Madonna Mary. Oliphant Margaret
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When the train had disappeared, Mary tried to take a kind of cold comfort to herself. She stood all alone, a stranger, with the few rustic passengers and rustic railway officials staring at her as if she had dropped from the skies, and no apparent sign anywhere that her coming had been looked for, or that there was any resting-place for her in this grey country. And she said to herself that it was natural, and must always be so henceforth, and that it was best at once to accustom herself to her lot. The carriage had not come, nor any message from Earlston to say she was expected, and all that she could do was to go into the rude little waiting-room, and wait there with the tired children till some conveyance could be got to take her to her brother-in-law’s house. Her thoughts would not be pleasant to put down on paper, could it be done; and yet they were not so painful as they had been the day before, when Aunt Agatha failed her, or seemed to fail. Now that disappointed craving for help and love and fellowship was over for the moment, and she had nothing but her own duty and Francis Ochterlony to encounter, who was not a man to give any occasion for vain hopes. Mary did not expect fellowship or love from her brother-in-law. If he was kind and tolerant of the children, and moderately considerate to herself, it was all she looked for from him. Perhaps, though he had invited her, he had not been prepared to have her thrown on his hands so soon; and it might be that the domestic arrangements of Earlston were not such as to admit of the unlooked-for invasion of a lady and a nursery on such very short notice. But the most prominent feeling in Mrs. Ochterlony’s mind was weariness, and that longing to escape anywhere, which is the most universal of all sentiments when the spirit is worn out and sick to death. Oh, that she had wings like a dove! – though Mary had nowhere to flee to, nobody to seek consolation from; and instead of having a home anywhere on earth awaiting her, was herself the home, the only shelter they understood, of the little pale fatherless children who clustered round her. If she could but have taken possession of one of those small cottages, grey and homely as they looked, and put the little ones to bed in it, and drawn a wooden chair to the fire, and been where she had a right to be! It was July, but the weather was cold at Shap, and Mary had that instinct common to wounded creatures of creeping to the fire, as if there was a kind of comfort in its warmth. She could have borne her burden bravely, or at least she thought so, if this had been what awaited her. But it was Earlston and Francis Ochterlony that awaited her – a stranger and a stranger’s house. All these thoughts, and many more, were passing through her mind, as she sat in the little waiting-room with her baby in her arms, and her two elder boys pressing close to her. The children clung and appealed to her, and the helpless Hindoo woman crouched at her mistress’s side; but as for Mary, there was nobody to give her any support or countenance. It was a hard opening to the stern way which had henceforward to be trodden alone.
Francis Ochterlony, however, though he had a certain superb indifference to the going-out and coming-in of trains, and had forgotten the precise hour, was not a wretch nor a brute, and had not forgotten his visitors. While Mary sat and waited, and while the master of the little station made slow but persevering search after some possible means of conveyance for her, a heavy rumbling of wheels became audible, and the carriage from Earlston made its tardy appearance. It was an old-fashioned vehicle, drawn by two horses, which betrayed their ordinary avocations much in the same way as the coachman did, who, though dressed, as they were, for the occasion, carried a breath of the fields about him, which was more convincing than any conventionalism of garments. But such as it was, the Earlston carriage was not without consideration in the country-side. All the people about turned out in a leisurely way to lift the children into it, and shoulder the boxes into such corners as could be found for them – which was an affair that demanded many counsellors – and at length the vehicle got under way. Twilight began to come on as they mounted up into the grey country, by the winding grey roads fenced in with limestone walls. Everything grew greyer in the waning light. The very trees, of which there were so few, dropped into the gathering shadows, and deepened them without giving any livelier tint of colour to the scene. The children dropped asleep, and the ayah crooned and nodded over the baby; but Mary, who had no temptation to sleep, looked out with steady eyes, and, though she saw nothing distinctly, took in unawares all the comfortless chill and monotony of the landscape. It went to her heart, and made her shiver. Or perhaps it was only the idea of meeting Francis Ochterlony that made her shiver. If the children, any one of them, had only been old enough to understand it a little, to clasp her hand or her neck with the exuberance of childish sympathy! But they did not understand, and dropped asleep, or asked with timid, quivering little voices, how long it