John Marchmont's Legacy Part 15

"Mr. Paul Marchmont."

She started as she read the name. Paul Marchmont! She remembered what her husband had told her of this man. It was not much; for John's feelings on the subject of his cousin had been of so vague a nature that he had shrunk from expounding them to his stern, practical wife.

He had told her, therefore, that he did not very much care for Paul, and that he wished no intimacy ever to arise between the artist and Mary; but he had said nothing more than this.

"The gentleman is waiting to see me, I suppose?" Mrs. Marchmont said.

"Yes, ma'am. The gentleman came to Kemberling by the 11.5 train from London, and has driven over here in one of Harris's flys."

"Tell him I will come to him immediately. Is he in the drawing-room?"

"Yes, ma'am."

The man bowed and left the room. Olivia rose from her chair and lingered by the fireplace with her foot on the fender, her elbow resting on the carved oak chimneypiece.

"Paul Marchmont! He has come to the funeral, I suppose. And he expects to find himself mentioned in the will, I dare say. I think, from what my husband told me, he will be disappointed in that. Paul Marchmont! If Mary were to die unmarried, this man or his sisters would inherit Marchmont Towers."

There was a looking-gla.s.s over the mantelpiece; a narrow, oblong gla.s.s, in an old-fas.h.i.+oned carved ebony frame, which was inclined forward.

Olivia looked musingly in this gla.s.s, and smoothed the heavy bands of dead-black hair under her cap.

"There are people who would call me handsome," she thought, as she looked with a moody frown at her image in the gla.s.s; "and yet I have seen Edward Arundel's eyes wander away from my face, even while I have been talking to him, to watch the swallows skimming by in the sun, or the ivy-leaves flapping against the wall."

She turned from the gla.s.s with a sigh, and went out into a dusky corridor. The shutters of all the princ.i.p.al rooms and the windows upon the grand staircase were still closed; the wide hall was dark and gloomy, and drops of rain spattered every now and then upon the logs that smouldered on the wide old-fas.h.i.+oned hearth. The misty October morning had heralded a wet day.

Paul Marchmont was sitting in a low easy-chair before a blazing fire in the western drawing-room, the red light full upon his face. It was a handsome face, or perhaps, to speak more exactly, it was one of those faces that are generally called "interesting." The features were very delicate and refined, the pale greyish-blue eyes were shaded by long brown lashes, and the small and rather feminine mouth was overshadowed by a slender auburn moustache, under which the rosy tint of the lips was very visible. But it was Paul Marchmont's hair which gave a peculiarity to a personal appearance that might otherwise have been in no way out of the common. This hair, fine, silky, and luxuriant, was _white_, although its owner could not have been more than thirty-seven years of age.

The uninvited guest rose as Olivia Marchmont entered the room.

"I have the honour of speaking to my cousin's widow?" he said, with a courteous smile.

"Yes, I am Mrs. Marchmont."

Olivia seated herself near the fire. The wet day was cold and cheerless. Mrs. Marchmont s.h.i.+vered as she extended her long thin hand to the blaze.

"And you are doubtless surprised to see me here, Mrs. Marchmont?" the artist said, leaning upon the back of his chair in the easy att.i.tude of a man who means to make himself at home. "But believe me, that although I never took advantage of a very friendly letter written to me by poor John----"

Paul Marchmont paused for a moment, keeping sharp watch upon the widow's face; but no sorrowful expression, no evidence of emotion, was visible in that inflexible countenance.

"Although, I repeat, I never availed myself of a sort of general invitation to come and shoot his partridges, or borrow money of him, or take advantage of any of those other little privileges generally claimed by a man's poor relations, it is not to be supposed, my dear Mrs. Marchmont, that I was altogether forgetful of either Marchmont Towers or its owner, my cousin. I did not come here, because I am a hard-working man, and the idleness of a country house would have been ruin to me. But I heard sometimes of my cousin from neighbours of his."

"Neighbours!" repeated Olivia, in a tone of surprise.

"Yes; people near enough to be called neighbours in the country. My sister lives at Stanfield. She is married to a surgeon who practises in that delightful town. You know Stanfield, of course?"

"No, I have never been there. It is five-and-twenty miles from here."

"Indeed! too far for a drive, then. Yes, my sister lives at Stanfield.

John never knew much of her in his adversity; and therefore may be forgiven if he forgot her in his prosperity. But she did not forget him. We poor relations have excellent memories. The Stanfield people have so little to talk about, that it is scarcely any wonder if they are inquisitive about the affairs of the grand country gentry round about them. I heard of John through my sister; I heard of his marriage through her,"--he bowed to Olivia as he said this,--"and I wrote immediately to congratulate him upon that happy event,"--he bowed again here;--"and it was through Lavinia Weston, my sister, that I heard of poor John's death; one day before the announcement appeared in the columns of the 'Times.' I am sorry to find that I am too late for the funeral. I could have wished to have paid my cousin the last tribute of esteem that one man can pay another."

