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Madonna Mary

by Mrs. Oliphant · English · Gutenberg #44080 · 1,078,090 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Madonna Mary

Author: Mrs. Oliphant


        
Release date: October 31, 2013 [eBook #44080]
                Most recently updated: November 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADONNA MARY ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)







                             MADONNA MARY.

                                A Novel.

                                   BY
                             MRS. OLIPHANT,

                               AUTHOR OF

              "LAST OF THE MORTIMERS," "IN THE DAYS OF MY
                 LIFE," "SQUIRE ARDEN," "OMBRA," "MAY,"
                               ETC., ETC.

                             _NEW EDITION._

                                LONDON:
                   CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
                                 1875.

                        [_All rights reserved._]




                                LONDON:
            SWIFT AND CO., NEWTON STREET, HIGH HOLBORN, W.C.




                             MADONNA MARY.





CHAPTER I.


Major Ochterlony had been very fidgety after the coming in of the mail.
He was very often so, as all his friends were aware, and nobody so much
as Mary, his wife, who was herself, on ordinary occasions, of an
admirable composure. But the arrival of the mail, which is so welcome an
event at an Indian station, and which generally affected the Major very
mildly, had produced a singular impression upon him on this special
occasion. He was not a man who possessed a large correspondence in his
own person; he had reached middle life, and had nobody particular
belonging to him, except his wife and his little children, who were as
yet too young to have been sent "home;" and consequently there was
nobody to receive letters from, except a few married brothers and
sisters, who don't count, as everybody knows. That kind of formally
affectionate correspondence is not generally exciting, and even Major
Ochterlony supported it with composure. But as for the mail which
arrived on the 15th of April, 1838, its effect was different. He went
out and in so often, that Mary got very little good of her letters,
which were from her young sister and her old aunt, and were naturally
overflowing with all kinds of pleasant gossip and domestic information.
The present writer has so imperfect an idea of what an Indian bungalow
is like, that it would be impossible for her to convey a clear idea to
the reader, who probably knows much better about it. But yet it was in
an Indian bungalow that Mrs. Ochterlony was seated--in the dim hot
atmosphere, out of which the sun was carefully excluded, but in which,
nevertheless, the inmates simmered softly with the patience of people
who cannot help it, and who are used to their martyrdom. She sat still,
and did her best to make out the pleasant babble in the letters, which
seemed to take sound to itself as she read, and to break into a sweet
confusion of kind voices, and rustling leaves, and running water, such
as, she knew, had filled the little rustic drawing-room in which the
letters were written. The sister was very young, and the aunt was old,
and all the experience of the world possessed by the two together, might
have gone into Mary's thimble, which she kept playing with upon her
finger as she read. But though she knew twenty times better than they
did, the soft old lady's gentle counsel, and the audacious girl's advice
and censure, were sweet to Mary, who smiled many a time at their
simplicity, and yet took the good of it in a way that was peculiar to
her. She read, and she smiled in her reading, and felt the fresh English
air blow about her, and the leaves rustling--if it had not been for the
Major, who went and came like a ghost, and let everything fall that he
touched, and hunted every innocent beetle or lizard that had come in to
see how things were going on; for he was one of those men who have a
great, almost womanish objection to reptiles and insects, which is a
sentiment much misplaced in India. He fidgeted so much, indeed, as to
disturb even his wife's accustomed nerves at last.

"Is there anything wrong--has anything happened?" she asked, folding up
her letter, and laying it down in her open work-basket. Her anxiety was
not profound, for she was accustomed to the Major's "ways," but still
she saw it was necessary for his comfort to utter what was on his mind.

"When you have read your letters I want to speak to you," he said. "What
do your people mean by sending you such heaps of letters? I thought you
would never be done. Well, Mary, this is what it is--there's nothing
wrong with the children, or anybody belonging to us, thank God; but it's
very nearly as bad, and, I am at my wit's end. Old Sommerville's dead."

"Old Sommerville!" said Mrs. Ochterlony. This time she was utterly
perplexed and at a loss. She could read easily enough the anxiety which
filled her husband's handsome, restless face; but, then, so small a
matter put _him_ out of his ordinary! And she could not for her life
remember who old Sommerville was.

"I daresay _you_ don't recollect him," said the Major, in an aggrieved
tone. "It is very odd how everything has gone wrong with us since that
false start. It is an awful shame, when a set of old fogies put young
people in such a position--all for nothing, too," Major Ochterlony
added: "for after we were actually married, everybody came round. It is
an awful shame!"

"If I was a suspicious woman," said Mary, with a smile, "I should think
it was our marriage that you called a false start and an awful shame."

"And so it is, my love: so it is," said the innocent soldier, his face
growing more and more cloudy. As for his wife being a suspicious woman,
or the possible existence of any delicacy on her part about his words,
the Major knew better than that. The truth was that he might have given
utterance to sentiments of the most atrocious description on that point,
sentiments which would have broken the heart and blighted the existence,
so to speak, of any sensitive young woman, without producing the
slightest effect upon Mary, or upon himself, to whom Mary was so utterly
and absolutely necessary, that the idea of existing without her never
once entered his restless but honest brain. "That is just what it is,"
he said; "it is a horrid business for me, and I don't know what to do
about it. They must have been out of their senses to drive us to marry
as we did; and we were a couple of awful fools," said the Major, with
the gravest and most care-worn countenance. Mrs. Ochterlony was still a
young woman, handsome and admired, and she might very well have taken
offence at such words; but, oddly enough, there was something in his
gravely-disturbed face and pathetic tone which touched another chord in
Mary's breast. She laughed, which was unkind, considering all the
circumstances, and took up her work, and fixed a pair of smiling eyes
upon her perplexed husband's face.

"I daresay it is not so bad as you think," she said, with the manner of
a woman who was used to this kind of thing. "Come, and tell me all about
it." She drew her chair a trifle nearer his, and looked at him with a
face in which a touch of suppressed amusement was visible, under a good
deal of gravity and sympathy. She was used to lend a sympathetic ear to
all his difficulties, and to give all her efforts to their elucidation,
but still she could not help feeling it somewhat droll to be complained
to in this strain about her own marriage. "We _were_ a couple of fools,"
she said, with a little laugh, "but it has not turned out so badly as it
might have done." Upon which rash statement the Major shook his head.

"It is easy for you to say so," he said, "and if I were to go no deeper,
and look no further---- It is all on your account, Mary. If it were not
on your account----"

"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Ochterlony, still struggling with a perverse
inclination to laugh; "but now tell me what old Sommerville has to do
with it; and who old Sommerville is; and what put it into his head just
at this moment to die."

The Major sighed, and gave her a half-irritated, half-melancholy look.
To think she should laugh, when, as he said to himself, the gulf was
yawning under her very feet. "My dear Mary," he said, "I wish you would
learn that this is not anything to laugh at. Old Sommerville was the old
gardener at Earlston, who went with us, you recollect, when we went
to--to Scotland. My brother would never have him back again, and he went
among his own friends. He was a stupid old fellow. I don't know what he
was good for, for my part;--but," said Major Ochterlony, with solemnity,
"he was the only surviving witness of our unfortunate marriage--that is
the only thing that made him interesting to me."

"Poor old man!" said Mary, "I am very sorry. I had forgotten his name;
but really,--if you speak like this of our unfortunate marriage, you
will hurt my feelings," Mrs. Ochterlony added. She had cast down her
eyes on her work, but still there was a gleam of fun out of one of the
corners. This was all the effect made upon her mind by words which would
have naturally produced a scene between half the married people in the
world.

As for the Major, he sighed: he was in a sighing mood, and at such
moments his wife's obtusity and thoughtlessness always made him sad. "It
is easy talking," he said, "and if it were not on your account, Mary----
The fact is that everything has gone wrong that had any connection with
it. The blacksmith's house, you know, was burned down, and his kind of a
register--if it was any good, and I am sure I don't know if it was any
good; and then that woman died, though she was as young as you are, and
as healthy, and nobody had any right to expect that she would die,"
Major Ochterlony added with an injured tone, "and now old Sommerville;
and we have nothing in the world to vouch for its being a good marriage,
except what that blacksmith fellow called the 'lines.' Of course you
have taken care of the lines," said the Major, with a little start. It
was the first time that this new subject of doubt had occurred to his
mind.

"To vouch for its being a good marriage!" said Mrs. Ochterlony: "really,
Hugh, you go too far. Our marriage is not a thing to make jokes about,
you know--nor to get up alarms about either. Everybody knows all about
it, both among your people and mine. It is very vexatious and
disagreeable of you to talk so." As she spoke the colour rose to Mary's
matron cheek. She had learned to make great allowances for her husband's
anxious temper and perpetual panics; but this suggestion was too much
for her patience just at the moment. She calmed down, however, almost
immediately, and came to herself with a smile. "To think you should
almost have made me angry!" she said, taking up her work again. This did
not mean to imply that to make Mrs. Ochterlony angry was at all an
impossible process. She had her gleams of wrath like other people, and
sometimes it was not at all difficult to call them forth; but, so far as
the Major's "temperament" was concerned, she had got, by much exercise,
to be the most indulgent of women--perhaps by finding that no other way
of meeting it was of any use.

"It is not my fault, my love," said the Major, with a meekness which was
not habitual to him. "But I hope you are quite sure you have the lines.
Any mistake about them would be fatal. They are the only proof that
remains to us. I wish you would go and find them, Mary, and let me make
sure."

"The lines!" said Mrs. Ochterlony, and, notwithstanding her
self-command, she faltered a little. "Of course I must have them
somewhere--I don't quite recollect at this moment. What do you want them
for, Hugh? Are we coming into a fortune, or what are the statistics good
for? When I can lay my hand upon them, I will give them to you," she
added, with that culpable carelessness which her husband had already so
often remarked in her. If it had been a trumpery picture or book that
had been mislaid, she could not have been less concerned.

"When you can lay your hands upon them!" cried the exasperated man. "Are
you out of your senses, Mary? Don't you know that they are your
sheet-anchor, your charter--the only document you have----"

"Hugh," said Mrs. Ochterlony, "tell me what this means. There must be
something in it more than I can see. What need have I for documents?
What does it matter to us this old man being dead, more than it matters
to any one the death of somebody who has been at their wedding? It is
sad, but I don't see how it can be a personal misfortune. If you really
mean anything, tell me what it is."

The Major for his part grew angry, as was not unnatural. "If you choose
to give me the attention you ought to give to your husband when he
speaks seriously to you, you will soon perceive what I mean," he said;
and then he repented, and came up to her and kissed her. "My poor Mary,
my bonnie Mary," he said. "If that wretched irregular marriage of ours
should bring harm to you! It is you only I am thinking of, my
darling--that you should have something to rest upon;" and his feelings
were so genuine that with that the water stood in his eyes.

As for Mrs. Ochterlony, she was very near losing patience altogether;
but she made an effort and restrained herself. It was not the first time
that she had heard compunctions expressed for the irregular marriage,
which certainly was not her fault. But this time she was undeniably a
little alarmed, for the Major's gravity was extreme. "Our marriage is no
more irregular than it always was," she said. "I wish you would give up
this subject, Hugh; I have you to rest upon, and everything that a woman
can have. We never did anything in a corner," she continued, with a
little vehemence. "Our marriage was just as well known, and well
published, as if it had been in St. George's, Hanover Square. I cannot
imagine what you are aiming at. And besides, it is done, and we cannot
mend it," she added, abruptly. On the whole, the runaway match had been
a pleasant frolic enough; there was no earthly reason, except some
people's stupid notions, why they should not have been married; and
everybody came to their senses rapidly, and very little harm had come of
it. But the least idea of doubt on such a subject is an offence to a
woman, and her colour rose and her breath came quick, without any will
of hers. As for the Major, he abandoned the broader general question,
and went back to the detail, as was natural to the man.

"If you only have the lines all safe," he said, "if you would but make
sure of that. I confess old Sommerville's death was a great shock to me,
Mary,--the last surviving witness; but Kirkman tells me the marriage
lines in Scotland are a woman's safeguard, and Kirkman is a Scotchman
and ought to know."

"Have you been consulting _him_?" said Mary, with a certain despair;
"have you been talking of such a subject to----"

"I don't know where I could have a better confidant," said the Major.
"Mary, my darling, they are both attached to you; and they are good
people, though they talk; and then he is Scotch, and understands. If
anything were to happen to me, and you had any difficulty in
proving----"

"Hugh, for Heaven's sake have done with this. I cannot bear any more,"
cried Mrs. Ochterlony, who was at the end of her powers.

It was time for the great _coup_ for which his restless soul had been
preparing. He approached the moment of fate with a certain skill, such
as weak people occasionally display, and mad people almost always,--as
if the feeble intellect had a certain right by reason of its weakness to
the same kind of defence which is possessed by the mind diseased. "Hush,
Mary, you are excited," he said, "and it is only you I am thinking of.
If anything should happen to me--I am quite well, but no man can answer
for his own life:--my dear, I am afraid you will be vexed with what I am
going to say. But for my own satisfaction, for my peace of mind--if we
were to go through the ceremony again----"

Mary Ochterlony rose up with sudden passion. It was altogether out of
proportion to her husband's intentions or errors, and perhaps to the
occasion. _That_ was but a vexatious complication of ordinary life; and
he a fidgety, uneasy, perhaps over-conscientious, well-meaning man. She
rose, tragic without knowing it, with a swell in her heart of the
unutterable and supreme--feeling herself for the moment an outraged
wife, an insulted woman, and a mother wounded to the heart. "I will hear
no more," she said, with lips that had suddenly grown parched and dry.
"Don't say another word. If it has come to this, I will take my chance
with my boys. Hugh, no more, no more." As she lifted her hands with an
impatient gesture of horror, and towered over him as he sat by, having
thus interrupted and cut short his speech, a certain fear went through
Major Ochterlony's mind. Could her mind be going? Had the shock been too
much for her? He could not understand otherwise how the suggestion which
he thought a wise one, and of advantage to his own peace of mind, should
have stung her into such an incomprehensible passion. But he was afraid
and silenced, and could not go on.

"My dear Mary," he said mildly, "I had no intention of vexing you. We
can speak of this another time. Sit down, and I'll get you a glass of
water," he added, with anxious affection; and hurried off to seek it:
for he was a good husband, and very fond of his wife, and was terrified
to see her turn suddenly pale and faint, notwithstanding that he was
quite capable of wounding her in the most exquisite and delicate point.
But then he did not mean it. He was a matter-of-fact man, and the idea
of marrying his wife over again in case there might be any doubtfulness
about the first marriage, seemed to him only a rational suggestion,
which no sensible woman ought to be disturbed by; though no doubt it was
annoying to be compelled to have recourse to such an expedient. So he
went and fetched her the water, and gave up the subject, and stayed with
her all the afternoon and read the papers to her, and made himself
agreeable. It was a puzzling sort of demonstration on Mary's part, but
that did not make her the less Mary, and the dearest and best of earthly
creatures. So Major Ochterlony put his proposal aside for a more
favourable moment, and did all he could to make his wife forget it, and
behaved himself as a man naturally would behave who was recognised as
the best husband and most domestic man in the regiment. Mary took her
seat again and her work, and the afternoon went on as if nothing had
happened. They were a most united couple, and very happy together, as
everybody knew; or if one of them at any chance moment was perhaps less
than perfectly blessed, it was not, at any rate, because the love-match,
irregular as it might be, had ended in any lack of love.




CHAPTER II.


Mrs. Ochterlony sat and worked and listened, and her husband read the
papers to her, picking out by instinct all those little bits of news
that are grateful to people who are so far away from their own country.
And he went through the births and marriages, to see "if there is
anybody we know,"--notwithstanding that he was aware that corner of the
paper is one which a woman does not leave to any reader, but makes it a
principle to examine herself. And Mary sat still and went on with her
work, and not another syllable was said about old Sommerville, or the
marriage lines, or anything that had to do with the previous
conversation. This tranquillity was all in perfect good faith on Major
Ochterlony's side, who had given up the subject with the intention of
waiting until a more convenient season, and who had relieved his mind by
talking of it, and could put off his anxiety. But as for Mary, it was
not in good faith that she put on this expression of outward calm. She
knew her husband, and she knew that he was pertinacious and insisting,
and that a question which he had once started was not to be made an end
of, and finally settled, in so short a time. She sat with her head a
little bent, hearing the bits of news run on like an accompaniment to
the quick-flowing current of her own thoughts. Her heart was beating
quick, and her blood coursing through her veins as if it had been a
sudden access of fever which had come upon her. She was a tall, fair,
serene woman, with no paltry passion about her; but at the same time,
when the occasion required it, Mary was capable of a vast suppressed
fire of feeling which it gave her infinite trouble to keep down. This
was a side of her character which was not suspected by the world in
general--meaning of course the regiment, and the ladies at the station,
who were all, more or less, military. Mrs. Ochterlony was the kind of
woman to whom by instinct any stranger would have appropriated the name
of Mary; and naturally all her intimates (and the regiment was very
"nice," and lived in great harmony, and they were all intimate) called
her by her Christian--most Christian name. And there were people who put
the word Madonna before it,--"as if the two did not mean the same
thing!" said little Mrs. Askell, the ensign's baby-wife, whose education
had been neglected, but whom Mrs. Ochterlony had been very kind to. It
was difficult to know how the title had originated, though people did
say it was young Stafford who had been brought up in Italy, and who had
such a strange adoration for Mrs. Ochterlony, and who died, poor
fellow--which was perhaps the best thing he could have done under the
circumstances. "It was a special providence," Mrs. Kirkman said, who was
the Colonel's wife: for, to be sure, to be romantically adored by a
foolish young subaltern, was embarrassing for a woman, however perfect
her mind and temper and fairest fame might be. It was he who originated
the name, perhaps with some faint foolish thought of Petrarch and his
Madonna Laura: and then he died and did no more harm; and a great many
people adopted it, and Mary herself did not object to be addressed by
that sweetest of titles.

And yet she was not meek enough for the name. Her complexion was very
fair, but she had only a very faint rose-tint on her cheeks, so faint
that people called her pale--which with her fairness, was a drawback to
her. Her hair was light-brown, with a golden reflection that went and
came, as if it somehow depended upon the state of her mind and spirits;
and her eyes were dark, large, and lambent,--not sparkling, but
concentrating within themselves a soft, full depth of light. It was a
question whether they were grey or brown; but at all events they were
dark and deep. And she was, perhaps, a little too large and full and
matronly in her proportions to please a youthful critic. Naturally such
a woman had a mass of hair which she scarcely knew what to do with, and
which at this moment seemed to betray the disturbed state of her mind by
unusual gleams of the golden reflection which sometimes lay quite
tranquil and hidden among the great silky coils. She was very happily
married, and Major Ochterlony was the model husband of the regiment.
They had married very young, and made a runaway love-match which was one
of the few which everybody allowed had succeeded to perfection. But
yet---- There are so few things in this world which succeed quite to
perfection. It was Mrs. Kirkman's opinion that nobody else in the
regiment could have supported the Major's fidgety temper. "It would be a
great trial for the most experienced Christian," she said; "and dear
Mary is still among the babes who have to be fed with milk; but
Providence is kind, and I don't think she feels it as you or I would."
This was the opinion of the Colonel's wife; but as for Mary, as she sat
and worked and listened to her husband reading the papers, perhaps she
could have given a different version of her own composure and calm.

