Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Mrs. Weston cast one rapid, half–despairing, half–appealing glance at her brother, and in the next moment recovered herself, by an effort only such as great women, or wicked women, are capable of.

  “Oh, you men!” she cried, in her liveliest voice; “oh, you men! What big silly babies, what nervous creatures you are! Come, George, I won’t have you giving way to this foolish nonsense, just because an extra glass or so of Mrs. Marchmont’s very fine old port has happened to disagree with you. You must not think we are a drunkard, Mr. Arundel,” added the lady, turning playfully to Edward, and patting her husband’s clumsy shoulder as she spoke; “we are only a poor village surgeon, with a limited income, and a very weak head, and quite unaccustomed to old light port. Come, Mr. George Weston, walk out into the open air, sir, and let us see if the March wind will bring you back your senses.”

  And without another word Lavinia Weston hustled her husband, who walked like a man in a dream, out of the painting–room, and closed the door behind her.

  Paul Marchmont laughed as the door shut upon his brother–in–law.

  “Poor George!” he said, carelessly; “I thought he helped himself to the port a little too liberally. He never could stand a glass of wine; and he’s the most stupid creature when he is drunk.”

  Excellent as all this by–play was, Edward Arundel was not deceived by it.

  “The man was not drunk,” he thought; “he was frightened. What could have happened to throw him into that state? What mystery are these people hiding amongst themselves; and what should he have to do with it?”

  “Good evening, Captain Arundel,” Paul Marchmont said. “I congratulate you on the change in your appearance since you were last in this place. You seem to have quite recovered the effects of that terrible railway accident.”

  Edward Arundel drew himself up stiffly as the artist spoke to him.

  “We cannot meet except as enemies, Mr. Marchmont,” he said. “My cousin has no doubt told you what I said of you when I discovered the lying paragraph which you caused to be shown to my wife.”

  “I only did what any one else would have done under the circumstances,” Paul Marchmont answered quietly. “I was deceived by a penny–a–liner’s false report. How should I know the effect that report would have upon my unhappy cousin?”

  “I cannot discuss this matter with you,” cried Edward Arundel, his voice tremulous with passion; “I am almost mad when I think of it. I am not safe; I dare not trust myself. I look upon you as the deliberate assassin of a helpless girl; but so skilful an assassin, that nothing less than the vengeance of God can touch you. I cry aloud to Him night and day, in the hope that He will hear me and avenge my wife’s death. I cannot look to any earthly law for help: but I trust in God; I put my trust in God.”

  There are very few positive and consistent atheists in this world. Mr. Paul Marchmont was a philosopher of the infidel school, a student of Voltaire and the brotherhood of the Encyclopedia, and a believer in those liberal days before the Reign of Terror, when Frenchmen, in coffee–houses, discussed the Supreme under the soubriquet of Mons. l’Etre; but he grew a little paler as Edward Arundel, with kindling eyes and uplifted hand, declared his faith in a Divine Avenger.

  The sceptical artist may have thought,

  “What if there should be some reality in the creed so many weak fools confide in? What if there is a God who cannot abide iniquity?”

  “I came here to look for you, Olivia,” Edward Arundel said presently. “I want to ask you a question. Will you come into the wood with me?”

  “Yes, if you wish it,” Mrs. Marchmont answered quietly.

  The cousins went out of the painting–room together, leaving Paul Marchmont alone. They walked on for a few yards in silence.

  “What is the question you came here to ask me?” Olivia asked abruptly.

  “The Kemberling people have raised a report about you which I should fancy would be scarcely agreeable to yourself,” answered Edward. “You would hardly wish to benefit by Mary’s death, would you, Olivia?”

  He looked at her searchingly as he spoke. Her face was at all times so expressive of hidden cares, of cruel mental tortures, that there was little room in her countenance for any new emotion. Her cousin looked in vain for any change in it now.

  “Benefit by her death!” she exclaimed. “How should I benefit by her death?”

  “By marrying the man who inherits this estate. They say you are going to marry Paul Marchmont.”

