THEY were married very shortly after—there being no reason why they should wait. Nobody approved of them nor of their match, nor would have been likely to do so had they waited half a dozen years. Their little world stood round, as it were, and gazed upon them, declaring it washed its hands of all responsibility. Her stepmother went about the house as if she were assisting at a funeral—even little Mary turned reproachful eyes upon her.
‘Poor wee baby! Poor wee Margret!’ she would say, caressing the child. ‘Why is she poor baby?’ said Isabel, and little Mary would sigh and shake her head. As for Miss Catherine, she made a formal proposal to take the child under her own care, and leave Mrs. Lothian to ‘her other duties.’
‘A bairn in the house will be an interruption,’ she said. ‘A man with a young wife is often impatient enough of a baby of his own; and ye cannot expect he would be more tender to another man’s child.’
‘She is my child!’ said Isabel, holding her baby tightly strained in her arms.
‘But she is my dear old friend’s child as well,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘and she should not be brought up in ignorance of her father’s very name.’
‘Oh, Miss Catherine, you are hard—hard!’ cried Isabel. ‘If he was your friend, he was my husband, and knew all, and would never, never have judged me like this!’
‘Isabel Diarmid,’ said Miss Catherine, sternly, ‘it’s little more than a year since he was brought home to his house to die, and for a time I thought it was your death-blow too; and now, with your baby in your arms, you are going to wed another man. You should not speak of harsh judgment to me.’
‘But I must,’ said poor Isabel. ‘Oh, Miss Catherine, if you would but think how it all was. Can I put it in words? I was fond—fond of him—and oh! but he was good to me. But you know—the difference; and if you had said a month since—He is coming; let us fly away, not to meet him, not to bring back the past—I would have gone to the end of the world. I would be—almost—glad—now——’
‘Of what, Isabel?’ cried Miss Catherine. ‘My dear, my dear, come, and I will go with you, and free you from this man!’
‘I can never be free of him—now!’ she said. ‘To say the words is an offence to me. I would have clung to my old life, to be Mr. Lothian’s widow and little Margaret’s mother, and nothing more; but now that is all past. If that was what you wanted, why did you let me see the one man—the only man——’
Here Isabel stopped, silenced by her sobs and her shame. She was not ashamed to love him, but she was ashamed to say it in words, to disclose the sacred depths of the heart to any strange eye. She bent her crimson tear-wet face over her child. Poor little Margaret! if she could have known the meaning of all those looks of trouble, and passion, and distress, at which she gazed so gravely with profound baby eyes! Miss Catherine rose up and shook out her dress with an agitated movement, as if shaking the very dust from it, according to scriptural injunction; and yet she had been touched, though she would not admit it, by Isabel’s cry.
‘You must judge for yourself,’ she said. ‘All has been said that can be said. I cannot change your heart or settle your life for you, one way or another. You must do as you will. You know what I think, and what a sore blow this is to me; and I can say no more.’
And Miss Catherine swept out of the room and out of the house, leaving poor Isabel with her face hidden and her heart torn asunder.
It did not even strike Isabel as strange that she received no overtures of friendship from his family, nor, indeed, heard of them in any way. Her case seemed too far removed out of the ordinary course of life to leave her any interest in ordinary circumstances. She never thought of his people; all who surrounded herself were hostile or disapproving, and the effect upon her was to make her independent (as she thought) of sympathy. The world was hard upon her, and she turned her back upon the world.
And thus it happened that they were married, without paying any attention to the objections and protestations of Loch Diarmid. It was in the beginning of winter, when little Margaret was nearly a year old. Margaret’s father had been but a year and a half dead, which was the fact that chiefly shocked the parish.
Stapylton took his bride to a pretty sea-side village further down the Clyde where the winter was mild, and where there were no associations to disturb the peace of their beginning. He bore with her in her distress at that temporary parting with her child—he bore with her anxieties about little Margaret and longings after her, in the little interval which he might have claimed as specially his own. He was thoughtful of her every wish, putting aside his own comfort (she thought) for hers. And Isabel found herself, all unawares, wrapt in that dream of happiness which most hearts entertain one time or other, and which so few realise. Out of her doubts she came into a sense of reality which was exquisite to her—and she who had loved her lover without believing in him, grew, with a blessed surprise and delight, which was like Heaven to her, to trust as much as she loved. The change was like that from night into the brightest day. She had reached the heights all radiant with the sun rising, after the valley of the shadow of death.
‘You have been a bride of brides,’ he said to her one day, when a few weeks of this dream had gone. ‘You have never asked me where we were to go, or what we were to do. I wish I could reward you for your trust, my love, and take you to a fine castle, and say you were queen——’
‘It was not that,’ said Isabel, ‘don’t praise me too much. It was because I had so much in my mind I forgot. But, Horace, it is trust now.’
‘And that is all I want,’ he said, ‘and we can settle together where we are to go.’
‘But you have your own home?’ said Isabel.
