"Thank you; that will very much simplify matters. I shall write you
immediate word of any discovery I make, and will then leave all the
rest to you. My influence over Mary Marchmont as an entire stranger
could be nothing. Yours, on the contrary, must be unbounded. It will be
for you to act upon my letter."

Olivia Marchmont waited for two days and nights for the promised
letter. Upon the third morning it came. The artist's epistle was very
brief:

"MY DEAR MRS. MARCHMONT,--I have made the necessary discovery. Miss
Marchmont is to be found at the White Hart Inn, Milldale, near
Winchester. May I venture to urge your proceeding there in search of
her without delay?

"Yours very faithfully,

"PAUL MARCHMONT.

"_Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square,_
"_Aug._ 15_th_."

CHAPTER VI.

RISEN FROM THE GRAVE.

The rain dripped ceaselessly upon the dreary earth under a grey
November sky,--a dull and lowering sky, that seemed to brood over this
lower world with some menace of coming down to blot out and destroy it.
The express-train, rushing headlong across the wet flats of
Lincolnshire, glared like a meteor in the gray fog; the dismal shriek
of the engine was like the cry of a bird of prey. The few passengers
who had chosen that dreary winter's day for their travels looked
despondently out at the monotonous prospect, seeking in vain to descry
some spot of hope in the joyless prospect; or made futile attempts to
read their newspapers by the dim light of the lamp in the roof of the
carriage. Sulky passengers shuddered savagely as they wrapped
themselves in huge woollen rugs or ponderous coverings made from the
skins of wild beasts. Melancholy passengers drew grotesque and hideous
travelling-caps over their brows, and, coiling themselves in the corner
of their seats, essayed to sleep away the weary hours. Everything upon
this earth seemed dismal and damp, cold and desolate, incongruous and
uncomfortable.

But there was one first-class passenger in that Lincolnshire express
who made himself especially obnoxious to his fellows by the display of
an amount of restlessness and superabundant energy quite out of keeping
with the lazy despondency of those about him.

This was a young man with a long tawny beard and a white face,--a very
handsome face, though wan and attenuated, as if with some terrible
sickness, and somewhat disfigured by certain strappings of plaister,
which were bound about a patch of his skull a little above the left
temple. This young man had one side of the carriage to himself; and a
sort of bed had been made up for him with extra cushions, upon which he
lay at full length, when he was still, which was never for very long
together. He was enveloped almost to the chin in voluminous
railway-rugs, but, in spite of these coverings, shuddered every now and
then, as if with cold. He had a pocket-pistol amongst his travelling
paraphernalia, which he applied occasionally to his dry lips. Sometimes
drops of perspiration broke suddenly out upon his forehead, and were
brushed away by a tremulous hand, that was scarcely strong enough to
hold a cambric handkerchief. In short, it was sufficiently obvious to
every one that this young man with the tawny beard had only lately
risen from a sick-bed, and had risen therefrom considerably before the
time at which any prudent medical practitioner would have given him
licence to do so.

It was evident that he was very, very ill, but that he was, if
anything, more ill at ease in mind than in body; and that some terrible
gnawing anxiety, some restless care, some horrible uncertainty or
perpetual foreboding of trouble, would not allow him to be at peace. It
was as much as the three fellow-passengers who sat opposite to him
could do to bear with his impatience, his restlessness, his short
half-stifled moans, his long weary sighs; the horror of his fidgety
feet shuffled incessantly upon the cushions; the suddenly convulsive
jerks with which he would lift himself upon his elbow to stare fiercely
into the dismal fog outside the carriage window; the groans that were
wrung from him as he flung himself into new and painful positions; the
frightful aspect of physical agony which came over his face as he
looked at his watch,--and he drew out and consulted that ill-used
chronometer, upon an average, once in a quarter of an hour; his
impatient crumpling of the crisp leaves of a new "Bradshaw," which he
turned over ever and anon, as if, by perpetual reference to that
mysterious time-table, he might hasten the advent of the hour at which
he was to reach his destination. He was, altogether, a most aggravating
and exasperating travelling companion; and it was only out of Christian
forbearance with the weakness of his physical state that his irritated
fellow-passengers refrained from uniting themselves against him, and
casting him bodily out of the window of the carriage; as a clown
sometimes flings a venerable but tiresome pantaloon through a square
trap or pitfall, lurking, undreamed of, in the façade of an honest
tradesman's dwelling.

The three passengers had, in divers manners, expressed their sympathy
with the invalid traveller; but their courtesies had not been responded
to with any evidence of gratitude or heartiness. The young man had
answered his companions in an absent fashion, scarcely deigning to look
at them as he spoke;--speaking altogether with the air of some
sleep-walker, who roams hither and thither absorbed in a dreadful
dream, making a world for himself, and peopling it with horrible images
unknown to those about him.

Had he been ill?--Yes, very ill. He had had a railway accident, and
then brain-fever. He had been ill for a long time.

Somebody asked him how long.

He shuffled about upon the cushions, and groaned aloud at this
question, to the alarm of the man who had asked it.

"How long?" he cried, in a fierce agony of mental or bodily
uneasiness;--"how long? Two months,--three months,--ever since the 15th
of August."

Then another passenger, looking at the young man's very evident
sufferings from a commercial point of view, asked him whether he had
had any compensation.

"Compensation!" cried the invalid. "What compensation?"

"Compensation from the Railway Company. I hope you've a strong case
against them, for you've evidently been a terrible sufferer."

It was dreadful to see the way in which the sick man writhed under this
question.

"Compensation!" he cried. "What compensation can they give me for an
accident that shut me in a living grave for three months, that
separated me from----? You don't know what you're talking about, sir,"
he added suddenly; "I can't think of this business patiently; I can't
be reasonable. If they'd hacked _me_ to pieces, I shouldn't have cared.
I've been under a red-hot Indian sun, when we fellows couldn't see the
sky above us for the smoke of the cannons and the flashing of the
sabres about our heads, and I'm not afraid of a little cutting and
smashing more or less; but when I think what others may have suffered
through----I'm almost mad, and----!"

He couldn't say any more, for the intensity of his passion had shaken
him as a leaf is shaken by a whirlwind; and he fell back upon the
cushions, trembling in every limb, and groaning aloud. His
fellow-passengers looked at each other rather nervously, and two out of
the three entertained serious thoughts of changing carriages when the
express stopped midway between London and Lincoln.

But they were reassured by-and-by; for the invalid, who was Captain
Edward Arundel, or that pale shadow of the dashing young cavalry
officer which had risen from a sick-bed, relapsed into silence, and
displayed no more alarming symptoms than that perpetual restlessness
and disquietude which is cruelly wearying even to the strongest nerves.
He only spoke once more, and that was when the short day, in which
there had been no actual daylight, was closing in, and the journey
nearly finished, when he startled his companions by crying out
suddenly,--

"O my God! will this journey never come to an end? Shall I never be put
out of this horrible suspense?"

The journey, or at any rate Captain Arundel's share of it, came to an
end almost immediately afterwards, for the train stopped at
Swampington; and while the invalid was staggering feebly to his feet,
eager to scramble out of the carriage, his servant came to the door to
assist and support him.

"You seem to have borne the journey wonderful, sir," the man said
respectfully, as he tried to rearrange his master's wrappings, and to
do as much as circumstances, and the young man's restless impatience,
would allow of being done for his comfort.

"I have suffered the tortures of the infernal regions, Morrison,"
Captain Arundel ejaculated, in answer to his attendant's congratulatory
address. "Get me a fly directly; I must go to the Towers at once."

"Not to-night, sir, surely?" the servant remonstrated, in a tone of
alarm. "Your Mar and the doctors said you _must_ rest at Swampington
for a night."

"I'll rest nowhere till I've been to Marchmont Towers," answered the
young soldier passionately. "If I must walk there,--if I'm to drop down
dead on the road,--I'll go. If the cornfields between this and the
Towers were a blazing prairie or a raging sea, I'd go. Get me a fly,
man; and don't talk to me of my mother or the doctors. I'm going to
look for my wife. Get me a fly."

This demand for a commonplace hackney vehicle sounded rather like an
anti-climax, after the young man's talk of blazing prairies and raging
seas; but passionate reality has no ridiculous side, and Edward
Arundel's most foolish words were sublime by reason of their
earnestness.

"Get me a fly, Morrison," he said, grinding his heel upon the platform
in the intensity of his impatience. "Or, stay; we should gain more in
the end if you were to go to the George--it's not ten minutes' walk
from here; one of the porters will take you--the people there know me,
and they'll let you have some vehicle, with a pair of horses and a
clever driver. Tell them it's for an errand of life and death, and that
Captain Arundel will pay them three times their usual price, or six
times, if they wish. Tell them anything, so long as you get what we
want."

The valet, an old servant of Edward Arundel's father, was carried away
by the young man's mad impetuosity. The vitality of this broken-down
invalid, whose physical weakness contrasted strangely with his mental
energy, bore down upon the grave man-servant like an avalanche, and
carried him whither it would. He was fain to abandon all hope of being
true to the promises which he had given to Mrs. Arundel and the medical
men, and to yield himself to the will of the fiery young soldier.

He left Edward Arundel sitting upon a chair in the solitary
waiting-room, and hurried after the porter who had volunteered to show
him the way to the George Inn, the most prosperous hotel in
Swampington.

The valet had good reason to be astonished by his young master's energy
and determination; for Mary Marchmont's husband was as one rescued from
the very jaws of death. For eleven weeks after that terrible concussion
upon the South-Western Railway, Edward Arundel had lain in a state of
coma,--helpless, mindless; all the story of his life blotted away, and
his brain transformed into as blank a page as if he had been an infant
lying on his mother's knees. A fractured skull had been the young
Captain's chief share in those injuries which were dealt out pretty
freely to the travellers in the Exeter mail on the 15th of August; and
the young man had been conveyed to Dangerfield Park, whilst his
father's corpse lay in stately solemnity in one of the chief rooms,
almost as much a corpse as that dead father.

Mrs. Arundel's troubles had come, as the troubles of rich and
prosperous people often do come, in a sudden avalanche, that threatened
to overwhelm the tender-hearted matron. She had been summoned from
Germany to attend her husband's deathbed; and she was called away from
her faithful watch beside that deathbed, to hear tidings of the
accident that had befallen her younger son.

Neither the Dorsetshire doctor who attended the stricken traveller upon
his homeward journey, and brought the strong man, helpless as a child,
to claim the same tender devotion that had watched over his infancy,
nor the Devonshire doctors who were summoned to Dangerfield, gave any
hope of their patient's recovery. The sufferer might linger for years,
they said; but his existence would be only a living death, a horrible
blank, which it was a cruelty to wish prolonged. But when a great
London surgeon appeared upon the scene, a new light, a wonderful gleam
of hope, shone in upon the blackness of the mother's despair.

This great London surgeon, who was a very unassuming and matter-of-fact
little man, and who seemed in a great hurry to earn his fee and run
back to Saville Row by the next express, made a brief examination of
the patient, asked a very few sharp and trenchant questions of the
reverential provincial medical practitioners, and then declared that
the chief cause of Edward Arundel's state lay in the fact that a
portion of the skull was depressed,--a splinter pressed upon the brain.

The provincial practitioners opened their eyes very wide; and one of
them ventured to mutter something to the effect that he had thought as
much for a long time. The London surgeon further stated, that until the
pressure was removed from the patient's brain, Captain Edward Arundel
would remain in precisely the same state as that into which he had
fallen immediately upon the accident. The splinter could only be
removed by a very critical operation, and this operation must be
deferred until the patient's bodily strength was in some measure
restored.

The surgeon gave brief but decisive directions to the provincial
medical men as to the treatment of their patient during this
interregnum, and then departed, after promising to return as soon as
Captain Arundel was in a fit state for the operation. This period did
not arrive till the first week in November, when the Devonshire doctors
ventured to declare their patient's shattered frame in a great measure
renovated by their devoted attention, and the tender care of the best
of mothers.

The great surgeon came. The critical operation was performed, with such
eminent success as to merit a very long description, which afterwards
appeared in the _Lancet_; and slowly, like the gradual lifting of a
curtain, the black shadows passed away from Edward Arundel's mind, and
the memory of the past returned to him.

It was then that he raved madly about his young wife, perpetually
demanding that she might be summoned to him; continually declaring that
some great misfortune would befall her if she were not brought to his
side, that, even in his feebleness, he might defend and protect her.
His mother mistook his vehemence for the raving of delirium. The
doctors fell into the same error, and treated him for brain-fever. It
was only when the young soldier demonstrated to them that he could, by
making an effort over himself, be as reasonable as they were, that he
convinced them of their mistake. Then he begged to be left alone with
his mother; and, with his feverish hands clasped in hers, asked her the
meaning of her black dress, and the reason why his young wife had not
come to him. He learned that his mother's mourning garments were worn
in memory of his dead father. He learned also, after much bewilderment
and passionate questioning, that no tidings of Mary Marchmont had ever
come to Dangerfield.

