Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  It would have been scarcely natural for Mary Marchmont, reserved and self–contained though she had been ever since her father’s death, to have had no yearning for more genial companionship than that of her stepmother. The girl who had kept watch in her room, by the doctor’s suggestion, was the one friend and confidante whom the young mistress of Marchmont Towers fain would have chosen. But here Olivia interposed, sternly forbidding any intimacy between the two girls. Hester Pollard was the daughter of a small tenant–farmer, and no fit associate for Mrs. Marchmont’s stepdaughter. Olivia thought that this taste for obscure company was the fruit of Mary’s early training––the taint left by those bitter, debasing days of poverty, in which John Marchmont and his daughter had lived in some wretched Lambeth lodging.

  “But Hester Pollard is fond of me, mamma,” the girl pleaded; “and I feel so happy at the old farm house! They are all so kind to me when I go there,––Hester’s father and mother, and little brothers and sisters, you know; and the poultry–yard, and the pigs and horses, and the green pond, with the geese cackling round it, remind me of my aunt’s, in Berkshire. I went there once with poor papa for a day or two; it was such a change after Oakley Street.”

  But Mrs. Marchmont was inflexible upon this point. She would allow her stepdaughter to pay a ceremonial visit now and then to Farmer Pollard’s, and to be entertained with cowslip–wine and pound–cake in the low, old–fashioned parlour, where all the polished mahogany chairs were so shining and slippery that it was a marvel how anybody ever contrived to sit down upon them. Olivia allowed such solemn visits as these now and then, and she permitted Mary to renew the farmer’s lease upon sufficiently advantageous terms, and to make occasional presents to her favourite, Hester. But all stolen visits to the farmyard, all evening rambles with the farmer’s daughter in the apple orchard at the back of the low white farmhouse, were sternly interdicted; and though Mary and Hester were friends still, they were fain to be content with a chance meeting once in the course of a dreary interval of months, and a silent pressure of the hand.

  “You mustn’t think that I am proud of my money, Hester,” Mary said to her friend, “or that I forget you now that we see each other so seldom. Papa used to let me come to the farm whenever I liked; but papa had seen a great deal of poverty. Mamma keeps me almost always at home at my studies; but she is very good to me, and of course I am bound to obey her; papa wished me to obey her.”

  The orphan girl never for a moment forgot the terms of her father’s will. He had wished her to obey; what should she do, then, but be obedient? Her submission to Olivia’s lightest wish was only a part of the homage which she paid to that beloved father’s memory.

  It was thus she grew to early womanhood; a child in gentle obedience and docility; a woman by reason of that grave and thoughtful character which had been peculiar to her from her very infancy. It was in a life such as this, narrow, monotonous, joyless, that her seventeenth birthday came and went, scarcely noticed, scarcely remembered, in the dull uniformity of the days which left no track behind them; and Mary Marchmont was a woman,––a woman with all the tragedy of life before her; infantine in her innocence and inexperience of the world outside Marchmont Towers.

  The passage of time had been so long unmarked by any break in its tranquil course, the dull routine of life had been so long undisturbed by change, that I believe the two women thought their lives would go on for ever and ever. Mary, at least, had never looked beyond the dull horizon of the present. Her habit of castle–building had died out with her father’s death. What need had she to build castles, now that he could no longer inhabit them? Edward Arundel, the bright boy she remembered in Oakley Street, the dashing young officer who had come to Marchmont Towers, had dropped back into the chaos of the past. Her father had been the keystone in the arch of Mary’s existence: he was gone, and a mass of chaotic ruins alone remained of the familiar visions which had once beguiled her. The world had ended with John Marchmont’s death, and his daughter’s life since that great sorrow had been at best only a passive endurance of existence. They had heard very little of the young soldier at Marchmont Towers. Now and then a letter from some member of the family at Dangerfield had come to the Rector of Swampington. The warfare was still raging far away in the East, cruel and desperate battles were being fought, and brave Englishmen were winning loot and laurels, or perishing under the scimitars of Sikhs and Affghans, as the case might be. Squire Arundel’s youngest son was not doing less than his duty, the letters said. He had gained his captaincy, and was well spoken of by great soldiers, whose very names were like the sound of the war–trumpet to English ears.

