"So I will do my best a
gude wife to be,
For Auld Robin Grey
is vera kind to me."
“I think this will do, my dear;
just listen;” and in a mysterious half whisper,
good Mrs. Ferguson, wife of James Ferguson, the well-to-do
silversmith and jeweler, of High Street, Avonsbridge,
read aloud from the sheet of paper in her hand:
“’On the 21st instant,
at the University Church, Avonsbridge, by the Reverend
John Smith, the Reverend Arnold Grey, D.D., Master
of Saint Bede’s College, Avonsbridge, to Christian,
only child of the late Edward Oakley, Esq., of that
place.’ Will it do? Because, if so,
James will send it to ‘The Times’ at once.”
“Better ask Dr. Grey first,” answered
the bride.
As she spoke, Dr. Grey turned round
from the window where he had been conversing-that
is, responding to conversation-with Mr.
Ferguson, chiefly on the weather; for it was a snowy
December day.
This precise moment, half an hour
after his marriage-his second marriage-is
hardly a fair time to describe Dr. Arnold Grey; suffice
it to say that he was a gentleman apparently about
forty-five, rather low in stature, and spare in figure,
with hair already thin and iron-gray. The twenty-five
years between him and his newly-married wife showed
plainly-only too plainly-as she
stood, in all her gracefulness of girlhood, which
even her extreme pallor and a certain sharp, worn,
unnaturally composed look could not destroy.
He seemed struck by this. His face clouded over
for a minute, and he slightly sighed. But the
pain, whatever it was, was only momentary. He
looked like a man who was not in the habit of acting
hastily or impulsively-who never did any
thing without having previously fully counted the cost.
“What were you saying, Mrs.
Ferguson?” said he, addressing her with the
grave and somewhat formal politeness which was his
natural manner, but which always somewhat awed that
rather vulgar, though kind-hearted and well-meaning
woman.
She put the paper into his hands.
“It’s the notice for ‘The Times;’
James and I made it up last night. James thought
it would save you trouble, master-”
Mrs. Ferguson always hesitated between this common
University custom of address and plain, “Dr.
Grey.”
“Thank you; Mr. Ferguson is
always kind,” returned the Master of Saint Bede’s.
“You see,” continued Mrs.
Ferguson, lowering her tone to a confidential whisper,
“I thought it was better only to put ’Edward
Oakley, Esq.,’ and nothing more. Wouldn’t
you like it to be so, sir?”
“I should like it to be exactly
as-” he paused, and the color rushed
violently over his thin, worn, and yet sensitive face,
as sensitive as if he had been a young man still-“exactly
as Mrs. Grey pleases.”
Mrs. Grey! At the sound of her
new name Christian started, and she, too, turned scarlet.
Not the sweet, rosy blush of a bride, but the dark
red flush of sharp physical or mental pain, which all
her self-control could not hide.
“Poor dear! poor dear! this
is a great change for her, and only a year since her
father died,” said Mrs. Ferguson, still in that
mysterious, apologetic whisper. “But indeed,
my love, you have done quite right in marrying; and
don’t fret a bit about it. Never mind her,
sir; she’ll be better by-and-by.”
This oppression of pity would have nerved any one
of reserved temperament to die rather than betray the
least fragment of emotion more. Christian gathered
herself up; her face grew pale again, and her voice
steady. She looked, not at Mrs. Ferguson, but
at the good man who had just made her his wife-and
any one looking at him must have felt that he was
a good man-then said, gently but determinedly,
“If Dr. Grey has no objection,
I should like to have stated my father’s occupation
or my own. I do not wish to hide or appear ashamed
of either.”
“Certainly not,” replied
Dr. Grey; and, taking up the pen, he added, “Edward
Oakley, Esq., late organist of Saint Bede’s.”
It was the last earthly memento of one who, born
a gentleman and a genius, had so lived, that, as all
Avonsbridge well knew, the greatest blessing which
could have happened to his daughter was his death.
But, as by some strange and merciful law of compensation
often occurs, Christian, inheriting mind and person
from him, had inherited temperament, disposition,
character from the lowly-born mother, who was every
thing that he was not, and who had lived just long
enough to stamp on the girl of thirteen a moral impress
which could resist all contamination, and leave behind
a lovely dream of motherhood that might, perhaps-
God knows!-have been diviner than the reality.
