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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Madonna Mary," Mrs. Oliphant weaves a profound narrative that intricately explores the themes of faith, devotion, and the complexities of womanhood within a Victorian context. Employing a thoughtful prose style that marries lyrical descriptions with keen psychological insight, Oliphant delves into the life of its titular character, offering readers an exploration of religious and societal expectations. The novel not only reflects the religious fervor of its time but also engages with the broader cultural discourses surrounding the role of women, showcasing a powerful juxtaposition between spiritual aspiration and personal longing. Mrs. Oliphant, a prolific novelist and a pivotal figure in 19th-century literature, was known for her acute observations of social dynamics and individual psyches. Her extensive experiences as a writer, literary critic, and widow in turbulent times undoubtedly informed her portrayal of the struggles faced by women in both public and private spheres. Oliphant's personal encounters with loss and resilience likely infused "Madonna Mary" with rich emotional depth, making it a poignant reflection of her own life's challenges. This book is a compelling read for those interested in feminist literature, Victorian studies, or the exploration of spirituality in fiction. Oliphant's nuanced character development and evocative writing invite readers to engage deeply with the text, ensuring that "Madonna Mary" remains relevant and resonant in contemporary discussions about identity and faith. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Madonna Mary
Table of Contents
Introduction
At once intimate and social, this novel traces how a woman’s sense of self must navigate the crosscurrents of duty, affection, and public judgment in a world that prizes serenity while testing it at every turn, setting personal conscience against the watchful gaze of community, measuring private tenderness against the demands of respectability, and weighing the risks of trust when reputations can be made or lost in a whisper, so that every choice becomes a negotiation between inner conviction and outer expectation, and every kindness or hesitation ripples outward through the fragile fabric of domestic life.
Madonna Mary, by the prolific Victorian author Margaret Oliphant—best known in her own era as Mrs. Oliphant—belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century domestic realism, unfolding within the recognizably provincial world of British middle-class society. Published in the mid-1860s, it shares the period’s concern with social mobility, moral responsibility, and the consequences of communal scrutiny. Readers encounter the rhythms of everyday life—visits, letters, confidences, and subtle shifts of status—rendered with a measured, observant eye. Without relying on melodrama, the book demonstrates how ordinary circumstances can concentrate profound ethical tensions, situating personal struggles within the broader cultural currents of the Victorian age.
The premise introduces a young woman at the heart of a closely watched household, where the ordinary pressures of kinship and livelihood are intensified by the knowledge that everyone seems to be looking on. As misunderstandings arise and loyalties are tested, choices that might appear simple become morally intricate. Oliphant guides the reader with an assured omniscient voice—sympathetic, gently ironic, and attentive to small social signals—offering a narrative experience that is patient rather than sensational, cumulative rather than abrupt. The atmosphere is one of steady emotional weather, where the drama lies less in spectacle than in the gradual clarification of character.
Central themes include the ethics of care, the boundaries of respectability, and the sometimes uneasy alliance between personal inclination and communal expectation. Oliphant probes how generosity can be complicated by pride, how candor may clash with tact, and how good intentions must be translated into sustainable conduct. The novel attends closely to women’s labor—emotional, managerial, and moral—without reducing its heroine to a single trait or role. By charting the circulation of favors, advice, and judgment, it shows how networks of obligation shape destinies, and how the desire to do right must continually reckon with the world’s contingent practicalities.
Faith and conscience, characteristic concerns in Oliphant’s fiction, surface here not as doctrinal debate but as lived experience: the daily work of choosing integrity when the cost is unclear, and of discerning kindness that neither condescends nor capitulates. The narrative’s moral texture arises from quiet scenes—conversations at thresholds, decisions made after a solitary walk, the tactful withholding or offering of information. In this register, the question is not whether virtue triumphs, but what virtue consists of when options are imperfect. The result is a study in measured judgment, where sympathy is a discipline and humility a form of strength.
For contemporary readers, the book’s scrutiny of reputation, privacy, and communal pressure feels strikingly current. It invites reflection on how public perception can shape private possibility, how economic precarity intensifies moral dilemmas, and how gendered expectations persist in subtler forms. The novel asks what it means to safeguard dignity without becoming rigid, to extend trust without being naïve, and to claim a voice without forfeiting courtesy. Its restrained style gives space for readers to weigh competing goods, while its humane intelligence resists easy verdicts, offering instead the steady light of attention to ordinary courage in the midst of social complexity.
To read Madonna Mary is to enter a world where the stakes of daily life accumulate until they reveal a character’s true contour, and where the drama of becoming is written in decisions that rarely announce themselves as dramatic at all. Oliphant’s prose is lucid, unhurried, and finely tuned to the implications of a glance or a pause. The reward is an experience both elegant and searching: a domestic novel that doubles as moral inquiry and social portrait. Without unveiling its later turns, one may say that it offers the satisfactions of recognition—of motives, pressures, and mercies that still speak to us now.
Synopsis
Madonna Mary opens in a quiet provincial community where social observation is keen and reputation matters. Mary, the young woman at its center, has earned the affectionate sobriquet “Madonna” from her serene beauty and unassuming manner. She lives modestly, attentive to family duties and the expectations that surround her. The early chapters establish the rhythms of this world: visits, small kindnesses, and the subtle pressures that attend any hint of irregularity. Mrs. Oliphant presents the setting with careful detail, sketching the clergy, neighbors, and minor gentry who form the town’s opinion. Within this ordered circle, Mary’s gentleness appears both strength and burden.
Mary’s history emerges gradually, revealing a life shaped by responsibility more than self-assertion. Though admired, she remains reticent about herself and focused on practical care—household matters, the comfort of those dependent on her, and a sincere regard for propriety. Her composure reflects not indifference but restraint, learned from adversity and the need to keep peace. The narrative lingers on this balance of duty and feeling, introducing relatives, friends, and well-wishers who variously protect, advise, or judge her. Mary’s social position, not quite secure yet respectable, frames the ambiguity that will later test her: how to reconcile personal truth with public proof.