  Olivia looked at him with an expression of surprise.

  “Do they say that of me?” she asked. “Do people say that?”

  “They do. Is it true, Olivia?”

  The widow turned upon him almost fiercely.

  “What does it matter to you whether it is true or not? What do you care whom I marry, or what becomes of me?”

  “I care this much,” Edward Arundel answered, “that I would not have your reputation lied away by the gossips of Kemberling. I should despise you if you married this man. But if you do not mean to marry him, you have no right to encourage his visits; you are trifling with your own good name. You should leave this place, and by that means give the lie to any false reports that have arisen about you.”

  “Leave this place!” cried Olivia Marchmont, with a bitter laugh. “Leave this place! O my God, if I could; if I could go away and bury myself somewhere at the other end of the world, and forget,––and forget!” She said this as if to herself; as if it had been a cry of despair wrung from her in despite of herself; then, turning to Edward Arundel, she added, in a quieter voice, “I can never leave this place till I leave it in my coffin. I am a prisoner here for life.”

  She turned from him, and walked slowly away, with her face towards the dying sunlight in the low western sky.

  CHAPTER XII. EDWARD’S VISITORS.

  Perhaps no greater sacrifice had ever been made by an English gentleman than that which Edward Arundel willingly offered up as an atonement for his broken trust, as a tribute to his lost wife. Brave, ardent, generous, and sanguine, this young soldier saw before him a brilliant career in the profession which he loved. He saw glory and distinction beckoning to him from afar, and turned his back upon those shining sirens. He gave up all, in the vague hope of, sooner or later, avenging Mary’s wrongs upon Paul Marchmont.

  He made no boast, even to himself, of that which he had done. Again and again memory brought back to him the day upon which he breakfasted in Oakley Street, and walked across Waterloo Bridge with the Drury Lane supernumerary. Every word that John Marchmont had spoken; every look of the meek and trusting eyes, the pale and thoughtful face; every pressure of the thin hand which had grasped his in grateful affection, in friendly confidence,––came back to Edward Arundel after an interval of nearly ten years, and brought with it a bitter sense of self–reproach.

  “He trusted his daughter to me,” the young man thought. “Those last words in the poor fellow’s letter are always in my mind: ‘The only bequest which I can leave to the only friend I have is the legacy of a child’s helplessness.’ And I have slighted his solemn warning: and I have been false to my trust.”

  In his scrupulous sense of honour, the soldier reproached himself as bitterly for that imprudence, out of which so much evil had arisen, as another man might have done after a wilful betrayal of his trust. He could not forgive himself. He was for ever and ever repeating in his own mind that one brief phase which is the universal chorus of erring men’s regret: “If I had acted differently, if I had done otherwise, this or that would not have come to pass.” We are perpetually wandering amid the hopeless deviations of a maze, finding pitfalls and precipices, quicksands and morasses, at every turn in the painful way; and we look back at the end of our journey to discover a straight and pleasant roadway by which, had we been wise enough to choose it, we might have travelled safely and comfortably to our destination.

  But Wisdom waits for us at the goal instead of accompanying us upon our journey. She is a divinity who
m we meet very late in life; when we are too near the end of our troublesome march to derive much profit from her counsels. We can only retail them to our juniors, who, not getting them from the fountain–head, have very small appreciation of their value.

  The young captain of East Indian cavalry suffered very cruelly from the sacrifice which he had made. Day after day, day after day, the slow, dreary, changeless, eventless, and unbroken life dragged itself out; and nothing happened to bring him any nearer to the purpose of this monotonous existence; no promise of even ultimate success rewarded his heroic self–devotion. Afar, he heard of the rush and clamour of war, of dangers and terror, of conquest and glory. His own regiment was in the thick of the strife, his brothers in arms were doing wonders. Every mail brought some new record of triumph and glory.

