Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Insult you? Now, Livy dear, that’s too bad, upon my word,” remonstrated the young man. “I come and tell you that as good a man as ever breathed is over head and ears in love with you, and that you may be mistress of one of the finest estates in Lincolnshire if you please, and you turn round upon me like no end of furies.”

  “Because I hate to hear you talk nonsense,” answered Olivia, her bosom still heaving with that first outburst of emotion, but her voice suppressed and cold. “Am I so beautiful, or so admired or beloved, that a man who has not seen me half a dozen times should fall in love with me? Do those who know me estimate me so much, or prize me so highly, that a stranger should think of me? You do insult me, Edward Arundel, when you talk as you have talked to–night.”

  She looked out towards the low yellow light in the sky with a black gloom upon her face, which no reflected glimmer of the sinking sun could illumine; a settled darkness, near akin to the utter blackness of despair.

  “But, good heavens, Olivia, what do you mean?” cried the young man. “I tell you something that I think a good joke, and you go and make a tragedy out of it. If I’d told Letitia that a rich widower had fallen in love with her, she’d think it the finest fun in the world.”

  “I’m not your sister Letitia.”

  “No; but I wish you’d half as good a temper as she has, Livy. However, never mind; I’ll say no more. If poor old Marchmont has fallen in love with you, that’s his look–out. Poor dear old boy, he’s let out the secret of his weakness half a dozen ways within these last few days. It’s Miss Arundel this, and Miss Arundel the other; so unselfish, so accomplished, so ladylike, so good! That’s the way he goes on, poor simple old dear; without having the remotest notion that he’s making a confounded fool of himself.”

  Olivia tossed the rumpled hair from her forehead with an impatient gesture of her hand.

  “Why should this Mr. Marchmont think all this of me?” she said, “when––” she stopped abruptly.

  “When––what, Livy?”

  “When other people don’t think it.”

  “How do you know what other people think? You haven’t asked them, I suppose?”

  The young soldier treated his cousin in very much the same free–and–easy manner which he displayed towards his sister Letitia. It would have been almost difficult for him to recognise any degree in his relationship to the two girls. He loved Letitia better than Olivia; but his affection for both was of exactly the same character.

  Hubert Arundel came into the garden, wearied out, like his daughter, while the two cousins were walking under the shadow of the neglected hazels. He declared his willingness to accept the invitation to Marchmont Towers, and promised to answer John’s ceremonious note the next day.

  “Cookson, from Kemberling, will be there, I suppose,” he said, alluding to a brother parson, “and the usual set? Well, I’ll come, Ned, if you wish it. You’d like to go, Olivia?”

  “If you like, papa.”

  There was a duty to be performed now––the duty of placid obedience to her father; and Miss Arundel’s manner changed from angry impatience to grave respect. She owed no special duty, be it remembered, to her cousin. She had no line or rule by which to measure her conduct to him.

  She stood at the gate nearly an hour later, and watched the young man ride away in the dim moonlight. If every separate tramp of his horse’s hoofs had struck upon her heart, it could scarcely have given her more pain than she felt as the sound of those slow footfalls died away in the distance.

  “O my God,” she cried, “is this madness to undo all that I have done? Is this folly to be the climax of my dismal life? Am I to die for the love of a frivolous, fair–haired boy, who laughs in my face when he tells me that his friend has pleased to ‘take a fancy to me’?”

  She walked away towards the house; then stopping, with a sudden shiver, she turned, and went back to the hazel–alley she had paced with Edward Arundel.

  “Oh, my narrow life!” she muttered between her set teeth; “my narrow life! It is that which has made me the slave of this madness. I love him because he is the brightest and fairest thing I have ever seen. I love him because he brings me all I have ever known of a more beautiful world than that I live in. Bah! why do I reason with myself?” she cried, with a sudden change of manner. “I love him because I am mad.”

