Christian's Mistake Part 2

But the instant Mrs. Ferguson was gone Christian locked the door. The same look, of more than pain--actual fear--crossed her face. She stood motionless, as if trying to collect herself, and then, with her hands all shaking, took from her traveling-trunk a sealed packet. For a second she seemed irresolute, and only a second.

"It must be done--it is right. I ought to have done it before--Good-by forever."

Good-by to what--or to whom?

All that the fire revealed, as she laid the packet on it, stirring it down into a red hollow, so that not a flickering fragment should be left unconsumed, were four letters--only four--written on dainty paper, in a man's hand, sealed with a man's large heraldic seal. When they were mere dust, Christian rose.

"It is over now--quite over. In the whole world there is n.o.body to believe in--except him. He is very good, and he loves me. I was right to marry him--yes, quite right."

She repeated this more than once, as if compelling herself to acknowledge it, and then paused.

Christian was not exactly a religious woman--that is, she had lived among such utterly irreligious people, that whatever she thought or felt upon these subjects had to be kept entirely to herself--but she was of a religious nature. She said her prayers duly, and she had one habit--or superst.i.tion, some might sneeringly call it--that the last thing before she went on a journey she always opened her Bible; read a verse or two, and knelt down, if only to say, "G.o.d, take care of me, and bring me safe back again;" pet.i.tions that in many a wretched compelled wandering were not so uncalled for as some might suppose. Before this momentous journey she did the same; but, instead of a Bible, it happened to be the children's Prayer-Book which she took up; it opened at the Marriage Service, which they had been inquisitively conning over; and the first words which flashed upon Christian's eyes were those which had two hours ago pa.s.sed over her deaf ears, and dull, uncomprehending heart--

_"For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh."_

She started, as if only now she began to comprehend the full force of that awful union--"one flesh" and "till death us do part."

Mrs. Ferguson tried the door, and knocked.

"Dr. Grey is waiting, my dear. You must not keep your husband waiting."

"My husband!" and again, came the wild look, as of a free creature suddenly caught, tied, and bound. "What have I done? oh what have I done? Is it _too_ late?"

Ay, it was too late.

Many a woman has married with far less excuse that Christian did-- married for money or position, or in a cowardly yielding to family persuasion, some one who she knew did not love her, or whom she did not love, with the only sort of love which makes marriage sacred.

What agonies such women must have endured, if they had any spark of feminine feeling left alive, they themselves know; and what Christian, far more guiltless than they, also endured during the three minutes that she kept Mrs. Ferguson waiting at the locked door, was a thing never to be spoken of, but also never to be forgotten during the longest and happiest lifetime. It was a warning that made her--even her--to the end of her days, say to every young woman she knew, "Beware! Marry _for love_, or never marry at all."

When she descended, every ray of color had gone out of her face--it was white and pa.s.sionless as stone; but she kissed the children all around, gave a little present to Isabella, who had been her only bridesmaid, shook hands and said a word or two of thanks to honest James Ferguson, her "father" for the day, and then found herself driving through the familiar streets--not alone. She never would be alone any more.

With a shudder, a sense of dread indescribable, she remembered this.

All her innocent, solitary, dreamy days quite over, her happiness.

vanished; her regrets become a crime. The responsibility of being no longer her own, but another's--bound fixedly and irrevocably by the most solemn vow that can be given or taken, subject to no limitations.

provisions, or exception while life remained. Oh. it was awful--awful!

She could have shrieked and leaped out of the carriage, to run wildly anywhere--to the world's end--when she felt her hand taken, softly but firmly.

"My dear, how cold you are! Let me make you warm if I can."

And then, in his own quiet, tender way, Dr. Grey wrapped her up in her shawl and rolled a rug about her feet. She took no notice, submitted pa.s.sively, and neither spoke a word more till they had driven on for two or three miles, into a country road leading to a village where Avonsbridge people sometimes went for summer lodgings.

Christian knew it well. There, just before her father's death, he and she had lived, for four delicious, miserable, momentous weeks. She had never seen the place since, but now she recognized it--every tree, every field, the very farm-house garden, once so bright, now lying deep in snow. She began tremble in every limb.

"Why are we here? This is not our right road. Where are we going?"

