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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 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. 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, 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 black