A turning point arrives with the reappearance of a figure connected to Mary’s past, bringing unresolved questions into the present. The encounter is outwardly courteous yet freighted with implication—hints of promises made, obligations unmet, and ties that may compromise future prospects. This return draws other actors into view: a cautious family elder, an energetic friend, and a legal mind alert to advantage. Gossip awakens, sifting Mary’s reserve for signs of concealment. Without revealing decisive facts, the narrative signals a contested claim that touches honor and inheritance. From this moment, Mary’s quiet interior life is set against the restless curiosity of the town.
The conflict soon takes a formal shape. Documents are sought, memories examined, and authority figures pronounce guarded opinions. A well-connected household resists any interpretation that might unsettle its standing, while sympathetic confidants urge Mary to secure recognition through proper channels. She remains calm but steadfast, declining both rash denunciation and convenient concessions. The question is not merely emotional attachment but the validity of a link with material consequences. Mrs. Oliphant depicts the friction between domestic kindness and institutional power, showing how affection, prudence, and self-interest combine. The stakes widen from private understanding to a matter capable of altering families and fortunes.
An investigative phase follows, moving between drawing rooms and official rooms, where whispered recollections meet registers and formal statements. Witnesses are approached; a date and place, once incidental, become central. The narrative builds evidence methodically, contrasting personal memory with public record. Practical allies—sensible women, a conscientious clergyman, and a clear-headed friend—help Mary navigate procedures and delays. The social atmosphere grows tense as partial information leaks out, prompting premature judgments. Mary neither dramatizes nor retreats; her resolve to anchor the case in verifiable fact defines her course. The search, though outwardly quiet, reads like a moral and administrative pursuit.
Countermeasures arise as those with opposing interests attempt to limit or discredit the claim. Alternative narratives are advanced, highlighting uncertainty, questioning character, and encouraging a safer compromise. Mary receives an offer that promises security at the cost of conceding what she believes to be true. Her decision point is clear: accept protection that leaves ambiguity untouched, or continue a path requiring patience and courage. The novel treats this not as melodrama but as a realistic pressure—financial, social, and emotional. Meanwhile, small mistakes and chance delays complicate the inquiry, making time itself an adversary as formal deadlines approach.
The tension tightens when a crucial lead threatens to fail. A potential witness proves elusive; a paper long assumed accessible is misplaced or sealed behind process. Mary confronts moments of solitude, aware that even well-meaning friends tire of uncertainty. A journey beyond the familiar precincts broadens the canvas, introducing new locales and secondary figures who hold fragments of truth. The scenes remain grounded in everyday detail—lodgings, churchyards, offices—while signaling the larger implications for identity and standing. As obstacles multiply, the narrative emphasizes endurance: steady work, careful words, and the refusal to let rumor fill the gaps left by fact.
Approaching its climax, the story gathers principals into one arena—family representatives, advisers, and observers—where statements must be made and weighed. The tone is restrained but decisive, preferring the formal cadence of readings, attestations, and acknowledgments to sensational revelation. Relationships strain: loyalties are declared, some publicly, others in guarded private interviews. Mary continues to present her case without denunciation, relying on the coherence of evidence and the integrity of her conduct. The community, alert to outcomes that may revise its own assessments, watches closely. The question of recognition and its ramifications is brought to the edge of resolution.
The conclusion affirms the novel’s central concern: the alignment of personal truth with public validation in a society that prizes decorum. Without detailing the final turn, the ending pivots on recognition, duty, and the terms on which security is granted. Mary’s constancy—neither combative nor yielding—emerges as an ethical model within the constraints of her world. Mrs. Oliphant underscores the social mechanisms by which character is tested, documented, and remembered. The last pages return to the domestic sphere altered by experience, hinting at stability won through patience. The overall message is one of measured justice and the lasting value of steadfastness.
Historical Context
Published in 1867, Madonna Mary is set in the mid-Victorian world of provincial Britain, a social landscape defined by expanding towns, closely knit parish structures, and the drawing rooms of respectable middle-class households. The time frame aligns with the 1850s–1860s, when railways, banks, and new professional careers linked London with county and border regions, including Scotland, where Margaret Oliphant herself was born and educated. The novel’s domestic sphere—guardianship, household economies, charitable committees, and clerical influence—reflects the habits and expectations of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). Its settings mirror a society governed by reputation and legal convention, where inheritance, trust management, and social surveillance shape every decision made by women and their advisors.
The financial panic of 1866, triggered by the collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co. on 10 May 1866, provides the single most resonant historical backdrop for Oliphant’s themes of precarious respectability and fiduciary duty. Overend’s liabilities, estimated around £11 million, precipitated runs on joint-stock banks and finance houses such as the Agra and Masterman’s Bank, and forced the Bank of England to raise its discount rate to 10 percent. The government issued a letter of indemnity allowing the Bank to act beyond the constraints of the Bank Charter Act of 1844—an extraordinary step acknowledging systemic risk. The crisis exposed how the Companies Acts (notably 1862) and the spread of limited liability enabled aggressive speculation that entangled trustees, guardians, and provincial investors. In Madonna Mary, the household economy is depicted as morally and materially vulnerable to exactly this kind of credit shock: a guardian’s prudence, the safety of a woman’s settlement, and the integrity of professional advisers are constant concerns. Oliphant was writing in the immediate aftermath of the panic, and her portrayal of anxieties over investments, mortgages, and bills is steeped in the language of mid-century finance. The novel mirrors the way a sudden tightening of credit—felt far from Lombard Street—could overturn marriage prospects, alter class position, and test the ethical fibre of men entrusted with women’s fortunes. For readers in 1867, these dangers were not abstractions but the lived reality of a society discovering the costs of modern finance.
