That her father should be induced to accompany her to Scotland, that she should not be parted from him, had been so urgent a desire on Margaret's part, that her husband and James Dugdale had set themselves resolutely to obtain its realisation, and they had succeeded, with some difficulty. The collection was a great obstacle, but then Mr. Baldwin's collection--whose treasures the old gentleman politely and sincerely declared his eagerness to inspect, while he secretly cherished a pleasing conviction that he should find them very inferior to those of his own--was a great inducement; besides, he had corresponded formerly with a certain Professor Bayly, of Glasgow, who had some brilliant theories connected with Bos primus, and this would be a favourable opportunity for seeing the Professor, who rarely "came South," as he called visiting England.
He was not at all disturbed by Margaret's eager desire that he should accompany her; he did not perceive in it the contradiction to her usual unselfish consideration for others, which James Dugdale saw and thoroughly understood, and which Mr. Baldwin saw and did not understand, but set down to the general account of her "nervousness." He had been rather unhappy at first about the journey and the change; but James's cheerful prognostications, and the unexpected discovery that Foster, his inseparable servant, whose displeasure was a calamity not to be lightly incurred, so far from objecting to the tremendous undertaking, "took to" the notion of a visit to the Deane very kindly, was a relief which no false shame interfered to prevent; Mr. Carteret candidly admitting, and the whole family thankfully recognising.
"I don't know how I should have got through this day," Margaret said to James, as they stood together on the terrace under the verandah, and she plucked a few of the tender young leaves which had begun to unfold, under the persuasion of the spring time--"I don't know how I should have got through this day, if papa had not agreed to come with us. It is bad enough as it is; a last day"--she was folding the tiny leaves now, and putting them between the covers of her pocket-book--"is always dreadful--dreadful to me, I mean. It sounds stupid and commonplace to talk of the uncertainty of life, but I don't think other people live always under the presence of the remembrance, the conviction of it, as I do. It is always over me, and it makes everything which has anything of finality about it peculiarly impressive to me."
Her hand was resting on his arm now, and they turned away from the house-front and walked down the grassy slope.
"Do you--do you mean that this sense of uncertainty relates to yourself?" he asked her, speaking with evident effort, and holding her arm more closely to him.
"Yes," she replied calmly; "I am never tortured by any fears about those I love now; the time was when I was first very, very happy; when the wonderful, glorious sense of the life that had opened to me came upon me fully; when I hardly dared to recognise it, because of the shadow of death. Then it hung over my husband and my child; over my father--and--you."
He shook his head with an involuntary deprecatory movement, and a momentary flicker of pain disturbed his grave thoughtful eyes.
"And it lent an intensity which sometimes I could hardly bear to every hour of my life--my wonderfully happy life," she repeated, and looked all around her in a loving solemn way which struck the listener to the heart. "But then the thing I had dreaded, though I had never divined its form, though it had gradually faded from my mind, came upon me--you know how, James, and how rebellious I was under my trial; no one knows but God and you--and then, then the shadow was lightened. It never has fallen again over them or you; it hangs only over me, and--James, look at me, don't turn away--I want to remember every look in your face to-day; it is not a shadow at all, but only a veil before the light whose glory I could not bear yet awhile. That is all, indeed."
He did not speak, and she felt that a sharp thrill of pain ran through his spare form.
"Don't be angry with me," she went on in soft pleading tones, "don't think I distress you needlessly, I do so want you to hear me--to leave what I am saying to you in your mind. When I first told you that I had a presentiment that I had suffered my last sorrow, that all was to be peace for me henceforth, except in thinking of my child, you were not persuaded; you imputed it to the shock my nerves had received, and you think so still. It is not so indeed, even with respect to my child. I am tranquil and happy now; I don't know why, I cannot account for it. Nothing in the circumstances is susceptible of change, and I see those circumstances as clearly as I saw them when they first existed; but I am changed. I feel as if my vision had been enlarged; I feel as if the horizon had widened before me, and with the great space has come great calm--calm of mind--like what travellers tell us comes with the immense mountain solitudes, when all the world beneath looks little, and yet the great loneliness lifts one up nearer to heaven, and has no fear or trembling in it. I am ne her God not unquiet now, James, not even for the child. The wrong that I have done her God will right."