They had been married about ten years, and it was the first time he had
taken _this_ idea into his head. It is true that Mrs. Ochterlony looked
at it solely as one of his ideas, and gave no weight whatever to the
death of old Sommerville, or the loss of the marriage lines. She had
been very young at the time of her marriage, and she was motherless, and
had not those pangs of wounded delicacy to encounter, which a young
woman ought to have who abandons her home in such a way. This perhaps
arose from a defect in Mary's girlish undeveloped character; but the
truth was, that she too belonged to an Indian family, and had no home to
speak of, nor any of the sweeter ties to break. And after that, she had
thought nothing more about it. She was married, and there was an end of
it; and the young people had gone to India immediately, and had been
very poor, and very happy, and very miserable, like other young people
who begin the world in an inconsiderate way. But in spite of a hundred
drawbacks, the happiness had always been pertinacious, lasted longest,
and held out most stedfastly, and lived everything down. For one thing,
Mrs. Ochterlony had a great deal to do, not being rich, and that happily
quite preserved her from the danger of brooding over the Major's
fidgets, and making something serious out of them. And then they had
married so young that neither of them could ever identify himself or
herself, or make the distinction that more reasonable couples can
between "me" and "you." This time, however, the Major's restlessness had
taken an uncomfortable form. Mary felt herself offended and insulted
without knowing why. She, a matron of ten years' standing, the mother of
children! She could not believe that she had really heard true, that a
repetition of her marriage could have been suggested to her--and at the
same time she knew that it was perfectly true. It never occurred to her
as a thing that possibly might have to be done, but still the suggestion
itself was a wound. Major Ochterlony, for his part, thought of it as a
precaution, and good for his peace of mind, as he had said; but to Mary
it was scarcely less offensive than if somebody else had ventured to
make love to her, or offer her his allegiance. It seemed to her an
insult of the same description, an outrage which surely could not have
occurred without some unwitting folly on her part to make such a
proposal possible. She went away, searching back into the far, far
distant years, as she sat at work and he read the papers. Had she anyhow
failed in womanly restraint or delicacy at that moment when she was
eighteen, and knew of nothing but honour, and love, and purity in the
world? To be sure, she had not occupied herself very much about the
matter--she had taken no pains for her own safety, and had not an idea
what registrars meant, nor marriage laws, nor "lines." All that she knew
was that a great many people were married at Gretna Green, and that she
was married, and that there was an end of it. All these things came up
and passed before her mind in a somewhat hurrying crowd; but Mary's
mature judgment did not disapprove of the young bride who believed what
was said to her, and was content, and had unbounded faith in the
blacksmith and in her bridegroom. If that young woman had been occupying
herself about the register, Mrs. Ochterlony probably, looking back,
would have entertained but a mean opinion of her. It was not anything
_she_ had done. It was not anything special, so far as she could see, in
the circumstances: for hosts of people before and after had been married
on the Scottish border. The only conclusion, accordingly, that she could
come to, was the natural conclusion, that it was one of the Major's
notions. But there was little comfort in that, for Mrs. Ochterlony was
aware that his notions were persistent, that they lived and lasted and
took new developments, and were sometimes very hard to get rid of. And
she sighed in the midst of the newspaper reading, and betrayed that she
had not been listening. Not that she expected her husband's new whim to
come to anything; but because she foresaw in it endless repetitions of
the scene which had just ended, and endless exasperation and weariness
to herself.

Major Ochterlony stopped short when he heard his wife sigh--for he was
not a man to leave anything alone, or to practise a discreet
neglect--and laid down his paper and looked with anxiety in her face.
"You have a headache," he said, tenderly; "I saw it the moment I entered
the room. Go and lie down, my dear, and take care of yourself. You take
care of everybody else," said the Major. "Why did you let me go on
reading the paper like an ass, when your head aches?"

"My head does not ache. I was only thinking," said Mrs. Ochterlony: for
she thought on the whole it would be best to resume the subject and
endeavour to make an end of it. But this was not the Major's way. He
had in the meantime emptied his reservoir, and it had to be filled again
before he would find himself in the vein for speech.

"But I don't want you to think," said Major Ochterlony with tender
patronage: "that ought to be my part of the business. Have you got a
novel?--if not, I'll go over and ask Miss Sorbette for one of hers. Lie
down and rest, Mary; I can see that is all you are good for to-day."

Whether such a speech was aggravating or not to a woman who knew that it
was her brain which had all the real weight of the family affairs to
bear, may be conjectured by wives in general who know the sort of thing.
But as for Mary, she was so used to it, that she took very little
notice. She said, "Thank you, Hugh; I have got my letters here, which I
have not read, and Aunt Agatha is as good as a novel." If this was not a
very clear indication to the Major that his best policy was to take
himself off for a little, and leave her in peace, it would be hard to
say what could have taught him. But then Major Ochterlony was a man of a
lively mind, and above being taught.

"Ah, Aunt Agatha," he said. "My dear, I know it is a painful subject,
but we must, you know, begin to think where we are to send Hugh."

Mary shuddered; her nerves--for she had nerves, though she was so fair
and serene--began to get excited. She said, "For pity's sake, not any
more to-day. I am worn out. I cannot bear it. He is only six, and he is
quite well."

The Major shook his head. "He is very well, but I have seen when a few
hours changed all that," he said. "We cannot keep him much longer. At
his age, you know; all the little Heskeths go at four--I think----"

"Ah," said Mary, "the Heskeths have nothing to do with it; they have
floods and floods of children,--they don't know what it is; they can do
without their little things; but I--Hugh, I am tired--I am not able for
any more. Let me off for to-day."

Major Ochterlony regarded his wife with calm indulgence, and smoothed
her hair off her hot forehead as he stooped to kiss her. "If you only
would call things by the same names as other people, and say you have a
headache, my dear," he said, in his caressing way. And then he was so
good as to leave her, saying to himself as he went away that his Mary
too had a little temper, though nobody gave her credit for it. Instead
of annoying him, this little temper on Mary's part rather pleased her
husband. When it came on he could be indulgent to her and pet her,
which he liked to do; and then he could feel the advantage on his own
side, which was not always the case. His heart quite swelled over her as
he went away; so good, and so wise, and so fair, and yet not without
that womanly weakness which it was sweet for a man to protect and pardon
and put up with. Perhaps all men are not of the same way of thinking;
but then Major Ochterlony reasoned only in his own way.

Mary stayed behind, and found it very difficult to occupy herself with
anything. It was not temper, according to the ordinary meaning of the
word. She was vexed, disturbed, disquieted, rather than angry. When she
took up the pleasant letter in which the English breezes were blowing,
and the leaves rustling, she could no longer keep her attention from
wandering. She began it a dozen times, and as often gave it up again,
driven by the importunate thoughts which took her mind by storm, and
thrust everything else away. As if it were not enough to have one great
annoyance suddenly overwhelming her, she had the standing terror of her
life, the certainty that she would have to send her children away,
thrown in to make up. She could have cried, had that been of any use;
but Mrs. Ochterlony had had good occasion to cry many times in her life,
which takes away the inclination at less important moments. The worst of
all was that her husband's oft-repeated suggestion struck at the very
roots of her existence, and seemed to throw everything of which she had
been most sure into sudden ruin. She would put no faith in it--pay no
attention to it, she said to herself; and then, in spite of herself, she
found that she paid great attention, and could not get it out of her
mind. The only character in which she knew herself--in which she had
ever been known--was that of a wife. There are some women--nay, many
women--who have felt their own independent standing before they made the
first great step in a woman's life, and who are able to realize their
own identity without associating it for ever with that of any other. But
as for Mary, she had married, as it were, out of the nursery, and except
as Hugh Ochterlony's wife, and his son's mother, she did not know
herself. In such circumstances, it may be imagined what a bewildering
effect any doubt about her marriage would have upon her. For the first
time she began to think of herself, and to see that she had been hardly
dealt with. She began to resent her guardian's carelessness, and to
blame even kind Aunt Agatha, who in those days was taken up with some
faint love-affairs of her own, which never came to anything. Why did
they not see that everything was right? Why did not Hugh make sure,
whose duty it was? After she had vexed herself with such thoughts, she
returned with natural inconsistency to the conclusion that it was all
one of the Major's notions. This was the easiest way of getting rid of
it, and yet it was aggravating enough that the Major should permit his
restless fancy to enter such sacred grounds, and to play with the very
foundations of their life and honour. And as if that was not enough, to
talk at the end of it all of sending Hugh away!

Perhaps it would have been good for Mary if she had taken her husband's
advice and lain down, and sent over to Miss Sorbette for a novel. But
she was rebellious and excited, and would not do it. It was true that
they were engaged out to dinner that night, and that when the hour came
Mrs. Ochterlony entered Mrs. Hesketh's drawing-room with her usual
composure, and without any betrayal of the agitation that was still
smouldering within. But that did not make it any easier for her. There
was nobody more respected, as people say, in the station than she
was--and to think that it was possible that such a thing might be, as
that she should be humiliated and pulled down from her fair elevation
among all those women! Neither the Major nor any man had a right to have
notions upon a matter of such importance. Mary tried hard to calm
herself down to her ordinary tranquillity, and to represent to herself
how good he was, and how small a drawback after all were those fidgets
of his, in comparison with the faults of most other men. Just as he
represented to himself, with more success, how trifling a disadvantage
was the "little temper" which gave him the privilege, now and then, of
feeling tenderly superior to his wife. But the attempt was not
successful that day in Mrs. Ochterlony's mind; for after all there are
some things too sacred for discussion, and with which the most fidgety
man in the world cannot be permitted to play. Such was the result of the
first conversation upon this startling subject. The Major found himself
very tolerably at his ease, having relieved his mind for the moment, and
enjoyed his dinner and spent a very pleasant evening; but as for Madonna
Mary, she might have prejudiced her serene character in the eyes of the
regiment had the veil been drawn aside only for a moment, and could
anybody have seen or guessed the whirl of thoughts that was passing
through her uneasy mind.




CHAPTER III.


The present writer has already lamented her inability to convey to the
readers of this history any clear account of an Indian bungalow, or the
manner in which life goes on in that curious kind of English home: so
that it would be vain to attempt any detailed description of Mary
Ochterlony's life at this period of her career. She lived very much as
all the others lived, and gave a great deal of attention to her two
little boys, and wrote regularly by every mail to her friends in
England, and longed for the day when the mail came in, though the
interest of her correspondence was not absorbing. All this she did like
everybody else, though the other ladies at the station had perhaps more
people belonging to them, and a larger number of letters, and got more
good of the eagerly looked-for mail. And she read all the books she
could come by, even Miss Sorbette's novels, which were indeed the chief
literary nourishment of the station; and took her due share in society,
and was generally very popular, though not so superior as Miss Sorbette
for example, nor of remarkable piety like Mrs. Kirkman, nor nearly so
well off as Mrs. Hesketh. Perhaps these three ladies, who were the
natural leaders of society, liked Mary all the better because she did
not come in direct contact with their claims; though if it had ever
entered into Mrs. Ochterlony's head to set up a distinct standard, no
doubt the masses would have flocked to it, and the peace of the station
might have been put in jeopardy. But as no such ambitious project was in
her mind, Mary kept her popularity with everybody, and gained besides
that character of "She could an if she would," which goes a great deal
farther than the limited reputation of any actual achievement. She was
very good to the new people, the young people, the recent arrivals, and
managed to make them feel at home sooner than anybody else could, which
was a very useful gift in such society; and then a wife who bore her
husband's fidgets so serenely was naturally a model and example for all
the new wives.

"I am sure nobody else in the station could do so well," Mrs. Kirkman
said. "The most experienced Christian would find it a trying task. But
then some people are so mercifully fitted for their position in life. I
don't think she feels it as you or I should." This was said, not as
implying that little Mrs. Askell--to whom the words were ostensibly
addressed--had peculiarly sensitive feelings, or was in any way to be
associated with the Colonel's wife, but only because it was a favourite
way Mrs. Kirkman had of bringing herself down to her audience, and
uniting herself, as it were, to ordinary humanity; for if there was one
thing more than another for which she was distinguished, it was her
beautiful Christian humanity; and this was the sense in which she now
spoke.

"Please don't say so," cried the ensign's wife, who was an unmanageable,
eighteen-year-old, half-Irish creature. "I am sure she has twenty
thousand times more feeling than you and--than both of us put together.
It's because she is real good; and the Major is an old dear. He _is_ a
fidget and he's awfully aggravating, and he puts one in a passion; but
he's an old dear, and so you would say if you knew him as well as I."

Mrs. Kirkman regarded the creature by her side, as may be supposed, with
the calm contempt which her utterance merited. She looked at her, out of
those "down-dropt," half-veiled eyes, with that look which everybody in
the station knew so well, as if she were looking down from an infinite
distance with a serene surprise which was too far off and elevated to
partake of the nature of disgust. If _she_ knew him as well as this baby
did! But the Colonel's wife did not take any notice of the audacious
suggestion. It was her duty, instead of resenting the impertinence to
herself, to improve the occasion for the offender's own sake.

"My dear, there is nobody really good," said Mrs. Kirkman. "We have the
highest authority for that. I wish I could think dear Mary was possessed
of the true secret of a higher life; but she has so much of that natural
amiability, you know, which is, of all things, the most dangerous for
the soul. I would rather, for my part, she was not so 'good' as you say.
It is all filthy rags," said Mrs. Kirkman, with a sigh. "It might be for
the good of her soul to be brought low, and forced to abandon these
refuges of lies----"

Upon which the little Irish wild-Indian blazed up with natural fury.

"I don't believe she ever told a lie in her life. I'll swear to all the
lies she tells," cried the foolish little woman; "and as for rags--it's
horrible to talk so. If you only knew--if you only could think--how kind
she was to me!"

For this absurd little hapless child had had a baby, as might have been
expected, and would have been in rags indeed, and everything that is
miserable, but for Mary, who had taken her in hand; and being not much
more than a baby herself, and not strong yet, and having her heart in
her mouth, so to speak, she burst out crying, as might have been
expected too.

This was a result which her companion had not in the least calculated
upon, for Mrs. Kirkman, notwithstanding her belief in Mary's
insensibility, had not very lively feelings, and was not quick at
divining other people. But she was a good woman notwithstanding all her
talk. She came down off her mountain top, and soothed her little
visitor, and gave her a glass of wine, and even kissed her, to make
matters up.

"I know she has a way, when people are sick," said the Colonel's wife;
and then, after that confession, she sighed again. "If only she does not
put her trust in her own works," Mrs. Kirkman added.

For, to tell the truth, the Chaplain of the regiment was not (as she
thought) a spiritual-minded man, and the Colonel's wife was troubled by
an abiding consciousness that it was into her hands Providence had
committed the souls of the station. "Which was an awful responsibility
for a sinful creature," she said, in her letters home; "and one that
required constant watch over herself."

Perhaps, in a slightly different way, Mrs. Ochterlony would have been
similarly put down and defended in the other two centres of society at
the station. "She is intelligent," Miss Sorbette said; "I don't deny
that she is intelligent; but I would not say she was superior. She is
fond of reading, but then most people are fond of reading, when it's
amusing, you know. She is a little too like Amelia in 'Vanity Fair.' She
is one of the sweet women. In a general way, I can't bear sweet women;
but I must confess she is the very best specimen I ever saw."

As for Mrs. Hesketh, her opinion was not much worth stating in words. If
she had any fault to find with Mrs. Ochterlony, it was because Mary had
sometimes a good deal of trouble in making the two ends meet. "I cannot
endure people that are always having anxieties," said the rich woman of
the station, who had an idea that everybody could be comfortable if they
liked, and that it was an offence to all his neighbours when a man
insisted on being poor; but at the same time everybody knew that she was
very fond of Mary. This had been the general opinion of her for all
these years, and naturally Mrs. Ochterlony was used to it, and, without
being at all vain on the subject, had that sense of the atmosphere of
general esteem and regard which surrounded her, which has a favourable
influence upon every character, and which did a great deal to give her
the sweet composure and serenity for which she was famed.

But from the time of that first conversation with her husband, a change
came upon the Madonna of the station. It was not perceptible to the
general vision, yet there were individual eyes which found out that
something was the matter, though nobody could tell what. Mrs. Hesketh
thought it was an attack of fever coming on, and Mrs. Kirkman hoped that
Mrs. Ochterlony was beginning to occupy herself about her spiritual
state; and the one recommended quinine to Mary, and the other sent her
sermons, which, to tell the truth, were not much more suitable to her
case. But Mary did not take any of the charitable friends about her into
her confidence. She went about among them as a prince might have gone
about in his court, or a chief among his vassals, after hearing in
secret that it was possible that one day he may be discovered to be an
impostor. Or, if not that,--for Mary knew that she never could be found
out an impostor,--at least, that such a charge was hanging over her
head, and that somebody might believe it; and that her history would be
discussed and her name get into people's mouths and her claims to their
regard be questioned. It was very hard upon her to think that such a
thing was possible with composure, or to contemplate her husband's
restless ways, and to recollect the indiscreet confidences which he was
in the habit of making. He had spoken to Colonel Kirkman about it, and
even quoted his advice about the marriage lines; and Mary could not but
think (though in this point she did the Colonel injustice) that Mrs.
Kirkman too must know; and then, with a man of Major Ochterlony's
temperament, nobody could make sure that he would not take young Askell,
the ensign, or any other boy in the station, into his confidence, if he
should happen to be in the way. All this was very galling to Mary, who
had so high an appreciation of the credit and honour which, up to this
moment, she had enjoyed; and who felt that she would rather die than
come down to be discussed and pitied and talked about among all these
people. She thought in her disturbed and uneasy mind, that she could
already hear all the different tones in which they would say, "Poor
Mary!" and all the wonders, and doubts, and inquiries that would rise up
round her. Mrs. Kirkman would have said that all these were signs that
her pride wanted humbling, and that the thing her friends should pray
for, should be some startling blow to lead her back to a better state of
mind. But naturally this was a kind of discipline which for herself, or
indeed for anybody else, Mary was not far enough advanced to desire.

Perhaps, however, it was partly true about the pride. Mrs. Ochterlony
did not say anything about it, but she locked the door of her own room
the next morning after that talk with the Major, and searched through
all her repositories for those "marriage lines," which no doubt she had
put away somewhere, and which she had naturally forgotten all about for
years. It was equally natural, and to be expected, that she should not
find them. She looked through all her papers, and letters, and little
sacred corners, and found many things that filled her heart with sadness
and her eyes with tears--for she had not come through those ten years
without leaving traces behind her where her heart had been wounded and
had bled by the way--but she did not find what she was in search of. She
tried hard to look back and think, and to go over in her mind the
contents of her little school-girl desk, which she had left at Aunt
Agatha's cottage, and the little work-table, and the secretary with all
its drawers. But she could not recollect anything about it, nor where
she had put it, nor what could have become of it; and the effect of her
examination was to give her, this time in reality, a headache, and to
make her eyes heavy and her heart sore. But she did not say a syllable
about her search to the Major, who was (as, indeed, he always was) as
anxiously affectionate as a man could be, and became (as he always did)
when he found his wife suffering, so elaborately noiseless and still,
that Mary ended by a good fit of laughing, which was of the greatest
possible service to her.

"When you are so quiet, you worry me, Hugh," she said. "I am used to
hear you moving about."

"My dear, I hope I am not such a brute as to move about when you are
suffering," her husband replied. And though his mind had again begun to
fill with the dark thoughts that had been the occasion of all Mary's
annoyance, he restrained himself with a heroic effort, and did not say a
syllable about it all that night.

But this was a height of virtue which was quite impossible any merely
mortal powers could keep up to. He began to make mysterious little
broken speeches next day, and to stop short and say, "My darling, I
mustn't worry _you_," and to sigh like a furnace, and to worry Mary to
such an extremity that her difficulty in keeping her temper and patience
grew indescribable. And then, when he had afflicted her in this way till
it was impossible to go any further--when he had betrayed it to her in
every look, in every step, in every breath he drew--which was half a
sigh--and in every restless movement he made; and when Mrs. Ochterlony,
who could not sleep for it, nor rest, nor get any relief from the
torture, had two red lines round her eyes, and was all but out of her
senses--the stream burst forth at last, and the Major spoke:

"You remember, perhaps, Mary, what we were talking of the other day," he
said, in an insidiously gentle way, one morning, early--when they had
still the long, long day before them to be miserable in. "I thought it
very important, but perhaps you may have forgot--about old Sommerville
who died?"

"Forgot!" said Mary. She felt it was coming now, and was rather glad to
have it over. "I don't know how I could forget, Hugh. What you said
would have made one recollect anything; but you cannot make old
Sommerville come alive again, whatever you do."

"My dear, I spoke to you about some--about a--paper," said the Major.
"Lines--that is what the Scotch call them--though, I daresay, they're
very far from being poetry. Perhaps you have found them, Mary?" said
Major Ochterlony, looking into her face in a pleading way, as if he
prayed her to answer yes. And it was with difficulty that she kept as
calm as she wished to do, and answered without letting him see the
agitation and excitement in her mind.

