Olivia Arundel sat silent and motionless, looking straight before her out into the black dulness of the garden. She was trying to think out the dark problem of her life.
Strange as it may seem, there was a certain fascination for her in John Marchmont's offer. He offered her something, no matter what; it would be a change. She had compared herself to a prisoner in the Bastille; and I think she felt very much as such a prisoner might have felt upon his gaoler's offering to remove him to Vincennes. The new prison might be worse than the old one, perhaps; but it would be different. Life at Marchmont Towers might be more monotonous, more desolate, than at Swampington; but it would be a new monotony, another desolation. Have you never felt, when suffering the hideous throes of toothache, that it would be a relief to have the earache or the rheumatism; that variety even in torture would be agreeable?
Then, again, Olivia Arundel, though unblest with many of the charms of womanhood, was not entirely without its weaknesses. To marry John Marchmont would be to avenge herself upon Edward Arundel. Alas! she forgot how impossible it is to inflict a dagger–thrust upon him who is guarded by the impenetrable armour of indifference. She saw herself the mistress of Marchmont Towers, waited upon by liveried servants, courted, not patronised by the country gentry; avenged upon the mercenary aunt who had slighted her, who had bade her go out and get her living as a nursery governess. She saw this; and all that was ignoble in her nature arose, and urged her to snatch the chance offered her––the one chance of lifting herself out of the horrible obscurity of her life. The ambition which might have made her an empress lowered its crest, and cried, "Take this; at least it is something." But, through all, the better voices which she had enlisted to do battle with the natural voice of her soul cried, "This is a temptation of the devil; put it away from thee."
But this temptation came to her at the very moment when her life had become most intolerable; too intolerable to be borne, she thought. She knew now, fatally, certainly, that Edward Arundel did not love her; that the one only day–dream she had ever made for herself had been a snare and a delusion. The radiance of that foolish dream had been the single light of her life. That taken away from her, the darkness was blacker than the blackness of death; more horrible than the obscurity of the grave.
In all the future she had not one hope: no, not one. She had loved Edward Arundel with all the strength of her soul; she had wasted a world of intellect and passion upon this bright–haired boy. This foolish, grovelling madness had been the blight of her life. But for this, she might have grown out of her natural self by force of her conscientious desire to do right; and might have become, indeed, a good and perfect woman. If her life had been a wider one, this wasted love would, perhaps, have shrunk into its proper insignificance; she would have loved, and suffered, and recovered; as so many of us recover from this common epidemic. But all the volcanic forces of an impetuous nature, concentrated into one narrow focus, wasted themselves upon this one feeling, until that which should have been a sentiment became a madness.
To think that in some far–away future time she might cease to love Edward Arundel, and learn to love somebody else, would have seemed about as reasonable to Olivia as to hope that she could have new legs and arms in that distant period. She could cut away this fatal passion with a desperate stroke, it may be, just as she could cut off her arm; but to believe that a new love would grow in its place was quite as absurd as to believe in the growing of a new arm. Some cork monstrosity might replace the amputated limb; some sham and simulated affection might succeed the old love.
Olivia Arundel thought of all these things, in about ten minutes by the little skeleton clock upon the mantel–piece, and while John Marchmont fidgeted rather nervously, with a pair of gloves in the crown of his hat, and waited for some definite answer to his appeal. Her mind came back at last, after all its passionate wanderings, to the rigid channel she had so laboriously worn for it,––the narrow groove of duty. Her first words testified this.
"If I accept this responsibility, I will perform it faithfully," she said, rather to herself than to Mr. Marchmont.
"I am sure you will, Miss Arundel," John answered eagerly; "I am sure you will. You mean to undertake it, then? you mean to consider my offer? May I speak to your father? may I tell him that I have spoken to you? may I say that you have given me a hope of your ultimate consent?"
"Yes, yes," Olivia said, rather impatiently; "speak to my father; tell him anything you please. Let him decide for me; it is my duty to obey him."