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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 compa.s.sion 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, hoa.r.s.ely.
"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? G.o.d 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 cla.s.sic 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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d!" 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.