It was then that the young man told his mother the story of his
marriage: how that marriage had been contracted in haste, but with no
real desire for secrecy; how he had, out of mere idleness, put off
writing to his friends until that last fatal night; and how, at the
very moment when the pen was in his hand and the paper spread out
before him, the different claims of a double duty had torn him asunder,
and he had been summoned from the companionship of his bride to the
deathbed of his father.

Mrs. Arundel tried in vain to set her son's mind at rest upon the
subject of his wife's silence.

"No, mother!" he cried; "it is useless talking to me. You don't know my
poor darling. She has the courage of a heroine, as well as the
simplicity of a child. There has been some foul play at the bottom of
this; it is treachery that has kept my wife from me. She would have
come here on foot, had she been free to come. I know whose hand is in
this business. Olivia Marchmont has kept my poor girl a prisoner;
Olivia Marchmont has set herself between me and my darling!"

"But you don't know this, Edward. I'll write to Mr. Paulette; he will
be able to tell us what has happened."

The young man writhed in a sudden paroxysm of mental agony.

"Write to Mr. Paulette!" he exclaimed. "No, mother; there shall be no
delay, no waiting for return-posts. That sort of torture would kill me
in a few hours. No, mother; I will go to my wife by the first train
that will take me on my way to Lincolnshire."

"You will go! You, Edward! in your state!"

There was a terrible outburst of remonstrance and entreaty on the part
of the poor mother. Mrs. Arundel went down upon her knees before her
son, imploring him not to leave Dangerfield till his strength was
recovered; imploring him to let her telegraph a summons to Richard
Paulette; to let her go herself to Marchmont Towers in search of Mary;
to do anything rather than carry out the one mad purpose that he was
bent on,--the purpose of going himself to look for his wife.

The mother's tears and prayers were vain; no adamant was ever firmer
than the young soldier.

"She is my wife, mother," he said; "I have sworn to protect and cherish
her; and I have reason to think she has fallen into merciless hands. If
I die upon the road, I must go to her. It is not a case in which I can
do my duty by proxy. Every moment I delay is a wrong to that poor
helpless girl. Be reasonable, dear mother, I implore you; I should
suffer fifty times more by the torture of suspense if I stayed here,
than I can possibly suffer in a railroad journey from here to
Lincolnshire."

The soldier's strong will triumphed over every opposition. The
provincial doctors held up their hands, and protested against the
madness of their patient; but without avail. All that either Mrs.
Arundel or the doctors could do, was to make such preparations and
arrangements as would render the weary journey easier; and it was under
the mother's superintendence that the air-cushions, the brandy-flasks,
the hartshorn, sal-volatile, and railway-rugs, had been provided for
the Captain's comfort.

It was thus that, after a blank interval of three months, Edward
Arundel, like some creature newly risen from the grave, returned to
Swampington, upon his way to Marchmont Towers.

The delay seemed endless to this restless passenger, sitting in the
empty waiting-room of the quiet Lincolnshire station, though the ostler
and stable-boys at the "George" were bestirring themselves with
good-will, urged on by Mr. Morrison's promises of liberal reward for
their trouble, and though the man who was to drive the carriage lost no
time in arraying himself for the journey. Captain Arundel looked at his
watch three times while he sat in that dreary Swampington waiting-room.
There was a clock over the mantelpiece, but he would not trust to that.

"Eight o'clock!" he muttered. "It will be ten before I get to the
Towers, if the carriage doesn't come directly."

He got up, and walked from the waiting-room to the platform, and from
the platform to the door of the station. He was so weak as to be
obliged to support himself with his stick; and even with that help he
tottered and reeled sometimes like a drunken man. But, in his eager
impatience, he was almost unconscious of his own weakness.

"Will it never come?" he muttered. "Will it never come?"

At last, after an intolerable delay, as it seemed to the young man, the
carriage-and-pair from the George Inn rattled up to the door of the
station, with Mr. Morrison upon the box, and a postillion loosely
balanced upon one of the long-legged, long-backed, bony grey horses.
Edward Arundel got into the vehicle before his valet could alight to
assist him.

"Marchmont Towers!" he cried to the postillion; "and a five-pound note
if you get there in less than an hour."

He flung some money to the officials who had gathered about the door to
witness his departure, and who had eagerly pressed forward to render
him that assistance which, even in his weakness, he disdained.

These men looked gravely at each other as the carriage dashed off into
the fog, blundering and reeling as it went along the narrow half-made
road, that led from the desert patch of waste ground upon which the
station was built into the high-street of Swampington.

"Marchmont Towers!" said one of the men, in a tone that seemed to imply
that there was something ominous even in the name of the Lincolnshire
mansion. "What does _he_ want at Marchmont Towers, I wonder?"

"Why, don't you know who he is, mate?" responded the other man,
contemptuously.

"No."

"He's Parson Arundel's nevy,--the young officer that some folks said
ran away with the poor young miss oop at the Towers."

"My word! is he now? Why, I shouldn't ha' known him."

"No; he's a'most like the ghost of what he was, poor young chap. I've
heerd as he was in that accident as happened last August on the
Sou'-Western."

The railway official shrugged his shoulders.

"It's all a queer story," he said. "I can't make out naught about it;
but I know _I_ shouldn't care to go up to the Towers after dark."

Marchmont Towers had evidently fallen into rather evil repute amongst
these simple Lincolnshire people.

The carriage in which Edward Arundel rode was a superannuated old
chariot, whose uneasy springs rattled and shook the sick man to pieces.
He groaned aloud every now and then from sheer physical agony; and yet
I almost doubt if he knew that he suffered, so superior in its
intensity was the pain of his mind to every bodily torture. Whatever
consciousness he had of his racked and aching limbs was as nothing in
comparison to the racking anguish of suspense, the intolerable agony of
anxiety, which seemed multiplied by every moment. He sat with his face
turned towards the open window of the carriage, looking out steadily
into the night. There was nothing before him but a blank darkness and
thick fog, and a flat country blotted out by the falling rain; but he
strained his eyes until the pupils dilated painfully, in his desire to
recognise some landmark in the hidden prospect.

"_When_ shall I get there?" he cried aloud, in a paroxysm of rage and
grief. "My own one, my pretty one, my wife, when shall I get to you?"

He clenched his thin hands until the nails cut into his flesh. He
stamped upon the floor of the carriage. He cursed the rusty, creaking
springs, the slow-footed horses, the pools of water through which the
wretched animals floundered pastern-deep. He cursed the darkness of the
night, the stupidity of the postillion, the length of the
way,--everything, and anything, that kept him back from the end which
he wanted to reach.

At last the end came. The carriage drew up before the tall iron gates,
behind which stretched, dreary and desolate as some patch of
common-land, that melancholy waste which was called a park.

A light burned dimly in the lower window of the lodge,--a little spot
that twinkled faintly red and luminous through the darkness and the
rain; but the iron gates were as closely shut as if Marchmont Towers
had been a prison-house. Edward Arundel was in no humour to linger long
for the opening of those gates. He sprang from the carriage, reckless
of the weakness of his cramped limbs, before the valet could descend
from the rickety box-seat, or the postillion could get off his horse,
and shook the wet and rusty iron bars with his own wasted hands. The
gates rattled, but resisted the concussion; they had evidently been
locked for the night. The young man seized an iron ring, dangling at
the end of a chain, which hung beside one of the stone pillars, and
rang a peal that resounded like an alarm-signal through the darkness. A
fierce watchdog far away in the distance howled dismally at the
summons, and the dissonant shriek of a peacock sounded across the flat.

The door of the lodge was opened about five minutes after the bell had
rung, and an old man peered out into the night, holding a candle shaded
by his feeble hand, and looking suspiciously towards the gate.

"Who is it?" he said.

"It is I, Captain Arundel. Open the gate, please."

The man, who was very old, and whose intellect seemed to have grown as
dim and foggy as the night itself, reflected for a few moments, and
then mumbled,--

"Cap'en Arundel! Ay, to be sure, to be sure. Parson Arundel's nevy; ay,
ay."

He went back into the lodge, to the disgust and aggravation of the
young soldier, who rattled fiercely at the gate once more in his
impatience. But the old man emerged presently, as tranquil as if the
blank November night had been some sunshiny noontide in July, carrying
a lantern and a bunch of keys, one of which he proceeded in a leisurely
manner to apply to the great lock of the gate.

"Let me in!" cried Edward Arundel. "Man alive! do you think I came down
here to stand all night staring through these iron bars? Is Marchmont
Towers a prison, that you shut your gates as if they were never to be
opened until the Day of Judgment?"

The old man responded with a feeble, chirpy laugh, an audible grin,
senile and conciliatory.

"We've no need to keep t' geates open arter dark," he said; "folk
doan't coome to the Toowers arter dark."

He had succeeded by this time in turning the key in the lock; one of
the gates rolled slowly back upon its rusty hinges, creaking and
groaning as if in hoarse protest against all visitors to the Towers;
and Edward Arundel entered the dreary domain which John Marchmont had
inherited from his kinsman.

The postillion turned his horses from the highroad without the gates
into the broad drive leading up to the mansion. Far away, across the
wet flats, the broad western front of that gaunt stone dwelling-place
frowned upon the travellers, its black grimness only relieved by two or
three dim red patches, that told of lighted windows and human
habitation. It was rather difficult to associate friendly flesh and
blood with Marchmont Towers on this dark November night. The nervous
traveller would have rather expected to find diabolical denizens
lurking within those black and stony walls; hideous enchantments
beneath that rain-bespattered roof; weird and incarnate horrors
brooding by deserted hearths, and fearful shrieks of souls in perpetual
pain breaking upon the stillness of the night.

Edward Arundel had no thought of these things. He knew that the place
was darksome and gloomy, and that, in very spite of himself, he had
always been unpleasantly impressed by it; but he knew nothing more. He
only wanted to reach the house without delay, and to ask for the young
wife whom he had parted with upon a balmy August evening three months
before. He wanted this passionately, almost madly; and every moment
made his impatience wilder, his anxiety more intense. It seemed as if
all the journey from Dangerfield Park to Lincolnshire was as nothing
compared to the space that still lay between him and Marchmont Towers.

"We've done it in double-quick time, sir," the postillion said,
complacently pointing to the steaming sides of his horses. "Master'll
gie it to me for driving the beasts like this."

Edward Arundel looked at the panting animals. They had brought him
quickly, then, though the way had seemed so long.

"You shall have a five-pound note, my lad," he said, "if you get me up
to yonder house in five minutes."

He had his hand upon the door of the carriage, and was leaning against
it for support, while he tried to recover enough strength with which to
clamber into the vehicle, when his eye was caught by some white object
flapping in the rain against the stone pillar of the gate, and made
dimly visible in a flickering patch of light from the lodge-keeper's
lantern.

"What's that?" he cried, pointing to this white spot upon the
moss-grown stone.

The old man slowly raised his eyes to the spot towards which the
soldier's finger pointed.

"That?" he mumbled. "Ay, to be sure, to be sure. Poor young lady!
That's the printed bill as they stook oop. It's the printed bill, to be
sure, to be sure. I'd a'most forgot it. It ain't been much good,
anyhow; and I'd a'most forgot it."

"The printed bill! the young lady!" gasped Edward Arundel, in a hoarse,
choking voice.

He snatched the lantern from the lodge-keeper's hand with a force that
sent the old man reeling and tottering several paces backward; and,
rushing to the stone pillar, held the light up above his head, on a
level with the white placard which had attracted his notice. It was
damp and dilapidated at the edges; but that which was printed upon it
was as visible to the soldier as though each commonplace character had
been a fiery sign inscribed upon a blazing scroll.

This was the announcement which Edward Arundel read upon the gate-post
of Marchmont Towers:--

"ONE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD.--Whereas Miss Mary Marchmont left her home
on Wednesday last, October 17th, and has not since been heard of, this
is to give notice that the above reward will be given to any one who
shall afford such information as will lead to her recovery if she be
alive, or to the discovery of her body if she be dead. The missing
young lady is eighteen years of age, rather below the middle height, of
fair complexion, light-brown hair, and hazel eyes. When she left her
home, she had on a grey silk dress, grey shawl, and straw bonnet. She
was last seen near the river-side upon the afternoon of Wednesday, the
17th instant.
"_Marchmont Towers, October_ 20_th_, 1848."

CHAPTER VII.

FACE TO FACE.