  The soldier’s heart sickened as he read the story of each new encounter; his heart sickened with that terrible yearning,––that yearning which seems physically palpable in its perpetual pain; the yearning with which a child at a hard school, lying broad awake in the long, gloomy, rush–lit bedchamber in the dead of the silent night, remembers the soft resting–place of his mother’s bosom; the yearning with which a faithful husband far away from home sighs for the presence of the wife he loves. Even with such a heart–sickness as this Edward Arundel pined to be amongst the familiar faces yonder in the East,––to hear the triumphant yell of his men as they swarmed after him through the breach in an Affghan wall,––to see the dark heathens blanch under the terror of Christian swords.

  He read the records of the war again and again, again and again, till every scene arose before him,––a picture, flaming and lurid, grandly beautiful, horribly sublime. The very words of those newspaper reports seemed to blaze upon the paper on which they were written, so palpable were the images which they evoked in the soldier’s mind. He was frantic in his eager impatience for the arrival of every mail, for the coming of every new record of that Indian warfare. He was like a devourer of romances, who reads a thrilling story link by link, and who is impatient for every new chapter of the fiction. His dreams were of nothing but battle and victory, danger, triumph, and death; and he often woke in the morning exhausted by the excitement of those visionary struggles, those phantom terrors.

  His sabre hung over the chimney–piece in his simple bedchamber. He took it down sometimes, and drew it from the sheath. He could have almost wept aloud over that idle sword. He raised his arm, and the weapon vibrated with a whirring noise as he swept the glittering steel in a wide circle through the empty air. An infidel’s head should have been swept from his vile carcass in that rapid circle of the keen–edged blade. The soldier’s arm was as strong as ever, his wrist as supple, his muscular force unwasted by mental suffering. Thank Heaven for that! But after that brief thanksgiving his arm dropped inertly, and the idle sword fell out of his relaxing grasp.

  “I seem a craven to myself,” he cried; “I have no right to be here––I have no right to be here while those other fellows are fighting for their lives out yonder. O God, have mercy upon me! My brain gets dazed sometimes; and I begin to wonder whether I am most bound to remain here and watch Paul Marchmont, or to go yonder and fight for my country and my Queen.”

  There were many phases in this mental fever. At one time the young man was seized with a savage jealousy of the officer who had succeeded to his captaincy. He watched this man’s name, and every record of his movements, and was constantly taking objection to his conduct. He was grudgingly envious of this particular officer’s triumphs, however small. He could not feel generously towards this happy successor, in the bitterness of his own enforced idleness.

  “What opportunities this man has!” he thought; “I never had such chances.”

  It is almost impossible for me to faithfully describe the tortures which this monotonous existence inflicted upon the impetuous young man. It is the speciality of a soldier’s career that it unfits most men for any other life. They cannot throw off the old habitudes. They cannot turn from the noisy stir of war to the tame quiet of every–day life; and even when they fancy themselves wearied and worn out, and willingly retire from service, their souls are stirred by every sound of the distant contest, as the war–steed is aroused by the blast of a trumpet. But Edward Arundel’s career had been cut suddenly short at the very hour in which it was brightest with the promise of future glory. It was as if a torrent rushing madly down a mountain–side had been dammed up, and its waters bidden to stagnate upon a level plain. The rebellious waters boiled and foamed in a sullen fury. The soldier could not submit himself contentedly to his fate. He might strip off his uniform, and accept sordid coin as the price of the epaulettes he had won so dearly; but he was at heart a soldier still. When he received the sum which had been raised amongst his juniors as the price of his captaincy, it seemed to him almost as if he had sold his brother’s blood.

  It was summer–time now. Ten months had elapsed since his marriage with Mary Marchmont, and no new light had been thrown upon the disappearance of his young wife. No one could feel a moment’s doubt as to her fate. She had perished in that lonely river which flowed behind Marchmont Towers, and far away down to the sea.

  The artist had kept his word, and had as yet taken no step towards entering into possession of the estate which he inherited by his cousin’s death. But Mr. Paul Marchmont spent a great deal of time at the Towers, and a great deal more time in the painting–room by the river–side, sometimes accompanied by his sister, sometimes alone.