Victorian marriage and property law framed women’s dependence and is central to the novel’s social tensions. Under common-law coverture, a married woman’s property was controlled by her husband unless protected by a separate settlement in equity. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 created a civil divorce court but preserved gendered asymmetries, and only later reforms—the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882—gradually secured wives’ earnings and separate estates. In Scotland, the analogous regime of jus mariti persisted until reform in 1881. Madonna Mary reflects the pre-reform world: women’s securities depend on trustees, careful settlements, and male probity. Oliphant, herself widowed in 1859, writes with exact knowledge of how law and custom constrained female autonomy.
Systems of relief and philanthropy, reshaped by the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 in England and Wales and by the Poor Law (Scotland) Act 1845, inform the novel’s depiction of charity as social governance. Parochial boards, workhouses, and outdoor relief placed the poor under surveillance, while mid-century ladies’ committees and subscription charities multiplied. The Charity Organization Society (founded 1869) formalized this ethos shortly after Oliphant’s novel, but its principles were already current. Madonna Mary mirrors the moral calculus of respectable giving—probing worthiness, disciplining recipients, and sustaining class boundaries. The book’s scenes of visiting, fundraising, and discreet aid reflect a culture where benevolence was inseparable from control and reputation.
Religious life—Anglican, Nonconformist, and Presbyterian—exerted significant pressure on mid-Victorian morals and community standing. The 1851 Religious Census underscored Nonconformist strength in England and Wales, while in Scotland the Disruption of 1843 led by Thomas Chalmers created the Free Church and divided parishes, charity, and schooling. Clergy mediated social legitimacy, from confirmations and communion rolls to discipline and domestic counsel. In Madonna Mary, ministers and church circles function as arbiters of conduct, suffusing courtship, guardianship, and benefaction with doctrinal and communal expectations. Oliphant’s Scottish background ensured acute attention to how confessional culture shaped everyday obligations and reputations.
Railway expansion and new communications underwrite the novel’s attention to mobility, secrecy, and speed. The “railway mania” of 1845–1847 and sustained building thereafter produced, by 1870, a network exceeding 13,000 route miles in Britain; telegraph companies, founded in the 1840s, made rapid news transmission commonplace. These systems enabled sudden financial reversals to ripple from the City to provincial parlours within hours, and facilitated swift departures, strategic visits, and the choreography of social surveillance. Madonna Mary leverages this infrastructure: movements between London and the provinces, the timely arrival of letters, and the quick spread of rumor all reflect a society whose moral dramas are paced by timetables and wires as much as by sermons and seasons.
Mid-1860s political reform enlarged the civic horizon of the middling classes whose authority Oliphant anatomizes. The Second Reform Act of 1867 roughly doubled the English and Welsh electorate (from about 1.3 million to 2.5 million), with Scotland’s parallel reform following in 1868, while municipal institutions and a vigorous provincial press gained prominence. These changes intensified debates on respectability, responsibility, and public voice. Madonna Mary mirrors this ascendancy in its focus on committees, vestries, and household governance, where middle-class men and women police standards and fear social slippage after scandal or insolvency. The novel’s domestic judgments parallel the period’s civic rhetoric about worth, prudence, and moral capital.
As social and political critique, the novel exposes the fragility of female security when law, finance, and reputation are controlled by men. It indicts speculative culture by showing how trustees and guardians, licensed by status and limited liability, can transfer risk onto dependents. It scrutinizes charity as an instrument of hierarchy, revealing how relief, gossip, and pastoral oversight maintain class lines. It questions the justice of coverture-era constraints that render prudence futile when male decision-making fails. Through these pressures—market panic, ecclesiastical surveillance, and civic respectability—Madonna Mary interrogates a system that prizes virtue yet tolerates structural inequity, urging ethical stewardship and reforms that align legal power with moral responsibility.
Madonna Mary
M A D O N N A M A R Y.
CHAPTER I.
AJOR OCHTERLONY had been very fidgety after the coming in of the mail[1]. He was very often so, as all his friends were aware, and nobody so much as Mary, his wife, who was herself, on ordinary occasions, of an admirable composure. But the arrival of the mail, which is so welcome an event at an Indian station, and which generally affected the Major very mildly, had produced a singular impression upon him on this special occasion. He was not a man who possessed a large correspondence in his own person; he had reached middle life, and had nobody particular belonging to him, except his wife and his little children, who were as yet too young to have been sent “home;” and consequently there was nobody to receive letters from, except a few married brothers and sisters, who don’t count, as everybody knows. That kind of formally affectionate correspondence is not generally exciting, and even Major Ochterlony supported it with composure. But as for the mail which arrived on the 15th of April, 1838, its effect was different. He went out and in so often, that Mary got very little good of her letters, which were from her young sister and her old aunt, and were naturally overflowing with all kinds of pleasant gossip and domestic information. The present writer has so imperfect an idea of what an Indian bungalow is like, that it would be impossible for her to convey a clear idea to the reader, who probably knows much better about it. But yet it was in an Indian bungalow that Mrs. Ochterlony was seated—in the dim hot atmosphere, out of which the sun was carefully excluded, but in which, nevertheless, the inmates simmered softly with the patience of people who cannot help it, and who are used to their martyrdom. She sat still, and did her best to make out the pleasant babble in the letters, which seemed to take sound to itself as she read, and to break into a sweet confusion of kind voices, and rustling leaves, and running water, such as, she knew, had filled the little rustic drawing-room in which the letters were written. The sister was very young, and the aunt was old, and all the experience of the world possessed by the two together, might have gone into Mary’s thimble, which she kept playing with upon her finger as she read. But though she knew twenty times better than they did, the soft old lady’s gentle counsel, and the audacious girl’s advice and censure, were sweet to Mary, who smiled many a time at their simplicity, and yet took the good of it in a way that was peculiar to her. She read, and she smiled in her reading, and felt the fresh English air blow about her, and the leaves rustling—if it had not been for the Major, who went and came like a ghost, and let everything fall that he touched, and hunted every innocent beetle or lizard that had come in to see how things were going on; for he was one of those men who have a great, almost womanish objection to reptiles and insects, which is a sentiment much misplaced in India. He fidgeted so much, indeed, as to disturb even his wife’s accustomed nerves at last.
