The study–bell rang for the second time while she was speaking.
"I must go to my mistress now, sir," she said. "You heard her ringing for me."
"Go, then, and let me see you as you come back. I tell you I must and will speak to you. Everybody in this house tries to avoid me. It seems as if I was not to get a straight answer from any one of you. But I will know all that is to be known about my lost wife. Do you hear, woman? I will know!"
"I will come back to you directly, sir," Barbara Simmons answered quietly.
The leaden calmness of this woman's manner irritated Edward Arundel beyond all power of expression. Before his cousin Olivia's gloomy coldness he had been flung back upon himself as before an iceberg; but every now and then some sudden glow of fiery emotion had shot up amid that frigid mass, lurid and blazing, and the iceberg had been transformed into an angry and passionate woman, who might, in that moment of fierce emotion, betray the dark secrets of her soul. But this woman's manner presented a passive barrier, athwart which the young soldier was as powerless to penetrate as he would have been to walk through a block of solid stone.
Olivia was like some black and stony castle, whose barred windows bade defiance to the besieger, but behind whose narrow casements transient flashes of light gleamed fitfully upon the watchers without, hinting at the mysteries that were hidden within the citadel.
Barbara Simmons resembled a blank stone wall, grimly confronting the eager traveller, and giving no indication whatever of the unknown country on the other side.
She came back almost immediately, after being only a few moments in Olivia's room,––certainly not long enough to consult with her mistress as to what she was to say or to leave unsaid,––and presented herself before Captain Arundel.
"If you have any questions to ask, sir, about Miss Marchmont––about your wife––I shall be happy to answer them," she said.
"I have a hundred questions to ask," exclaimed the young man; "but first answer me this one plainly and truthfully––Where do you think my wife has gone? What do you think has become of her?"