It is not easy to imagine a lion-hearted young cavalry officer, whose
soldiership in the Punjaub had won the praises of a Napier and an
Outram, fainting away like a heroine of romance at the coming of evil
tidings; but Edward Arundel, who had risen from a sick-bed to take a
long and fatiguing journey in utter defiance of the doctors, was not
strong enough to bear the dreadful welcome that greeted him upon the
gate-post at Marchmont Towers.

He staggered, and would have fallen, had not the extended arms of his
father's confidential servant been luckily opened to receive and
support him. But he did not lose his senses.

"Get me into the carriage, Morrison," he cried. "Get me up to that
house. They've tortured and tormented my wife while I've been lying
like a log on my bed at Dangerfield. For God's sake, get me up there as
quick as you can!"

Mr. Morrison had read the placard on the gate across his young master's
shoulder. He lifted the Captain into the carriage, shouted to the
postillion to drive on, and took his seat by the young man's side.

"Begging you pardon, Mr. Edward," he said, gently; "but the young lady
may be found by this time. That bill's been sticking there for upwards
of a month, you see, sir, and it isn't likely but what Miss Marchmont
has been found between that time and this."

The invalid passed his hand across his forehead, down which the cold
sweat rolled in great beads.

"Give me some brandy," he whispered; "pour some brandy down my throat,
Morrison, if you've any compassion upon me; I must get strength somehow
for the struggle that lies before me."

The valet took a wicker-covered flask from his pocket, and put the neck
of it to Edward Arundel's lips.

"She may be found, Morrison," muttered the young man, after drinking a
long draught of the fiery spirit; he would willingly have drunk living
fire itself, in his desire to obtain unnatural strength in this crisis.
"Yes; you're right there. She may be found. But to think that she
should have been driven away! To think that my poor, helpless, tender
girl should have been driven a second time from the home that is her
own! Yes; her own by every law and every right. Oh, the relentless
devil, the pitiless devil!--what can be the motive of her conduct? Is
it madness, or the infernal cruelty of a fiend incarnate?"

Mr. Morrison thought that his young master's brain had been disordered
by the shock he had just undergone, and that this wild talk was mere
delirium.

"Keep your heart up, Mr. Edward," he murmured, soothingly; "you may
rely upon it, the young lady has been found."

But Edward was in no mind to listen to any mild consolatory remarks
from his valet. He had thrust his head out of the carriage-window, and
his eyes were fixed upon the dimly-lighted casements of the western
drawing-room.

"The room in which John and Polly and I used to sit together when first
I came from India," he murmured. "How happy we were!--how happy we
were!"

The carriage stopped before the stone portico, and the young man got
out once more, assisted by his servant. His breath came short and quick
now that he stood upon the threshold. He pushed aside the servant who
opened the familiar door at the summons of the clanging bell, and
strode into the hall. A fire burned on the wide hearth; but the
atmosphere of the great stone-paved chamber was damp and chilly.

Captain Arundel walked straight to the door of the western
drawing-room. It was there that he had seen lights in the windows; it
was there that he expected to find Olivia Marchmont.

He was not mistaken. A shaded lamp burnt dimly on a table near the
fire. There was a low invalid-chair beside this table, an open book
upon the floor, and an Indian shawl, one he had sent to his cousin,
flung carelessly upon the pillows. The neglected fire burned low in the
old-fashioned grate, and above the dull-red blaze stood the figure of a
woman, tall, dark, and gloomy of aspect.

It was Olivia Marchmont, in the mourning-robes that she had worn, with
but one brief intermission, ever since her husband's death. Her profile
was turned towards the door by which Edward Arundel entered the room;
her eyes were bent steadily upon the low heap of burning ashes in the
grate. Even in that doubtful light the young man could see that her
features were sharpened, and that a settled frown had contracted her
straight black brows.

In her fixed attitude, in her air of deathlike tranquillity, this woman
resembled some sinful vestal sister, set, against her will, to watch a
sacred fire, and brooding moodily over her crimes.

She did not hear the opening of the door; she had not even heard the
trampling of the horses' hoofs, or the crashing of the wheels upon the
gravel before the house. There were times when her sense of external
things was, as it were, suspended and absorbed in the intensity of her
obstinate despair.

"Olivia!" said the soldier.

Mrs. Marchmont looked up at the sound of that accusing voice, for there
was something in Edward Arundel's simple enunciation of her name which
seemed like an accusation or a menace. She looked up, with a great
terror in her face, and stared aghast at her unexpected visitor. Her
white cheeks, her trembling lips, and dilated eyes could not have more
palpably expressed a great and absorbing horror, had the young man
standing quietly before her been a corpse newly risen from its grave.

"Olivia Marchmont," said Captain Arundel, after a brief pause, "I have
come here to look for my wife."

The woman pushed her trembling hands across her forehead, brushing the
dead black hair from her temples, and still staring with the same
unutterable horror at the face of her cousin. Several times she tried
to speak; but the broken syllables died away in her throat in hoarse,
inarticulate mutterings. At last, with a great effort, the words came.

"I--I--never expected to see you," she said; "I heard that you were
very ill; I heard that you----"

"You heard that I was dying," interrupted Edward Arundel; "or that, if
I lived, I should drag out the rest of my existence in hopeless idiocy.
The doctors thought as much a week ago, when one of them, cleverer than
the rest I suppose, had the courage to perform an operation that
restored me to consciousness. Sense and memory came back to me by
degrees. The thick veil that had shrouded the past was rent asunder;
and the first image that came to me was the image of my young wife, as
I had seen her upon the night of our parting. For more than three
months I had been dead. I was suddenly restored to life. I asked those
about me to give me tidings of my wife. Had she sought me out?--had she
followed me to Dangerfield? No! They could tell me nothing. They
thought that I was delirious, and tried to soothe me with compassionate
speeches, merciful falsehoods, promising me that I should see my
darling. But I soon read the secret of their scared looks. I saw pity
and wonder mingled in my mother's face, and I entreated her to be
merciful to me, and to tell me the truth. She had compassion upon me,
and told me all she knew, which was very little. She had never heard
from my wife. She had never heard of any marriage between Mary
Marchmont and me. The only communication which she had received from
any of her Lincolnshire relations had been a letter from my uncle
Hubert, in reply to one of hers telling him of my hopeless state.

"This was the shock that fell upon me when life and memory came back. I
could not bear the imprisonment of a sick-bed. I felt that for the
second time I must go out into the world to look for my darling; and in
defiance of the doctors, in defiance of my poor mother, who thought
that my departure from Dangerfield was a suicide, I am here. It is here
that I come first to seek for my wife. I might have stopped in London
to see Richard Paulette; I might sooner have gained tidings of my
darling. But I came here; I came here without stopping by the way,
because an uncontrollable instinct and an unreasoning impulse tells me
that it is here I ought to seek her. I am here, her husband, her only
true and legitimate defender; and woe be to those who stand between me
and my wife!"

He had spoken rapidly in his passion; and he stopped, exhausted by his
own vehemence, and sank heavily into a chair near the lamplit table.

Then for the first time that night Olivia Marchmont plainly saw her
cousin's face, and saw the terrible change that had transformed the
handsome young soldier, since the bright August morning on which he had
gone forth from Marchmont Towers. She saw the traces of a long and
wearisome illness sadly visible in his waxen-hued complexion, his
hollow cheeks, the faded lustre of his eyes, his dry and pallid lips.
She saw all this, the woman whose one great sin had been to love this
man wickedly and madly, in spite of her better self, in spite of her
womanly pride; she saw the change in him that had altered him from a
young Apollo to a shattered and broken invalid. And did any revulsion
of feeling arise in her breast? Did any corresponding transformation in
her own heart bear witness to the baseness of her love?

No; a thousand times, no! There was no thrill of disgust, how transient
soever; not so much as one passing shudder of painful surprise, one
pang of womanly regret. No! In place of these, a passionate yearning
arose in this woman's haughty soul; a flood of sudden tenderness rushed
across the black darkness of her mind. She fain would have flung
herself upon her knees, in loving self-abasement, at the sick man's
feet. She fain would have cried aloud, amid a tempest of passionate
sobs,--

"O my love, my love! you are dearer to me a hundred times by this cruel
change. It was _not_ your bright-blue eyes and waving chestnut
hair,--it was not your handsome face, your brave, soldier-like bearing
that I loved. My love was not so base as that. I inflicted a cruel
outrage upon myself when I thought that I was the weak fool of a
handsome face. Whatever _I_ have been, my love, at least, has been
pure. My love is pure, though I am base. I will never slander that
again, for I know now that it is immortal."

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 attitude 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 God!" ejaculated 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
compassion 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, hoarsely.

"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? God 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
classic 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 God'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 God!" 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.

"Yes."

"When was he here?"

"He has been here often; he comes here constantly. He has been living
at Kemberling for the last three months."

"Why?"

"For his own pleasure, I suppose," Olivia answered haughtily. "It is no
business of mine to pry into Mr. Marchmont's motives."

Edward Arundel ground his teeth in an access of ungovernable passion.
It was not against Olivia, but against himself this time that he was
enraged. He hated himself for the arrogant folly, the obstinate
presumption, with which he had ridiculed and slighted John Marchmont's
vague fears of his kinsman Paul.

"So this man has been here,--is here constantly," he muttered. "Of
course, it is only natural that he should hang about the place. And you
and he are stanch allies, I suppose?" he added, turning upon Olivia.

"Stanch allies! Why?"

"Because you both hate my wife."

"What do you mean?"

"You both hate her. You, out of a base envy of her wealth; because of
her superior rights, which made you a secondary person in this house,
perhaps,--there is nothing else for which you _could_ hate her. Paul
Marchmont, because she stands between him and a fortune. Heaven help
her! Heaven help my poor, gentle, guileless darling! Surely Heaven must
have had some pity upon her when her husband was not by!"

The young man dashed the blinding tears from his eyes. They were the
first that he had shed since he had risen from that which many people
had thought his dying-bed, to search for his wife.

But this was no time for tears or lamentations. Stern determination
took the place of tender pity and sorrowful love. It was a time for
resolution and promptitude.

"Olivia Marchmont," he said, "there has been some foul play in this
business. My wife has been missing a month; yet when I asked my mother
what had happened at this house during my illness, she could tell me
nothing. Why did you not write to tell her of Mary's flight?"

"Because Mrs. Arundel has never done me the honour to cultivate any
intimacy between us. My father writes to his sister-in-law sometimes; I
scarcely ever write to my aunt. On the other hand, your mother had
never seen Mary Marchmont, and could not be expected to take any great
interest in her proceedings. There was, therefore, no reason for my
writing a special letter to announce the trouble that had befallen me."

"You might have written to my mother about my marriage. You might have
applied to her for confirmation of the story which you disbelieved."

Olivia Marchmont smiled.

"Should I have received that confirmation?" she said. "No. I saw your
mother's letters to my father. There was no mention in those letters of
any marriage; no mention whatever of Mary Marchmont. This in itself was
enough to confirm my disbelief. Was it reasonable to imagine that you
would have married, and yet have left your mother in total ignorance of
the fact?"

"O God, help me!" cried Edward Arundel, wringing his hands. "It seems
as if my own folly, my own vile procrastination, have brought this
trouble upon my wife. Olivia Marchmont, have pity upon me. If you hate
this girl, your malice must surely have been satisfied by this time.
She has suffered enough. Pity me, and help me; if you have any human
feeling in your breast. She left this house because her life here had
grown unendurable; because she saw herself doubted, disbelieved,
widowed in the first month of her marriage, utterly desolate and
friendless. Another woman might have borne up against all this misery.
Another woman would have known how to assert herself, and to defend
herself, even in the midst of her sorrow and desolation. But my poor
darling is a child; a baby in ignorance of the world. How should _she_
protect herself against her enemies? Her only instinct was to run away
from her persecutors,--to hide herself from those whose pretended
doubts flung the horror of dishonour upon her. I can understand all
now; I can understand. Olivia Marchmont, this man Paul has a strong
reason for being a villain. The motives that have induced you to do
wrong must be very small in comparison to his. He plays an infamous
game, I believe; but he plays for a high stake."

A high stake! Had not _she_ perilled her soul upon the casting of this
die? Had _she_ not flung down her eternal happiness in that fatal game
of hazard?

"Help me, then, Olivia," said Edward, imploringly; "help me to find my
wife; and atone for all that you have ever done amiss in the past. It
is not too late."

His voice softened as he spoke. He turned to her, with his hands
clasped, waiting anxiously for her answer. Perhaps this appeal was the
last cry of her good angel, pleading against the devils for her
redemption. But the devils had too long held possession of this woman's
breast. They arose, arrogant and unpitying, and hardened her heart
against that pleading voice.

"How much he loves her!" thought Olivia Marchmont; "how dearly he loves
her! For her sake he humiliates himself to me."