"I don't know where I have put them, Hugh," she said, with a natural
evasion, and in a low voice. She did not acknowledge having looked for
them, and having failed to find them; but in spite of herself, she
answered with a certain humility, as of a woman culpable. For, after
all, it was her fault.

"You don't know where you put them?" said the Major, with rising horror.
"Have you the least idea how important they are? They may be the saving
of you and of your children, and you don't know where you have put them!
Then it is all as I feared," Major Ochterlony added, with a groan, "and
everything is lost."

"What is lost?" said Mary. "You speak to me in riddles, Hugh. I know I
put them somewhere--I must have put them somewhere safe. They are, most
likely, in my old desk at home, or in one of the drawers of the
secretary," said Mary calmly, giving those local specifications with a
certainty which she was far from feeling. As for the Major, he was
arrested by the circumstance which made her faint hope and supposition
look somehow like truth.

"If I could hope that _that_ was the case," he said; "but it can't be
the case, Mary. You never were at home after we were married--you forget
that. We went to Earlston for a day, and we went to your guardian's; but
never to Aunt Agatha. You are making a mistake, my dear; and God bless
me, to think of it, what would become of you if anything were to happen
to me?"

"I hope there is nothing going to happen to you; but I don't think in
that case it would matter what became of me," said Mary in utter
depression; for by this time she was worn out.

"You think so now, my love; but you would be obliged to think
otherwise," said Major Ochterlony. "I hope I'm all right for many a
year; but a man can never tell. And the insurance, and pension, and
everything--and Earlston, if my brother should leave it to us--all our
future, my darling. I think it will drive me distracted," said the
Major, "not a witness nor a proof left!"

Mary could make no answer. She was quite overwhelmed by the images thus
called before her; for her part, the pension and the insurance money had
no meaning to her ears; but it is difficult not to put a certain faith
in it when a man speaks in such a circumstantial way of things that can
only happen after his death.

"You have been talking to the doctor, and he has been putting things
into your head," she said faintly. "It is cruel to torture me so. We
know very well how we were married, and all about it, and so do our
friends, and it is cruel to try to make me think of anything happening.
There is nobody in the regiment so strong and well as you are," she
continued, taking courage a little. She thought to herself he looked, as
people say, the picture of health, as he sat beside her, and she began
to recover out of her prostration. As for spleen or liver, or any of
those uncomfortable attributes, Major Ochterlony, up to this moment, had
not known whether he possessed them--which was a most re-assuring
thought, naturally, for his anxious wife.

"Thank God," said the Major, with a little solemnity. It was not that he
had any presentiment, or thought himself likely to die early; but simply
that he was in a pathetic way, and had a _naïf_ and innocent pleasure in
deepening his effects; and then he took to walking about the room in his
nervous manner. After a while he came to a dead stop before his wife,
and took both her hands into his.

"Mary," he said, "I know it's an idea you don't like; but, for my peace
of mind; suppose--just suppose for the sake of supposing--that I was to
die now, and leave you without a word to prove your claims. It would be
ten times worse than death, Mary; but I could die at peace if you would
only make one little sacrifice to my peace of mind."

"Oh, Hugh, don't kill me--you are not going to die," was all Mary could
say.

"No, my darling, not if I can help it; but if it were only for my peace
of mind. There's no harm in it that I can see. It's ridiculous, you
know; but that's all, Mary," said the Major, looking anxiously into her
face. "Why, it is what hosts of people do every day. It is the easiest
thing to do--a mere joke, for that matter. They will say, you know, that
it is like Ochterlony, and a piece of his nonsense. I know how they
talk; but never mind. I know very well there is nothing else you would
not do for my peace of mind. It will set your future above all
casualties, and it will be all over in half an hour. For instance,
Churchill says----"

"You have spoken to Mr. Churchill, too?" said Mary, with a thrill of
despair.

"A man can never do any harm speaking to his clergyman, I hope," the
Major said, peevishly. "What do you mean by _too_? I've only mentioned
it to Kirkman besides--I wanted his advice--and to Sorbette, to explain
that bad headache of yours. And they all think I am perfectly right."

Mary put her hands up to her face, and gave a low but bitter cry. She
said nothing more--not a syllable. She had already been dragged down
without knowing it, and set low among all these people. She who deserved
nothing but honour, who had done nothing to be ashamed of, who was the
same Madonna Mary whom they had all regarded as the "wisest,
virtuousest, discreetest, best." By this time they had all begun to
discuss her story, and to wonder if all _had_ been quite right at the
beginning, and to say, "Poor Mary!" She knew it as well as if she had
heard the buzz of talk in those three houses to which her husband had
confided his difficulty. It was a horrible torture, if you will but
think of it, for an innocent woman to bear.

"It is not like you to make such a fuss about so simple a thing," said
Major Ochterlony. "You know very well it is not myself but you I am
thinking of; that you may have everything in order, and your future
provided for, whatever may happen. It may be absurd, you know; but a
woman mustn't mind being absurd to please her husband. We'll ask our
friends to step over with us to church in the morning, and in half an
hour it will be all over. Don't cover your face, Mary. It worries me not
to see your face. God bless me, it is nothing to make such a fuss
about," said the Major, getting excited. "I would do a great deal more,
any day, to please you."

"I would cut off my hand to please you," said Mary, with perhaps a
momentary extravagance in the height of her passion. "You know there is
no sacrifice I would not make for you; but oh, Hugh, not this, not
this," she said, with a sob that startled him--one of those sobs that
tear and rend the breast they come from, and have no accompaniment of
tears.

His answer was to come up to her side, and take the face which she had
been covering, between his hands, and kiss it as if it had been a
child's. "My darling, it is only this that will do me any good. It is
for my peace of mind," he said, with all that tenderness and effusion
which made him the best of husbands. He was so loving to her that, even
in the bitterness of the injury, it was hard for Mary to refuse to be
soothed and softened. He had got his way, and his unbounded love and
fondness surrounded her with a kind of atmosphere of tender enthusiasm.
He knew so well there was none like her, nobody fit to be put for a
moment in comparison with his Mary; and this was how her fate was fixed
for her, and the crisis came to an end.




CHAPTER IV.


"I am going with you, Mary," said Mrs. Kirkman, coming suddenly in upon
the morning of the day which was to give peace to Major Ochterlony's
mind, and cloud over with something like a shadow of shame (or at least
she thought so) his wife's fair matron fame. The Colonel's wife had put
on her last white bonnet, which was not so fresh as it had been at the
beginning of the season, and white gloves which were also a little the
worse for wear. To be sure the marriage was not like a real marriage,
and nobody knew how the unwilling bride would think proper to dress.
Mrs. Kirkman came in at a quicker pace than ordinary, with her hair
hanging half out of curl on either side of her face, as was always the
case. She was fair, but of a greyish complexion, with light blue eyes _à
fleur de la tête_, which generally she kept half veiled within their
lids--a habit which was particularly aggravating to some of the livelier
spirits. She came in hastily (for her), and found Mary seated
disconsolate, and doing nothing, which is, in such a woman, one of the
saddest signs of a mind disturbed. Mrs. Ochterlony sat, dropped down
upon a chair, with her hands listlessly clasped in her lap, and a hot
flush upon her cheek. She was lost in a dreary contemplation of the
sacrifice which was about to be exacted from her, and of the possible
harm it might do. She was thinking of her children, what effect it
might have on them--and she was thinking bitterly, that for good or evil
she could not help it; that again, as on many a previous occasion, her
husband's restless mind had carried the day over her calmer judgment,
and that there was no way of changing it. To say that she consented with
personal pain of the most acute kind, would not be to say all. She gave
in, at the same time, with a foreboding utterly indistinct, and which
she would not have given utterance to, yet which was strong enough to
heighten into actual misery the pain and shame of her position. When
Mrs. Kirkman came in, with her eyes full of observation, and making the
keenest scrutiny from beneath the downcast lids, Mrs. Ochterlony was not
in a position to hide her emotions. She was not crying, it is true, for
the circumstances were too serious for crying; but it was not difficult
to form an idea of her state of mind from her strangely listless
attitude, and the expression of her face.

"I have come to go with you," said Mrs. Kirkman. "I thought you would
like to have somebody to countenance you. It will make no difference to
me, I assure you, Mary; and both the Colonel and I think if there is
_any_ doubt, you know, that it is by far the wisest thing you could do.
And I only hope----"

"Doubt!" said Mary, lighting up for the moment. "There is no more doubt
than there is of all the marriages made in Scotland. The people who go
there to be married are not married again afterwards that I ever heard
of. There is no doubt whatever--none in the world. I beg your pardon. I
am terribly vexed and annoyed, and I don't know what I am saying. To
hear any one talk of doubt!"

"My dear Mary, we _know_ nothing but what the Major has told us," said
Mrs. Kirkman. "You may depend upon it he has reason for what he is
doing; and I do hope you will see a higher hand in it all, and feel that
you are being humbled for your good."

"I wish you would tell me how it can be for my good," said Mrs.
Ochterlony, "when even you, who ought to know better, talk of doubt--you
who have known us all along from the very first. Hugh has taken it into
his head--that is the whole matter; and you, all of you know, when he
takes a thing into his head----"

She had been hurried on to say this by the rush of her disturbed
thoughts; but Mary was not a woman to complain of her husband. She came
to a sudden standstill, and rose up, and looked at her watch.

"It is about time to go," she said, "and I am sorry to give you the
trouble of going with me. It is not worth while for so short a
distance; but, at least, don't say anything more about it, please."

Mrs. Kirkman had already made the remark that Mary was not at all
"dressed." She had on her brown muslin, which was the plainest morning
dress in her possession, as everybody knew; and instead of going to her
room, to make herself a little nice, she took up her bonnet, which was
on the table, and tied it on without even so much as looking in the
glass. "I am quite ready," she said, when she had made this simple
addition to her dress, and stood there, looking everything that was most
unlike the Madonna of former days--flushed and clouded over, with lines
in her forehead, and the corners of her mouth dropped, and her fair
large serene beauty hidden beneath the thunder-cloud. And the Colonel's
wife was very sorry to see her friend in such a state of mind, as may be
supposed.

"My dear Mary," Mrs. Kirkman said, taking her arm as they went out, and
holding it fast. "I should much wish to see you in a better frame of
mind. Man is only the instrument in our troubles. It must have been that
Providence saw you stood in need of it, my dear. He knows best. It would
not have been sent if it had not been for your good."

"In that way, if I were to stand in the sun till I got a sunstroke, it
would be for my good," said Mary, in anger. "You would say, it was God's
fault, and not mine. But I know it is _my_ fault; I ought to have stood
out and resisted, and I have not had the strength; and it is not for
good, but evil. It is not God's fault, but ours. It can be for nobody's
good."

But after this, she would not say any more. Not though Mrs. Kirkman was
shocked at her way of speaking, and took great pains to impress upon her
that she must have been doing or thinking something God punished by this
means. "Your pride must have wanted bringing down, my dear; as we all
do, Mary, both you and I," said the Colonel's wife; but then Mrs.
Kirkman's humility was well known.

Thus they walked together to the chapel, whither various wondering
people, who could not understand what it meant, were straying. Major
Ochterlony had meant to come for his wife, but he was late, as he so
often was, and met them only near the chapel-door; and then he did
something which sent the last pang of which it was capable to Mary's
heart, though it was only at a later period that she found it out. He
found his boy with the Hindoo nurse, and brought little Hugh in,
'wildered and wondering. Mr. Churchill by this time had put his
surplice on, and all was ready. Colonel Kirkman had joined his wife, and
stood by her side behind the "couple," furtively grasping his grey
moustache, and looking out of a corner of his eyes at the strange scene.
Mrs. Kirkman, for her part, dropt her eyelids as usual, and looked down
upon Mary kneeling at her feet, with a certain compassionate
uncertainty, sorry that Mrs. Ochterlony did not see this trial to be for
her good, and at the same time wondering within herself whether it _had_
all been perfectly right, or was not more than a notion of the Major's.
Farther back Miss Sorbette, who was with Annie Hesketh, was giving vent
in a whisper to the same sentiments.

"I am very sorry for poor Mary: but _could_ it be all quite right
before?" Miss Sorbette was saying. "A man does not take fright like that
for nothing. We women are silly, and take fancies; but when a _man_ does
it, you know----"

And it was with such an accompaniment that Mary knelt down, not looking
like a Madonna, at her husband's side. As for the Major, an air of
serenity had diffused itself over his handsome features. He knelt in
quite an easy attitude, pleased with himself, and not displeased to be
the centre of so interesting a group. Mary's face was slightly averted
from him, and was burning with the same flush of indignation as when
Mrs. Kirkman found her in her own house. She had taken off her bonnet
and thrown it down by her side; and her hair was shining as if in anger
and resistance to this fate, which, with closed mouth, and clasped
hands, and steady front, she was submitting to, though it was almost as
terrible as death. Such was the curious scene upon which various
subaltern members of society at the station looked on with wondering
eyes. And little Hugh Ochterlony stood near his mother with childish
astonishment, and laid up the singular group in his memory, without
knowing very well what it meant; but that was a sentiment shared by many
persons much more enlightened than the poor little boy, who did not know
how much influence this mysterious transaction might have upon his own
fate.

The only other special feature was that Mary, with the corners of her
mouth turned down, and her whole soul wound up to obstinacy, would not
call herself by any name but Mary Ochterlony. They persuaded her,
painfully, to put her long disused maiden name upon the register, and
kind Mr. Churchill shut his ears to it in the service; but yet it was a
thing that everybody remarked. When all was over, nobody knew how they
were expected to behave, whether to congratulate the pair, or whether to
disappear and hold their tongues, which seemed in fact the wisest way.
But no popular assembly ever takes the wisest way of working. Mr.
Churchill was the first to decide the action of the party. He descended
the altar steps, and shook hands with Mary, who stood tying her bonnet,
with still the corners of her mouth turned down, and that feverish flush
on her cheeks. He was a good man, though not spiritually-minded in Mrs.
Kirkman's opinion; and he felt the duty of softening and soothing his
flock as much as of teaching them, which is sometimes a great deal less
difficult. He came and shook hands with her, gravely and kindly.

"I don't see that I need congratulate you, Mrs. Ochterlony," he said, "I
don't suppose it makes much difference; but you know you always have all
our best wishes." And he cast a glance over his audience, and reproved
by that glance the question that was circulating among them. But to tell
the truth, Mrs. Kirkman and Miss Sorbette paid very little attention to
Mr. Churchill's looks.

"My dear Mary, you have kept up very well, though I am sure it must have
been trying," Mrs. Kirkman said. "Once is bad enough; but I am sure you
will see a good end in it at the last."

And while she spoke she allowed a kind of silent interrogation, from her
half-veiled eyes, to steal over Mary, and investigate her from head to
foot. _Had_ it been all right before? Might not this perhaps be in
reality the first time, the once which was bad enough? The question
crept over Mrs. Ochterlony, from the roots of her hair down to her feet,
and examined her curiously to find a response. The answer was plain
enough, and yet it was not plain to the Colonel's wife; for she knew
that the heart is deceitful above all things, and that where human
nature is considered it is always safest to believe the worst.

Miss Sorbette came forward too in her turn, with a grave face. "I am
sure you must feel more comfortable after it, and I am so glad you have
had the moral courage," the doctor's sister said, with a certain
solemnity. But perhaps it was Annie Hesketh, in her innocence, who was
the worst of all. She advanced timidly, with her face in a blaze, like
Mary's own, not knowing where to look, and lost in ingenuous
embarrassment.

"Oh, dear Mrs. Ochterlony, I don't know what to say," said Annie. "I am
so sorry, and I hope you will always be very, very happy; and mamma
couldn't come----" Here she stopped short, and looked up with candid
eyes, that asked a hundred questions. And Mary's reply was addressed to
her alone.

"Tell your mamma, Annie, that I am glad she could not come," said the
injured wife. "It was very kind of her." When she had said so much, Mrs.
Ochterlony turned round, and saw her boy standing by, looking at her. It
was only then that she turned to the husband to whom she had just
renewed her troth. She looked full at him, with a look of indignation
and dismay. It was the last drop that made the cup run over; but then,
what was the good of saying anything? That final prick however, brought
her to herself. She shook hands with all the people afterwards, as if
they were dispersing after an ordinary service, and took little Hugh's
hand and went home as if nothing had happened. She left the Major behind
her, and took no notice of him, and did not even, as young Askell
remarked, offer a glass of wine to the assistants at the ceremony, but
went home with her little boy, talking to him, as she did on Sundays
going home from church; and everybody stood and looked after her, as
might have been expected. She knew they were looking after her, and
saying "Poor Mary!" and wondering after all if there must not have been
a very serious cause for this re-marriage. Mary thought to herself that
she knew as well what they were saying as if she had been among them,
and yet she was not entirely so correct in her ideas of what was going
on as she thought.

In the first place, she could not have imagined how a moment could undo
all the fair years of unblemished life which she had passed among them.
She did not really believe that they would doubt her honour, although
she herself felt it clouded; and at the same time she did not know the
curious compromise between cruelty and kindness, which is all that their
Christian feelings can effect in many commonplace minds, yet which is a
great deal when one comes to think of it. Mrs. Kirkman, arguing from the
foundation of the desperate wickedness of the human heart, had gradually
reasoned herself into the belief that Mary had deceived her, and had
never been truly an honourable wife; but notwithstanding this
conclusion, which in the abstract would have made her cast off the
culprit with utter disdain, the Colonel's wife paused, and was moved,
almost in spite of herself, by the spirit of that faith which she so
often wrapped up and smothered in disguising talk. She did not believe
in Mary; but she did, in a wordy, defective way, in Him who was the son
of a woman, and who came not to condemn; and she could not find it in
her heart to cast off the sinner. Perhaps if Mrs. Ochterlony had known
this divine reason for her friend's charity, it would have struck a
deeper blow than any other indignity to which she had been subjected.
In all her bitter thoughts, it never occurred to her that her neighbour
stood by her as thinking of those Marys who once wept at the Saviour's
feet. Heaven help the poor Madonna, whom all the world had heretofore
honoured! In all her thoughts she never went so far as that.

The ladies waited a little, and sent away Annie Hesketh, who was too
young for scenes of this sort, though her mamma was so imprudent, and
themselves laid hold of Mr. Churchill, when the other gentlemen had
dispersed. Mr. Churchill was one of those mild missionaries who turn
one's thoughts involuntarily to that much-abused, yet not altogether
despicable institution of a celibate clergy. He was far from being
celibate, poor man! He, or at least his wife, had such a succession of
babies as no man could number. They had children at "home" in genteel
asylums for the sons and daughters of the clergy, and they had children
in the airiest costume at the station, whom people were kind to, and who
were waiting their chance of being sent "home" too; and withal, there
were always more arriving, whom their poor papa received with mild
despair. For his part, he was not one of the happy men who held
appointments under the beneficent rule of the Company, nor was he a
regimental chaplain. He was one of that hapless band who are always
"doing duty" for other and better-off people. He was almost too old now
(though he was not old), and too much hampered and overlaid by children,
to have much hope of anything better than "doing duty" all the rest of
his life; and the condition of Mrs. Churchill, who had generally need of
neighbourly help, and of the children, who were chiefly clothed--such
clothing as it was--by the bounty of the Colonel's and Major's and
Captain's wives, somehow seemed to give these ladies the upper hand of
their temporary pastor. He managed well enough among the men, who
respected his goodness, and recognised him to be a gentleman,
notwithstanding his poverty; but he stood in terror of the women, who
were more disposed to interfere, and who were kind to his family and
patronised himself. He tried hard on this occasion, as on many others,
to escape, but he was hemmed in, and no outlet was left him. If he had
been a celibate brother, there can be little doubt it would have been he
who would have had the upper hand; but with all his family burdens and
social obligations, the despotism of the ladies of his flock came hard
upon the poor clergyman; all the more that, poor though he was, and
accustomed to humiliations, he had not learned yet to dispense with the
luxury of feelings and delicacies of his own.

