Madonna Mary

CHAPTER V

BUT the worst of all to Mrs. Ochterlony was that little Hugh had been there – Hugh, who was six years old, and so intelligent for his age. The child was very anxious to know what it meant, and why she knelt by his father’s side while all the other people were standing. Was it something particular they were praying for, which Mrs. Kirkman, and the rest did not want? Mary satisfied him as she best could, and by-and-by he forgot, and began to play with his little brother as usual; but his mother knew that so strange a scene could not fail to leave some impression. She sat by herself that long day, avoiding her husband for perhaps the first time in her life, and imagining a hundred possibilities to herself. It seemed to her as if everybody who ever heard of her henceforth must hear of this, and as if she must go through the world with a continual doubt upon her; and Mary’s weakness was to prize fair reputation and spotless honour above everything in the world. Perhaps Mrs. Kirkman was not so far wrong after all, and there was a higher meaning in the unlooked-for blow that thus struck her at her tenderest point; but that was an idea she could not receive. She could not think that God had anything to do with her husband’s foolish restlessness, and her own impatient submission. It was a great deal more like a malicious devil’s work, than anything a beneficent providence could have arranged. This way of thinking was far from bringing Mary any consolation or solace, but still there was a certain reasonableness in her thoughts. And then an indistinct foreboding of harm to her children, she did not know what, or how to be brought about, weighed upon Mary’s mind. She kept looking at them as they played beside her, and thinking how, in the far future, the meaning of that scene he had been a witness to might flash into Hugh’s mind when he was a man, and throw a bewildering doubt upon his mother’s name, which perhaps she might not be living to clear up; and these ideas stung her like a nest of serpents, each waking up and darting its venom to her heart at a separate moment. She had been very sad and very sorry many a time before in her life, – she had tasted all the usual sufferings of humanity; and yet she had never been what may be called unhappy, tortured from within and without, dissatisfied with herself and everything about her. Major Ochterlony was in every sense of the word a good husband, and he had been Mary’s support and true companion in all her previous troubles. He might be absurd now and then, but he never was anything but kind and tender and sympathetic, as was the nature of the man. But the special feature of this misfortune was that it irritated and set her in arms against him, that it separated her from her closest friend and all her friends, and that it made even the sight and thought of her children, a pain to her among all her other pains.

This was the wretched way in which Mary spent the day of her second wedding. Naturally, Major Ochterlony brought people in with him to lunch (probably it should be written tiffin, but our readers will accept the generic word), and was himself in the gayest spirits, and insisted upon champagne, though he knew they could not afford it. “We ate our real wedding breakfast all by ourselves in that villanous little place at Gretna,” he said, with a boy’s enthusiasm, “and had trout out of the Solway: don’t you recollect, Mary? Such trout! What a couple of happy young fools we were; and if every Gretna Green marriage turned out like mine!” the Major added, looking at his wife with beaming eyes. She had been terribly wounded by his hand, and was suffering secret torture, and was full of the irritation of pain; and yet she could not so steel her heart as not to feel a momentary softening at sight of the love and content in his eyes. But though he loved her he had sacrificed all her scruples, and thrown a shadow upon her honour, and filled her heart with bitterness, to satisfy an unreasonable fancy of his own, and give peace, as he said, to his mind. All this was very natural, but in the pain of the moment it seemed almost inconceivable to Mary, who was obliged to conceal her mortification and suffering, and minister to her guests as she was wont to do, without making any show of the shadow that she felt to have fallen upon her life.