  She paced up and down the hazel–shaded pathway till the moonlight grew broad and full, and every ivy–grown gable of the Rectory stood sharply out against the vivid purple of the sky. She paced up and down, trying to trample the folly within her under her feet as she went; a fierce, passionate, impulsive woman, fighting against her mad love for a bright–faced boy.

  “Two years older––only two years!” she said; “but he spoke of the difference between us as if it had been half a century. And then I am so clever, that I seem older than I am; and he is afraid of me! Is it for this that I have sat night after night in my father’s study, poring over the books that were too difficult for him? What have I made of myself in my pride of intellect? What reward have I won for my patience?”

  Olivia Arundel looked back at her long life of duty––a dull, dead level, unbroken by one of those monuments which mark the desert of the past; a desolate flat, unlovely as the marshes between the low Rectory wall and the shimmering grey sea.

  CHAPTER VIII. “MY LIFE IS COLD, AND DARK, AND DREARY.”

  Mr. Richard Paulette, of that eminent legal firm, Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson, coming to Marchmont Towers on business, was surprised to behold the quiet ease with which the sometime copying–clerk received the punctilious country gentry who came to sit at his board and do him honour.

  Of all the legal fairy–tales, of all the parchment–recorded romances, of all the poetry run into affidavits, in which the solicitor had ever been concerned, this story seemed the strangest. Not so very strange in itself, for such romances are not uncommon in the history of a lawyer’s experience; but strange by reason of the tranquil manner in which John Marchmont accepted his new position, and did the honours of his house to his late employer.

  “Ah, Paulette,” Edward Arundel said, clapping the solicitor on the back, “I don’t suppose you believed me when I told you that my friend here was heir–presumptive to a handsome fortune.”

  The dinner–party at the Towers was conducted with that stately grandeur peculiar to such solemnities. There was the usual round of country–talk and parish–talk; the hunting squires leading the former section of the discourse, the rectors and rectors’ wives supporting the latter part of the conversation. You heard on one side that Martha Harris’ husband had left off drinking, and attended church morning and evening; and on the other that the old grey fox that had been hunted nine seasons between Crackbin Bottom and Hollowcraft Gorse had perished ignobly in the poultry–yard of a recusant farmer. While your left ear became conscious of the fact that little Billy Smithers had fallen into a copper of scalding water, your right received the dismal tidings that all the young partridges had been drowned by the rains after St. Swithin, and that there were hardly any of this year’s birds, sir, and it would be a very blue look–out for next season.

  Mary Marchmont had listened to gayer talk in Oakley Street than any that was to be heard that night in her father’s drawing–rooms, except indeed when Edward Arundel left off flirting with some pretty girls in blue, and hovered near her side for a little while, quizzing the company. Heaven knows the young soldier’s jokes were commonplace enough; but Mary admired him as the most brilliant and accomplished of wits.

  “How do you like my cousin, Polly?” he asked at last.

  “Your cousin, Miss Arundel?”

  “Yes.”

  “She is very handsome.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” the young man answered carelessly. “Everybody says that Livy’s handsome; but it’s rather a cold style of beauty, isn’t it? A little too much of the Pallas Athenë about it for my taste. I like those girls in blue, with the crinkly aubur
n hair,––there’s a touch of red in it in the light,––and the dimples. You’ve a dimple, Polly, when you smile.”

  Miss Marchmont blushed as she received this information, and her brown eyes wandered away, looking very earnestly at the pretty girls in blue. She looked at them with a strange interest, eager to discover what it was that Edward admired.

  “But you haven’t answered my question, Polly,” said Mr. Arundel. “I am afraid you have been drinking too much wine, Miss Marchmont, and muddling that sober little head of yours with the fumes of your papa’s tawny port. I asked you how you liked Olivia.”

  Mary blushed again.

  “I don’t know Miss Arundel well enough to like her––yet,” she answered timidly.

  “But shall you like her when you’ve known her longer? Don’t be jesuitical, Polly. Likings and dislikings are instantaneous and instinctive. I liked you before I’d eaten half a dozen mouthfuls of the roll you buttered for me at that breakfast in Oakley Street, Polly. You don’t like my cousin Olivia, miss; I can see that very plainly. You’re jealous of her.”