These things Dr. Grey, brought accidentally
into contact with Christian Oakley on business matters
after her father’s lamentable death, speedily
discovered for himself; and the result was one of those
sudden resolves which in some men spring from mere
passion, in others from an instinct so deep and true
that they are not to be judged by ordinary rules.
People call it “love at first sight,”
and sometimes tell wonderful stories of how a man
sees, quite unexpectedly, some sweet, strange, and
yet mysteriously familiar face, which takes possession
of his fancy with an almost supernatural force.
He says to himself, “That woman shall be my
wife;” and some day, months or years after, he
actually marries her; even as, within a twelvemonth,
having waited silently until she was twenty-one, Dr.
Grey married Christian Oakley.
But until within a few weeks ago she
herself had had no idea of the kind. She intensely
respected him; her gratitude for his fatherly care
and kindness was almost boundless; but marrying him,
or marrying at all, was quite foreign to her thoughts.
How things had come about even yet she could hardly
remember or comprehend. All was a perfect dream.
It seemed another person, and not she, who was suddenly
changed from Mrs. Ferguson’s poor governess,
without a friend or relative in the wide world, to
the wife of the Master of Saint Bede’s.
That she could have married, or been
thought to have married him, for aught but his own
good and generous self, or that the mastership of
Saint Bede’s, his easy income, and his high reputation
had any thing to do with it, never once crossed her
imagination. She was so simple; her forlorn,
shut-up, unhappy life had kept her, if wildly romantic,
so intensely, childishly true, that, whatever objections
she had to Dr. Grey’s offer, the idea that this
could form one of them-that any one could
suspect her-her, Christian Oakley-of
marrying for money or for a home, did not occur to
her for an instant. He saw that, this lover,
who, from his many years of seniority, and the experience
of a somewhat hard life, looked right down into the
depths of the girl’s perplexed, troubled, passionate,
innocent heart, and he was not afraid. Though
she told him quite plainly that she felt for him not
love, but only affection and gratitude, he had simply
said, with his own tender smile, “Never mind-I
love you;” and married her.
As she stood in her white dress, white
shawl, white bonnet-all as plain as possible,
but still pure bridal white, contrasted strongly with
the glaring colors of that drawing-room over the shop,
which Poor Mrs. Ferguson had done her luckless best
to make as fine as possible, her tall, slender figure,
harmonious movements and tones, being only more noticeable
by the presence of that stout, gaudily-dressed, and
loud-speaking woman, most people would have said
that, though he had married a governess, a solitary,
unprotected woman, with neither kith nor kin to give
her dignity, earning her own bread by her own honest
labor, the master of Saint Bede’s was not exactly
a man to be pitied.
He rose, and having silently shown
the paper to Christian, enclosed it in an envelope,
and gave it to Mr. Ferguson.
“Will you take the trouble of
forwarding this to ‘The Times,’ the latest
of all your many kindnesses?” said he, with
that manner, innately a gentleman’s, which makes
the acknowledging of a favor appear like the conferring
of one.
Worthy James Ferguson took it as such;
but he was a person of deeds, not words; and he never
could quite overcome the awe with which, as an Avonsbridge
person, he, the jeweler of High Street, regarded the
master of St. Bede’s.
Meanwhile the snow, which had been
falling all day, fell thicker and thicker, so that
the hazy light of the drawing-room darkened into absolute
gloom.
“Don’t you think the children
should be here?” said Mrs. Ferguson, pausing
in her assiduous administration of cake and wine.
“That is-I’m sure I beg your
pardon, master-if they are really coming.”
“I desired my sisters to send
them without fail,” quietly replied the master.
But another half hour dragged heavily
on; the bridegroom’s carriage, which was to
take them across country to a quiet railway station,
already stood at the door, when another carriage was
heard to drive up to it.
“There they are!” cried
Mrs. Ferguson; and the bride, who had been sitting
beside her on the sofa, passive, silent, all but motionless,
started a little.
