"No, Olivia," answered the young man, calmly. "I am silent, because I have nothing to say to you. Why you have acted as you have acted,––why you have chosen to be the tool of a black–hearted villain,––is an unfathomable mystery to me. I thank God that your conscience was aroused this day, and that you have at least hindered the misery of an innocent girl. But why you have kept my wife hidden from me,––why you have been the accomplice of Paul Marchmont's crime,––is more than I can even attempt to guess."
"Not yet?" said Olivia, looking at him with a strange smile. "Even yet I am a mystery to you?"
"You are, indeed, Olivia."
She turned away from him with a laugh.
"Then I had better remain so till the end," she said, looking out into the garden. But after a moment's silence she turned her head once more towards the young man. "I will speak," she said; "I will speak, Edward Arundel. I hope and believe that I have not long to live, and that all my shame and misery, my obstinate wickedness, my guilty passion, will come to an end, like a long feverish dream. O God, have mercy on my waking, and make it brighter than this dreadful sleep! I loved you, Edward Arundel. Ah! you start. Thank God at least for that. I kept my secret well. You don't know what that word 'love' means, do you? You think you love that childish girl yonder, perhaps; but I can tell you that you don't know what love is. I know what it is. I have loved. For ten years,––for ten long, dreary, desolate, miserable years, fifty–two weeks in every year, fifty–two Sundays, with long idle hours between the two church services––I have loved you, Edward. Shall I tell you what it is to love? It is to suffer, to hate, yes, to hate even the object of your love, when that love is hopeless; to hate him for the very attributes that have made you love him; to grudge the gifts and graces that have made him dear. It is to hate every creature on whom his eyes look with greater tenderness than they look on you; to watch one face until its familiar lines become a perpetual torment to you, and you cannot sleep because of its eternal presence staring at you in all your dreams. It is to be like some wretched drunkard, who loathes the fiery spirit that is destroying him, body and soul, and yet goes on, madly drinking, till he dies. Love! How many people upon this great earth know the real meaning of that hideous word! I have learnt it until my soul loathes the lesson. They will tell you that I am mad, Edward, and they will tell you something near the truth; but not quite the truth. My madness has been my love. From long ago, when you were little more than a boy––you remember, don't you, the long days at the Rectory? I remember every word you ever spoke to me, every sentiment you ever expressed, every look of your changing face––you were the first bright thing that came across my barren life; and I loved you. I married John Marchmont––why, do you think?––because I wanted to make a barrier between you and me. I wanted to make my love for you impossible by making it a sin. So long as my husband lived, I shut your image out of my mind as I would have shut out the Prince of Darkness, if he had come to me in a palpable shape. But since then––oh, I hope I have been mad since then; I hope that God may forgive my sins because I have been mad!"
Her thoughts wandered away to that awful question which had been so lately revived in her mind––Could she be forgiven? Was it within the compass of heavenly mercy to forgive such a sin as hers?
[CHAPTER XII.
MARY'S STORY.]
One of the minor effects of any great shock, any revolution, natural or political, social or domestic, is a singular unconsciousness, or an exaggerated estimate, of the passage of time. Sometimes we fancy that the common functions of the universe have come to a dead stop during the tempest which has shaken our being to its remotest depths. Sometimes, on the other hand, it seems to us that, because we have endured an age of suffering, or half a lifetime of bewildered joy, the terrestrial globe has spun round in time to the quickened throbbing of our passionate hearts, and that all the clocks upon earth have been standing still.
When the sun sank upon the summer's day that was to have been the day of Belinda's bridal, Edward Arundel thought that it was still early in the morning. He wondered at the rosy light all over the western sky, and that great ball of molten gold dropping down below the horizon. He was fain to look at his watch, in order to convince himself that the low light was really the familiar sun, and not some unnatural appearance in the heavens.
And yet, although he wondered at the closing of the day, with a strange inconsistency his mind could scarcely grapple with the idea that only last night he had sat by Belinda Lawford's side, her betrothed husband, and had pondered, Heaven only knows with what sorrowful regret, upon the unknown grave in which his dead wife lay.