T was accordingly with a little excitement that when the regiment had actually arrived Mrs. Ochterlony set out for the neighbouring town to renew her acquaintance with her old friends. It was winter by that time, and winter is seldom very gentle in Cumberland: but she was too much interested to be detained by the weather. She had said nothing to Wilfrid on the subject, and it startled her a little to find him standing at the door waiting for her, carefully dressed, which was not usually a faculty of his, and evidently prepared to accompany her. When she opened the Cottage door to go out, and saw him, an unaccountable panic seized her. There he stood in the sunshine,—not gay and thoughtless like his brother Hugh, nor preoccupied like Islay,—with his keen eyes and sharp ears, and mind that seemed always to lie in wait for something. The recollection of the one thing which she did not want to be known had come strongly to her mind once more at that particular moment; a little tremor had run through her frame—a sense of half-painful, half-pleasant, excitement. When her eye fell on Wilfrid, she went back a step unconsciously, and her heart for the moment seemed to stop beating. She wanted to bring her friends to Kirtell, to show them her boys and make them acquainted with all her life; and probably, had it been Hugh, he would have accompanied her as a matter of course. But somehow Wilfrid was different. Without knowing what her reason was, she felt reluctant to undergo the first questionings and reminiscences with this keen spectator standing by to hear and see all, and to demand explanation of matters which it might be difficult to explain.
“Did you mean to go with me, Will?” she said. “But you know we cannot leave Aunt Agatha all by herself. I wanted to see you to ask you to be as agreeable as possible while I am gone.”
“I am never agreeable to Aunt Agatha,” said Will; “she always liked the others best; and besides, she does not want me, and I am going to take care of you.”
“Thank you,” said Mary, with a smile; “but I don’t want you either for to-day. We shall have so many things to talk about—old affairs that you would not understand.”
“I like that sort of thing,” said Will; “I like listening to women’s talk—especially when it is about things I don’t understand. It is always something new.”
Mary smiled, but there was something in his persistence that frightened her. “My dear Will, I don’t want you to-day,” she said with a slight shiver, in spite of herself.
“Why, mamma?” said Will, with open eyes.
He was not so well brought up as he ought to have been, as everybody will perceive. He did not accept his mother’s decision, and put away his Sunday hat, and say no more about it. On the contrary, he looked with suspicion (as she thought) at her, and kept his position—surprised and remonstrative, and not disposed to give in.
“Will,” said Mrs. Ochterlony. “I will not have you with me, and that must be enough. These are all people whom I have not seen since you were a baby. It may be a trial for us all to meet, for I don’t know what may have happened to them. I can speak of my affairs before you, for you—know them all,” Mary went on with a momentary faltering; “but it is not to be supposed that they could speak of theirs in the presence of a boy they do not know. Go now and amuse yourself, and don’t do anything to frighten Aunt Agatha: and you can come and meet me by the evening train.”
But she could not get rid of a sense of fear as she left him. He was not like other boys, from whose mind a little contradiction passes away almost as soon as it is spoken. He had that strange faculty of connecting one thing with another, which is sometimes so valuable, and sometimes leads a lively intellect so much astray; and if ever he should come to know that there was anything in his mother’s history which she wished to keep concealed from him—— It was a foolish thought, but it was not the less painful on that account. Mary had come to the end of her little journey before she got free from its influence. The united household at the cottage was not rich enough to possess anything in the shape of a carriage, but they were near the railway, which served almost the same purpose. It seemed to Mrs. Ochterlony as if the twelve intervening years were but a dream when she found herself in a drawing-room which had already taken Mrs. Kirkman’s imprint, and breathed of her in every corner. It was not such a room, it is true, as the hot Indian chamber in which Mary had last seen the colonel’s wife. It was one of the most respectable and sombre, as well as one of the best of the houses which let themselves furnished, with an eye to the officers. It had red curtains and red carpets, and blinds drawn more than half way down; and there were two or three boxes, with a significant slit in the lid, distributed about the different tables. In the centre of the round table before the fire there was a little trophy built up of small Indian gods, which were no doubt English manufacture, but which had been for a long time Mrs. Kirkman’s text, and quite invaluable to her as a proof of the heathen darkness, which was her favourite subject; and at the foot of this ugly pyramid lay a little heap of pamphlets, reports of all the societies under heaven. Mary recognised, too, as she sat and waited, the large brown-paper cover, in which she knew by experience Mrs. Kirkman’s favourite tracts were enclosed; and the little basket which contained a smaller roll, and which had room besides occasionally for a little tea and sugar, when circumstances made them necessary; and the book with limp boards, in which the Colonel’s wife kept her list of names, with little biographical comments opposite, which had once amused the subalterns so much when it fell into their hands. She had her sealed book besides, with a Bramah lock, which was far too sacred to be revealed to profane eyes; but yet, perhaps, she liked to tantalize profane eyes with the sight of its undiscoverable riches, for it lay on the table like the rest. This was how Mary saw at a glance that, whatever might have happened to the others, Mrs. Kirkman at least was quite unchanged.