It was, however, tacitly agreed by the ladies of the station to make no difference, according to the example of the Colonel’s wife. Mrs. Kirkman had resolved upon that charitable course from the highest motives, but the others were perhaps less elevated in their principles of conduct. Mrs. Hesketh, who was quite a worldly-minded woman, concluded it would be absurd for one to take any step unless they all did, and that on the whole, whatever were the rights of it, Mary could be no worse than she had been for all the long time they had known her. As for Miss Sorbette, who was strong-minded, she was disposed to consider that the moral courage the Ochterlonys had displayed in putting an end to an unsatisfactory state of affairs merited public appreciation. Little Mrs. Askell, for her part, rushed headlong as soon as she heard of it, which fortunately was not till it was all over, to see her suffering protectress. Perhaps it was at that moment, for the first time, that the ensign’s wife felt the full benefit of being a married lady, able to stand up for her friend and stretch a small wing of championship over her. She rushed into Mrs. Ochterlony’s presence and arms like a little tempest, and cried and sobbed and uttered inarticulate exclamations on her friend’s shoulder, to Mary’s great surprise, who thought something had happened to her. Fortunately the little eighteen-year-old matron, after the first incoherence was over, began to find out that Mrs. Ochterlony looked the same as ever, and that nothing tragical could have happened, and so restrained the offer of her own countenance and support, which would have been more humbling to Mary than all the desertion in the world.

“What is the matter, my dear?” said Mrs. Ochterlony, who had regained her serene looks, though not her composed mind; and little Irish Emma, looking at her, was struck with such a sense of her own absurdity and temerity and ridiculous pretensions, that she very nearly broke down again.

“I’ve been quarrelling with Charlie,” the quick-witted girl said, with the best grace she could, and added in her mind a secret clause to soften down the fiction, – “he is so aggravating; and when I saw my Madonna looking so sweet and so still – ”

“Hush!” said Mary “there was no need for crying about that – nor for telling fibs either,” she added, with a smile that went to the heart of the ensign’s wife. “You see there is nothing the matter with me,” Mrs. Ochterlony added; but notwithstanding her perfect composure it was in a harder tone.

“I never expected anything else,” said the impetuous little woman; “as if any nonsense could do any harm to you! And I love the Major, and I always have stood up for him; but oh, I should just like for once to box his ears.”

“Hush!” said Mary again; and then the need she had of sympathy prompted her for one moment to descend to the level of the little girl beside her, who was all sympathy and no criticism, which Mary knew to be a kind of friendship wonderfully uncommon in this world. “It did me no harm,” she said, feeling a certain relief in dropping her reserve, and making visible the one thing of which they were both thinking, and which had no need of being identified by name. “It did me no harm, and it pleased him. I don’t deny that it hurt at the time,” Mary added after a little pause, with a smile; “but that is all over now. You need not cry over me, my dear.”

“I – cry over you,” cried the prevaricating Emma, “as if such a thing had ever come into my head; but I did feel glad I was a married lady,” the little thing added; and then saw her mistake, and blushed and faltered and did not know what to say next. Mrs. Ochterlony knew very well what her young visitor meant, but she took no notice, as was the wisest way. She had steeled herself to all the consequences by this time, and knew she must accustom herself to such allusions and to take no notice of them. But it was hard upon her, who had been so good to the child, to think that little Emma was glad she was a married lady, and could in her turn give a certain countenance. All these sharp, secret, unseen arrows went direct to Mary’s heart.

