Madonna Mary

by Mrs. Oliphant

“Will,” she said suddenly, “I should like to speak to you frankly about what you have on your mind. You are thinking of what happened before you were taken ill?”

“Yes,” he said, turning quickly upon her his great hollow eyes, shining with interest and surprise; and then he stopped short, and compressed his upper lip again, and looked at her with a watchful eye, conscious of the imperfection of his own memory, and unwilling to commit himself.

“I will go over it all, that we may understand each other,” said Mary, though the effort made her own cheek pale. “You were told that I had been married in India just before you were born, and you were led to believe that your brothers were—were—illegitimate, and that you were your father’s heir. I don’t know if they ever told you, my poor boy, that I had been married in Scotland long before; at all events, they made you believe——”

“Made me believe!” said Will, with feverish haste; “do people generally marry each other more than once? I don’t see how you can say ‘made me believe.’”

“Well, Will, perhaps it seemed very clear as it was told to you,” said Mary, with a sigh; “and you have even so much warrant for your mistake, that your father too took fright, and thought because everybody was dead that saw us married that we ought to be married again; and I yielded to his wish, though I knew it was wrong. But it appears everybody was not dead; two people who were present have come to light very unexpectedly, and we have applied to that Court—that new Court, you know, where they treat such things—to have my marriage proved, and Hugh’s legitimacy declared. It will cost some money, and it will not be pleasant to me; but better that than such a mistake should ever be possible again.”

Will looked in his mother’s face, and knew and saw beyond all question that she told him was absolute fact; not even truth, but fact; the sort of thing that can be proved by witnesses and established in law. His mouth which had been compressed so close, relaxed; his underlip drooped, his eyes hid themselves, as it were, under their lids. A sudden blank of mortification and humbled pride came over his soul. A mistake, simply a mistake, such a blunder as any fool might make, an error about simple facts which he might have set right if he had tried. And now for ever and ever he was nothing but the youngest son; doubly indebted to everybody belonging to him; indebted to them for forgiveness, forbearance, tenderness, and services of every kind. He saw it all, and his heart rose up against it; he had tried to wrong them, and it was his punishment that they forgave him. It all seemed so hopeless and useless to struggle against, that he turned his face from the light, and felt as if it would be a relief if he could be able to be ill again, or if he had wounds that he could have secretly unbound; so that he might get to die, and be covered over and abandoned, and have no more to bear. Such thoughts were about as foreign to Mrs. Ochterlony’s mind as any human cogitations could be, and yet she divined them, as it were, in the greatness of her pity and love.

“Will,” she said, speaking softly in the silence which had been unbroken for long, “I want you to think if this had been otherwise, what it would have been for me. I would have been a woman shut out from all good women. I would have been only all the more wicked and wretched that I had succeeded in concealing my sin. You would have blushed for your mother whenever you had to name her name. You could not have kept me near you, because my presence would have shut against you every honest house. You would have been obliged to conceal me and my shame in the darkness—to cover me over in some grave with no name on it—to banish me to the ends of the earth——”

“Mother!” said Will, rising up in his gaunt length and paleness on the sofa. He did not understand it. He saw her figure expanding, as it were, her eyes shining in the twilight like two great mournful stars, the hot colour rising to her face, her voice labouring with an excitement which had been long pent up and found no channel; and the thrill and jar in it of suppressed passion, made a thrill in his heart.

“And your father!” she went on, always with growing emotion, “whom you are all proud of, who died for his duty and left his name without a blot;—he would have been an impostor like me, a man who had taken base advantage of a woman, and deceived all his friends, and done the last wrong to his children,—we two that never wronged man nor woman, that would have given our lives any day for any one of you,—that is what you would have made us out.”

“Mother!” said Will. He could not bear it any longer. His heart was up at last, and spoke. He came to her, crept to her in his weakness, and laid his long feeble arms round her as she sat hiding her face. “Mother! don’t say that. I must have been mad. Not what I would have made you out——”