Part 14

"Sweet she is," said he, as he timidly scanned the face of his first love, and pressed her hand; but his countenance changed as he felt the silky-skinned hand of the girl tremble within his, as if it shrunk from the touch, and saw her blue eyes turned on the ground, and heard a sigh steal from her breast. A feeling that was new to him thrilled through the circle of his nerves, and made him tremble to the centre of his being. He had never calculated upon that strange emotion, nor could he analyze it: it was inscrutable, but it was terrible; it was not simply a return of his own love under the restraint of the new one, neither was it simple remorse, but a mixture of various thrills which induced no purpose, but only rendered him uncertain, feeble, and miserable. So engrossed for a moment was he, that he did not even seek the eye of Isobel, who was watching him in every turn of his countenance. Then he would seek some relief in words.

"You have my mother's love at least, Marjory," he said; and he could not help saying it. "And I shall be pleased to see you wear her gift, which she sent to you through me, who gave it to Isobel."

Marjory was silent, and Ogilvy turned his eye upon Isobel.

"She rejects it," said Isobel, "and wishes me to return it."

"Rejects it!" ejaculated the youth, as he again looked at Marjory.

Marjory was still silent, and her eyes were even more timidly turned to the ground.

"I did not regard the gift as valuable for the brilliants and opals," continued he, "but as conveying the love of my mother; and surely Marjory cannot reject that love."

Yet still was Marjory silent, for she had sworn.

"Oh, she is frightened, poor Sweet Marjory," cried Isobel, with a satirical laugh; "for she has seen the wraith bride on the bastle tower."

"The wraith bride!" responded Ogilvy, relapsing into silence, and instinctively looking round him, where only glared the torchlight among the trees of the lawn, and the dark bodies of the fagot-pilers were moving backwards and forwards. He had heard the couplet mentioned by the forester, and had of course viewed it as a play of superstition; but reason is a weak thing in the grasp of feeling, and now he was all feeling. The remorse of which he had had premonitions, had now taken him as a fit. His eye sought Marjory's down-turned face, and shrunk from Isobel's watchful stare; but the direction of that organ did not form an index to his mind, for his fancy was, even during these swift instants, busy weaving the many-coloured web of the future of his married life, and clouding it with sombre shades; nor did the active agent hesitate to draw materials from the past fortunes of the house of Bell's Tower, and mix them up as things yet to be repeated. Even the wraith bride performed her part now, where she had feeling to help her weakness, and set her up among realities.

At this critical juncture of Ogilvy's thoughts, there came up from the mansion good Dame Bower herself, of portly corporation, often resonant of a comfortable laugh; and now, when flushed with the exercise of her domestic superintendence, looking the very picture of the joyous mother of a happy bride.

"I had forgotten," she said as she approached, "to ask you to convey my thanks to Dame Ogilvy for that beautiful locket with her hair therein--more precious, I ween, than the diamonds and opals, though these, I'm told, are worth five thousand good merks--which she has so thoughtfully sent to Isobel."

"Isobel!" ejaculated Ogilvy, fixing his eye on the face of his bride, where there were no blushes to reveal the consciousness of deceit. "To Isobel!" he repeated; "and did Isobel say this?"

"Yes," replied the mother.

"It is false," cried the damsel, precipitated by anger into the terrible imputation.

The mother stood aghast, and Marjory held her head away.

"Speak, Marjory," said Ogilvy, with lips that in an instant had become white and parched.

"I have sworn," said Marjory.

"And dare not speak?" said Ogilvy. Then a deep gloom spread over his face, his eye flashed with a sudden flame. He spoke not a word more; but, vaulting into the saddle, he drove his spurs into the side of his horse, and rode off. As he passed the fagot-hewers, he saw them clustered together, and heard high words among them, with names of so potent a charm to him, that, even in his confusion and speed, he could not drive them from his mind. These names were, Sweet Marjory and Devil Isobel.

And as if the words had entered the rowels and made them sharper, his horse reared, and he sped on with a whirling tumult in his brain, but yet without uttering a word--nor even to himself did he mutter a remark--still urging his steed, yet unconscious that his journey's end would bring no assuagement of that tumult, nor mean of extricating him from his strange and perilous predicament. Nor was he aware of the speed of his riding, or how far he had gone, till he came to some huts in the outskirts of the Craigwood, which bounds the domain of Bell's Tower on the west, where he saw some cottagers assembled at a door, and again heard words which pierced his ear--no other than those of his own marriage. Again urged by curiosity, he put the question,

"Whom do you speak of, good folks?"

"Sweet Marjory," said one; and another added, "Devil Isobel."

