“Harm! it is sure to do harm,” said the Major. “It is as good as saying we were never married till now. Good heavens! to think you should have seen all that, and yet let me do it. We may have ruined him, for all we know. And the question is, what’s to be done? Perhaps I should write to Francis, and tell him that I thought it best for your sake, in case anything happened to me—— and as it was merely a matter of form, I don’t see that Churchill could have any hesitation in striking it out of the register——”
“Oh, Hugh, let it alone now,” said Mrs. Ochterlony. “It is done, and we cannot undo it. Let us only be quiet and make no more commotion. People may forget it, perhaps, if we forget it.”
“Forget it!” the Major said, and sighed. He shook his head, and at the same time he looked with a certain tender patronage on Mary. “You may forget it, my dear, and I hope you will,” he said, with a magnanimous pathos; “but it is too much to expect that I should forget what may have such important results. I feel sure I ought to let Francis know. I daresay he could advise us what would be best. It is a very kind letter,” said the Major; and he sighed, and gave Mary Mr. Ochterlony’s brief and unimportant note with an air of resigned yet hopeless affliction, which half irritated her, and half awoke those possibilities of laughter which come “when there is little laughing in one’s head,” as we say in Scotland. She could have laughed, and she could have stormed at him; and yet in the midst of all she felt a poignant sense of contrast, and knew that it was she and not he who would really suffer—as it was he and not she who was in fault.
While Mary read Mr. Ochterlony’s letter, lulling now and then with a soft movement the baby on her knee, the Major at the other side got attracted after a while by the pretty picture of the sleeping child, and began at length to forego his sighing, and to smooth out the long white drapery that lay over Mary’s dress. He was thinking no harm, the tender-hearted man. He looked at little Wilfrid’s small waxen face pillowed on his mother’s arm—so much smaller and feebler than Hugh and Islay had been, the great, gallant fellows—and his heart was touched by his little child. “My little man! you are all right, at least,” said the inconsiderate father. He said it to himself, and thought, if he thought at all on the subject, that Mary, who was reading his brother’s letter, did not hear him. And when Mrs. Ochterlony gave that cry which roused all the house and brought everybody trooping to the door, in the full idea that it must be a cobra at least, the Major jumped up to his feet as much startled as any of them, and looked down to the floor and cried, “Where—what is it?” with as little an idea of what was the matter as the ayah who grinned and gazed in the distance. When he saw that instead of indicating somewhere a reptile intruder, Mary had dropped the letter and fallen into a weak outburst of tears, the Major was confounded. He sent the servants away, and took his wife into his arms and held her fast. “What is it, my love?” said the Major. “Are you ill? For Heaven’s sake tell me what it is; my poor darling, my bonnie Mary?” This was how he soothed her, without the most distant idea what was the matter, or what had made her cry out. And when Mary came to herself, she did not explain very clearly. She said to herself that it was no use making him unhappy by the fantastical horror which had come into her mind with his words, or indeed had been already lurking there. And, poor soul, she was better when she had had her cry out, and had given over little Wilfrid, woke up by the sound, to his nurse’s hands. She said, “Never mind me, Hugh; I am nervous, I suppose;” and cried on his shoulder as he never remembered her to have cried, except for very serious griefs. And when at last he had made her lie down, which was the Major’s favourite panacea for all female ills of body or mind, and had covered her over, and patted and caressed and kissed her, Major Ochterlony went out with a troubled mind. It could not be anything in Francis’s letter, which was a model of brotherly correctness, that had vexed or excited her: and then he began to think that for some time past her health had not been what it used to be. The idea disturbed him greatly, as may be supposed; for the thought of Mary ailing and weakly, or perhaps ill and in danger, was one which had never yet entered his mind. The first thing he thought of was to go and have a talk with Sorbette, who ought to know, if he was good for anything, what it was.
“I am sure I don’t know in the least what is the matter,” the Major said. “She is not ill, you know. This morning she looked as well as ever she did, and then all at once gave a cry and burst into tears. It is so unlike Mary.”
“It is very unlike her,” said the doctor. “Perhaps you were saying something that upset her nerves.”
“Nerves!” said the Major, with calm pride. “My dear fellow, you know that Mary has no nerves; she never was one of that sort of women. To tell the truth, I don’t think she has ever been quite herself since that stupid business, you know.”
“What stupid business?” said Mr. Sorbette.
“Oh, you know—the marriage, to be sure. A man looks very silly afterwards,” said the Major with candour, “when he lets himself be carried away by his feelings. She ought not to have consented when that was her idea. I would give a hundred pounds I had not been so foolish. I don’t think she has ever been quite herself since.”
The doctor had opened de grands yeux. He looked at his companion as if he could not believe his ears. “Of course you would never have taken such an unusual step if there had not been good reason for it,” he ventured to say, which was rather a hazardous speech; for the Major might have divined its actual meaning, and then things would have gone badly with Mr. Sorbette. But, as it happened, Major Ochterlony was far too much occupied to pay attention to anybody’s meaning except his own.
“Yes, there was good reason,” he said. “She lost her marriage ‘lines,’ you know; and all our witnesses are dead. I thought she might perhaps find herself in a disagreeable position if anything happened to me.”
As he spoke, the doctor regarded him with surprise so profound as to be half sublime—surprise and a perplexity and doubt wonderful to behold. Was this a story the Major had made up, or was it perhaps after all the certain truth? It was just what he had said at first; but the first time it was stated with more warmth, and did not produce the same effect. Mr. Sorbette respected Mrs. Ochterlony to the bottom of his heart; but still he had shaken his head, and said, “There was no accounting for those things.” And now he did not know what to make of it: whether to believe in the innocence of the couple, or to think the Major had made up a story—which, to be sure, would be by much the greatest miracle of all.
“If that was the case, I think it would have been better to let well alone,” said the doctor. “That is what I would have done had it been me.”
“Then why did not you tell me so?” said Major Ochterlony. “I asked you before; and what you all said to me was, ‘If that’s the case, best to repeat it at once.’ Good Lord! to think how little one can rely upon one’s friends when one asks their advice. But in the meantime the question is about Mary. I wish you’d go and see her and give her something—a tonic, you know, or something strengthening. I think I’ll step over and see Churchill, and get him to strike that unfortunate piece of nonsense out of the register. As it was only a piece of form, I should think he would do it; and if it is that that ails her, it would do her good.”
“If I were you, I’d let well alone,” said the doctor; but he said it low, and he was putting on his hat as he spoke, and went off immediately to see his patient. Even if curiosity and surprise had not been in operation, he would still probably have hastened to Madonna Mary. For the regiment loved her in its heart, and the loss of her fair serene presence would have made a terrible gap at the station. “We must not let her be ill if we can help it,” Mr. Sorbette said to himself; and then he made a private reflection about that ass Ochterlony and his fidgets. But yet, notwithstanding all his faults, the Major was not an ass. On thinking it over again, he decided not to go to Churchill with that little request about the register; and he felt more and more, the more he reflected upon it, how hard it was that in a moment of real emergency a man should be able to put so little dependence upon his friends. Even Mary had let him do it, though she had seen how dangerous and impolitic it was; and all the others had let him do it;