There was, therefore, no shadow of change in the stately mansion. The dinner-bell still rang at the same hour; the same tradespeople left the same species of wares at the low oaken door; the old housekeeper, arranging her simple _menu_, planned her narrow round of soups and roasts, sweets and made-dishes, exactly as she had been wont to do, and had no new tastes to consult. A grey-haired bachelor, who had been own-man to Philip, was now own-man to John. The carriage which had conveyed the late lord every Sunday to morning and afternoon service at Kemberling conveyed the new lord, who sat in the same seat that his predecessor had occupied in the great family-pew, and read his prayers out of the same book,--a n.o.ble crimson, morocco-covered volume, in which George, our most gracious King and Governor, and all manner of dead-and-gone princes and princesses were prayed for.

The presence of Mary Marchmont made the only change in the old house; and even that change was a very trifling one. Mary and her father were as closely united at Marchmont Towers as they had been in Oakley Street. The little girl clung to her father as tenderly as ever--more tenderly than ever perhaps; for she knew something of that which the physicians had said, and she knew that John Marchmont's lease of life was not a long one. Perhaps it would be better to say that he had no lease at all. His soul was a tenant on sufferance in its frail earthly habitation, receiving a respite now and again, when the flicker of the lamp was very low--every chance breath of wind threatening to extinguish it for ever. It was only those who knew John Marchmont very intimately who were fully acquainted with the extent of his danger. He no longer bore any of those fatal outward signs of consumption, which fatigue and deprivation had once made painfully conspicuous. The hectic flush and the unnatural brightness of the eyes had subsided; indeed, John seemed much stronger and heartier than of old; and it is only great medical pract.i.tioners who can tell to a nicety what is going on _inside_ a man, when he presents a very fair exterior to the unprofessional eye. But John was decidedly better than he had been. He might live three years, five, seven, possibly even ten years; but he must live the life of a man who holds himself perpetually upon his defence against death; and he must recognise in every bleak current of wind, in every chilling damp, or perilous heat, or over-exertion, or ill-chosen morsel of food, or hasty emotion, or sudden pa.s.sion, an insidious ally of his dismal enemy.

Mary Marchmont knew all this,--or divined it, perhaps, rather than knew it, with the child-woman's subtle power of divination, which is even stronger than the actual woman's; for her father had done his best to keep all sorrowful knowledge from her. She knew that he was in danger; and she loved him all the more dearly, as the one precious thing which was in constant peril of being s.n.a.t.c.hed away. The child's love for her father has not grown any less morbid in its intensity since Edward Arundel's departure for India; nor has Mary become more childlike since her coming to Marchmont Towers, and her abandonment of all those sordid cares, those pitiful every-day duties, which had made her womanly.

It may be that the last lingering glamour of childhood had for ever faded away with the realisation of the day-dream which she had carried about with her so often in the dingy transpontine thoroughfares around Oakley Street. Marchmont Towers, that fairy palace, whose lighted windows had shone upon her far away across a cruel forest of poverty and trouble, like the enchanted castle which appears to the lost wanderer of the child's story, was now the home of the father she loved. The grim enchanter Death, the only magician of our modern histories, had waved his skeleton hand, more powerful than the star-gemmed wand of any fairy G.o.dmother, and the obstacles which had stood between John Marchmont and his inheritance had one by one been swept away.

But was Marchmont Towers quite as beautiful as that fairy palace of Mary's day-dream? No, not quite--not quite. The rooms were handsome,--handsomer and larger, even, than the rooms she had dreamed of; but perhaps none the better for that. They were grand and gloomy and magnificent; but they were not the sunlit chambers which her fancy had built up, and decorated with such shreds and patches of splendour as her narrow experience enabled her to devise. Perhaps it was rather a disappointment to Miss Marchmont to discover that the mansion was completely furnished, and that there was no room in it for any of those splendours which she had so often contemplated in the New Cut. The parrot at the greengrocer's was a vulgar bird, and not by any means admissible in Lincolnshire. The carrying away and providing for Mary's favourite tradespeople was not practicable; and John Marchmont had demurred to her proposal of adopting the butcher's daughter.

There is always something to be given up even when our brightest visions are realised; there is always some one figure (a low one perhaps) missing in the fullest sum of earthly happiness. I dare say if Alnaschar had married the Vizier's daughter, he would have found her a shrew, and would have looked back yearningly to the humble days in which he had been an itinerant vendor of crockery-ware.