"I did not mean to come this way, but we missed the train, and cannot reach London tonight; so I thought we would post across country to E____," naming a quiet cathedral town, "where you can rest, and go on when or where you please. Will that do?"

"Oh yes."

"You are not dissatisfied? We could not help missing the Train, you see."

"Oh no."

The quick, sharp, querulous answers--that last refuge of a fict.i.tious strength that was momentarily breaking down--he saw it all, this good man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what sorrow was, and who for a whole year had watched her with the acuteness which love alone teaches, especially the love which, coming late in life, had a calmness and unselfishness which youthful love rarely possesses. The sort of love which, as he had once quoted to her out of an American book, could feel, deeply and solemnly, "that if a man really loves a woman, he would not marry her for the world, were he not quite sure he was the best person she could by any possibility marry"--that is, the one who loved her so perfectly that he was prepared to take upon himself all the burden of her future life, her happiness or sorrow, her peculiarities, shortcomings, faults, and all.

This, though he did not speak a word, was written, plain as in a book, on the face of Christian's husband, as he watched her, still silently, for another mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through the leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light in at the carriage window.

Christian looked up, and closed her eyes again in a pa.s.sive hopelessness sad to see.

Her husband watched her still. Once he sighed--a rather sad sigh for a bridegroom, and then a light, better and holier than love, or rather the essence of all love, self-denial and self-forgetfullness, brightened up his whole countenance.

"How very tired she is; but I shall take care of her, my poor child!"

The words were as gentle as if he had been speaking to one of his own children, and he drew her to him with a tender, protecting fatherliness which seemed the natural habit of his life, such as never, in her poor, forlorn life, had any one shown to Christian Oakley. It took away all her doubts, all her fears. For the moment she forgot she was married, forgot everything but his goodness, his tenderness, his care over her, and her great and sore need of the same. She turned and clung to him, weeping pa.s.sionately.

"I have n.o.body in the world but you. Oh, be kind to me!"

"I will," said Arnold Grey.

Chapter 2

_"You'll love me yet! And I can tarry Your love's protracted growing: June reaped that bunch of flowers you carry From seeds of April's sowing."_

Saint Bede's is one of the most ancient of the minor colleges of Avonsbridge. Its foundress's sweet, pale, suffering face, clad in the close coif of the time of the wars of the Roses, still smiles over the fellow's table in hall, and adorns the walls of combination-room. The building itself has no great architectural beauty except the beauty of age. Its courts are gray and still, and its grounds small; in fact, it possesses only the Lodge garden, and a walk between tall trees on the other side of the Avon, which is crossed by a very curious bridge. The Lodge itself is so close to the river, that from its windows you may drop a stone into the dusky, slowly rippling, sluggish water, which seems quieter and deeper there than at any other college past which it flows.

Saint Bede's is, as I said, a minor college, rarely numbering more than fifty gownsmen at a time, and maintaining, both as to sports and honors, a mild mediocrity. For years it had not sent any first-rate man either to boat-race, or cricket-ground, or senate-house. Lately, however, it had boasted one, quite an Admirable Crichton in his way, who, had his moral equaled his mental qualities, would have carried all before him. As it was, being discovered in offenses not merely against University authority, but obnoxious to society at large, he had been rusticated. Though the matter was kept as private as possible, its details being known only to the master, dean and tutor, still it made a nine-day's talk, not only in the college, but in the town--until the remorseless wave of daily life, which so quickly closes over the head of either ill-doer or well-doer, closed completely over that of Edwin Uniacke.

Recovering from the shock of his turpitude, the college now reposed in peace upon its slender list of well-conducted and harmless undergraduates, its two or three tutors, and its dozen or so of gray old fellows, who dozed away their evenings in combination-room. Even such an event as the master's second marriage had scarcely power to stir Saint Bede's from its sleepy equanimity.

It was, indeed, a peaceful place. It had no grand entrance, but in a narrow back street you came suddenly upon its ancient gateway, through which you pa.s.sed into a mediaeval world. The clock tower and clock, with an upright sundial affixed below it, marked the first court, whence, through a pa.s.sage which, as is usual in colleges, had the hall on one hand and the b.u.t.tery on the other, you entered the second court, round three sides of which ran cloisters of very ugly, very plain, but very ancient architecture. In a corner of these cloisters was the door of the Lodge--the master's private dwelling.