“Is there anything wrong—has anything happened?” she asked, folding up her letter, and laying it down in her open work-basket. Her anxiety was not profound, for she was accustomed to the Major’s “ways,” but still she saw it was necessary for his comfort to utter what was on his mind.
“When you have read your letters I want to speak to you,” he said. “What do your people mean by sending you such heaps of letters? I thought you would never be done. Well, Mary, this is what it is—there’s nothing wrong with the children, or anybody belonging to us, thank God; but it’s very nearly as bad, and, I am at my wit’s end. Old Sommerville[2]’s dead.”
“Old Sommerville!” said Mrs. Ochterlony. This time she was utterly perplexed and at a loss. She could read easily enough the anxiety which filled her husband’s handsome, restless face; but, then, so small a matter put him out of his ordinary! And she could not for her life remember who old Sommerville was.
“I daresay you don’t recollect him,” said the Major, in an aggrieved tone. “It is very odd how everything has gone wrong with us since that false start. It is an awful shame, when a set of old fogies put young people in such a position—all for nothing, too,” Major Ochterlony added: “for after we were actually married, everybody came round. It is an awful shame!”
“If I was a suspicious woman,” said Mary, with a smile, “I should think it was our marriage that you called a false start and an awful shame.”
“And so it is, my love: so it is,” said the innocent soldier, his face growing more and more cloudy. As for his wife being a suspicious woman, or the possible existence of any delicacy on her part about his words, the Major knew better than that. The truth was that he might have given utterance to sentiments of the most atrocious description on that point, sentiments which would have broken the heart and blighted the existence, so to speak, of any sensitive young woman, without producing the slightest effect upon Mary, or upon himself, to whom Mary was so utterly and absolutely necessary, that the idea of existing without her never once entered his restless but honest brain. “That is just what it is,” he said; “it is a horrid business for me, and I don’t know what to do about it. They must have been out of their senses to drive us to marry as we did; and we were a couple of awful fools,” said the Major, with the gravest and most care-worn countenance. Mrs. Ochterlony was still a young woman, handsome and admired, and she might very well have taken offence at such words; but, oddly enough, there was something in his gravely-disturbed face and pathetic tone which touched another chord in Mary’s breast. She laughed, which was unkind, considering all the circumstances, and took up her work, and fixed a pair of smiling eyes upon her perplexed husband’s face.
“I daresay it is not so bad as you think,” she said, with the manner of a woman who was used to this kind of thing. “Come, and tell me all about it.” She drew her chair a trifle nearer his, and looked at him with a face in which a touch of suppressed amusement was visible, under a good deal of gravity and sympathy. She was used to lend a sympathetic ear to all his difficulties, and to give all her efforts to their elucidation, but still she could not help feeling it somewhat droll to be complained to in this strain about her own marriage. “We were a couple of fools,” she said, with a little laugh, “but it has not turned out so badly as it might have done.” Upon which rash statement the Major shook his head.
“It is easy for you to say so,” he said, “and if I were to go no deeper, and look no further—— It is all on your account, Mary[1q]. If it were not on your account——”
“Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Ochterlony, still struggling with a perverse inclination to laugh; “but now tell me what old Sommerville has to do with it; and who old Sommerville is; and what put it into his head just at this moment to die.”
The Major sighed, and gave her a half-irritated, half-melancholy look. To think she should laugh, when, as he said to himself, the gulf was yawning under her very feet. “My dear Mary,” he said, “I wish you would learn that this is not anything to laugh at. Old Sommerville was the old gardener at Earlston[5], who went with us, you recollect, when we went to—to Scotland. My brother would never have him back again, and he went among his own friends. He was a stupid old fellow. I don’t know what he was good for, for my part;—but,” said Major Ochterlony, with solemnity, “he was the only surviving witness of our unfortunate marriage—that is the only thing that made him interesting to me.”
“Poor old man!” said Mary, “I am very sorry. I had forgotten his name; but really,—if you speak like this of our unfortunate marriage, you will hurt my feelings,” Mrs. Ochterlony added. She had cast down her eyes on her work, but still there was a gleam of fun out of one of the corners. This was all the effect made upon her mind by words which would have naturally produced a scene between half the married people in the world.
As for the Major, he sighed: he was in a sighing mood, and at such moments his wife’s obtusity and thoughtlessness always made him sad. “It is easy talking,” he said, “and if it were not on your account, Mary—— The fact is that everything has gone wrong that had any connection with it. The blacksmith’s house, you know, was burned down, and his kind of a register—if it was any good, and I am sure I don’t know if it was any good; and then that woman died, though she was as young as you are, and as healthy, and nobody had any right to expect that she would die,” Major Ochterlony added with an injured tone, “and now old Sommerville; and we have nothing in the world to vouch for its being a good marriage, except what that blacksmith fellow called the ‘lines[4].’ Of course you have taken care of the lines,” said the Major, with a little start. It was the first time that this new subject of doubt had occurred to his mind.
“To vouch for its being a good marriage!” said Mrs. Ochterlony: “really, Hugh, you go too far. Our marriage is not a thing to make jokes about, you know—nor to get up alarms about either. Everybody knows all about it, both among your people and mine. It is very vexatious and disagreeable of you to talk so.” As she spoke the colour rose to Mary’s matron cheek. She had learned to make great allowances for her husband’s anxious temper and perpetual panics; but this suggestion was too much for her patience just at the moment. She calmed down, however, almost immediately, and came to herself with a smile. “To think you should almost have made me angry!” she said, taking up her work again. This did not mean to imply that to make Mrs. Ochterlony angry was at all an impossible process. She had her gleams of wrath like other people, and sometimes it was not at all difficult to call them forth; but, so far as the Major’s “temperament” was concerned, she had got, by much exercise, to be the most indulgent of women—perhaps by finding that no other way of meeting it was of any use.