If, therefore, Mary Marchmont found her sunlit fancies not quite realised by the great stony mansion that frowned upon the fenny countryside, the wide gra.s.sy flat, the black pool, with its dismal shelter of weird pollard-willows, whose ugly reflections, distorted on the bosom of the quiet water, looked like the shadows of hump-backed men;--if these things did not compose as beautiful a picture as that which the little girl had carried so long in her mind, she had no more reason to be sorry than the rest of us, and had been no more foolish than other dreamers. I think she had built her airy castle too much after the model of a last scene in a pantomime, and that she expected to find spangled waters twinkling in perpetual sunshine, revolving fountains, ever-expanding sunflowers, and gilded clouds of rose-coloured gauze,--every thing except the fairies, in short,--at Marchmont Towers. Well, the dream was over: and she was quite a woman now, and very grateful to Providence when she remembered that her father had no longer need to toil for his daily bread, and that he was luxuriously lodged, and could have the first physicians in the land at his beck and call.

"Oh, papa, it is so nice to be rich!" the young lady would exclaim now and then, in a fleeting transport of enthusiasm. "How good we ought to be to the poor people, when we remember how poor we once were!"

And the little girl did not forget to be good to the poor about Kemberling and Marchmont Towers. There were plenty of poor, of course--free-and-easy pensioners, who came to the Towers for brandy, and wine, and milk, and woollen stuffs, and grocery, precisely as they would have gone to a shop, except that there was to be no bill. The housekeeper doled out her bounties with many short homilies upon the depravity and ingrat.i.tude of the recipients, and gave tracts of an awful and denunciatory nature to the pitiful pet.i.tioners--tracts interrogatory, and tracts fiercely imperative; tracts that asked, "Where are you going?" "Why are you wicked?" "What will become of you?"

and other tracts which cried, "Stop, and think!" "Pause, while there is time!" "Sinner, consider!" "Evil-doer, beware!" Perhaps it may not be the wisest possible plan to begin the work of reformation by frightening, threatening, and otherwise disheartening the wretched sinner to be reformed. There is a certain sermon in the New Testament, containing sacred and comforting words which were spoken upon a mountain near at hand to Jerusalem, and spoken to an auditory amongst which there must have been many sinful creatures; but there is more of blessing than cursing in that sublime discourse, and it might be rather a tender father pleading gently with his wayward children than an offended Deity dealing out denunciation upon a stubborn and refractory race. But the authors of the tracts may have never read this sermon, perhaps; and they may take their ideas of composition from that comforting service which we read on Ash-Wednesday, cowering in fear and trembling in our pews, and calling down curses upon ourselves and our neighbours. Be it as it might, the tracts were not popular amongst the pensioners of Marchmont Towers. They infinitely preferred to hear Mary read a chapter in the New Testament, or some pretty patriarchal story of primitive obedience and faith. The little girl would discourse upon the Scripture histories in her simple, old-fashioned manner; and many a stout Lincolnshire farm-labourer was content to sit over his hearth, with a pipe of s.h.a.g-tobacco and a mug of fettled beer, while Miss Marchmont read and expounded the history of Abraham and Isaac, or Joseph and his brethren.

"It's joost loike a story-book to hear her," the man would say to his wife; "and yet she brings it all hoame, too, loike. If she reads about Abraham, she'll say, maybe, 'That's joost how you gave your only son to be a soldier, you know, Muster Moggins;'--she allus says Muster Moggins;--'you gave un into G.o.d's hands, and you troosted G.o.d would take care of un; and whatever cam' to un would be the best, even if it was death.' That's what she'll say, bless her little heart! so gentle and tender loike. The wust o' chaps couldn't but listen to her."

Mary Marchmont's morbidly sensitive nature adapted her to all charitable offices. No chance word in her simple talk ever inflicted a wound upon the listener. She had a subtle and intuitive comprehension of other people's feelings, derived from the extreme susceptibility of her own. She had never been vulgarised by the a.s.sociations of poverty; for her self-contained nature took no colour from the things that surrounded her, and she was only at Marchmont Towers that which she had been from the age of six--a little lady, grave and gentle, dignified, discreet, and wise.

