A DAY or two passed in idleness, not unlike the honeymoon idleness of Ranza Bay. Stapylton lounged out and saw the steamer come and go, and lounged back again with nothing to occupy him, sometimes lavishing caresses upon his wife, sometimes sullen to her, complaining of the delay and the time he was losing, and of being buried alive in ‘such a hole as this.’
One morning, about a week after their establishment at Kilcranion, a message came to Isabel from Janet Macfarlane, begging her to go to Ailie. It was while they were seated at breakfast that the message arrived. ‘Eelin,’ the ‘lass’ who had been witness of the first meeting between Mrs. Lothian and her former lover, was Janet’s messenger. ‘Eh, mem, there’s word frae Ardnamore,’ said the young woman; ‘you’ll have heard of a’ that’s come and gone. Eh, I would have brought ye the paper if I had thought ye didna ken. He’s joined thae radicals that are ay plotting; and it was some awful plan to blow up the king. And Ardnamore he’s been blown up himself instead, and it’s no thought he’ll live. And there’s been letters. You wouldna have thought the mistress was that taken up with him, when he was here; but she’s ta’en her bed, and we dinna ken what to do. And auld Janet—I’m meaning Mrs. Macfarlane—has awfu’ confidence in you. If you were to come, she thinks maybe Ailie—eh, Gude forgive me, I’m meaning the mistress—would mind what you would say.’
‘If you’ll wait a little, Helen,’ said Isabel, ‘I will see what I can do.’ She went back to her husband with a little excitement. ‘You never told me,’ she said, ‘that there was something in the papers about Mr. John. And now they say he is dying, and I am sent for to Ailie. Poor Ailie! she scarcely said good-bye to him when he went away; and she will feel it now. Horace, will you get the gig and drive me over the hill, or must I wait for the boat?’
‘Neither the one nor the other!’ he said. ‘Why should you go to every Ailie in the country-side when they send for you? Nonsense! You have no official position now, Isabel. You are my wife, and I won’t have you go!’
‘But, Horace, I must!’ said Isabel, quite unsuspicious that this was the voice of authority. ‘Poor Ailie! I had to do with her marriage, though I did not wish it—and I was there when he went away. And I am Margaret’s sister. There is nobody she will speak to like me. I will stay as short a time as possible, but I could not refuse to go.’
‘By Jove! but you shall refuse to go,’ he said, ‘when I say it. If that is what you think your duty, it is not my view. Tell the woman I’ll see her at Jericho first! My wife trotting about the country to every fool that sends for her! No, no. Don’t say anything, Isabel. I tell you, you shan’t go.’
She stood gazing at him with amazement so complete that there was no room for any other feeling. Obedience after this fashion had never so much as entered into Isabel’s conception of the duties of a wife. Her mind was incapable of grasping this strangest new idea. ‘I am sorry you don’t like it,’ she said; ‘but, Horace, you know—I can’t refuse.’
‘I don’t know anything of the sort,’ he said; ‘you shall refuse. Here, Jenny, Mary—whatever your name is—Mrs. Stapylton can’t come. Do you hear? Tell your mistress, or whoever it was that sent you; she has got something else to do than dance attendance on the parish now. Mrs. Stapylton is not going; do you hear? Now, take yourself off and shut the door!’
‘If the leddy will tell me herself,’ said Eelin, standing her ground. Cæsarism of this description was unknown on Loch Diarmid, and naturally the very sight of a rampant husband awoke the spirit of the female messenger. ‘Oh, mistress,’ she added, turning with sudden softening to Isabel, who sat dumb with crimson cheeks and downcast eyes, ‘dinna forsake us in our trouble. There is no one on a’ the Loch that can be of any help to us but you.’
‘Go ben to the kitchen and get a cup of tea after your long walk,’ said Isabel; ‘and I will come and speak to you, Helen. Go now and sit down and rest.’
Her voice was very low, she did not raise her eyes; but the woman understood and had compassion, and obeyed her without a word. A sudden harsh assumption of authority is a dangerous matter in any relationship, and perhaps most dangerous of all in that difficult transition from the love-dream to the ordinary conditions of life. Isabel’s proud and delicate spirit had never yet received so strange a shock. She sat dumb for the moment, quivering so painfully with the blow that she was unable to speak.
‘You may say what you like to her besides,’ said Stapylton; ‘but this you must just make up your mind to say, my love—that you shan’t go.’
There was a certain air of smiling insolence in the young man’s face. He was making his first experiment in the matter of sovereignty—beginning as he meant to end, he would have said.