Fain would he have asked more--these were not to him more than sufficient; but pride interposed, and fear aided pride, and away he again sped even at a still quicker pace. Never before had he been so agitated: fear, anger, or remorse had never ruffled the tenor of an existence which passed amidst rural avocations and unsophisticated pleasures,--knew nothing of intrigue, falsehood, or dissimulation--those parasitic plagues that follow the societies of men. The moon that shone over his head was as placid and beautiful, and forest and wold as quiet, as they used to be when his mind was a reflection of the peace that was without; but now, as he rode on and on, wild images arose from the roused autonomy of the spirit, and seemed to be impressed by fire,--the face of Isobel reflecting the light of the moon, and those eyes which, looking up, were in their own expression an adjuration similar to that pronounced by her lips, that she would obey him, and deliver the diamond gift to its rightful owner; then the same eyes when, inflamed by the fire of her wrath, she called her mother a liar, and proved her own falsehood, while she cast off the duty of a daughter. But through all glided the face of Sweet Marjory, with its mildness, beneficence, and timidity; and the eye that, quailing under her sister's tyranny, looked so lovingly in the face of the mother, but dared not chide him who had been false to her. He felt within him that revolution from one feeling to its opposite, which, when it begins in the mind, is so energetic and startling. His love for Isobel--which had been a frenzy, tearing him from another love which had been a sweet dream--began to undergo the wonderful change: her beauty faded before a moral expression which waxed hideous, and grew up in these passing moments into a direct contrast with the gentle loveliness of her sister, which, coming from the heart, beamed through features fitted to enhance it. Nor could he stop this revolution of his sentiments, the full effect of which, aggravated by remorse, shook his frame, as his horse bounded, and added to the turmoil within him. Yet ever the words came from his quivering lips--"Am I fated to be the husband of Devil Isobel? Is Sweet Marjory destined to bless the nuptial bed of another?" And at every repetition he unconsciously drove the spur into the sides of his now foaming steed.

But whither all this hot haste--whither was he flying? To his home, where he knew that his mother condemned his choice, though her delicacy had limited her dissatisfaction to that strange but pregnant expression, whereby she had sent her most valuable jewel to her whom she valued and loved, and whom, in the madness of fascination, he had left to sorrow, if not to heartbreaking--perhaps death. He felt that he behoved to be home to make certain preparations for his appearance on the morrow, as a bridegroom by the side of Isobel Bower; and yet he felt that he could not face his mother under the feelings which now ruled him, and the very weakness of his resolution prompted the device of tarrying by the way until she should have gone to bed. He knew where to watch her chamber light, and he began to draw the rein. Yet how unconscious he was of a peculiarity of that power that had been for some time working within him!--yea, even remorse, who, true to her unfailing purpose, was moulding his heart into that yearning to visit the victim on which she insists for ever as a condition of peace to the betrayer. He had come to the cross-road leading eastwards; and even while muttering his purpose of merely prolonging the period of his home-going, he was twitching the rein to the right, so that the obedient steed turned and carried him forward at the old speed. Whither now, versatile and remorseful youth? From this eastern road there goes off, a couple of miles forward, a rough track, leading to the mansion he had so recently left. And it was not long ere he reached the point of turn. Nor was he even decided when there, that he would again draw the rein to the right. But if he was master of his horse, he was not master of himself: the rough track was taken, and Ogilvy was in full swing to Bell's Tower. He did not know that it is only when the act is accomplished that one thinks of the decrees of Fate, though it is true that the purposes of man are equally fated in their beginnings, when reason is battling against feeling, as in their termination. In how short time was he in the pine wood, behind the house, where were his bane, and perhaps his antidote, though he could not divine the latter! And he trembled as through the trees he saw the flitting lights, as they came and went past the windows, indicating the joy of preparation: not for these he looked, only for one, sombre and steady, like Melancholy's dull eye, wherein no tear glistens. Leaving his horse tied to a pine stem, Ogilvy was in an instant kneeling at the low casement at the foot of the bastle house, where glimmered that light for which he had been so intensely looking.

Was it that grief, forced into an excitement foreign to its lonely, self-indulgent nature, wooed the evening air, to cool by the open window the fever of her slow-throbbing veins? Certain it is at least that Marjory Bower expected no salutation from without at that hour.

"Sweet Marjory, will you listen to one who once dared to love you, and who has now sorrow at his heart, yet Heaven's wrath will not send forth lightnings to kill?"

"What terrible words are these?" replied the maiden, as she took her hand from her brow and looked in the direction of the open casement.

"Not those," replied he, "which are winged with the hope of a bridegroom. But I am miserable! Marjory Bower, I loved you, and you returned my love; I deserted you, and you never even gloomed on me; and I am now the bridegroom of your sister,--ay, your sister, Devil Isobel! Will you give me hope if I break off this marriage?"