‘I sold that; did I never tell you? I have no ties but you now,’ he said. ‘I meant to have gone to America—two years ago. Shall we go now? or shall we stay in your own country? or what are we to do?’
‘I have been a fool,’ cried Isabel, ‘to think of nothing all this time. But you must have had plans of your own.’
‘Yes, to disappear out of the world if you would not have me,’ he said; ‘but since I knew you would have me, everything else has gone out of my head.’ And then she clasped his arm with both her hands, and they walked on forgetting everything, even their plans. Oh, how different it was from the tender quiescence with which she had accepted the minister’s love! That had been but a dream and this was life.
They went on together wandering along the beach which was lit up by all the glories of the sunset. She too happy to think of anything; he absorbed in her.
‘Oh, Horace, how different everything is!’ she said. Her heart was full and spoke out of its abundance. ‘If I could have thought this would ever come in those weary days when I looked for you, and you stayed away from me——’
‘But you forgot me, Isabel.’
‘Did I forget you? Oh, how I wearied for you, Horace!’ There was something like guilt in the confession; but the meaning in her mind was different from his conception of it. The time in which she ‘wearied’ for him had not been that pure, calm, cloistered year of her marriage, when all vain thoughts and wishes had been hushed in the unspeakable quiet. She had not thought of him then. She had been faithful and true as an angel to her father-husband, whose love surrounded her like a dwelling-place, and kept her pure from all the soils of earth. So detached was that period from her life that she did not even remember it while she spoke. It was a vision, a trance, a world apart. But in the other agitated world of her young lonely life it seemed now as if there had been but one thought, and that was him. ‘You left me all that year—all that weary, weary year, after our Margaret was taken from me,’ she said, looking up at him with her tender, shining eyes; ‘and I thought I would break my heart.’
‘And at the end of it—’ he said, ‘shall I remind you, Isabel, how you showed your love to me? or shall we let by-gones be by-gones, and speak of it no more?’
‘How I showed my love for you?’ said innocent Isabel—innocent, heartless, ungrateful—and yet, in her heart, loyal, after their degrees, to all affections. She looked in his face with genuine surprise. And then, all at once, with a scorching blush remembered what he meant.
‘He was so good to me,’ she murmured, with downcast looks; ‘oh, so kind, like my father! What could I do? It was different. Never, never, could he have been—like you.’
Stapylton drew her to his side with a shudder. ‘We’ll speak of it no more,’ he said; ‘I could not trust myself, Isabel; one moment of my life I was in Hell—and it was by seeing you——’
‘Seeing me?’ she said, aghast.
‘With him—more lovely than I ever dreamt of—in London—at the opera. My God! when I think of it,’ said the young man, with a blackness impenetrable to her anxious gaze coming over his face.
‘Oh, Horace! was it you? Oh, was it you? There was something there that made me miserable. Oh, my Horace!’ she said, with pity, and remorse, and terror, clinging to his arm.
‘It was Hell!’ he said, wiping his forehead, upon which great drops of moisture were standing. ‘I had been forgetting as best I could—till then. It was Hell; but this is Heaven,’ he added, after a pause, holding her closer. Isabel, terrified and appalled, clung to him, gazing, with her wistful eyes, into his face. ‘It is all past now,’ she said, clinging close to him, with her hands clasped on his arm.
‘My darling! and this is Heaven!’
One evening, a week later than the conversation we have just recorded, it happened unfortunately that the cry of a child in one of the cottages awoke the heart of the young mother within her. Her maternity had been slumbering, but was not weakened by absence from her child. ‘If I had but my baby!’ she sighed softly, half to herself, without thinking—as, indeed, she ought to have done—what an interruption such an exclamation must have been to any young man’s love-dream.
He said something—she could not distinguish what; but there was impatience in the tone, and it jarred upon her. He quickened his pace, too, out of the lover’s ramble, drawing her along with him. When Isabel thought of it, she saw, with a new-born power of putting herself in his place, that it was cruel to bring in the baby at that moment; but at first it hurt her, and brought a little pang into her heart.
‘Cannot you be content with me for a little?’ he said; and then there was a pause, and they both turned, by instinct, to their lodgings. It was a winter night; but there are nooks along the coast where the soft west, even in Scotland, cheats the visitor into dreams which would better become the south. The sun was setting behind the Arran hills, lighting up all the horizon with a brilliant wintry glory. The tints were deeper, the gold more dazzling, than in summer; and far away stretched the sea, blue as steel, and brimming over with a rounded fullness, as if it could hold no more. The night air blew somewhat chill in their faces: perhaps it was that alone which made Isabel so cold and so willing to return.
‘If we were to go away there,’ Stapylton said, pointing across the steel-blue glistening water, ‘it would be hard work exposing a baby to such a voyage. Could you make up your mind, Isabel, to leave her at home?’
‘Leave—my child!’ she cried, with a little shriek; and her joy all at once seemed to die suddenly out of her heart.
‘I do not say so,’ said Stapylton; ‘I am only making a suggestion. At her age it would be hard upon her. You could not get milk for her, nor anything. Poor child! If you could trust her to anyone at home——’
‘Oh, Horace, ask me anything but that,’ said Isabel, clinging to his arm.