She came gliding into the room a minute after, so like herself that Mrs. Ochterlony felt once more that time was not, and that her life had been a dream. She folded her visitor in a silent embrace, and kissed her with inexpressible meaning, and fanned her cheeks with those two long locks hanging out of curl, which had been her characteristic embellishments since ever any one remembered. The light hair was now a little grey, but that made no difference to speak of either in colour or general aspect; and, so far as any other change went, those intervening years might never have been.
“My dear Mary!” she said at last. “My dear friend! Oh, what a thought that little as we deserve it, we should have been both spared to meet again!”
There was an emphasis on the both which it was very touching to hear; and Mary naturally could not but feel that the wonder and the thankfulness were chiefly on her own account.
“I am very glad to see you again,” she said, feeling her heart yearn to her old friend—“and so entirely unchanged.”
“Oh, I hope not,” said Mrs. Kirkman. “I hope we have both profited by our opportunities, and made some return for so many mercies. One great thing I have looked forward to ever since I knew we were coming here, was the thought of seeing you again. You know I always considered you one of my own little flock, dear Mary! one of those who would be my crown of rejoicing. It is such a pleasure to have you again.”
And Mrs. Kirkman gave Mrs. Ochterlony another kiss, and thought of the woman that was a sinner with a gush of sweet feeling in her heart.
As for Mary, she took it very quietly, having no inclination to be affronted or offended—but, on the contrary, a kind of satisfaction in finding all as it used to be; the same thoughts and the same kind of talk, and everything unchanged, while all with herself had changed so much. “Thank you,” she said; “and now tell me about yourself and about them all; the Heskeths and the Churchills, and all our old friends. I am thirsting to hear about them, and what changes there may have been, and how many are here.”
“Ah, my dear Mary, there have been many changes,” said Mrs. Kirkman. “Mrs. Churchill died years ago—did you not hear?—and in a very much more prepared state of mind, I trust and hope; and he has a curacy somewhere, and is bringing up the poor children—in his own pernicious views, I sadly fear.”
“Has he pernicious views?” said Mary. “Poor Mrs. Churchill—and yet one could not have looked for anything else.”
“Don’t say poor,” said Mrs. Kirkman. “It is good for her to have been taken away from the evil to come. He is very lax, and always was very lax. You know how little he was to be depended upon at the station, and how much was thrown upon me, unworthy as I am, to do; and it is sad to think of those poor dear children brought up in such opinions. They are very poor, but that is nothing in comparison. Captain Hesketh retired when we came back to England. They went to their own place in the country, and they are very comfortable, I believe—too comfortable, Mary. It makes them forget things that are so much more precious. And I doubt if there is anybody to say a faithful word——”
“She was very kind,” said Mary, “and good to everybody. I am very sorry they are gone.”
“Yes, she was kind,” said Mrs. Kirkman, “that kind of natural amiability which is such a delusion. And everything goes well with them,” she added, with a sigh: “there is nothing to rouse them up. Oh, Mary, you remember what I said when your pride was brought low—anything is better than being let alone.”
Mrs. Ochterlony began to feel her old opposition stirring in her mind, but she refrained heroically, and went on with her interrogatory. “And the doctor,” she said, “and the Askells?—they are still in the regiment. I want you to tell me where I can find Emma, and how things have gone with her—poor child! but she ought not to be such a baby now.”
Mrs. Kirkman sighed. “No, she ought not to be a baby,” she said. “I never like to judge any one, and I would like you to form your own opinion, Mary. She too has little immortal souls committed to her; and oh! it is sad to see how little people think of such a trust—whereas others who would have given their whole souls to it—— But no doubt it is all for the best. I have not asked you yet how are your dear boys? I hope you are endeavouring to make them grow in grace. Oh, Mary, I hope you have thought well over your responsibility. A mother has so much in her hands.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Ochterlony, quickly; “but they are very good boys, and I have every reason to be content with them. Hugh is at Earlston, just now, with his uncle. He is to succeed him, you know; and he is going to Oxford directly, I believe. And Islay is going to Woolwich if he can pass his examination. He is just the same long-headed boy he used to be. And Will—my baby; perhaps you remember what a little thing he was?—I think he is going to be the genius of the family.” Mary went on with a simple effusiveness unusual to her, betrayed by the delight of talking about her boys to some one who knew and yet did not know them. Perhaps she forgot that her listener’s interest could not possibly be so great as her own.