“It is not my fault, my love,” said the Major, with a meekness which was not habitual to him. “But I hope you are quite sure you have the lines. Any mistake about them would be fatal. They are the only proof that remains to us. I wish you would go and find them, Mary, and let me make sure.”
“The lines!” said Mrs. Ochterlony, and, notwithstanding her self-command, she faltered a little. “Of course I must have them somewhere—I don’t quite recollect at this moment. What do you want them for, Hugh? Are we coming into a fortune, or what are the statistics good for? When I can lay my hand upon them, I will give them to you,” she added, with that culpable carelessness which her husband had already so often remarked in her. If it had been a trumpery picture or book that had been mislaid, she could not have been less concerned.
“When you can lay your hands upon them!” cried the exasperated man. “Are you out of your senses, Mary? Don’t you know that they are your sheet-anchor, your charter—the only document you have——”
“Hugh,” said Mrs. Ochterlony, “tell me what this means. There must be something in it more than I can see. What need have I for documents? What does it matter to us this old man being dead, more than it matters to any one the death of somebody who has been at their wedding? It is sad, but I don’t see how it can be a personal misfortune. If you really mean anything, tell me what it is.”
The Major for his part grew angry, as was not unnatural. “If you choose to give me the attention you ought to give to your husband when he speaks seriously to you, you will soon perceive what I mean,” he said; and then he repented, and came up to her and kissed her. “My poor Mary, my bonnie Mary,” he said. “If that wretched irregular marriage[3] of ours should bring harm to you! It is you only I am thinking of, my darling—that you should have something to rest upon;” and his feelings were so genuine that with that the water stood in his eyes.
As for Mrs. Ochterlony, she was very near losing patience altogether; but she made an effort and restrained herself. It was not the first time that she had heard compunctions expressed for the irregular marriage, which certainly was not her fault. But this time she was undeniably a little alarmed, for the Major’s gravity was extreme. “Our marriage is no more irregular than it always was,” she said. “I wish you would give up this subject, Hugh; I have you to rest upon, and everything that a woman can have. We never did anything in a corner,” she continued, with a little vehemence. “Our marriage was just as well known, and well published, as if it had been in St. George’s, Hanover Square. I cannot imagine what you are aiming at. And besides, it is done, and we cannot mend it,” she added, abruptly. On the whole, the runaway match had been a pleasant frolic enough; there was no earthly reason, except some people’s stupid notions, why they should not have been married; and everybody came to their senses rapidly, and very little harm had come of it. But the least idea of doubt on such a subject is an offence to a woman, and her colour rose and her breath came quick, without any will of hers. As for the Major, he abandoned the broader general question, and went back to the detail, as was natural to the man.
“If you only have the lines all safe,” he said, “if you would but make sure of that. I confess old Sommerville’s death was a great shock to me, Mary,—the last surviving witness; but Kirkman tells me the marriage lines in Scotland are a woman’s safeguard, and Kirkman is a Scotchman and ought to know.”
“Have you been consulting him?” said Mary, with a certain despair; “have you been talking of such a subject to——”
“I don’t know where I could have a better confidant,” said the Major. “Mary, my darling, they are both attached to you; and they are good people, though they talk; and then he is Scotch, and understands. If anything were to happen to me, and you had any difficulty in proving——”
“Hugh, for Heaven’s sake have done with this. I cannot bear any more,” cried Mrs. Ochterlony, who was at the end of her powers.
It was time for the great coup for which his restless soul had been preparing. He approached the moment of fate with a certain skill, such as weak people occasionally display, and mad people almost always,—as if the feeble intellect had a certain right by reason of its weakness to the same kind of defence which is possessed by the mind diseased. “Hush, Mary, you are excited,” he said, “and it is only you I am thinking of. If anything should happen to me—I am quite well, but no man can answer for his own life:—my dear, I am afraid you will be vexed with what I am going to say. But for my own satisfaction, for my peace of mind—if we were to go through the ceremony again——”
Mary Ochterlony rose up with sudden passion. It was altogether out of proportion to her husband’s intentions or errors, and perhaps to the occasion. That was but a vexatious complication of ordinary life; and he a fidgety, uneasy, perhaps over-conscientious, well-meaning man. She rose, tragic without knowing it, with a swell in her heart of the unutterable and supreme—feeling herself for the moment an outraged wife, an insulted woman, and a mother wounded to the heart. “I will hear no more,” she said, with lips that had suddenly grown parched and dry. “Don’t say another word. If it has come to this, I will take my chance with my boys. Hugh, no more, no more.” As she lifted her hands with an impatient gesture of horror, and towered over him as he sat by, having thus interrupted and cut short his speech, a certain fear went through Major Ochterlony’s mind. Could her mind be going? Had the shock been too much for her? He could not understand otherwise how the suggestion which he thought a wise one, and of advantage to his own peace of mind, should have stung her into such an incomprehensible passion. But he was afraid and silenced, and could not go on.
“My dear Mary,” he said mildly, “I had no intention of vexing you. We can speak of this another time. Sit down, and I’ll get you a glass of water,” he added, with anxious affection; and hurried off to seek it: for he was a good husband, and very fond of his wife, and was terrified to see her turn suddenly pale and faint, notwithstanding that he was quite capable of wounding her in the most exquisite and delicate point. But then he did not mean it. He was a matter-of-fact man, and the idea of marrying his wife over again in case there might be any doubtfulness about the first marriage, seemed to him only a rational suggestion, which no sensible woman ought to be disturbed by; though no doubt it was annoying to be compelled to have recourse to such an expedient. So he went and fetched her the water, and gave up the subject, and stayed with her all the afternoon and read the papers to her, and made himself agreeable. It was a puzzling sort of demonstration on Mary’s part, but that did not make her the less Mary, and the dearest and best of earthly creatures. So Major Ochterlony put his proposal aside for a more favourable moment, and did all he could to make his wife forget it, and behaved himself as a man naturally would behave who was recognised as the best husband and most domestic man in the regiment. Mary took her seat again and her work, and the afternoon went on as if nothing had happened. They were a most united couple, and very happy together, as everybody knew; or if one of them at any chance moment was perhaps less than perfectly blessed, it was not, at any rate, because the love-match, irregular as it might be, had ended in any lack of love.