"Nay," rejoined she; "that cannot be. You have gone too far to go back with honour."

"Or forward with any hope of happiness," said he. "But I will brave all your father's anger, Isobel's revenge, and my loss of honour, if you will consent to be mine within a year."

"Nay," repeated the maid with a sigh. "Out of my unhappiness may come the happiness of others. Though I may not live to see it, I may die in the hope that Isobel Bower may, in your keeping, come to deserve a name better than that terrible one she has earned, and which just now sounded so terrible from your lips."

"Is she not a liar, who falsified my words?" said he impassionedly. "Is she not a thief, who appropriated the diamond gift of my mother, intended for you? Is she not an undutiful daughter, who first deceived her mother by a falsehood, and then denounced her as herself false? Is that woman, with the form of an angel and the heart of a devil, to be my wife? And does Marjory Bower counsel it? Then Marjory Bower hates Hector Ogilvy!"

"Nay," replied she calmly, "I only love your honour. Night and day I will pray for a blessing on your marriage, and that God, who made the heart of my sister, may change it into love and goodness."

A repressed spasmodic laugh shook the frame of the youth. "What a hope," he said, "on which to found the happiness of a life, and for which to barter such a creature as you! But, Marjory, you have roused the pride of my honour, while you have appeased my remorse; and I will marry Isobel because you have said that I should. It is thus I shall punish myself by becoming a victim in turn to the honour I was false to."

As he pronounced these words, he fixed his eye on the face of Marjory, which at the moment reflected brightly the light of the lamp. Her eyes were swimming in tears. She seemed to struggle with herself, as if she feared that, in thus counselling him, she incurred some heavy responsibility. So Ogilvy thought. But he little knew that there was mixed up with these emotions the keen anguish of a sacrifice; for she had not as yet admitted to him how dear he had been to her, and how bitterly she had felt the transference of his affections from her to her sister. He waited for a few moments. He got no reply, except from these swimming eyes. "Adieu! dear Marjory," he said; and hastened again to the pine wood, where, having flung himself on his steed, he started for home.

As he hurried along, he felt that he had appeased one feeling at the expense of a life's happiness, and yet he was satisfied, according to that law whereby the present evil always appears the greatest. About half way up the rough track he met one of the servants of Bell's Tower proceeding homewards, and suspecting that he had been with a message to him or his mother, he stopped and questioned him.

"I have been to Dame Ogilvy with a letter from Dame Bower," said the man; "and well I may," he added, as he sided up and whispered, "The fagot-hewers have seen the bride to-night on the top bartisan of the castle tower."

"And I now see a fool," replied Ogilvy, and rode on. Not that he thought the man the fool he called him, but that he felt it necessary, as many men do, to make a protest against the weakness of superstition at the very moment when the mysterious power was busy with his heart; and, repeating the word "fool," he went on auguring and condemning in the double way of mortals. How strangely he had been led for the last hour! The terms he had heard applied to his bride, justifying what he had himself seen, had all but resolved him to remain absent from the intended ceremony of the morrow. He had had some lurking hope that Marjory would agree to his resolution, and again inspire him with hope; and he knew that his mother would be pleased with a change which would yield her a chance of having her favourite for her daughter-in-law. He had been proposing as a weak mortal. Another power was purposing as a God; and yet he considered himself as so much master of himself and the occasion as to laugh with bitter scorn at the rustic diviner, and his folly of the apparition bride. And now there was shining before him the light of the lamp from the chamber of his mother, whom he had still stronger reasons than ever for avoiding that night. But even these reasons were unavailing. The spirit of his honour, which had been so fragile a thing when opposed by the advent of a new love, had been breathed upon and increased to a flame by her he had deserted; and he for the moment felt he could face the mild reproof of a mother whom he loved. What a versatile, incomprehensible creature is man, even in those inspired moments, when, with the nerve trembling under the tension of purpose, he appears to himself and others in his highest position! In a few minutes more he was in the presence of his mother.

