But two or three hours afterwards, when the flats before the house were silvered by the moonlight, and the long ranges of windows glittered with the lamps within, Mrs. Marchmont emerged from her dressing–room another creature, as it seemed.
Edward and his uncle were walking up and down the great oaken banqueting–hall, which had been decorated and fitted up as a ballroom for the occasion, when Olivia crossed the wide threshold of the chamber. The young officer looked up with an involuntary expression of surprise. In all his acquaintance with his cousin, he had never seen her thus. The gloomy black–robed woman was transformed into a Semiramis. She wore a voluminous dress of a deep claret–coloured velvet, that glowed with the warm hues of rich wine in the lamplight. Her massive hair was coiled in a knot at the back of her head, and diamonds glittered amidst the thick bands that framed her broad white brow. Her stern classical beauty was lit up by the unwonted splendour of her dress, and asserted itself as obviously as if she had said, "Am I a woman to be despised for the love of a pale–faced child?"
Mary Marchmont came into the room a few minutes after her stepmother. Her lover ran to welcome her, and looked fondly at her simple dress of shadowy white crape, and the pearl circlet that crowned her soft brown hair. The pearls she wore upon this night had been given to her by her father on her fourteenth birthday.
Olivia watched the young man as he bent over Mary Marchmont.
He wore his uniform to–night for the special gratification of his young mistress, and he was looking down with a tender smile at her childish admiration of the bullion ornaments upon his coat, and the decoration he had won in India.
The widow looked from the two lovers to an antique glass upon an ebony bureau in a niche opposite to her, which reflected her own face,––her own face, more beautiful than she had ever seen it before, with a feverish glow of vivid crimson lighting up her hollow cheeks.
"I might have been beautiful if he had loved me," she thought; and then she turned to her father, and began to talk to him of his parishioners, the old pensioners upon her bounty, whose little histories were so hatefully familiar to her. Once more she made a feeble effort to tread the old hackneyed pathway, which she had toiled upon with such weary feet; but she could not,––she could not. After a few minutes she turned abruptly from the Rector, and seated herself in a recess of the window, from which she could see Edward and Mary.
But Mrs. Marchmont's duties as hostess soon demanded her attention. The county families began to arrive; the sound of carriage–wheels seemed perpetual upon the crisp gravel–drive before the western front; the names of half the great people in Lincolnshire were shouted by the old servants in the hall. The band in the music–gallery struck up a quadrille, and Edward Arundel led the youthful mistress of the mansion to her place in the dance.
To Olivia that long night seemed all glare and noise and confusion. She did the honours of the ballroom, she received her guests, she meted out due attention to all; for she had been accustomed from her earliest girlhood to the stereotyped round of country society. She neglected no duty; but she did all mechanically, scarcely knowing what she said or did in the feverish tumult of her soul.
Yet, amidst all the bewilderment of her senses, in all the confusion of her thoughts, two figures were always before her. Wherever Edward Arundel and Mary Marchmont went, her eyes followed them––her fevered imagination pursued them. Once, and once only, in the course of that long night she spoke to her stepdaughter.