But she was compelled to appear at dinner, and she took her accustomed place at the head of the table. Paul therefore had some opportunity of sounding the depths of the strangest nature he had ever tried to fathom. He talked to her very much, listening with unvarying attention to every word she uttered. He watched her––but with no obtrusive gaze––almost incessantly; and when he went away from Marchmont Towers, without having seen Mary since the reading of the will, it was of Olivia he thought; it was the recollection of Olivia which interested as much as it perplexed him.
The few people waiting for the London train looked at the artist as he strolled up and down the quiet platform at Kemberling Station, with his head bent and his eyebrows slightly contracted. He had a certain easy, careless grace of dress and carriage, which harmonised well with his delicate face, his silken silvery hair, his carefully–trained auburn moustache, and rosy, womanish mouth. He was a romantic–looking man. He was the beau–ideal of the hero in a young lady's novel. He was a man whom schoolgirls would have called "a dear." But it had been better, I think, for any helpless wretch to be in the bull–dog hold of the sturdiest Bill Sykes ever loosed upon society by right of his ticket–of–leave, than in the power of Paul Marchmont, artist and teacher of drawing, of Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square.
He was thinking of Olivia as he walked slowly up and down the bare platform, only separated by a rough wooden paling from the flat open fields on the outskirts of Kemberling.
"The little girl is as feeble as a pale February butterfly." he thought; "a puff of frosty wind might wither her away. But that woman, that woman––how handsome she is, with her accurate profile and iron mouth; but what a raging fire there is hidden somewhere in her breast, and devouring her beauty by day and night! If I wanted to paint the sleeping scene in Macbeth, I'd ask her to sit for the Thane's wicked wife. Perhaps she has some bloody secret as deadly as the murder of a grey–headed Duncan upon her conscience, and leaves her bedchamber in the stillness of the night to walk up and down those long oaken corridors at the Towers, and wring her hands and wail aloud in her sleep. Why did she marry John Marchmont? His life gave her little more than a fine house to live in; his death leaves her with nothing but ten or twelve thousand pounds in the Three per Cents. What is her mystery––what is her secret, I wonder? for she must surely have one."
Such thoughts as these filled his mind as the train carried him away from the lonely little station, and away from the neighbourhood of Marchmont Towers, within whose stony walls Mary lay in her quiet chamber, weeping for her dead father, and wishing––God knows in what utter singleness of heart!––that she had been buried in the vault by his side.
[CHAPTER XIII.
OLIVIA'S DESPAIR.]
The life which Mary and her stepmother led at Marchmont Towers after poor John's death was one of those tranquil and monotonous existences that leave very little to be recorded, except the slow progress of the weeks and months, the gradual changes of the seasons. Mary bore her sorrows quietly, as it was her nature to bear all things. The doctor's advice was taken, and Olivia removed her stepdaughter to Scarborough soon after the funeral. But the change of scene was slow to effect any change in the state of dull despairing sorrow into which the girl had fallen. The sea–breezes brought no colour into her pale cheeks. She obeyed her stepmother's behests unmurmuringly, and wandered wearily by the dreary seashore in the dismal November weather, in search of health and strength. But wherever she went, she carried with her the awful burden of her grief; and in every changing cadence of the low winter winds, in every varying murmur of the moaning waves, she seemed to hear her dead father's funeral dirge.
I think that, young as Mary Marchmont was, this mournful period was the grand crisis of her life. The past, with its one great affection, had been swept away from her, and as yet there was no friendly figure to fill the dismal blank of the future. Had any kindly matron, any gentle Christian creature been ready to stretch out her arms to the desolate orphan, Mary's heart would have melted, and she would have crept to the shelter of that womanly embrace, to nestle there for ever. But there was no one. Olivia Marchmont obeyed the letter of her husband's solemn appeal, as she had obeyed the letter of those Gospel sentences that had been familiar to her from her childhood, but was utterly unable to comprehend its spirit. She accepted the charge intrusted to her. She was unflinching in the performance of her duty; but no one glimmer of the holy light of motherly love and tenderness, the semi–divine compassion of womanhood, ever illumined the dark chambers of her heart. Every night she questioned herself upon her knees as to her rigid performance of the level round of duty she had allotted to herself; every night––scrupulous and relentless as the hardest judge who ever pronounced sentence upon a criminal––she took note of her own shortcomings, and acknowledged her deficiencies.
But, unhappily, this self–devotion of Olivia's pressed no less heavily upon Mary than on the widow herself. The more rigidly Mrs. Marchmont performed the duties which she understood to be laid upon her by her dead husband's last will and testament, the harder became the orphan's life. The weary treadmill of education worked on, when the young student was well–nigh fainting upon every step in that hopeless revolving ladder of knowledge. If Olivia, on communing with herself at night, found that the day just done had been too easy for both mistress and pupil, the morrow's allowance of Roman emperors and French grammar was made to do penance for yesterday's shortcomings.
"This girl has been intrusted to my care, and one of my first duties is to give her a good education," Olivia Marchmont thought. "She is inclined to be idle; but I must fight against her inclination, whatever trouble the struggle entails upon myself. The harder the battle, the better for me if I am conqueror."