“Oh, I’m so glad!”
she said, in the first natural tone that had been heard
in her voice all day. “I did so want to
see the children.”
Dr. Grey went out of the room at once,
and Mrs. Ferguson had the good sense to follow, taking
her husband with her. “For,” as she
said afterward, “the first sight of three stepchildren,
and she, poor dear, such a mere girl, must be a very
unpleasant thing.” For her part, she was
thankful that when she married James Ferguson he was
a bachelor, with not a soul belonging to him except
an old aunt. She wouldn’t like to be
in poor Mrs. Grey’s shoes-“dear
me, no!”-with those two old ladies
who have lived at the Lodge ever since the first Mrs.
Grey died. She wondered how on earth Miss Oakley
would manage them. And upon James Ferguson’s
suggesting “in the same way as she managed every
body,” his wife soundly berated him for saying
such a silly thing, though he had, with the usual
acuteness of silent people, said a wiser thing than
he was aware of.
Meantime Christian was left alone,
for the first time that day, and many days; for solitude
was a blessing not easy to get in the Ferguson’s
large, bustling family. Perhaps she did not
seek it-perhaps she dared not. Anyhow,
during the month that had been occupied with her marriage
preparations, she had scarcely been ten minutes alone,
not even at night, for two children shared her room-the
loving little things whom she had taught for two years,
first as daily, and then as resident governess, and
to whom she had persisted in giving lessons till the
last.
She stood with the same fixed composedness-not
composure-of manner; the quietness of a
person who, having certain things to go through, goes
through them in a sort of dream, almost without recognizing
her own identity. Women, more than men, are subject
to this strange, somnambulistic, mental condition,
the result of strong emotion, in which they both do
and endure to an extent that men would never think
of or find possible.
After a minute she moved slightly,
took up and laid down a book, but still mechanically,
as if she did not quite know what she was doing until,
suddenly, she caught sight of her wedding-ring.
She regarded it with something very like affright;
tried convulsively to pull it off; but it was rather
tight; and before it had passed a finger-joint she
had recollected herself and pressed it down again.
“It is too late now. He
is so good-every body says so-and
he is so very good to me.”
She spoke aloud, though she was alone
in the room, or rather because she was alone, after
a habit which, like all solitarily reared and dreamy
persons, Christian had had all her life-her
young, short life-only twenty-one years-and
yet it seemed to her a whole, long, weary existence.
“If I can but make him happy!
If what is left to me is only enough to make him
happy!”
These broken sentences were repeated
more than once, and then she stood silent as though
in a dream still.
When she heard the door open, she
turned round with that still, gentle, passive smile
which had welcomed Dr. Grey on every day of his brief
“courting” days. It never altered,
though he entered in a character not the pleasantest
for a bridegroom, with his three little children, one
on either side of him, and the youngest in his arms.
But there are some men, and mostly
those grave, shy, and reserved men, who have always
the truest and tenderest hearts, whom nothing transforms
so much as to be with children, especially if the children
are their own. They are given to hiding a great
deal, but the father in them can not be hid.
Why should it? Every man who has anything really
manly in his nature knows well that to be a truly good
father, carrying out by sober reason and conscience
those duties which in the mother spring from instinct,
is the utmost dignity to which his human nature can
attain.
Miss Oakley, like the rest of Avonsbridge,
had long-known Dr. Grey’s history; how he had
married early, or (ill-natured report said) been married
by, a widow lady, very handsome, and some years older
than himself. However, the sharpest insinuations
ever made against their domestic bliss were that she
visited a good deal, while he was deeply absorbed
in his studies. And when, after a good many childless
years, she brought him a girl and boy, he became excessively
fond of his children. Whether this implied that
he had been disappointed in his wife, nobody could
tell. He certainly did not publish his woes.
Men seldom do. At the birth of a third child
Mrs. Grey died, and then the widower’s grief;
though unobtrusive, was sufficiently obvious to make
Avonsbridge put all unkindly curiosity aside, and conclude
that the departed lady must have been the most exemplary
and well-beloved of wives and mothers.
