Madonna Mary

“I, two!” cried Sir Edward, with sudden terror; “why should I settle two? You might as well tell me to retire from the Hall, and leave them my house. And pray, Mr. Penrose, when you are so liberal for other people, what do you mean to give yourself?”

“I am a family man,” said Uncle Penrose, taking his other hand out of his pocket, “and what I can give must be, in justice to my family, very limited. But Mrs. Percival, who has only four sons, and yourself who have none, are in very different circumstances. If he had had a father, the business might have been entered into more satisfactorily – but as you are his godfather, I hear – ”

“I never understood before, up to this minute,” said Sir Edward, with great courtesy, “that it was the duty of a godfather to endow his charge with two hundred a year.”

“I beg your pardon, Sir Edward,” said Mr. Penrose; “I am a plain man, and I treat things in a business way. I give my godchildren a silver mug, and feel my conscience clear: but if I had introduced a young man, not otherwise very eligible, to a handsome girl, who might have done a great deal better for herself, that would make a great difference in the responsibility. Winnie Seton is of very good family by her father’s side, as you know, I suppose, better than I do; and of very good business connexions by her mother’s; and her beauty is first rate – I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. If she had been an ordinary pretty girl, I would not have said so much; but with all her advantages, I should say that any fair equivalent in the shape of a husband should be worth at least five thousand a year.”

Mr. Penrose spoke with such seriousness that Sir Edward was awed out of his first feeling of amusement. He restrained his smile, and acknowledged the logic. “But I did not introduce him in any special way,” he said. “If I can negotiate with Mrs. Percival for a more liberal allowance, I will do it. She has an estate of her own, and she is free to leave it to any of her sons: but Edward, I fear, has been rather unsatisfactory – ”

“Ah, wild?” said Mr. Penrose: “all young men are alike for that. I think, on the whole, that it is you who should negotiate with the mother. You know her better than I do, and have known all about it from the beginning, and you could show her the state of the case better. If such a mad thing could be consented to by anybody in their senses, it must at least be apparent that Winnie would bring twice as much as the other into the common stock. If she were with me in Liverpool she would not long be Winnie Seton; and you may trust me she should marry a man who was worthy of her,” the rich uncle added, with a confirmatory nod of his head. When he spoke of a man who would be worthy of Winnie, he meant no sentimental fitness such as Aunt Agatha would have meant, had she said these words, nor was it even moral worth he was thinking of. What Mr. Penrose meant, was a man who would bring a fair equivalent in silver and gold to Winnie’s beauty and youth, and he meant it most seriously, and could not but groan when he contemplated the possibility of so much valuable capital being thrown away.

And he felt that he had made a good impression when he went back to the Cottage. He seemed to himself to have secured Mrs. Percival’s three hundred a-year, and even Sir Edward’s more problematical gift to the young people; and he occupied the interval in thinking of a silver tea-service which had rather caught his fancy, in a shop window, and which he thought if his negotiations succeeded, he would give to his niece for a wedding present. If they did not succeed it would be a different question – for a young woman who married upon a captain’s pay and a hundred a-year of her own, would have little occasion for a silver tea-service. So Mr. Penrose mused as he returned to the Cottage. Under the best of circumstances it was now evident that there could be nothing to “settle” upon Winnie. The mother and the friends might make up a little income, but as for capital – which after all was what Mr. Penrose prized most – there was none in the whole matter, except that which Winnie had in her face and person, and was going to throw so lamentably away. Mr. Penrose could not but make some reflections on Aunt Agatha’s feminine idiocy and the cruel heedlessness of Sir Edward, as he walked along the rural road. A girl who had so many advantages, whose husband, to be worthy of her, should have had five thousand a-year at the least, and something handsome to “settle” – and yet her natural guardians had suffered her to get engaged to a captain in a marching regiment, with only his pay! No wonder that Mr. Penrose was sad. But he went home with a sense that, painful as the position was, he had done his duty, at least.

