Madonna Mary. Mrs. Oliphant
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 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