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                             MADONNA MARY.

                                A Novel.

                                   BY
                             MRS. OLIPHANT,

                               AUTHOR OF

              "LAST OF THE MORTIMERS," "IN THE DAYS OF MY
                 LIFE," "SQUIRE ARDEN," "OMBRA," "MAY,"
                               ETC., ETC.

                             _NEW EDITION._

                                LONDON:
                   CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
                                 1875.

                        [_All rights reserved._]




                                LONDON:
            SWIFT AND CO., NEWTON STREET, HIGH HOLBORN, W.C.




                             MADONNA MARY.





CHAPTER I.


Major Ochterlony had been very fidgety after the coming in of the mail.
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'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