This was how Winnie’s marriage got itself accomplished notwithstanding all opposition. Captain Percival was the second of his mother’s four sons, and consequently the natural heir of her personal fortune if he had not been “foolish,” as she said; and the thought that it might be the saving of him, which was suggested by Sir Edward, was naturally a very moving argument. A beautiful young wife whom he was very fond of, and who was ready to enter with him into all the risks of life, – if that did not keep him right, what would? And after all he was only five-and-twenty, an age at which reformation was quite possible. So his friends thought, persuading themselves with natural sophistry that the influence of love and a self-willed girl of eighteen would do what all other inducements had failed to do; and as for her friends, they were so elated to see that in the eyes of Uncle Penrose the young man’s faults bore only the most ordinary aspect, and counted for next to nothing, that their misgivings all but disappeared, and their acceptance of the risk was almost enthusiastic. Sometimes indeed a momentary shadow would cross the mind of Aunt Agatha – sometimes a doubt would change Sir Edward’s countenance – but then these two old people were believers in love, and besides had the faculty of believing what they wished to believe, which was a still more important circumstance. And Mary for her part had said her say. The momentary hope she had felt in Winnie’s strength of character, and in her love – a hope which had opened her heart to speak to her sister – found but little to support it after that moment. She could not go on protesting, and making her presence a thorn in the flesh of the excited household; and if she felt throughout all a sense that the gulf was still there, though all these flowers had been strewed over it – a sense of the terrible risk which was so poorly counterbalanced by the vaguest and most doubtful of hopes – still Mary was aware that this might be simply the fault of her position, which led her to look upon everything with a less hopeful eye. She was the spectator, and she saw what was going on as the actors themselves could not be expected to see it. She saw Winnie’s delight at the idea of freedom from all restraint – and she saw Percival’s suppressed impatience of the anxious counsels addressed to him, and the look which Winnie and he exchanged on such occasions, as if assuring each other that in spite of all this they would take their own way. And then Mrs. Ochterlony’s own relations with the bridegroom were not of a comfortable kind. He knew apparently by instinct that she was not his friend, and he approached her with a solemn politeness under which Mary, perhaps over-sensitive on that point, felt that a secret sneer was concealed. And he made references to her Indian experiences, with a certain subtle implication of something in them which he knew and nobody else did – something which would be to Mrs. Ochterlony’s injury should it be known – which awoke in Mary an irritation and exasperation which nothing else could have produced. She avoided him as much as it was possible to avoid him during the busy interval before the marriage, and he perceived it and thought it was fear, and the sneer that lay under his courtesy became more and more evident. He took to petting little Wilfrid with an evident consciousness of Mary’s vexation and the painful effect it produced upon her; not Hugh nor Islay, who were of an age to be a man’s plaything, but the baby, who was too young for any but a woman’s interest; and Captain Percival was not the kind of man who is naturally fond of children. When she saw her little boy on her future brother-in-law’s knee, Mary felt her heart contract with an involuntary shiver, of which she could have given no clear explanation. She did not know what she was afraid of, but she was afraid.

Perhaps it was a relief to them all when the marriage day arrived – which had to be shortly, for the regiment was ordered to Malta, and Captain Percival had already had all the leave he could ask for. Mr. Penrose’s exertions had been crowned with such success that when he came to Winnie’s wedding he brought her the silver tea-service which in his heart he had decided conditionally to give her as a marriage gift. Mrs. Percival had decided to settle two hundred and fifty pounds a-year upon her son, which was very near Mr. Penrose’s mark; and Sir Edward, after long pondering upon the subject, and a half-amused, half-serious, consideration of Winnie’s capital which was being thrown away, had made up his mind to a still greater effort. He gave the young man in present possession what he had left him in his will, which was a sum of five thousand pounds – a little fortune to the young soldier. “You might have been my son, my boy, if your mother and I could have made up our minds,” the old baronet said, with a momentary weakness; though if anybody else had suggested such an idea no doubt Sir Edward would have said, “Heaven forbid!” And Mr. Penrose pounced upon it and had it settled upon Winnie, and was happy, though the bridegroom resisted a little. After that there could be no doubt about the tea-service. “If you should ever be placed in Mary’s position you will have something to fall back upon,” Uncle Penrose said; “or even if you should not get on together, you know.” It was not a large sum, but the difficulty there had been about getting it, and the pleasant sense that it was wholly owing to his own exertions, made it sweet to the man of capital, and he gave his niece his blessing and the tea-service with a full heart.

