John Marchmont's Legacy. Volume 2 of 3

"Polly," cried the soldier, very seriously, "we must consult Richard Paulette as to the future. I don't think I did right in marrying you during his absence; and I have delayed writing to him too long, Polly.

Those letters must be written this afternoon."

"The letter to Mr. Paulette and to your father?"

"Yes; and the letter to my cousin Olivia."

Mary's face grew sorrowful again, as Captain Arundel said this.

"Must you tell my stepmother of our marriage?" she said.

"Most assuredly, my dear. Why should we keep her in ignorance of it? Your father's will gave her the privilege of advising you, but not the power to interfere with your choice, whatever that choice might be. You were your own mistress, Mary, when you married me. What reason have you to fear my cousin Olivia?"

"No reason, perhaps," the girl answered, sadly; "but I do fear her. I know I am very foolish, Edward, and you have reason to despise me, – you who are so brave. But I could never tell you how I tremble at the thought of being once more in my stepmother's power. She said cruel things to me, Edward. Every word she spoke seemed to stab me to the heart; but it isn't that only. There's something more than that; something that I can't describe, that I can't understand; something which tells me that she hates me."

"Hates you, darling?"

"Yes, Edward; yes, she hates me. It wasn't always so, you know. She used to be only cold and reserved, but lately her manner has changed. I thought that she was ill, perhaps, and that my presence worried her. People often wish to be alone, I know, when they are ill. O Edward, I have seen her shrink from me, and shudder if her dress brushed against mine, as if I had been some horrible creature. What have I done, Edward, that she should hate me?"

Captain Arundel knitted his brows, and set himself to work out this womanly problem, but he could make nothing of it. Yes, what Mary had said was perfectly true: Olivia hated her. The young man had seen that upon the morning of the girl's flight from Marchmont Towers; he had seen vengeful fury and vindictive passion raging in the dark face of John Marchmont's widow. But what reason could the woman have for her hatred of this innocent girl? Again and again Olivia's cousin asked himself this question; and he was so far away from the truth at last, that he could only answer it by imagining the lowest motive for the widow's bad feeling. "She envies my poor little girl her fortune and position," he thought.

"But you won't leave me alone with my stepmother, will you, Edward?" Mary said, recurring to her old prayer. "I am not afraid of her, nor of anybody or anything in the world, while you are with me, – how should I be? – but I think if I were to be alone with her again, I should die. She would speak to me again as she spoke upon the night of the ball, and her bitter taunts would kill me. I could not bear to be in her power again, Edward."

"And you shall not, my darling," answered the young man, enfolding the slender, trembling figure in his strong arms. "My own childish pet, you shall never be exposed to any woman's insolence or tyranny. You shall be sheltered and protected, and hedged in on every side by your husband's love. And when I go to India, you shall sail with me, my pearl. Mary, look up and smile at me, and let's have no more talk of cruel stepmothers. How strange it seems to me, Polly dear, that you should have been so womanly when you were a child, and yet are so childlike now you are a woman!"

The mistress of Marchmont Towers looked doubtfully at her husband, as if she feared her childishness might be displeasing to him.

"You don't love me any the less because of that, do you, Edward?" she asked timidly.

"Because of what, my treasure?"

"Because I am so – childish?"

"Polly," cried the young man, "do you think Jupiter liked Hebe any the less because she was as fresh and innocent as the nectar she served out to him? If he had, my dear, he'd have sent for Clotho, or Atropos, or some one or other of the elderly maiden ladies of Hades, to wait upon him as cupbearer. I wouldn't have you otherwise than you are, Polly, by so much as one thought."

The girl looked up at her husband in a rapture of innocent affection.

"I am too happy, Edward," she said, in a low awe-stricken whisper – "I am too happy! So much happiness can never last."

Alas! the orphan girl's experience of this life had early taught her the lesson which some people learn so late. She had learnt to distrust the equal blue of a summer sky, the glorious splendour of the blazing sunlight. She was accustomed to sorrow; but these brief glimpses of perfect happiness filled her with a dim sense of terror. She felt like some earthly wanderer who had strayed across the threshold of Paradise. In the midst of her delight and admiration, she trembled for the moment in which the ruthless angels, bearing flaming swords, should drive her from the celestial gates.

"It can't last, Edward," she murmured.