"Mr. Churchill, do give us your advice," said Miss Sorbette, who was
first. "Do tell us what all this means? They surely must have told _you_
at least the rights of it. Do you think they have really never been
married all this time? Goodness gracious me! to think of us all
receiving her, and calling her Madonna, and all that, if this be true!
Do you think----"

"I don't think anything but what Major Ochterlony told me," said Mr.
Churchill, with a little emphasis. "I have not the least doubt he told
me the truth. The witnesses of their marriage are dead, and that
wretched place at Gretna was burnt down, and he is afraid that his wife
would have no means of proving her marriage in case of anything
happening to him. I don't know what reason there can be to suppose that
Major Ochterlony, who is a Christian and a gentleman, said anything that
was not true."

"My dear Mr. Churchill," said Mrs. Kirkman, with a sigh, "you are so
charitable. If one could but hope that the poor dear Major was a true
Christian, as you say. But one has no evidence of any vital change in
his case. And, dear Mary!--I have made up my mind for one thing, that it
shall make no difference to me. Other people can do as they like, but so
far as I am concerned, I can but think of our Divine Example," said the
Colonel's wife. It was a real sentiment, and she meant well, and was
actually thinking as well as talking of that Divine Example; but still
somehow the words made the blood run cold in the poor priest's veins.

"What can you mean, Mrs. Kirkman?" he said. "Mrs. Ochterlony is as she
always was, a person whom we all may be proud to know."

"Yes, yes," said Miss Sorbette, who interrupted them both without any
ceremony; "but that is not what I am asking. As for his speaking the
truth as a Christian and a gentleman, I don't give much weight to that.
If he has been deceiving us for all these years, you may be sure he
would not stick at a fib to end off with. What is one to do? I don't
believe it could ever have been a good marriage, for my part!"

This was the issue to which she had come by dint of thinking it over and
discussing it; although the doctor's sister, like the Colonel's wife,
had got up that morning with the impression that Major Ochterlony's
fidgets had finally driven him out of his senses, and that Mary was the
most ill-used woman in the world.

"And I believe exactly the contrary," said the clergyman, with some
heat. "I believe in an honourable man and a pure-minded woman. I had
rather give up work altogether than reject such an obvious truth."

"Ah, Mr. Churchill," Mrs. Kirkman said again, "we must not rest in these
vain appearances. We are all vile creatures, and the heart is deceitful
above all things. I do fear that you are taking too charitable a view."

"Yes," said Mr. Churchill, but perhaps he made a different application
of the words; "I believe that about the heart; but then it shows its
wickedness generally in a sort of appropriate, individual way. I daresay
_they_ have their thorns in the flesh, like the rest; but it is not
falsehood and wantonness that are their besetting sins," said the poor
man, with a plainness of speech which put his hearers to the blush.

"Goodness gracious! remember that you are talking to ladies, Mr.
Churchill," Miss Sorbette said, and put down her veil. It was not a fact
he was very likely to forget; and then he put on his hat as they left
the chapel, and hoped he was now free to go upon his way.

"Stop a minute, please," said Miss Sorbette. "I should like to know what
course of action is going to be decided on. I am very sorry for Mary,
but so long as her character remains under this doubt----"

"It shall make no difference to me," said Mrs. Kirkman. "I don't pretend
to regulate anybody's actions, Sabina; but when one thinks of Mary of
Bethany! She may have done wrong, but I hope this occurrence will be
blessed to her soul. I felt sure she wanted something to bring her low,
and make her feel her need," the Colonel's wife added, with solemnity;
"and it is such a lesson for us all. In other circumstances, the same
thing might have happened to you or me."

"It could never have happened to me," said Miss Sorbette, with sudden
wrath; which was a fortunate diversion for Mr. Churchill. This was how
her friends discussed her after Mary had gone away from her second
wedding; and perhaps they were harder upon her than she had supposed
even in her secret thoughts.




CHAPTER V.


But the worst of all to Mrs. Ochterlony was that little Hugh had been
there--Hugh, who was six years old, and so intelligent for his age. The
child was very anxious to know what it meant, and why she knelt by his
father's side while all the other people were standing. Was it something
particular they were praying for, which Mrs. Kirkman, and the rest did
not want? Mary satisfied him as she best could, and by-and-by he forgot,
and began to play with his little brother as usual; but his mother knew
that so strange a scene could not fail to leave some impression. She sat
by herself that long day, avoiding her husband for perhaps the first
time in her life, and imagining a hundred possibilities to herself. It
seemed to her as if everybody who ever heard of her henceforth must hear
of this, and as if she must go through the world with a continual doubt
upon her; and Mary's weakness was to prize fair reputation and spotless
honour above everything in the world. Perhaps Mrs. Kirkman was not so
far wrong after all, and there was a higher meaning in the unlooked-for
blow that thus struck her at her tenderest point; but that was an idea
she could not receive. She could not think that God had anything to do
with her husband's foolish restlessness, and her own impatient
submission. It was a great deal more like a malicious devil's work, than
anything a beneficent providence could have arranged. This way of
thinking was far from bringing Mary any consolation or solace, but still
there was a certain reasonableness in her thoughts. And then an
indistinct foreboding of harm to her children, she did not know what, or
how to be brought about, weighed upon Mary's mind. She kept looking at
them as they played beside her, and thinking how, in the far future, the
meaning of that scene he had been a witness to might flash into Hugh's
mind when he was a man, and throw a bewildering doubt upon his mother's
name, which perhaps she might not be living to clear up; and these ideas
stung her like a nest of serpents, each waking up and darting its venom
to her heart at a separate moment. She had been very sad and very sorry
many a time before in her life,--she had tasted all the usual sufferings
of humanity; and yet she had never been what may be called _unhappy_,
tortured from within and without, dissatisfied with herself and
everything about her. Major Ochterlony was in every sense of the word a
good husband, and he had been Mary's support and true companion in all
her previous troubles. He might be absurd now and then, but he never was
anything but kind and tender and sympathetic, as was the nature of the
man. But the special feature of this misfortune was that it irritated
and set her in arms against him, that it separated her from her closest
friend and all her friends, and that it made even the sight and thought
of her children, a pain to her among all her other pains.

This was the wretched way in which Mary spent the day of her second
wedding. Naturally, Major Ochterlony brought people in with him to lunch
(probably it should be written tiffin, but our readers will accept the
generic word), and was himself in the gayest spirits, and insisted upon
champagne, though he knew they could not afford it. "We ate our real
wedding breakfast all by ourselves in that villanous little place at
Gretna," he said, with a boy's enthusiasm, "and had trout out of the
Solway: don't you recollect, Mary? Such trout! What a couple of happy
young fools we were; and if every Gretna Green marriage turned out like
mine!" the Major added, looking at his wife with beaming eyes. She had
been terribly wounded by his hand, and was suffering secret torture, and
was full of the irritation of pain; and yet she could not so steel her
heart as not to feel a momentary softening at sight of the love and
content in his eyes. But though he loved her he had sacrificed all her
scruples, and thrown a shadow upon her honour, and filled her heart with
bitterness, to satisfy an unreasonable fancy of his own, and give peace,
as he said, to his mind. All this was very natural, but in the pain of
the moment it seemed almost inconceivable to Mary, who was obliged to
conceal her mortification and suffering, and minister to her guests as
she was wont to do, without making any show of the shadow that she felt
to have fallen upon her life.

It was, however, tacitly agreed by the ladies of the station to make no
difference, according to the example of the Colonel's wife. Mrs. Kirkman
had resolved upon that charitable course from the highest motives, but
the others were perhaps less elevated in their principles of conduct.
Mrs. Hesketh, who was quite a worldly-minded woman, concluded it would
be absurd for one to take any step unless they all did, and that on the
whole, whatever were the rights of it, Mary could be no worse than she
had been for all the long time they had known her. As for Miss Sorbette,
who was strong-minded, she was disposed to consider that the moral
courage the Ochterlonys had displayed in putting an end to an
unsatisfactory state of affairs merited public appreciation. Little Mrs.
Askell, for her part, rushed headlong as soon as she heard of it, which
fortunately was not till it was all over, to see her suffering
protectress. Perhaps it was at that moment, for the first time, that the
ensign's wife felt the full benefit of being a married lady, able to
stand up for her friend and stretch a small wing of championship over
her. She rushed into Mrs. Ochterlony's presence and arms like a little
tempest, and cried and sobbed and uttered inarticulate exclamations on
her friend's shoulder, to Mary's great surprise, who thought something
had happened to her. Fortunately the little eighteen-year-old matron,
after the first incoherence was over, began to find out that Mrs.
Ochterlony looked the same as ever, and that nothing tragical could have
happened, and so restrained the offer of her own countenance and
support, which would have been more humbling to Mary than all the
desertion in the world.

"What is the matter, my dear?" said Mrs. Ochterlony, who had regained
her serene looks, though not her composed mind; and little Irish Emma,
looking at her, was struck with such a sense of her own absurdity and
temerity and ridiculous pretensions, that she very nearly broke down
again.

"I've been quarrelling with Charlie," the quick-witted girl said, with
the best grace she could, and added in her mind a secret clause to
soften down the fiction,--"he is so aggravating; and when I saw my
Madonna looking so sweet and so still----"

"Hush!" said Mary "there was no need for crying about that--nor for
telling fibs either," she added, with a smile that went to the heart of
the ensign's wife. "You see there is nothing the matter with me," Mrs.
Ochterlony added; but notwithstanding her perfect composure it was in a
harder tone.

"I never expected anything else," said the impetuous little woman; "as
if any nonsense could do any harm to you! And I love the Major, and I
always have stood up for him; but oh, I should just like for once to box
his ears."

"Hush!" said Mary again; and then the need she had of sympathy prompted
her for one moment to descend to the level of the little girl beside
her, who was all sympathy and no criticism, which Mary knew to be a kind
of friendship wonderfully uncommon in this world. "It did me no harm,"
she said, feeling a certain relief in dropping her reserve, and making
visible the one thing of which they were both thinking, and which had no
need of being identified by name. "It did me no harm, and it pleased
him. I don't deny that it hurt at the time," Mary added after a little
pause, with a smile; "but that is all over now. You need not cry over
me, my dear."

"I--cry over you," cried the prevaricating Emma, "as if such a thing had
ever come into my head; but I _did_ feel glad I was a married lady," the
little thing added; and then saw her mistake, and blushed and faltered
and did not know what to say next. Mrs. Ochterlony knew very well what
her young visitor meant, but she took no notice, as was the wisest way.
She had steeled herself to all the consequences by this time, and knew
she must accustom herself to such allusions and to take no notice of
them. But it was hard upon her, who had been so good to the child, to
think that little Emma was glad she was a married lady, and could in her
turn give a certain countenance. All these sharp, secret, unseen arrows
went direct to Mary's heart.

But on the whole the regiment kept its word and made no difference. Mrs.
Kirkman called every Wednesday and took Mary with her to the
prayer-meeting which she held among the soldiers' wives, and where she
said she was having much precious fruit; and was never weary of
representing to her companion that she had need of being brought down
and humbled, and that for her part she would rejoice in anything that
would bring her dear Mary to a more serious way of thinking; which was
an expression of feeling perfectly genuine on Mrs. Kirkman's part,
though at the same time she felt more and more convinced that Mrs.
Ochterlony had been deceiving her, and was not by any means an innocent
sufferer. The Colonel's wife was quite sincere in both these beliefs,
though it would be hard to say how she reconciled them to each other;
but then a woman is not bound to be logical, whether she belongs to High
or Low Church. At the same time she brought Mary sermons to read, with
passages marked, which were adapted for both these states of
feeling,--some consoling the righteous who were chastened because they
were beloved, and some exhorting the sinners who had been long callous
and now were beginning to awaken to a sense of their sins. Perhaps Mary,
who was not very discriminating in point of sermon-books, read both with
equal innocence, not seeing their special application: but she could
scarcely be so blind when her friend discoursed at the Mothers' Meeting
upon the Scripture Marys, and upon her who wept at the Saviour's feet.
Mrs. Ochterlony understood then, and never forgot afterwards, that it
was _that_ Mary with whom, in the mind of one of her most intimate
associates, she had come to be identified. Not the Mary blessed among
women, the type of motherhood and purity, but the other Mary, who was
forgiven much because she had much loved. That night she went home with
a swelling heart, wondering over the great injustice of human ways and
dealings, and crying within herself to the Great Spectator who knew all
against the evil thoughts of her neighbours. Was that what they all
believed of her, all these women? and yet she had done nothing to
deserve it, not so much as by a light look, or thought, or word; and it
was not as if she could defend herself, or convince them of their
cruelty: for nobody accused her, nobody reproached her--her friends, as
they all said, made no difference. This was the sudden cloud that came
over Mary in the very fairest and best moment of her life.

But as for the Major, he knew nothing about all that. It had been done
for his peace of mind, and until the next thing occurred to worry him he
was radiant with good-humour and satisfaction. If he saw at any time a
cloud on his wife's face, he thought it was because of that approaching
necessity which took the pleasure out of everything even to himself, for
the moment, when he thought of it--the necessity of sending Hugh "home."
"We shall still have Islay for a few years at least, my darling," he
would say, in his affectionate way; "and then the baby,"--for there was
a baby, which had come some time after the event which we have just
narrated. That too must have had something to do, no doubt, with Mary's
low spirits. "He'll get along famously with Aunt Agatha, and get
spoiled, that fellow will," the Major said; "and as for Islay, we'll
make a man of him." And except at those moments, when, as we have just
said, the thoughts of his little Hugh's approaching departure struck
him, Major Ochterlony was as happy and light-hearted as a man who is
very well off in all his domestic concerns, and getting on in his
profession, and who has a pleasant consciousness of doing his duty to
all men and a grateful sense of the mercies of God, should be, and
naturally is. When two people are yoked for life together, there is
generally one of the two who bears the burden, while the other takes
things easy. Sometimes it is the husband, as is fit and right, who has
the heavy weight on his shoulders; but sometimes, and oftener than
people think, it is the wife. And perhaps this was why Major Ochterlony
was so frisky in his harness, and Madonna Mary felt her serenity fall
into sadness, and was conscious of going on very slowly and heavily upon
the way of life. Not that he was to blame, who was now, as always, the
best husband in the regiment, or even in the world. Mary would not for
all his fidgets, not for any reward, have changed him against Colonel
Kirkman with his fishy eye, nor against Captain Hesketh's jolly
countenance, nor for anybody else within her range of vision. He was
very far from perfect, and in utter innocence had given her a wound
which throbbed and bled daily whichever way she turned herself, and
which she would never cease to feel all her life; but still at the same
time he stood alone in the world, so far as Mary's heart was concerned:
for true love is, of all things on earth, the most pertinacious and
unreasonable, let the philosophers say what they will.

And then the baby, for his part, was not like what the other babies had
been; he was not a great fellow, like Hugh and Islay; but puny and
pitiful and weakly,--a little selfish soul that would leave his mother
no rest. She had been content to leave the other boys to Providence and
Nature, tending them tenderly, wholesomely, and not too much, and hoping
to make men of them some day; but with this baby Mary fell to dreaming,
wondering often as he lay in her lap what his future would be. She used
to ask herself unconsciously, without knowing why, what his influence
might be on the lives of his brothers, who were like and yet so unlike
him: though when she roused up she rebuked herself, and thought how much
more reasonable it would be to speculate upon Hugh's influence, who was
the eldest, or even upon Islay, who had the longest head in the
regiment, and looked as if he meant to make some use of it one day. To
think of the influence of little weakly Wilfrid coming to be of any
permanent importance in the lives of those two strong fellows seemed
absurd enough; and yet it was an idea which would come back to her, when
she thought without thinking, and escaped as it were into a spontaneous
state of mind. The name even was a weak-minded sort of name, and did not
please Mary; and all sorts of strange fancies came into her head as she
sat with the pitiful little peevish baby, who insisted upon having all
her attention, lying awake and fractious upon her wearied knee.

Thus it was that the first important scene of her history came to an
end, with thorns which she never dreamed of planted in Mrs. Ochterlony's
way, and a still greater and more unthought-of cloud rising slowly upon
the broken serenity of her life.




CHAPTER VI.


Everything however went on well enough at the station for some time
after the great occurrence which counted for so much in Mrs.
Ochterlony's history; and the Major was very peaceable, for him, and
nothing but trifling matters being in his way to move him, had fewer
fidgets than usual. To be sure he was put out now and then by something
the Colonel said or did, or by Hesketh's well-off-ness, which had come
to the length of a moral peculiarity, and was trying to a man; but these
little disturbances fizzed themselves out, and got done with without
troubling anybody much. There was a lull, and most people were
surprised at it and disposed to think that something must be the matter
with the Major; but there was nothing the matter. Probably it occurred
to him now and then that his last great fidget had rather gone a step
too far--but this is mere conjecture, for he certainly never said so.
And then, after a while, he began to play, as it were, with the next
grand object of uneasiness which was to distract his existence. This was
the sending "home" of little Hugh. It was not that he did not feel to
the utmost the blank this event would cause in the house, and the
dreadful tug at his heart, and the difference it would make to Mary. But
at the same time it was a thing that had to be done, and Major
Ochterlony hoped his feelings would never make him fail in his duty. He
used to feel Hugh's head if it was hot, and look at his tongue at all
sorts of untimely moments, which Mary knew meant nothing, but yet which
made her thrill and tremble to her heart; and then he would shake his
own head and look sad. "I would give him a little quinine, my dear," he
would say; and then Mary, out of her very alarm and pain, would turn
upon him.

"Why should I give him quinine? It is time enough when he shows signs of
wanting it. The child is quite well, Hugh." But there was a certain
quiver in Mrs. Ochterlony's voice which the Major could not and did not
mistake.

"Oh yes, he is quite well," he would reply; "come and let me feel if you
have any flesh on your bones, old fellow. He is awfully thin, Mary. I
don't think he would weigh half so much as he did a year ago if you were
to try. I don't want to alarm you, my dear; but we must do it sooner or
later, and in a thing that is so important for the child, we must not
think of ourselves," said Major Ochterlony; and then again he laid his
hand with that doubting, experimenting look upon the boy's brow, to feel
"if there was any fever," as he said.

"He is quite well," said Mary, who felt as if she were going distracted
while this pantomime went on. "You do frighten me, though you don't mean
it; but I _know_ he is quite well."

"Oh yes," said Major Ochterlony, with a sigh; and he kissed his little
boy solemnly, and set him down as if things were in a very bad way; "he
is quite well. But I have seen when five or six hours have changed all
that," he added with a still more profound sigh, and got up as if he
could not bear further consideration of the subject, and went out and
strolled into somebody's quarters, where Mary did not see how
light-hearted he was half-and-hour after, quite naturally, because he
had poured out his uneasiness, and a little more, and got quite rid of
it, leaving her with the arrow sticking in her heart. No wonder that
Mrs. Kirkman, who came in as the Major went out, said that even a very
experienced Christian would have found it trying. As for Mary, when she
woke up in the middle of the night, which little peevish Wilfrid gave
her plenty of occasion to do, she used to steal off as soon as she had
quieted that baby-tyrant, and look at her eldest boy in his little bed,
and put her soft hand on his head, and stoop over him to listen to his
breathing. And sometimes she persuaded herself that his forehead _was_
hot, which it was quite likely to be, and got no more sleep that night;
though as for the Major, he was a capital sleeper. And then somehow it
was not so easy as it had been to conclude that it was only his way; for
after his way had once brought about such consequences as in that
re-marriage which Mary felt a positive physical pain in remembering, it
was no longer to be taken lightly. The consequence was, that Mrs.
Ochterlony wound herself up, and summoned all her courage, and wrote to
Aunt Agatha, though she thought it best, until she had an answer, to say
nothing about it; and she began to look over all little Hugh's wardrobe,
to make and mend, and consider within herself what warm things she could
get him for the termination of that inevitable voyage, and to think what
might happen before she had these little things of his in her care
again--how they would wear out and be replenished, and his mother have
no hand in it--and how he would get on without her. She used to make
pictures of the little forlorn fellow on shipboard, and how he would cry
himself to sleep, till the tears came dropping on her needle and rusted
it; and then would try to think how good Aunt Agatha would be to him,
but was not to say comforted by that--not so much as she ought to have
been. There was nothing in the least remarkable in all this, but only
what a great many people have to go through, and what Mrs. Ochterlony no
doubt would go through with courage when the inevitable moment came. It
was the looking forward to and rehearsing it, and the Major's awful
suggestions, and the constant dread of feeling little Hugh's head hot,
or his tongue white, and thinking it was her fault--this was what made
it so hard on Mary; though Major Ochterlony never meant to alarm her, as
anybody might see.