  Olivia heard all this. She sat by her father, sometimes looking over his shoulder at the crumpled letter, as he read aloud to her of her cousin’s exploits. The familiar name seemed to be all ablaze with lurid light as the widow’s greedy eyes devoured it. How commonplace the letters were! What frivolous nonsense Letitia Arundel intermingled with the news of her brother!––”You’ll be glad to hear that my grey pony has got the better of his lameness. Papa gave a hunting–breakfast on Tuesday week. Lord Mountlitchcombe was present; but the hunting–men are very much aggravated about the frost, and I fear we shall have no crocuses. Edward has got his captaincy, papa told me to tell you. Sir Charles Napier and Major Outram have spoken very highly of him; but he––Edward, I mean––got a sabre–cut on his left arm, besides a wound on his forehead, and was laid up for nearly a month. I daresay you remember old Colonel Tollesly, at Halburton Lodge? He died last November; and has left all his money to––––” and the young lady ran on thus, with such gossip as she thought might be pleasing to her uncle; and there were no more tidings of the young soldier, whose life–blood had so nearly been spilt for his country’s glory.

  Olivia thought of him as she rode back to Marchmont Towers. She thought of the sabre–cut upon his arm, and pictured him wounded and bleeding, lying beneath the canvass–shelter of a tent, comfortless, lonely, forsaken.

  “Better for me if he had died,” she thought; “better for me if I were to hear of his death to–morrow!”

  And with the idea the picture of such a calamity arose before her so vividly and hideously distinct, that she thought for one brief moment of agony, “This is not a fancy, it is a presentiment; it is second sight; the thing will occur.”

  She imagined herself going to see her father as she had gone that morning. All would be the same: the low grey garden–wall of the Rectory; the ceaseless surging of the sea; the prim servant–maid; the familiar study, with its litter of books and papers; the smell of stale cigar–smoke; the chintz curtains flapping in the open window; the dry leaves fluttering in the garden without. There would be nothing changed except her father’s face, which would be a little graver than usual. And then, after a little hesitation––after a brief preamble about the uncertainty of life, the necessity for looking always beyond this world, the horrors of war,––the dreadful words would be upon his lips, when she would read all the hideous truth in his face, and fall prone to the ground, before he could say, “Edward Arundel is dead!”

  Yes; she felt all the anguish. It would be this––this sudden paralysis of black despair. She tested the strength of her endurance by this imaginary torture,––scarcely imaginary, surely, when it seemed so real,––and asked herself a strange question: “Am I strong enough to bear this, or would it be less terrible to go on, suffering for ever––for ever abased and humiliated by the degradation of my love for a man who does not care for me?”

  So long as John Marchmont had lived, this woman would have been true to the terrible victory she had won upon the eve of her bridal. She would have been true to herself and to her marriage–vow; but her husband’s death, in setting her free, had cast her back upon the madness of her youth. It was no longer a sin to think of Edward Arundel. Having once suffered this idea to arise in her mind, her idol grew too strong for her, and she thought of him by night and day.

  Yes; she thought of hi
m for ever and ever. The narrow life to which she doomed herself, the self–immolation which she called duty, left her a prey to this one thought. Her work was not enough for her. Her powerful mind wasted and shrivelled for want of worthy employment. It was like one vast roll of parchment whereon half the wisdom of the world might have been inscribed, but on which was only written over and over again, in maddening repetition, the name of Edward Arundel. If Olivia Marchmont could have gone to America, and entered herself amongst the feminine professors of law or medicine,––if she could have turned field–preacher, like simple Dinah Morris, or set up a printing–press in Bloomsbury, or even written a novel,––I think she might have been saved. The superabundant energy of her mind would have found a new object. As it was, she did none of these things. She had only dreamt one dream, and by force of perpetual repetition the dream had become a madness.