But on the whole the regiment kept its word and made no difference. Mrs. Kirkman called every Wednesday and took Mary with her to the prayer-meeting which she held among the soldiers’ wives, and where she said she was having much precious fruit; and was never weary of representing to her companion that she had need of being brought down and humbled, and that for her part she would rejoice in anything that would bring her dear Mary to a more serious way of thinking; which was an expression of feeling perfectly genuine on Mrs. Kirkman’s part, though at the same time she felt more and more convinced that Mrs. Ochterlony had been deceiving her, and was not by any means an innocent sufferer. The Colonel’s wife was quite sincere in both these beliefs, though it would be hard to say how she reconciled them to each other; but then a woman is not bound to be logical, whether she belongs to High or Low Church. At the same time she brought Mary sermons to read, with passages marked, which were adapted for both these states of feeling, – some consoling the righteous who were chastened because they were beloved, and some exhorting the sinners who had been long callous and now were beginning to awaken to a sense of their sins. Perhaps Mary, who was not very discriminating in point of sermon-books, read both with equal innocence, not seeing their special application: but she could scarcely be so blind when her friend discoursed at the Mothers’ Meeting upon the Scripture Marys, and upon her who wept at the Saviour’s feet. Mrs. Ochterlony understood then, and never forgot afterwards, that it was that Mary with whom, in the mind of one of her most intimate associates, she had come to be identified. Not the Mary blessed among women, the type of motherhood and purity, but the other Mary, who was forgiven much because she had much loved. That night she went home with a swelling heart, wondering over the great injustice of human ways and dealings, and crying within herself to the Great Spectator who knew all against the evil thoughts of her neighbours. Was that what they all believed of her, all these women? and yet she had done nothing to deserve it, not so much as by a light look, or thought, or word; and it was not as if she could defend herself, or convince them of their cruelty: for nobody accused her, nobody reproached her – her friends, as they all said, made no difference. This was the sudden cloud that came over Mary in the very fairest and best moment of her life.

But as for the Major, he knew nothing about all that. It had been done for his peace of mind, and until the next thing occurred to worry him he was radiant with good-humour and satisfaction. If he saw at any time a cloud on his wife’s face, he thought it was because of that approaching necessity which took the pleasure out of everything even to himself, for the moment, when he thought of it – the necessity of sending Hugh “home.” “We shall still have Islay for a few years at least, my darling,” he would say, in his affectionate way; “and then the baby,” – for there was a baby, which had come some time after the event which we have just narrated. That too must have had something to do, no doubt, with Mary’s low spirits. “He’ll get along famously with Aunt Agatha, and get spoiled, that fellow will,” the Major said; “and as for Islay, we’ll make a man of him.” And except at those moments, when, as we have just said, the thoughts of his little Hugh’s approaching departure struck him, Major Ochterlony was as happy and light-hearted as a man who is very well off in all his domestic concerns, and getting on in his profession, and who has a pleasant consciousness of doing his duty to all men and a grateful sense of the mercies of God, should be, and naturally is. When two people are yoked for life together, there is generally one of the two who bears the burden, while the other takes things easy. Sometimes it is the husband, as is fit and right, who has the heavy weight on his shoulders; but sometimes, and oftener than people think, it is the wife. And perhaps this was why Major Ochterlony was so frisky in his harness, and Madonna Mary felt her serenity fall into sadness, and was conscious of going on very slowly and heavily upon the way of life. Not that he was to blame, who was now, as always, the best husband in the regiment, or even in the world. Mary would not for all his fidgets, not for any reward, have changed him against Colonel Kirkman with his fishy eye, nor against Captain Hesketh’s jolly countenance, nor for anybody else within her range of vision. He was very far from perfect, and in utter innocence had given her a wound which throbbed and bled daily whichever way she turned herself, and which she would never cease to feel all her life; but still at the same time he stood alone in the world, so far as Mary’s heart was concerned: for true love is, of all things on earth, the most pertinacious and unreasonable, let the philosophers say what they will.

And then the baby, for his part, was not like what the other babies had been; he was not a great fellow, like Hugh and Islay; but puny and pitiful and weakly, – a little selfish soul that would leave his mother no rest. She had been content to leave the other boys to Providence and Nature, tending them tenderly, wholesomely, and not too much, and hoping to make men of them some day; but with this baby Mary fell to dreaming, wondering often as he lay in her lap what his future would be. She used to ask herself unconsciously, without knowing why, what his influence might be on the lives of his brothers, who were like and yet so unlike him: though when she roused up she rebuked herself, and thought how much more reasonable it would be to speculate upon Hugh’s influence, who was the eldest, or even upon Islay, who had the longest head in the regiment, and looked as if he meant to make some use of it one day. To think of the influence of little weakly Wilfrid coming to be of any permanent importance in the lives of those two strong fellows seemed absurd enough; and yet it was an idea which would come back to her, when she thought without thinking, and escaped as it were into a spontaneous state of mind. The name even was a weak-minded sort of name, and did not please Mary; and all sorts of strange fancies came into her head as she sat with the pitiful little peevish baby, who insisted upon having all her attention, lying awake and fractious upon her wearied knee.

