfield was a suicide, I am here. It is here that I come first to seek for my wife. I might have stopped in London to see Richard Paulette; I might sooner have gained tidings of my darling. But I came here; I came here without stopping by the way, because an uncontrollable instinct and an unreasoning impulse tells me that it is here I ought to seek her. I am here, her husband, her only true and legitimate defender; and woe be to those who stand between me and my wife!”

  He had spoken rapidly in his passion; and he stopped, exhausted by his own vehemence, and sank heavily into a chair near the lamplit table.

  Then for the first time that night Olivia Marchmont plainly saw her cousin’s face, and saw the terrible change that had transformed the handsome young soldier, since the bright August morning on which he had gone forth from Marchmont Towers. She saw the traces of a long and wearisome illness sadly visible in his waxen–hued complexion, his hollow cheeks, the faded lustre of his eyes, his dry and pallid lips. She saw all this, the woman whose one great sin had been to love this man wickedly and madly, in spite of her better self, in spite of her womanly pride; she saw the change in him that had altered him from a young Apollo to a shattered and broken invalid. And did any revulsion of feeling arise in her breast? Did any corresponding transformation in her own heart bear witness to the baseness of her love?

  No; a thousand times, no! There was no thrill of disgust, how transient soever; not so much as one passing shudder of painful surprise, one pang of womanly regret. No! In place of these, a passionate yearning arose in this woman’s haughty soul; a flood of sudden tenderness rushed across the black darkness of her mind. She fain would have flung herself upon her knees, in loving self–abasement, at the sick man’s feet. She fain would have cried aloud, amid a tempest of passionate sobs,––

  “O my love, my love! you are dearer to me a hundred times by this cruel change. It was not your bright–blue eyes and waving chestnut hair,––it was not your handsome face, your brave, soldier–like bearing that I loved. My love was not so base as that. I inflicted a cruel outrage upon myself when I thought that I was the weak fool of a handsome face. Whatever I have been, my love, at least, has been pure. My love is pure, though I am base. I will never slander that again, for I know now that it is immortal.”

  In the sudden rush of that flood–tide of love and tenderness, all these thoughts welled into Olivia Marchmont’s mind. In all her sin and desperation she had never been so true a woman as now; she had never, perhaps, been so near being a good woman. But the tender emotion was swept out of her breast the next moment by the first words of Edward Arundel.

  “Why do you not answer my question?” he said.

  She drew herself up in the erect and rigid attitude that had become almost habitual to her. Every trace of womanly feeling faded out of her face, as the sunlight disappears behind the sudden darkness of a thundercloud.

  “What question?” she asked, with icy indifference.

  “The question I have come to Lincolnshire to ask––the question I have perilled my life, perhaps, to ask,” cried the young man. “Where is my wife?”

  The widow turned upon him with a horrible smile.

  “I never heard that you were married,” she said. “Who is your wife?”

  “Mary Marchmont, the mistress of this house.”

  Olivia opened her eyes, and looked at him in half–sardonic surprise.

  “Then it was not a fable?” she said.

  “What was not a fable?”

  “The unhappy girl spoke the truth when she said that you had married her at some out–of–the–way church in Lambeth.”

  “The truth! Yes!” cried Edward Arundel. “Who should dare to say that she spoke other than the truth? Who should dare to disbelieve her?”

  Olivia Marchmont smiled again,––that same strange smile which was almost too horrible for humanity, and yet had a certain dark and gloomy grandeur of its own. Satan, the star of the morning, may have so smiled despairing defiance upon the Archangel Michael.

  “Unfortunately,” she said, “no one believed the poor child. Her story was such a very absurd one, and she could bring forward no shred of evidence in support of it.”

  “O my God!” ejaculated Edward Arundel, clasping his hands above his head in a paroxysm of rage and despair. “I see it all––I see it all! My darling has been tortured to death. Woman!” he cried, “are you possessed by a thousand fiends? Is there no one sentiment of womanly compassion left
in your breast? If there is one spark of womanhood in your nature, I appeal to that; I ask you what has happened to my wife?”

  “My wife! my wife!” The reiteration of that familiar phrase was to Olivia Marchmont like the perpetual thrust of a dagger aimed at an open wound. It struck every time upon the same tortured spot, and inflicted the same agony.