  But the monotonous life was not to go on for ever. The dull, grey, leaden sky was to be illumined by sudden bursts of sunshine, and swept by black thunder–clouds, whose stormy violence was to shake the very universe for these two solitary women.

  John Marchmont had been dead nearly three years. Mary’s humble friend, the farmer’s daughter, had married a young tradesman in the village of Kemberling, a mile and a half from the Towers. Mary was a woman now, and had seen the last of the Roman emperors and all the dry–as–dust studies of her early girlhood. She had nothing to do but accompany her stepmother hither and thither amongst the poor cottagers about Kemberling and two or three other small parishes within a drive of the Towers, “doing good,” after Olivia’s fashion, by line and rule. At home the young lady did what she pleased, sitting for hours together at her piano, or wading through gigantic achievements in the way of embroidery–work. She was even allowed to read novels now, but only such novels as were especially recommended to Olivia, who was one of the patronesses of a book–club at Swampington: novels in which young ladies fell in love with curates, and didn’t marry them: novels in which everybody suffered all manner of misery, and rather liked it: novels in which, if the heroine did marry the man she loved––and this happy conclusion was the exception, and not the rule––the smallpox swept away her beauty, or a fatal accident deprived him of his legs, or eyes, or arms before the wedding–day.

  The two women went to Kemberling Church together three times every Sunday. It was rather monotonous––the same church, the same rector and curate, the same clerk, the same congregation, the same old organ–tunes and droning voices of Lincolnshire charity–children, the same sermons very often. But Mary had grown accustomed to monotony. She had ceased to hope or care for anything since her father’s death, and was very well contented to be let alone, and allowed to dawdle through a dreary life which was utterly without aim or purpose. She sat opposite her stepmother on one particular afternoon in the state–pew at Kemberling, which was lined with faded red baize, and raised a little above the pews of meaner worshippers; she was sitting with her listless hands lying in her lap, looking thoughtfully at her stepmother’s stony face, and listening to the dull droning of the rector’s voice above her head. It was a sunny afternoon in early June, and the church was bright with a warm yellow radiance; one of the old diamond–paned windows was open, and the tinkling of a sheep–bell far away in the distance, and the hum of bees in the churchyard, sounded pleasantly in the quiet of the hot atmosphere.

  The young mistress of Marchmont Towers felt the drowsy influence of that tranquil summer weather creeping stealthily upon her. The heavy eyelids drooped over her soft brown eyes, those wistful eyes which had so long looked wearily out upon a world in which there seemed so little joy. The rector’s sermon was a very long one this warm afternoon, and there was a low sound of snoring somewhere in one of the shadowy and sheltered pews beneath the galleries. Mary tried very hard to keep herself awake. Mrs. Marchmont had frowned darkly at her once or twice already, for to fall asleep in church was a dire iniquity in Olivia’s rigid creed; but the drowsiness was not easily to be conquered, and the girl was sinking into a peaceful slumber in spite of her stepmother’s menacing frowns, when the sound of a sharp footfall on one of the gravel pathways in the churchyard aroused her attention.

  Heaven knows why she should have been awoke out of her sleep by the sound of that step. It was different, perhaps, to the footsteps of the Kemberling congregation. The brisk, sharp sound of the tread striking lightly but firmly on the gravel was not compatible with the shuffling gait of the tradespeople and farmers’ men who formed the greater part of the worshippers at that quiet Lincolnshire church. Again, it would have been a monstrous sin in that tranquil place for any one member of the congregation to disturb the devotions of the rest by entering at such a time as this. It was a stranger, then, evidently. What did it matter? Miss Marchmont scarcely cared to lift her eyelids to see who or what the stranger was; but the intruder let in such a flood of June sunshine when he pushed open the ponderous oaken door under the church–porch, that she was dazzled by that sudden burst of light, and involuntarily opened her eyes.

  The stranger let the door swing softly to behind him, and stood beneath the shadow of the porch, not caring to advance any further, or to disturb the congregation by his presence.