CHAPTER II.
RS. OCHTERLONY sat and worked and listened, and her husband read the papers to her, picking out by instinct all those little bits of news that are grateful to people who are so far away from their own country. And he went through the births and marriages, to see “if there is anybody we know,”—notwithstanding that he was aware that corner of the paper is one which a woman does not leave to any reader, but makes it a principle to examine herself. And Mary sat still and went on with her work, and not another syllable was said about old Sommerville, or the marriage lines, or anything that had to do with the previous conversation. This tranquillity was all in perfect good faith on Major Ochterlony’s side, who had given up the subject with the intention of waiting until a more convenient season, and who had relieved his mind by talking of it, and could put off his anxiety. But as for Mary, it was not in good faith that she put on this expression of outward calm. She knew her husband, and she knew that he was pertinacious and insisting, and that a question which he had once started was not to be made an end of, and finally settled, in so short a time. She sat with her head a little bent, hearing the bits of news run on like an accompaniment to the quick-flowing current of her own thoughts. Her heart was beating quick, and her blood coursing through her veins as if it had been a sudden access of fever which had come upon her. She was a tall, fair, serene woman, with no paltry passion about her; but at the same time, when the occasion required it, Mary was capable of a vast suppressed fire of feeling which it gave her infinite trouble to keep down. This was a side of her character which was not suspected by the world in general—meaning of course the regiment, and the ladies at the station, who were all, more or less, military. Mrs. Ochterlony was the kind of woman to whom by instinct any stranger would have appropriated the name of Mary; and naturally all her intimates (and the regiment was very “nice,” and lived in great harmony, and they were all intimate) called her by her Christian—most Christian name. And there were people who put the word Madonna[6] before it,—“as if the two did not mean the same thing!” said little Mrs. Askell, the ensign’s baby-wife, whose education had been neglected, but whom Mrs. Ochterlony had been very kind to. It was difficult to know how the title had originated, though people did say it was young Stafford who had been brought up in Italy, and who had such a strange adoration for Mrs. Ochterlony, and who died, poor fellow—which was perhaps the best thing he could have done under the circumstances. “It was a special providence,” Mrs. Kirkman said, who was the Colonel’s wife: for, to be sure, to be romantically adored by a foolish young subaltern, was embarrassing for a woman, however perfect her mind and temper and fairest fame might be. It was he who originated the name, perhaps with some faint foolish thought of Petrarch and his Madonna Laura: and then he died and did no more harm; and a great many people adopted it, and Mary herself did not object to be addressed by that sweetest of titles.
And yet she was not meek enough for the name. Her complexion was very fair, but she had only a very faint rose-tint on her cheeks, so faint that people called her pale—which with her fairness, was a drawback to her. Her hair was light-brown, with a golden reflection that went and came, as if it somehow depended upon the state of her mind and spirits; and her eyes were dark, large, and lambent,—not sparkling, but concentrating within themselves a soft, full depth of light. It was a question whether they were grey or brown; but at all events they were dark and deep. And she was, perhaps, a little too large and full and matronly in her proportions to please a youthful critic. Naturally such a woman had a mass of hair which she scarcely knew what to do with, and which at this moment seemed to betray the disturbed state of her mind by unusual gleams of the golden reflection which sometimes lay quite tranquil and hidden among the great silky coils. She was very happily married, and Major Ochterlony was the model husband of the regiment. They had married very young, and made a runaway love-match which was one of the few which everybody allowed had succeeded to perfection. But yet—— There are so few things in this world which succeed quite to perfection. It was Mrs. Kirkman’s opinion that nobody else in the regiment could have supported the Major’s fidgety temper. “It would be a great trial for the most experienced Christian,” she said; “and dear Mary is still among the babes who have to be fed with milk; but Providence is kind, and I don’t think she feels it as you or I would.” This was the opinion of the Colonel’s wife; but as for Mary, as she sat and worked and listened to her husband reading the papers, perhaps she could have given a different version of her own composure and calm.
They had been married about ten years, and it was the first time he had taken this idea into his head. It is true that Mrs. Ochterlony looked at it solely as one of his ideas, and gave no weight whatever to the death of old Sommerville, or the loss of the marriage lines. She had been very young at the time of her marriage, and she was motherless, and had not those pangs of wounded delicacy to encounter, which a young woman ought to have who abandons her home in such a way. This perhaps arose from a defect in Mary’s girlish undeveloped character; but the truth was, that she too belonged to an Indian family, and had no home to speak of, nor any of the sweeter ties to break. And after that, she had thought nothing more about it. She was married, and there was an end of it; and the young people had gone to India immediately, and had been very poor, and very happy, and very miserable, like other young people who begin the world in an inconsiderate way. But in spite of a hundred drawbacks, the happiness had always been pertinacious, lasted longest, and held out most stedfastly, and lived everything down. For one thing, Mrs. Ochterlony had a great deal to do, not being rich, and that happily quite preserved her from the danger of brooding over the Major’s fidgets, and making something serious out of them. And then they had married so young that neither of them could ever identify himself or herself, or make the distinction that more reasonable couples can between “me” and “you.” This time, however, the Major’s restlessness had taken an uncomfortable form. Mary felt herself offended and insulted without knowing why. She, a matron of ten years’ standing, the mother of children! She could not believe that she had really heard true, that a repetition of her marriage could have been suggested to her—and at the same time she knew that it was perfectly true. It never occurred to her as a thing that possibly might have to be done, but still the suggestion itself was a wound. Major Ochterlony, for his part, thought of it as a precaution, and good for his peace of mind, as he had said; but to Mary it was scarcely less offensive than if somebody else had ventured to make love to her, or offer her his allegiance. It seemed to her an insult of the same description, an outrage which surely could not have occurred without some unwitting folly on her part to make such a proposal possible. She went away, searching back into the far, far distant years, as she sat at work and he read the papers. Had she anyhow failed in womanly restraint or delicacy at that moment when she was eighteen, and knew of nothing but honour, and love, and purity in the world? To be sure, she had not occupied herself very much about the matter—she had taken no pains for her own safety, and had not an idea what registrars meant, nor marriage laws, nor “lines.” All that she knew was that a great many people were married at Gretna Green, and that she was married, and that there was an end of it. All these things came up and passed before her mind in a somewhat hurrying crowd; but Mary’s mature judgment did not disapprove of the young bride who believed what was said to her, and was content, and had unbounded faith in the blacksmith and in her bridegroom. If that young woman had been occupying herself about the register, Mrs. Ochterlony probably, looking back, would have entertained but a mean opinion of her. It was not anything she had done. It was not anything special, so far as she could see, in the circumstances: for hosts of people before and after had been married on the Scottish border. The only conclusion, accordingly, that she could come to, was the natural conclusion, that it was one of the Major’s notions. But there was little comfort in that, for Mrs. Ochterlony was aware that his notions were persistent, that they lived and lasted and took new developments, and were sometimes very hard to get rid of. And she sighed in the midst of the newspaper reading, and betrayed that she had not been listening. Not that she expected her husband’s new whim to come to anything; but because she foresaw in it endless repetitions of the scene which had just ended, and endless exasperation and weariness to herself.