"Can't last, Polly!" cried the young man; "why, my dove is transformed all at once into a raven. We have outlived our troubles, Polly, like the hero and heroine in one of your novels; and what is to prevent our living happy ever afterwards, like them? If you remember, my dear, no sorrows or trials ever fall to the lot of people after marriage. The persecutions, the separations, the estrangements, are all ante-nuptial. When once your true novelist gets his hero and heroine up to the altar-rails in real earnest, – he gets them into the church sometimes, and then forbids the banns, or brings a former wife, or a rightful husband, pale and denouncing, from behind a pillar, and drives the wretched pair out again, to persecute them through three hundred pages more before he lets them get back again, – but when once the important words are spoken and the knot tied, the story's done, and the happy couple get forty or fifty years' wedded bliss, as a set-off against the miseries they have endured in the troubled course of a twelvemonth's courtship. That's the sort of thing, isn't it, Polly?"

The clock of St. Cross, sounding faintly athwart the meadows, struck three as the young man finished speaking.

"Three o'clock, Polly!" he cried; "we must go home, my pet. I mean to be businesslike to-day."

Upon each day in that happy honeymoon holiday Captain Arundel had made some such declaration with regard to his intention of being businesslike; that is to say, setting himself deliberately to the task of writing those letters which should announce and explain his marriage to the people who had a right to hear of it. But the soldier had a dislike to all letter-writing, and a special horror of any epistolary communication which could come under the denomination of a business-letter; so the easy summer days slipped by, – the delicious drowsy noontides, the soft and dreamy twilight, the tender moonlit nights, – and the Captain put off the task for which he had no fancy, from after breakfast until after dinner, and from after dinner until after breakfast; always beguiled away from his open travelling-desk by a word from Mary, who called him to the window to look at a pretty child on the village green before the inn, or at the blacksmith's dog, or the tinker's donkey, or a tired Italian organ-boy who had strayed into that out-of-the-way nook, or at the smart butcher from Winchester, who rattled over in a pony-cart twice a week to take orders from the gentry round about, and to insult and defy the local purveyor, whose stock-in-trade generally seemed to consist of one leg of mutton and a dish of pig's fry.

The young couple walked slowly through the meadows, crossing rustic wooden bridges that spanned the winding stream, loitering to look down into the clear water at the fish which Captain Arundel pointed out, but which Mary could never see; – that young lady always fixing her eyes upon some long trailing weed afloat in the transparent water, while the silvery trout indicated by her husband glided quietly away to the sedgy bottom of the stream. They lingered by the water-mill, beneath whose shadow some children were fishing; they seized upon every pretext for lengthening that sunny homeward walk, and only reached the inn as the village clocks were striking four, at which hour Captain Arundel had ordered dinner.

But after the simple little repast, mild and artless in its nature as the fair young spirit of the bride herself; after the landlord, sympathetic yet respectful, had in his own person attended upon his two guests; after the pretty rustic chamber had been cleared of all evidence of the meal that had been eaten, Edward Arundel began seriously to consider the business in hand.

"The letters must be written, Polly," he said, seating himself at a table near the open window. Trailing branches of jasmine and honeysuckle made a framework round the diamond-paned casement; the perfumed blossoms blew into the room with every breath of the warm August breeze, and hung trembling in the folds of the chintz curtains. Mr. Arundel's gaze wandered dreamily away through this open window to the primitive picture without, – the scattered cottages upon the other side of the green, the cattle standing in the pond, the cackling geese hurrying homeward across the purple ridge of common, the village gossips loitering beneath the faded sign that hung before the low white tavern at the angle of the road. He looked at all these things as he flung his leathern desk upon the table, and made a great parade of unlocking and opening it.

"The letters must be written," he repeated, with a smothered sigh. "Did you ever notice a peculiar property in stationery, Polly?"

Mrs. Edward Arundel only opened her brown eyes to their widest extent, and stared at her husband.