  The Kemberling gossips had grown by no means less talkative upon the subject of Olivia and the new owner of Marchmont Towers. On the contrary, the voices that discussed Mrs. Marchmont’s conduct were a great deal more numerous than heretofore; in other words, John Marchmont’s widow was “talked about.” Everything is said in this phrase. It was scarcely that people said bad things of her; it was rather that they talked more about her than any woman can suffer to be talked of with safety to her fair fame. They began by saying that she was going to marry Paul Marchmont; they went on to wonder whether she was going to marry him; then they wondered why she didn’t marry him. From this they changed the venue, and began to wonder whether Paul Marchmont meant to marry her,––there was an essential difference in this new wonderment,––and next, why Paul Marchmont didn’t marry her. And by this time Olivia’s reputation was overshadowed by a terrible cloud, which had arisen no bigger than a man’s hand, in the first conjecturings of a few ignorant villagers.

  People made it their business first to wonder about Mrs. Marchmont, and then to set up their own theories about her; to which theories they clung with a stupid persistence, forgetting, as people generally do forget, that there might be some hidden clue, some secret key, to the widow’s conduct, for want of which the cleverest reasoning respecting her was only so much groping in the dark.

  Edward Arundel heard of the cloud which shadowed his cousin’s name. Her father heard of it, and went to remonstrate with her, imploring her to come to him at Swampington, and to leave Marchmont Towers to the new lord of the mansion. But she only answered him with gloomy, obstinate reiteration, and almost in the same terms as she had answered Edward Arundel; declaring that she would stay at the Towers till her death; that she would never leave the place till she was carried thence in her coffin.

  Hubert Arundel, always afraid of his daughter, was more than ever afraid of her now; and he was as powerless to contend against her sullen determination as he would have been to float up the stream of a rushing river.

  So Olivia was talked about. She had scared away all visitors, after the ball at the Towers, by the strangeness of her manner and the settled gloom in her face; and she lived unvisited and alone in the gaunt stony mansion; and people said that Paul Marchmont was almost perpetually with her, and that she went to meet him in the painting–room by the river.

  Edward Arundel sickened of his wearisome life, and no one helped him to endure his sufferings. His mother wrote to him imploring him to resign him
self to the loss of his young wife, to return to Dangerfield, to begin a new existence, and to blot out the memory of the past.

  “You have done all that the most devoted affection could prompt you to do,” Mrs. Arundel wrote. “Come back to me, my dearest boy. I gave you up to the service of your country because it was my duty to resign you then. But I cannot afford to lose you now; I cannot bear to see you sacrificing yourself to a chimera. Return to me; and let me see you make a new and happier choice. Let me see my son the father of little children who will gather round my knees when I grow old and feeble.”

  “A new and happier choice!” Edward Arundel repeated the words with a melancholy bitterness. “No, my poor lost girl; no, my blighted wife; I will not be false to you. The smiles of happy women can have no sunlight for me while I cherish the memory of the sad eyes that watched me when I drove away from Milldale, the sweet sorrowful face that I was never to look upon again.”

  The dull empty days succeeded each other, and did resemble each other, with a wearisome similitude that well–nigh exhausted the patience of the impetuous young man. His fiery nature chafed against this miserable delay. It was so hard to have to wait for his vengeance. Sometimes he could scarcely refrain from planting himself somewhere in Paul Marchmont’s way, with the idea of a hand–to–hand struggle in which either he or his enemy must perish.

  Once he wrote the artist a desperate letter, denouncing him as an arch–plotter and villain; calling upon him, if his evil nature was redeemed by one spark of manliness, to fight as men had been in the habit of fighting only a few years before, with a hundred times less reason than these two men had for their quarrel.

  “I have called you a villain and traitor; in India we fellows would kill each other for smaller words than those,” wrote the soldier. “But I have no wish to take any advantage of my military experience. I may be a better shot than you. Let us have only one pistol, and draw lots for it. Let us fire at each other across a dinner–table. Let us do anything; so that we bring this miserable business to an end.”