  “The placard upon the gates of this place can tell you as much as I can,” she said.

  The ghastly whiteness of the soldier’s face told her that he had seen the placard of which she spoke.

  “She has not been found, then?” he said, hoarsely.

  “No.”

  “How did she disappear?”

  “As she disappeared upon the morning on which you followed her. She wandered out of the house, this time leaving no letter, nor message, nor explanation of any kind whatever. It was in the middle of the day that she went out; and for some time her absence caused no alarm. But, after some hours, she was waited for and watched for very anxiously. Then a search was made.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever she had at any time been in the habit of walking,––in the park; in the wood; along the narrow path by the water; at Pollard’s farm; at Hester’s house at Kemberling,––in every place where it might be reasonably imagined there was the slightest chance of finding her.”

  “And all this was without result?”

  “It was.”

  “Why did she leave this place? God help you, Olivia Marchmont, if it was your cruelty that drove her away!”

  The widow took no notice of the threat implied in these words. Was there anything upon earth that she feared now? No––nothing. Had she not endured the worst long ago, in Edward Arundel’s contempt? She had no fear of a battle with this man; or with any other creature in the world; or with the whole world arrayed and banded together against her, if need were. Amongst all the torments of those black depths to which her soul had gone down, there was no such thing as fear. That cowardly baseness is for the happy and prosperous, who have something to lose. This woman was by nature dauntless and resolute as the hero of some classic story; but in her despair she had the desperate and reckless courage of a starving wolf. The hand of death was upon her; what could it matter how she died?

  “I am very grateful to you, Edward Arundel,” she said, bitterly, “for the good opinion you have always had of me. The blood of the Dangerfield Arundels must have had some drop of poison intermingled with it, I should think, before it could produce so vile a creature as myself; and yet I have heard people say that my mother was a good woman.”

  The young man writhed impatiently beneath the torture of his cousin’s deliberate speech. Was there to be no end to this unendurable delay? Even now,––now that he was in this house, face to face with the woman he had come to question––it seemed as if he could not get tidings of his wife.

  So, often in his dreams, he had headed a besieging–party against the Affghans, with the scaling–ladders reared against the wall; he had seen the dark faces grinning down upon him––all savage glaring eyes and fierce glistening teeth––and had heard the voices of his men urging him on to the encounter, but had felt himself paralysed and helpless, with his sabre weak as a withered reed in his nerveless hand.

  “For God’s sake, let there be no quarrelling with phrases between you and me, Olivia!” he cried. “If you or any other living being have injured my wife, the reckoning between us shall be no light one. But there will be time enough to talk of that by–and–by. I stand before you, newly risen from a grave in which I have lain for more than three months, as dead to the world, and to every creature I have ever loved or hated, as if the Funeral Service had been read over my coffin. I come to demand from you an account of what has happened during that interval. If you palter or prevaricate with me, I shall know that it is because you fear to tell me the truth.”

  “Fear!”

  “Yes; you have good reason to fear, if you have wronged Mary Arundel. Why did she leave this house?”

  “Because she was not happy in it, I suppose. She chose to shut herself up in her own room, and to refuse to be governed, or advised, or consoled. I tried to do my duty to her; yes,” cried Olivia Marchmont, suddenly raising her voice, as if she had been vehemently contradicted;––”yes, I did try to do my duty to her. I urged her to listen to reason; I begged her to abandon her foolish falsehood about a marriage with you in London.”

  “You disbelieved in that marriage?”

  “I did,” answered Olivia.

  “You lie!” cried Edward Arundel. “You knew the poor child had spoken the truth. You knew her––you knew me––well enough to know that I should not have detained her away from her home an hour, except to make her my wife––except to give myself the strongest right to love and defend her.”

  “I knew nothing of the kind, Captain Arundel; you and Mary Marchmont had taken good care to keep your secrets from me. I knew nothing of your plots, your intentions. I should have considered that one of the Dangerfield Arundels would have thought his honour sullied by such an act as a stolen marriage with an heiress, considerably under age, and nominally in the guardianship of her stepmother. I did, therefore, disbelieve the story Mary Marchmont told me. Another person, much more experienced than I, also disbelieved the unhappy girl’s account of her absence.”