"I think he should certainly go home," Mrs. Kirkman said. "It is a
trial, but it is one of the trials that will work for good. I don't like
to blame you, Mary, but I have always thought your children were a
temptation to you; oh, take care!--if you were to make idols of
them----"

"I don't make idols of them," said Mrs. Ochterlony, hastily; and then
she added, with an effort of self-control which stopped even the rising
colour on her cheek, "You know I don't agree with you about these
things." She did not agree with Mrs. Kirkman; and yet to tell the truth,
where so much is concerned, it is a little hard for a woman, however
convinced she may be of God's goodness, not to fail in her faith and
learn to think that, after all, the opinion which would make an end of
her best hopes and her surest confidence may be true.

"I know you don't agree with me," said the Colonel's wife, sitting down
with a sigh. "Oh, Mary, if you only knew how much I would give to see
you taking these things to heart--to see you not almost, but altogether
such as I am," she added, with sudden pathos. "If you would but remember
that these blessings are only lent us--that we don't know what day or
hour they may be taken back again----"

All this Mary listened to with a rising of nature in her heart against
it, and yet with that wavering behind,--What if it might be true?

"Don't speak to me so," she said. "You always make me think that
something is going to happen. As if God grudged us our little happiness.
Don't talk of lending and taking back again. If _He_ is not a cheerful
giver, who can be?" For she was carried away by her feelings, and was
not quite sure what she was saying--and at the same time, it comes so
much easier to human nature to think that God grudges and takes back
again, and is not a cheerful giver. As for Mrs. Kirkman, she thought it
sinful so much as to imagine anything of the kind.

"It grieves me to hear you speak in that loose sort of latitudinarian
way," she said; "oh, my dear Mary, if you could only see how much need
you have to be brought low. When one cross is not enough, another
comes--and I feel that you are not going to be let alone. This trial, if
you take it in a right spirit, may have the most blessed consequences.
It must be to keep you from making an idol of him, my dear--for if he
takes up your heart from better things----"

What could Mary say? She stopped in her work to give her hands an
impatient wring together, by way of expressing somehow in secret to
herself the impatience with which she listened. Yet perhaps, after all,
it might be true. Perhaps God was not such a Father as He, the supreme
and all-loving, whom her own motherhood shadowed forth in Mary's heart,
but such a one as those old pedant fathers, who took away pleasures and
reclaimed gifts, for discipline's sake. Perhaps--for when a heart has
everything most dear to it at stake, it has such a miserable inclination
to believe the worst of Him who leaves his explanation to the end,--Mary
thought perhaps it might be true, and that God her Father might be lying
in wait for her somewhere to crush her to the ground for having too much
pleasure in his gift,--which was the state of mind which her friend, who
was at the bottom of her heart a good woman, would have liked to bring
about.

"I think it is simply because we are in India," said Mrs. Ochterlony,
recovering herself; "it is one of the conditions of our lot. It is a
very hard condition, but of course we have to bear it. I think, for my
part, that God, instead of doing it to punish me, is sorry for me, and
that He would mend it and spare us if something else did not make it
necessary. But perhaps it is you who are right," she added, faltering
again, and wondering if it was wrong to believe that God, in a wonderful
supreme way, must be acting, somehow as in a blind ineffective way, she,
a mother, would do to her children. But happily her companion was not
aware of that profane thought. And then, Mrs. Hesketh had come in, who
looked at the question from entirely a different point of view.

"We have all got to do it, you know," said that comfortable woman,
"whether we idolize them or not. I don't see what that has to do with
it; but then I never do understand _you_. The great thing is, if you
have somebody nice to send them to. One's mother is a great comfort for
that; but then, there is one's husband's friends to think about. I am
not sure, for my own part, that a good school is not the best. _That_
can't offend anybody, you know; neither your own people, nor _his_; and
then they can go all round in the holidays. Mine have all got on
famously," said Mrs Hesketh; and nobody who looked at her could have
thought anything else. Though, indeed, Mrs. Hesketh's well-off-ness was
not nearly so disagreeable or offensive to other people as her
husband's, who had his balance at his banker's written on his face;
whereas in her case it was only evident that she was on the best of
terms with her milliner and her jeweller, and all her tradespeople, and
never had any trouble with her bills. Mary sat between the woman who had
no children, and who thought she made idols of her boys--and the woman
who had quantities of children, and saw no reason why anybody should be
much put out of their way about them; and neither the one nor the other
knew what she meant, any more than she perhaps knew exactly what they
meant, though, as was natural, the latter idea did not much strike her.
And the sole strengthening which Mrs. Ochterlony drew from this talk
was a resolution never to say anything more about it; to keep what she
was thinking of to herself, and shut another door in her heart, which,
after all, is a process which has to be pretty often repeated as one
goes through the world.

"But Mary has no friends--no _female_ friends, poor thing. It is so sad
for a girl when that happens, and accounts for so many things," the
Colonel's wife said, dropping the lids over her eyes, and with an
imperceptible shake of her head, which brought the little chapel and the
scene of her second marriage in a moment before Mary's indignant eyes;
"but there is one good even in that, for it gives greater ground for
faith; when we have nothing and nobody to cling to----"

"We were talking of the children," Mrs. Hesketh broke in calmly. "If I
were you I should keep Hugh until Islay was old enough to go with him.
They are such companions to each other, you know, and two children don't
cost much more than one. If I were you, Mary, I would send the two
together. I always did it with mine. And I am sure you have somebody
that will take care of them; one always has somebody in one's eye; and
as for female friends----"

Mary stopped short the profanity which doubtless her comfortable visitor
was about to utter on the subject. "I have nothing but female friends,"
she said, with a natural touch of sharpness in her voice. "I have an
aunt and a sister who are my nearest relatives--and it is there Hugh is
going," for the prick of offence had been good for her nerves, and
strung them up.

"Then I can't see what you have to be anxious about," said Mrs. Hesketh;
"some people always make a fuss about things happening to children; why
should anything happen to them? mine have had everything, I think, that
children can have, and never been a bit the worse; and though it makes
one uncomfortable at the time to think of their being ill, and so far
away if anything should happen, still, if you know they are in good
hands, and that everything is done that can be done---- And then, one
never hears till the worst is over," said the well-off woman, drawing
her lace shawl round her. "Good-by, Mary, and don't fret; there is
nothing that is not made worse by fretting about it; I never do, for my
part."

Mrs. Kirkman threw a glance of pathetic import out of the corners of her
down-dropped eyes at the large departing skirts of Mary's other visitor.
The Colonel's wife was one of the people who always stay last, and her
friends generally cut their visits short when they encountered her, with
a knowledge of this peculiarity, and at the same time an awful sense of
something that would be said when they had withdrawn. "Not that I care
for what she says," Mrs. Hesketh murmured to herself as she went out,
"and Mary ought to know better at least;" but at the same time, society
at the station, though it was quite used to it, did not like to think of
the sigh, and the tender, bitter lamentations which would be made over
them when they took their leave. Mrs. Hesketh was not sensitive, but she
could not help feeling a little aggrieved, and wondering what special
view of her evil ways her regimental superior would take this time--for
in so limited a community, everybody knew about everybody, and any
little faults one might have were not likely to be hid.

Mrs. Kirkman had risen too, and when Mary came back from the door the
Colonel's wife came and sat down beside her on the sofa, and took Mrs.
Ochterlony's hand. "She would be very nice, if she only took a little
thought about the one thing needful," said Mrs. Kirkman, with the usual
sigh. "What does it matter about all the rest? Oh, Mary, if we could
only choose the good part which cannot be taken away from us!"

"But surely, we all try a little after that," said Mary. "She is a kind
woman, and very good to the poor. And how can we tell what her thoughts
are? I don't think we ever understand each other's thoughts."

"I never pretend to understand. I judge according to the Scripture
rule," said Mrs. Kirkman; "you are too charitable, Mary; and too often,
you know, charity only means laxness. Oh, I cannot tell you how those
people are all laid upon my soul! Colonel Kirkman being the principal
officer, you know, and so little real Christian work to be expected from
Mr. Churchill, the responsibility is terrible. I feel sometimes as if I
must die under it. If their blood should be demanded at my hands!"

"But surely God must care a little about them Himself," said Mrs.
Ochterlony. "Don't you think so? I cannot think that He has left it all
upon you----"

"Dear Mary, if you but give me the comfort of thinking I had been of use
to _you_," said Mrs. Kirkman, pressing Mary's hand. And when she went
away she believed that she had done her duty by Mrs. Ochterlony at
least; and felt that perhaps, as a brand snatched from the burning, this
woman, who was so wrapped up in regard for the world and idolatry of her
children, might still be brought into a better state. From this it will
be seen that the painful impression made by the marriage had a little
faded out of the mind of the station. It was there, waiting any chance
moment or circumstance that might bring the name of Madonna Mary into
question; but in the meantime, for the convenience of ordinary life, it
had been dropped. It was a nuisance to keep up a sort of shadowy censure
which never came to anything, and by tacit consent the thing had
dropped. For it was a very small community, and if any one had to be
tabooed, the taboo must have been complete and crushing, and nobody had
the courage for that. And so gradually the cloudiness passed away like a
breath on a mirror, and Mary to all appearance was among them as she had
been before. Only no sort of compromise could really obliterate the fact
from anybody's recollection, or above all from her own mind.

And Mary went back to little Hugh's wardrobe when her visitors were
gone, with that sense of having shut another door in her heart which has
already been mentioned. It is so natural to open all the doors and leave
all the chambers open to the day; but when people walk up to the
threshold and look in and turn blank looks of surprise or sad looks of
disapproval upon you, what is to be done but to shut the door? Mrs.
Ochterlony thought as most people do, that it was almost incredible that
her neighbours did not understand what she meant; and she thought too,
like an inexperienced woman, that this was an accident of the station,
and that elsewhere other people knew better, which was a very fortunate
thought, and did her good. And so she continued to put her boy's things
in order, and felt half angry when she saw the Major come in, and knew
beforehand that he was going to resume his pantomime with little Hugh,
and to try if his head was hot and look at his tongue. If his tongue
turned out to be white and his head feverish, then Mary knew that he
would think it was her fault, and began to long for Aunt Agatha's
letter, which she had been fearing, and which might be looked for by the
next mail.

As for the Major, he came home with the air of a man who has hit upon a
new trouble. His wife saw it before he had been five minutes in the
house. She saw it in his eyes, which sought her and retired from her in
their significant restless way, as if studying how to begin. In former
days Mrs. Ochterlony, when she saw this, used to help her husband out;
but recently she had had no heart for that, and he was left unaided to
make a beginning for himself. She took no notice of his fidgeting, nor
of the researches he made all about the room, and all the things he put
out of their places. She could wait until he informed her what it was.
But Mary felt a little nervous until such time as her husband had seated
himself opposite her, and began to pull her working things about, and to
take up little Hugh's linen blouses which she had been setting in order.
Then the Major heaved a demonstrative sigh. He meant to be asked what
it meant, and even gave a glance up at her from the corner of his eye to
see if she remarked it, but Mary was hard-hearted and would take no
notice. He had to take all the trouble himself.

"He will want warmer things when he goes home," said the Major. "You
must write to Aunt Agatha about that, Mary. I have been thinking a great
deal about his going home. I don't know how I shall get on without him,
nor you either, my darling; but it is for his good. How old is Islay?"
Major Ochterlony added with a little abruptness: and then his wife knew
what it was.

"Islay is not quite three," said Mary, quietly, as if the question was
of no importance; but for all that her heart began to jump and beat
against her breast.

"Three! and so big for his age," said the guilty Major, labouring with
his secret meaning. "I don't want to vex you, Mary, my love, but I was
thinking perhaps when Hugh went; it comes to about the same thing, you
see--the little beggar would be dreadfully solitary by himself, and I
don't see it would make any difference to Aunt Agatha----"

"It would make a difference to _me_," said Mary. "Oh, Hugh, don't be so
cruel to me. I cannot let him go so young. If Hugh must go, it may be
for _his_ good--but not for Islay's, who is only a baby. He would not
know us or have any recollection of us. Don't make me send both of my
boys away."

"You would still have the baby," said the Major. "My darling, I am not
going to do anything without your consent. Islay looked dreadfully
feverish the other day, you know. I told you so; and as I was coming
home I met Mrs. Hesketh----"

"You took _her_ advice about it," said Mary, with a little bitterness.
As for the Major, he set his Mary a whole heaven above such a woman as
Mrs. Hesketh, and yet he _had_ taken her advice about it, and it
irritated him a little to perceive his wife's tone of reproach.

"If I listened to her advice it is because she is a very sensible
woman," said Major Ochterlony. "You are so heedless, my dear. When your
children's health is ruined, you know, that is not the time to send them
home. We ought to do it now, while they are quite well; though indeed I
thought Islay very feverish the other night," he added, getting up again
in his restless way. And then the Major was struck with compunction when
he saw Mary bending down over her work, and remembered how constantly
she was there, working for them, and how much more trouble those
children cost her than they ever could cost him. "My love," he said,
coming up to her and laying his hand caressingly upon her bent head, "my
bonnie Mary! you did not think I meant that you cared less for them, or
what was for their good, than I do? It will be a terrible trial; but
then, if it is for their good and our own peace of mind----"

"God help me," said Mary, who was a little beside herself. "I don't
think you will leave me any peace of mind. You will drive me to do what
I think wrong, or, if I don't do it, you will make me think that
everything that happens is my fault. You don't mean it, but you are
cruel, Hugh."

"I am sure I don't mean it," said the Major, who, as usual, had had his
say out; "and when you come to think--but we will say no more about it
to-night. Give me your book, and I will read to you for an hour or two.
It is a comfort to come in to you and get a little peace. And after all,
my love, Mrs. Hesketh means well, and she's a very sensible woman. I
don't like Hesketh, but there's not a word to say against her. They are
all very kind and friendly. We are in great luck in our regiment. Is
this your mark where you left off? Don't let us say anything more about
it, Mary, for to-night."

"No," said Mrs. Ochterlony, with a sigh; but she knew in her heart that
the Major would begin to feel Islay's head, if it was hot, and look at
his tongue, as he had done to Hugh's, and drive her out of her senses;
and that, most likely, when she had come to an end of her powers, she
would be beaten and give in at last. But they said no more about it that
night; and the Major got so interested in the book that he sat all the
evening reading, and Mary got very well on with her work. Major
Ochterlony was so interested that he even forgot to look as if he
thought the children feverish when they came to say good-night, which
was the most wonderful relief to his wife. If thoughts came into her
head while she trimmed little Hugh's blouses, of another little
three-year-old traveller tottering by his brother's side, and going away
on the stormy dangerous sea, she kept them to herself. It did not seem
to her as if she could outlive the separation, nor how she could permit
a ship so richly freighted to sail away into the dark distance and the
terrible storms; and yet she knew that she must outlive it, and that it
must happen, if not now, yet at least some time. It is the condition of
existence for the English sojourners in India. And what was she more
than another, that any one should think there was any special hardship
in her case?




CHAPTER VII.


The next mail was an important one in many ways. It was to bring Aunt
Agatha's letter about little Hugh, and it did bring something which had
still more effect upon the Ochterlony peace of mind. The Major, as has
been already said, was not a man to be greatly excited by the arrival of
the mail. All his close and pressing interests were at present
concentrated in the station. His married sisters wrote to him now and
then, and he was very glad to get their letters, and to hear when a new
niece or nephew arrived, which was the general burden of these epistles.
Sometimes it was a death, and Major Ochterlony was sorry; but neither
the joy nor the sorrow disturbed him much. For he was far away, and he
was tolerably happy himself, and could bear with equanimity the
vicissitudes in the lot of his friends. But this time the letter which
arrived was of a different description. It was from his brother, the
head of the house--who was a little of an invalid and a good deal of a
dilettante, and gave the Major no nephews or nieces, being indeed a
confirmed bachelor of the most hopeless kind. He was a man who never
wrote letters, so that the communication was a little startling. And yet
there was nothing very particular in it. Something had occurred to make
Mr. Ochterlony think of his brother, and the consequence was that he had
drawn his writing things to his hand and written a few kind words, with
a sense of having done something meritorious to himself and deeply
gratifying to Hugh. He sent his love to Mary, and hoped the little
fellow was all right who was, he supposed, to carry on the family
honours--"if there are any family honours," the Squire had said, not
without an agreeable sense that there was something in his last paper on
the "Coins of Agrippa," that the Numismatic Society would not willingly
let die. This was the innocent morsel of correspondence which had come
to the Major's hand. Mary was sitting by with the baby on her lap while
he read it, and busy with a very different kind of communication. She
was reading Aunt Agatha's letter which she had been dreading and wishing
for, and her heart was growing sick over the innocent flutter of
expectation and kindness and delight which was in it. Every assurance of
the joy she would feel in seeing little Hugh, and the care she would
take of him, which the simple-minded writer sent to be a comfort to
Mary, came upon the mother's unreasonable mind like a kind of injury.
To think that anybody could be happy about an occurrence that would be
so terrible to her; to think that anybody could have the bad taste to
say that they looked with impatience for the moment that to Mary would
be like dying! She was unhinged, and for the first time, perhaps, in her
life, her nerves were thoroughly out of order, and she was unreasonable
to the bottom of her heart; and when she came to her young sister's gay
announcement of what for _her_ part she would do for her little nephew's
education, and how she had been studying the subject ever since Mary's
letter arrived, Mrs. Ochterlony felt as if she could have beaten the
girl, and was ready to cry with wretchedness and irritation and despair.
All these details served somehow to fix it, though she knew it had been
fixed before. They told her the little room Hugh should have, and the
old maid who would take care of him; and how he should play in the
garden, and learn his lessons in Aunt Agatha's parlour, and all those
details which would be sweet to Mary when her boy was actually there.
But at present they made his going away so real, that they were very
bitter to her, and she had to draw the astonished child away from his
play, and take hold of him and keep him by her, to feel quite sure that
he was still here, and not in the little North-country cottage which she
knew so well. But this was an arrangement which did not please the baby,
who liked to have his mother all to himself, and pushed Hugh away, and
kicked and screamed at him lustily. Thus it was an agitated little group
upon which the Major looked down as he turned from his brother's
pleasant letter. He was in a very pleasant frame of mind himself, and
was excessively entertained by the self-assertion of little Wilfrid on
his mother's knee.

"He is a plucky little soul, though he is so small," said Major
Ochterlony; "but Willie, my boy, there's precious little for you of the
grandeurs of the family. It is from Francis, my dear. It's very
surprising, you know, but still it's true. And he sends you his love.
You know I always said that there was a great deal of good in Francis;
he is not a demonstrative man--but still, when you get at it, he has a
warm heart. I am sure he would be a good friend to you, Mary, if
ever----"

"I hope I shall never need him to be a good friend to me," said Mrs.
Ochterlony. "He is your brother, Hugh, but you know we never got on." It
was a perfectly correct statement of fact, but yet, perhaps, Mary would
not have made it, had she not been so much disturbed by Aunt Agatha's
letter. She was almost disposed to persuade herself for that moment that
she had not got on with Aunt Agatha, which was a moral impossibility.
As for the Major, he took no notice of his wife's little ill-tempered
un-enthusiastic speech.

"You will be pleased when you read it," he said. "He talks of Hugh quite
plainly as the heir of Earlston. I can't help being pleased. I wonder
what kind of Squire the little beggar will make: but we shall not live
to see that--or, at least, _I_ shan't," the Major went on, and he looked
at his boy with a wistful look which Mary used to think of afterwards.
As for little Hugh, he was very indifferent, and not much more conscious
of the affection near home than of the inheritance far off. Major
Ochterlony stood by the side of Mary's chair, and he had it in his heart
to give her a little lesson upon her unbelief and want of confidence in
him, who was always acting for the best, and who thought much more of
her interests than of his own.