Thus it was that the first important scene of her history came to an end, with thorns which she never dreamed of planted in Mrs. Ochterlony’s way, and a still greater and more unthought-of cloud rising slowly upon the broken serenity of her life.

CHAPTER VI

EVERYTHING however went on well enough at the station for some time after the great occurrence which counted for so much in Mrs. Ochterlony’s history; and the Major was very peaceable, for him, and nothing but trifling matters being in his way to move him, had fewer fidgets than usual. To be sure he was put out now and then by something the Colonel said or did, or by Hesketh’s well-off-ness, which had come to the length of a moral peculiarity, and was trying to a man; but these little disturbances fizzed themselves out, and got done with without troubling anybody much. There was a lull, and most people were surprised at it and disposed to think that something must be the matter with the Major; but there was nothing the matter. Probably it occurred to him now and then that his last great fidget had rather gone a step too far – but this is mere conjecture, for he certainly never said so. And then, after a while, he began to play, as it were, with the next grand object of uneasiness which was to distract his existence. This was the sending “home” of little Hugh. It was not that he did not feel to the utmost the blank this event would cause in the house, and the dreadful tug at his heart, and the difference it would make to Mary. But at the same time it was a thing that had to be done, and Major Ochterlony hoped his feelings would never make him fail in his duty. He used to feel Hugh’s head if it was hot, and look at his tongue at all sorts of untimely moments, which Mary knew meant nothing, but yet which made her thrill and tremble to her heart; and then he would shake his own head and look sad. “I would give him a little quinine, my dear,” he would say; and then Mary, out of her very alarm and pain, would turn upon him.

“Why should I give him quinine? It is time enough when he shows signs of wanting it. The child is quite well, Hugh.” But there was a certain quiver in Mrs. Ochterlony’s voice which the Major could not and did not mistake.

“Oh yes, he is quite well,” he would reply; “come and let me feel if you have any flesh on your bones, old fellow. He is awfully thin, Mary. I don’t think he would weigh half so much as he did a year ago if you were to try. I don’t want to alarm you, my dear; but we must do it sooner or later, and in a thing that is so important for the child, we must not think of ourselves,” said Major Ochterlony; and then again he laid his hand with that doubting, experimenting look upon the boy’s brow, to feel “if there was any fever,” as he said.

“He is quite well,” said Mary, who felt as if she were going distracted while this pantomime went on. “You do frighten me, though you don’t mean it; but I know he is quite well.”