All this, being town’s talk,
Christian already knew; more she had never inquired,
not even when she was engaged to him. Nor did
Dr. Grey volunteer any information. The strongest
and most soothing part of his influence over her was
his exceeding silence. He had never troubled
her with any great demonstrations, nor frightened her
with questionings. From the time of their engagement
he had seemed to take every thing for granted, and
to treat her tenderly, almost reverently, without
fuss or parade, yet with the consideration due from
a man to his future wife; so much so that she had
hardly missed, what, indeed, in her simplicity she
hardly expected, the attention usually paid to an
affianced bride from the relatives of her intended.
Dr. Grey had only two, his own sister and his late
wife’s. These ladies, Miss Gascoigne and
Miss Grey, had neither called upon nor taken the least
notice of Miss Oakley. But Miss Oakley-if
she thought about the matter at all- ascribed
it to a fact well recognized in Avonsbridge, as in
most University towns, that one might as soon expect
the skies to fall as for a college lady to cross,
save for purely business purposes, the threshold of
a High Street tradesman. The same cause, she
concluded, made them absent from her wedding; and
when Dr. Grey had said simply, “I shall desire
my sisters to send the children,” Christian had
inquired no farther. Only for a second, hanging
on the brink of this first meeting with the children-her
husband’s children, hers that were to be-did
her heart fail her, and then she came forward to meet
the little group.
Letitia and Arthur were thin, prim-looking,
rather plain children; but Oliver was the very picture
of a father’s darling, a boy that any childless
man would bitterly covet, any childless woman crave
and yearn for, with a longing that women alone can
understand; a child who, beautiful as most childhood
is, had a beauty you rarely see- bright,
frank, merry, bold; half a Bacchus and half a Cupid,
he was a perfect image of the Golden Age. Though
three years old, he was evidently still “the
baby,” and rode on his father’s shoulder
with a glorious tyranny charming to behold.
“Who’s that?” said
he, pointing his fat fingers and shaking his curls
that undulated like billows of gold.
“Papa, who’s that?”
Hardly could there have been put by
anyone a more difficult question. Dr. Grey did
not answer, but avoided it, taking the whole three
to Christian’s side, and bidding them, in a
rather nervous voice, to “kiss this lady.”
But that ceremony the two elder obstinately declined.
“I am a big boy, and I don’t like to be
kissed,” said Arthur.
“Nurse told us, since we had
no mamma of our own, we were not to kiss any body
but our aunts,” added Letitia.
Dr. Grey looked terribly annoyed,
but Christian said calmly, “Very well, then
shake hands only. We shall be better friends
by-and-by.”
They suffered her to touch a little
hand of each, passively rather than unwillingly, and
let it go. For a minute or so the boy and girl
stood opposite her, holding fast by one another, and
staring with all their eyes; but they said nothing
more, being apparently very “good” children,
that is, children brought up under the old-fashioned
rules, which are indicated in the celebrated rhyme,
"Come when you’re called,
Do as you’re bid:
Shut the door after you,
And you’ll never be chid."
Therefore, on being told to sit down,
they gravely took their places on the sofa, and continued
to stare.
The father and bridegroom looked on,
silent as they. What could he say or do?
It was the natural and necessary opening up of that
vexed question-second marriages, concerning
which moralists, sentimentalists, and practical people
argue forever, and never come to any conclusion.
Of course not, because each separate case should
decide itself. The only universal rule or law,
if there be one, is that which applies equally to
the love before marriage; that as to a complete, mutual
first love, any after love is neither likely, necessary,
nor desirable; so, to anyone who has known a perfect
first marriage-the whole satisfaction of
every requirement of heart and soul and human affection-unto
such, a second marriage, like a second love, would
be neither right nor wrong, advisable nor unadvisable,
but simply impossible.
What could he do-the father
who had just given his children a new mother, they
being old enough not only to understand this, but
previously taught; as most people are so fatally ready
to teach children, the usual doctrine about step-mothers,
and also quite ready to rebel against the same?
The step-mother likewise, what could
she do, even had she recognized and felt all that
the children’s behavior implied?
Alas! (I say “alas!” for
this was as sad a thing as the other) she did not
recognize it. She scarcely noticed it at all.
