Madonna Mary

by Mrs. Oliphant

Hugh did not stop to hear any more. He woke up in a moment out of himself, and rushed forth upon the road to meet the messenger, leaving Nelly and his joy behind him. He felt as if he had been guilty then, but as he flew along the road he had no time to think. As for poor Nelly, she took to walking up and down the lawn, keeping him in sight, with limbs that trembled under her, and eyes half blind with tears and terror. Nelly had suffered to some extent from the influence of Mrs. Kirkman’s training. She could not feel sure that to be very happy, nay blessed, to feel one’s self full of joy and unmingled content, was not something of an offence to God. Perhaps it was selfish and wicked at that moment, and now the punishment might be coming. If it should be so, would it not be her fault. She who had let herself be persuaded, who ought to have known better. Aunt Agatha sat at her window, sobbing, and saying little prayers aloud without knowing it. “God help my Mary! Oh God, help my poor Mary: give her strength to bear it!” was what Aunt Agatha said. And poor Nelly for her part put up another prayer, speechless, in an agony—“God forgive us,” she said, in her innocent heart.

But all at once both of them stopped praying, stopped weeping, and gave one simultaneous cry, that thrilled through the whole grey landscape. And this was why it was;—Hugh, a distant figure on the road, had met the messenger, had torn open the precious despatch. It was too far off to tell them in words, or make any other intelligible sign. What he did was to fling his hat into the air and give a wild shout, which they saw rather than heard. Was it all well? Nelly went to the gate to meet him, and held by it, and Aunt Agatha came tottering downstairs. And what he did next was to tear down the road like a racehorse, the few country folks about it staring at him as if he were mad,—and to seize Nelly in his arms in open day, on the open road, and kiss her publicly before Aunt Agatha, and Peggy, and all the world. “She said she would not mind,” cried Hugh, breathlessly, coming headlong into the garden, “as soon as we heard that Will was going to get well; and there’s the despatch, Aunt Agatha, and Nelly is to be my wife.”

This was how two joyful events in the Ochterlony family intimated themselves at the same moment to Bliss Seton and her astonished house.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

ND this was how it all ended, so far as any end can be said to have come to any episode in human history. While Will was still only recovering—putting his recollections slowly together—and not very certain about them, what they were, Hugh and his mother went through the preliminaries necessary to have Mrs. Ochterlony’s early marriage proved before the proper court—a proceeding which Mary did not shrink from when the time came that she could look calmly over the whole matter, and decide upon the best course. She was surprised to see her own unfinished letter preserved so carefully in Hugh’s pocket-book. “Put it in the fire,” she said to him, “it will only put us in mind of painful things if you keep it;” and it did not occur to Mary why it was that her son smiled and put it back in its place, and kissed her hand, which had grown thin and white in her long seclusion. And then he told her of Nelly, and Mrs. Ochterlony was glad—glad to the bottom of her heart, and yet touched with a momentary pang for which she was angry with herself. He had stood by her so in all this time of trial, and now he was about to remove himself a little, ever so little further off from her, though he was her first-born and her pride; but then she despised herself, who could grudge, even for half a moment, his reward to Hugh, and made haste to make amends for it, even though he was unconscious of the offence.

“I always thought she should have been my child,” Mary said, “the very first time I saw her. I had once one like her; and I hungered and thirsted for Nelly when I saw her first. I did not think of getting her like this. I will love her as if she were my own, Hugh.”

“And so she will be your own,” said Hugh, not knowing the difference. And he was so happy that the sight of him made his mother happy, though she had care enough in the meantime for her individual share.

For it may be supposed that Will, such a youth as he was, did not come out of his fever changed and like a child. Such changes are few in this world, and a great sickness is not of necessity a moral agent. When the first languor and comfort of his convalescence was over, his mind began to revive and to join things together, as was natural—and he did not know where or how he had broken off in the confused and darkling story that returned to his brain as he pondered. He had forgotten, or never understood about all that happened on the day he was taken ill, but yet a dreamy impression that some break had come to his plans, that there was some obstacle, something that made an end of his rights, as he still called them in his mind, hovered about his recollections. He was as frank and open as it was natural to his character to be, for the first few days after he began to recover, before he had made much progress with his recollections; and then he became moody and thoughtful and perplexed, not knowing how to piece the story out. This was perhaps, next to death itself, the thing which Mary had most dreaded, and she saw that though his sickness had been all but death, it had not changed the character or identity of the pale boy absorbed in his own thoughts, uncommunicating and unyielding, whose weakness compelled him to obey her like an infant in everything external, yet whose heart gave her no such obedience. It was as unlike Hugh’s frank exuberance of mind, and Islay’s steady but open soul, as could be conceived. But yet he was her boy as much as either; as dear, perhaps even more bound to her by the evil he had tried to do, and by the suffering he himself had borne. And now she had to think not only how to remedy the wrong he had attempted, and to put such harm out of his and everybody’s power, but to set the discord in himself at rest, and to reconcile the jangled chords. It was this that gave her a preoccupied look even while Hugh spoke to her of all his plans. It was more difficult than appearing before the court, harder work perhaps than anything she had yet had in her hands to do—and hard as it was, it was she who had to seek the occasion and begin.

She had been sitting with her boy, one winterly afternoon, when all was quiet in the house—they were still in the lodging in Liverpool, not far from Mr. Penrose’s, to which Will had been removed when his illness began; he was not well enough yet to be removed, and the doctors were afraid of cold, and very reluctant to send him, in this weak state, still further to the north. She had been reading to him, but he was evidently paying no attention to the reading, and she had left off and began to talk, but he had been impatient of the talk. He lay on the sofa by the fire, with his pale head against the pillow, looking thin, spectral, and shadowy, and yet with a weight of weary thought upon his overhanging brow, and in his close compressed lips, which grieved his mother’s heart.