‘Is this how it is to be?’ said Isabel, with quivering lips. ‘I—don’t understand. It never came into my mind before. Oh, Horace, is this how it is to be between us? It could never be any pleasure to me to do what you don’t like; but is it to be you who are to judge always, and never me?’
‘Didn’t you promise to obey me, you little rebel?’ he said, still with artificial playfulness; ‘and, of course, I mean to be obeyed. You may trust me not to give up my right.’
‘But not as a baby obeys,’ said Isabel, in a voice which was scarcely audible.
He got up with a laugh which jarred on all her excited nerves.
‘I don’t mind how you make it out,’ he said; ‘but I mean you to do what I like, and for this once you had better make up your mind. You shan’t go!’
It was at this moment—moved by what evil suggestion it is impossible to tell—that Nelly Spence, who had gradually been growing to a fever point of indignation at the little notice taken of her baby, suddenly opened the door of the room in which such a momentous discussion was going on. They both turned round, and for a moment nothing was visible; then little Margaret, staggering in her first baby run, came swift and unsteady through the open door, her attendant appearing behind her, stretching out sheltering arms. ‘She’s walking!’ said Nelly, with a shriek of delight. And Isabel, for the moment forgetting all her wounds, gave a cry of instinctive joy, and, turning round, held out her arms. Stapylton turned away with an oath. He went to the window, turning his back on the scene—so pretty a scene!—the young mother melting into a sudden transport out of her first hard passage of beginning life; the young nurse, half frantic with exultation, the little fairy creature rushing into the arms held out for it. Never was happy household yet, in which such a moment does not detach itself from the blank of years like a picture—sweet, evanescent, innocent delight! But here the bonds of nature were twisted awry. Isabel took her child into her arms with a throb of happiness, and then signed to its nurse to go away, and turned round with a deeper pang of pain. It banished even her own humiliation out of her mind. She gazed wistfully at her husband, not knowing whether to speak to him or remain silent—longing to say, ‘I will be your slave, only tolerate my child.’
‘Do you want to drive me mad with that man’s child?’ he said, turning round upon her with a look of hatred and horror which struck her with consternation; and then went out of the room, out of the house, without another word. She saw him go rapidly past the window while she still sat thunderstruck, holding her baby. Poor Isabel! And this conflict was to last all her life.
She did not know how long she sat thus silent, with a thousand thoughts passing through her mind. She was not thinking; she was stunned, and incapable of any mental action. Her thoughts came and went independently, presenting their arguments before her like so many unseen pleaders. Little Margaret slid from her arms to the floor, and sat there playing with anything that came to hand, gurgling with sweet rills of laughter, sweet murmurs, and those attempts at words which mothers know how to translate. But she took no notice. Slowly the invisible advocates delivered their pleas, and set forth all their reasonings. There rose before her a vision of what must be done, of what it was impossible to do. She was his wife; she had counted the cost and taken the risk, and now the forfeit was required of her. The time had been when she was little Margaret’s mother before all; but she had willingly, consciously, taken up another responsibility. She was his wife. Life must be transformed, must be so arranged that it should be practicable with him and not another. Isabel took the baby up from the floor and pressed it to her heart with a despair which could find no words. Thus it must be. She had drawn her lot with her eyes open, knowing she must pay some hard price for it, though not this price. The decision to be made was so bitter and so terrible that it quenched down even her impetuous, passionate nature. She could not be angry as she would have been had the occasion been less trivial. She was beyond anger. There was in her whole being the silence of despair.
The whole day passed over her in a hush like that which comes before a storm. She framed the softest message she could, and sent Eelin back with it, declaring that it was impossible she could come. And she occupied her mind with schemes for her baby’s comfort, and for keeping some trace of her own recollection before the child when they should be parted, perhaps for ever and ever. For ever and ever—that was most likely—with the great ocean between them, and life more bitter than any ocean. Jean would be good to the child she knew, and Miss Catherine would keep a watchful eye on her—and—— Only the mother would have no part—no part in little Margaret’s life. She could not shed any more tears, they were all dried up, scorched up out of her eyes; but she sat all day by herself, and thought, and thought. Yes, this was how it must be. Her own life was decided and settled by her own deed; and Isabel would not say even to herself what a prospect she felt to be before her. But to expose Margaret to the hatred of the man who ought to stand to her in the place of a father, to make her little life subject to such storms, to give her no happy home, full of love and tender freedom, but a nook on suffrance in the house of ‘another family’—better let the mother’s heart break once for all, and the child be happy, caressed, above all criticism. Thus it must be.