  Mary could not see him very plainly at first. She could only dimly define the outline of his tall figure, the waving masses of chestnut hair tinged with gleams of gold; but little by little his face seemed to grow out of the shadow, until she saw it all,––the handsome patrician features, the luminous blue eyes, the amber moustache,––the face which, in Oakley Street eight years ago, she had elected as her type of all manly perfection, her ideal of heroic grace.

  Yes; it was Edward Arundel. Her eyes lighted up with an unwonted rapture as she looked at him; her lips parted; and her breath came in faint gasps. All the monotonous years, the terrible agonies of sorrow, dropped away into the past; and Mary Marchmont was conscious of nothing except the unutterable happiness of the present.

  The one friend of her childhood had come back. The one link, the almost forgotten link, that bound her to every day–dream of those foolish early days, was united once more by the presence of the young soldier. All that happy time, nearly five years ago,––that happy time in which the tennis–court had been built, and the boat–house by the river restored,––those sunny autumn days before her father’s second marriage,––returned to her. There was pleasure and joy in the world, after all; and then the memory of her father came back to her mind, and her eyes filled with tears. How sorry Edward would be to see his old friend’s empty place in the western drawing–room; how sorry for her, and for her loss! Olivia Marchmont saw the change in her stepdaughter’s face, and looked at her with stern amazement. But, after the first shock of that delicious surprise, Mary’s training asserted itself. She folded her hands,––they trembled a little, but Olivia did not see that,––and waited patiently, with her eyes cast down and a faint flush lighting up her pale cheeks, until the sermon was finished, and the congregation began to disperse. She was not impatient. She felt as if she could have waited thus peacefully and contentedly for ever, knowing that the only friend she had on earth was near her.

  Olivia was slow to leave her pew; but at last she opened the door and went out into the quiet aisle, followed by Mary, out under the shadowy porch and into the gravel–walk in the churchyard, where Edward Arundel was waiting for the two ladies.

  John Marchmont’s widow uttered no cry of surprise when she saw her cousin standing a little way apart from the slowly–dispersing Kemberling congregation. Her dark face faded a little, and her heart seemed to stop its pulsation suddenly, as if she had been turned into stone; but this was only for a moment. She held out her hand to Mr. Arundel in the next instant, and bade him welcome to Lincolnshire.

  “I did not know you were in England,” she said.

  “Scarcely any one knows it yet,” the young man answered; “and I have not even been home. I came to Marchmont Towers at once.”

  He
turned from his cousin to Mary, who was standing a little behind her stepmother.

  “Dear Polly,” he said, taking both her hands in his, “I was so sorry for you, when I heard––––”

  He stopped, for he saw the tears welling up to her eyes. It was not his allusion to her father’s death that had distressed her. He had called her Polly, the old familiar name, which she had never heard since that dead father’s lips had last spoken it.

  The carriage was waiting at the gate of the churchyard, and Edward Arundel went back to Marchmont Towers with the two ladies. He had reached the house a quarter of an hour after they had left it for afternoon church, and had walked over to Kemberling.

  “I was so anxious to see you, Polly,” he said, “after all this long time, that I had no patience to wait until you and Livy came back from church.”

  Olivia started as the young man said this. It was Mary Marchmont whom he had come to see, then––not herself. Was she never to be anything? Was she to be for ever insulted by this humiliating indifference? A dark flush came over her face, as she drew her head up with the air of an offended empress, and looked angrily at her cousin. Alas! he did not even see that indignant glance. He was bending over Mary, telling her, in a low tender voice, of the grief he had felt at learning the news of her father’s death.

  Olivia Marchmont looked with an eager, scrutinising gaze at her stepdaughter. Could it be possible that Edward Arundel might ever come to love this girl? Could such a thing be possible? A hideous depth of horror and confusion seemed to open before her with the thought. In all the past, amongst all things she had imagined, amongst all the calamities she had pictured to herself, she had never thought of anything like this. Would such a thing ever come to pass? Would she ever grow to hate this girl––this girl, who had been intrusted to her by her dead husband––with the most terrible hatred that one woman can feel towards another?