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?"