As for Winnie, she was radiant in her glow of beauty and happiness on that momentous day. A thunder-shower of sudden tears when she signed the register, and another when she was taking leave of Aunt Agatha, was all that occurred to overcloud her brightness; and even these did not overcloud her, but were in harmony – hot, violent, and sudden as they were – with the passionate happiness and emancipation of the married girl. She kissed over and over again her tender guardian – who for her part sat speechless and desolate to see her child go away, weeping with a silent anguish which could not find any words – and dropped that sudden shower over Aunt Agatha’s gown; but a moment after threw back the veil which had fallen over her face, and looked back from the carriage window upon them in a flush of joy, and pride, and conscious freedom, which, had no other sentiments been called for at the moment, it would have done one’s heart good to see. She was so happy that she could not cry, nor be sentimental, nor think of broken links, as she said – and why should she pretend to be sad about parting? Which was very true, no doubt, from Winnie’s point of view. And there was not the vestige of a cloud about when she waved her hand to them for the last time as she drove away. She was going away to the world and life, to see everything and enjoy everything, and have her day. Why should she not show her delight? While poor old Aunt Agatha, whose day was so long over, fell back into Mary’s arms, who was standing beside her, and felt that now at last and finally, her heart was broken, and the joy of her life gone. Was it not simply the course of nature and the way of the world?

CHAPTER XXII

THERE followed after this a time of such tranquillity as never yet entered into Mrs. Ochterlony’s life. Mary had known joy, and she had known sorrow, as people do to whom life comes with full hands, giving and taking; but it had always been life, busy and personal, which left her little leisure for anything beyond the quickly recurring duties of the hour and the day. She had had no time to watch the current how it flowed, being as it were part of it, and going along with it in its ceaseless course. But now all this was changed. After Winnie’s marriage a sudden tranquillity fell upon the ladies in the Cottage. Life had gone on and left them; they were no longer going with the tide, but standing by upon the bank watching it. They were not unhappy, nor was their existence sad, – for the three boys were world enough to satisfy the two women and keep them occupied and cheerful; and when the children were asleep, Aunt Agatha and her niece were, as people say, company for each other, and talked over their work as they sat by the evening lamp, or in the twilight garden, which was always so green and so sweet, – and were content, or more than content; but still sometimes Mrs. Ochterlony would bethink herself, and it would seem as a dream to her that she, too, had once taken her part with the others and gone with the stream, and suffered cruel sufferings and tasted sudden joys, and been Hugh Ochterlony’s wife. Was it so? Or had she never been but with Aunt Agatha by the little river that ran steadily one day like another under the self-same trees? This strange sense of unreality in the past turned her giddy by times, and made her head swim and the world to go round and round; but, to be sure, she never spoke of these sensations, and life continued, and the boys grew, and everything went very well at Kirtell-side.

Everything went so well that Aunt Agatha many a day pitied the poor people who were out in the world, or the young men who set out from the parish to begin their career, and would say, “Oh, if they but knew how much better everybody is at home!” Mary was younger, and perhaps she was not quite of the same mind; but still it was peace that had fallen upon her and was wrapping her all round like a garment. There was the same quiet routine every day; the same things to do, the same places to walk to, the same faces to see. Nothing unforeseen ever arrived to break the calm. When Hugh was old enough to begin serious lessons, a curate turned up in the course of nature who took pupils, and to whom Islay, too went by-and-by, and even little Wilfrid, who was always delicate. The boys went to him with shining morning faces, and came back growing louder and stronger, and, as Peggy said, more “stirring” every day. And Sir Edward made his almost daily visit, and let a thin and gentle echo of the out-of-door din into the Cottage quiet. He told them in his mild way what was going on, and talked about the news in the papers, and about the books reviewed, and about the occasional heavenly visitant in the shape of a new publication that found its way to Kirtell-side. There were few magazines then, and no cheap ones, and a single Blackwood did for a good many families. Sir Edward himself, who had been always considered intellectual, took in the Edinburgh all for himself, and lent it to his neighbours; but then it could not be expected that many people in a district could be so magnificent as that. When the Curate, on the other hand, came to tea (he was not the sort of man, as Aunt Agatha said, that one would think of making a dinner for), it was all about the parish that he talked; and as Mrs. Ochterlony was a perverse woman in her way, and had her own ideas about her poor neighbours, such conversation was not so interesting to her as it might have been. But it was in this sort of way that she spent the next ten or twelve years of her life.