There was one bright figure missing out of the picture which Mary had been wont of late years to make of the Lincolnshire mansion, and that was the figure of the yellow-haired boy who had breakfasted upon haddocks and hot rolls in Oakley Street. She had imagined Edward Arundel an inhabitant of that fair Utopia. He would live with them; or, if he could not live with them, he would be with them as a visitor,--often--almost always. He would leave off being a soldier, for of course her papa could give him more money than he could get by being a soldier--(you see that Mary's experience of poverty had taught her to take a mercantile and sordid view of military life)--and he would come to Marchmont Towers, and ride, and drive, and play tennis (what was tennis? she wondered), and read three-volume novels all day long. But that part of the dream was at least broken. Marchmont Towers was Mary's home, but the young soldier was far away; in the Pa.s.s of Bolan, perhaps,--Mary had a picture of that cruel rocky pa.s.s almost always in her mind,--or cutting his way through a black jungle, with the yellow eyes of hungry tigers glaring out at him through the rank tropical foliage; or dying of thirst and fever under a scorching sun, with no better pillow than the neck of a dead camel, with no more tender watcher than the impatient vulture flapping her wings above his head, and waiting till he, too, should be carrion. What was the good of wealth, if it could not bring this young soldier home to a safe shelter in his native land? John Marchmont smiled when his daughter asked this question, and implored her father to write to Edward Arundel, recalling him to England.

"G.o.d knows how glad I should be to have the boy here, Polly!" John said, as he drew his little girl closer to his breast,--she sat on his knee still, though she was thirteen years of age. "But Edward has a career before him, my dear, and could not give it up for an inglorious life in this rambling old house. It isn't as if I could hold out any inducement to him: you know, Polly, I can't; for I mustn't leave any money away from my little girl."

"But he might have half my money, papa, or all of it," Mary added piteously. "What could I do with money, if----?"

She didn't finish the sentence; she never could complete any such sentence as this; but her father knew what she meant.

So six months had pa.s.sed since a dreary January day upon which John Marchmont had read, in the second column of the "Times," that he could hear of something greatly to his advantage by applying to a certain solicitor, whose offices were next door but one to those of Messrs.

Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson's. His heart began to beat very violently when he read that advertis.e.m.e.nt in the supplement, which it was one of his duties to air before the fire in the clerks' office; but he showed no other sign of emotion. He waited until he took the papers to his employer; and as he laid them at Mr. Mathewson's elbow, murmured a respectful request to be allowed to go out for half-an-hour, upon his own business.

"Good gracious me, Marchmont!" cried the lawyer; "what can you want to go out for at this time in the morning? You've only just come; and there's that agreement between Higgs and Sandyman must be copied before----"

"Yes, I know, sir. I'll be back in time to attend to it; but I--I think I've come into a fortune, sir; and I should like to go and see about it."

The solicitor turned in his revolving library-chair, and looked aghast at his clerk. Had this Marchmont--always rather unnaturally reserved and eccentric--gone suddenly mad? No; the copying-clerk stood by his employer's side, grave, self-possessed as ever, with his forefinger upon the advertis.e.m.e.nt.

"Marchmont--John--call--Messrs. Tindal and Trollam--" gasped Mr.

Mathewson. "Do you mean to tell me it's _you_?"

"Yes, sir."

"Egad, I'll go with you!" cried the solicitor, hooking his arm through that of his clerk, s.n.a.t.c.hing his hat from an adjacent stand, and dashing through the outer office, down the great staircase, and into the next door but one before John Marchmont knew where he was.

John had not deceived his employer. Marchmont Towers was his, with all its appurtenances. Messrs. Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson took him in hand, much to the chagrin of Messrs. Tindal and Trollam, and proved his ident.i.ty in less than a week. On a shelf above the high wooden desk at which John had sat, copying law-papers, with a weary hand and an aching spine, appeared two bran-new deed-boxes, inscribed, in white letters, with the name and address of JOHN MARCHMONT, ESQ., MARCHMONT TOWERS. The copying-clerk's sudden accession to fortune was the talk of all the _employes_ in "The Fields." Marchmont Towers was exaggerated into half Lincolnshire, and a tidy slice of Yorkshire; eleven thousand a year was expanded into an annual million. Everybody expected largesse from the legatee. How fond people had been of the quiet clerk, and how magnanimously they had concealed their sentiments during his poverty, lest they should wound him, as they urged, "which" they knew he was sensitive; and how expansively they now dilated on their long-suppressed emotions! Of course, under these circ.u.mstances, it is hardly likely that everybody could be satisfied; so it is a small thing to say that the dinner which John gave--by his late employers'