"My darling," he said, in that coaxing tone which Mary knew so well, "I
don't mean to blame you. It was a hard thing to make you do; and you
might have thought me cruel and too precise. But only see now how
important it was to be exact about our marriage--_too_ exact even. If
Hugh should come into the estate----"

Here Major Ochterlony stopped short all at once, without any apparent
reason. He had still his brother's letter in his hand, and was standing
by Mary's side; and nobody had come in, and nothing had happened. But
all at once, like a flash of lightning, something of which he had never
thought before had entered his mind. He stopped short, and said, "Good
God!" low to himself, though he was not a man who used profane
expressions. His face changed as a summer day changes when the wind
seizes it like a ghost, and covers its heavens with clouds. So great was
the shock he had received, that he made no attempt to hide it, but stood
gazing at Mary, appealing to her out of the midst of his sudden trouble.
"Good God!" he said. His eyes went in a piteous way from little Hugh,
who knew nothing about it, to his mother, who was at present the chief
sufferer. Was it possible that instead of helping he had done his best
to dishonour Hugh? It was so new an idea to him, that he looked
helplessly into Mary's eyes to see if it was true. And she, for her
part, had nothing to say to him. She gave a little tremulous cry which
did but echo his own exclamation, and pitifully held out her hand to her
husband. Yes; it was true. Between them they had sown thorns in their
boy's path, and thrown doubt on his name, and brought humiliation and
uncertainty into his future life. Major Ochterlony dropped into a chair
by his wife's side, and covered his face with her hand. He was struck
dumb by his discovery. It was only she who had seen it all long ago--to
whom no sudden revelation could come--who had been suffering, even
angrily and bitterly, but who was now altogether subdued and conscious
only of a common calamity; who was the only one capable of speech or
thought.

"Hugh, it is done now," said Mary; "perhaps it may never do him any
harm. We are in India, a long way from all our friends. They know what
took place in Scotland, but they can't know what happened here."

The Major only replied once more, "Good God!" Perhaps he was not
thinking so much of Hugh as of the failure he had himself made. To think
he should have landed in the most apparent folly by way of being
wise--that perhaps was the immediate sting. But as for Mrs. Ochterlony,
her heart was full of her little boy who was going away from her, and
her husband's horror and dismay seemed only natural. She had to withdraw
her hand from him, for the tyrant baby did not approve of any other
claim upon her attention, but she caressed his stooping head as she did
so. "Oh, Hugh, let us hope things will turn out better than we think,"
she said, with her heart overflowing in her eyes; and the soft tears
fell on Wilfrid's little frock as she soothed and consoled him. Little
Hugh for his part had been startled in the midst of his play, and had
come forward to see what was going on. He was not particularly
interested, it is true, but still he rather wanted to know what it was
all about. And when the pugnacious baby saw his brother he returned to
the conflict. It was his baby efforts with hands and feet to thrust Hugh
away which roused the Major. He got up and took a walk about the room,
sighing heavily. "When you saw what was involved, why did you let me do
it, Mary?" he said, amid his sighs. That was all the advantage his wife
had from his discovery. He was still walking about the room and sighing,
when the baby went to sleep, and Hugh was taken away; and then to be
sure the father and mother were alone.

"_That_ never came into my head," Major Ochterlony said, drawing a chair
again to Mary's side. "When you saw the danger why did you not tell me?
I thought it was only because you did not like it. And then, on the
other side, if anything happened to me----. Why did you let me do it
when you saw that?" said the Major, almost angrily. And he drew another
long impatient sigh.

"Perhaps it will do no harm, after all," said Mary, who felt herself
suddenly put upon her defence.

"Harm! it is sure to do harm," said the Major. "It is as good as saying
we were never married till now. Good heavens! to think you should have
seen all that, and yet let me do it. We may have ruined him, for all we
know. And the question is, what's to be done? Perhaps I should write to
Francis, and tell him that I thought it best for your sake, in case
anything happened to me---- and as it was merely a matter of form, I
don't see that Churchill could have any hesitation in striking it out of
the register----"

"Oh, Hugh, let it alone now," said Mrs. Ochterlony. "It is done, and we
cannot undo it. Let us only be quiet and make no more commotion. People
may forget it, perhaps, if we forget it."

"Forget it!" the Major said, and sighed. He shook his head, and at the
same time he looked with a certain tender patronage on Mary. "You may
forget it, my dear, and I hope you will," he said, with a magnanimous
pathos; "but it is too much to expect that I should forget what may have
such important results. I feel sure I ought to let Francis know. I
daresay he could advise us what would be best. It is a very kind
letter," said the Major; and he sighed, and gave Mary Mr. Ochterlony's
brief and unimportant note with an air of resigned yet hopeless
affliction, which half irritated her, and half awoke those possibilities
of laughter which come "when there is little laughing in one's head," as
we say in Scotland. She could have laughed, and she could have stormed
at him; and yet in the midst of all she felt a poignant sense of
contrast, and knew that it was she and not he who would really
suffer--as it was he and not she who was in fault.

While Mary read Mr. Ochterlony's letter, lulling now and then with a
soft movement the baby on her knee, the Major at the other side got
attracted after a while by the pretty picture of the sleeping child, and
began at length to forego his sighing, and to smooth out the long white
drapery that lay over Mary's dress. He was thinking no harm, the
tender-hearted man. He looked at little Wilfrid's small waxen face
pillowed on his mother's arm--so much smaller and feebler than Hugh and
Islay had been, the great, gallant fellows--and his heart was touched by
his little child. "My little man! _you_ are all right, at least," said
the inconsiderate father. He said it to himself, and thought, if he
thought at all on the subject, that Mary, who was reading his brother's
letter, did not hear him. And when Mrs. Ochterlony gave that cry which
roused all the house and brought everybody trooping to the door, in the
full idea that it must be a cobra at least, the Major jumped up to his
feet as much startled as any of them, and looked down to the floor and
cried, "Where--what is it?" with as little an idea of what was the
matter as the ayah who grinned and gazed in the distance. When he saw
that instead of indicating somewhere a reptile intruder, Mary had
dropped the letter and fallen into a weak outburst of tears, the Major
was confounded. He sent the servants away, and took his wife into his
arms and held her fast. "What is it, my love?" said the Major. "Are you
ill? For Heaven's sake tell me what it is; my poor darling, my bonnie
Mary?" This was how he soothed her, without the most distant idea what
was the matter, or what had made her cry out. And when Mary came to
herself, she did not explain very clearly. She said to herself that it
was no use making him unhappy by the fantastical horror which had come
into her mind with his words, or indeed had been already lurking there.
And, poor soul, she was better when she had had her cry out, and had
given over little Wilfrid, woke up by the sound, to his nurse's hands.
She said, "Never mind me, Hugh; I am nervous, I suppose;" and cried on
his shoulder as he never remembered her to have cried, except for very
serious griefs. And when at last he had made her lie down, which was the
Major's favourite panacea for all female ills of body or mind, and had
covered her over, and patted and caressed and kissed her, Major
Ochterlony went out with a troubled mind. It could not be anything in
Francis's letter, which was a model of brotherly correctness, that had
vexed or excited her: and then he began to think that for some time past
her health had not been what it used to be. The idea disturbed him
greatly, as may be supposed; for the thought of Mary ailing and weakly,
or perhaps ill and in danger, was one which had never yet entered his
mind. The first thing he thought of was to go and have a talk with
Sorbette, who ought to know, if he was good for anything, what it was.

"I am sure I don't know in the least what is the matter," the Major
said. "She is not ill, you know. This morning she looked as well as ever
she did, and then all at once gave a cry and burst into tears. It is so
unlike Mary."

"It is very unlike her," said the doctor. "Perhaps you were saying
something that upset her nerves."

"Nerves!" said the Major, with calm pride. "My dear fellow, you know
that Mary has no nerves; she never was one of that sort of women. To
tell the truth, I don't think she has ever been quite herself since that
stupid business, you know."

"What stupid business?" said Mr. Sorbette.

"Oh, you know--the marriage, to be sure. A man looks very silly
afterwards," said the Major with candour, "when he lets himself be
carried away by his feelings. She ought not to have consented when that
was her idea. I would give a hundred pounds I had not been so foolish. I
don't think she has ever been quite herself since."

The doctor had opened _de grands yeux_. He looked at his companion as if
he could not believe his ears. "Of course you would never have taken
such an unusual step if there had not been good reason for it," he
ventured to say, which was rather a hazardous speech; for the Major
might have divined its actual meaning, and then things would have gone
badly with Mr. Sorbette. But, as it happened, Major Ochterlony was far
too much occupied to pay attention to anybody's meaning except his own.

"Yes, there was good reason," he said. "She lost her marriage 'lines,'
you know; and all our witnesses are dead. I thought she might perhaps
find herself in a disagreeable position if anything happened to me."

As he spoke, the doctor regarded him with surprise so profound as to be
half sublime--surprise and a perplexity and doubt wonderful to behold.
Was this a story the Major had made up, or was it perhaps after all the
certain truth? It was just what he had said at first; but the first time
it was stated with more warmth, and did not produce the same effect. Mr.
Sorbette respected Mrs. Ochterlony to the bottom of his heart; but still
he had shaken his head, and said, "There was no accounting for those
things." And now he did not know what to make of it: whether to believe
in the innocence of the couple, or to think the Major had made up a
story--which, to be sure, would be by much the greatest miracle of all.

"If that was the case, I think it would have been better to let well
alone," said the doctor. "That is what I would have done had it been
me."

"Then why did not you tell me so?" said Major Ochterlony. "I asked you
before; and what you all said to me was, 'If that's the case, best to
repeat it at once.' Good Lord! to think how little one can rely upon
one's friends when one asks their advice. But in the meantime the
question is about Mary. I wish you'd go and see her and give her
something--a tonic, you know, or something strengthening. I think I'll
step over and see Churchill, and get him to strike that unfortunate
piece of nonsense out of the register. As it was only a piece of form, I
should think he would do it; and if it is _that_ that ails her, it would
do her good."

"If I were you, I'd let well alone," said the doctor; but he said it
low, and he was putting on his hat as he spoke, and went off immediately
to see his patient. Even if curiosity and surprise had not been in
operation, he would still probably have hastened to Madonna Mary. For
the regiment loved her in its heart, and the loss of her fair serene
presence would have made a terrible gap at the station. "We must not let
her be ill if we can help it," Mr. Sorbette said to himself; and then he
made a private reflection about that ass Ochterlony and his fidgets. But
yet, notwithstanding all his faults, the Major was not an ass. On
thinking it over again, he decided not to go to Churchill with that
little request about the register; and he felt more and more, the more
he reflected upon it, how hard it was that in a moment of real emergency
a man should be able to put so little dependence upon his friends. Even
Mary had let him do it, though she had seen how dangerous and impolitic
it was; and all the others had let him do it; for certainly it was not
without asking advice that he had taken what the doctor called so
unusual a step. Major Ochterlony felt as he took this into consideration
that he was an injured man. What was the good of being on intimate terms
with so many people if not one of them could give him the real counsel
of a friend when he wanted it? And even Mary had let him do it! The
thought of such a strange dereliction of duty on the part of everybody
connected with him, went to the Major's heart.

As for Mary, it would be a little difficult to express her feelings. She
got up as soon as her husband was gone, and threw off the light covering
he had put over her so carefully, and went back to her work; for to lie
still in a darkened room was not a remedy in which she put any faith.
And to tell the truth, poor Mary's heart was eased a little, perhaps
physically, by her tears, which had done her good, and by the other
incidents of the evening, which had thrown down as it were the
separation between her and her husband, and taken away the one rankling
and aching wound she had. Now that he saw that he had done wrong--now
that he was aware that it was a wrong step he had taken--a certain
remnant of bitterness which had been lurking in a corner of Mary's heart
came all to nothing and died down in a moment. As soon as he was himself
awakened to it, Mary forgot her own wound and every evil thought she had
ever had, in her sorrow for him. She remembered his look of dismay, his
dead silence, his unusual exclamation; and she said, "poor Hugh!" in her
heart, and was ready to condone his worst faults. _Otherwise_, as Mrs.
Ochterlony said to herself, he had scarcely a fault that anybody could
point out. He was the kindest, the most true and tender! Everybody
acknowledged that he was the best husband in the regiment, and which of
them could stand beside him, even in an inferior place? Not Colonel
Kirkman, who might have been a petrified Colonel out of the Drift (if
there were Colonels in those days), for any particular internal evidence
to the contrary; nor Captain Hesketh, who was so well off; nor any half
dozen of the other officers. This was the state of mind in which Mrs.
Ochterlony was when the doctor called. And he found her quite well, and
thought her an unaccountable woman, and shrugged his shoulders, and
wondered what the Major would take into his head next. "He said it was
on the nerves, as the poor women call it," said the doctor, transferring
his own suggestion to Major Ochterlony. "I should like to know what he
means by making game of people--as if I had as much time to talk
nonsense as he has: but I thought, to be sure, when he said that, that
it was a cock-and-bull story. I ought to know something about your
nerves."

"He was quite right," said Mrs. Ochterlony; and she smiled and took hold
of the great trouble that was approaching her and made a buckler of it
for her husband. "My nerves were very much upset. You know we have to
make up our minds to send Hugh home."

And as she spoke she looked up at Mr. Sorbette with eyes brimming over
with two great tears--real tears, Heaven knows, which came but too
readily to back up her sacred plea. The doctor recoiled before them as
if somebody had levelled a pistol at him; for he was a man that could
not bear to see women crying, as he said, or to see anybody in distress,
which was the true statement of the case.

"There--there," he said, "don't excite yourself. What is the good of
thinking about it? Everybody has to do it, and the monkeys get on as
well as possible. Look here, pack up all this work and trash, and amuse
yourself. Why don't you go out more, and take a little relaxation? You
had better send over to my sister for a novel; or if there's nothing
else for it, get the baby. Don't sit working and driving yourself crazy
here."

So that was all Mr. Sorbette could do in the case; and a wonderfully
puzzled doctor he was as he went back to his quarters, and took the
first opportunity of telling his sister that she was all wrong about the
Ochterlonys, and he always knew she was. "As if a man could know
anything about it," Miss Sorbette said. And in the meantime the Major
went home, and was very tender of Mary, and petted and watched over her
as if she had had a real illness. Though, after all, the question why
she had let him do so, was often nearly on his lips, as it was always in
his heart.




CHAPTER VIII.


What Mrs. Ochterlony had to do after this was to write to Aunt Agatha,
settling everything about little Hugh, which was by no means an easy
thing to do, especially since the matter had been complicated by that
most unnecessary suggestion about Islay, which Mrs. Hesketh had thought
proper to make; as if she, who had a grown-up daughter to be her
companion, and swarms of children, so many as almost to pass the bounds
of possible recollection, could know anything about how it felt to send
off one's entire family, leaving only a baby behind; but then that is so
often the way with those well-off people, who have never had anything
happen to them. Mary had to write that if all was well, and they could
find "an opportunity," probably Hugh would be sent by the next mail but
one; for she succeeded in persuading herself and the Major that sooner
than that it would be impossible to have his things ready. "You do not
say anything about Islay, my dear," said the Major, when he read the
letter, "and you must see that for the child's sake----"

"Oh, Hugh, what difference can it make?" said Mrs. Ochterlony, with
conscious sophistry. "If she can take one child, she can take two. It is
not like a man----" But whether it was Islay or Aunt Agatha who was not
like a man, Mary did not explain; and she went on with her preparations
with a desperate trust in circumstances, such as women are often driven
to. Something might happen to preserve to her yet for a little while
longer her three-year-old boy. Hugh was past hoping for, but it seemed
to her now that she would accept with gratitude, as a mitigated
calamity, the separation from one which had seemed so terrible to her at
first. As for the Major, he adhered to the idea with a tenacity unusual
to him. He even came, and superintended her at the work-table, and asked
continually, How about Islay? if all these things were for Hugh?--which
was a question that called forth all the power of sophistry and
equivocation which Mrs. Ochterlony possessed to answer. But still she
put a certain trust in circumstances that something might still happen
to save Islay--and indeed something did happen, though far, very far,
from being as Mary wished.

The Major in the meantime had done his best to shake himself free from
the alarm and dismay indirectly produced in his mind by his brother's
letter. He had gone to Mr. Churchill after all, but found it
impracticable to get the entry blotted out of the register,
notwithstanding his assurance that it was simply a matter of form. Mr.
Churchill had no doubt on that point, but he could not alter the record,
though he condoled with the sufferer. "I cannot think how you all could
let me do it," the Major said. "A man may be excused for taking the
alarm, if he is persuaded that his wife will get into trouble when he is
gone, for want of a formality; but how all of you, with cool heads and
no excitement to take away your judgment----"

"Who persuaded you?" said the clergyman, with a little dismay.

"Well, you know Kirkman said things looked very bad in Scotland when the
marriage lines were lost. How could I tell? he is Scotch, and he ought
to know. And then to think of Mary in trouble, and perhaps losing her
little provision if anything happened to me. It was enough to make a man
do anything foolish; but how all of you who know better should have let
me do it----"

"My dear Major," said Mr. Churchill mildly, "I don't think you are a man
to be kept from doing anything when your heart is set upon it;--and then
you were in such a hurry----"

"Ah, yes," said Major Ochterlony with a deep sigh; "and nobody, that I
can remember, ever suggested to me to wait a little. That's what it is,
Churchill; to have so many friends, and not one among them who would
take the trouble to tell a man he was wrong."

"Major Ochterlony," said the clergyman, a little stiffly, "you forget
that I said everything I could say to convince you. Of course I did not
know all the circumstances--but I hope I shall always have courage
enough, when I think so, to tell any man he is in the wrong."

"My dear fellow, I did not mean you," said the Major, with another sigh;
and perhaps it was with a similar statement that the conversation always
concluded when Major Ochterlony confided to any special individual of
his daily associates, this general condemnation of his friends, of which
he made as little a secret as he had made of his re-marriage. The
station knew as well after that, that Major Ochterlony was greatly
disturbed about the "unusual step" he had taken, and was afraid it might
be bad for little Hugh's future prospects, as it had been aware
beforehand of the wonderful event itself. And naturally there was a
great deal of discussion on the subject. There were some people who
contented themselves with thinking, like the doctor, that Ochterlony was
an ass with his fidgets; while there were others who thought he was
"deep," and was trying, as they said, to do away with the bad
impression. The former class were men, and the latter were women; but it
was by no means all the women who thought so. Not to speak of the
younger class, like poor little Mrs. Askell, there were at least two of
the most important voices at the station which did not declare
themselves. Mrs. Kirkman shook her head, and hoped that however it
turned out it might be for all their good, and above all might convince
Mary of the error of her ways; and Mrs. Hesketh thought everybody made a
great deal too much fuss about it, and begged the public in general to
let the Ochterlonys alone. But the fact was, that so far as the ordinary
members of society were concerned, the Major's new agitation revived the
gossip that had nearly died out, and set it all afloat again. It had
been dying away under the mingled influences of time, and the non-action
of the leading ladies, and Mrs. Ochterlony's serene demeanour, which
forbade the idea of evil. But when it was thus started again the second
time, it was less likely to be made an end of. Mary, however, was as
unconscious of the renewed commotion as if she had been a thousand miles
away. The bitterness had gone out of her heart, and she had half begun
to think as the Major did, that he was an injured man, and that it was
her fault and his friends' fault; and then she was occupied with
something still more important, and could not go back to the old pain,
from which she had suffered enough. Thus it was with her in those
troubled, but yet, as she afterwards thought, happy days; when she was
very miserable sometimes and very glad--when she had a great deal, as
people said, to put up with, a great deal to forgive, and many a thing
of which she did not herself approve, to excuse and justify to others.
This was her condition, and she had at the same time before her the
dreadful probability of separation from both of her children, the
certainty of a separation, and a long, dangerous voyage for one of them,
and sat and worked to this end day after day, with a sense of what at
the moment seemed exquisite wretchedness. But yet, thinking over it
afterwards, and looking back upon it, it seemed to Mary as if those were
happy days.