As for Winnie, she was having her day, as she had said, and was, it is to be supposed, enjoying it. She wrote letters regularly and diligently, which is one point in which a woman, however little elevated she may be above her masculine companion in other respects, always has the better of him. And she possessed a true feminine gift which ought also to be put in the compensating scale against those female drawbacks which are so often insisted upon. Sometimes she was ill-tempered, sometimes bitter in her letters, for the honeymoon happiness naturally did not last for ever; but, whatever mood Winnie might be in, she always threw an unconscious halo of interest around herself when she wrote. It was, as everybody might see, an instinctive and unpremeditated act, but it was successful to the highest extent. Whether she described her triumphs or her disappointments, her husband’s kindness or his carelessness, their extravagant living or their want of money, Winnie herself, in the foreground of the picture, was always charmingly, and sometimes touchingly, posed. A word or two did it, and it was done to perfection; and the course of her history thus traced was followed by Aunt Agatha with unfailing enthusiasm. She herself went through it all in the person of her favourite, and Mary connected herself with a vague but still fairer future in the persons of her boys. And thus the peaceful existence went on day by day, with nothing more serious to trouble it than a transitory childish ailment, or a passing rumour that the Percivals were “going too fast,” or did not “get on,” – clouds which only floated mistily and momentarily about the horizon, and never came down to trouble the quiet waters. It was a time which left no record, and which by times felt languid and lingering to the younger woman, who was still too young to be altogether satisfied with so dead a calm in the middle of her existence; but still, perhaps, it was, on the whole, the happiest time of Mary’s life.

This halcyon time lasted until the boys were so far grown up as to bring the disturbing plans and speculations of their beginning life into the household calm. It lasted until Islay was sixteen and ready to pass his examination for Woolwich, the long-headed boy having fixed his affections upon scientific soldiership in a way which was slightly disappointing to his mother, who, as was natural, had thought him capable of a more learned profession. It roused the Cottage into something like a new stage of existence to think of and prepare for the entry of its nursling into that great vague unseen sphere which Aunt Agatha called the world. But, after all, it was not Islay who was the troublesome member of the family. He had fixed his thoughts upon his chosen profession almost as soon as he knew what was meant by his father’s sword, which had hung in Mrs. Ochterlony’s room from his earliest recollection; and though there might be a little anxiety about how he would succeed at his examination, and how he would get on when he left home, still Islay was so steady that no one felt any alarm or absolute disquiet about him.