In her countenance was no annoyance-no
sharp pain, that even in that first bridal hour she
was not first and sole, as every woman may righteously
wish to be. There came to her no sting of regret,
scarcely unnatural, to watch another woman’s
children already taking the first and best of that
fatherly love which it would be such exquisite joy
to see lavished upon her own. Alas! poor Christian!
all these things passed over her as the wind passes
over a bare February tree, stirring no emotions, for
there were none to stir. Her predominating feeling
was a vague sense of relief in the presence of the
children, and of delight in the exceeding beauty of
the youngest.
“This is Oliver. I remember
you told me his name. Will he come to me? children
generally do,” said she in a shy sort of way,
but still holding out her arms. In her face
and manner was that inexplicable motherliness which
some girls have even while nursing their dolls -some
never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children-
never!
Master Oliver guessed this by instinct,
as children always do. He looked at her intently,
a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then broke
into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed.
Christian, the solitary governess, first the worse
than orphan, and then the real orphan, without a friend
or relative in the world, felt a child clinging round
her neck-a child toward whom, by the laws
of God and man, she was bound to fulfill all the duties
of a mother-duties which, from the time
when she insisted on having a “big doll,”
that she might dress it, not like a fine lady, but
“like a baby,” had always seemed to her
the very sweetest in all the world. Her heart
leaped with a sudden ecstasy, involuntary and uncontrollable.
“My bonny boy!” she murmured,
kissing the top of that billowy curl which extended
from brow to crown-“my curl”-for
Oliver immediately and proudly pointed it to her.
“And to think that his mother never saw him.
Poor thing! poor thing!”
Dr. Grey turned away to the window.
What remembrances, bitter or sweet, came over the
widower’s heart, Heaven knows! But he kept
them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things
that were incommunicable and inevitable, and especially
all things that could have given pain to any human
being. He only said on returning,
“I knew, Christian, from the
first, that you would be a good mother to my children.”
She looked up at him, the tears in
her eyes, but with a great light shining in them too.
“I will try.”
Poor Christian! If her hasty
marriage, or any other mistake of her life, needed
pardon, surely it might be won for the earnest sincerity
of this vow, and for its self-forgetful, utter humility-“I
will try.”
For another half hour, at her entreaty,
the children staid, though Letitia and Arthur never
relaxed from their dignified decorum farther than to
inform her that they were sometimes called “Titia”
and “Atty;” that their nurse was named
Phillis; and that she had remained in the carriage
because “she said she would not come in.”
Still, having expected nothing, the young step-mother
was not disappointed. And when the three left,
Oliver having held up his rosy mouth voluntarily for
“a good large kiss,” the sweetness of
the caress lingered on her mouth like a chrism of
consecration, sanctifying her for these new duties
which seemed to have been sent to her without her
choice, almost without her volition; for she often
felt, when she paused to thing at all, as if in the
successive links of circumstances which had brought
about her marriage, she had been a passive agent,
led on step by step, like a person half asleep.
Would she ever awake?
When Mrs. Ferguson, re-entering, ready
with any amount of sympathy, found the young step-mother
kissing her hand to the retreating carriage with a
composed smile, which asked no condolence, and offered
no confidences, the good lady was, to say the least,
surprised. “But,” as she afterward
confessed to at least two dozen of her most intimate
friends, “there always was something so odd,
so different from most young ladies about Miss.
Oakley.” However, to the young lady herself
she said nothing, except suggesting, rather meekly,
that it was time to change her dress.
“And just once more let me beg
you to take my shawl-my very best-
instead of your own, which you have had a year and
a half. Ah!” sighing, “if you had
only spent more money on your wedding clothes!”
“How could I?” said Christian,
and stopped, seeing Dr. Grey enter. This was
the one point on which she had resisted him.
She could not accept her trousseau from her husband’s
generosity. It had been the last struggle of
that fierce, poverty-nurtured independence, which nothing
short of perfect love could have extinguished into
happy humility, and she had held to her point resolute
and hard; so much so, that when, with a quiet dignity
peculiarly his own, Dr. Grey had yielded, she had
afterward almost felt ashamed. And even now a
slight blush came in her cheek when she heard him
say cheerfully,
“Do not trouble her, Mrs. Ferguson,
about her shawl. You know I have taken her-that
is, we have taken one another ‘for better, for
worse,’ and it is little matter what sort of
clothes she wears.”