The time was coming very near when Hugh (as Mrs. Ochterlony said), or
the children (as the Major was accustomed to say) were going home; when
all at once, without any preparation, very startling news came to the
station. One of the little local rebellions that are always taking place
in India had broken out somewhere, and a strong detachment of the
regiment was to be sent immediately to quell it. Major Ochterlony came
home that day a little excited by the news, and still more by the
certainty that it was he who must take the command. He was excited
because he was a soldier at heart, and liked, kind man as he was, to see
something doing; and because active service was more hopeful, and
exhilarating, and profitable, than reposing at the station, where there
was no danger, and very little to do. "I don't venture to hope that the
rogues will show fight," he said cheerfully; "so there is no need to be
anxious, Mary; and you can keep the boys with you till I come back--that
is only fair," he said, in his exultation. As for Mary, the announcement
took all the colour out of her cheeks, and drove both Hugh and Islay out
of her mind. He had seen service enough, it is true, since they were
married, to habituate her to that sort of thing; and she had made, on
the whole, a very good soldier's wife, bearing her anxiety in silence,
and keeping a brave front to the world. But perhaps Mr. Sorbette was
right when he thought her nerves were upset. So many things all coming
together may have been too much for her. When she heard of this she
broke down altogether, and felt a cold thrill of terror go through her
from her head to her heart, or from her heart to her head, which perhaps
would be the most just expression; but she dared not say a word to her
husband to deter or discourage him. When he saw the two tears that
sprang into her eyes, and the sudden paleness that came over her face,
he kissed her, all flushed and smiling as he was, and said: "Now, don't
be silly, Mary. Don't forget you are a soldier's wife." There was not a
touch of despondency or foreboding about him; and what could she say who
knew, had there been ever so much foreboding, that his duty was the
thing to be thought of, and not anybody's feelings? Her cheek did not
regain its colour all that day, but she kept it to herself, and forgot
even about little Hugh's reprieve. The children were dear, but their
father was dearer, or at least so it seemed at that moment. Perhaps if
the lives of the little ones had been threatened, the Major's expedition
might have bulked smaller--for the heart can hold only one overwhelming
emotion at a time. But the affair was urgent, and Mary did not have very
much time left to her to think of it. Almost before she had realized
what it was, the drums had beat, and the brisk music of the band--that
music that people called exhilarating--had roused all the station, and
the measured march of the men had sounded past, as if they were all
treading upon her heart. The Major kissed his little boys in their beds,
for it was, to be sure, unnaturally early, as everything is in India;
and he had made his wife promise to go and lie down, and take care of
herself, when he was gone. "Have the baby, and don't think any more of
me than you can help, and take care of my boys. We shall be back sooner
than you want us," the Major had said, as he took tender leave of his
"bonnie Mary." And for her part, she stood as long as she could see
them, with her two white lips pressed tight together, waving her hand to
her soldier till he was gone out of sight. And then she obeyed him, and
lay down and covered her head, and sobbed to herself in the growing
light, as the big blazing sun began to touch the horizon. She was sick
with pain and terror, and she could not tell why. She had watched him go
away before, and had hailed him coming back again, and had known him in
hotter conflict than this could be, and wounded, and yet he had taken no
great harm. But all that did her little good now; perhaps because her
nerves were weaker than usual, from the repeated shocks she had had to
bear.

And it was to be expected that Mrs. Kirkman would come to see her, to
console her that morning, and put the worst thoughts into her head, But
before even Mrs. Kirkman, little Emma Askell came rushing in, with her
baby and a bundle, and threw herself at Mary's feet. The Ensign had gone
to the wars, and it was the first experience of such a kind that had
fallen to the lot of his little baby-wife; and naturally her anxiety
told more distinctly upon her than it did upon Mary's ripe soul and
frame. The poor little thing was white and cold and shivering,
notwithstanding the blazing Indian day that began to lift itself over
their heads. She fell down at Mary's feet, forgetting all about the
beetles and scorpions which were the horror of her ordinary existence,
and clasped her knees, and held Mrs. Ochterlony fast, grasping the
bundle and the little waxen baby at the same time in the other arm.

"Do you think they will ever come back?" said poor little Emma. "Oh,
Mrs. Ochterlony, tell me. I can bear it if you will tell me the worst.
If anything were to happen to Charlie, and me not with him! I never,
never, never can live until the news comes. Oh, tell me, do you think
they will ever come back?"

"If I did not think they would come back, do you think I could take it
so quietly?" said Mary, and she smiled as best she could, and lifted up
the poor little girl, and took from her the baby and the bundle, which
seemed all one, so closely were they held. Mrs. Ochterlony had deep
eyes, which did not show when she had been crying; and she was not young
enough to cry in thunder showers, as Emma Askell at eighteen might still
be permitted to do; and the very sight of her soothed the young
creature's heart. "You know you are a soldier's wife," Mary said; "I
think I was as bad as you are the first time the Major left me--but we
all get used to it after a few years."

"And he came back?" said Emma, doing all she could to choke a sob.

"He must have come back, or I should not have parted with him this
morning," said Mrs. Ochterlony, who had need of all her own strength
just at that moment. "Let us see in the meantime what this bundle is,
and why you have brought poor baby out in her night-gown. And what a
jewel she is to sleep! When my little Willy gets disturbed," said Mary,
with a sigh, "he gives none of us any rest. I will make up a bed for her
here on the sofa; and now tell me what this bundle is for, and why you
have rushed out half dressed. We'll talk about _them_ presently. Tell me
first about yourself."

Upon which Emma hung down her pretty little head, and began to fold a
hem upon her damp handkerchief, and did not know how to explain herself.
"Don't be angry with me," she said. "Oh, my Madonna, let me come and
stay with you!--that was what I meant; I can't stay there by myself--and
I will nurse Willy, and do your hair and help sewing. I don't mind what
I do. Oh, Mrs. Ochterlony, don't send me away! I should die if I were
alone. And as for baby, she never troubles anybody. She is so good. I
will be your little servant, and wait upon you like a slave, if you will
only let me stay."

It would be vain to say that Mrs. Ochterlony was pleased by this appeal,
for she was herself in a very critical state of mind, full of fears that
she could give no reason for, and a hundred fantastic pains which she
would fain have hidden from human sight. She had been taking a little
comfort in the thought of the solitude, the freedom from visitors and
disturbance, that she might safely reckon on, and in which she thought
her mind might perhaps recover a little; and this young creature's
society was not specially agreeable to her. But she was touched by the
looks of the forlorn girl, and could no more have sent her away than she
could repress the little movement of impatience and half disgust that
rose in her heart. She was not capable of giving her an effusive
welcome; but she kissed poor little Emma, and put the bundle beside the
baby on the sofa, and accepted her visitor without saying anything about
it. Perhaps it did her no harm: though she felt by moments as if her
impatient longing to be alone and silent, free to think her own
thoughts, would break out in spite of all her self-control. But little
Mrs. Askell never suspected the existence of any such emotions. She
thought, on the contrary, that it was because Mary was used to it that
she took it so quietly, and wondered whether _she_ would ever get used
to it. Perhaps, on the whole, Emma hoped not. She thought to herself
that Mrs. Ochterlony, who was so little disturbed by the parting, would
not feel the joy of the return half so much as she should; and on these
terms she preferred to take the despair along with the joy. But under
the shadow of Mary's matronly presence the little thing cheered up, and
got back her courage. After she had been comforted with tea, and had
fully realized her position as Mrs. Ochterlony's visitor, Emma's spirits
rose. She was half or quarter Irish, as has been already mentioned, and
behaved herself accordingly. She recollected her despair, it is true, in
the midst of a game with Hugh and Islay, and cried a little, but soon
comforted herself with the thought that at that moment her Charlie could
be in no danger. "They'll be stopping somewhere for breakfast by a well,
and camping all about, and they can't get any harm there," said Emma;
and thus she kept chattering all day. If she had chattered only, and
been content with chattering, it would have been comparatively easy
work; but then she was one of those people who require answers, and will
be spoken to. And Mary had to listen and reply, and give her opinion
where they would be now, and when, at the very earliest, they might be
expected back. With such a discipline to undergo, it may be thought a
supererogation to bring Mrs. Kirkman in upon her that same morning with
her handkerchief in her hand, prepared, if it were necessary, to weep
with Mary. But still it is the case that Mrs. Kirkman did come, as might
have been expected; and to pass over conversation so edifying as hers,
would, under such circumstances, be almost a crime.

"My dear Mary," Mrs. Kirkman said when she came in, "I am so glad to see
you up and making an effort; it is so much better than giving way. We
must accept these trials as something sent for our good. I am sure the
Major has all our prayers for his safe return. Oh, Mary, do you not
remember what I said to you--that God, I was sure, was not going to let
you alone?"

"I never thought He would leave me alone," said Mrs. Ochterlony; but
certainly, though it was a right enough sentiment, it was not uttered in
a right tone of voice.

"He will not rest till you see your duty more clearly," said her
visitor; "if it were not for that, why should He have sent you so many
things one after another? It is far better and more blessed than if He
had made you happy and comfortable as the carnal heart desires. But I
did not see you had any one with you," said Mrs. Kirkman, stopping short
at the sight of Emma, who had just come into the room.

"Poor child, she was frightened and unhappy, and came to me this
morning," said Mary. "She will stay with me--till--they come home."

"Let us say _if_ they come home," said Mrs. Kirkman, solemnly. "I never
like to be too certain. We know when they go forth, but who can tell
when they will come back. That is in God's hands."

At this speech Emma fell trembling and shivering again, and begged Mrs.
Kirkman to tell her the worst, and cried out that she could bear it. She
thought of nothing but her Charlie, as was natural, and that the
Colonel's wife had already heard some bad news. And Mrs. Kirkman thought
of nothing but improving the occasion; and both of them were equally
indifferent, and indeed unaware of the cold shudder which went through
Mary, and the awful foreboding that closed down upon her, putting out
the sunshine. It was a little safeguard to her to support the shivering
girl who already half believed herself a widow, and to take up the
challenge of the spiritual teacher who felt herself responsible for
their souls.

"Do not make Emma think something is wrong," she said. "It is so easy to
make a young creature wretched with a word. If the Colonel had been with
them, it might have been different. But it is easy just now for you to
frighten us. I am sure you do not mean it." And then Mary had to whisper
in the young wife's ear, "She knows nothing about them--it is only her
way," which was a thing very easily said to Emma, but very difficult to
establish herself upon in her own heart.

And then Mrs. Hesketh came in to join the party.

"So they are gone," the new-comer said. "What a way little Emma is in,
to be sure. Is it the first time he has ever left you, my dear? and I
daresay they have been saying something dreadful to frighten you. It is
a great shame to let girls marry so young. I have been reckoning," said
the easy-minded woman, whose husband was also of the party, "how long
they are likely to be. If they get to Amberabad, say to-morrow, and if
there is nothing very serious, and all goes well, you know, they might
be back here on Saturday--and we had an engagement for Saturday," Mrs.
Hesketh said. Her voice was quite easy and pleasant, as it always was;
but nevertheless, Mary knew that if she had not felt excited, she would
not have paid such an early morning visit, and that even her confident
calculation about the return proved she was in a little anxiety about
it. The fact was, that none of them were quite at their ease, except
Mrs. Kirkman, who, having no personal interest in the matter, was quite
equal to taking a very gloomy view of affairs.

"How can any one think of such vanities at such a moment?" Mrs. Kirkman
said. "Oh, if I could only convince you, my dear friends. None of us can
tell what sort of engagement they may have before next Saturday--perhaps
the most solemn engagement ever given to man. Don't let misfortune find
you in this unprepared state of mind. There is nothing on earth so
solemn as seeing soldiers go away. You may think of the band and all
that, but for me, I always seem to hear a voice saying, 'Prepare to meet
your God.'"

To be sure the Colonel was in command of the station and was safe at
home, and his wife could speculate calmly upon the probable fate of the
detachment. But as for the three women who were listening to her, it was
not so easy for them. There was a dreadful pause, for nobody could
contradict such a speech; and poor little Emma dropped down sobbing on
the floor; and the colour forsook even Mrs. Hesketh's comely cheek; and
as for Mary, though she could not well be paler, her heart seemed to
contract and shrink within her; and none of them had the courage to say
anything. Naturally Mrs. Hesketh, with whom it was a principle not to
fret, was the first to recover her voice.

"After all, though it's always an anxious time, I don't see any
particular reason we have to be uneasy," she said. "Hesketh told me he
felt sure they would give in at once. It may be very true all you say,
but at the same time we may be reasonable, you know, and not take fright
when there is no cause for it. Don't cry, Emma, you little goose; you'll
have him back again in two or three days, all right."

And after awhile the anxious little assembly broke up, and Mrs. Hesketh,
who though she was very liberal in her way, was not much given to
personal charities, went to see some of the soldiers' wives, who, poor
souls, would have been just as anxious if they had had the time for it,
and gave them the best advice about their children, and promised tea
and sugar if they would come to fetch it, and old frocks, in which she
was always rich; and these women were so ungrateful as to like her visit
better than that of the Colonel's wife, who carried them always on her
heart and did them a great deal of good, and never confined herself to
kindness of impulse. And little Emma Askell cried herself to sleep
sitting on the floor, notwithstanding the beetles, reposing her pretty
face flushed with weeping and her swollen eyes upon the sofa, where Mary
sat and watched over her. Mrs. Hesketh got a little ease out of her
visit to the soldiers' wives, and Emma forgot her troubles in sleep; but
no sort of relief came to Mary, who reasoned with herself all day long
without being able to deliver herself from the pressure of the deadly
cold hand that seemed to have been laid upon her heart.




CHAPTER IX.


And Mary's forebodings came true. Though it was so unlikely, and indeed
seemed so unreasonable to everybody who knew about such expeditions,
instead of bringing back his men victorious, it was the men, all
drooping and discouraged, who carried back the brave and tender Major,
covered over with the flag he had died for. The whole station was
overcast with mourning when that melancholy procession came back. Mr.
Churchill, who met them coming in, hurried back with his heart swelling
up into his throat to prepare Mrs. Ochterlony for what was coming; but
Mary was the only creature at the station who did not need to be
prepared. She knew it was going to be so when she saw him go away. She
felt in her heart that this was to be the end of it from the moment when
he first told her of the expedition on which he was ordered. And when
she saw poor Mr. Churchill's face, from which he had vainly tried to
banish the traces of the horrible shock he had just received, she saw
that the blow had fallen. She came up to him and took hold of his hands,
and said, "I know what it is;" and almost felt, in the strange and
terrible excitement of the moment, as if she were sorry for him who felt
it so much.

This was how it was, and all the station was struck with mourning. A
chance bullet, which most likely had been fired without any purpose at
all, had done its appointed office in Major Ochterlony's brave, tender,
honest bosom. Though he had been foolish enough by times, nobody now
thought of that to his disadvantage. Rather, if anything, it surrounded
him with a more affectionate regret. A dozen wise men might have
perished and not left such a gap behind them as the Major did, who had
been good to everybody in his restless way, and given a great deal of
trouble, and made up for it, as only a man with a good heart and natural
gift of friendliness could do. He had worried his men many a time as the
Colonel never did, for example; but then, to Major Ochterlony they were
men and fine fellows, while they were only machines, like himself, to
Colonel Kirkman; and more than one critic in regimentals was known to
say with a sigh, "If it had only been the Colonel." But it was only the
fated man who had been so over-careful about his wife's fate in case
anything happened to him. Young Askell came by stealth like a robber to
take his little wife out of the house where Mary was not capable any
longer of her society; and Captain Hesketh too had come back all
safe--all of them except the one: and the women in their minds stood
round Mary in a kind of hushed circle, looking with an awful
fellow-feeling and almost self-reproach at the widowhood which might
have, but had not, fallen upon themselves. It was no fault of theirs
that she had to bear the cross for all of them as it were; and yet their
hearts ached over her, as if somehow they had purchased their own
exemption at her expense. When the first dark moment, during which
nobody saw Madonna Mary--a sweet title which had come back to all their
lips in the hour of trouble--was over, they took turns to be with her,
those grieved and compunctious women--compunctious not so much because
at one time in thought they had done her wrong, as because now they were
happy and she was sorrowful. And thus passed over a time that cannot be
described in a book, or at least in such a book as this. Mary had to
separate herself, with still the bloom of her life unimpaired, from all
the fair company of matrons round her; to put the widow's veil over the
golden reflections in her hair, and the faint colour that came faintly
back to her cheek by imprescriptible right of her health and comparative
youth, and to go away out of the high-road of life where she had been
wayfaring in trouble and in happiness, to one of those humble by-ways
where the feeble and broken take shelter. Heaven knows she did not think
of that. All that she thought of was her dead soldier who had gone away
in the bloom of _his_ days to the unknown darkness which God alone knows
the secrets of, who had left all his comrades uninjured and at peace
behind him, and had himself been the only one to answer for that
enterprise with his life. It is strange to see this wonderful selection
going on in the world, even when one has no immediate part in it; but
stranger, far stranger, to wake up from one's musings and feel all at
once that it is one's self whom God has laid his hand upon for this
stern purpose. The wounded creature may writhe upon the sword, but it is
of no use; and again as ever, those who are not wounded--those perhaps
for whose instruction the spectacle is made--draw round in a hushed
circle and look on. Mary Ochterlony was a dutiful woman, obedient and
submissive to God's will; and she gave no occasion to that circle of
spectators to break up the hush and awe of natural sympathy and
criticise her how she bore it. But after a while she came to perceive,
what everybody comes to perceive who has been in such a position, that
the sympathy had changed its character. That was natural too. How a man
bears death and suffering of body, has long been one of the favourite
objects of primitive human curiosity; and to see how anguish and sorrow
affect the mind is a study as exciting and still more interesting. It
was this that roused Mrs. Ochterlony out of her first stupor, and made
her decide so soon as she did upon her journey home.

All these events had passed in so short a time, that there were many
people who on waking up in the morning, and recollecting that Mary and
her children were going next day, could scarcely realize that the fact
was possible, or that it could be true about the Major, who had so fully
intended sending his little boys home by that same mail. But it is, on
the whole, astonishing how soon and how calmly a death is accepted by
the general community; and even the people who asked themselves could
this change really have happened in so short a time, took pains an hour
or two after to make up little parcels for friends at home, which Mary
was to carry; bits of Oriental embroidery and filagree ornaments, and
little portraits of the children, and other trifles that were not
important enough to warrant an Overland parcel, or big enough to go by
the Cape. Mary was very kind in that way, they all said. She accepted
all kinds of commissions, perhaps without knowing very well what she was
doing, and promised to go and see people whom she had no likelihood of
ever going to see; the truth was, that she heard and saw and understood
only partially, sometimes rousing up for a moment and catching one word
or one little incident with the intensest distinctness, and then
relapsing back again into herself. She did not quite make out what Emma
Askell was saying the last time her little friend came to see her. Mary
was packing her boys' things at the moment, and much occupied with a
host of cares, and what she heard was only a stream of talk, broken with
the occasional burden which came in like a chorus "when you see mamma."

"When I see mamma?" said Mary, with a little surprise.

"Dear Mrs. Ochterlony, you said you would perhaps go to see her--in St.
John's Wood," said Emma, with tears of vexation in her eyes; "you know I
told you all about it. The Laburnums, Acacia-road. And she will be so
glad to see you. I explained it all, and you said you would go. I told
her how kind you had been to me, and how you let me stay with you when I
was so anxious about Charlie. Oh, dear Mrs. Ochterlony, forgive me! I
did not mean to bring it back to your mind."

"No," said Mary, with a kind of forlorn amusement. It seemed so strange,
almost droll, that they should think any of their poor little passing
words would bring that back to her which was never once out of her mind,
nor other than the centre of all her thoughts. "I must have been
dreaming when I said so, Emma: but if I have promised, I will try to
go--I have nothing to do in London, you know--I am going to the
North-country, among my own people," which was an easier form of
expression than to say, as they all did, that she was going home.

"But everybody goes to London," insisted Emma; and it was only when Mr.
Churchill came in, also with a little packet, that the ensign's wife was
silenced. Mr. Churchill's parcel was for his mother who lived in
Yorkshire, naturally, as Mrs. Ochterlony was going to the North, quite
in her way. But the clergyman, for his part, had something more
important to say. When Mrs. Askell was gone, he stopped Mary in her
packing to speak to her seriously as he said, "You will forgive me and
feel for me, I know," he said. "It is about your second marriage, Mrs.
Ochterlony."

"Don't speak of it--oh, don't speak of it," Mary said, with an imploring
tone that went to his heart.