But it was rather different with Hugh. Hugh was supposed to be his uncle’s heir, and received as such wherever he went, with perhaps more enthusiasm than might have fallen to his share merely as Mary’s son. He was heir presumptive, recognised to a certain extent at Earlston itself as elsewhere in that capacity; and yet Mr. Ochterlony had not, so far as anybody was aware, made any distinct decision, and might still alter his mind, and, indeed, was not too old to marry and have heirs of his own, which was a view of the subject chiefly taken by Aunt Agatha. And, to aggravate the position, Hugh was far from being a boy of fixed resolutions, like his brother. He was one of the troublesome people, who have no particular bias. He liked everything that was pleasant. He was not idle, nor had he any evil tendencies; he was fond of literature in a way, and at the same time fond of shooting and hunting, and all the occupations and amusements of a country life. Public opinion in the country-side proclaimed him one of the nicest young fellows going; and if he had been Francis Ochterlony’s son, and indisputably the heir of Earlston, Hugh would have been as satisfactory a specimen of a budding country gentleman as could have been found. But the crook in his lot was, that he was the heir presumptive, and at the same time was generous and proud and high-spirited, and not the kind of nature which could lie in wait for another man’s place, or build his fortunes upon another man’s generosity. His own opinion, no doubt, was that he had a right to Earlston; but he was far too great a Quixote, too highly fantastical in youthful pride and independence, to permit any one to say that it was his uncle’s duty to provide for him. And withal, he did not himself know what manner of life to take up, or what to do. He would have made a good soldier, or a good farmer, different though the two things are; and would have filled, as well as most people, almost any other practical position which Providence or circumstances had set clearly before him. But no intuitive perception of what he was most fit for was in him to enlighten his way; and at the same time he began to be highly impatient, being eighteen, and a man as he thought, of waiting and doing nothing, and living at home.

“If we could but have sent him to Oxford,” Aunt Agatha said; “if I had the means!” – but it is very doubtful whether she ever could have had the means; and of late Aunt Agatha too had been disturbed in her quiet. Her letters to Winnie had begun to convey enclosures of which she did not speak much, even to Mrs. Ochterlony, but which were dead against any such possibility for Hugh.

“If I had been brought up at school where I might have got a scholarship, or something,” said Hugh; “but I don’t know why I should want to go to Oxford. We must send Will if we can, mother; he has the brains for it. Oxford is too grand an idea for me – ”

“Not if you are to have Earlston, Hugh,” said his mother.

“I wish Earlston was at the bottom of the sea,” cried the poor boy; “but for Earlston, one would have known what one was good for. I wish my uncle would make up his mind and found a hospital with it, or marry, as Aunt Agatha says – ”

“He will never marry,” said Mary; “he was a great deal older than your father; he is quite an old man.”

“Indeed, Mary, he is not old at all, for a man,” said Aunt Agatha, with eagerness. “Ladies are so different. He might get a very nice wife yet, and children, for anything any one could tell. Not too young, you know – I think it would be a great pity if he were to marry anybody too young; but a nice person, of perhaps forty or so,” said Aunt Agatha; and she rounded off her sentence with a soft little sigh.

“He will never marry, I am sure,” said Mary, almost with indignation; for, not to speak of the injustice to Hugh, it sounded like an imputation upon her brother-in-law, who was sober-minded, and not thinking of anything so foolish; not to say that his heart was with his marble Venus, and he was indifferent to any other love.

“Well, if you think so, my dear – ” said Miss Seton; and a faint colour rose upon her soft old cheek. She thought Mary’s meaning was, that after his behaviour to herself, which was not exactly what people expected, he was not likely to entertain another affection; which was probably as true as any other theory of Mr. Ochterlony’s conduct. Aunt Agatha thought this was Mary’s meaning, and it pleased her. It was an old story, but still she remembered it so well, that it was pleasant to think he had not forgotten. But this, to be sure, had very little to do with Hugh.

“I wish he would marry,” said his heir presumptive, “or put one out of pain one way or another. Things can’t go on for ever like this. Islay is only sixteen, and he is starting already; and here am I eighteen past, and good for nothing. You would not like me to be a useless wretch all my life?” said Hugh, severely, turning round upon his mother, who was not prepared for such an address; but Hugh, of all the boys, was the one most like his father, and had the Major’s “way.”

“No,” cried Mary, a little alarmed, “anything but that. I still think you might wait a little, and see what your uncle means. You are not so very old. Well, my dear boy! don’t be impatient; tell me what you wish to do.”

But this was exactly what Hugh could not tell. “If there had been no Earlston in the question, one would have known,” he said. “It is very hard upon a fellow to be another man’s nephew. I think the best thing I could do would be to ignore Earlston altogether, and go in for – anything I could make my own living by. There’s Islay has had the first chance – ”