At the village doors the question was still more hotly discussed.
‘Set her up with her trips to London!’ cried one of the neighbours, ‘and her only Duncan Diarmid’s daughter, as we a’ ken, and with nae right to such extravagance.’
‘But by the mother’s side Isabel’s a lady born,’ cried Jenny Spence, ‘and her father was an officer as grand as young Kilcranion, that you think so much of. When ye marry an auld man ye may well expect mair consideration at the least. A’ he can do is but little for bonnie Isabel.’
‘If they were to spend the siller on God’s service it would set them better—and him a minister,’ said Mary White.
And in higher circles there were a good many smiles and gentle jokes about the minister’s uxorious fondness. Even Miss Catherine was not quite sure about such an extravagant notion. But all the criticism did not affect Mr. Lothian. He had made all his plans, and arranged everything without regard to the popular babble. ‘I mean my Isabel to see everything, and have everything I can give her,’ he said. He had lived in that mysterious world himself when he was young. He had been tutor to the Marquis, the tutelary deity of the district, who came to church always when he was on the Loch, and had the minister to dine with him and showed him every sort of attention. London was no such wonder and enigma to him as it was to most of his parishioners. And Isabel, for the first time since her marriage, was moved with an excitement which almost renewed her impetuosity. The thought of going ‘to England’ stirred up all her dormant faculties for pleasure. She made him tell her all about it, where they should go; what the Park was like where the ladies rode; if he was sure it was quite right to go to a theatre—and a hundred other particulars; and when at last the moment came for setting out, the young creature almost threw off her wifely gravity and felt herself a girl again.
They went by sea, which was a somewhat awful experience; but yet, when she had recovered the first frightful consequences of acquaintance with the unsteady waters, even the fact of ‘the voyage’ added something to Isabel’s sense of growing experience and knowledge of life. She walked about the deck, leaning on her husband’s arm as the steamer went up the peaceable Thames, quite recovered from all unpleasant sensations, and full of bright wonder and curiosity. ‘You know everything as if you had lived here all your life,’ she said, in unfeigned admiration for her husband’s cleverness, and hung upon him, asking a thousand questions, pleased with all the novelty about her, proud of his unbounded information, a sweeter picture he thought than all London besides could produce.
‘I was here when I was young like you,’ he said, ‘when everything takes hold of one’s mind—when I did not know I was to be so happy as to bring my bonnie Isabel. I suppose it was before you were born.’
‘And perhaps you were thinking of some other Isabel,’ she said, looking up in his face, with the laughing half-jealousy of the wife, a something more like love and less like simple affection (he thought) than he had seen in her before.
‘Never,’ he said, bending down over the sweet face that was his own, ‘my darling, I never loved woman till I saw you. And when I saw you, you were no woman, but a child. I kept my heart young for you, Isabel.’
She gave him a wondering glance, and then a little flush came over her face, and she turned to ask him a question about something else which struck her on the other side of the river. She had not kept her heart fresh for him. She felt, with a momentary sense of guiltiness, that they were not equal on that point. But her very thoughts were as innocently and simply true to him now as if he had been—her father. Something like this was what Isabel thought, but not with any conscious sense that her love for her husband should have been different.