"But I ought to speak of it--if you can bear it," said Mr. Churchill,
"and I know for the boys' sake that you can bear everything. I have
brought an extract from the register, if you would like to have it; and
I have added below----"

"Mr. Churchill, you are very kind, but I don't want ever to think of
that," said Mrs. Ochterlony. "I don't want to recollect now that such a
thing ever took place--I wish all record of it would disappear from the
face of the earth. Afterwards he thought the same," she said, hurriedly.
Meanwhile Mr. Churchill stood with the paper half drawn from his
pocket-book, watching the changes of her face.

"It shall be as you like," he said, slowly, "but only as I have written
below---- If you change your mind, you have only to write to me, my dear
Mrs. Ochterlony--if I stay here--and I am sure I don't know if I shall
stay here; but in case I don't, you can always learn where I am, from my
mother at that address."

"Do you think you will not stay here?" said Mary, whose heart was not so
much absorbed in her own sorrows that she could not feel for the
dismayed, desponding mind that made itself apparent in the poor
clergyman's voice.

"I don't know," he said, in the dreary tones of a man who has little
choice, "with our large family, and my wife's poor health. I shall miss
you dreadfully--both of you: you can't think how cheery and hearty he
always was--and that to a down-hearted man like me----"

And then Mary sat down and cried. It went to her heart and dispersed all
her heaviness and stupor, and opened the great sealed fountains. And Mr.
Churchill once more felt the climbing sorrow in his throat, and said in
broken words, "Don't cry--God will take care of you. He knows why He has
done it, though we don't; and He has given his own word to be a father
to the boys."

That was all the poor priest could find it in his heart to say--but it
was better than a sermon--and he went away with the extract from the
register still in his pocket-book and tears in his eyes; while for her
part Mary finished her packing with a heart relieved by her tears. Ah,
how cheery and hearty he had been, how kind to the down-hearted man; how
different the stagnant quietness now from that cheerful commotion he
used to make, and all the restless life about him; and then his
favourite words seemed to come up about and surround her, flitting in
the air with a sensation between acute torture and a dull happiness. His
bonnie Mary! It was not any vanity on Mary's part that made her think
above all of that name. Thus she did her packing and got ready for her
voyage, and took the good people's commissions without knowing very well
to what it was that she pledged herself; and it was the same mail--"the
mail after next"--by which she had written to Aunt Agatha that Hugh was
to be sent home.

They would all have come to see her off if they could have ventured to
do it that last morning; but the men prevented it, who are good for
something now and then in such cases. As it was, however, Mrs. Kirkman
and Mrs. Hesketh and Emma Askell were there, and poor sick Mrs.
Churchill, who had stolen from her bed in her dressing-gown to kiss Mary
for the last time.

"Oh, my dear, if it had been me--oh, if it had only been me!--and you
would all have been so good to the poor children," sobbed the poor
clergyman's ailing wife. Yet it was not her, but the strong, brave,
cheery Major, the prop and pillar of a house. As for Mrs. Kirkman, there
never was a better proof that she was, as we have so often said, in
spite of her talk, a good woman, than the fact that she could only cry
helplessly over Mary, and had not a word to say. She had thought and
prayed that God would not leave her friend alone, but she had not meant
Him to go so far as this; and her heart ached and fluttered at the
terrible notion that perhaps _she_ had something to do with the striking
of this blow. Mrs. Hesketh for her part packed every sort of dainties
for the children in a basket, and strapped on a bundle of portable toys
to amuse them on the journey, to one of Mrs. Ochterlony's boxes. "You
will be glad of them before you get there," said the experienced woman,
who had once made the journey with half-a-dozen, as she said, and knew
what it was. And then one or two of the men were walking about outside
in an accidental sort of way, to have a last look of Mary. It was
considered a very great thing among them all when the doctor, who hated
to see people in trouble, and disapproved of crying on principle, made
up his mind to go in and shake hands with Mrs. Ochterlony; but it was
not _that_ he went for, but to look at the baby, and give Mary a little
case "with some sal volatile and so forth, and the quantities marked,"
he said, "not that you are one to want sal volatile. The little shaver
there will be all right as soon as you get to England. Good-bye. Take
care of yourself." And he wrung her hand and bolted out again like a
flash of lightning. He said afterwards that the only sensible thing he
knew of his sister, was that she did not go; and that the sight of all
those women crying was enough to give a man a sunstroke, not to speak of
the servants and the soldiers' wives who were howling at the back of the
house.

Oh, what a change it was in so short a time, to go out of the Indian
home, which had been a true home, with Mr. Churchill to take care of her
and her poor babies, and set her face to the cold far-away world of her
youth which she had forgotten, and which everybody called home by a kind
of mockery; and where was Hugh, who had always taken such care of his
own? Mary did not cry as people call crying, but now and then, two great
big hot tears rolled out of the bitter fountain that was full to
overflowing, and fell scalding on her hands, and gave her a momentary
sense of physical relief. Almost all the ladies of the station were ill
after it all the day; but Mary could not afford to be ill; and Mr.
Churchill was very kind, and went with her through all the first part of
her journey over the cross roads, until she had come into the trunk
road, where there was no more difficulty. He was very, very kind, and
she was very grateful; but yet perhaps when you have had some one of
your very own to do everything for you, who was not kind but did it by
nature, it is better to take to doing it yourself _after_, than have
even the best of friends to do it for kindness' sake. This was what Mary
felt when the good man had gone sadly back to his sick wife and his
uncertain lot. It was a kind of relief to her to be all alone, entirely
alone with her children, for the ayah, to be sure, did not count--and to
have everything to do; and this was how they came down mournfully to the
sea-board, and to the big town which filled Hugh and Islay with childish
excitement, and Mary bade an everlasting farewell to her life, to all
that she had actually known as life--and got to sea, to go, as they
said, home.

It would be quite useless for our purpose to go over the details of the
voyage, which was like other voyages, bad and good by turns. When she
was at sea, Mrs. Ochterlony had a little leisure, and felt ill and weak
and overworn, and was the better for it after. It took her mind for the
moment off that unmeasured contemplation of her sorrow which is the soul
of grief, and her spirit got a little strength in the interval of
repose. She had been twelve years in India, and from eighteen to thirty
is a wonderful leap in a life. She did not know how she was to find the
things and the people of whom she had a girl's innocent recollection;
nor how they, who had not changed, would appear to her changed eyes. Her
own people were very kind, like everybody. Mary found a letter at
Gibraltar from her brother-in-law, Francis, full of sympathy and
friendly offers. He asked her to come to Earlston with her boys to see
if they could not get on together. "Perhaps it might not do, but it
would be worth a trial," Mr. Ochterlony sensibly said; and there was
even a chance that Aunt Agatha, who was to have met with Hugh at
Southampton, would come to meet her widowed niece, who might be supposed
to stand still more in need of her good offices. Though indeed this was
rather an addition to Mary's cares; for she thought the moment of
landing would be bitter enough of itself, without the pain of meeting
with some one who belonged to her, and yet did not belong to her, and
who had doubtless grown as much out of the Aunt Agatha of old as she had
grown out of the little Mary. When Mrs. Ochterlony left the
North-country, Aunt Agatha had been a middle-aged maiden lady, still
pretty, though a little faded, with light hair growing grey, which makes
a woman's countenance, already on the decline, more faded still, and
does not bring out the tints as dark hair in the same powdery condition
sometimes does. And at that time she was still occupied by a thought of
possibilities which people who knew Agatha Seton from the time she was
sixteen, had decided at that early period to be impossible. No doubt
twelve years had changed this--and it must have made a still greater
change upon the little sister whom Mary had known only at six years old,
and who was now eighteen, the age she had herself been when she married;
a grown-up young woman, and of a character more decided than Mary's had
ever been.

A little stir of reviving life awoke in her and moved her, when the
weary journey was over, and the steam-boat at length had reached
Southampton, to go up to the deck and look from beneath the heavy
pent-house of her widow's veil at the strangers who were coming--to see,
as she said to herself, with a throb at her heart, if there was anybody
she knew. Aunt Agatha was not rich, and it was a long journey, and
perhaps she had not come. Mary stood on the crowded deck, a little
apart, with Hugh and Islay on each side of her, and the baby in his
nurse's arms--a group such as is often seen on these decks--all clad
with loss and mourning, coming "home" to a country in which perhaps they
have no longer any home. Nobody came to claim Mrs. Ochterlony as she
stood among her little children. She thought she would have been glad of
that, but when it came to the moment--when she saw the cold unknown
shore and the strange country, and not a Christian soul to say welcome,
poor Mary's heart sank. She sat down, for her strength was failing her,
and drew Hugh and Islay close to her, to keep her from breaking down
altogether. And it was just at that moment that the brightest of young
faces peered down under her veil and looked doubtfully, anxiously at
her, and called out impatiently, "Aunt Agatha!" to some one at the other
side, without speaking to Mary. Mrs. Ochterlony did not hear this
new-comer's equally impatient demand: "Is it Mary? Are those the
children?" for she had dropped her sick head upon a soft old breast, and
had an old fresh sweet faded face bent down upon her, lovely with love
and age, and a pure heart. "Cry, my dear love, cry, it will do you
good," was all that Aunt Agatha said. And she cried, too, with good
will, and yet did not know whether it was for sorrow or joy. This was
how Mary, coming back to a fashion of existence which she knew not, was
taken home.




CHAPTER X.


Aunt Agatha had grown into a sweet old lady: not so old, perhaps, but
that she might have made up still into that elderly aspirant after
youth, for whose special use the name "old maid" must have been
invented. And yet there is a sweetness in the name, and it was not
inapplicable to the fair old woman, who received Mary Ochterlony into
her kind arms. There was a sort of tender misty consciousness upon her
age, just as there is a tender unconsciousness in youth, of so many
things that cannot but come to the knowledge of people who have eaten of
the tree in the middle of the garden. She was surrounded by the unknown
as was seemly to such a maiden soul. And yet she was old, and gleams of
experience, and dim knowledge at second hand, had come to her from those
misty tracts. Though she had not, and never could have, half the vigour
or force in her which Mary had even in her subdued and broken state,
still she had strength of affection and goodness enough to take the
management of all affairs into her hands for the moment, and to set
herself at the head of the little party. She took Mary and the children
from the ship, and brought them to the inn at which she had stayed the
night before; and, what was a still greater achievement, she repressed
Winnie, and kept her in a semi-subordinate and silent state--which was
an effort which taxed all Aunt Agatha's powers. Though it may seem
strange to say it, Mary and her young sister did not, as people say,
take to each other at that first meeting. It was twelve years since they
had met, and the eighteen-year-old young woman, accustomed to be a
sovereign among her own people, and have all her whims attended to, did
not, somehow, commend herself to Mary, who was broken, and joyless, and
feeble, and little capable of glitter and motion. Aunt Agatha took the
traveller to a cool room, where comparative quiet was to be had, and
took off her heavy bonnet and cloak, and made her lie down, and came and
sat by her. The children were in the next room, where the sound of their
voices could reach their mother to keep her heart; and then Aunt Agatha
took Mary's hand in both of hers, and said, "Tell me about it, my dear
love." It was a way she had of speaking, but yet such words are sweet;
especially to a forlorn creature who has supposed that there is nobody
left in the world to address her so. And then Mary told her sad story
with all the details that women love, and cried till the fountain of
tears was for the time exhausted, and grief itself by its very vehemence
had got calm; which was, as Aunt Agatha knew by instinct, the best way
to receive a poor woman who was a widow, and had just set her solitary
feet for the first time upon the shores which she left as a bride.

And so they rested and slept that first night on English soil. There are
moments when sorrow feels sacramental, and as if it never could be
disturbed again by the pettier emotions of life. Mrs. Ochterlony had
gone to sleep in this calm, and it was with something of the same
feeling that she awoke. As if life, as she thought, being over, its
cares were in some sense over too, and that now nothing could move her
further; unless, indeed, it might be any harm to the children, which,
thank God, there was no appearance of. In this state of mind she rose up
and said her prayers, mingling them with some of those great tears which
gather one by one as the heart fills, and which seem to give a certain
physical relief when they brim over; and then she went to join her aunt
and sister at breakfast, where they had not expected to see her. "My
love, I would have brought you your tea," said Aunt Agatha, with a
certain reproach; and when Mary smiled and said there was no need, even
Winnie's heart was touched,--wilful Winnie in her black muslin gown, who
was a little piqued to feel herself in the company of one more
interesting than even she was, and hated herself for it, and yet could
not help feeling as if Mary had come in like the prodigal, to be feasted
and tended, while they never even killed a kid for her who had always
been at home.

Winnie was eighteen, and she was not like her sister. She was tall, but
not like Mary's tallness--a long slight slip of a girl, still full of
corners. She had corners at her elbows, and almost at her shoulders, and
a great many corners in her mind. She was not so much a pretty girl as a
girl who would, or might be, a beautiful woman. Her eyebrows were
arched, and so were her delicate nostrils, and her upper lip--all curved
and moveable, and ready to quiver and speak when it was needful. When
you saw her face in profile, that outline seemed to cut itself out, as
in some warm marble against the background. It was not the _beauté du
diable_, the bewildering charm of youth, and freshness, and smiles, and
rose tints. She had something of all this, and to boot she had
features--_beaux traits_. But as for this part of her power, Winnie, to
do her justice, thought nothing of it; perhaps, to have understood that
people minded what she said, and noticed what she did because she was
very handsome, would have conveyed something like an insult and affront
to the young lady. She did not care much, nor mind much at the present
moment, whether she was pretty or not. She had no rivals, and beauty was
a weapon the importance of which had not occurred to her. But she did
care a good deal for being Winifred Seton, and as such, mistress of all
she surveyed; and though she could have beaten herself for it, it galled
her involuntarily to find herself thus all at once in the presence of a
person whom Providence seemed to have set, somehow, in a higher
position, and who was more interesting than herself. It was a wicked
thought, and she did it battle. If it had been left to her, how she
could have petted and cared for Mary, how she would have borne her
triumphantly over all the fatigues of the journey, and thought nothing
to take the tickets, and mind the luggage, and struggle with the railway
porters for Mary's sake! But to have Mary come in and absorb Aunt
Agatha's and everybody's first look, their first appeal and principal
regard, was trying to Winnie; and she had never learned yet to banish
altogether from her eyes what she thought.

"It does not matter, aunt," said Mary; "I cannot make a recluse of
myself--I must go among strangers--and it is well to be able to practise
a little with Winnie and you."

"You must not mind Winnie and me, my darling," said Aunt Agatha, who had
a way of missing the arrow, as it were, and catching some of the
feathers of it as it flew past.

"What do you mean about going among strangers?" said the keener Winnie.
"I hope you don't think we are strangers; and there is no need for you
to go into society that I can see--not now at least; or at all events
not unless you like," she continued with a suspicion of sharpness in her
tone, not displeased, perhaps, on the whole that Mary was turning out
delusive, and was thinking already of society--for which notwithstanding
she scorned her sister, as was natural to a young woman at the
experienced age of eighteen.

"Society is not what I was thinking of," said Mary, who in her turn did
not like her young sister's criticism; and she took her seat and her cup
of tea with an uncomfortable sense of opposition. She had thought that
she could not be annoyed any more by petty matters, and was incapable of
feeling the little cares and complications of life, and yet it was
astonishing how Winnie's little, sharp, half-sarcastic tone brought back
the faculty of being annoyed.

"The little we have at Kirtell will be a comfort to you, my love," said
the soothing voice of Aunt Agatha; "all old friends. The vicar you know,
Mary, and the doctor, and poor Sir Edward. There are some new people,
but I do not make much account of them; and our little visiting would
harm nobody," the old lady said, though with a slight tone of apology,
not quite satisfied in herself that the widow should be even able to
think of society so soon.

Upon which a little pucker of vexation came to Mary's brow. As if she
cared or could care for their little visiting, and the vicar, and the
doctor, and Sir Edward! she to whom going among strangers meant
something so real and so hard to bear.

"Dear Aunt Agatha," she said, "I am afraid you will not be pleased; but
I have not been looking forward to anything so pleasant as going to
Kirtell. The first thing I have to think of is the boys and their
interests. And Francis Ochterlony has asked us to go to Earlston." These
words came all confused from Mary's lips. She broke down, seeing what
was coming; for this was something that she never had calculated on, or
thought of having to bear.

A dead pause ensued; Aunt Agatha started and flushed all over, and gave
an agitated exclamation, and then a sudden blank came upon her sweet old
face. Mary did not look at her, but she saw without looking how her aunt
stiffened into resentment, and offence, and mortification. She changed
in an instant, as if Mrs. Ochterlony's confused statement had been a
spell, and drew herself up and sat motionless, a picture of surprised
affection and wounded pride. Poor Mary saw it, and was grieved to the
heart, and yet could not but resent such a want of understanding of her
position and sympathy for herself. She lifted her cup to her lips with a
trembling hand, and her tea did not refresh her. And it was the only
near relative she had in the world, the tenderest-hearted creature in
existence, a woman who could be cruel to nobody, who thus shut up her
heart against her. Thus the three women sat together round their
breakfast-table, and helped each other, and said nothing for one stern
moment, which was a cruel moment for one of them at least.

"Earlston!" said Aunt Agatha at last, with a quiver in her voice.
"Indeed it never occurred to me--I had not supposed that Francis
Ochterlony had been so much to---- But never mind; if that is what you
think best for yourself, Mary----"

"There is nothing best for myself," said Mrs. Ochterlony, with the
sharpness of despair. "I think it is my duty--and--and Hugh, I know,
would have thought so. Our boy is his uncle's heir. They are the--the
only Ochterlonys left now. It is what I must--what I ought to do."

And then there was another pause. Aunt Agatha for her part would have
liked to cry, but then she had her side of the family to maintain, and
though every pulse in her was beating with disappointment and mortified
affection, she was not going to show that. "You must know best," she
said, taking up her little air of dignity; "I am sure you must know
best; I would never try to force my way of thinking on you, Mary. No
doubt you have been more in the world than I have; but I did think when
a woman was in trouble that to go among her own friends----"

"Yes," said Mary, who was overwhelmed, and did not feel able to bear it,
"but her friends might understand her and have a little pity for her,
aunt, when she had hard things to do that wrung her heart----"

"My dear," said Aunt Agatha, with, on her side, the bitterness of
unappreciated exertion, "if you will think how far I have come, and what
an unusual journey I have made, I think you will perceive that to accuse
me of want of pity----"

"Don't worry her, Aunt Agatha," said Winnie, "she is not accusing you of
want of pity. I think it a very strange sort of thing, myself; but let
Mary have justice, that was not what she meant."

"I should like to know what she did mean," said Aunt Agatha, who was
trembling with vexation, and with those tears which she wanted so much
to shed: and then two or three of them dropped on the broad-brimmed
cambric cuff which she was wearing solely on Mary's account. For, to be
sure, Major Ochterlony was not to say a relation of hers that she should
have worn such deep mourning for him. "I am sure I don't want to
interfere, if she prefers Francis Ochterlony to her own friends," she
added, with tremulous haste. She was the very same Aunt Agatha who had
taken Mary to her arms the day before, and sat by her bed, listening to
all the sad story of her widowhood. She had wept for Hugh, and she would
have shared her cottage and her garden and all she had with Mary, with
goodwill and bounty, eagerly--but Francis Ochterlony was a different
matter; and it was not in human nature to bear the preference of a
husband's brother to "her own friends." "They may be the last
Ochterlonys," said Aunt Agatha, "but I never understood that a woman was
to give up her own family entirely; and your sister was born a Seton
like you and me, Winnie;--I don't understand it, for my part."

Aunt Agatha broke down when she had said this, and cried more bitterly,
more effusively, so long as it lasted, than she had cried last night
over Hugh Ochterlony's sudden ending: and Mary could not but feel that;
and as for Winnie, she sat silent, and if she did not make things worse,
at least she made no effort to make them better. On the whole, it was
not much wonder. They had made great changes in the cottage for Mary's
sake. Aunt Agatha had given up her parlour, her own pretty room that she
loved, for a nursery, and they had made up their minds that the best
chamber was to be Mary's, with a sort of sense that the fresh chintz and
the pictures on the walls--it was the only bed-room that had any
pictures--would make up to her if anything could. And now to find 

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