Christian, as she passed him, gave
her husband a grateful look. Grateful, alas!
Love does not understand, or even recognize, gratitude.
But when the door closed after her,
Dr. Grey’s eyes rested on it like those of one
who misses a light.
He sat down covering his mouth-his
firmly-set but excessively sensitive month with his
hand, an attitude which was one of his peculiarities;
for he had many, which the world excused because of
his learning, and his friends-well, because
of himself.
If ever there was a man who without
the slightest obtrusiveness, or self-assertion of
any kind, had unlimited influence over those about
him, it was Arnold Grey. Throughout a life spent
entirely within the college walls, he had, from freshman
to fellow, from thence to tutor, and so on to the
early dignity of mastership, the most extraordinary
faculty of making people do whatsoever he liked –ay,
and enjoy the doing of it. Friends, acquaintances,
undergraduates, even down to children and servants,
all did, more or less, sooner or later, the good pleasure
of Dr. Grey. Perhaps the secret of this was
that his “pleasure” was never merely his
own. None wield such absolute power over others
as those who think little about themselves.
Had circumstance, or his own inclination,
led him out farther into the world, he might have
been noticeable there, for he had very great and varied
acquirements –more acquirements perhaps,
than originalities. He had never written a book,
but he had read almost every book that ever was written-or,
at least, such was the belief current in Avonsbridge.
In his study he was literally entombed in books –
volumes in all languages-and Avonsbridge
supposed him able to read them all. How far
this was a popular superstition, and to what length
his learning went, it is impossible to say. But
nobody ever came quite to the end of it. He
was a silent, modest man, who never spoke much of
what he knew, or of himself in any wise. His
strongest outward characteristic was quietness, both
of manner, speech, motions, springing, it appeared,
out of a corresponding quietness of soul. Whether
it had been born with him, or through what storms of
human passion and suffering he had attained to this
permanent central calm, who could say? Certainly
nobody knew or was likely to know; for the Master
of Saint Bede’s was a person, the depth of whose
nature could not be fathomed easily with any line.
Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as
does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line,
by the right hand, had never been dropped yet.
As he sat, his grave eyes fixed on
the ground, and his mouth covered by the long thin
brown hand-the sort of hand you see in mediaeval
portraits of student-gentlemen-nothing of
him was discernible except the gentleman and the student.
Not though he sat waiting for his “two-hours’
wife,” whom undoubtedly he had married for love-pure
love- the only reason for which anyone,
man or woman, old or young, ought to dare to marry.
That he could feel as very few have the power to feel,
no one who was any judge of physiognomy could doubt
for a moment; yet he sat perfectly quiet-the
quietness of a man accustomed to something safer and
higher than self-suppression-self-control.
When Mr. Ferguson came in, he rose and began to speak
about the weather and local topics as men do speak
to one another-and better that they should!-even
at such crises as weddings or funerals.
And Christian his wife?
She had run up stairs-ran
almost with her former light step, for her heart felt
lightened with the childish smile of little Oliver-to
the attic which for the last nine months she had occupied-the
nursery, now made into a bedroom, and tenanted by
herself and the two little Fergusons. No special
sanctity of appropriation had it; a large, somewhat
bare room, in which not a thing was her own, either
to miss or leave behind. For, in truth, she
had nothing of her own; the small personalities which
she had contrived to drag about with her from lodging
to lodging having all gone to pay debts, which she
had insisted -and Dr. Grey agreed-ought
to be paid before she was married. So he had
taken from her the desk, the work-table, and the other
valueless yet well-prized feminine trifles, and brought
her, as their equivalent, a sum large enough to pay
both these debts and all her marriage expenses, which
sum she, ignorant and unsuspicious, took gratefully,
merely saying “he was very kind.”
She now looked round on her sole worldly
possessions-the large trunk which contained
her ordinary apparel, and the smaller one, in which
were packed all she needed for her fortnight’s
marriage tour. Her traveling dress lay on the
bed-a plain dark silk-her only
silk gown except the marriage one. She let Mrs.