  “Jealous of her!”

  The bright colour faded out of Mary Marchmont’s face, and left her ashy pale.

  “Do you like her, then?” she asked.

  But Mr. Arundel was not such a coxcomb as to catch at the secret so naïvely betrayed in that breathless question.

  “No, Polly,” he said, laughing; “she’s my cousin, you know, and I’ve known her all my life; and cousins are like sisters. One likes to tease and aggravate them, and all that; but one doesn’t fall in love with them. But I think I could mention somebody who thinks a great deal of Olivia.”

  “Who?”

  “Your papa.”

  Mary looked at the young soldier in utter bewilderment.

  “Papa!” she echoed.

  “Yes, Polly. How would you like a stepmamma? How would you like your papa to marry again?”

  Mary Marchmont started to her feet, as if she would have gone to her father in the midst of all those spectators. John was standing near Olivia and her father, talking to them, and playing nervously with his slender watch–chain when he addressed the young lady.

  “My papa––marry again!” gasped Mary. “How dare you say such a thing, Mr. Arundel?”

  Her childish devotion to her father arose in all its force; a flood of passionate emotion that overwhelmed her sensitive nature. Marry again! marry a woman who would separate him from his only child! Could he ever dream for one brief moment of such a horrible cruelty?

  She looked at Olivia’s sternly handsome face, and trembled. She could almost picture that very woman standing between her and her father, and putting her away from him. Her indignation quickly melted into grief. Indignation, however intense, was always short–lived in that gentle nature.

  “Oh, Mr Arundel!” she said, piteously appealing to the young man, “papa would never, never, never marry again,––would he?”

  “Not if it was to grieve you, Polly, I dare say,” Edward answered soothingly.

  He had been dumbfounded by Mary’s passionate sorrow. He had expected that she would have been rather pleased, than otherwise, at the idea of a young stepmother,––a companion in those vast lonely rooms, an instructress and a friend as she grew to womanhood.

  “I was only talking nonsense, Polly darling,” he said. “You mustn’t make yourself unhappy about any absurd fancies of mine. I think your papa admires my cousin Olivia: and I thought, perhaps, you’d be glad to have a stepmother.”

  “Glad to have any one who’d take papa’s love away from me?” Mary said plaintively. “Oh, Mr. Arundel, how could you think so?”

  In all their familiarity the little girl had never learned to call her father’s friend by his Christian name, though he had often told her to do so. She trembled to pronounce that simple Saxon name, which was so beautiful and wonderful because it was his: but when she read a very stupid novel, in which the hero was a namesake of Mr. Arundel’s, the vapid pages seemed to be phosphorescent with light wherever the name appeared upon them.

  I scarcely know why John Marchmont lingered by Miss Arundel’s chair. He had heard her praises from every one. She was a paragon of goodness, an uncanonised saint, for ever sacrificing herself for the benefit of others. Perhaps he was thinking that such a woman as this would be the best friend he could win for his little girl. He turned from the county matrons, the tender, kindly, motherly creatures, who would have been ready to take little Mary to the loving shelter of their arms, and looked to Olivia Arundel––this cold, perfect benefactress of the poor––for help in his difficulty.

  “She, who is so good to all her father’s parishioners, could not refuse to be kind to my poor Mary?” he thought.

  But how was he to win this woman’s friendship for his darling? He asked himself this question even in the midst of the frivolous people about him, and with the buzz of their conversation in his ears. He was perpetually tormenting himself about his little girl’s future, which seemed more dimly perplexing now than it had ever appeared in Oakley Street, when the Lincolnshire property was a far–away dream, perhaps never to be realised. He felt that his brief lease of life was running out; he felt as if he and Mary had been standing upon a narrow tract of yellow sand; very bright, very pleasant under the sunshine; but with the slow–coming tide rising like a wall about them, and creeping stealthily onward to overwhelm them.