Then, with no show of relenting in her voice or manner, she said
deliberately:

"I can only tell you again what I told you before. The placard you saw
at the park-gates can tell you as much as I can. Mary Marchmont ran
away. She was sought for in every direction, but without success. Mr.
Marchmont, who is a man of the world, and better able to suggest what
is right in such a case as this, advised that Mr. Paulette should be
sent for. He was accordingly communicated with. He came, and instituted
a fresh search. He also caused a bill to be printed and distributed
through the country. Advertisements were inserted in the 'Times' and
other papers. For some reason--I forget what reason--Mary Marchmont's
name did not appear in these advertisements. They were so worded as to
render the publication of the name unnecessary."

Edward Arundel pushed his hand across his forehead.

"Richard Paulette has been here?" he murmured, in a low voice.

He had every confidence in the lawyer; and a deadly chill came over him
at the thought that the cool, hard-headed solicitor had failed to find
the missing girl.

"Yes; he was here two or three days."

"And he could do nothing?"

"Nothing, except what I have told you."

The young man thrust his hand into his breast to still the cruel
beating of his heart. A sudden terror had taken possession of him,--a
horrible dread that he should never look upon his young wife's face
again. For some minutes there was a dead silence in the room, only
broken once or twice by the falling of some ashes on the hearth.
Captain Arundel sat with his face hidden behind his hand. Olivia still
stood as she had stood when her cousin entered the room, erect and
gloomy, by the old-fashioned chimney-piece.

"There was something in that placard," the soldier said at last, in a
hoarse, altered voice,--"there was something about my wife having been
seen last by the water-side. Who saw her there?"

"Mr. Weston, a surgeon of Kemberling,--Paul Marchmont's
brother-in-law."

"Was she seen by no one else?"

"Yes; she was seen at about the same time--a little sooner or later, we
don't know which--by one of Farmer Pollard's men."

"And she has never been seen since?"

"Never; that is to say, we can hear of no one who has seen her."

"At what time in the day was she seen by this Mr. Weston?"

"At dusk; between five and six o'clock."

Edward Arundel put his hand suddenly to his throat, as if to check some
choking sensation that prevented his speaking.

"Olivia," he said, "my wife was last seen by the river-side. Does any
one think that, by any unhappy accident, by any terrible fatality, she
lost her way after dark, and fell into the water? or that--O God, that
would be too horrible!--does any one suspect that she drowned herself?"

"Many things have been said since her disappearance," Olivia Marchmont
answered. "Some people say one thing, some another."

"And it has been said that she--that she was drowned?"

"Yes; many people have said so. The river was dragged while Mr.
Paulette was here, and after he went away. The men were at work with
the drags for more than a week."

"And they found nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Was there any other reason for supposing that--that my wife fell into
the river?"

"Only one reason."

"What was that?"

"I will show you," Olivia Marchmont answered.

She took a bunch of keys from her pocket, and went to an old-fashioned
bureau or cabinet upon the other side of the room. She unlocked the
upper part of this bureau, opened one of the drawers, and took from it
something which she brought to Edward Arundel.

This something was a little shoe; a little shoe of soft bronzed
leather, stained and discoloured with damp and moss, and trodden down
upon one side, as if the wearer had walked a weary way in it, and had
been unaccustomed to so much walking.

Edward Arundel remembered, in that brief, childishly-happy honeymoon at
the little village near Winchester, how often he had laughed at his
young wife's propensity for walking about damp meadows in such delicate
little slippers as were better adapted to the requirements of a
ballroom. He remembered the slender foot, so small that he could take
it in his hand; the feeble little foot that had grown tired in long
wanderings by the Hampshire trout-streams, but which had toiled on in
heroic self-abnegation so long as it was the will of the sultan to
pedestrianise.

"Was this found by the river-side?" he asked, looking piteously at the
slipper which Mrs. Marchmont had put into his hand.

"Yes; it was found amongst the rushes on the shore, a mile below the
spot at which Mr. Weston saw my step-daughter."

Edward Arundel put the little shoe into his bosom.

"I'll not believe it," he cried suddenly; "I'll not believe that my
darling is lost to me. She was too good, far too good, to think of
suicide; and Providence would never suffer my poor lonely child to be
led away to a dreary death upon that dismal river-shore. No, no; she
fled away from this place because she was too wretched here. She went
away to hide herself amongst those whom she could trust, until her
husband came to claim her. I will believe anything in the world except
that she is lost to me. And I will not believe that, I will never
believe that, until I look down at her corpse; until I lay my hand on
her cold breast, and feel that her true heart has ceased beating. As I
went out of this place four months ago to look for her, I will go again
now. My darling, my darling, my innocent pet, my childish bride; I will
go to the very end of the world in search of you."

The widow ground her teeth as she listened to her kinsman's passionate
words. Why did he for ever goad her to blacker wickedness by this
parade of his love for Mary? Why did he force her to remember every
moment how much cause she had to hate this pale-faced girl?

Captain Arundel rose, and walked a few paces, leaning on his stick as
he went.

"You will sleep here to-night, of course?" Olivia Marchmont said.

"Sleep here!"

His tone expressed plainly enough that the place was abhorrent to him.

"Yes; where else should you stay?"

"I meant to have stopped at the nearest inn."

"The nearest inn is at Kemberling."

"That would suit me well enough," the young man answered indifferently;
"I must be in Kemberling early to-morrow, for I must see Paul
Marchmont. I am no nearer the comprehension of my wife's flight by
anything that you have told me. It is to Paul Marchmont that I must
look next. Heaven help him if he tries to keep the truth from me."

"You will see Mr. Marchmont here as easily as at Kemberling," Olivia
answered; "he comes here every day."

"What for?"

"He has built a sort of painting-room down by the river-side, and he
paints there whenever there is light."

"Indeed!" cried Edward Arundel; "he makes himself at home at Marchmont
Towers, then?"

"He has a right to do so, I suppose," answered the widow indifferently.
"If Mary Marchmont is dead, this place and all belonging to it is his.
As it is, I am only here on sufferance."

"He has taken possession, then?"

"On the contrary, he shrinks from doing so."

"And, by the Heaven above us, he does wisely," cried Edward Arundel.
"No man shall seize upon that which belongs to my darling. No foul plot
of this artist-traitor shall rob her of her own. God knows how little
value _I_ set upon her wealth; but I will stand between her and those
who try to rob her, until my last gasp. No, Olivia; I'll not stay here;
I'll accept no hospitality from Mr. Marchmont. I suspect him too much."

He walked to the door; but before he reached it the widow went to one
of the windows, and pushed aside the blind.

"Look at the rain," she said; "hark at it; don't you hear it, drip,
drip, drip upon the stone? I wouldn't turn a dog out of doors upon such
a night as this; and you--you are so ill--so weak. Edward Arundel, do
you hate me so much that you refuse to share the same shelter with me,
even for a night?"

There is nothing so difficult of belief to a man, who is not a coxcomb,
as the simple fact that he is beloved by a woman whom he does not love,
and has never wooed by word or deed. But for this, surely Edward
Arundel must, in that sudden burst of tenderness, that one piteous
appeal, have discovered a clue to his cousin's secret.

He discovered nothing; he guessed nothing. But he was touched by her
tone, even in spite of his utter ignorance of its meaning, and he
replied, in an altered manner,

"Certainly, Olivia, if you really wish it, I will stay. Heaven knows I
have no desire that you and I should be ill friends. I want your help;
your pity, perhaps. I am quite willing to believe that any cruel things
you said to Mary arose from an outbreak of temper. I cannot think that
you could be base at heart. I will even attribute your disbelief of the
statement made by my poor girl as to our marriage to the narrow
prejudices learnt in a small country town. Let us be friends, Olivia."

He held out his hand. His cousin laid her cold fingers in his open
palm, and he shuddered as if he had come in contact with a corpse.
There was nothing very cordial in the salutation. The two hands seemed
to drop asunder, lifeless and inert; as if to bear mute witness that
between these two people there was no possibility of sympathy or union.

But Captain Arundel accepted his cousin's hospitality. Indeed he had
need to do so; for he found that his valet had relied upon his master's
stopping at the Towers, and had sent the carriage back to Swampington.
A tray with cold meat and wine was brought into the drawing-room for
the young soldier's refreshment. He drank a glass of Madeira, and made
some pretence of eating a few mouthfuls, out of courtesy to Olivia; but
he did this almost mechanically. He sat silent and gloomy, brooding
over the terrible shock that he had so newly received; brooding over
the hidden things that had happened in that dreary interval, during
which he had been as powerless to defend his wife from trouble as a
dead man.

Again and again the cruel thought returned to him, each time with a
fresh agony,--that if he had written to his mother, if he had told her
the story of his marriage, the things which had happened could never
have come to pass. Mary would have been sheltered and protected by a
good and loving woman. This thought, this horrible self-reproach, was
the bitterest thing the young man had to bear.

"It is too great a punishment," he thought; "I am too cruelly punished
for having forgotten everything in my happiness with my darling."

The widow sat in her low easy-chair near the fire, with her eyes fixed
upon the burning coals; the grate had been replenished, and the light
of the red blaze shone full upon Olivia Marchmont's haggard face.
Edward Arundel, aroused for a few moments out of his gloomy
abstraction, was surprised at the change which an interval of a few
months had made in his cousin. The gloomy shadow which he had often
seen on her face had become a fixed expression; every line had
deepened, as if by the wear and tear of ten years, rather than by the
progress of a few months. Olivia Marchmont had grown old before her
time. Nor was this the only change. There was a look, undefined and
undefinable, in the large luminous grey eyes, unnaturally luminous now,
which filled Edward Arundel with a vague sense of terror; a terror
which he would not--which he dared not--attempt to analyse. He
remembered Mary's unreasoning fear of her stepmother, and he now
scarcely wondered at that fear. There was something almost weird and
unearthly in the aspect of the woman sitting opposite to him by the
broad hearth: no vestige of colour in her gloomy face, a strange light
burning in her eyes, and her black draperies falling round her in
straight, lustreless folds.

"I fear you have been ill, Olivia," the young man said, presently.

Another sentiment had arisen in his breast side by side with that vague
terror,--a fancy that perhaps there was some reason why his cousin
should be pitied.

"Yes," she answered indifferently; as if no subject of which Captain
Arundel could have spoken would have been of less concern to
her,--"yes, I have been very ill."

"I am sorry to hear it."

Olivia looked up at him and smiled. Her smile was the strangest he had
ever seen upon a woman's face.

"I am very sorry to hear it. What has been the matter with you?"

"Slow fever, Mr. Weston said."

"Mr. Weston?"

"Yes; Mr. Marchmont's brother-in-law. He has succeeded to Mr.
Dawnfield's practice at Kemberling. He attended me, and he attended my
step-daughter."

"My wife was ill, then?"

"Yes; she had brain-fever: she recovered from that, but she did not
recover strength. Her low spirits alarmed me, and I considered it only
right--Mr. Marchmont suggested also--that a medical man should be
consulted."

"And what did this man, this Mr. Weston, say?"

"Very little; there was nothing the matter with Mary, he said. He gave
her a little medicine, but only in the desire of strengthening her
nervous system. He could give her no medicine that would have any very
good effect upon her spirits, while she chose to keep herself
obstinately apart from every one."

The young man's head sank upon his breast. The image of his desolate
young wife arose before him; the image of a pale, sorrowful girl,
holding herself apart from her persecutors, abandoned, lonely,
despairing. Why had she remained at Marchmont Towers? Why had she ever
consented to go there, when she had again and again expressed such
terror of her stepmother? Why had she not rather followed her husband
down to Devonshire, and thrown herself upon his relatives for
protection? Was it like this girl to remain quietly here in
Lincolnshire, when the man she loved with such innocent devotion was
lying between life and death in the west?

"She is such a child," he thought,--"such a child in her ignorance of
the world. I must not reason about her as I would about another woman."

And then a sudden flush of passionate emotion rose to his face, as a
new thought flashed into his mind. What if this helpless girl had been
detained by force at Marchmont Towers?

"Olivia," he cried, "whatever baseness this man, Paul Marchmont, may be
capable of, you at least must be superior to any deliberate sin. I have
all my life believed in you, and respected you, as a good woman. Tell
me the truth, then, for pity's sake. Nothing that you can tell me will
fill up the dead blank that the horrible interval since my accident has
made in my life. But you can give me some help. A few words from you
may clear away much of this darkness. How did you find my wife? How did
you induce her to come back to this place? I know that she had an
unreasonable dread of returning here."

"I found her through the agency of Mr. Marchmont," Olivia answered,
quietly. "I had some difficulty in inducing her to return here; but
after hearing of your accident--"

"How was the news of that broken to her?"

"Unfortunately she saw a paper that had happened to be left in her
way."

"By whom?"

"By Mr. Marchmont."

"Where was this?"

"In Hampshire."

"Indeed! Then Paul Marchmont went with you to Hampshire?"