suggestion (he was about the last man to think of giving a dinner)--at the "Albion Tavern," to the legal staff of Messrs. Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson, and such acquaintance of the legal profession as they should choose to invite, was a failure; and that gentlemen who were pretty well used to dine upon liver and bacon, or beefsteak and onions, or the joint, vegetables, bread, cheese, and celery for a shilling, turned up their noses at the turbot, murmured at the paucity of green fat in the soup, made light of red mullet and ortolans, objected to the flavour of the truffles, and were contemptuous about the wines.

John knew nothing of this. He had lived a separate and secluded existence; and his only thought now was of getting away to Marchmont Towers, which had been familiar to him in his boyhood, when he had been wont to go there on occasional visits to his grandfather. He wanted to get away from the turmoil and confusion of the big, heartless city, in which he had endured so much; he wanted to carry away his little girl to a quiet country home, and live and die there in peace. He liberally rewarded all the good people about Oakley Street who had been kind to little Mary; and there was weeping in the regions of the Ladies'

Wardrobe when Mr. Marchmont and his daughter went away one bitter winter's morning in a cab, which was to carry them to the hostelry whence the coach started for Lincoln.

It is strange to think how far those Oakley-street days of privation and endurance seem to have receded in the memories of both father and daughter. The impalpable past fades away, and it is difficult for John and his little girl to believe that they were once so poor and desolate. It is Oakley Street now that is visionary and unreal. The stately county families bear down upon Marchmont Towers in great lumbering chariots, with brazen crests upon the hammer-cloths, and sulky coachmen in Brown-George wigs. The county mammas patronise and caress Miss Marchmont--what a match she will be for one of the county sons by-and-by!--the county daughters discourse with Mary about her poor, and her fancy-work, and her piano. She is getting on slowly enough with her piano, poor little girl! under the tuition of the organist of Swampington, who gives lessons to that part of the county.

And there are solemn dinners now and then at Marchmont Towers--dinners at which Miss Mary appears when the cloth has been removed, and reflects in silent wonder upon the change that has come to her father and herself. Can it be true that she has ever lived in Oakley Street, whither came no more aristocratic visitors than her Aunt Sophia, who was the wife of a Berkshire farmer, and always brought hogs' puddings, and b.u.t.ter, and home-made bread, and other rustic delicacies to her brother-in-law; or Mrs. Brigsome, the washer-woman, who made a morning-call every Monday, to fetch John Marchmont's shabby shirts? The shirts were not shabby now; and it was no longer Mary's duty to watch them day by day, and manipulate them tenderly when the linen grew frayed at the sharp edges of the folds, or the b.u.t.tonholes gave signs of weakness. Corson, Mr. Marchmont's own-man, had care of the shirts now: and John wore diamond-studs and a black-satin waistcoat, when he gave a dinner-party. They were not very lively, those Lincolnshire dinner-parties; though the dessert was a sight to look upon, in Mary's eyes. The long shining table, the red and gold and purple Indian china, the fluffy woollen d'oyleys, the sparkling cut-gla.s.s, the sticky preserved ginger and guava-jelly, and dried orange rings and chips, and all the stereotyped sweetmeats, were very grand and beautiful, no doubt; but Mary had seen livelier desserts in Oakley Street, though there had been nothing better than a brown-paper bag of oranges from the Westminster Road, and a bottle of two-and-twopenny Marsala from a licensed victualler's in the Borough, to promote conviviality.

CHAPTER VI.

THE YOUNG SOLDIER'S RETURN.

The rain beats down upon the battlemented roof of Marchmont Towers this July day, as if it had a mind to flood the old mansion. The flat waste of gra.s.s, and the lonely clumps of trees, are almost blotted out by the falling rain. The low grey sky shuts out the distance. This part of Lincolnshire--fenny, misty, and flat always--seems flatter and mistier than usual to-day. The rain beats hopelessly upon the leaves in the wood behind Marchmont Towers, and splashes into great pools beneath the trees, until the ground is almost hidden by the fallen water, and the trees seem to be growing out of a black lake. The land is lower behind Marchmont Towers, and slopes down gradually to the bank of a dismal river, which straggles through the Marchmont property at a snail's pace, to gain an impetus farther on, until it hurries into the sea somewhere northward of Grimsby. The wood is not held in any great favour by the household at the Towers; and it has been a pet project of several Marchmonts to level and drain it, but a project not very easily to be carried out. Marchmont Towers is said to be unhealthy, as a dwelling-house, by reason of this wood, from which miasmas rise in certain states of the weather; and it is on this account that the back of the house--the eastern front, at least, as it is called--looking to the wood is very little used.

