John Marchmont's Legacy Part 40

"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 pa.s.sed 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 the measure of time by science--country pract.i.tioners were apt to place themselves upon the side of the disease rather than of the patient, and to a.s.sist grim Death in his siege, by lending the professional aid of purgatives and phlebotomy.

On this principle Mr. George Weston, the surgeon of Kemberling, and the submissive and well-tutored husband of Paul Marchmont's sister, would fain have set to work with the prostrate soldier, on the plea that the patient's skin was hot and dry, and his white lips parched with fever.

But Captain Arundel protested vehemently against any such treatment.

"You shall not take an ounce of blood out of my veins," he said, "or give me one drop of medicine that will weaken me. What I want is strength; strength to get up and leave this intolerable room, and go about the business that I have to do. As to fever," he added scornfully, "as long as I have to lie here and am hindered from going about the business of my life, every drop of my blood will boil with a fever that all the drugs in Apothecaries' Hall would have no power to subdue. Give me something to strengthen me. Patch me up somehow or other, Mr. Weston, if you can. But I warn you that, if you keep me long here, I shall leave this place either a corpse or a madman."

The surgeon, drinking tea with his wife and brother-in-law half an hour afterwards, related the conversation that had taken place between himself and his patient, breaking up his narrative with a great many "I said's" and "said he's," and with a good deal of rambling commentary upon the text.

Lavinia Weston looked at her brother while the surgeon told his story.

"He is very desperate about his wife, then, this dashing young captain?" Mr. Marchmont said, presently.

"Awful," answered the surgeon; "regular awful. I never saw anything like it. Really it was enough to cut a man up to hear him go on so. He asked me all sorts of questions about the time when she was ill and I attended upon her, and what did she say to me, and did she seem very unhappy, and all that sort of thing. Upon my word, you know, Mr.

Paul,--of course I am very glad to think of your coming into the fortune, and I'm very much obliged to you for the kind promises you've made to me and Lavinia; but I almost felt as if I could have wished the poor young lady hadn't drowned herself."

Mrs. Weston shrugged her shoulders, and looked at her brother.

"_Imbecile!_" she muttered.

She was accustomed to talk to her brother very freely in rather school-girl French before her husband, to whom that language was as the most recondite of tongues, and who heartily admired her for superior knowledge.

He sat staring at her now, and eating bread-and-b.u.t.ter with a simple relish, which in itself was enough to mark him out as a man to be trampled upon.

On the fourth day after his interview with Hester, Edward Arundel was strong enough to leave his chamber at the Black Bull.

"I shall go to London by to-night's mail, Morrison," he said to his servant; "but before I leave Lincolnshire, I must pay another visit to Marchmont Towers. You can stop here, and pack my portmanteau while I go."

A rumbling old fly--looked upon as a splendid equipage by the inhabitants of Kemberling--was furnished for Captain Arundel's accommodation by the proprietor of the Black Bull; and once more the soldier approached that ill-omened dwelling-place which had been the home of his wife.

He was ushered without any delay to the study in which Olivia spent the greater part of her time.

The dusky afternoon was already closing in. A low fire burned in the old-fashioned grate, and one lighted wax-candle stood upon an open davenport, before which the widow sat amid a confusion of torn papers, cast upon the ground about her.

The open drawers of the davenport, the littered sc.r.a.ps of paper and loosely-tied doc.u.ments, thrust, without any show of order, into the different compartments of the desk, bore testimony to that state of mental distraction which had been common to Olivia Marchmont for some time past. She herself, the gloomy tenant of the Towers, sat with her elbow resting on her desk, looking hopelessly and absently at the confusion before her.

"I am very tired," she said, with a sigh, as she motioned her cousin to a chair. "I have been trying to sort my papers, and to look for bills that have to be paid, and receipts. They come to me about everything. I am very tired."

Her manner was changed from that stern defiance with which she had last confronted her kinsman to an air of almost piteous feebleness. She rested her head on her hand, repeating, in a low voice,

"Yes, I am very tired."

Edward Arundel looked earnestly at her faded face, so faded from that which he remembered it in its proud young beauty, that, in spite of his doubt of this woman, he could scarcely refrain from some touch of pity for her.

"You are ill, Olivia," he said.

"Yes, I am ill; I am worn out; I am tired of my life. Why does not G.o.d have pity upon me, and take the bitter burden away? I have carried it too long."

She said this not so much to her cousin as to herself. She was like Job in his despair, and cried aloud to the Supreme Himself in a gloomy protest against her anguish.

"Olivia," said Edward Arundel very earnestly, "what is it that makes you unhappy? Is the burden that you carry a burden on your conscience?