"He did. He was of great service to me in this crisis. After seeing the
paper, my stepdaughter was seized with brain-fever. She was unconscious
when we brought her back to the Towers. She was nursed by my old
servant Barbara, and had the highest medical care. I do not think that
anything more could have been done for her."

"No," answered Edward Arundel, bitterly; "unless you could have loved
her."

"We cannot force our affections," the widow said, in a hard voice.

Another voice in her breast seemed to whisper, "Why do you reproach me
for not having loved this girl? If you had loved _me_, the whole world
would have been different."

"Olivia Marchmont," said Captain Arundel, "by your own avowal there has
never been any affection for this orphan girl in your heart. It is not
my business to dwell upon the fact, as something almost unnatural under
the peculiar circumstances through which that helpless child was cast
upon your protection. It is needless to try to understand why you have
hardened your heart against my poor wife. Enough that it is so. But I
may still believe that, whatever your feelings may be towards your dead
husband's daughter, you would not be guilty of any deliberate act of
treachery against her. I can afford to believe this of you; but I
cannot believe it of Paul Marchmont. That man is my wife's natural
enemy. If he has been here during my illness, he has been here to plot
against her. When he came here, he came to attempt her destruction. She
stands between him and this estate. Long ago, when I was a careless
schoolboy, my poor friend, John Marchmont, told me that, if ever the
day came upon which Mary's interests should be opposed to the interests
of her cousin, that man would be a dire and bitter enemy; so much the
more terrible because in all appearance her friend. The day came; and
I, to whom the orphan girl had been left as a sacred legacy, was not by
to defend her. But I have risen from a bed that many have thought a bed
of death; and I come to this place with one indomitable resolution
paramount in my breast,--the determination to find my wife, and to
bring condign punishment upon the man who has done her wrong."

Captain Arundel spoke in a low voice; but his passion was all the more
terrible because of the suppression of those common outward evidences
by which anger ordinarily betrays itself. He relapsed into thoughtful
silence.

Olivia made no answer to anything that he had said. She sat looking at
him steadily, with an admiring awe in her face. How splendid he
was--this young hero--even in his sickness and feebleness! How
splendid, by reason of the grand courage, the chivalrous devotion, that
shone out of his blue eyes!

The clock struck eleven while the cousins sat opposite to each
other,--only divided, physically, by the width of the tapestried
hearth-rug; but, oh, how many weary miles asunder in spirit!--and
Edward Arundel rose, startled from his sorrowful reverie.

"If I were a strong man," he said, "I would see Paul Marchmont
to-night. But I must wait till to-morrow morning. At what time does he
come to his painting-room?"'

"At eight o'clock, when the mornings are bright; but later when the
weather is dull."

"At eight o'clock! I pray Heaven the sun may shine early to-morrow! I
pray Heaven I may not have to wait long before I find myself face to
face with that man! Good-night, Olivia."

He took a candle from a table near the door, and lit it almost
mechanically. He found Mr. Morrison waiting for him, very sleepy and
despondent, in a large bedchamber in which Captain Arundel had never
slept before,--a dreary apartment, decked out with the faded splendours
of the past; a chamber in which the restless sleeper might expect to
see a phantom lady in a ghostly sacque, cowering over the embers, and
spreading her transparent hands above the red light.

"It isn't particular comfortable, after Dangerfield," the valet
muttered in a melancholy voice; "and all I 'ope, Mr. Edward, is, that
the sheets are not damp. I've been a stirrin' of the fire and puttin'
on fresh coals for the last hour. There's a bed for me in the dressin'
room, within call."

Captain Arundel scarcely heard what his servant said to him. He was
standing at the door of the spacious chamber, looking out into a long
low-roofed corridor, in which he had just encountered Barbara, Mrs.
Marchmont's confidential attendant,--the wooden-faced,
inscrutable-looking woman, who, according to Olivia, had watched and
ministered to his wife.

"Was that the tenderest face that looked down upon my darling as she
lay on her sick-bed?" he thought. "I had almost as soon have had a
ghoul to watch by my poor dear's pillow."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PAINTING-ROOM BY THE RIVER.

Edward Arundel lay awake through the best part of that November night,
listening to the ceaseless dripping of the rain upon the terrace, and
thinking of Paul Marchmont. It was of this man that he must demand an
account of his wife. Nothing that Olivia had told him had in any way
lessened this determination. The little slipper found by the water's
edge; the placard flapping on the moss-grown pillar at the entrance to
the park; the story of a possible suicide, or a more probable
accident;--all these things were as nothing beside the young man's
suspicion of Paul Marchmont. He had pooh-poohed John's dread of his
kinsman as weak and unreasonable; and now, with the same unreason, he
was ready to condemn this man, whom he had never seen, as a traitor and
a plotter against his young wife.

He lay tossing from side to side all that night, weak and feverish,
with great drops of cold perspiration rolling down his pale face,
sometimes falling into a fitful sleep, in whose distorted dreams Paul
Marchmont was for ever present, now one man, now another. There was no
sense of fitness in these dreams; for sometimes Edward Arundel and the
artist were wrestling together with newly-sharpened daggers in their
eager hands, each thirsting for the other's blood; and in the next
moment they were friends, and had been friendly--as it seemed--for
years.

The young man woke from one of these last dreams, with words of
good-fellowship upon his lips, to find the morning light gleaming
through the narrow openings in the damask window-curtains, and Mr.
Morrison laying out his master's dressing apparatus upon the carved oak
toilette-table.

Captain Arundel dressed himself as fast as he could, with the
assistance of the valet, and then made his way down the broad
staircase, with the help of his cane, upon which he had need to lean
pretty heavily, for he was as weak as a child.

"You had better give me the brandy-flask, Morrison," he said. "I am
going out before breakfast. You may as well come with me, by-the-by;
for I doubt if I could walk as far as I want to go, without the help of
your arm."

In the hall Captain Arundel found one of the servants. The western door
was open, and the man was standing on the threshold looking out at the
morning. The rain had ceased; but the day did not yet promise to be
very bright, for the sun gleamed like a ball of burnished copper
through a pale November mist.

"Do you know if Mr. Paul Marchmont has gone down to the boat-house?"
Edward asked.

"Yes, sir," the man answered; "I met him just now in the quadrangle.
He'd been having a cup of coffee with my mistress."

Edward started. They were friends, then, Paul Marchmont and
Olivia!--friends, but surely not allies! Whatever villany this man
might be capable of committing, Olivia must at least be guiltless of
any deliberate treachery?

Captain Arundel took his servant's arm and walked out into the
quadrangle, and from the quadrangle to the low-lying woody swamp, where
the stunted trees looked grim and weird-like in their leafless
ugliness. Weak as the young man was, he walked rapidly across the
sloppy ground, which had been almost flooded by the continual rains. He
was borne up by his fierce desire to be face to face with Paul
Marchmont. The savage energy of his mind was stronger than any physical
debility. He dismissed Mr. Morrison as soon as he was within sight of
the boat-house, and went on alone, leaning on his stick, and pausing
now and then to draw breath, angry with himself for his weakness.

The boat-house, and the pavilion above it, had been patched up by some
country workmen. A handful of plaster here and there, a little new
brickwork, and a mended window-frame bore witness of this. The
ponderous old-fashioned wooden shutters had been repaired, and a good
deal of the work which had been begun in John Marchmont's lifetime had
now, in a certain rough manner, been completed. The place, which had
hitherto appeared likely to fall into utter decay, had been rendered
weather-tight and habitable; the black smoke creeping slowly upward
from the ivy-covered chimney, gave evidence of occupation. Beyond this,
a large wooden shed, with a wide window fronting the north, had been
erected close against the boat-house. This rough shed Edward Arundel at
once understood to be the painting-room which the artist had built for
himself.

He paused a moment outside the door of this shed. A man's voice--a
tenor voice, rather thin and metallic in quality--was singing a scrap
of Rossini upon the other side of the frail woodwork.

Edward Arundel knocked with the handle of his stick upon the door. The
voice left off singing, to say "Come in."

The soldier opened the door, crossed the threshold, and stood face to
face with Paul Marchmont in the bare wooden shed. The painter had
dressed himself for his work. His coat and waistcoat lay upon a chair
near the door. He had put on a canvas jacket, and had drawn a loose
pair of linen trousers over those which belonged to his usual costume.
So far as this paint-besmeared coat and trousers went, nothing could
have been more slovenly than Paul Marchmont's appearance; but some
tincture of foppery exhibited itself in the black velvet smoking-cap,
which contrasted with and set off the silvery whiteness of his hair, as
well as in the delicate curve of his amber moustache. A moustache was
not a very common adornment in the year 1848. It was rather an
eccentricity affected by artists, and permitted as the wild caprice of
irresponsible beings, not amenable to the laws that govern rational and
respectable people.

Edward Arundel sharply scrutinised the face and figure of the artist.
He cast a rapid glance round the bare whitewashed walls of the shed,
trying to read even in those bare walls some chance clue to the
painter's character. But there was not much to be gleaned from the
details of that almost empty chamber. A dismal, black-looking iron
stove, with a crooked chimney, stood in one corner. A great easel
occupied the centre of the room. A sheet of tin, nailed upon a wooden
shutter, swung backwards and forwards against the northern window,
blown to and fro by the damp wind that crept in through the crevices in
the framework of the roughly-fashioned casement. A heap of canvases
were piled against the walls, and here and there a half-finished
picture--a lurid Turneresque landscape; a black stormy sky; or a rocky
mountain-pass, dyed blood-red by the setting sun--was propped up
against the whitewashed background. Scattered scraps of water-colour,
crayon, old engravings, sketches torn and tumbled, bits of rockwork and
foliage, lay littered about the floor; and on a paint-stained
deal-table of the roughest and plainest fashion were gathered the
colour-tubes and palettes, the brushes and sponges and dirty cloths,
the greasy and sticky tin-cans, which form the paraphernalia of an
artist. Opposite the northern window was the moss-grown stone-staircase
leading up to the pavilion over the boat-house. Mr. Marchmont had built
his painting-room against the side of the pavilion, in such a manner as
to shut in the staircase and doorway which formed the only entrance to
it. His excuse for the awkwardness of this piece of architecture was
the impossibility of otherwise getting the all-desirable northern light
for the illumination of his rough studio.

This was the chamber in which Edward Arundel found the man from whom he
came to demand an account of his wife's disappearance. The artist was
evidently quite prepared to receive his visitor. He made no pretence of
being taken off his guard, as a meaner pretender might have done. One
of Paul Marchmont's theories was, that as it is only a fool who would
use brass where he could as easily employ gold, so it is only a fool
who tells a lie when he can conveniently tell the truth.

"Captain Arundel, I believe?" he said, pushing a chair forward for his
visitor. "I am sorry to say I recognise you by your appearance of ill
health. Mrs. Marchmont told me you wanted to see me. Does my meerschaum
annoy you? I'll put it out if it does. No? Then, if you'll allow me,
I'll go on smoking. Some people say tobacco-smoke gives a tone to one's
pictures. If so, mine ought to be Rembrandts in depth of colour."

Edward Arundel dropped into the chair that had been offered to him. If
he could by any possibility have rejected even this amount of
hospitality from Paul Marchmont, he would have done so; but he was a
great deal too weak to stand, and he knew that his interview with the
artist must be a long one.

"Mr. Marchmont," he said, "if my cousin Olivia told you that you might
expect to see me here to-day, she most likely told you a great deal
more. Did she tell you that I looked to you to account to me for the
disappearance of my wife?"

Paul Marchmont shrugged his shoulders, as who should say, "This young
man is an invalid. I must not suffer myself to be aggravated by his
absurdity." Then taking his meerschaum from his lips, he set it down,
and seated himself at a few paces from Edward Arundel on the lowest of
the moss-grown steps leading up to the pavilion.

"My dear Captain Arundel," he said, very gravely, "your cousin did
repeat to me a great deal of last night's conversation. She told me
that you had spoken of me with a degree of violence, natural enough
perhaps to a hot-tempered young soldier, but in no manner justified by
our relations. When you call upon me to account for the disappearance
of Mary Marchmont, you act about as rationally as if you declared me
answerable for the pulmonary complaint that carried away her father.
If, on the other hand, you call upon me to assist you in the endeavour
to fathom the mystery of her disappearance, you will find me ready and
willing to aid you to the very uttermost. It is to my interest as much
as to yours that this mystery should be cleared up."

"And in the meantime you take possession of this estate?"

"No, Captain Arundel. The law would allow me to do so; but I decline to
touch one farthing of the revenue which this estate yields, or to
commit one act of ownership, until the mystery of Mary Marchmont's
disappearance, or of her death, is cleared up."

"The mystery of her death?" said Edward Arundel; "you believe, then,
that she is dead?"

