John Marchmont's Legacy. Volumes 1-3. Braddon Mary Elizabeth
and soldiers, and lawyers, and parsons, and simple country–squires of the Marchmont race may have descended from their picture–frames to hold a witches' sabbath in the old mansion; but as the Lincolnshire servants were hearty eaters and heavy sleepers, the ghosts had it all to themselves. I believe there was one dismal story attached to the house,–the story of a Marchmont of the time of Charles I, who had murdered his coachman in a fit of insensate rage; and it was even asserted, upon the authority of an old housekeeper, that John Marchmont's grandmother, when a young woman and lately come as a bride to the Towers, had beheld the murdered coachman stalk into her chamber, ghastly and blood–bedabbled, in the dim summer twilight. But as this story was not particularly romantic, and possessed none of the elements likely to insure popularity,–such as love, jealousy, revenge, mystery, youth, and beauty,–it had never been very widely disseminated.
I should think that the new owner of Marchmont Towers–new within the last six months–was about the last person in Christendom to be hypercritical, or to raise fanciful objections to his dwelling; for inasmuch as he had come straight from a wretched transpontine lodging to this splendid Lincolnshire mansion, and had at the same time exchanged a stipend of thirty shillings a week for an income of eleven thousand a year (derivable from lands that spread far away, over fenny flats and low–lying farms, to the solitary seashore), he had ample reason to be grateful to Providence, and well pleased with his new abode.
Yes; Philip Marchmont, the childless widower, had died six months before, at the close of the year '43, of a broken heart,–his old servants said, broken by the loss of his only and idolised son; after which loss he had never been known to smile. He was one of those undemonstrative men who can take a great sorrow quietly, and only–die of it. Philip Marchmont lay in a velvet–covered coffin, above his son's, in the stone recess set apart for them in the Marchmont vault beneath Kemberling Church, three miles from the Towers; and John reigned in his stead. John Marchmont, the supernumerary, the banner–holder of Drury Lane, the patient, conscientious copying and outdoor clerk of Lincoln's Inn, was now sole owner of the Lincolnshire estate, sole master of a household of well–trained old servants, sole proprietor of a very decent country–gentleman's stud, and of chariots, barouches, chaises, phaetons, and other vehicles–a little shabby and out of date it may be, but very comfortable to a man for whom an omnibus ride had long been a treat and a rarity. Nothing had been touched or disturbed since Philip Marchmont's death. The rooms he had used were still the occupied apartments; the chambers he had chosen to shut up were still kept with locked doors; the servants who had served him waited upon his successor, whom they declared to be a quiet, easy gentleman, far too wise to interfere with old servants, every one of whom knew the ways of the house a great deal better than he did, though he was the master of it.
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 noble 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 practitioners 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 passion, 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 snatched 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 godmother, 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 grassy 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,