And then a spirit within her arose and whispered, with a mocking voice, "What resignation do you show beneath your affliction,––you, who should be so good a Christian? How have you learned to school your rebellious heart?"
"My cousin is very young," Paul Marchmont said, presently.
"She was fifteen last July."
"Fifteen! Very young to be the owner of Marchmont Towers and an income of eleven thousand a year," returned the artist. He walked to one of the long windows, and drawing aside the edge of the blind, looked out upon the terrace and the wide flats before the mansion. The rain dripped and splashed upon the stone steps; the rain–drops hung upon the grim adornments of the carved balustrade, soaking into moss–grown escutcheons and half–obliterated coats–of–arms. The weird willows by the pools far away, and a group of poplars near the house, looked gaunt and black against the dismal grey sky.
Paul Marchmont dropped the blind, and turned away from the gloomy landscape with a half–contemptuous gesture. "I don't know that I envy my cousin, after all," he said: "the place is as dreary as Tennyson's Moated Grange."
There was the sound of wheels on the carriage–drive before the terrace, and presently a subdued murmur of hushed voices in the hall. Mr. Richard Paulette, and the two medical men who had attended John Marchmont, had returned to the Towers, for the reading of the will. Hubert Arundel had returned with them; but the other followers in the funeral train had departed to their several homes. The undertaker and his men had come back to the house by the side–entrance, and were making themselves very comfortable in the servants'–hall after the fulfilment of their mournful duties.
The will was to be read in the dining–room; and Mr. Paulette and the clerk who had accompanied him to Marchmont Towers were already seated at one end of the long carved–oak table, busy with their papers and pens and ink, assuming an importance the occasion did not require. Olivia went out into the hall to speak to her father.
"You will find Mr. Marchmont's solicitor in the dining–room," she said to Paul, who was looking at some of the old pictures on the drawing–room walls.
A large fire was blazing in the wide grate at the end of the dining–room. The blinds had been drawn up. There was no longer need that the house should be wrapped in darkness. The Awful Presence had departed; and such light as there was in the gloomy October sky was free to enter the rooms, which the death of one quiet, unobtrusive creature had made for a time desolate.
There was no sound in the room but the low voice of the two doctors talking of their late patient in undertones near the fireplace, and the occasional fluttering of the papers under the lawyer's hand. The clerk, who sat respectfully a little way behind his master, and upon the very edge of his ponderous morocco–covered chair, had been wont to give John Marchmont his orders, and to lecture him for being tardy with his work a few years before, in the Lincoln's Inn office. He was wondering now whether he should find himself remembered in the dead man's will, to the extent of a mourning ring or an old–fashioned silver snuff–box.