The Minister's Wife

by Mrs. Oliphant

She was quite happy standing there with her hand drawn closely within his arm, proud of him and of everything about him, from his boundless knowledge down to his spotless ruffles; and felt at the present moment no need of anything else for the happiness of her life.

And Isabel enjoyed all the sights of London with the same proud satisfaction. He could tell her about everything, from Westminster and St. Paul’s down to the old gentlemen riding in the Row, among whom he pointed out to her the Duke and Sir Robert Peel, and at least a dozen more, as if he had known them all his life, she said to herself. He was not so learned in respect to the ladies, it was true. But still to know so much was a great thing. And then it made his wife so independent. She had no need to ask, to consult books, to remain in ignorance of anything. It gave her the sweetest sense of superiority when she met a young country lady in the Row with her husband who was not so clever as the minister, and saw them gaze and gape at the notabilities. ‘Mr. Lothian will tell you who they are,’ said Isabel, proudly. And when her countrywoman confided to her how little she knew about the places she had seen, the gratification of the minister’s wife grew stronger and stronger. ‘Mr. Lothian was here when he was young,’ she said; ‘and I never need to ask anybody but him—he knows everything.’

‘Here when he was young, indeed!’ young Mrs. Diarmid, of Ardgartan, exclaimed to her husband, when they parted company. ‘Here as a tutor, I suppose; but Isabel gives herself as many airs as if he were the Marquis himself.’

‘Well, at least he was the Marquis’s tutor,’ said young Ardgartan; ‘and if she is pleased with her old man, it is very lucky for her.’

And the fact was that Isabel was thoroughly pleased with her old man, and enjoyed her expedition with all her heart. The Marquis asked his old tutor to dinner, and gave Isabel his arm, and placed her by his side with much admiration of her sweet looks. ‘I used to know your father,’ he told her, ‘when I was a lad. What an eye he had! and would tire us all out shooting over the Kilcranion moors.’ This acknowledgment of Captain Duncan as himself in some way received by the local deities, was balm to Isabel’s soul, and opened her shy intelligence to the Marquis, who found her little sayings as piquant as sayings usually are which fall from pretty lips. And the Marchioness offered Mrs. Lothian her box at the Opera to Isabel’s great confusion and perplexity. The young ladies of the house clustered round her, telling her what the music was to be, and how she would enjoy it, and how much they envied her her first opera. ‘You will think you are in Heaven,’ cried one enthusiastic girl. When she left the grand house in Park Lane, with this ecstatic prospect before her, Isabel felt that her life, as the stepmother had said, was indeed like a fairy-tale.

‘But is it so nice as they say?’ she asked her husband, as they went home.

‘To them it is,’ said that man of universal information, ‘for they have been brought up to it. I am not so sure about you; but you must ask me no more questions, for I want you to judge of it for yourself.’

And it was with a sense of responsibility that Isabel set out for this new felicity. She had put on one of her wedding-dresses, the blue one which her husband loved—and had white flowers in her pretty brown hair. Her sense of her present judicial position took from her the pretty girlish excitement into which she had fallen about all the novelties that surrounded her, and restored that soft dignity of the old man’s wife, the look of age she had tried to put on when she first realised Mrs. Lothian’s responsibility. She looked, perhaps, rather more girlish in this state of importance and seriousness than she did in her livelier mood. And there was another reason, too, for unusual dignity. Lady Mary was to go with her under her charge. ‘And I trust to you, Mrs. Lothian, to take care of her,’ the Marchioness had said, with a sense of the joke which was far from being shared by Isabel. It was the first time she had ever acted as chaperone, and her mind was disturbed by the awful question what she should do if anyone approached the young lady who was under her charge. ‘Is she not to speak to anyone?—and am I to keep everybody away?’ she asked her husband, and if possible admired Mr. Lothian’s knowledge more than ever when he instructed her in her easy duties. As for Lady Mary herself, she was quite excited by the prospect of witnessing Isabel’s delight. ‘Oh I wish I were you!’ she cried, ‘I am blasée, you know. I know them all off by heart, and exactly how they will look, and how Grisi will bring out her notes. But you will think you are in Heaven.’ And then they all got into the lordly carriage, with the powdered footmen, and went to this earthly paradise, with no thought of any evil awaiting them, or harm which could enter there.

There were many opera-glasses directed to the box when Isabel in her simplicity and pretty dignity, half-matron half-child, took her seat in it. Lady Mary was no beauty, and the eyes of the world directed themselves to the fresh, new face with a rustle of curiosity and interrogation. Isabel gave one glance round her in acknowledgment of the fine assembly, and the ladies in their pretty dresses, and then turned her face intent upon the stage. The opera was Lucia di Lammermoor. Her companions both watched her with much more interest than they did the scene—Lady Mary with delightful expectation at first, then with a shade of disappointment and surprise: while the minister looked on amused, and yet conscious of the least little shade of anxiety, lest his wife should compromise herself by a total want of susceptibility to the entertainment. Neither of them observed, at first, among the gazers below and around one pair of opera-glasses, which the owner with a sudden start had directed full upon the box at the commencement of the performance, and which remained fixed, held with rigid hands, during the whole of the first act. When the curtain fell, Isabel drew breath and heart, her eyes somewhat strained and dilated with the intense gaze she had been fixing upon the stage.

‘Don’t you feel, then, as if this was all a dream, and that was true?’ said Lady Mary, who was a musical enthusiast.