“Oh yes,” said Major Ochterlony, with a sigh; and he kissed his little boy solemnly, and set him down as if things were in a very bad way; “he is quite well. But I have seen when five or six hours have changed all that,” he added with a still more profound sigh, and got up as if he could not bear further consideration of the subject, and went out and strolled into somebody’s quarters, where Mary did not see how light-hearted he was half-and-hour after, quite naturally, because he had poured out his uneasiness, and a little more, and got quite rid of it, leaving her with the arrow sticking in her heart. No wonder that Mrs. Kirkman, who came in as the Major went out, said that even a very experienced Christian would have found it trying. As for Mary, when she woke up in the middle of the night, which little peevish Wilfrid gave her plenty of occasion to do, she used to steal off as soon as she had quieted that baby-tyrant, and look at her eldest boy in his little bed, and put her soft hand on his head, and stoop over him to listen to his breathing. And sometimes she persuaded herself that his forehead was hot, which it was quite likely to be, and got no more sleep that night; though as for the Major, he was a capital sleeper. And then somehow it was not so easy as it had been to conclude that it was only his way; for after his way had once brought about such consequences as in that re-marriage which Mary felt a positive physical pain in remembering, it was no longer to be taken lightly. The consequence was, that Mrs. Ochterlony wound herself up, and summoned all her courage, and wrote to Aunt Agatha, though she thought it best, until she had an answer, to say nothing about it; and she began to look over all little Hugh’s wardrobe, to make and mend, and consider within herself what warm things she could get him for the termination of that inevitable voyage, and to think what might happen before she had these little things of his in her care again – how they would wear out and be replenished, and his mother have no hand in it – and how he would get on without her. She used to make pictures of the little forlorn fellow on shipboard, and how he would cry himself to sleep, till the tears came dropping on her needle and rusted it; and then would try to think how good Aunt Agatha would be to him, but was not to say comforted by that – not so much as she ought to have been. There was nothing in the least remarkable in all this, but only what a great many people have to go through, and what Mrs. Ochterlony no doubt would go through with courage when the inevitable moment came. It was the looking forward to and rehearsing it, and the Major’s awful suggestions, and the constant dread of feeling little Hugh’s head hot, or his tongue white, and thinking it was her fault – this was what made it so hard on Mary; though Major Ochterlony never meant to alarm her, as anybody might see.

“I think he should certainly go home,” Mrs. Kirkman said. “It is a trial, but it is one of the trials that will work for good. I don’t like to blame you, Mary, but I have always thought your children were a temptation to you; oh, take care! – if you were to make idols of them – ”

“I don’t make idols of them,” said Mrs. Ochterlony, hastily; and then she added, with an effort of self-control which stopped even the rising colour on her cheek, “You know I don’t agree with you about these things.” She did not agree with Mrs. Kirkman; and yet to tell the truth, where so much is concerned, it is a little hard for a woman, however convinced she may be of God’s goodness, not to fail in her faith and learn to think that, after all, the opinion which would make an end of her best hopes and her surest confidence may be true.

“I know you don’t agree with me,” said the Colonel’s wife, sitting down with a sigh. “Oh, Mary, if you only knew how much I would give to see you taking these things to heart – to see you not almost, but altogether such as I am,” she added, with sudden pathos. “If you would but remember that these blessings are only lent us – that we don’t know what day or hour they may be taken back again – ”

All this Mary listened to with a rising of nature in her heart against it, and yet with that wavering behind, – What if it might be true?

“Don’t speak to me so,” she said. “You always make me think that something is going to happen. As if God grudged us our little happiness. Don’t talk of lending and taking back again. If He is not a cheerful giver, who can be?” For she was carried away by her feelings, and was not quite sure what she was saying – and at the same time, it comes so much easier to human nature to think that God grudges and takes back again, and is not a cheerful giver. As for Mrs. Kirkman, she thought it sinful so much as to imagine anything of the kind.

“It grieves me to hear you speak in that loose sort of latitudinarian way,” she said; “oh, my dear Mary, if you could only see how much need you have to be brought low. When one cross is not enough, another comes – and I feel that you are not going to be let alone. This trial, if you take it in a right spirit, may have the most blessed consequences. It must be to keep you from making an idol of him, my dear – for if he takes up your heart from better things – ”

What could Mary say? She stopped in her work to give her hands an impatient wring together, by way of expressing somehow in secret to herself the impatience with which she listened. Yet perhaps, after all, it might be true. Perhaps God was not such a Father as He, the supreme and all-loving, whom her own motherhood shadowed forth in Mary’s heart, but such a one as those old pedant fathers, who took away pleasures and reclaimed gifts, for discipline’s sake. Perhaps – for when a heart has everything most dear to it at stake, it has such a miserable inclination to believe the worst of Him who leaves his explanation to the end, – Mary thought perhaps it might be true, and that God her Father might be lying in wait for her somewhere to crush her to the ground for having too much pleasure in his gift, – which was the state of mind which her friend, who was at the bottom of her heart a good woman, would have liked to bring about.