‘Is not that giving up your duty?’ Miss Catherine continued, pitiless. ‘Isabel, there is no love lost between him and me; but I could not counsel you to abandon your duty for all that.’
‘Oh, ask me no more questions,’ cried Isabel, with a gesture of despair; and that was all that could be torn from her whatever anyone might say.
When she was well enough to go so far, she made a secret pilgrimage to her husband’s grave. The whole parish knew of it before the week was out, and drew its conclusions; but nobody suspected why it was that she sat so long, wrapt in musing and solitude, in that spot where the minister and Margaret slept side by side. ‘God grant her her wits, puir thing!’ said one of the village gossips. ‘There she sat among the grass; and every bit weed that caught her eye, and the moss on the tombstone, all cleared away. You would have said it was a gardener in a garden at his work.’ Some thought it was penitence for her sin against him, and some that it was a compunctious regret for her ‘good man.’ Nobody knew that Isabel had buried in her husband’s grave something more than her grief and remorse for her infidelity—another token more awful than anything so trifling could be supposed to be. She worked at it unseen with her slender, trembling fingers, making a place for it deep under the sod, and there hid the innocent present of her first affection—the little brooch, which had been plucked from the dead man—the fatal sign which had made her existence a desolation, and rent asunder her heart and her life.
And common life crept up round her, like the rising tide on the beach, and set her softly afloat in the old habits, the old routine, the current of the past. Little Margaret rose once more to be the chief object, and occupation, and interest of the quiet days. Within the first year there came a claim upon her, of which her lawyer informed Isabel, and which oozed out through the district after a while by those invisible channels which make everybody’s secrets known. It was a bill drawn upon her from a far distant corner of America, which she paid without hesitation, though it cost her many sacrifices. The same thing was repeated several times within the course of a dozen years; and then there came a letter to her, in a strange handwriting——
No one had mentioned her legal name for a long time before that. She saw only those who called her Isabel. But after the coming of this letter, it happened to her by chance to encounter the old Laird, Miss Catherine’s brother, come upon a rare visit to his own country. ‘So this is Isabel,’ he said to her kindly, patting her head as if she had been but still a child. ‘Mrs—Mrs—— I forget the name.’
‘Lothian,’ she said, distinctly, before the servants, as was afterwards remembered. And from that hour was called by her old name.
And little Margaret lived and grew. A woman cannot be utterly wretched, whatever tragedies may have happened in her life, so long as she has a woman-child to make her live anew. She was even happy in her way, developing into a hundred gracious forms of being, which Stapylton’s wife could never have known; and had her life after life was over, like the most of us—the one, an existence brief and full with sorrow and joy in it, and a crowd of events; the other, long, tranquil, with no facts at all to speak of, marking the passage of the years—nothing to tell: but yet, perhaps, the life that bulks most largely in the records in the skies.
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