"You would wish to hear the reading of the will?" Olivia said, interrogatively.

Paul Marchmont shrugged his shoulders, with a low, careless laugh; not an indecorous laugh,--nothing that this man did or said ever appeared ill-advised or out of place. The people who disliked him were compelled to acknowledge that they disliked him unreasonably, and very much on the Doctor-Fell principle; for it was impossible to take objection to either his manners or his actions.

"That important legal doc.u.ment can have very little interest for me, my dear Mrs. Marchmont," he said gaily. "John can have had nothing to leave me. I am too well acquainted with the terms of my grandfather's will to have any mercenary hopes in coming to Marchmont Towers."

He stopped, and looked at Olivia's impa.s.sible face.

"What on earth could have induced this woman to marry my cousin?" he thought. "John could have had very little to leave his widow."

He played with the ornaments at his watch-chain, looking reflectively at the fire for some moments.

"Miss Marchmont,--my cousin, Mary Marchmont, I should say,--bears her loss pretty well, I hope?"

Olivia shrugged her shoulders.

"I am sorry to say that my stepdaughter displays very little Christian resignation," she said.

And then a spirit within her arose and whispered, with a mocking voice, "What resignation do _you_ show beneath _your_ affliction,--you, who should be so good a Christian? How have _you_ learned to school your rebellious heart?"

"My cousin is very young," Paul Marchmont said, presently.

"She was fifteen last July."

"Fifteen! Very young to be the owner of Marchmont Towers and an income of eleven thousand a year," returned the artist. He walked to one of the long windows, and drawing aside the edge of the blind, looked out upon the terrace and the wide flats before the mansion. The rain dripped and splashed upon the stone steps; the rain-drops hung upon the grim adornments of the carved bal.u.s.trade, soaking into moss-grown escutcheons and half-obliterated coats-of-arms. The weird willows by the pools far away, and a group of poplars near the house, looked gaunt and black against the dismal grey sky.

Paul Marchmont dropped the blind, and turned away from the gloomy landscape with a half-contemptuous gesture. "I don't know that I envy my cousin, after all," he said: "the place is as dreary as Tennyson's Moated Grange."

There was the sound of wheels on the carriage-drive before the terrace, and presently a subdued murmur of hushed voices in the hall. Mr.

Richard Paulette, and the two medical men who had attended John Marchmont, had returned to the Towers, for the reading of the will.

Hubert Arundel had returned with them; but the other followers in the funeral train had departed to their several homes. The undertaker and his men had come back to the house by the side-entrance, and were making themselves very comfortable in the servants'-hall after the fulfilment of their mournful duties.

The will was to be read in the dining-room; and Mr. Paulette and the clerk who had accompanied him to Marchmont Towers were already seated at one end of the long carved-oak table, busy with their papers and pens and ink, a.s.suming an importance the occasion did not require.

Olivia went out into the hall to speak to her father.

"You will find Mr. Marchmont's solicitor in the dining-room," she said to Paul, who was looking at some of the old pictures on the drawing-room walls.

A large fire was blazing in the wide grate at the end of the dining-room. The blinds had been drawn up. There was no longer need that the house should be wrapped in darkness. The Awful Presence had departed; and such light as there was in the gloomy October sky was free to enter the rooms, which the death of one quiet, un.o.btrusive creature had made for a time desolate.

There was no sound in the room but the low voice of the two doctors talking of their late patient in undertones near the fireplace, and the occasional fluttering of the papers under the lawyer's hand. The clerk, who sat respectfully a little way behind his master, and upon the very edge of his ponderous morocco-covered chair, had been wont to give John Marchmont his orders, and to lecture him for being tardy with his work a few years before, in the Lincoln's Inn office. He was wondering now whether he should find himself remembered in the dead man's will, to the extent of a mourning ring or an old-fas.h.i.+oned silver snuff-box.

Richard Paulette looked up as Olivia and her father entered the room, followed at a little distance by Paul Marchmont, who walked at a leisurely pace, looking at the carved doorways and the pictures against the wainscot, and appearing, as he had declared himself, very little concerned in the important business about to be transacted.

"We shall want Miss Marchmont here, if you please," Mr. Paulette said, as he looked up from his papers.

"Is it necessary that she should be present?" Olivia asked.

"Very necessary."

"But she is ill; she is in bed."