Mrs. Kirkman sat with her hands clasped on her knee, and she looked in Mary’s eyes with a glance which was meant to go to her soul—a mournful inquiring glance which, from under the dropped eyelids, seemed to fall as from an altitude of scarcely human compassion and solicitude. “Oh, call them not good,” she said. “Tell me what signs of awakening you have seen in their hearts. Dear Mary, do not neglect the one thing needful for your precious boys. Think of their immortal souls. That is what interests me much more than their worldly prospects. Do you think their hearts have been truly touched——”
“I think God has been very kind to us all, and that they are good boys,” said Mary; “you know we don’t think quite alike on some subjects; or, at least, we don’t express ourselves alike. I can see you do as much as ever among the men, and among the poor——”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Kirkman, with a sigh; “I feel unworthy of it, and the flesh is weak, and I would fain draw back; but it happens strangely that there is always a very lukewarm ministry wherever we are placed, my dear. I would give anything in the world to be but a hearer of the word like others; but yet woe is unto me if I neglect the work. This is some one coming in now to speak with me on spiritual matters. I am at home to them between two and three; but, my dear Mary, it is not necessary that you, who have been in the position of an inquiring soul yourself, should go away.”
“I will come back again,” said Mary, rising; “and you will come to see me at Kirtell, will not you? It makes one forget how many years have passed to see you employed exactly as of old.”
“Ah, we are all too apt to forget how the years pass,” said Mrs. Kirkman. She gave a nod of recognition to some women who came shyly in at the moment, and then she took Mary’s hand and drew her a step aside. “And nothing more has happened, Mary?” she said; “nothing has followed, and there is to be no inquiry or anything? I am very thankful, for your sake.”
“Inquiry!” said Mary, with momentary amazement. “What kind of inquiry? what could have followed? I do not know what you mean!!”
“I mean about—what gave us all so much pain—your marriage, Mary,” said Mrs. Kirkman. “I hope there has been nothing about it again?”
This was a very sharp trial for the superstition of old friendship in Mrs. Ochterlony’s heart, especially as the inquiring souls who had come to see Mrs. Kirkman were within hearing, and looked with a certain subdued curiosity upon the visitor and the conversation. Mary’s face flushed with a sudden burning, and indignation came to her aid; but even at that moment her strongest feeling was thankfulness that Wilfrid was not there.
“I do not know what could have been about it,” she said: “I am among my own people here; my marriage was well known, and everything about it, in my own place.”
“You are angry, dear,” said Mrs. Kirkman. “Oh, don’t encourage angry feelings; you know I never made any difference; I never imagined it was your fault. And I am so glad to hear it has made no unpleasantness with the dear boys.”
Perhaps it was not with the same charity as at first that Mrs. Ochterlony felt the long curls again fan her cheek, but still she accepted the farewell kiss. She had expected some ideal difference, some visionary kind of elevation, which would leave the same individual, yet a loftier kind of woman, in the place of her former friend. And what she had found was a person quite unchanged—the same woman, harder in her peculiarities rather than softer, as is unfortunately the most usual case. The Colonel’s wife had the best meaning in the world, and she was a good woman in her way; but not a dozen lives, let alone a dozen years, could have given her the finer sense which must come by nature, nor even that tolerance and sweetness of experience, which is a benefit which only a few people in the world draw from the passage of years. Mary was disappointed, but she acknowledged in her heart—having herself acquired that gentleness of experience—that she had no right to be disappointed; and it was with a kind of smile at her own vain expectations that she went in search of Emma Askell, her little friend of old—the impulsive girl, who had amused her, and loved her, and worried her in former times. Young Askell was Captain now, and better off, it was to be hoped: but yet they were not well enough off to be in a handsome house, or have everything proper about them, like the Colonel’s wife. It was in the outskirts of the town that Mary had to seek them, in a house with a little bare garden in front, bare in its winter nakedness, with its little grass-plot trodden down by many feet, and showing all those marks of neglect and indifference which betray the stage at which poverty sinks into a muddle of discouragement and carelessness, and forgets appearances. It was a dirty little maid who opened the door, and the house was another very inferior specimen of the furnished house so well known to all unsettled and wandering people. The chances are, that delicate and orderly as Mrs. Ochterlony was by nature, the sombre shabbiness of the place would not have struck her in her younger days, when she, too, had to take her chance of furnished houses, and do her best, as became a soldier’s wife. And then poor little Emma had been married too early, and began her struggling, shifty life too soon, to know anything about that delicate domestic order, which is half a religion. Poor little Emma! she was as old now as Mary had been when she came back to Kirtell with her boys, and it was difficult to form any imagination of what time might have done for her. Mrs. Ochterlony went up the narrow stairs with a sense of half-amused curiosity, guided not only by the dirty little maid, but by the sound of a little voice crying in a lamentable, endless sort of way. It was a kind of cry which in itself told the story of the family—not violent, as if the result of a sudden injury or fit of passion, which there was somebody by to console or to punish, but the endless, tedious lamentation, which nobody took any particular notice of, or cared about.
