Christian's Mistake by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

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CHRISTIAN'S MISTAKE

BY

DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK

Author of _John Halifax, Gentleman_,
&c., &c., &c.
New York Harper & Brothers,
Publishers Franklin Square.

Inscribed affectionately to
John and Lucy

Chapter 1.

_"So I will do my best a gude wife to be,
For Auld Robin Grey is vera kind to me."_

"I think this will do, my dear; just listen;" and in a mysterious half
whisper, good Mrs. Ferguson, wife of James Ferguson, the well-to-do
silversmith and jeweler, of High Street, Avonsbridge, read aloud from
the sheet of paper in her hand:

"'On the 21st instant, at the University Church, Avonsbridge, by the
Reverend John Smith, the Reverend Arnold Grey, D.D., Master of
Saint Bede's College, Avonsbridge, to Christian, only child of the late
Edward Oakley, Esq., of that place.' Will it do? Because, if so, James
will send it to 'The Times' at once."

"Better ask Dr. Grey first," answered the bride.

As she spoke, Dr. Grey turned round from the window where he had
been conversing--that is, responding to conversation--with Mr.
Ferguson, chiefly on the weather; for it was a snowy December day.

This precise moment, half an hour after his marriage--his second
marriage--is hardly a fair time to describe Dr. Arnold Grey; suffice it to
say that he was a gentleman apparently about forty-five, rather low in
stature, and spare in figure, with hair already thin and iron-gray. The
twenty-five years between him and his newly-married wife showed
plainly--only too plainly--as she stood, in all her gracefulness of
girlhood, which even her extreme pallor and a certain sharp, worn,
unnaturally composed look could not destroy. He seemed struck by
this. His face clouded over for a minute, and he slightly sighed. But
the pain, whatever it was, was only momentary. He looked like a man
who was not in the habit of acting hastily or impulsively--who never
did any thing without having previously fully counted the cost.

"What were you saying, Mrs. Ferguson?" said he, addressing her with
the grave and somewhat formal politeness which was his natural
manner, but which always somewhat awed that rather vulgar, though
kind-hearted and well-meaning woman.

She put the paper into his hands. "It's the notice for 'The Times;' James
and I made it up last night. James thought it would save you trouble,
master--" Mrs. Ferguson always hesitated between this common
University custom of address and plain, "Dr. Grey."

"Thank you; Mr. Ferguson is always kind," returned the Master of Saint
Bede's.

"You see," continued Mrs. Ferguson, lowering her tone to a
confidential whisper, "I thought it was better only to put 'Edward
Oakley, Esq.,' and nothing more. Wouldn't you like it to be so, sir?"

"I should like it to be exactly as--" he paused, and the color rushed
violently over his thin, worn, and yet sensitive face, as sensitive as
if he had been a young man still--"exactly as Mrs. Grey pleases."

Mrs. Grey! At the sound of her new name Christian started, and she,
too, turned scarlet. Not the sweet, rosy blush of a bride, but the dark
red flush of sharp physical or mental pain, which all her self-control
could not hide.

"Poor dear! poor dear! this is a great change for her, and only a year
since her father died," said Mrs. Ferguson, still in that mysterious,
apologetic whisper. "But indeed, my love, you have done quite right in
marrying; and don't fret a bit about it. Never mind her, sir; she'll be
better by-and-by." This oppression of pity would have nerved any one
of reserved temperament to die rather than betray the least fragment of
emotion more. Christian gathered herself up; her face grew pale again,
and her voice steady. She looked, not at Mrs. Ferguson, but at the good
man who had just made her his wife--and any one looking at him must
have felt that he was a good man--then said, gently but determinedly,

"If Dr. Grey has no objection, I should like to have stated my father's
occupation or my own. I do not wish to hide or appear ashamed of
either."

"Certainly not," replied Dr. Grey; and, taking up the pen, he added,
"Edward Oakley, Esq., late organist of Saint Bede's." It was the last
earthly memento of one who, born a gentleman and a genius, had so
lived, that, as all Avonsbridge well knew, the greatest blessing which
could have happened to his daughter was his death. But, as by some
strange and merciful law of compensation often occurs, Christian,
inheriting mind and person from him, had inherited temperament,
disposition, character from the lowly-born mother, who was every thing
that he was not, and who had lived just long enough to stamp on the
girl of thirteen a moral impress which could resist all contamination,
and leave behind a lovely dream of motherhood that might, perhaps--
God knows!--have been diviner than the reality.

These things Dr. Grey, brought accidentally into contact with Christian
Oakley on business matters after her father's lamentable death, speedily
discovered for himself; and the result was one of those sudden resolves
which in some men spring from mere passion, in others from an
instinct so deep and true that they are not to be judged by ordinary
rules. People call it "love at first sight," and sometimes tell wonderful
stories of how a man sees, quite unexpectedly, some sweet, strange, and
yet mysteriously familiar face, which takes possession of his fancy with
an almost supernatural force. He says to himself, "That woman shall be
my wife;" and some day, months or years after, he actually marries her;
even as, within a twelvemonth, having waited silently until she was
twenty-one, Dr. Grey married Christian Oakley.

But until within a few weeks ago she herself had had no idea of the
kind. She intensely respected him; her gratitude for his fatherly care
and kindness was almost boundless; but marrying him, or marrying at
all, was quite foreign to her thoughts. How things had come about even
yet she could hardly remember or comprehend. All was a perfect
dream. It seemed another person, and not she, who was suddenly
changed from Mrs. Ferguson's poor governess, without a friend or
relative in the wide world, to the wife of the Master of Saint Bede's.