"I anticipate nothing; I think nothing," answered the artist; "I only
wait. The mysteries of life are so many and so incomprehensible,--the
stories, which are every day to be read by any man who takes the
trouble to look through a newspaper, are so strange, and savour so much
of the improbabilities of a novel-writer's first wild fiction,--that I
am ready to believe everything and anything. Mary Marchmont struck me,
from the first moment in which I saw her, as sadly deficient in mental
power. Nothing she could do would astonish me. She may be hiding
herself away from us, prompted only by some eccentric fancy of her own.
She may have fallen into the power of designing people. She may have
purposely placed her slipper by the water-side, in order to give the
idea of an accident or a suicide; or she may have dropped it there by
chance, and walked barefoot to the nearest railway-station. She acted
unreasonably before when she ran away from Marchmont Towers; she may
have acted unreasonably again."

"You do not think, then, that she is dead?"

"I hesitate to form any opinion; I positively decline to express one."

Edward Arundel gnawed savagely at the ends of his moustache. This man's
cool imperturbability, which had none of the studied smoothness of
hypocrisy, but which seemed rather the plain candour of a thorough man
of the world, who had no wish to pretend to any sentiment he did not
feel, baffled and infuriated the passionate young soldier. Was it
possible that this man, who met him with such cool self-assertion, who
in no manner avoided any discussion of Mary Marchmont's
disappearance,--was it possible that he could have had any treacherous
and guilty part in that calamity? Olivia's manner looked like guilt;
but Paul Marchmont's seemed the personification of innocence. Not angry
innocence, indignant that its purity should have been suspected; but
the matter-of-fact, commonplace innocence of a man of the world, who is
a great deal too clever to play any hazardous and villanous game.

"You can perhaps answer me this question, Mr. Marchmont," said Edward
Arundel. "Why was my wife doubted when she told the story of her
marriage?"

The artist smiled, and rising from his seat upon the stone step, took a
pocket-book from one of the pockets of the coat that he had been
wearing.

"I _can_ answer that question," he said, selecting a paper from amongst
others in the pocket-book. "This will answer it."

He handed Edward Arundel the paper, which was a letter folded
lengthways, and indorsed, "From Mrs. Arundel, August 31st." Within this
letter was another paper, indorsed, "Copy of letter to Mrs. Arundel,
August 28th."

"You had better read the copy first," Mr. Marchmont said, as Edward
looked doubtfully at the inner paper.

The copy was very brief, and ran thus:

"Marchmont Towers, August 28, 1848.

"MADAM,--I have been given to understand that your son, Captain
Arundel, within a fortnight of his sad accident, contracted a secret
marriage with a young lady, whose name I, for several reasons, prefer
to withhold. If you can oblige me by informing me whether there is any
foundation for this statement, you will confer a very great favour upon

"Your obedient servant,

"PAUL MARCHMONT."

The answer to this letter, in the hand of Edward Arundel's mother, was
equally brief:

"Dangerfield Park, August 31, 1848.

"SIR,--In reply to your inquiry, I beg to state that there can be no
foundation whatever for the report to which you allude. My son is too
honourable to contract a secret marriage; and although his present
unhappy state renders it impossible for me to receive the assurance
from his own lips, my confidence in his high principles justifies me in
contradicting any such report as that which forms the subject of your
letter.

"I am, sir,

"Yours obediently,

"LETITIA ARUNDEL."

The soldier stood, mute and confounded, with his mother's letter in his
hand. It seemed as if every creature had been against the helpless girl
whom he had made his wife. Every hand had been lifted to drive her from
the house that was her own; to drive her out upon the world, of which
she was ignorant, a wanderer and an outcast; perhaps to drive her to a
cruel death.

"You can scarcely wonder if the receipt of that letter confirmed me in
my previous belief that Mary Marchmont's story of a marriage arose out
of the weakness of a brain, never too strong, and at that time very
much enfeebled by the effect of a fever."

Edward Arundel was silent. He crushed his mother's letter in his hand.
Even his mother--even his mother--that tender and compassionate woman,
whose protection he had so freely promised, ten years before, in the
lobby of Drury Lane, to John Marchmont's motherless child,--even she,
by some hideous fatality, had helped to bring grief and shame upon the
lonely girl. All this story of his young wife's disappearance seemed
enveloped in a wretched obscurity, through whose thick darkness he
could not penetrate. He felt himself encompassed by a web of mystery,
athwart which it was impossible to cut his way to the truth. He asked
question after question, and received answers which seemed freely
given; but the story remained as dark as ever. What did it all mean?
What was the clue to the mystery? Was this man, Paul Marchmont,--busy
amongst his unfinished pictures, and bearing in his every action, in
his every word, the stamp of an easy-going, free-spoken soldier of
fortune,--likely to have been guilty of any dark and subtle villany
against the missing girl? He had disbelieved in the marriage; but he
had had some reason for his doubt of a fact that could not very well be
welcome to him.

The young man rose from his chair, and stood irresolute, brooding over
these things.

"Come, Captain Arundel," cried Paul Marchmont, heartily, "believe me,
though I have not much superfluous sentimentality left in my
composition after a pretty long encounter with the world, still I can
truly sympathise with your regret for this poor silly child. I hope,
for your sake, that she still lives, and is foolishly hiding herself
from us all. Perhaps, now you are able to act in the business, there
may be a better chance of finding her. I am old enough to be your
father, and am ready to give you the help of any knowledge of the world
which I may have gathered in the experience of a lifetime. Will you
accept my help?"

Edward Arundel paused for a moment, with his head still bent, and his
eyes fixed upon the ground. Then suddenly lifting his head, he looked
full in the artist's face as he answered him.

"No!" he cried. "Your offer may be made in all good faith, and if so, I
thank you for it; but no one loves this missing girl as I love her; no
one has so good a right as I have to protect and shelter her. I will
look for my wife, alone, unaided; except by such help as I pray that
God may give me."

CHAPTER IX.

IN THE DARK.

Edward Arundel walked slowly back to the Towers, shaken in body,
perplexed in mind, baffled, disappointed, and most miserable; the young
husband, whose married life had been shut within the compass of a brief
honeymoon, went back to that dark and gloomy mansion within whose
encircling walls Mary had pined and despaired.

"Why did she stop here?" he thought; "why didn't she come to me? I
thought her first impulse would have brought her to me. I thought my
poor childish love would have set out on foot to seek her husband, if
need were."

He groped his way feebly and wearily amidst the leafless wood, and
through the rotting vegetation decaying in oozy slime beneath the black
shelter of the naked trees. He groped his way towards the dismal
eastern front of the great stone dwelling-house, his face always turned
towards the blank windows, that stared down at him from the discoloured
walls.

"Oh, if they could speak!" he exclaimed, almost beside himself in his
perplexity and desperation; "if they could speak! If those cruel walls
could find a voice, and tell me what my darling suffered within their
shadow! If they could tell me why she despaired, and ran away to hide
herself from her husband and protector! _If_ they could speak!"

He ground his teeth in a passion of sorrowful rage.

"I should gain as much by questioning yonder stone wall as by talking
to my cousin, Olivia Marchmont," he thought, presently. "Why is that
woman so venomous a creature in her hatred of my innocent wife? Why is
it that, whether I threaten, or whether I appeal, I can gain nothing
from her--nothing? She baffles me as completely by her measured
answers, which seem to reply to my questions, and which yet tell me
nothing, as if she were a brazen image set up by the dark ignorance of
a heathen people, and dumb in the absence of an impostor-priest. She
baffles me, question her how I will. And Paul Marchmont, again,--what
have I learned from him? Am I a fool, that people can prevaricate and
lie to me like this? Has my brain no sense, and my arm no strength,
that I cannot wring the truth from the false throats of these
wretches?"

The young man gnashed his teeth again in the violence of his rage.

Yes, it was like a dream; it was like nothing but a dream. In dreams he
had often felt this terrible sense of impotence wrestling with a mad
desire to achieve something or other. But never before in his waking
hours had the young soldier experienced such a sensation.

He stopped, irresolute, almost bewildered, looking back at the
boat-house, a black spot far away down by the sedgy brink of the slow
river, and then again turning his face towards the monotonous lines of
windows in the eastern frontage of Marchmont Towers.

"I let that man play with me to-day," he thought; "but our reckoning is
to come. We have not done with each other yet."

He walked on towards the low archway leading into the quadrangle.

The room which had been John Marchmont's study, and which his widow had
been wont to occupy since his death, looked into this quadrangle.
Edward Arundel saw his cousin's dark head bending over a book, or a
desk perhaps, behind the window.

"Let her beware of me, if she has done any wrong to my wife!" he
thought. "To which of these people am I to look for an account of my
poor lost girl? To which of these two am I to look! Heaven guide me to
find the guilty one; and Heaven have mercy upon that wretched creature
when the hour of reckoning comes; for I will have none."

Olivia Marchmont, looking through the window, saw her kinsman's face
while this thought was in his mind. The expression which she saw there
was so terrible, so merciless, so sublime in its grand and vengeful
beauty, that her own face blanched even to a paler hue than that which
had lately become habitual to it.

"Am I afraid of him?" she thought, as she pressed her forehead against
the cold glass, and by a physical effort restrained the convulsive
trembling that had suddenly shaken her frame. "Am I afraid of him? No;
what injury can he inflict upon me worse than that which he has done me
from the very first? If he could drag me to a scaffold, and deliver me
with his own hands into the grasp of the hangman, he would do me no
deeper wrong than he has done me from the hour of my earliest
remembrance of him. He could inflict no new pangs, no sharper tortures,
than I have been accustomed to suffer at his hands. He does not love
me. He has never loved me. He never will love me. _That_ is my wrong;
and it is for that I take my revenge!"

She lifted her head, which had rested in a sullen attitude against the
glass, and looked at the soldier's figure slowly advancing towards the
western side of the house.

Then, with a smile,--the same horrible smile which Edward Arundel had
seen light up her face on the previous night,--she muttered between her
set teeth:--

"Shall I be sorry because this vengeance has fallen across my pathway?
Shall I repent, and try to undo what I have done? Shall I thrust myself
between others and Mr. Edward Arundel? Shall _I_ make myself the ally
and champion of this gallant soldier, who seldom speaks to me except to
insult and upbraid me? Shall _I_ take justice into my hands, and
interfere for my kinsman's benefit? No; he has chosen to threaten me;
he has chosen to believe vile things of me. From the first his
indifference has been next kin to insolence. Let him take care of
himself."

Edward Arundel took no heed of the grey eyes that watched him with such
a vengeful light in their fixed gaze. He was still thinking of his
missing wife, still feeling, to a degree that was intolerably painful,
that miserable dream-like sense of helplessness and prostration.

"What am I to do?" he thought. "Shall I be for ever going backwards and
forwards between my Cousin Olivia and Paul Marchmont; for ever
questioning them, first one and then the other, and never getting any
nearer to the truth?"

He asked himself this question, because the extreme anguish, the
intense anxiety, which he had endured, seemed to have magnified the
smallest events, and to have multiplied a hundred-fold the lapse of
time. It seemed as if he had already spent half a lifetime in his
search after John Marchmont's lost daughter.

"O my friend, my friend!" he thought, as some faint link of
association, some memory thrust upon him by the aspect of the place in
which he was, brought back the simple-minded tutor who had taught him
mathematics eighteen years before,--"my poor friend, if this girl had
not been my love and my wife, surely the memory of your trust in me
would be enough to make me a desperate and merciless avenger of her
wrongs."

He went into the hall, and from the hall to the tenantless western
drawing-room,--a dreary chamber, with its grim and faded splendour, its
stiff, old-fashioned furniture; a chamber which, unadorned by the
presence of youth and innocence, had the aspect of belonging to a day
that was gone, and people that were dead. So might have looked one of
those sealed-up chambers in the buried cities of Italy, when the doors
were opened, and eager living eyes first looked in upon the habitations
of the dead.

Edward Arundel walked up and down the empty drawing-room. There were
the ivory chessmen that he had brought from India, under a glass shade
on an inlaid table in a window. How often he and Mary had played
together in that very window; and how she had always lost her pawns,
and left bishops and knights undefended, while trying to execute
impossible manoeuvres with her queen! The young man paced slowly
backwards and forwards across the old-fashioned bordered carpet, trying
to think what he should do. He must form some plan of action in his own
mind, he thought. There was foul work somewhere, he most implicitly
believed; and it was for him to discover the motive of the treachery,
and the person of the traitor.

Paul Marchmont! Paul Marchmont!

His mind always travelled back to this point. Paul Marchmont was Mary's
natural enemy. Paul Marchmont was therefore surely the man to be
suspected, the man to be found out and defeated.