And this was the scene that met Mrs. Ochterlony’s eyes when she entered the room. She had sent the maid away and opened the door herself, for her heart was full. It was a shabby little room on the first floor, with cold windows opening down to the floor, and letting in the cold Cumberland winds to chill the feet and aggravate the temper of the inhabitants. In the foreground sat a little girl with a baby sleeping on her knee, one little brother in front of her and another behind her chair, and that pretty air of being herself the domestic centre and chief mover of everything, which it is at once sweet and sad to see in a child. This little woman neither saw nor heard the stranger at the door. She had been hushing and rocking her baby, and, now that it had peaceably sunk to sleep, was about to hear her little brother’s lesson, as it appeared; while at the same time addressing a word of remonstrance to the author of the cry, another small creature who sat rubbing her eyes with two fat fists, upon the floor. Of all this group, the only one aware of Mary’s appearance was the little fellow behind his sister’s chair, who lifted wondering eyes to the door, and stared and said nothing, after the manner of children. The little party was so complete in itself, and seemed to centre so naturally in the elder sister, that the spectator felt no need to seek further. It was all new and unlooked for, yet it was a kind of scene to go to the heart of a woman who had children of her own; and Mary stood and looked at the little ones, and at the child-mother in the midst of them, without even becoming aware of the presence of the actual mother, who had been lying on a sofa, in a detached and separate way, reading a book, which she now thrust under her pillow, as she raised herself on her cushions and gazed with wide-open eyes at her visitor, who did not see her. It was a woman very little like the pretty Emma of old times, with a hectic colour on her cheeks, her hair hanging loosely and disordered by lying down, and the absorbed, half-awakened look, natural to a mind which had been suddenly roused up out of a novel into an actual emergency. The hushing of the baby to sleep, the hearing of the lessons, the tedious crying of the little girl at her feet, had all gone on without disturbing Mrs. Askell. She had been so entirely absorbed in one of Jane Eyre’s successors and imitators (for that was the epoch of Jane Eyre in novels), and Nelly was so completely responsible for all that was going on, that the mother had never even roused up to a sense of what was passing round her, until the door opened and the stranger looked in with a face which was not a stranger’s face.
“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Askell, springing up. “Oh, my Madonna, can it be you? Are you sure it is you, you dear, you darling! Don’t go looking at the children as if they were the principal, but give me a kiss and say it is you,—say you are sure it is you!”
And the rapture of delight and welcome she went into, though it showed how weak-minded and excitable she was, was in its way not disagreeable to Mary, and touched her heart. She gave the kiss she was asked for, and received a flood in return, and such embraces as nearly took her breath away; and then Nelly was summoned to take “the things” off an easy chair, the only one in the room, which stood near her mother’s sofa. Mary was still in Mrs. Askell’s embrace when this command was given, but she saw the girl gather up the baby in her arms, and moving softly not to disturb the little sleeper, collect the encumbering articles together and draw the chair forward. No one else moved or took any trouble. The bigger boy stood and watched behind his sister’s chair, and the younger one turned round to indulge in the same inspection, and little Emma took her fists out of her eyes. But there was nobody but the little woman with the baby who could get for the guest the only comfortable chair.
“Now sit down and be comfortable, and let me look at you; I could be content just to look at you all day,” said Emma. “You are just as you always were, and not a bit changed. It is because you have not had all our cares. I look a perfect fright, and as old as my grandmother, and I am no good for anything; but you are just the same as you used to be. Oh, it is just like the old times, seeing you! I have been in such a state, I did not know what to do with myself since ever I knew we were coming here.”
“But I do not think you are looking old, though you look delicate,” said Mary. “Let me make acquaintance with the children. Nelly, you used to be in my arms as much as your mamma’s when you were a baby. You are just the same age as my Will, and you were the best baby that ever was. Tell me their names and how old they all are. You know they are all strangers to me.”
