"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.