Private it could hardly be called; for, like all these lodges of colleges, it had an atmosphere most anti-home like, which at first struck you as extremely painful. Its ancientness, both of rooms and furniture, added to this feeling. When you pa.s.sed through the small entrance hall, up the stone staircase, and into a long, narrow, mysterious gallery, looking as it must have looked for two centuries at least, you felt an involuntary shiver, as of warm, human, daily life brought suddenly into contact with the pale ghosts of the past. You could not escape the haunting thought that these oaken tables were dined at, these high-backed chairs sat upon, these black-framed, dirt-obscured portraits gazed at and admired by people, once flesh and blood like yourself, who had become skeletons--nay, mere dust, centuries before you were born. Also, that other people would be dining, sitting, gazing, and talking in this very same spot long after you yourself had become a skeleton in your turn.

This impression of the exceeding mutability of all things, common to most very old houses, was stronger than ordinary in this house, whose owners did not even hold it by ancestral right, so as to find and leave behind some few ancestral ties and memories, but came and went, with all that belonged to them; the only trace of their occupancy and themselves being a name on the college books, or a solitary portrait on the college wall. The old dervish's saying to the Eastern king, "Sire, this is not a place, but a caravanserai," might have been applied here only too truly. It was not a home, it was the lodge of a college.

Until eighteen months ago, the date of Dr. Grey's appointment, there had not been a woman's face or a child's foot about it for a hundred and fifty years. All the masters had been unmarried--grim, gray fellows-- advanced in years. Dr. Arnold Grey, whose fellowship had terminated early, and who had afterward been tutor and dean, was the youngest master that had ever been known at Saint Bede's; and his election might consequently have been unpopular had he not been personally so much liked, and had there not happened immediately afterward that scandal about Edwin Uniacke. Therein he acted so promptly and wisely, that the sleepy, timid old dons as well as the Uniacke family--for the lad was highly connected--were thankful that this unlucky business had not occurred in the time of the late master, who was both old and foolish, and would have made it the talk of all England, instead of hushing it up, with the prudent decision of Dr. Grey, so that now it was scarcely spoken of beyond the college walls.

Solemn, quiet, and beautiful, as if they had never known a scandal or a tragedy, slept those old walls in the moonlight, which streamed also in long bars from window to window, across the ghostly gallery before mentioned. Ghostly enough in all conscience; and yet two little figures went trotting fearlessly down it, as they did every night at eight o'clock, between the two ancient apartments now converted into dining-room and nursery. The master's children were too familiar with these grim, shadowy corners to feel the slightest dread besides, they were not imaginative children. To Arthur, an "ally taw," that is, a real alabaster marble, such as he now fumbled in his pocket, was an object of more importance than all the defunct bishops, archbishops, kings, queens, and benefactors of every sort, whose grim portraits stared at him by day and night. And Let.i.tia was far more anxious that the candle she carried should not drop any of its grease upon her best silk frock, than alarmed at the grotesque shadows it cast, making every portrait seem to follow her with his eyes, as old portraits always do. Neither child was very interesting. Let.i.tia, with her angular figure and thin light hair, looked not unlike a diminished spectral reflection of the foundress herself--that pale, prim, pre-Raphaelitish dame who was represented all over the college, in all sizes and varieties of the limner's art. Arthur, who hung a little behind his sister, was different from her, being stout and square; but he, too, was not an attractive child, and there was a dormant sullenness in his under lip which showed he could be a very naughty one if he chose.

"I told you so, t.i.tia," said he, darting to an open door facing the staircase at the gallery's end. "There's papa's study fire lit. I knew he was coming home to-night, though aunts won't let us sit up, as he said we should. But I will! I'll lie awake, if it's till twelve o'clock, and call him as he pa.s.ses the nursery door."

"You forget," said t.i.tia, drawing herself up with a womanly air, "papa will not be alone now. He may not care to come to you now he has got Mrs. Grey."

"Mrs. Grey!"

"You know aunts told us always to call her so. I'm sure I don't want to call her any thing. I hate her!"