Paul Marchmont smiled.
"The business will pick up by–and–by, I daresay," he said. "You'll have the Marchmont Towers family to attend to in good time, I suppose."
"That's what Lavinia said," answered the surgeon. "'Mrs. John Marchmont can't refuse to employ a relation,' she says; 'and, as first–cousin to Mary Marchmont's father, I ought'––meaning herself, you know––'to have some influence in that quarter.' But then, you see, the very week we come here the gal goes and runs away; which rather, as one may say, puts a spoke in our wheel, you know."
Mr. George Weston rubbed his chin reflectively as he concluded thus. He was a man given to spending his leisure–hours––when he had any leisure, which was not very often––in tavern parlours, where the affairs of the nation were settled and unsettled every evening over sixpenny glasses of hollands and water; and he regretted his removal from Stanfield, which had been as the uprooting of all his dearest associations. He was a solemn man, who never hazarded an opinion lightly,––perhaps because he never had an opinion to hazard,––and his stolidity won him a good deal of respect from strangers; but in the hands of his wife he was meeker than the doves that cooed in the pigeon–house behind his dwelling, and more plastic than the knob of white wax upon which industrious Mrs. Weston was wont to rub her thread when engaged in the mysteries of that elaborate and terrible science which women paradoxically call plain needlework.
Paul Marchmont presented himself at the Towers upon the day after his arrival at Kemberling. His interview with the widow was a very long one. He had studied every line of his sister's letter; he had weighed every word that had fallen from Olivia's lips and had been recorded by Lavinia Weston; and taking the knowledge thus obtained as his starting–point, he took his dissecting–knife and went to work at an intellectual autopsy. He anatomised the wretched woman's soul. He made her tell her secret, and bare her tortured breast before him; now wringing some hasty word from her impatience, now entrapping her into some admission,––if only so much as a defiant look, a sudden lowering of the dark brows, an involuntary compression of the lips. He made her reveal herself to him. Poor Rosencranz and Guildenstern were sorry blunderers in that art which is vulgarly called pumping, and were easily put out by a few quips and quaint retorts from the mad Danish prince; but Paul Marchmont would have played upon Hamlet more deftly than ever mortal musician played upon pipe or recorder, and would have fathomed the remotest depths of that sorrowful and erratic soul. Olivia writhed under the torture of that polite inquisition, for she knew that her secrets were being extorted from her; that her pitiful folly––that folly which she would have denied even to herself, if possible––was being laid bare in all its weak foolishness. She knew this; but she was compelled to smile in the face of her bland inquisitor, to respond to his commonplace expressions of concern about the protracted absence of the missing girl, and meekly to receive his suggestions respecting the course it was her duty to take. He had the air of responding to her suggestions, rather than of himself dictating any particular line of conduct. He affected to believe that he was only agreeing with some understood ideas of hers, while he urged his own views upon her.
"Then we are quite of one mind in this, my dear Mrs. Marchmont," he said at last; "this unfortunate girl must not be suffered to remain away from her legitimate home any longer than we can help. It is our duty to find and bring her back. I need scarcely say that you, being bound to her by every tie of affection, and having, beyond this, the strongest claim upon her gratitude for your devoted fulfilment of the trust confided in you,––one hears of these things, Mrs. Marchmont, in a country village like Kemberling,––I need scarcely say that you are the most fitting person to win the poor child back to a sense of her duty––if she can be won to such a sense." Paul Marchmont added, after a sudden pause and a thoughtful sigh, "I sometimes fear––––"
He stopped abruptly, waiting until Olivia should question him.
"You sometimes fear––––?"
"That––that the error into which Miss Marchmont has fallen is the result of a mental rather than of a moral deficiency."
"What do you mean?"