“Yes,” said their mother, with a little fretfulness. “It was such a mercy Nelly was the eldest. I never could have kept living if she had been a boy. I have been such a suffering creature, and we have been moved about so much, and oh, we have had so much to do! You can’t fancy what a life we have had,” cried poor Emma; and the mere thought of it brought tears to her eyes.
“Yes, I know it is a troublesome life,” said Mary; “but you are young, and you have your husband, and the children are all so well——”
“Yes, the children are all well,” said Emma; “but then every new place they come to, they take measles or something, and I am gone to a shadow before they are right again; and then the doctors’ bills—I think Charley and Lucy and Emma have had everything,” said the aggrieved mother; “and they always take them so badly; and then Askell takes it into his head it is damp linen or something, and thinks it is my fault. It is bad enough when a woman is having her children,” cried poor Emma, “without all their illnesses, you know, and tempers and bills, and everything besides. Oh, Madonna! you are so well off. You live quiet, and you know nothing about all our cares.”
“I think I would not mind the cares,” said Mary; “if you were quiet like me, you would not like it. You must come out to Kirtell for a little change.”
“Oh, yes, with all my heart,” said Emma. “I think sometimes it would do me all the good in the world just to be out of the noise for a little, and where there was nothing to be found fault with. I should feel like a girl again, my Madonna, if I could be with you.”
“And Nelly must come too,” said Mrs. Ochterlony, looking down upon the little bright, anxious, careful face.
Nelly was thirteen—the same age as Wilfrid; but she was little, and laden with the care of which her mother talked. Her eyes were hazel eyes, such as would have run over with gladness had they been left to nature, and her brown hair curled a little on her neck. She was uncared for, badly dressed, and not old enough yet for the instinct that makes the budding woman mindful of herself. But the care that made Emma’s cheek hollow and her life a waste, looked sweet out of Nelly’s eyes. The mother thought she bore it all, and cried and complained under it, while the child took it on her shoulders unawares and carried it without any complaint. Her soft little face lighted up for a moment as Mary spoke, and then her look turned on the sleeping baby with that air half infantile, half motherly, which makes a child’s face like an angel’s.
“I do not think I could go,” she said; “for the children are not used to the new nurse; and it would make poor papa so uncomfortable; and then it would do mamma so much more good to be quiet for a little without the children——”
Mary rose up softly just then, and, to Nelly’s great surprise, bent over her and kissed her. Nobody but such another woman could have told what a sense of envy and yearning was in Mary’s heart as she did it. How she would have surrounded with tenderness and love that little daughter who was but a domestic slave to Emma Askell! and yet, if she had been Mary’s daughter, and surrounded by love and tenderness, she would not have been such a child. The little thing brightened and blushed, and looked up with a gleam of sweet surprise in her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Ochterlony,” she said, in that sudden flush of pleasure; and the two recognised each other in that moment, and knitted between them, different as their ages were, that bond of everlasting friendship which is made oftener at sight than in any more cautious way.
“Come and sit by me,” said Emma, “or I shall be jealous of my own child. She is a dear little thing, and so good with the others. Come and tell me about your boys. And, oh, please, just one word—we have so often spoken about it, and so often wondered. Tell me, dear Mrs. Ochterlony, did it never do any harm?”
“Did what never do any harm?” asked Mary, with once more a sudden pang of thankfulness that Wilfrid was not there.
Mrs. Askell threw her arms round Mary’s neck and kissed her and clasped her close. “There never was any one like you,” she said; “you never even would complain.”
This second assault made Mary falter and recoil, in spite of herself. They had not forgot, though she might have forgotten. And, what was even worse than words, as Emma spoke, the serious little woman-child, who had won Mrs. Ochterlony’s heart, raised her sweet eyes and looked with a mixture of wonder and understanding in Mary’s face. The child whom she would have liked to carry away and make her own—did she, too, know and wonder? There was a great deal of conversation after this—a great deal about the Askells themselves, and a great deal about Winnie and her husband, whom Mrs. Askell knew much more about than Mrs. Ochterlony did. But it would be vain to say that anything she heard made as great an impression upon Mary as the personal allusions which sent the blood tingling through her veins. She went home, at last, with that most grateful sense of home which can only be fully realized by those who return from the encounter of an indifferent world, and from friends who, though kind, are naturally disposed to regard everything from their own point of view. It is sweet to have friends, and yet by times it is bitter. Fortunately for Mary, she had the warm circle of her own immediate belongings to return into, and could retire, as it were, into her citadel, and there smile at all the world. Her boys gave her that sweetest youthful adoration which is better than the love of lovers, and no painful ghost lurked in their memory—or so, at least, Mrs. Ochterlony thought.