And yet, if there was any truth in appearances, it was Olivia who was
most inimical to the missing girl; it was Olivia whom Mary had feared;
it was Olivia who had driven John Marchmont's orphan-child from her
home once, and who might, by the same power to tyrannise and torture a
weak and yielding nature, have so banished her again.

Or these two, Paul and Olivia, might both hate the defenceless girl,
and might have between them plotted a wrong against her.

"Who will tell me the truth about my lost darling?" cried Edward
Arundel. "Who will help me to look for my missing love?"

His lost darling; his missing love. It was thus that the young man
spoke of his wife. That dark thought which had been suggested to him by
the words of Olivia, by the mute evidence of the little bronze slipper
picked up near the river-brink, had never taken root, or held even a
temporary place in his breast. He would not--nay, more, he could
not--think that his wife was dead. In all his confused and miserable
dreams that dreary November night, no dream had ever shown him _that_.
No image of death had mingled itself with the distorted shadows that
had tormented his sleep. No still white face had looked up at him
through a veil of murky waters. No moaning sob of a rushing stream had
mixed its dismal sound with the many voices of his slumbers. No; he
feared all manner of unknown sorrows; he looked vaguely forward to a
sea of difficulty, to be waded across in blindness and bewilderment
before he could clasp his rescued wife in his arms; but he never
thought that she was dead.

Presently the idea came to him that it was outside Marchmont
Towers,--away, beyond the walls of this grim, enchanted castle, where
evil spirits seemed to hold possession,--that he should seek for the
clue to his wife's hiding-place.

"There is Hester, that girl who was fond of Mary," he thought; "she may
be able to tell me something, perhaps. I will go to her."

He went out into the hall to look for his servant, the faithful
Morrison, who had been eating a very substantial breakfast with the
domestics of the Towers--"the sauce to meat" being a prolonged
discussion of the facts connected with Mary Marchmont's disappearance
and her relations with Edward Arundel--and who came, radiant and greasy
from the enjoyment of hot buttered cakes and Lincolnshire bacon, at the
sound of his master's voice.

"I want you to get me some vehicle, and a lad who will drive me a few
miles, Morrison," the young soldier said; "or you can drive me
yourself, perhaps?"

"Certainly, Master Edward; I have driven your pa often, when we was
travellin' together. I'll go and see if there's a phee-aton or a shay
that will suit you, sir; something that goes easy on its springs."

"Get anything," muttered Captain Arundel, "so long as you can get it
without loss of time."

All fuss and anxiety upon the subject of his health worried the young
man. He felt his head dizzied with weakness and excitement; his
arm--that muscular right arm, which had done him good service two years
before in an encounter with a tigress--was weaker than the jewel-bound
wrist of a woman. But he chafed against anything like consideration of
his weakness; he rebelled against anything that seemed likely to hinder
him in that one object upon which all the powers of his mind were bent.

Mr. Morrison went away with some show of briskness, but dropped into a
very leisurely pace as soon as he was fairly out of his master's sight.
He went straight to the stables, where he had a pleasant gossip with
the grooms and hangers-on, and amused himself further by inspecting
every bit of horseflesh in the Marchmont stables, prior to selecting a
quiet grey cob which he felt himself capable of driving, and an
old-fashioned gig with a yellow body and black and yellow wheels,
bearing a strong resemblance to a monstrous wooden wasp.

While the faithful attendant to whom Mrs. Arundel had delegated the
care of her son was thus employed, the soldier stood in the stone hall,
looking out at the dreary wintry landscape, and pining to hurry away
across the dismal swamps to the village in which he hoped to hear
tidings of her he sought. He was lounging in a deep oaken window-seat,
looking hopelessly at that barren prospect, that monotonous expanse of
flat morass and leaden sky, when he heard a footstep behind him; and
turning round saw Olivia's confidential servant, Barbara Simmons, the
woman who had watched by his wife's sick-bed,--the woman whom he had
compared to a ghoule.

She was walking slowly across the hall towards Olivia's room, whither a
bell had just summoned her. Mrs. Marchmont had lately grown fretful and
capricious, and did not care to be waited upon by any one except this
woman, who had known her from her childhood, and was no stranger to her
darkest moods.

Edward Arundel had determined to appeal to every living creature who
was likely to know anything of his wife's disappearance, and he
snatched the first opportunity of questioning this woman.

"Stop, Mrs. Simmons," he said, moving away from the window; "I want to
speak to you; I want to talk to you about my wife."

The woman turned to him with a blank face, whose expressionless stare
might mean either genuine surprise or an obstinate determination not to
understand anything that might be said to her.

"Your wife, Captain Arundel!" she said, in cold measured tones, but
with an accent of astonishment.

"Yes; my wife. Mary Marchmont, my lawfully-wedded wife. Look here,
woman," cried Edward Arundel; "if you cannot accept the word of a
soldier, and an honourable man, you can perhaps believe the evidence of
your eyes."

He took a morocco memorandum-book from his breast-pocket. It was full
of letters, cards, bank-notes, and miscellaneous scraps of paper
carelessly stuffed into it, and amongst them Captain Arundel found the
certificate of his marriage, which he had put away at random upon his
wedding morning, and which had lain unheeded in his pocket-book ever
since.

"Look here," he cried, spreading the document before the
waiting-woman's eyes, and pointing, with a shaking hand, to the lines.
"You believe that, I suppose?"

"O yes, sir," Barbara Simmons answered, after deliberately reading the
certificate. "I have no reason to disbelieve it; no wish to disbelieve
it."

"No; I suppose not," muttered Edward Arundel, "unless you too are
leagued with Paul Marchmont."

The woman did not flinch at this hinted accusation, but answered the
young man in that slow and emotionless manner which no change of
circumstance seemed to have power to alter.

"I am leagued with no one, sir," she said, coldly. "I serve no one
except my mistress, Miss Olivia--I mean Mrs. Marchmont."

The study-bell rang for the second time while she was speaking.

"I must go to my mistress now, sir," she said. "You heard her ringing
for me."

"Go, then, and let me see you as you come back. I tell you I must and
will speak to you. Everybody in this house tries to avoid me. It seems
as if I was not to get a straight answer from any one of you. But I
_will_ know all that is to be known about my lost wife. Do you hear,
woman? I will know!"

"I will come back to you directly, sir," Barbara Simmons answered
quietly.

The leaden calmness of this woman's manner irritated Edward Arundel
beyond all power of expression. Before his cousin Olivia's gloomy
coldness he had been flung back upon himself as before an iceberg; but
every now and then some sudden glow of fiery emotion had shot up amid
that frigid mass, lurid and blazing, and the iceberg had been
transformed into an angry and passionate woman, who might, in that
moment of fierce emotion, betray the dark secrets of her soul. But
_this_ woman's manner presented a passive barrier, athwart which the
young soldier was as powerless to penetrate as he would have been to
walk through a block of solid stone.

Olivia was like some black and stony castle, whose barred windows bade
defiance to the besieger, but behind whose narrow casements transient
flashes of light gleamed fitfully upon the watchers without, hinting at
the mysteries that were hidden within the citadel.

Barbara Simmons resembled a blank stone wall, grimly confronting the
eager traveller, and giving no indication whatever of the unknown
country on the other side.

She came back almost immediately, after being only a few moments in
Olivia's room,--certainly not long enough to consult with her mistress
as to what she was to say or to leave unsaid,--and presented herself
before Captain Arundel.

"If you have any questions to ask, sir, about Miss Marchmont--about
your wife--I shall be happy to answer them," she said.

"I have a hundred questions to ask," exclaimed the young man; "but
first answer me this one plainly and truthfully--Where do you think my
wife has gone? What do you think has become of her?"

The woman was silent for a few moments, and then answered very
gravely,--

"I would rather not say what I think, sir."

"Why not?"

"Because I might say that which would make you unhappy."

"Can anything be more miserable to me than the prevarication which I
meet with on every side?" cried Edward Arundel. "If you or any one else
will be straightforward with me--remembering that I come to this place
like a man who has risen from the grave, depending wholly on the word
of others for the knowledge of that which is more vital to me than
anything upon this earth--that person will be the best friend I have
found since I rose from my sick-bed to come hither. You can have had no
motive--if you are not in Paul Marchmont's pay--for being cruel to my
poor girl. Tell me the truth, then; speak, and speak fearlessly."

"I have no reason to fear, sir," answered Barbara Simmons, lifting her
faded eyes to the young man's eager face, with a gaze that seemed to
say, "I have done no wrong, and I do not shrink from justifying
myself." "I have no reason to fear, sir; I was piously brought up, and
have done my best always to do my duty in the state of life in which
Providence has been pleased to place me. I have not had a particularly
happy life, sir; for thirty years ago I lost all that made me happy, in
them that loved me, and had a claim to love me. I have attached myself
to my mistress; but it isn't for me to expect a lady like her would
stoop to make me more to her or nearer to her than I have a right to be
as a servant."

There was no accent of hypocrisy or cant in any one of these
deliberately-spoken words. It seemed as if in this speech the woman had
told the history of her life; a brief, unvarnished history of a barren
life, out of which all love and sunlight had been early swept away,
leaving behind a desolate blank, that was not destined to be filled up
by any affection from the young mistress so long and patiently served.

"I am faithful to my mistress, sir," Barbara Simmons added, presently;
"and I try my best to do my duty to her. I owe no duty to any one
else."

"You owe a duty to humanity," answered Edward Arundel. "Woman, do you
think duty is a thing to be measured by line and rule? Christ came to
save the lost sheep of the children of Israel; but was He less pitiful
to the Canaanitish woman when she carried her sorrows to His feet? You
and your mistress have made hard precepts for yourselves, and have
tried to live by them. You try to circumscribe the area of your
Christian charity, and to do good within given limits. The traveller
who fell among thieves would have died of his wounds, for any help he
might have had from you, if he had lain beyond your radius. Have you
yet to learn that Christianity is cosmopolitan, illimitable,
inexhaustible, subject to no laws of time or space? The duty you owe to
your mistress is a duty that she buys and pays for--a matter of sordid
barter, to be settled when you take your wages; the duty you owe to
every miserable creature in your pathway is a sacred debt, to be
accounted for to God."

As the young soldier spoke thus, carried away by his passionate
agitation, suddenly eloquent by reason of the intensity of his feeling,
a change came over Barbara's face. There was no very palpable evidence
of emotion in that stolid countenance; but across the wooden blankness
of the woman's face flitted a transient shadow, which was like the
shadow of fear.

"I tried to do my duty to Miss Marchmont as well as to my mistress,"
she said. "I waited on her faithfully while she was ill. I sat up with
her six nights running; I didn't take my clothes off for a week. There
are folks in the house who can tell you as much."

"God knows I am grateful to you, and will reward you for any pity you
may have shown my poor darling," the young man answered, in a more
subdued tone; "only, if you pity me, and wish to help me, speak out,
and speak plainly. What do you think has become of my lost girl?"

"I cannot tell you, sir. As God looks down upon me and judges me, I
declare to you that I know no more than you know. But I think----"

"You think what?"

"That you will never see Miss Marchmont again."

Edward Arundel started as violently as if, of all sentences, this was
the last he had expected to hear pronounced. His sanguine temperament,
fresh in its vigorous and untainted youth, could not grasp the thought
of despair. He could be mad with passionate anger against the obstacles
that separated him from his wife; but he could not believe those
obstacles to be insurmountable. He could not doubt the power of his own
devotion and courage to bring him back his lost love.

"Never--see her--again!"

He repeated these words as if they had belonged to a strange language,
and he were trying to make out their meaning.

"You think," he gasped hoarsely, after a long pause,--"you
think--that--she is--dead?"

"I think that she went out of this house in a desperate state of mind.
She was seen--not by me, for I should have thought it my duty to stop
her if I had seen her so--she was seen by one of the servants crying
and sobbing awfully as she went away upon that last afternoon."

"And she was never seen again?"

"Never by me."

"And--you--you think she went out of this house with the intention
of--of--destroying herself?"

The words died away in a hoarse whisper, and it was by the motion of
his white lips that Barbara Simmons perceived what the young man meant.

"I do, sir."

"Have you any--particular reason for thinking so?"

"No reason beyond what I have told you, sir."

Edward Arundel bent his head, and walked away to hide his blanched
face. He tried instinctively to conceal this mental suffering, as he
had sometimes hidden physical torture in an Indian hospital, prompted
by the involuntary impulse of a brave man. But though the woman's words
had come upon him like a thunderbolt, he had no belief in the opinion
they expressed. No; his young spirit wrestled against and rejected the
awful conclusion. Other people might think what they chose; but he knew
better than they. His wife was _not_ dead. His life had been so smooth,
so happy, so prosperous, so unclouded and successful, that it was
scarcely strange he should be sceptical of calamity,--that his mind
should be incapable of grasping the idea of a catastrophe so terrible
as Mary's suicide.