When Stapylton returned that evening his mood was changed. Perhaps he was ashamed, and felt that he had gone too far. Perhaps it was a natural revulsion towards the wife he was still so fond of, that he was determined to have her all to himself. He never mentioned little Margaret or made any reference to her, but he was very tender to Isabel. ‘I am an ill-tempered fellow,’ he went so far as to say; ‘and if I make myself disagreeable sometimes, my Isabel must forgive me.’ And Isabel, for her part, was worn out; much emotion had worn her as great fatigue might have done. She yielded her soul to the sweetness when it came. She laid her head on his shoulder when he drew her to him, and cried, and despaired, and yet was consoled.
‘I am going to Maryburgh fair,’ he said to her next morning. ‘Smeaton has written to me to fetch away the cattle I bought. But I don’t want them now; so I must sell them if I can. I shall be back by the last steamer at dusk.’
‘Then that is farewell to all your thoughts of settling here?’
‘Farewell was said long ago,’ he said, ‘unless, indeed, there was something very tempting. No, no, don’t look at me so eagerly; I don’t mean to raise any hopes—America is the place for you and me. But, of course, if there was any great temptation——’
‘Oh, Horace, if I might hope it would be so’—cried Isabel, with her heart leaping to her mouth.
‘Well, well, wait and see what will happen,’ he said cheerfully; and in that sudden gleam of comfort she hung about him, feeling all her fears and sorrows melt away like mists in the sunshine. She kissed him with her very heart on her lips before he left her. Isabel had been bred in all the reticence of a grave Scottish maiden; her kisses were few, and very rarely bestowed, but in this moment of revulsion, her heart smote her for all the hard things she had been thinking. ‘Dear Horace!’ she said, hanging about him, ‘I am always so hasty; but every day I will know you better.’
‘And every day you grow sweeter,’ he said with a lover’s looks—and thus they parted; he to the boat which should carry him to Maryburgh, she to little Margaret’s room to dance her baby, and sing all manner of joyful ditties to the child. ‘Oh, my bonnie darling, shall I keep you after all?’ was the burden of Isabel’s gladness. She sang the words over and over in her joy, as if they had been the refrain of a song; and little Margaret crowed and clapped her baby hands in reply, and the whole was like the blessed awaking from a bad dream.
When Isabel had exhausted herself with enjoyment, she sat down at length, having ordered the daintiest dinner she could contrive for his comfort when he should return, and began to her wifely work, sewing on buttons and putting her husband’s ‘things’ in order. It was pleasant to be engaged about his ‘things’ at such a moment. She said to herself that she had done him injustice, and her heart in the revulsion went back to him with a warmth beyond the fervency even of her first love. The cloud had blown past—surely for ever. She had misconceived him altogether. While she had supposed him to be so harsh and unsympathetic, was it not evident that all the time he had been overcoming his own prepossessions, bringing himself to acquiescence in her desires? Her heart uttered confessions of her sin against him, and praises of his goodness, while she put the buttons on his shirts. And little Margaret played at her feet, and the sunshine came in and lighted on the baby’s golden head, and for almost the first time since her marriage Isabel’s heart was light, and her happiness was unclouded as the day.
It was about two o’clock in the afternoon when the messenger whom Stapylton had sent from Maryburgh reached the house. It was one of the men upon the pier, whom Isabel knew. He brought her a little note, written in pencil, from her husband, sending the key of a desk of his which he always kept locked.
‘I want some money,’ Stapylton wrote. ‘I see something here I can buy with advantage, but I have not money enough. Open the right-hand drawer above the pigeon-hole; be sure you don’t touch anything else—and send me a pocket-book you will find in it. Remember not to touch anything else, for there are things in it which belong to other people, and I can’t have my papers interfered with. Lock it up again as soon as you have taken out the pocket-book, and send me back the key.’
