The Minister's Wife

by Mrs. Oliphant

‘But I must,’ said poor Isabel. ‘Oh, Miss Catherine, if you would but think how it all was. Can I put it in words? I was fond—fond of him—and oh! but he was good to me. But you know—the difference; and if you had said a month since—He is coming; let us fly away, not to meet him, not to bring back the past—I would have gone to the end of the world. I would be—almost—glad—now——’

‘Of what, Isabel?’ cried Miss Catherine. ‘My dear, my dear, come, and I will go with you, and free you from this man!’

‘I can never be free of him—now!’ she said. ‘To say the words is an offence to me. I would have clung to my old life, to be Mr. Lothian’s widow and little Margaret’s mother, and nothing more; but now that is all past. If that was what you wanted, why did you let me see the one man—the only man——’

Here Isabel stopped, silenced by her sobs and her shame. She was not ashamed to love him, but she was ashamed to say it in words, to disclose the sacred depths of the heart to any strange eye. She bent her crimson tear-wet face over her child. Poor little Margaret! if she could have known the meaning of all those looks of trouble, and passion, and distress, at which she gazed so gravely with profound baby eyes! Miss Catherine rose up and shook out her dress with an agitated movement, as if shaking the very dust from it, according to scriptural injunction; and yet she had been touched, though she would not admit it, by Isabel’s cry.

‘You must judge for yourself,’ she said. ‘All has been said that can be said. I cannot change your heart or settle your life for you, one way or another. You must do as you will. You know what I think, and what a sore blow this is to me; and I can say no more.’

And Miss Catherine swept out of the room and out of the house, leaving poor Isabel with her face hidden and her heart torn asunder.

It did not even strike Isabel as strange that she received no overtures of friendship from his family, nor, indeed, heard of them in any way. Her case seemed too far removed out of the ordinary course of life to leave her any interest in ordinary circumstances. She never thought of his people; all who surrounded herself were hostile or disapproving, and the effect upon her was to make her independent (as she thought) of sympathy. The world was hard upon her, and she turned her back upon the world.

And thus it happened that they were married, without paying any attention to the objections and protestations of Loch Diarmid. It was in the beginning of winter, when little Margaret was nearly a year old. Margaret’s father had been but a year and a half dead, which was the fact that chiefly shocked the parish.

Stapylton took his bride to a pretty sea-side village further down the Clyde where the winter was mild, and where there were no associations to disturb the peace of their beginning. He bore with her in her distress at that temporary parting with her child—he bore with her anxieties about little Margaret and longings after her, in the little interval which he might have claimed as specially his own. He was thoughtful of her every wish, putting aside his own comfort (she thought) for hers. And Isabel found herself, all unawares, wrapt in that dream of happiness which most hearts entertain one time or other, and which so few realise. Out of her doubts she came into a sense of reality which was exquisite to her—and she who had loved her lover without believing in him, grew, with a blessed surprise and delight, which was like Heaven to her, to trust as much as she loved. The change was like that from night into the brightest day. She had reached the heights all radiant with the sun rising, after the valley of the shadow of death.