They were married very shortly after—there being no reason why they should wait. Nobody approved of them nor of their match, nor would have been likely to do so had they waited half a dozen years. Their little world stood round, as it were, and gazed upon them, declaring it washed its hands of all responsibility. Her stepmother went about the house as if she were assisting at a funeral—even little Mary turned reproachful eyes upon her.

‘Poor wee baby! Poor wee Margret!’ she would say, caressing the child. ‘Why is she poor baby?’ said Isabel, and little Mary would sigh and shake her head. As for Miss Catherine, she made a formal proposal to take the child under her own care, and leave Mrs. Lothian to ‘her other duties.’

‘A bairn in the house will be an interruption,’ she said. ‘A man with a young wife is often impatient enough of a baby of his own; and ye cannot expect he would be more tender to another man’s child.’

‘She is my child!’ said Isabel, holding her baby tightly strained in her arms.

‘But she is my dear old friend’s child as well,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘and she should not be brought up in ignorance of her father’s very name.’

‘Oh, Miss Catherine, you are hard—hard!’ cried Isabel. ‘If he was your friend, he was my husband, and knew all, and would never, never have judged me like this!’

‘Isabel Diarmid,’ said Miss Catherine, sternly, ‘it’s little more than a year since he was brought home to his house to die, and for a time I thought it was your death-blow too; and now, with your baby in your arms, you are going to wed another man. You should not speak of harsh judgment to me.’

‘But I must,’ said poor Isabel. ‘Oh, Miss Catherine, if you would but think how it all was. Can I put it in words? I was fond—fond of him—and oh! but he was good to me. But you know—the difference; and if you{258} had said a month since—He is coming; let us fly away, not to meet him, not to bring back the past—I would have gone to the end of the world. I would be—almost—glad—now——’

‘Of what, Isabel?’ cried Miss Catherine. ‘My dear, my dear, come, and I will go with you, and free you from this man!’

‘I can never be free of him—now!’ she said. ‘To say the words is an offence to me. I would have clung to my old life, to be Mr. Lothian’s widow and little Margaret’s mother, and nothing more; but now that is all past. If that was what you wanted, why did you let me see the one man—the only man——’

Here Isabel stopped, silenced by her sobs and her shame. She was not ashamed to love him, but she was ashamed to say it in words, to disclose the sacred depths of the heart to any strange eye. She bent her crimson tear-wet face over her child. Poor little Margaret! if she could have known the meaning of all those looks of trouble, and passion, and distress, at which she gazed so gravely with profound baby eyes! Miss Catherine rose up and shook out her dress with an agitated movement, as if shaking the very dust from it, according to scriptural injunction; and yet she had been touched, though she would not admit it, by Isabel’s cry.

‘You must judge for yourself,’ she said. ‘All has been said that can be said. I cannot change your heart or settle your life for you, one way or another. You must do as you will. You know what I think, and what a sore blow this is to me; and I can say no more.’

And Miss Catherine swept out of the room and out of the house, leaving poor Isabel with her face hidden and her heart torn asunder.

It did not even strike Isabel as strange that she received no overtures of friendship from his family, nor, indeed, heard of them in any way. Her case seemed too far removed out of the ordinary course of life to leave her any interest in ordinary circumstances. She never thought of his people; all who surrounded herself were hostile or disapproving, and the effect upon her was to make her independent (as she thought) of sympathy. The world was hard upon her, and she turned her back upon the world.

And thus it happened that they were married, without paying any attention to the objections and protestations of Loch Diarmid. It was in the beginning of winter, when little Margaret was nearly a year old. Margaret’s father had been but a year and a half dead, which was the fact that chiefly shocked the parish.

{259}

Stapylton took his bride to a pretty sea-side village further down the Clyde where the winter was mild, and where there were no associations to disturb the peace of their beginning. He bore with her in her distress at that temporary parting with her child—he bore with her anxieties about little Margaret and longings after her, in the little interval which he might have claimed as specially his own. He was thoughtful of her every wish, putting aside his own comfort (she thought) for hers. And Isabel found herself, all unawares, wrapt in that dream of happiness which most hearts entertain one time or other, and which so few realise. Out of her doubts she came into a sense of reality which was exquisite to her—and she who had loved her lover without believing in him, grew, with a blessed surprise and delight, which was like Heaven to her, to trust as much as she loved. The change was like that from night into the brightest day. She had reached the heights all radiant with the sun rising, after the valley of the shadow of death.

‘You have been a bride of brides,’ he said to her one day, when a few weeks of this dream had gone. ‘You have never asked me where we were to go, or what we were to do. I wish I could reward you for your trust, my love, and take you to a fine castle, and say you were queen——’

‘It was not that,’ said Isabel, ‘don’t praise me too much. It was because I had so much in my mind I forgot. But, Horace, it is trust now.’

‘And that is all I want,’ he said, ‘and we can settle together where we are to go.’

‘But you have your own home?’ said Isabel.

‘I sold that; did I never tell you? I have no ties but you now,’ he said. ‘I meant to have gone to America—two years ago. Shall we go now? or shall we stay in your own country? or what are we to do?’

‘I have been a fool,’ cried Isabel, ‘to think of nothing all this time. But you must have had plans of your own.’

‘Yes, to disappear out of the world if you would not have me,’ he said; ‘but since I knew you would have me, everything else has gone out of my head.’ And then she clasped his arm with both her hands, and they walked on forgetting everything, even their plans. Oh, how different it was from the tender quiescence with which she had accepted the minister’s love! That had been but a dream and this was life.

They went on together wandering along the beach which was lit up by all the glories of the sunset. She too happy to think of anything; he absorbed in her.

‘Oh, Horace, how different everything is!’ she said. Her heart was full and spoke out of its abundance. ‘If I could have thought this would ever come in those weary{260} days when I looked for you, and you stayed away from me——’

‘But you forgot me, Isabel.’

‘Did I forget you? Oh, how I wearied for you, Horace!’ There was something like guilt in the confession; but the meaning in her mind was different from his conception of it. The time in which she ‘wearied’ for him had not been that pure, calm, cloistered year of her marriage, when all vain thoughts and wishes had been hushed in the unspeakable quiet. She had not thought of him then. She had been faithful and true as an angel to her father-husband, whose love surrounded her like a dwelling-place, and kept her pure from all the soils of earth. So detached was that period from her life that she did not even remember it while she spoke. It was a vision, a trance, a world apart. But in the other agitated world of her young lonely life it seemed now as if there had been but one thought, and that was him. ‘You left me all that year—all that weary, weary year, after our Margaret was taken from me,’ she said, looking up at him with her tender, shining eyes; ‘and I thought I would break my heart.’

‘And at the end of it—’ he said, ‘shall I remind you, Isabel, how you showed your love to me? or shall we let by-gones be by-gones, and speak of it no more?’

‘How I showed my love for you?’ said innocent Isabel—innocent, heartless, ungrateful—and yet, in her heart, loyal, after their degrees, to all affections. She looked in his face with genuine surprise. And then, all at once, with a scorching blush remembered what he meant.

‘He was so good to me,’ she murmured, with downcast looks; ‘oh, so kind, like my father! What could I do? It was different. Never, never, could he have been—like you.’

Stapylton drew her to his side with a shudder. ‘We’ll speak of it no more,’ he said; ‘I could not trust myself, Isabel; one moment of my life I was in Hell—and it was by seeing you——’

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