Is the black shadow upon your life a guilty secret? Is the cause of your unhappiness that which I suspect it to be? Is it that, in some hour of pa.s.sion, you consented to league yourself with Paul Marchmont against my poor innocent girl? For pity's sake, speak, and undo what you have done. You cannot have been guilty of a crime. There has been some foul play, some conspiracy, some suppression; and my darling has been lured away by the machinations of this man. But he could not have got her into his power without your help. You hated her,--Heaven alone knows for what reason,--and in an evil hour you helped him, and now you are sorry for what you have done. But it is not too late, Olivia; Olivia, it is surely not too late. Speak, speak, woman, and undo what you have done. As you hope for mercy and forgiveness from G.o.d, undo what you have done. I will exact no atonement from you. Paul Marchmont, this smooth traitor, this frank man of the world, who defied me with a smile,--he only shall be called upon to answer for the wrong done against my darling. Speak, Olivia, for pity's sake," cried the young man, casting himself upon his knees at his cousin's feet. "You are of my own blood; you must have some spark of regard for me; have compa.s.sion upon me, then, or have compa.s.sion upon your own guilty soul, which must perish everlastingly if you withhold the truth. Have pity, Olivia, and speak!"

The widow had risen to her feet, recoiling from the soldier as he knelt before her, and looking at him with an awful light in the eyes that alone gave life to her corpse-like face.

Suddenly she flung her arms up above her head, stretching her wasted hands towards the ceiling.

"By the G.o.d who has renounced and abandoned me," she cried, "I have no more knowledge than you have of Mary Marchmont's fate. From the hour in which she left this house, upon the 17th of October, until this present moment, I have neither seen her nor heard of her. If I have lied to you, Edward Arundel," she added, dropping her extended arms, and turning quietly to her cousin,--"if I have lied to you in saying this, may the tortures which I suffer be doubled to me,--if in the infinite of suffering there is any anguish worse than that I now endure."

Edward Arundel paused for a little while, brooding over this strange reply to his appeal. Could he disbelieve his cousin?

It is common to some people to make forcible and impious a.s.severations of an untruth shamelessly, in the very face of an insulted Heaven. But Olivia Marchmont was a woman who, in the very darkest hour of her despair, knew no wavering from her faith in the G.o.d she had offended.

"I cannot refuse to believe you, Olivia," Captain Arundel said presently. "I do believe in your solemn protestations, and I no longer look for help from you in my search for my lost love. I absolve you from all suspicion of being aware of her fate _after_ she left this house. But so long as she remained beneath this roof she was in your care, and I hold you responsible for the ills that may have then befallen her. You, Olivia, must have had some hand in driving that unhappy girl away from her home."

The widow had resumed her seat by the open davenport. She sat with her head bent, her brows contracted, her mouth fixed and rigid, her left hand trifling absently with the scattered papers before her.

"You accused me of this once before, when Mary Marchmont left this house," she said sullenly.

"And you were guilty then," answered Edward.

"I cannot hold myself answerable for the actions of others. Mary Marchmont left this time, as she left before, of her own free will."

"Driven away by your cruel words."

"She must have been very weak," answered Olivia, with a sneer, "if a few harsh words were enough to drive her away from her own house."

"You deny, then, that you were guilty of causing this poor deluded child's flight from this house?"

Olivia Marchmont sat for some moments in moody silence; then suddenly raising her head, she looked her cousin full in the face.

"I do," she exclaimed; "if any one except herself is guilty of an act which was her own, I am not that person."

"I understand," said Edward Arundel; "it was Paul Marchmont's hand that drove her out upon the dreary world. It was Paul Marchmont's brain that plotted against her. You were only a minor instrument; a willing tool, in the hands of a subtle villain. But he shall answer; he shall answer!"

The soldier spoke the last words between his clenched teeth. Then with his chin upon his breast, he sat thinking over what he had just heard.

"How was it?" he muttered; "how was it? He is too consummate a villain to use violence. His manner the other morning told me that the law was on his side. He had done nothing to put himself into my power, and he defied me. How was it, then? By what means did he drive my darling to her despairing flight?"

As Captain Arundel sat thinking of these things, his cousin's idle fingers still trifled with the papers on the desk; while, with her chin resting on her other hand, and her eyes fixed upon the wall before her, she stared blankly at the reflection of the flame of the candle on the polished oaken panel. Her idle fingers, following no design, strayed here and there among the scattered papers, until a few that lay nearest the edge of the desk slid off the smooth morocco, and fluttered to the ground.

Edward Arundel, as absent-minded as his cousin, stooped involuntarily to pick up the papers. The uppermost of those that had fallen was a slip cut from a country newspaper, to which was pinned an open letter, a few lines only. The paragraph in the newspaper slip was marked by double ink-lines, drawn round it by a neat penman. Again almost involuntarily, Edward Arundel looked at this marked paragraph. It was very brief:

"We regret to be called upon to state that another of the sufferers in the accident which occurred last August on the South-Western Railway has expired from injuries received upon that occasion. Captain Arundel, of the H.E.I.C.S., died on Friday night at Dangerfield Park, Devon, the seat of his elder brother."

The letter was almost as brief as the paragraph: