"So I will do my best a gude wife to be, For Auld Robin Grey is vera kind to me."
"I think this will do, my dear; just listen;" and in a mysterious half whisper, good Mrs. Ferguson, wife of James Ferguson, the well-to-do silversmith and jeweler, of High Street, Avonsbridge, read aloud from the sheet of paper in her hand:
"'On the 21st instant, at the University Church, Avonsbridge, by the
Reverend John Smith, the Reverend Arnold Grey, D.D., Master of Saint
Bede's College, Avonsbridge, to Christian, only child of the late Edward
Oakley, Esq., of that place.' Will it do? Because, if so, James will
send it to 'The Times' at once."
"Better ask Dr. Grey first," answered the bride.
As she spoke, Dr. Grey turned round from the window where he had been conversing—that is, responding to conversation—with Mr. Ferguson, chiefly on the weather; for it was a snowy December day.
This precise moment, half an hour after his marriage—his second marriage—is hardly a fair time to describe Dr. Arnold Grey; suffice it to say that he was a gentleman apparently about forty-five, rather low in stature, and spare in figure, with hair already thin and iron-gray. The twenty-five years between him and his newly-married wife showed plainly—only too plainly—as she stood, in all her gracefulness of girlhood, which even her extreme pallor and a certain sharp, worn, unnaturally composed look could not destroy. He seemed struck by this. His face clouded over for a minute, and he slightly sighed. But the pain, whatever it was, was only momentary. He looked like a man who was not in the habit of acting hastily or impulsively—who never did any thing without having previously fully counted the cost.
"What were you saying, Mrs. Ferguson?" said he, addressing her with the grave and somewhat formal politeness which was his natural manner, but which always somewhat awed that rather vulgar, though kind-hearted and well-meaning woman.
She put the paper into his hands. "It's the notice for 'The Times;'
James and I made it up last night. James thought it would save you
trouble, master—" Mrs. Ferguson always hesitated between this common
University custom of address and plain, "Dr. Grey."
"Thank you; Mr. Ferguson is always kind," returned the Master of Saint
Bede's.
"You see," continued Mrs. Ferguson, lowering her tone to a confidential whisper, "I thought it was better only to put 'Edward Oakley, Esq.,' and nothing more. Wouldn't you like it to be so, sir?"
"I should like it to be exactly as—" he paused, and the color rushed violently over his thin, worn, and yet sensitive face, as sensitive as if he had been a young man still—"exactly as Mrs. Grey pleases."
Mrs. Grey! At the sound of her new name Christian started, and she, too, turned scarlet. Not the sweet, rosy blush of a bride, but the dark red flush of sharp physical or mental pain, which all her self-control could not hide.
"Poor dear! poor dear! this is a great change for her, and only a year since her father died," said Mrs. Ferguson, still in that mysterious, apologetic whisper. "But indeed, my love, you have done quite right in marrying; and don't fret a bit about it. Never mind her, sir; she'll be better by-and-by." This oppression of pity would have nerved any one of reserved temperament to die rather than betray the least fragment of emotion more. Christian gathered herself up; her face grew pale again, and her voice steady. She looked, not at Mrs. Ferguson, but at the good man who had just made her his wife—and any one looking at him must have felt that he was a good man—then said, gently but determinedly,
"If Dr. Grey has no objection, I should like to have stated my father's occupation or my own. I do not wish to hide or appear ashamed of either."
"Certainly not," replied Dr. Grey; and, taking up the pen, he added, "Edward Oakley, Esq., late organist of Saint Bede's." It was the last earthly memento of one who, born a gentleman and a genius, had so lived, that, as all Avonsbridge well knew, the greatest blessing which could have happened to his daughter was his death. But, as by some strange and merciful law of compensation often occurs, Christian, inheriting mind and person from him, had inherited temperament, disposition, character from the lowly-born mother, who was every thing that he was not, and who had lived just long enough to stamp on the girl of thirteen a moral impress which could resist all contamination, and leave behind a lovely dream of motherhood that might, perhaps—God knows!—have been diviner than the reality.
These things Dr. Grey, brought accidentally into contact with Christian Oakley on business matters after her father's lamentable death, speedily discovered for himself; and the result was one of those sudden resolves which in some men spring from mere passion, in others from an instinct so deep and true that they are not to be judged by ordinary rules. People call it "love at first sight," and sometimes tell wonderful stories of how a man sees, quite unexpectedly, some sweet, strange, and yet mysteriously familiar face, which takes possession of his fancy with an almost supernatural force. He says to himself, "That woman shall be my wife;" and some day, months or years after, he actually marries her; even as, within a twelvemonth, having waited silently until she was twenty-one, Dr. Grey married Christian Oakley.
But until within a few weeks ago she herself had had no idea of the kind. She intensely respected him; her gratitude for his fatherly care and kindness was almost boundless; but marrying him, or marrying at all, was quite foreign to her thoughts. How things had come about even yet she could hardly remember or comprehend. All was a perfect dream. It seemed another person, and not she, who was suddenly changed from Mrs. Ferguson's poor governess, without a friend or relative in the wide world, to the wife of the Master of Saint Bede's.
That she could have married, or been thought to have married him, for aught but his own good and generous self, or that the mastership of Saint Bede's, his easy income, and his high reputation had any thing to do with it, never once crossed her imagination. She was so simple; her forlorn, shut-up, unhappy life had kept her, if wildly romantic, so intensely, childishly true, that, whatever objections she had to Dr. Grey's offer, the idea that this could form one of them—that any one could suspect her—her, Christian Oakley—of marrying for money or for a home, did not occur to her for an instant. He saw that, this lover, who, from his many years of seniority, and the experience of a somewhat hard life, looked right down into the depths of the girl's perplexed, troubled, passionate, innocent heart, and he was not afraid. Though she told him quite plainly that she felt for him not love, but only affection and gratitude, he had simply said, with his own tender smile, "Never mind—I love you;" and married her.
As she stood in her white dress, white shawl, white bonnet—all as plain as possible, but still pure bridal white, contrasted strongly with the glaring colors of that drawing-room over the shop, which Poor Mrs. Ferguson had done her luckless best to make as fine as possible, her tall, slender figure, harmonious movements and tones, being only more noticeable by the presence of that stout, gaudily-dressed, and loud-speaking woman, most people would have said that, though he had married a governess, a solitary, unprotected woman, with neither kith nor kin to give her dignity, earning her own bread by her own honest labor, the master of Saint Bede's was not exactly a man to be pitied.
He rose, and having silently shown the paper to Christian, enclosed it in an envelope, and gave it to Mr. Ferguson.
"Will you take the trouble of forwarding this to 'The Times,' the latest of all your many kindnesses?" said he, with that manner, innately a gentleman's, which makes the acknowledging of a favor appear like the conferring of one.
Worthy James Ferguson took it as such; but he was a person of deeds, not words; and he never could quite overcome the awe with which, as an Avonsbridge person, he, the jeweler of High Street, regarded the master of St. Bede's.
Meanwhile the snow, which had been falling all day, fell thicker and thicker, so that the hazy light of the drawing-room darkened into absolute gloom.
"Don't you think the children should be here?" said Mrs. Ferguson, pausing in her assiduous administration of cake and wine. "That is—I'm sure I beg your pardon, master—if they are really coming."
"I desired my sisters to send them without fail," quietly replied the master.
But another half hour dragged heavily on; the bridegroom's carriage, which was to take them across country to a quiet railway station, already stood at the door, when another carriage was heard to drive up to it.
"There they are!" cried Mrs. Ferguson; and the bride, who had been sitting beside her on the sofa, passive, silent, all but motionless, started a little.
"Oh, I'm so glad!" she said, in the first natural tone that had been heard in her voice all day. "I did so want to see the children."
Dr. Grey went out of the room at once, and Mrs. Ferguson had the good sense to follow, taking her husband with her. "For," as she said afterward, "the first sight of three stepchildren, and she, poor dear, such a mere girl, must be a very unpleasant thing." For her part, she was thankful that when she married James Ferguson he was a bachelor, with not a soul belonging to him except an old aunt. She wouldn't like to be in poor Mrs. Grey's shoes—"dear me, no!"—with those two old ladies who have lived at the Lodge ever since the first Mrs. Grey died. She wondered how on earth Miss Oakley would manage them. And upon James Ferguson's suggesting "in the same way as she managed every body," his wife soundly berated him for saying such a silly thing, though he had, with the usual acuteness of silent people, said a wiser thing than he was aware of.
Meantime Christian was left alone, for the first time that day, and many days; for solitude was a blessing not easy to get in the Ferguson's large, bustling family. Perhaps she did not seek it—perhaps she dared not. Anyhow, during the month that had been occupied with her marriage preparations, she had scarcely been ten minutes alone, not even at night, for two children shared her room—the loving little things whom she had taught for two years, first as daily, and then as resident governess, and to whom she had persisted in giving lessons till the last.
She stood with the same fixed composedness—not composure—of manner; the quietness of a person who, having certain things to go through, goes through them in a sort of dream, almost without recognizing her own identity. Women, more than men, are subject to this strange, somnambulistic, mental condition, the result of strong emotion, in which they both do and endure to an extent that men would never think of or find possible.
After a minute she moved slightly, took up and laid down a book, but still mechanically, as if she did not quite know what she was doing until, suddenly, she caught sight of her wedding-ring. She regarded it with something very like affright; tried convulsively to pull it off; but it was rather tight; and before it had passed a finger-joint she had recollected herself and pressed it down again.
"It is too late now. He is so good—every body says so—and he is so very good to me."
She spoke aloud, though she was alone in the room, or rather because she was alone, after a habit which, like all solitarily reared and dreamy persons, Christian had had all her life—her young, short life—only twenty-one years—and yet it seemed to her a whole, long, weary existence.
"If I can but make him happy! If what is left to me is only enough to make him happy!"
These broken sentences were repeated more than once, and then she stood silent as though in a dream still.
When she heard the door open, she turned round with that still, gentle, passive smile which had welcomed Dr. Grey on every day of his brief "courting" days. It never altered, though he entered in a character not the pleasantest for a bridegroom, with his three little children, one on either side of him, and the youngest in his arms.
But there are some men, and mostly those grave, shy, and reserved men, who have always the truest and tenderest hearts, whom nothing transforms so much as to be with children, especially if the children are their own. They are given to hiding a great deal, but the father in them can not be hid. Why should it? Every man who has anything really manly in his nature knows well that to be a truly good father, carrying out by sober reason and conscience those duties which in the mother spring from instinct, is the utmost dignity to which his human nature can attain.
Miss Oakley, like the rest of Avonsbridge, had long-known Dr. Grey's history; how he had married early, or (ill-natured report said) been married by, a widow lady, very handsome, and some years older than himself. However, the sharpest insinuations ever made against their domestic bliss were that she visited a good deal, while he was deeply absorbed in his studies. And when, after a good many childless years, she brought him a girl and boy, he became excessively fond of his children. Whether this implied that he had been disappointed in his wife, nobody could tell. He certainly did not publish his woes. Men seldom do. At the birth of a third child Mrs. Grey died, and then the widower's grief; though unobtrusive, was sufficiently obvious to make Avonsbridge put all unkindly curiosity aside, and conclude that the departed lady must have been the most exemplary and well-beloved of wives and mothers.
All this, being town's talk, Christian already knew; more she had never inquired, not even when she was engaged to him. Nor did Dr. Grey volunteer any information. The strongest and most soothing part of his influence over her was his exceeding silence. He had never troubled her with any great demonstrations, nor frightened her with questionings. From the time of their engagement he had seemed to take every thing for granted, and to treat her tenderly, almost reverently, without fuss or parade, yet with the consideration due from a man to his future wife; so much so that she had hardly missed, what, indeed, in her simplicity she hardly expected, the attention usually paid to an affianced bride from the relatives of her intended. Dr. Grey had only two, his own sister and his late wife's. These ladies, Miss Gascoigne and Miss Grey, had neither called upon nor taken the least notice of Miss Oakley. But Miss Oakley—if she thought about the matter at all—ascribed it to a fact well recognized in Avonsbridge, as in most University towns, that one might as soon expect the skies to fall as for a college lady to cross, save for purely business purposes, the threshold of a High Street tradesman. The same cause, she concluded, made them absent from her wedding; and when Dr. Grey had said simply, "I shall desire my sisters to send the children," Christian had inquired no farther. Only for a second, hanging on the brink of this first meeting with the children—her husband's children, hers that were to be—did her heart fail her, and then she came forward to meet the little group.
Letitia and Arthur were thin, prim-looking, rather plain children; but Oliver was the very picture of a father's darling, a boy that any childless man would bitterly covet, any childless woman crave and yearn for, with a longing that women alone can understand; a child who, beautiful as most childhood is, had a beauty you rarely see—bright, frank, merry, bold; half a Bacchus and half a Cupid, he was a perfect image of the Golden Age. Though three years old, he was evidently still "the baby," and rode on his father's shoulder with a glorious tyranny charming to behold.
"Who's that?" said he, pointing his fat fingers and shaking his curls that undulated like billows of gold.
"Papa, who's that?"
Hardly could there have been put by anyone a more difficult question.
Dr. Grey did not answer, but avoided it, taking the whole three to
Christian's side, and bidding them, in a rather nervous voice, to "kiss
this lady."
But that ceremony the two elder obstinately declined.
"I am a big boy, and I don't like to be kissed," said Arthur.
"Nurse told us, since we had no mamma of our own, we were not to kiss any body but our aunts," added Letitia.
Dr. Grey looked terribly annoyed, but Christian said calmly, "Very well, then shake hands only. We shall be better friends by-and-by."
They suffered her to touch a little hand of each, passively rather than unwillingly, and let it go. For a minute or so the boy and girl stood opposite her, holding fast by one another, and staring with all their eyes; but they said nothing more, being apparently very "good" children, that is, children brought up under the old-fashioned rules, which are indicated in the celebrated rhyme,
"Come when you're called,
Do as you're bid:
Shut the door after you,
And you'll never be chid."
Therefore, on being told to sit down, they gravely took their places on the sofa, and continued to stare.
The father and bridegroom looked on, silent as they. What could he say or do? It was the natural and necessary opening up of that vexed question—second marriages, concerning which moralists, sentimentalists, and practical people argue forever, and never come to any conclusion. Of course not, because each separate case should decide itself. The only universal rule or law, if there be one, is that which applies equally to the love before marriage; that as to a complete, mutual first love, any after love is neither likely, necessary, nor desirable; so, to anyone who has known a perfect first marriage—the whole satisfaction of every requirement of heart and soul and human affection—unto such, a second marriage, like a second love, would be neither right nor wrong, advisable nor unadvisable, but simply impossible.
What could he do—the father who had just given his children a new mother, they being old enough not only to understand this, but previously taught; as most people are so fatally ready to teach children, the usual doctrine about step-mothers, and also quite ready to rebel against the same?
The step-mother likewise, what could she do, even had she recognized and felt all that the children's behavior implied?
Alas! (I say "alas!" for this was as sad a thing as the other) she did not recognize it. She scarcely noticed it at all. In her countenance was no annoyance—no sharp pain, that even in that first bridal hour she was not first and sole, as every woman may righteously wish to be. There came to her no sting of regret, scarcely unnatural, to watch another woman's children already taking the first and best of that fatherly love which it would be such exquisite joy to see lavished upon her own. Alas! poor Christian! all these things passed over her as the wind passes over a bare February tree, stirring no emotions, for there were none to stir. Her predominating feeling was a vague sense of relief in the presence of the children, and of delight in the exceeding beauty of the youngest.
"This is Oliver. I remember you told me his name. Will he come to me? children generally do," said she in a shy sort of way, but still holding out her arms. In her face and manner was that inexplicable motherliness which some girls have even while nursing their dolls —some never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children—never!
Master Oliver guessed this by instinct, as children always do. He looked at her intently, a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then broke into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed. Christian, the solitary governess, first the worse than orphan, and then the real orphan, without a friend or relative in the world, felt a child clinging round her neck—a child toward whom, by the laws of God and man, she was bound to fulfill all the duties of a mother—duties which, from the time when she insisted on having a "big doll," that she might dress it, not like a fine lady, but "like a baby," had always seemed to her the very sweetest in all the world. Her heart leaped with a sudden ecstasy, involuntary and uncontrollable.
"My bonny boy!" she murmured, kissing the top of that billowy curl which extended from brow to crown—"my curl"—for Oliver immediately and proudly pointed it to her. "And to think that his mother never saw him. Poor thing! poor thing!"
Dr. Grey turned away to the window. What remembrances, bitter or sweet, came over the widower's heart, Heaven knows! But he kept them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things that were incommunicable and inevitable, and especially all things that could have given pain to any human being. He only said on returning,
"I knew, Christian, from the first, that you would be a good mother to my children."
She looked up at him, the tears in her eyes, but with a great light shining in them too.
"I will try."
Poor Christian! If her hasty marriage, or any other mistake of her life, needed pardon, surely it might be won for the earnest sincerity of this vow, and for its self-forgetful, utter humility—"I will try."
For another half hour, at her entreaty, the children staid, though Letitia and Arthur never relaxed from their dignified decorum farther than to inform her that they were sometimes called "Titia" and "Atty;" that their nurse was named Phillis; and that she had remained in the carriage because "she said she would not come in." Still, having expected nothing, the young step-mother was not disappointed. And when the three left, Oliver having held up his rosy mouth voluntarily for "a good large kiss," the sweetness of the caress lingered on her mouth like a chrism of consecration, sanctifying her for these new duties which seemed to have been sent to her without her choice, almost without her volition; for she often felt, when she paused to thing at all, as if in the successive links of circumstances which had brought about her marriage, she had been a passive agent, led on step by step, like a person half asleep. Would she ever awake?
When Mrs. Ferguson, re-entering, ready with any amount of sympathy, found the young step-mother kissing her hand to the retreating carriage with a composed smile, which asked no condolence, and offered no confidences, the good lady was, to say the least, surprised. "But," as she afterward confessed to at least two dozen of her most intimate friends, "there always was something so odd, so different from most young ladies about Miss. Oakley." However, to the young lady herself she said nothing, except suggesting, rather meekly, that it was time to change her dress.
"And just once more let me beg you to take my shawl—my very best—instead of your own, which you have had a year and a half. Ah!" sighing, "if you had only spent more money on your wedding clothes!"
"How could I?" said Christian, and stopped, seeing Dr. Grey enter. This was the one point on which she had resisted him. She could not accept her trousseau from her husband's generosity. It had been the last struggle of that fierce, poverty-nurtured independence, which nothing short of perfect love could have extinguished into happy humility, and she had held to her point resolute and hard; so much so, that when, with a quiet dignity peculiarly his own, Dr. Grey had yielded, she had afterward almost felt ashamed. And even now a slight blush came in her cheek when she heard him say cheerfully,
"Do not trouble her, Mrs. Ferguson, about her shawl. You know I have taken her—that is, we have taken one another 'for better, for worse,' and it is little matter what sort of clothes she wears."
Christian, as she passed him, gave her husband a grateful look.
Grateful, alas! Love does not understand, or even recognize, gratitude.
But when the door closed after her, Dr. Grey's eyes rested on it like those of one who misses a light.
He sat down covering his mouth—his firmly-set but excessively sensitive month with his hand, an attitude which was one of his peculiarities; for he had many, which the world excused because of his learning, and his friends—well, because of himself.
If ever there was a man who without the slightest obtrusiveness, or self-assertion of any kind, had unlimited influence over those about him, it was Arnold Grey. Throughout a life spent entirely within the college walls, he had, from freshman to fellow, from thence to tutor, and so on to the early dignity of mastership, the most extraordinary faculty of making people do whatsoever he liked—-ay, and enjoy the doing of it. Friends, acquaintances, undergraduates, even down to children and servants, all did, more or less, sooner or later, the good pleasure of Dr. Grey. Perhaps the secret of this was that his "pleasure" was never merely his own. None wield such absolute power over others as those who think little about themselves.
Had circumstance, or his own inclination, led him out farther into the world, he might have been noticeable there, for he had very great and varied acquirements—-more acquirements perhaps, than originalities. He had never written a book, but he had read almost every book that ever was written—or, at least, such was the belief current in Avonsbridge. In his study he was literally entombed in books—-volumes in all languages—and Avonsbridge supposed him able to read them all. How far this was a popular superstition, and to what length his learning went, it is impossible to say. But nobody ever came quite to the end of it. He was a silent, modest man, who never spoke much of what he knew, or of himself in any wise. His strongest outward characteristic was quietness, both of manner, speech, motions, springing, it appeared, out of a corresponding quietness of soul. Whether it had been born with him, or through what storms of human passion and suffering he had attained to this permanent central calm, who could say? Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, had never been dropped yet.
As he sat, his grave eyes fixed on the ground, and his mouth covered by the long thin brown hand—the sort of hand you see in mediaeval portraits of student-gentlemen—nothing of him was discernible except the gentleman and the student. Not though he sat waiting for his "two-hours' wife," whom undoubtedly he had married for love—pure love—the only reason for which anyone, man or woman, old or young, ought to dare to marry. That he could feel as very few have the power to feel, no one who was any judge of physiognomy could doubt for a moment; yet he sat perfectly quiet—the quietness of a man accustomed to something safer and higher than self-suppression—self-control. When Mr. Ferguson came in, he rose and began to speak about the weather and local topics as men do speak to one another—and better that they should!—even at such crises as weddings or funerals.
And Christian his wife?
She had run up stairs—ran almost with her former light step, for her heart felt lightened with the childish smile of little Oliver—to the attic which for the last nine months she had occupied—the nursery, now made into a bedroom, and tenanted by herself and the two little Fergusons. No special sanctity of appropriation had it; a large, somewhat bare room, in which not a thing was her own, either to miss or leave behind. For, in truth, she had nothing of her own; the small personalities which she had contrived to drag about with her from lodging to lodging having all gone to pay debts, which she had insisted —and Dr. Grey agreed—ought to be paid before she was married. So he had taken from her the desk, the work-table, and the other valueless yet well-prized feminine trifles, and brought her, as their equivalent, a sum large enough to pay both these debts and all her marriage expenses, which sum she, ignorant and unsuspicious, took gratefully, merely saying "he was very kind."
She now looked round on her sole worldly possessions—the large trunk which contained her ordinary apparel, and the smaller one, in which were packed all she needed for her fortnight's marriage tour. Her traveling dress lay on the bed—a plain dark silk—her only silk gown except the marriage one. She let Mrs. Ferguson array her in it, and then, with her usual mechanical orderliness, began folding up the shining white draperies and laying them in the larger trunk.
"Shall I send that direct to the Lodge, my dear?"
Christian looked up absently.
"To Saint Bede's Lodge—you know—that it may be ready for you when you come home?"
Home—that blessed word which should send a thrill to the heart of any bride. Alas! this bride heard it quite unheeding, saying only, "Do what you think best, Mrs. Ferguson."
And then she proceeded to fasten her collar and complete the minutiae of her dress with that careful neatness which was an instinct with Christian, as it is with all womanly women, though how this poor motherless girl had ever learned womanliness at all was a marvel. She answered chiefly in soft monosyllables to the perpetual stream of Mrs. Ferguson's talk, till at last the good soul could no longer restrain herself.
"Oh, my dear, if you would only speak—only let out your feelings a little; for you must feel this day so; I'm sure I do, just as if it were my own wedding day, or Isabella's, or Sarah Jane's. And when they do come to be married, poor lambs! I hope it will be as good a match as you are making—only, perhaps, not a widower. But I beg your pardon. Oh, Miss Oakley, my dear, we shall miss you so!"
And the good woman, who had a heart—and hearts are worth something—clasped the orphan-bride to her broad bosom, and shed over her a torrent of honest tears.
"Thank you," Christian said, and returned the kiss gently, but no tears came to her eyes.
"And now," added Mrs. Ferguson, recovering herself, "I'll go and see that every thing is right; and I'll get my warm tartan shawl for you to travel in. It is a terrible snowy day still. You'll come down stairs presently?"
"Yes."
But the instant Mrs. Ferguson was gone Christian locked the door. The same look, of more than pain—actual fear—crossed her face. She stood motionless, as if trying to collect herself, and then, with her hands all shaking, took from her traveling-trunk a sealed packet. For a second she seemed irresolute, and only a second.
"It must be done—it is right. I ought to have done it before—Good-by forever."
Good-by to what—or to whom?
All that the fire revealed, as she laid the packet on it, stirring it down into a red hollow, so that not a flickering fragment should be left unconsumed, were four letters—only four—written on dainty paper, in a man's hand, sealed with a man's large heraldic seal. When they were mere dust, Christian rose.
"It is over now—quite over. In the whole world there is nobody to believe in—except him. He is very good, and he loves me. I was right to marry him—yes, quite right."
She repeated this more than once, as if compelling herself to acknowledge it, and then paused.
Christian was not exactly a religious woman—that is, she had lived among such utterly irreligious people, that whatever she thought or felt upon these subjects had to be kept entirely to herself—but she was of a religious nature. She said her prayers duly, and she had one habit—or superstition, some might sneeringly call it—that the last thing before she went on a journey she always opened her Bible; read a verse or two, and knelt down, if only to say, "God, take care of me, and bring me safe back again;" petitions that in many a wretched compelled wandering were not so uncalled for as some might suppose. Before this momentous journey she did the same; but, instead of a Bible, it happened to be the children's Prayer-Book which she took up; it opened at the Marriage Service, which they had been inquisitively conning over; and the first words which flashed upon Christian's eyes were those which had two hours ago passed over her deaf ears, and dull, uncomprehending heart— "For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh."
She started, as if only now she began to comprehend the full force of that awful union—"one flesh" and "till death us do part."
Mrs. Ferguson tried the door, and knocked.
"Dr. Grey is waiting, my dear. You must not keep your husband waiting."
"My husband!" and again, came the wild look, as of a free creature suddenly caught, tied, and bound. "What have I done? oh what have I done? Is it too late?"
Ay, it was too late.
Many a woman has married with far less excuse that Christian did—married for money or position, or in a cowardly yielding to family persuasion, some one who she knew did not love her, or whom she did not love, with the only sort of love which makes marriage sacred. What agonies such women must have endured, if they had any spark of feminine feeling left alive, they themselves know; and what Christian, far more guiltless than they, also endured during the three minutes that she kept Mrs. Ferguson waiting at the locked door, was a thing never to be spoken of, but also never to be forgotten during the longest and happiest lifetime. It was a warning that made her—even her—to the end of her days, say to every young woman she knew, "Beware! Marry for love, or never marry at all."
When she descended, every ray of color had gone out of her face—it was white and passionless as stone; but she kissed the children all around, gave a little present to Isabella, who had been her only bridesmaid, shook hands and said a word or two of thanks to honest James Ferguson, her "father" for the day, and then found herself driving through the familiar streets—not alone. She never would be alone any more.
With a shudder, a sense of dread indescribable, she remembered this. All her innocent, solitary, dreamy days quite over, her happiness vanished; her regrets become a crime. The responsibility of being no longer her own, but another's—bound fixedly and irrevocably by the most solemn vow that can be given or taken, subject to no limitations provisions, or exception while life remained. Oh, it was awful—awful!
She could have shrieked and leaped out of the carriage, to run wildly anywhere—to the world's end—when she felt her hand taken, softly but firmly.
"My dear, how cold you are! Let me make you warm if I can."
And then, in his own quiet, tender way, Dr. Grey wrapped her up in her shawl and rolled a rug about her feet. She took no notice, submitted passively, and neither spoke a word more till they had driven on for two or three miles, into a country road leading to a village where Avonsbridge people sometimes went for summer lodgings.
Christian knew it well. There, just before her father's death, he and she had lived, for four delicious, miserable, momentous weeks. She had never seen the place since, but now she recognized it—every tree, every field, the very farm-house garden, once so bright, now lying deep in snow. She began tremble in every limb.
"Why are we here? This is not our right road. Where are we going?"
"I did not mean to come this way, but we missed the train, and cannot reach London tonight; so I thought we would post across country to E____," naming a quiet cathedral town, "where you can rest, and go on when or where you please. Will that do?"
"Oh yes."
"You are not dissatisfied? We could not help missing the train, you see."
"Oh no."
The quick, sharp, querulous answers—that last refuge of a fictitious strength that was momentarily breaking down—he saw it all, this good man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what sorrow was, and who for a whole year had watched her with the acuteness which love alone teaches, especially the love which, coming late in life, had a calmness and unselfishness which youthful love rarely possesses. The sort of love which, as he had once quoted to her out of an American book, could feel, deeply and solemnly, "that if a man really loves a woman, he would not marry her for the world, were he not quite sure he was the best person she could by any possibility marry"—that is, the one who loved her so perfectly that he was prepared to take upon himself all the burden of her future life, her happiness or sorrow, her peculiarities, shortcomings, faults, and all.
This, though he did not speak a word, was written, plain as in a book, on the face of Christian's husband, as he watched her, still silently, for another mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through the leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light in at the carriage window.
Christian looked up, and closed her eyes again in a passive hopelessness sad to see.