Major Ochterlony stopped short when he heard his wife sigh—for he was not a man to leave anything alone, or to practise a discreet neglect—and laid down his paper and looked with anxiety in her face. “You have a headache,” he said, tenderly; “I saw it the moment I entered the room. Go and lie down, my dear, and take care of yourself. You take care of everybody else,” said the Major. “Why did you let me go on reading the paper like an ass, when your head aches?”
“My head does not ache. I was only thinking,” said Mrs. Ochterlony: for she thought on the whole it would be best to resume the subject and endeavour to make an end of it. But this was not the Major’s way. He had in the meantime emptied his reservoir, and it had to be filled again before he would find himself in the vein for speech.
“But I don’t want you to think,” said Major Ochterlony with tender patronage: “that ought to be my part of the business. Have you got a novel?—if not, I’ll go over and ask Miss Sorbette for one of hers. Lie down and rest, Mary; I can see that is all you are good for to-day.”
Whether such a speech was aggravating or not to a woman who knew that it was her brain which had all the real weight of the family affairs to bear, may be conjectured by wives in general who know the sort of thing. But as for Mary, she was so used to it, that she took very little notice. She said, “Thank you, Hugh; I have got my letters here, which I have not read, and Aunt Agatha is as good as a novel.” If this was not a very clear indication to the Major that his best policy was to take himself off for a little, and leave her in peace, it would be hard to say what could have taught him. But then Major Ochterlony was a man of a lively mind, and above being taught.
“Ah, Aunt Agatha,” he said. “My dear, I know it is a painful subject, but we must, you know, begin to think where we are to send Hugh.”
Mary shuddered; her nerves—for she had nerves, though she was so fair and serene—began to get excited. She said, “For pity’s sake, not any more to-day. I am worn out. I cannot bear it. He is only six, and he is quite well.”
The Major shook his head. “He is very well, but I have seen when a few hours changed all that,” he said. “We cannot keep him much longer. At his age, you know; all the little Heskeths go at four—I think——”
“Ah,” said Mary, “the Heskeths have nothing to do with it; they have floods and floods of children,—they don’t know what it is; they can do without their little things; but I—Hugh, I am tired—I am not able for any more. Let me off for to-day.”
Major Ochterlony regarded his wife with calm indulgence, and smoothed her hair off her hot forehead as he stooped to kiss her. “If you only would call things by the same names as other people, and say you have a headache, my dear,” he said, in his caressing way. And then he was so good as to leave her, saying to himself as he went away that his Mary too had a little temper, though nobody gave her credit for it. Instead of annoying him, this little temper on Mary’s part rather pleased her husband. When it came on he could be indulgent to her and pet her, which he liked to do; and then he could feel the advantage on his own side, which was not always the case. His heart quite swelled over her as he went away; so good, and so wise, and so fair, and yet not without that womanly weakness which it was sweet for a man to protect and pardon and put up with. Perhaps all men are not of the same way of thinking; but then Major Ochterlony reasoned only in his own way.
Mary stayed behind, and found it very difficult to occupy herself with anything. It was not temper, according to the ordinary meaning of the word. She was vexed, disturbed, disquieted, rather than angry. When she took up the pleasant letter in which the English breezes were blowing, and the leaves rustling, she could no longer keep her attention from wandering. She began it a dozen times, and as often gave it up again, driven by the importunate thoughts which took her mind by storm, and thrust everything else away. As if it were not enough to have one great annoyance suddenly overwhelming her, she had the standing terror of her life, the certainty that she would have to send her children away, thrown in to make up. She could have cried, had that been of any use; but Mrs. Ochterlony had had good occasion to cry many times in her life, which takes away the inclination at less important moments. The worst of all was that her husband’s oft-repeated suggestion struck at the very roots of her existence, and seemed to throw everything of which she had been most sure into sudden ruin. She would put no faith in it—pay no attention to it, she said to herself; and then, in spite of herself, she found that she paid great attention, and could not get it out of her mind. The only character in which she knew herself—in which she had ever been known—was that of a wife. There are some women—nay, many women—who have felt their own independent standing before they made the first great step in a woman’s life, and who are able to realize their own identity without associating it for ever with that of any other. But as for Mary, she had married, as it were, out of the nursery, and except as Hugh Ochterlony’s wife, and his son’s mother, she did not know herself. In such circumstances, it may be imagined what a bewildering effect any doubt about her marriage would have upon her. For the first time she began to think of herself, and to see that she had been hardly dealt with. She began to resent her guardian’s carelessness, and to blame even kind Aunt Agatha, who in those days was taken up with some faint love-affairs of her own, which never came to anything. Why did they not see that everything was right? Why did not Hugh make sure, whose duty it was? After she had vexed herself with such thoughts, she returned with natural inconsistency to the conclusion that it was all one of the Major’s notions. This was the easiest way of getting rid of it, and yet it was aggravating enough that the Major should permit his restless fancy to enter such sacred grounds, and to play with the very foundations of their life and honour. And as if that was not enough, to talk at the end of it all of sending Hugh away!