  Mary might gather bright–coloured shells and wet seaweed in her childish ignorance; but he, who knew that the flood was coming, could but grow sick at heart with the dull horror of that hastening doom. If the black waters had been doomed to close over them both, the father might have been content to go down under the sullen waves, with his daughter clasped to his breast. But it was not to be so. He was to sink in that unknown stream while she was left upon the tempest–tossed surface, to be beaten hither and thither, feebly battling with the stormy billows.

  Could John Marchmont be a Christian, and yet feel this horrible dread of the death which must separate him from his daughter? I fear this frail, consumptive widower loved his child with an intensity of affection that is scarcely reconcilable with Christianity. Such great passions as these must be put away before the cross can be taken up, and the troublesome path followed. In all love and kindness towards his fellow–creatures, in all patient endurance of the pains and troubles that befel himself, it would have been difficult to find a more single–hearted follower of Gospel–teaching than John Marchmont; but in this affection for his motherless child he was a very Pagan. He set up an idol for himself, and bowed down before it. Doubtful and fearful of the future, he looked hopelessly forward. He could not trust his orphan child into the hands of God; and drop away himself into the fathomless darkness, serene in the belief that she would be cared for and protected. No; he could not trust. He could be faithful for himself; simple and confiding as a child; but not for her. He saw the gloomy rocks louring black in the distance; the pitiless waves beating far away yonder, impatient to devour the frail boat that was so soon to be left alone upon the waters. In the thick darkness of the future he could see no ray of light, except one,––a new hope that had lately risen in his mind; the hope of winning some noble and perfect woman to be the future friend of his daughter.

  The days were past in which, in his simplicity, he had looked to Edward Arundel as the future shelter of his child. The generous boy had grown into a stylish young man, a soldier, whose duty lay far away from Marchmont Towers. No; it was to a good woman’s guardianship the father must leave his child.

  Thus the very intensity of his love was the one motive which led John Marchmont to contemplate the step that Mary thought such a cruel and bitter wrong to her.

  * * * * *

  It was not till long after the dinner–party at Marchmont Towers that these ideas resolved themselves into any positive form, and that John began to think that for his daughter’s sake he might be led to contemplate a second marriage. Edward Arundel had spoken the tr
uth when he told his cousin that John Marchmont had repeatedly mentioned her name; but the careless and impulsive young man had been utterly unable to fathom the feeling lurking in his friend’s mind. It was not Olivia Arundel’s handsome face which had won John’s admiration; it was the constant reiteration of her praises upon every side which had led him to believe that this woman, of all others, was the one whom he would do well to win for his child’s friend and guardian in the dark days that were to come.

  The knowledge that Olivia’s intellect was of no common order, together with the somewhat imperious dignity of her manner, strengthened this belief in John Marchmont’s mind. It was not a good woman only whom he must seek in the friend he needed for his child; it was a woman powerful enough to shield her in the lonely path she would have to tread; a woman strong enough to help her, perhaps, by–and–by to do battle with Paul Marchmont.

  So, in the blind paganism of his love, John refused to trust his child into the hands of Providence, and chose for himself a friend and guardian who should shelter his darling. He made his choice with so much deliberation, and after such long nights and days of earnest thought, that he may be forgiven if he believed he had chosen wisely.

  Thus it was that in the dark November days, while Edward and Mary played chess by the wide fireplace in the western drawing–room, or ball in the newly–erected tennis–court, John Marchmont sat in his study examining his papers, and calculating the amount of money at his own disposal, in serious contemplation of a second marriage.

  Did he love Olivia Arundel? No. He admired her and respected her, and he firmly believed her to be the most perfect of women. No impulse of affection had prompted the step he contemplated taking. He had loved his first wife truly and tenderly; but he had never suffered very acutely from any of those torturing emotions which form the several stages of the great tragedy called Love.

  But had he ever thought of the likelihood of his deliberate offer being rejected by the young lady who had been the object of such careful consideration? Yes; he had thought of this, and was prepared to abide the issue. He should, at least, have tried his uttermost to secure a friend for his darling.