Ferguson array her in it, and then, with her usual
mechanical orderliness, began folding up the shining
white draperies and laying them in the larger trunk.
“Shall I send that direct to the Lodge, my dear?”
Christian looked up absently.
“To Saint Bede’s Lodge-you
know-that it may be ready for you when
you come home?”
Home-that blessed word
which should send a thrill to the heart of any bride.
Alas! this bride heard it quite unheeding, saying
only, “Do what you think best, Mrs. Ferguson.”
And then she proceeded to fasten her
collar and complete the minutiae of her dress with
that careful neatness which was an instinct with Christian,
as it is with all womanly women, though how this poor
motherless girl had ever learned womanliness at all
was a marvel. She answered chiefly in soft monosyllables
to the perpetual stream of Mrs. Ferguson’s talk,
till at last the good soul could no longer restrain
herself.
“Oh, my dear, if you would only
speak-only let out your feelings a little;
for you must feel this day so; I’m sure I do,
just as if it were my own wedding day, or Isabella’s,
or Sarah Jane’s. And when they do come
to be married, poor lambs! I hope it will be
as good a match as you are making-only,
perhaps, not a widower. But I beg your pardon.
Oh, Miss Oakley, my dear, we shall miss you so!”
And the good woman, who had a heart-and
hearts are worth something-clasped the
orphan-bride to her broad bosom, and shed over her
a torrent of honest tears.
“Thank you,” Christian
said, and returned the kiss gently, but no tears came
to her eyes.
“And now,” added Mrs.
Ferguson, recovering herself, “I’ll go
and see that every thing is right; and I’ll
get my warm tartan shawl for you to travel in.
It is a terrible snowy day still. You’ll
come down stairs presently?”
“Yes.”
But the instant Mrs. Ferguson was
gone Christian locked the door. The same look,
of more than pain-actual fear-crossed
her face. She stood motionless, as if trying
to collect herself, and then, with her hands all shaking,
took from her traveling-trunk a sealed packet.
For a second she seemed irresolute, and only a second.
“It must be done-it
is right. I ought to have done it before-Good-by
forever.”
Good-by to what-or to whom?
All that the fire revealed, as she
laid the packet on it, stirring it down into a red
hollow, so that not a flickering fragment should be
left unconsumed, were four letters-only
four-written on dainty paper, in a man’s
hand, sealed with a man’s large heraldic seal.
When they were mere dust, Christian rose.
“It is over now-quite
over. In the whole world there is nobody to
believe in-except him. He is very
good, and he loves me. I was right to marry
him-yes, quite right.”
She repeated this more than once,
as if compelling herself to acknowledge it, and then
paused.
Christian was not exactly a religious
woman-that is, she had lived among such
utterly irreligious people, that whatever she thought
or felt upon these subjects had to be kept entirely
to herself-but she was of a religious nature.
She said her prayers duly, and she had one habit-or
superstition, some might sneeringly call it-that
the last thing before she went on a journey she always
opened her Bible; read a verse or two, and knelt down,
if only to say, “God, take care of me, and bring
me safe back again;” petitions that in many
a wretched compelled wandering were not so uncalled
for as some might suppose. Before this momentous
journey she did the same; but, instead of a Bible,
it happened to be the children’s Prayer-Book
which she took up; it opened at the Marriage Service,
which they had been inquisitively conning over; and
the first words which flashed upon Christian’s
eyes were those which had two hours ago passed over
her deaf ears, and dull, uncomprehending heart-
"For this cause shall a man leave
his father and his mother, and be joined unto his
wife, and they two shall be one flesh."
She started, as if only now she began
to comprehend the full force of that awful union-“one
flesh” and “till death us do part.”
Mrs. Ferguson tried the door, and knocked.
“Dr. Grey is waiting, my dear. You must
not keep your husband waiting.”
“My husband!” and again,
came the wild look, as of a free creature suddenly
caught, tied, and bound. “What have I done?
oh what have I done? Is it too late?”
Ay, it was too late.