"She was intrusted to me by her father," he thought. "She gave her
faith to me before God's altar. She _cannot_ have perished body and
soul; she _cannot_ have gone down to destruction for want of my arm
outstretched to save her. God is too good to permit such misery."

The young soldier's piety was of the simplest and most unquestioning
order, and involved an implicit belief that a right cause must always
be ultimately victorious. With the same blind faith in which he had
often muttered a hurried prayer before plunging in amidst the mad havoc
of an Indian battle-field, confident that the justice of Heaven would
never permit heathenish Affghans to triumph over Christian British
gentlemen, he now believed that, in the darkest hour of Mary
Marchmont's life, God's arm had held her back from the dread
horror--the unatonable offence--of self-destruction.

"I thank you for having spoken frankly to me," he said to Barbara
Simmons; "I believe that you have spoken in good faith. But I do not
think my darling is for ever lost to me. I anticipate trouble and
anxiety, disappointment, defeat for a time,--for a long time, perhaps;
but I _know_ that I shall find her in the end. The business of my life
henceforth is to look for her."

Barbara's dull eyes held earnest watch upon the young man's countenance
as he spoke. Anxiety and even fear were in that gaze, palpable to those
who knew how to read the faint indications of the woman's stolid face.

CHAPTER X.

THE PARAGRAPH IN THE NEWSPAPER.

Mr. Morrison brought the gig and pony to the western porch while
Captain Arundel was talking to his cousin's servant, and presently the
invalid was being driven across the flat between the Towers and the
high-road to Kemberling.

Mary's old favourite, Farmer Pollard's daughter, came out of a low
rustic shop as the gig drew up before her husband's door. This
good-natured, tender-hearted Hester, advanced to matronly dignity under
the name of Mrs. Jobson, carried a baby in her arms, and wore a white
dimity hood, that made a penthouse over her simple rosy face. But at
the sight of Captain Arundel nearly all the rosy colour disappeared
from the country-woman's plump cheeks, and she stared aghast at the
unlooked-for visitor, almost ready to believe that, if anything so
substantial as a pony and gig could belong to the spiritual world, it
was the phantom only of the soldier that she looked upon.

"O sir!" she said; "O Captain Arundel, is it really you?"

Edward alighted before Hester could recover from the surprise
occasioned by his appearance.

"Yes, Mrs. Jobson," he said. "May I come into your house? I wish to
speak to you."

Hester curtseyed, and stood aside to allow her visitor to pass her. Her
manner was coldly respectful, and she looked at the young officer with
a grave, reproachful face, which was strange to him. She ushered her
guest into a parlour at the back of the shop; a prim apartment,
splendid with varnished mahogany, shell-work boxes--bought during
Hester's honeymoon-trip to a Lincolnshire watering-place--and
voluminous achievements in the way of crochet-work; a gorgeous and
Sabbath-day chamber, looking across a stand of geraniums into a garden
that was orderly and trimly kept even in this dull November weather.

Mrs. Jobson drew forward an uneasy easy-chair, covered with horsehair,
and veiled by a crochet-work representation of a peacock embowered
among roses. She offered this luxurious seat to Captain Arundel, who,
in his weakness, was well content to sit down upon the slippery
cushions.

"I have come here to ask you to help me in my search for my wife,
Hester," Edward Arundel said, in a scarcely audible voice.

It is not given to the bravest mind to be utterly independent and
defiant of the body; and the soldier was beginning to feel that he had
very nearly run the length of his tether, and must soon submit himself
to be prostrated by sheer physical weakness.

"Your wife!" cried Hester eagerly. "O sir, is that true?"

"Is what true?"

"That poor Miss Mary was your lawful wedded wife?"

"She was," replied Edward Arundel sternly, "my true and lawful wife.
What else should she have been, Mrs. Jobson?"

The farmer's daughter burst into tears.

"O sir," she said, sobbing violently as she spoke,--"O sir, the things
that was said against that poor dear in this place and all about the
Towers! The things that was said! It makes my heart bleed to think of
them; it makes my heart ready to break when I think what my poor sweet
young lady must have suffered. And it set me against you, sir; and I
thought you was a bad and cruel-hearted man!"

"What did they say?" cried Edward. "What did they dare to say against
her or against me?"

"They said that you had enticed her away from her home, sir, and
that--that--there had been no marriage; and that you had deluded that
poor innocent dear to run away with you; and that you'd deserted her
afterwards, and the railway accident had come upon you as a punishment
like; and that Mrs. Marchmont had found poor Miss Mary all alone at a
country inn, and had brought her back to the Towers."

"But what if people did say this?" exclaimed Captain Arundel. "You
could have contradicted their foul slanders; you could have spoken in
defence of my poor helpless girl."

"Me, sir!"

"Yes. You must have heard the truth from my wife's own lips."

Hester Jobson burst into a new flood of tears as Edward Arundel said
this.

"O no, sir," she sobbed; "that was the most cruel thing of all. I never
could get to see Miss Mary; they wouldn't let me see her."

"Who wouldn't let you?"

"Mrs. Marchmont and Mr. Paul Marchmont. I was laid up, sir, when the
report first spread about that Miss Mary had come home. Things was kept
very secret, and it was said that Mrs. Marchmont was dreadfully cut up
by the disgrace that had come upon her stepdaughter. My baby was born
about that time, sir; but as soon as ever I could get about, I went up
to the Towers, in the hope of seeing my poor dear miss. But Mrs.
Simmons, Mrs. Marchmont's own maid, told me that Miss Mary was ill,
very ill, and that no one was allowed to see her except those that
waited upon her and that she was used to. And I begged and prayed that
I might be allowed to see her, sir, with the tears in my eyes; for my
heart bled for her, poor darling dear, when I thought of the cruel
things that was said against her, and thought that, with all her riches
and her learning, folks could dare to talk of her as they wouldn't dare
talk of a poor man's wife like me. And I went again and again, sir; but
it was no good; and, the last time I went, Mrs. Marchmont came out into
the hall to me, and told me that I was intrusive and impertinent, and
that it was me, and such as me, as had set all manner of scandal afloat
about her stepdaughter. But I went again, sir, even after that; and I
saw Mr. Paul Marchmont, and he was very kind to me, and frank and
free-spoken,--almost like you, sir; and he told me that Mrs. Marchmont
was rather stern and unforgiving towards the poor young lady,--he spoke
very kind and pitiful of poor Miss Mary,--and that he would stand my
friend, and he'd contrive that I should see my poor dear as soon as
ever she picked up her spirits a bit, and was more fit to see me; and I
was to come again in a week's time, he said."

"Well; and when you went----?"

"When I went, sir," sobbed the carpenter's wife, "it was the 18th of
October, and Miss Mary had run away upon the day before, and every body
at the Towers was being sent right and left to look for her. I saw Mrs.
Marchmont for a minute that afternoon; and she was as white as a sheet,
and all of a tremble from head to foot, and she walked about the place
as if she was out of her mind like."

"Guilt," thought the young soldier; "guilt of some sort. God only knows
what that guilt has been!"

He covered his face with his hands, and waited to hear what more Hester
Jobson had to tell him. There was no need of questioning here--no
reservation or prevarication. With almost as tender regret as he
himself could have felt, the carpenter's wife told him all that she
knew of the sad story of Mary's disappearance.

"Nobody took much notice of me, sir, in the confusion of the place,"
Mrs. Jobson continued; "and there is a parlour-maid at the Towers
called Susan Rose, that had been a schoolfellow with me ten years
before, and I got her to tell me all about it. And she said that poor
dear Miss Mary had been weak and ailing ever since she had recovered
from the brain-fever, and that she had shut herself up in her room, and
had seen no one except Mrs. Marchmont, and Mr. Paul, and Barbara
Simmons; but on the 17th Mrs. Marchmont sent for her, asking her to
come to the study. And the poor young lady went; and then Susan Rose
thinks that there was high words between Mrs. Marchmont and her
stepdaughter; for as Susan was crossing the hall poor Miss came out of
the study, and her face was all smothered in tears, and she cried out,
as she came into the hall, 'I can't bear it any longer. My life is too
miserable; my fate is too wretched!' And then she ran upstairs, and
Susan Rose followed up to her room and listened outside the door; and
she heard the poor dear sobbing and crying out again and again, 'O
papa, papa! If you knew what I suffer! O papa, papa, papa!'--so
pitiful, that if Susan Rose had dared she would have gone in to try and
comfort her; but Miss Mary had always been very reserved to all the
servants, and Susan didn't dare intrude upon her. It was late that
evening when my poor young lady was missed, and the servants sent out
to look for her."

"And you, Hester,--you knew my wife better than any of these
people,--where do you think she went?"

Hester Jobson looked piteously at the questioner.

"O sir!" she cried; "O Captain Arundel, don't ask me; pray, pray don't
ask me."

"You think like these other people,--you think that she went away to
destroy herself?"

"O sir, what can I think, what can I think except that? She was last
seen down by the water-side, and one of her shoes was picked up amongst
the rushes; and for all there's been such a search made after her, and
a reward offered, and advertisements in the papers, and everything done
that mortal could do to find her, there's been no news of her,
sir,--not a trace to tell of her being living; not a creature to come
forward and speak to her being seen by them after that day. What can I
think, sir, what can I think, except--"

"Except that she threw herself into the river behind Marchmont Towers."

"I've tried to think different, sir; I've tried to hope I should see
that poor sweet lamb again; but I can't, I can't. I've worn mourning
for these three last Sundays, sir; for I seemed to feel as if it was a
sin and a disrespectfulness towards her to wear colours, and sit in the
church where I have seen her so often, looking so meek and beautiful,
Sunday after Sunday."

Edward Arundel bowed his head upon his hands and wept silently. This
woman's belief in Mary's death afflicted him more than he dared confess
to himself. He had defied Olivia and Paul Marchmont, as enemies, who
tried to force a false conviction upon him; but he could neither doubt
nor defy this honest, warm-hearted creature, who wept aloud over the
memory of his wife's sorrows. He could not doubt her sincerity; but he
still refused to accept the belief which on every side was pressed upon
him. He still refused to think that his wife was dead.

"The river was dragged for more than a week," he said, presently, "and
my wife's body was never found."

Hester Jobson shook her head mournfully.

"That's a poor sign, sir," she answered; "the river's full of holes,
I've heard say. My husband had a fellow-'prentice who drowned himself
in that river seven year ago, and _his_ body was never found."

Edward Arundel rose and walked towards the door.

"I do not believe that my wife is dead," he cried. He held out his hand
to the carpenter's wife. "God bless you!" he said. "I thank you from my
heart for your tender feeling towards my lost girl."

He went out to the gig, in which Mr. Morrison waited for him, rather
tired of his morning's work.

"There is an inn a little way farther along the street, Morrison,"
Captain Arundel said. "I shall stop there."

The man stared at his master.

"And not go back to Marchmont Towers, Mr. Edward?"

"No."

Edward Arundel had held Nature in abeyance for more than
four-and-twenty hours, and this outraged Nature now took her revenge by
flinging the young man prostrate and powerless upon his bed at the
simple Kemberling hostelry, and holding him prisoner there for three
dreary days; three miserable days, with long, dark interminable
evenings, during which the invalid had no better employment than to lie
brooding over his sorrows, while Mr. Morrison read the "Times"
newspaper in a monotonous and droning voice, for his sick master's
entertainment.

How that helpless and prostrate prisoner, bound hand and foot in the
stern grasp of retaliative Nature, loathed the leading-articles, the
foreign correspondence, in the leviathan journal! How he sickened at
the fiery English of Printing-House Square, as expounded by Mr.
Morrison! The sound of the valet's voice was like the unbroken flow of
a dull river. The great names that surged up every now and then upon
that sluggish tide of oratory made no impression upon the sick man's
mind. What was it to him if the glory of England were in danger, the
freedom of a mighty people wavering in the balance? What was it to him
if famine-stricken Ireland were perishing, and the far-away Indian
possessions menaced by contumacious and treacherous Sikhs? What was it
to him if the heavens were shrivelled like a blazing scroll, and the
earth reeling on its shaken foundations? What had he to do with any
catastrophe except that which had fallen upon his innocent young wife?

"O my broken trust!" he muttered sometimes, to the alarm of the
confidential servant; "O my broken trust!"

But during the three days in which Captain Arundel lay in the best
chamber at the Black Bull--the chief inn of Kemberling, and a very
splendid place of public entertainment long ago, when all the
northward-bound coaches had passed through that quiet Lincolnshire
village--he was not without a medical attendant to give him some feeble
help in the way of drugs and doctor's stuff, in the battle which he was
fighting with offended Nature. I don't know but that the help, however
well intended, may have gone rather to strengthen the hand of the
enemy; for in those days--the year '48 is very long ago when we take