There sat in her painted chamber the fine gentlewoman, with her fixed eye divining in the light of the gilded lamp, as the spirit cast upon the dark curtain of the future the forms which were but as re-adaptations of the signs of what had come and gone in her memory and experience. The two families had been linked by the power of fate, and the connection, which had never been dissolved; was to evolve in some new form. She had grieved for her gentle favourite, Marjory Bower; and had she been as stern as she was mild, she would have interposed a parent's authority against her son's change of purpose. Yea, there might have been true affection in that sternness; but such would have been the resolution of a mental strength which she did not possess, for she was as those whose parental love gratifies wilfulness from a fear of producing pain. Nor even now, when she held in her hand a letter of, to her, strange import, could she call up from her soft heart an energy to save her son from the ruin which seemed to impend over him. He stood for a moment before her, silent, pale, and resolved against all chances,--verily a puppet under the reaction of affections and principles he had dared to tamper with against the injunctions of honour,--and yet he could not see that the soft and trembling hand of her in Bell's Tower, which held the strings that bound him so, held them and straitened them by a spasm. Nor was it of use to him now that the strings trembled, and relaxed only for the time when the soft, reproving, yet loving light of his mother's eye, as it turned from her reverie, fell upon his soul; for his purpose came again, as his lip quivered and he waxed more pale.

"What means this letter?" said she, as she held it forth in her hand. "Mrs. Bower thanks me for the gift I sent to your bride."

"It means, dear mother," replied he firmly, "what it says. I was weak enough to think that, if I committed your jewelled locket to Isobel's hand as the mean whereby it would reach Marjory, I would do something to cement their love. I saw Isobel's eye light up as she fixed it on the diamonds--their glare had entered her soul and made it avaricious; and envy threw her red glance to fire the passion. Yes, she appropriated the gift. I have other evidence than this, even from my bride." And as he pronounced the word "bride," a scornful laugh escaped from him, and alarmed his mother.

"And yet she _is_ your bride, and will be your wife to-morrow?" said she, looking inquiringly.

"She will," replied he, in a tone which, though soft, if not pitiful, was firm, if a trait of sarcasm against himself might not have been detected in it.

"Strange!" ejaculated the mother, as she still fixed her eyes on him. Then, musing a little, "Do you know that the bride has been seen to-night on the bastle tower?"

"Superstition."

"An ill-used word, Hector," said she; "as if God was not the Ruler of his own world. When we see unnatural motives swaying men, and all working to an event, are we not to suppose that that event shall also be out of Nature's scheme? and that which is out of Nature's scheme must be in God's immediate hand. What motives impel you to wed a woman with whom you must be miserable, and have that misery enhanced by seeing every day her who would have rendered you happy?"

"My honour pledged to the world, which must condemn and laugh at a breach of faith, not to be justified except at the expense of Isobel."

"A false reason," continued the mother. "Is there more honour in adhering to a breach of honour than in returning to the honour that was broken?"

"There is another reason, mother," said Ogilvy, as he carried his hand over his sorrowful face.

"What is that?"

"Sweet Marjory commands me."

"Ah, Hector, Hector, how little you know of the heart of woman! Know you not that in a forsaken woman the heart has an irony even when it is breaking? Ask her if you should wed her rival, and the breaking heart-string will respond Yes, even as the cord of the harp will twang when it is severed. Well do I know Sweet Marjory, and what she must have felt when she uttered this command. The canker has begun, and she will die. The worm does not seek always the withered leaf. You've heard the song that Patricia used to sing--

"'The dainty worm, it loves the tomb, And gnaws, and gnaws its nightly food; But a daintier worm selects the bloom, And a daintier still affects the bud.'"

"Oh, God forgive me!" ejaculated the miserable youth, as, holding his hand on his brow, he rushed out of the room and sought his bed-chamber. Was there ever such a night before the day, of all days auspicious to mortals, of the culminating joy of human life! Could he not find refuge in sleep, where the miserable so often seek to escape from the vibrations of the leaping, palpitating nerve, inflamed by the fever of life? A half-hour's dreamy consciousness, an hour's vision of returning images, rest and unrest, haunting scenes woven by some secret power, so varied, so ephialtic, so monstrous, yet all, somehow or another, however unlike the reality, still vindicating a connection. Why should Sweet Marjory be in the deep recesses of the pine wood, resting by his foaming steed, with his mother sitting and breathing hope's accents in her ear, and ever and again calling on him in sobbing vocables to return from his pursuit of another? He would return. The charm of her sweet voice is felt to be irresistible; yet it is resisted. And though he looks back only to see her by the flaught of the lightning that plays among the trees, his steps are forward, where Devil Isobel charms him with a song, in comparison of which the magic of the sirens is but the rustle of the reed as it swerves in the blast. He struggles, and seizes the stems of the pines to hold him from his progress and keep him steady; and he writhes as he finds he cannot obey the maternal appeal to a son's love. All is still again, and there is rest, only to be alternated by the recurring visions always assuming new forms, changing and disappearing, flaring up again, and then the deep breast-riding oppression, and those hollow moans, which never can be imitated by the waking sense, as if Nature preserved this domain of the spirit as an evidence, in the night of the soul, that there is another world where the limbo of agony is not less certain than the heaven which is simulated by sweet dreams.