It was not that he had any thought of meeting Olivia Marchmont; he had dismissed her from his mind ever since his last visit to the lonely boat–house. Whatever the mystery of her life might be, her secret lay at the bottom of a black depth which the impetuous soldier did not care to fathom. He did not want to discover that hideous secret. Tarnished honour, shame, falsehood, disgrace, lurked in the obscurity in which John Marchmont's widow had chosen to enshroud her life. Let them rest. It was not for him to drag away the curtain that sheltered his kinswoman from the world.
He had no thought, therefore, of prying into any secrets that might be hidden in the pavilion by the water. The fascination that lured him to the spot was the memory of the past. He could not go to Mary's grave; but he went, in as reverent a spirit as he would have gone thither, to the scene of his betrothal, to pay his farewell visit to the spot which had been for ever hallowed by the confession of her innocent love.
It was nearly dark when he got to the river–side. He went by a path which quite avoided the grounds about Marchmont Towers,––a narrow footpath, which served as a towing–path sometimes, when some black barge crawled by on its way out to the open sea. To–night the river was hidden by a mist,––a white fog,––that obscured land and water; and it was only by the sound of the horses' hoofs that Edward Arundel had warning to step aside, as a string of them went by, dragging a chain that grated on the pebbles by the river–side.
"Why should they say my darling committed suicide?" thought Edward Arundel, as he groped his way along the narrow pathway. "It was on such an evening as this that she ran away from home. What more likely than that she lost the track, and wandered into the river? Oh, my own poor lost one, God grant it was so! God grant it was by His will, and not your own desperate act, that you were lost to me!"
Sorrowful as the thought of his wife's death was to him, it soothed him to believe that death might have been accidental. There was all the difference betwixt sorrow and despair in the alternative.
Wandering ignorantly and helplessly through this autumnal fog, Edward Arundel found himself at the boat–house before he was aware of its vicinity.
There was a light gleaming from the broad north window of the painting–room, and a slanting line of light streamed out of the half–open door. In this lighted doorway Edward saw the figure of a girl,––an unkempt, red–headed girl, with a flat freckled face; a girl who wore a lavender–cotton pinafore and hob–nailed boots, with a good deal of brass about the leathern fronts, and a redundancy of rusty leathern boot–lace twisted round the ankles.
The young man remembered having seen this girl once in the village of Kemberling. She had been in Mrs. Weston's service as a drudge, and was supposed to have received her education in the Swampington union.
This young lady was supporting herself against the half–open door, with her arms a–kimbo, and her hands planted upon her hips, in humble imitation of the matrons whom she had been wont to see lounging at their cottage–doors in the high street of Kemberling, when the labours of the day were done.
Edward Arundel started at the sudden apparition of this damsel.