Perhaps it would have been good for Mary if she had taken her husband’s advice and lain down, and sent over to Miss Sorbette for a novel. But she was rebellious and excited, and would not do it. It was true that they were engaged out to dinner that night, and that when the hour came Mrs. Ochterlony entered Mrs. Hesketh’s drawing-room with her usual composure, and without any betrayal of the agitation that was still smouldering within. But that did not make it any easier for her. There was nobody more respected, as people say, in the station than she was—and to think that it was possible that such a thing might be, as that she should be humiliated and pulled down from her fair elevation among all those women! Neither the Major nor any man had a right to have notions upon a matter of such importance. Mary tried hard to calm herself down to her ordinary tranquillity, and to represent to herself how good he was, and how small a drawback after all were those fidgets of his, in comparison with the faults of most other men. Just as he represented to himself, with more success, how trifling a disadvantage was the “little temper” which gave him the privilege, now and then, of feeling tenderly superior to his wife. But the attempt was not successful that day in Mrs. Ochterlony’s mind; for after all there are some things too sacred for discussion, and with which the most fidgety man in the world cannot be permitted to play. Such was the result of the first conversation upon this startling subject. The Major found himself very tolerably at his ease, having relieved his mind for the moment, and enjoyed his dinner and spent a very pleasant evening; but as for Madonna Mary, she might have prejudiced her serene character in the eyes of the regiment had the veil been drawn aside only for a moment, and could anybody have seen or guessed the whirl of thoughts that was passing through her uneasy mind.
CHAPTER III.
HE present writer has already lamented her inability to convey to the readers of this history any clear account of an Indian bungalow, or the manner in which life goes on in that curious kind of English home: so that it would be vain to attempt any detailed description of Mary Ochterlony’s life at this period of her career. She lived very much as all the others lived, and gave a great deal of attention to her two little boys, and wrote regularly by every mail to her friends in England, and longed for the day when the mail came in, though the interest of her correspondence was not absorbing. All this she did like everybody else, though the other ladies at the station had perhaps more people belonging to them, and a larger number of letters, and got more good of the eagerly looked-for mail. And she read all the books she could come by, even Miss Sorbette’s novels, which were indeed the chief literary nourishment of the station; and took her due share in society, and was generally very popular, though not so superior as Miss Sorbette for example, nor of remarkable piety like Mrs. Kirkman, nor nearly so well off as Mrs. Hesketh. Perhaps these three ladies, who were the natural leaders of society, liked Mary all the better because she did not come in direct contact with their claims; though if it had ever entered into Mrs. Ochterlony’s head to set up a distinct standard, no doubt the masses would have flocked to it, and the peace of the station might have been put in jeopardy. But as no such ambitious project was in her mind, Mary kept her popularity with everybody, and gained besides that character of “She could an if she would,” which goes a great deal farther than the limited reputation of any actual achievement. She was very good to the new people, the young people, the recent arrivals, and managed to make them feel at home sooner than anybody else could, which was a very useful gift in such society; and then a wife who bore her husband’s fidgets so serenely was naturally a model and example for all the new wives.
“I am sure nobody else in the station could do so well,” Mrs. Kirkman said. “The most experienced Christian would find it a trying task. But then some people are so mercifully fitted for their position in life. I don’t think she feels it as you or I should.” This was said, not as implying that little Mrs. Askell—to whom the words were ostensibly addressed—had peculiarly sensitive feelings, or was in any way to be associated with the Colonel’s wife, but only because it was a favourite way Mrs. Kirkman had of bringing herself down to her audience, and uniting herself, as it were, to ordinary humanity; for if there was one thing more than another for which she was distinguished, it was her beautiful Christian humanity; and this was the sense in which she now spoke.
“Please don’t say so,” cried the ensign’s wife, who was an unmanageable, eighteen-year-old, half-Irish creature. “I am sure she has twenty thousand times more feeling than you and—than both of us put together. It’s because she is real good; and the Major is an old dear. He is a fidget and he’s awfully aggravating, and he puts one in a passion; but he’s an old dear, and so you would say if you knew him as well as I.”
Mrs. Kirkman regarded the creature by her side, as may be supposed, with the calm contempt which her utterance merited. She looked at her, out of those “down-dropt,” half-veiled eyes, with that look which everybody in the station knew so well, as if she were looking down from an infinite distance with a serene surprise which was too far off and elevated to partake of the nature of disgust. If she knew him as well as this baby did! But the Colonel’s wife did not take any notice of the audacious suggestion. It was her duty, instead of resenting the impertinence to herself, to improve the occasion for the offender’s own sake.
“My dear, there is nobody really good,” said Mrs. Kirkman. “We have the highest authority for that. I wish I could think dear Mary was possessed of the true secret of a higher life; but she has so much of that natural amiability, you know, which is, of all things, the most dangerous for the soul. I would rather, for my part, she was not so ‘good’ as you say. It is all filthy rags,” said Mrs. Kirkman, with a sigh. “It might be for the good of her soul to be brought low, and forced to abandon these refuges of lies——”
Upon which the little Irish wild-Indian blazed up with natural fury.
“I don’t believe she ever told a lie in her life. I’ll swear to all the lies she tells,” cried the foolish little woman; “and as for rags—it’s horrible to talk so. If you only knew—if you only could think—how kind she was to me!”