  “Another person! What other person?”

  “Mr. Marchmont.”

  “Mr. Marchmont!”

  “Yes; Paul Marchmont,––my husband’s first–cousin.”

  A sudden cry of rage and grief broke from Edward Arundel’s lips.

  “O my God!” he exclaimed, “there was some foundation for the warning in John Marchmont’s letter, after all. And I laughed at him; I laughed at my poor friend’s fears.”

  The widow looked at her kinsman in mute wonder.

  “Has Paul Marchmont been in this house?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When was he here?”

  “He has been here often; he comes here constantly. He has been living at Kemberling for the last three months.”

  “Why?”

  “For his own pleasure, I suppose,” Olivia answered haughtily. “It is no business of mine to pry into Mr. Marchmont’s motives.”

  Edward Arundel ground his teeth in an access of ungovernable passion. It was not against Olivia, but against himself this time that he was enraged. He hated himself for the arrogant folly, the obstinate presumption, with which he had ridiculed and slighted John Marchmont’s vague fears of his kinsman Paul.

  “So this man has been here,––is here constantly,” he muttered. “Of course, it is only natural that he should hang about the place. And you and he are stanch allies, I suppose?” he added, turning upon Olivia.

  “Stanch allies! Why?”

  “Because you both hate my wife.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You both hate her. You, out of a base envy of her wealth; because of her superior rights, which made you a secondary person in this house, perhaps,––there is nothing else for which you could hate her. Paul Marchmont, because she stands between him and a fortune. Heaven help her! Heaven help my poor, gentle, guileless darling! Surely Heaven must have had some pity upon her when her husband was not by!”

  The young man dashed the blinding tears from his eyes. They were the first that he had shed since he had risen from that which many people had thought his dying–bed, to search for his wife.

  But this was no time for tears or lamentations. Stern determination took the place of tender pity and sorrowful love. It was a time for resolution and promptitude.

  “Olivia Marchmont,” he said, “there has been some foul play in this business. My wife has been missing a month; yet when I asked my mother what had happened at this house during my illness, she could tell me nothing. Why did you not write to tell her of Mary’s flight?”

  “Because Mrs. Arundel has never done me the honour to cultivate any intimacy between us. My father w
rites to his sister–in–law sometimes; I scarcely ever write to my aunt. On the other hand, your mother had never seen Mary Marchmont, and could not be expected to take any great interest in her proceedings. There was, therefore, no reason for my writing a special letter to announce the trouble that had befallen me.”

  “You might have written to my mother about my marriage. You might have applied to her for confirmation of the story which you disbelieved.”

  Olivia Marchmont smiled.

  “Should I have received that confirmation?” she said. “No. I saw your mother’s letters to my father. There was no mention in those letters of any marriage; no mention whatever of Mary Marchmont. This in itself was enough to confirm my disbelief. Was it reasonable to imagine that you would have married, and yet have left your mother in total ignorance of the fact?”

  “O God, help me!” cried Edward Arundel, wringing his hands. “It seems as if my own folly, my own vile procrastination, have brought this trouble upon my wife. Olivia Marchmont, have pity upon me. If you hate this girl, your malice must surely have been satisfied by this time. She has suffered enough. Pity me, and help me; if you have any human feeling in your breast. She left this house because her life here had grown unendurable; because she saw herself doubted, disbelieved, widowed in the first month of her marriage, utterly desolate and friendless. Another woman might have borne up against all this misery. Another woman would have known how to assert herself, and to defend herself, even in the midst of her sorrow and desolation. But my poor darling is a child; a baby in ignorance of the world. How should she protect herself against her enemies? Her only instinct was to run away from her persecutors,––to hide herself from those whose pretended doubts flung the horror of dishonour upon her. I can understand all now; I can understand. Olivia Marchmont, this man Paul has a strong reason for being a villain. The motives that have induced you to do wrong must be very small in comparison to his. He plays an infamous game, I believe; but he plays for a high stake.”

  A high stake! Had not she perilled her soul upon the casting of this die? Had she not flung down her eternal happiness in that fatal game of hazard?