Isabel was a little startled by the note, anticipating evil at the sight of it, as women instinctively do. And she was a little fluttered by the haste of the messenger, who had to return by the boat in half an hour, and was very pressing. She gave little Margaret over to Nelly Spence, and put aside her work and hastened upstairs to her room where the desk was. The very fact of his wishing to buy something, whatever it might be, was an additional proof that he did not mean to go away, but was thinking in earnest of remaining at home. She ran lightly upstairs, and went to the old-fashioned brass-bound desk which had so often roused her curiosity. She did not remember ever to have seen him open it. It had belonged to his grandfather, he had once told her, and had secret drawers in it, and all kinds of wonders. It was, however, commonplace enough when it was opened. One side folded down to form the slope for writing, and the other was filled with a little range of drawers exactly alike. The right-hand one, however, was quite unmistakable; the pigeon-hole below was clear of papers, and distinguished it from all the rest. But it was stiff, and cost Isabel a great deal of trouble to open it. She had to pull and pull till the little ivory knob came off, and then her task was more difficult than ever. While she was trying her best to get it open, with the thought in her mind that the messenger was waiting all the time, and the boat ready to start, and her husband fretting for the man’s arrival, her finger suddenly caught something below, which came out with a little rush and click as of a spring. It came upon her hand and hurt it, which was the first thing that attracted her attention. Then it occurred to her that she might now get a better hold upon her obstinate drawer; and putting her hand in behind, she at length pulled it out triumphantly, and found the pocket-book, the object of her search. No curiosity was in Isabel’s mind as to the other contents of the desk. She shut the drawer hastily, and only then looked at the smaller one below, which she had involuntarily opened. It would not push back again in haste like the other. She stooped over it to adjust the spring, thinking of nothing. Next moment she uttered a low cry of horror. The pocket-book fell out of her hand on the floor. She stood paralysed—immovable; her lips dropping apart like the lips of an idiot, her face blanched as by a sudden whisper of Death.
‘I must go!’ said the man below stairs; ‘he’ll be that rampaging I’ll no daur face him. Gang up the stair, my woman, and ask the mistress if I’m to bide here a’ day.’
‘The boat’s ay late,’ said the servant-woman out of the kitchen. ‘Take patience, man; she’ll no keep you waiting, unless there’s some reason for it; and I’m busy wi’ my cakes, and canna stir, rampage as muckle as ye please.’
‘Then, lassie, gang you,’ said Stapylton’s messenger. ‘She’s been half an hour up the stair—half an hour, as I’m a sinner!—and her man cursing and swearing a’ the time on Maryburgh pier. Rise up and ask, like a bonnie lass! Tell her—answer or no answer—I maun away.’
‘Oh, aye, I’ll gang,’ said Nelly Spence; ‘but give me my wean. Now she’s walking she’s mair trouble than when she was carried. She’s away, half way down the passage before ye ken.’
‘Rin first and speak after,’ said the man. ‘Lord, woman, maun I gang up the stair to the mistress mysel?’
Thus stimulated, Nelly Spence, with little Margaret in her arms, went upstairs to the bedroom door. She knocked, but there was no answer. She called softly, then louder, getting frightened; finally, she opened the door and looked in. Isabel was standing in the same attitude, like a creature suddenly congealed into ice or snow. Her side face, which was visible to Nelly, was so ghastly white, and so like the face of an idiot, that the girl was dumb with panic. She went quickly forward, making a noise which at last seemed to catch Isabel’s ear. Her action, then, was as extraordinary as her looks had been. She turned suddenly round, and placed herself between the new-comer and the open desk, going back upon the latter and putting her hands behind her, as if to conceal it.
‘What do you want?’ poor Nelly supposed her to say; but it was a babble, instead of words. She was like the old people who were paralysed.
‘Oh, Isabel,’ cried Nelly, in her terror forgetting all conventional rules of respect, ‘Oh, Isabel, dinna look at me like that! I’ll rin for the doctor. You’ve had a stroke!’
‘No!’ Isabel said, with an imperative gesture; and then, though her look did not change, she struggled into utterance.
‘What do you want—what is it?’ she said.
‘It’s the man,’ cried Nelly; ‘he’s wanting his answer. But, oh, you’re fitter to be in your bed. I’ll rin for the doctor, and tell him you’re no able. Oh, what will we do?—a young thing like you!’
‘Tell him,’ said Isabel, regaining her voice by degrees—‘to tell—Mr. Stapylton—there’s no answer. You hear me, Nelly: there is—no answer. That is what he is to say.’
‘But, eh,’ said Nelly, with anxious kindliness, ‘he’ll be awfu’ angry. If you would let me help you, and find it, whatever it was——’
‘Hold your peace!’ said Isabel, harshly. ‘Go and tell him. There is—no answer. And leave me to myself. I have something here I want to do.’
‘Is she going to kill herself? Does she want him to kill her?’ Nelly said, talking to herself as she went down the stair. When she was gone, Isabel, with unsteady step, came across the room and locked the door. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass as she passed, and wondered vaguely who it was. Then she went back to the open desk, and took out the little secret drawer, and carried it, staggering as she went, to the window. There was but one thing in it: a little broach set round with pearls, with hair in the centre, attached to a long gold pin. Adhering to the pin were still some ragged threads of the cambric in which Isabel, with her own hands, had placed it one June morning, not yet two years ago. This was the treasure shut carefully away in Horace Stapylton’s secret drawer.