Many a woman has married with far
less excuse that Christian did- married
for money or position, or in a cowardly yielding to
family persuasion, some one who she knew did not love
her, or whom she did not love, with the only sort
of love which makes marriage sacred. What agonies
such women must have endured, if they had any spark
of feminine feeling left alive, they themselves know;
and what Christian, far more guiltless than they,
also endured during the three minutes that she kept
Mrs. Ferguson waiting at the locked door, was a thing
never to be spoken of, but also never to be forgotten
during the longest and happiest lifetime. It
was a warning that made her-even her-to
the end of her days, say to every young woman she
knew, “Beware! Marry for love, or
never marry at all.”
When she descended, every ray of color
had gone out of her face-it was white and
passionless as stone; but she kissed the children all
around, gave a little present to Isabella, who had
been her only bridesmaid, shook hands and said a word
or two of thanks to honest James Ferguson, her “father”
for the day, and then found herself driving through
the familiar streets-not alone. She
never would be alone any more.
With a shudder, a sense of dread indescribable,
she remembered this. All her innocent, solitary,
dreamy days quite over, her happiness. vanished; her
regrets become a crime. The responsibility of
being no longer her own, but another’s-bound
fixedly and irrevocably by the most solemn vow that
can be given or taken, subject to no limitations.
provisions, or exception while life remained.
Oh. it was awful-awful!
She could have shrieked and leaped
out of the carriage, to run wildly anywhere-to
the world’s end-when she felt her
hand taken, softly but firmly.
“My dear, how cold you are!
Let me make you warm if I can.”
And then, in his own quiet, tender
way, Dr. Grey wrapped her up in her shawl and rolled
a rug about her feet. She took no notice, submitted
passively, and neither spoke a word more till they
had driven on for two or three miles, into a country
road leading to a village where Avonsbridge people
sometimes went for summer lodgings.
Christian knew it well. There,
just before her father’s death, he and she had
lived, for four delicious, miserable, momentous weeks.
She had never seen the place since, but now she recognized
it-every tree, every field, the very farm-house
garden, once so bright, now lying deep in snow.
She began tremble in every limb.
“Why are we here? This
is not our right road. Where are we going?”
“I did not mean to come this
way, but we missed the train, and cannot reach London
tonight; so I thought we would post across country
to E____,” naming a quiet cathedral town, “where
you can rest, and go on when or where you please.
Will that do?”
“Oh yes.”
“You are not dissatisfied? We could not
help missing the
Train, you see.”
“Oh no.”
The quick, sharp, querulous answers-that
last refuge of a fictitious strength that was momentarily
breaking down-he saw it all, this good
man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what
sorrow was, and who for a whole year had watched her
with the acuteness which love alone teaches, especially
the love which, coming late in life, had a calmness
and unselfishness which youthful love rarely possesses.
The sort of love which, as he had once quoted to
her out of an American book, could feel, deeply and
solemnly, “that if a man really loves a woman,
he would not marry her for the world, were he not quite
sure he was the best person she could by any possibility
marry”-that is, the one who loved
her so perfectly that he was prepared to take upon
himself all the burden of her future life, her happiness
or sorrow, her peculiarities, shortcomings, faults,
and all.
This, though he did not speak a word,
was written, plain as in a book, on the face of Christian’s
husband, as he watched her, still silently, for another
mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through
the leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light
in at the carriage window.
Christian looked up, and closed her
eyes again in a passive hopelessness sad to see.
Her husband watched her still.
Once he sighed-a rather sad sigh for a
bridegroom, and then a light, better and holier than
love, or rather the essence of all love, self-denial
and self-forgetfullness, brightened up his whole countenance.
“How very tired she is; but
I shall take care of her, my poor child!”
The words were as gentle as if he
had been speaking to one of his own children, and
he drew her to him with a tender, protecting fatherliness
which seemed the natural habit of his life, such as
never, in her poor, forlorn life, had any one shown
to Christian Oakley. It took away all her doubts,
all her fears. For the moment she forgot she
was married, forgot everything but his goodness, his
tenderness, his care over her, and her great and sore
need of the same. She turned and clung to him,
weeping passionately.
“I have nobody in the world but you. Oh,
be kind to me!”
“I will,” said Arnold Grey.