Olivia Marchmont came into the embrasure of the open window, and took her place there to watch them.
She came again to the torture. From the remotest end of the long banqueting–room she had seen the two figures glide out into the moonlight. She had seen them, and had gone on with her courteous speeches, and had repeated her formula of hospitality, with the fire in her heart devouring and consuming her. She came again, to watch and to listen, and to endure her self–imposed agonies––as mad and foolish in her fatal passion as some besotted wretch who should come willingly to the wheel upon which his limbs had been well–nigh broken, and supplicate for a renewal of the torture. She stood rigid and motionless in the shadow of the arched window, hiding herself, as she had hidden in the dark cavernous recess by the river; she stood and listened to all the childish babble of the lovers as they loitered up and down the vaulted cloister. How she despised them, in the haughty superiority of an intellect which might have planned a revolution, or saved a sinking state! What bitter scorn curled her lip, as their foolish talk fell upon her ear! They talked like Florizel and Perdita, like Romeo and Juliet, like Paul and Virginia; and they talked a great deal of nonsense, no doubt––soft harmonious foolishness, with little more meaning in it than there is in the cooing of doves, but tender and musical, and more than beautiful, to each other's ears. A tigress, famished and desolate, and but lately robbed of her whelps, would not be likely to listen very patiently to the communing of a pair of prosperous ringdoves. Olivia Marchmont listened with her brain on fire, and the spirit of a murderess raging in her breast. What was she that she should be patient? All the world was lost to her. She was thirty years of age, and she had never yet won the love of any human being. She was thirty years of age, and all the sublime world of affection was a dismal blank for her. From the outer darkness in which she stood, she looked with wild and ignorant yearning into that bright region which her accursed foot had never trodden, and saw Mary Marchmont wandering hand–in–hand with the only man she could have loved––the only creature who had ever had the power to awake the instinct of womanhood in her soul.
She stood and waited until the clock in the quadrangle struck the first quarter after three: the moon was fading out, and the colder light of early morning glimmered in the eastern sky.
"I mustn't keep you out here any longer, Polly," Captain Arundel said, pausing near the window. "It's getting cold, my dear, and it's high time the mistress of Marchmont should retire to her stony bower. Good–night, and God bless you, my darling! I'll stop in the quadrangle and smoke a cheroot before I go to my room. Your stepmamma will be wondering what has become of you, Mary, and we shall have a lecture upon the proprieties to–morrow; so, once more, good–night."
He kissed the fair young brow under the coronal of pearls, stopped to watch Mary while she crossed the threshold of the open window, and then strolled away into the flagged court, with his cigar–case in his hand.
Olivia Marchmont stood a few paces from the window when her stepdaughter entered the room, and Mary paused involuntarily, terrified by the cruel aspect of the face that frowned upon her: terrified by something that she had never seen before,––the horrible darkness that overshadows the souls of the lost.
"Mamma!" the girl cried, clasping her hands in sudden affright––"mamma! why do you look at me like that? Why have you been so changed to me lately? I cannot tell you how unhappy I have been. Mamma, mamma! what have I done to offend you?"
Olivia Marchmont grasped the trembling hands uplifted entreatingly to her, and held them in her own,––held them as if in a vice. She stood thus, with her stepdaughter pinioned in her grasp, and her eyes fixed upon the girl's face. Two streams of lurid light seemed to emanate from those dilated gray eyes; two spots of crimson blazed in the widow's hollow cheeks.
"What have you done?" she cried. "Do you think I have toiled for nothing to do the duty which I promised my dead husband to perform for your sake? Has all my care of you been so little, that I am to stand by now and be silent, when I see what you are? Do you think that I am blind, or deaf, or besotted; that you defy me and outrage me, day by day, and hour by hour, by your conduct?"
"Mamma, mamma! what do you mean?"