Mary Marchmont sits at a window in the western drawing-room, watching the ceaseless falling of the rain upon this dreary summer afternoon.

She is little changed since the day upon which Edward Arundel saw her in Oakley Street. She is taller, of course, but her figure is as slender and childish as ever: it is only her face in which the earnestness of premature womanhood reveals itself in a grave and sweet serenity very beautiful to contemplate. Her soft brown eyes have a pensive shadow in their gentle light; her mouth is even more pensive.

It has been said of Jane Grey, of Mary Stuart, of Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and other fated women, that in the gayest hours of their youth they bore upon some feature, or in some expression, the shadow of the End--an impalpable, indescribable presage of an awful future, vaguely felt by those who looked upon them.

Is it thus with Mary Marchmont? Has the solemn hand of Destiny set that shadowy brand upon the face of this child, that even in her prosperity, as in her adversity, she should be so utterly different from all other children? Is she already marked out for some womanly martyrdom--already set apart for more than common suffering?

She sits alone this afternoon, for her father is busy with his agent.

Wealth does not mean immunity from all care and trouble; and Mr.

Marchmont has plenty of work to get through, in conjunction with his land-steward, a hard-headed Yorkshireman, who lives at Kemberling, and insists on doing his duty with pertinacious honesty.

The large brown eyes looked wistfully out at the dismal waste and the falling rain. There was a wretched equestrian making his way along the carriage-drive.

"Who can come to see us on such a day?" Mary thought. "It must be Mr.

Gormby, I suppose;"--the agent's name was Gormby. "Mr. Gormby never cares about the wet; but then I thought he was with papa. Oh, I hope it isn't anybody coming to call."

But Mary forgot all about the struggling equestrian the next moment.

She had some morsel of fancy-work upon her lap, and picked it up and went on with it, setting slow st.i.tches, and letting her thoughts wander far away from Marchmont Towers--to India, I am afraid; or to that imaginary India which she had created for herself out of such images as were to be picked up in the "Arabian Nights." She was roused suddenly by the opening of a door at the farther end of the room, and by the voice of a servant, who mumbled a name which sounded something like Mr.

Armenger.

She rose, blushing a little, to do honour to one of her father's county acquaintance, as she thought; when a fair-haired gentleman dashed in, very much excited and very wet, and made his way towards her.

"I _would_ come, Miss Marchmont," he said,--"I would come, though the day was so wet. Everybody vowed I was mad to think of it, and it was as much as my poor brute of a horse could do to get over the ten miles of swamp between this and my uncle's house; but I would come! Where's John? I want to see John. Didn't I always tell him he'd come into the Lincolnshire property? Didn't I always say so, now? You should have seen Martin Mostyn's face--he's got a capital berth in the War Office, and he's such a sn.o.b!--when I told him the news: it was as long as my arm! But I must see John, dear old fellow! I long to congratulate him."

Mary stood with her hands clasped, and her breath coming quickly. The blush had quite faded out, and left her unusually pale. But Edward Arundel did not see this: young gentlemen of four-and-twenty are not very attentive to every change of expression in little girls of thirteen.

"Oh, is it you, Mr. Arundel? Is it really you?"

She spoke in a low voice, and it was almost difficult to keep the rushing tears back while she did so. She had pictured him so often in peril, in famine, in sickness, in death, that to see him here, well, happy, light-hearted, cordial, handsome, and brave, as she had seen him four-and-a-half years before in the two-pair back in Oakley Street, was almost too much for her to bear without the relief of tears. But she controlled her emotion as bravely as if she had been a woman of twenty.

"I am so glad to see you," she said quietly; "and papa will be so glad too! It is the only thing we want, now we are rich; to have you with us. We have talked of you so often; and I--we--have been so unhappy sometimes, thinking that----"

"That I should be killed, I suppose?"

"Yes; or wounded very, very badly. The battles in India have been dreadful, have they not?"