The Minister's Wife by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XLVII

ISABEL’S recovery was slow and tedious. The strain, both of body and mind, had been so great, and her spirit was so broken, that it was often in doubt whether the uncertain balance would be for death or life.

The parish had waited, after the first flash of wonder was over, with patience scarcely to be looked for, for the explanation which might be expected on her recovery. And the little circle round her had specially cherished this hope, as was natural. Miss Catherine, in her higher degree, and Jean Campbell and her friends, waited with calm, knowing that the revelation must first be made to them. ‘Don’t weary yourself, my dear,’ said the former. ‘I will wait your own time.’ But Isabel made no reply to this insinuated question. She ignored their wonder with a silent resolution which it was difficult to make any head against. ‘When you have anything to say to me, you know I am always at your service, Isabel,’ Miss Catherine added, a week after she had first signified her readiness to listen. ‘Thank you,’ Isabel had said, faintly; but she said nothing more. Then Jean made an attempt in her own way.

‘My bonnie woman,’ said Jean, ‘eh, it’s pleasant to see ye in your ain house again, as I never thought to see you! But you’ll no bide? I canna expect it, I ken that. And, oh! how we’ll miss you, the bairns and me.’

‘I mean to stay if you will let me,’ said Isabel, whose pale cheek always flushed when this subject was propounded. ‘Margaret and me.’

‘Let you!’ cried Jean: ‘and dearly welcome. As if it wasna your own house and hers, the bonnie lamb! But it’s mair than I could expect that you should stay.’

Isabel made no answer. She treated Jean’s artful address as a mere remark, and no question. Her face would be a shade sadder; her eye more languid all the evening after—but that was all.

Perhaps, of all the eager, curious people about her, the one most difficult to silence was the Dominie, who had taken to coming across the braes every evening while Isabel was so ill, and now found it difficult to give up the habit. He would sit opposite to her in the little parlour while the spring evening lengthened, and watch her words and her looks with an inquisition which he could not restrain. ‘It’s like old times to have ye back,’ the Dominie would say: and a faint smile would be Isabel’s answer. She was always at work now—reading much—trying to teach herself a variety of new accomplishments, labouring at a dozen different pursuits with a pathetic earnestness that went to her visitor’s heart.

‘What do you want with all these books?’ he said, as he sat at the parlour window looking out upon the darkling Loch.

‘To learn,’ she said. They were some of the minister’s old Italian books, of which he had been so fond.

‘To learn!—what for? It’s an accomplishment will be of little use to you,’ said the Dominie; ‘unless it is there you are going when you leave here.’

‘It is for Margaret,’ said Isabel, with a quivering lip—‘I would like her to learn when she is old enough what her father knew.’

‘Ah, that’s a good thought,’ said the Dominie, taken by surprise; and then he added, ‘But you cannot give your life to little Margaret—nor carry such things about with you through the world.’

‘I will have time enough here,’ she said, under her breath.

‘But, my dear!—we cannot expect you will be here all your life—that would be good for us, but ill for you.’

‘And why should it be ill for me?’

‘Isabel! I must go back to your old name,’ said the Dominie; ‘I cannot call you by that lad’s name. Are you another man’s wife, or are ye no?’

And then the self-sustained creature, who had resisted so many attempts to penetrate her secret, fell into a passion of sudden tears.

‘I am his wife,’ she cried, ‘but I will never see him again. Call me Isabel, or call me by my good man’s name; and ask me no more.’

Strong as the Dominie’s curiosity was, he could not persist in face of this appeal and of the tears which accompanied it; but he carried the news to Miss Catherine, who day by day became more perplexed and more anxious to know the real state of affairs. His partial success inspired the old lady. Next day she went up to the Glebe, determined to show no mercy.

‘Isabel,’ she said, solemnly, ‘it’s time, for your own sake, that your friends should know. I am not speaking of the world. You may keep silence as you please for them that’s outside, but your friends should know. I saw ye married with my own eyes; there could be nothing wrong about that?’

‘There was nothing wrong,’ said Isabel.

‘Then, my dear, tell us—tell me—what is wrong? Has he gone to America, as they all say?’

‘So far as I know,’ was the answer, spoken so low that the inquisitor could scarcely hear.

‘And do you mean to go after him, Isabel?’

A shudder ran through her frame. ‘Oh no, no—never more!’ she cried, hiding her face in her hands. If it was longing or loathing, Miss Catherine could not tell, but she thought it was the former. Whatever it is, she is fond of him still, was what she said in her heart.

‘Is not that giving up your duty?’ Miss Catherine continued, pitiless. ‘Isabel, there is no love lost between him and me; but I could not counsel you to abandon your duty for all that.’

‘Oh, ask me no more questions,’ cried Isabel, with a gesture of despair; and that was all that could be torn from her whatever anyone might say.

When she was well enough to go so far, she made a secret pilgrimage to her husband’s grave. The whole parish knew of it before the week was out, and drew its conclusions; but nobody suspected why it was that she sat so long, wrapt in musing and solitude, in that spot where the minister and Margaret slept side by side. ‘God grant her her wits, puir thing!’ said one of the village gossips. ‘There she sat among the grass; and every bit weed that caught her eye, and the moss on the tombstone, all cleared away. You would have said it was a gardener in a garden at his work.’ Some thought it was penitence for her sin against him, and some that it was a compunctious regret for her ‘good man.’ Nobody knew that Isabel had buried in her husband’s grave something more than her grief and remorse for her infidelity—another token more awful than anything so trifling could be supposed to be. She worked at it unseen with her slender, trembling fingers, making a place for it deep under the sod, and there hid the innocent present of her first affection—the little brooch, which had been plucked from the dead man—the fatal sign which had made her existence a desolation, and rent asunder her heart and her life.

And common life crept up round her, like the rising tide on the beach, and set her softly afloat in the old habits, the old routine, the current of the past. Little Margaret rose once more to be the chief object, and occupation, and interest of the quiet days. Within the first year there came a claim upon her, of which her lawyer informed Isabel, and which oozed out through the district after a while by those invisible channels which make everybody’s secrets known. It was a bill drawn upon her from a far distant corner of America, which she paid without hesitation, though it cost her many sacrifices. The same thing was repeated several times within the course of a dozen years; and then there came a letter to her, in a strange handwriting——

No one had mentioned her legal name for a long time before that. She saw only those who called her Isabel. But after the coming of this letter, it happened to her by chance to encounter the old Laird, Miss Catherine’s brother, come upon a rare visit to his own country. ‘So this is Isabel,’ he said to her kindly, patting her head as if she had been but still a child. ‘Mrs—Mrs—— I forget the name.’

‘Lothian,’ she said, distinctly, before the servants, as was afterwards remembered. And from that hour was called by her old name.

And little Margaret lived and grew. A woman cannot be utterly wretched, whatever tragedies may have happened in her life, so long as she has a woman-child to make her live anew. She was even happy in her way, developing into a hundred gracious forms of being, which Stapylton’s wife could never have known; and had her life after life was over, like the most of us—the one, an existence brief and full with sorrow and joy in it, and a crowd of events; the other, long, tranquil, with no facts at all to speak of, marking the passage of the years—nothing to tell: but yet, perhaps, the life that bulks most largely in the records in the skies.

THE END