"Nay," repeated the maid with a sigh. "Out of my unhappiness may come the happiness of others. Though I may not live to see it, I may die in the hope that Isobel Bower may, in your keeping, come to deserve a name better than that terrible one she has earned, and which just now sounded so terrible from your lips."
"Is she not a liar, who falsified my words?" said he impassionedly. "Is she not a thief, who appropriated the diamond gift of my mother, intended for you? Is she not an undutiful daughter, who first deceived her mother by a falsehood, and then denounced her as herself false? Is that woman, with the form of an angel and the heart of a devil, to be my wife? And does Marjory Bower counsel it? Then Marjory Bower hates Hector Ogilvy!"
"Nay," replied she calmly, "I only love your honour. Night and day I will pray for a blessing on your marriage, and that God, who made the heart of my sister, may change it into love and goodness."
A repressed spasmodic laugh shook the frame of the youth. "What a hope," he said, "on which to found the happiness of a life, and for which to barter such a creature as you! But, Marjory, you have roused the pride of my honour, while you have appeased my remorse; and I will marry Isobel because you have said that I should. It is thus I shall punish myself by becoming a victim in turn to the honour I was false to."
As he pronounced these words, he fixed his eye on the face of Marjory, which at the moment reflected brightly the light of the lamp. Her eyes were swimming in tears. She seemed to struggle with herself, as if she feared that, in thus counselling him, she incurred some heavy responsibility. So Ogilvy thought. But he little knew that there was mixed up with these emotions the keen anguish of a sacrifice; for she had not as yet admitted to him how dear he had been to her, and how bitterly she had felt the transference of his affections from her to her sister. He waited for a few moments. He got no reply, except from these swimming eyes. "Adieu! dear Marjory," he said; and hastened again to the pine wood, where, having flung himself on his steed, he started for home.
As he hurried along, he felt that he had appeased one feeling at the expense of a life's happiness, and yet he was satisfied, according to that law whereby the present evil always appears the greatest. About half way up the rough track he met one of the servants of Bell's Tower proceeding homewards, and suspecting that he had been with a message to him or his mother, he stopped and questioned him.
"I have been to Dame Ogilvy with a letter from Dame Bower," said the man; "and well I may," he added, as he sided up and whispered, "The fagot-hewers have seen the bride to-night on the top bartisan of the castle tower."
"And I now see a fool," replied Ogilvy, and rode on. Not that he thought the man the fool he called him, but that he felt it necessary, as many men do, to make a protest against the weakness of superstition at the very moment when the mysterious power was busy with his heart; and, repeating the word "fool," he went on auguring and condemning in the double way of mortals. How strangely he had been led for the last hour! The terms he had heard applied to his bride, justifying what he had himself seen, had all but resolved him to remain absent from the intended ceremony of the morrow. He had had some lurking hope that Marjory would agree to his resolution, and again inspire him with hope; and he knew that his mother would be pleased with a change which would yield her a chance of having her favourite for her daughter-in-law. He had been proposing as a weak mortal. Another power was purposing as a God; and yet he considered himself as so much master of himself and the occasion as to laugh with bitter scorn at the rustic diviner, and his folly of the apparition bride. And now there was shining before him the light of the lamp from the chamber of his mother, whom he had still stronger reasons than ever for avoiding that night. But even these reasons were unavailing. The spirit of his honour, which had been so fragile a thing when opposed by the advent of a new love, had been breathed upon and increased to a flame by her he had deserted; and he for the moment felt he could face the mild reproof of a mother whom he loved. What a versatile, incomprehensible creature is man, even in those inspired moments, when, with the nerve trembling under the tension of purpose, he appears to himself and others in his highest position! In a few minutes more he was in the presence of his mother.
There sat in her painted chamber the fine gentlewoman, with her fixed eye divining in the light of the gilded lamp, as the spirit cast upon the dark curtain of the future the forms which were but as re-adaptations of the signs of what had come and gone in her memory and experience. The two families had been linked by the power of fate, and the connection, which had never been dissolved; was to evolve in some new form. She had grieved for her gentle favourite, Marjory Bower; and had she been as stern as she was mild, she would have interposed a parent's authority against her son's change of purpose. Yea, there might have been true affection in that sternness; but such would have been the resolution of a mental strength which she did not possess, for she was as those whose parental love gratifies wilfulness from a fear of producing pain. Nor even now, when she held in her hand a letter of, to her, strange import, could she call up from her soft heart an energy to save her son from the ruin which seemed to impend over him. He stood for a moment before her, silent, pale, and resolved against all chances,—verily a puppet under the reaction of affections and principles he had dared to tamper with against the injunctions of honour,—and yet he could not see that the soft and trembling hand of her in Bell's Tower, which held the strings that bound him so, held them and straitened them by a spasm. Nor was it of use to him now that the strings trembled, and relaxed only for the time when the soft, reproving, yet loving light of his mother's eye, as it turned from her reverie, fell upon his soul; for his purpose came again, as his lip quivered and he waxed more pale.
"What means this letter?" said she, as she held it forth in her hand. "Mrs. Bower thanks me for the gift I sent to your bride."