"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.