"No, I see you haven't," said the young man. "How should you, you fortunate Polly? You've never had to write any business-letters yet, though you are an heiress. The peculiarity of all stationery, my dear, is, that it is possessed of an intuitive knowledge of the object for which it is to be used. If one has to write an unpleasant letter, Polly, it might go a little smoother, you know; one might round one's paragraphs, and spell the difficult words – the 'believes' and 'receives,' the 'tills' and 'untils,' and all that sort of thing – better with a pleasant pen, an easy-going, jolly, soft-nibbed quill, that would seem to say, 'Cheer up, old fellow! I'll carry you through it; we'll get to "your very obedient servant" before you know where you are,' and so on. But, bless your heart, Polly! let a poor unbusinesslike fellow try to write a business-letter, and everything goes against him. The pen knows what he's at, and jibs, and stumbles, and shies about the paper, like a broken-down screw; the ink turns thick and lumpy; the paper gets as greasy as a London pavement after a fall of snow, till a poor fellow gives up, and knocks under to the force of circumstances. You see if my pen doesn't splutter, Polly, the moment I address Richard Paulette."

Captain Arundel was very careful in the adjustment of his sheet of paper, and began his letter with an air of resolution.

"White Hart Inn, Milldale, near Winchester,

"August 14th.

"MY DEAR SIR,"

He wrote as much as this with great promptitude, and then, with his elbow on the table, fell to staring at his pretty young wife and drumming his fingers on his chin. Mary was sitting opposite her husband at the open window, working, or making a pretence of being occupied with some impossible fragment of Berlin wool-work, while she watched her husband.

"How pretty you look in that white frock, Polly!" said the soldier; "you call those things frocks, don't you? And that blue sash, too, – you ought always to wear white, Mary, like your namesakes abroad who arevouée au blanc by their faithful mothers, and who are a blessing to the laundresses for the first seven or fourteen years of their lives. What shall I say to Paulette? He's such a jolly fellow, there oughtn't to be much difficulty about the matter. 'My dear sir,' seems absurdly stiff; 'my dear Paulette,' – that's better, – 'I write this to inform you that your client, Miss Mary March – ' What's that, Polly?"

It was the postman, a youth upon a pony, with the afternoon letters from London. Captain Arundel flung down his pen and went to the window. He had some interest in this young man's arrival, as he had left orders that such letters as were addressed to him at the hotel in Covent Garden should be forwarded to him at Milldale.

"I daresay there's a letter from Germany, Polly," he said eagerly. "My mother and Letitia are capital correspondents; I'll wager anything there's a letter, and I can answer it in the one I'm going to write this evening, and that'll be killing two birds with one stone. I'll run down to the postman, Polly."

Captain Arundel had good reason to go after his letters, for there seemed little chance of those missives being brought to him. The youthful postman was standing in the porch drinking ale out of a ponderous earthenware mug, and talking to the landlord, when Edward went down.

"Any letters for me, Dick?" the Captain asked. He knew the Christian name of almost every visitor or hanger-on at the little inn, though he had not stayed there an entire fortnight, and was as popular and admired as if he had been some free-spoken young squire to whom all the land round about belonged.

"'Ees, sir," the young man answered, shuffling off his cap; "there be two letters for ye."

He handed the two packets to Captain Arundel, who looked doubtfully at the address of the uppermost, which, like the other, had been re-directed by the people at the London hotel. The original address of this letter was in a handwriting that was strange to him; but it bore the postmark of the village from which the Dangerfield letters were sent.

The back of the inn looked into an orchard, and through an open door opposite to the porch Edward Arundel saw the low branches of the trees, and the ripening fruit red and golden in the afternoon sunlight. He went out into this orchard to read his letters, his mind a little disturbed by the strange handwriting upon the Dangerfield epistle.

The letter was from his father's housekeeper, imploring him most earnestly to go down to the Park without delay. Squire Arundel had been stricken with paralysis, and was declared to be in imminent danger. Mrs. and Miss Arundel and Mr. Reginald were away in Germany. The faithful old servant implored the younger son to lose no time in hurrying home, if he wished to see his father alive.

The soldier leaned against the gnarled grey trunk of an old apple-tree, and stared at this letter with a white awe-stricken face.

What was he to do? He must go to his father, of course. He must go without a moment's delay. He must catch the first train that would carry him westward from Southampton. There could be no question as to his duty. He must go; he must leave his young wife.

His heart sank with a sharp thrill of pain, and with perhaps some faint shuddering sense of an unknown terror, as he thought of this.

"It was lucky I didn't write the letters," he reflected; "no one will guess the secret of my darling's retreat. She can stay here till I come back to her. God knows I shall hurry back the moment my duty sets me free. These people will take care of her. No one will know where to look for her. I'm very glad I didn't write to Olivia. We were so happy this morning! Who could think that sorrow would come between us so soon?"