‘Well, well,’ he said, subduing his impatience, as her quickened senses could discern, by an effort, ‘I am not asking you to do it; I am only suggesting what might be for her good.’
And then they went in, and a change came over the heavens and the earth to Isabel. It was not that he had changed: he was as anxious to be good to her, to save her all annoyance, to make her happy, as ever. It was that a note, which jarred upon the perfect happiness she had begun to rise into, had been struck, as it were, unawares. Her husband was still her lover, still full of fond delight in her, and eager to please her; but a meaning she could not quite fathom, a purpose which was not made clear to her, seemed to be under his love and his fondness—now more, now less clearly visible from that day. He spoke a great deal of America, pointing out all its advantages to her; and Isabel, who had no dear friends to leave behind her, and of whom her neighbours all disapproved, was not disinclined to think of emigration. But then there were the discomforts of the voyage, upon which he insisted with ever-strengthening force of words.
‘I would never hesitate if we were alone; but the child necessitates a maid,’ he said, ‘and the maid brings other troubles in her train.’
‘But I want no maid; I can take care of my child without any help,’ cried Isabel.
‘And if you did that how much should I see of you?’ he said, with an almost sneer. ‘No, Isabel, I don’t want to be disagreeable, but my wife must be my wife, and not a baby’s nurse.’
‘She will soon be walking,’ said the young mother, trying with anxious wiles to recommend her child. ‘She would soon be—a help to me, Horace, instead of a trouble.’
‘You must consider it all well,’ he said; ‘it is not just our—your own pleasure that you must think of; you must remember what you owe to the child. She is too young for a long voyage, Isabel; probably she might fall ill—and die. My dear, I don’t want to frighten you—babies so often do.’
‘Oh, Horace, not with my care!’ cried Isabel. ‘God would protect her by sea as well as by land. The poor women have all their little children with them. What should happen to my darling more than to the rest?’
‘But it does happen to the half of the rest,’ he said, calmly. ‘I don’t want to frighten you, Isabel; but afterwards, if anything were to happen, you would blame me for not telling you. And then if she lived and grew up she might object to be severed from all her friends and her own country. She has her friends, I suppose—her—father’s friends.’
‘She can have no friend so near as her mother,’ said Isabel, in a voice which was scarcely audible.
‘What do you say? Of course you are her mother, my dear; but if she were to grow up to feel herself alone in a family, she—did not belong to, one may say—don’t you think she would reflect upon you for taking her from her home? My darling! I did not mean to vex you; I am only saying what you will think yourself when you look at it calmly and see it in a reasonable light.’
‘Oh, Horace, Horace,’ cried Isabel, clasping her hands, ‘did not you say she should be as your own? You would not take your own child from its mother? You would not leave her behind?’
‘Why should not I,’ he said, ‘if it would be for the child’s good?’
For a moment she looked at him aghast, and then hid her face in her hands. He towered over her in superior virtue condemning her woman’s weakness. ‘If it were for the child’s good. It is not our own pleasure we must think of.’ The sound of these sentiments bewildered Isabel. Was it possible that her eagerness to keep her baby at any cost or risk was but the selfishness of maternity? Could it be that he would actually be so self-denying as to leave even his own child behind him, if it was ‘for its good’? Isabel’s heart protested against such virtue, and yet it silenced her indignant cry.
‘I believe I have strength of mind enough to do it,’ he said, ‘if it was for the child’s good. Drag her out there with you to undergo all the hardships of a long voyage, to be exposed to disease perhaps, to be parted from her own relations and the country in which her property lies. If she had been unprovided for the case might be different.’
There was a shade of bitterness in his voice. Was he angry that little Margaret’s fortune was safe and out of reach, though he himself had taken pains to make all the arrangements? Isabel withdrew her hands from her face, and gazed at him confused by his vehemence. What could it be that he meant?
‘But she is very well provided for,’ he added, with meaning—‘quite a little heiress. And her friends would never be content that her property should go out of the country. I see a thousand difficulties in the way. And if I were you, I would choose the most careful guardian I could get for her, and leave her quietly at home, at least till she knows what is what, and can decide for herself.’
‘Oh, Horace, do you remember she is my child—my only child, that I love more than my life? If I had to leave her I would die!’ cried Isabel; ‘but I cannot leave my baby, it would be worse than leaving my life.’
‘Which shows you don’t make much account of me,’ said Stapylton. And then he went out suddenly and left her, leaving all those suggestions to take form and germinate within her. She threw herself down on the sofa in the little lodging-house parlour, and hid her face in the cushions. It would be too much to investigate what her thoughts were at this dreadful moment. A storm raged within her moving Heaven and earth. A hundred mocking spirits seemed to come round and gibe at her, and laugh at her vague, splendid anticipations. Was the joy over, and the consolation, along with the honeymoon? And were distress, and distrust, and a consuming terror to enter in and take possession so soon?