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, pa.s.sionate, 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 ign.o.bly 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 Athene about it for my taste. I like those girls in blue, with the crinkly auburn 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 b.u.t.tered 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 c.o.xcomb as to catch at the secret so navely 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sionate 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 phosph.o.r.escent 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d; 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 n.o.ble 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.