That she could have married, or been thought to have married him, for
aught but his own good and generous self, or that the mastership of
Saint Bede's, his easy income, and his high reputation had any thing to
do with it, never once crossed her imagination. She was so simple; her
forlorn, shut-up, unhappy life had kept her, if wildly romantic, so
intensely, childishly true, that, whatever objections she had to Dr.
Grey's offer, the idea that this could form one of them--that any one
could suspect her--her, Christian Oakley--of marrying for money or for
a home, did not occur to her for an instant. He saw that, this lover,
who, from his many years of seniority, and the experience of a
somewhat hard life, looked right down into the depths of the girl's
perplexed, troubled, passionate, innocent heart, and he was not afraid.
Though she told him quite plainly that she felt for him not love, but
only affection and gratitude, he had simply said, with his own tender
smile, "Never mind--I love you;" and married her.

As she stood in her white dress, white shawl, white bonnet--all as plain
as possible, but still pure bridal white, contrasted strongly with the
glaring colors of that drawing-room over the shop, which Poor Mrs.
Ferguson had done her luckless best to make as fine as possible, her
tall, slender figure, harmonious movements and tones, being only more
noticeable by the presence of that stout, gaudily-dressed, and loud-
speaking woman, most people would have said that, though he had
married a governess, a solitary, unprotected woman, with neither kith
nor kin to give her dignity, earning her own bread by her own honest
labor, the master of Saint Bede's was not exactly a man to be pitied.

He rose, and having silently shown the paper to Christian, enclosed it in
an envelope, and gave it to Mr. Ferguson.

"Will you take the trouble of forwarding this to 'The Times,' the latest
of all your many kindnesses?" said he, with that manner, innately a
gentleman's, which makes the acknowledging of a favor appear like the
conferring of one.

Worthy James Ferguson took it as such; but he was a person of deeds,
not words; and he never could quite overcome the awe with which, as
an Avonsbridge person, he, the jeweler of High Street, regarded the
master of St. Bede's.

Meanwhile the snow, which had been falling all day, fell thicker and
thicker, so that the hazy light of the drawing-room darkened into
absolute gloom.

"Don't you think the children should be here?" said Mrs. Ferguson,
pausing in her assiduous administration of cake and wine. "That is--I'm
sure I beg your pardon, master--if they are really coming."

"I desired my sisters to send them without fail," quietly replied the
master.

But another half hour dragged heavily on; the bridegroom's carriage,
which was to take them across country to a quiet railway station,
already stood at the door, when another carriage was heard to drive up
to it.

"There they are!" cried Mrs. Ferguson; and the bride, who had been
sitting beside her on the sofa, passive, silent, all but motionless,
started a little.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" she said, in the first natural tone that had been heard
in her voice all day. "I did so want to see the children."

Dr. Grey went out of the room at once, and Mrs. Ferguson had the good
sense to follow, taking her husband with her. "For," as she said
afterward, "the first sight of three stepchildren, and she, poor dear, such
a mere girl, must be a very unpleasant thing." For her part, she was
thankful that when she married James Ferguson he was a bachelor, with
not a soul belonging to him except an old aunt. She wouldn't like to be
in poor Mrs. Grey's shoes--"dear me, no!"--with those two old ladies
who have lived at the Lodge ever since the first Mrs. Grey died. She
wondered how on earth Miss Oakley would manage them. And upon
James Ferguson's suggesting "in the same way as she managed every
body," his wife soundly berated him for saying such a silly thing,
though he had, with the usual acuteness of silent people, said a wiser
thing than he was aware of.

Meantime Christian was left alone, for the first time that day, and many
days; for solitude was a blessing not easy to get in the Ferguson's large,
bustling family. Perhaps she did not seek it--perhaps she dared not.
Anyhow, during the month that had been occupied with her marriage
preparations, she had scarcely been ten minutes alone, not even at
night, for two children shared her room--the loving little things whom
she had taught for two years, first as daily, and then as resident
governess, and to whom she had persisted in giving lessons till the last.

She stood with the same fixed composedness--not composure--of
manner; the quietness of a person who, having certain things to go
through, goes through them in a sort of dream, almost without
recognizing her own identity. Women, more than men, are subject to
this strange, somnambulistic, mental condition, the result of strong
emotion, in which they both do and endure to an extent that men would
never think of or find possible.

After a minute she moved slightly, took up and laid down a book, but
still mechanically, as if she did not quite know what she was doing
until, suddenly, she caught sight of her wedding-ring. She regarded it
with something very like affright; tried convulsively to pull it off;
but it was rather tight; and before it had passed a finger-joint she
had recollected herself and pressed it down again.

"It is too late now. He is so good--every body says so--and he is so
very good to me."

She spoke aloud, though she was alone in the room, or rather because
she was alone, after a habit which, like all solitarily reared and dreamy
persons, Christian had had all her life--her young, short life--only
twenty-one years--and yet it seemed to her a whole, long, weary
existence.

"If I can but make him happy! If what is left to me is only enough to
make him happy!"

These broken sentences were repeated more than once, and then she
stood silent as though in a dream still.

When she heard the door open, she turned round with that still, gentle,
passive smile which had welcomed Dr. Grey on every day of his brief
"courting" days. It never altered, though he entered in a character not
the pleasantest for a bridegroom, with his three little children, one on
either side of him, and the youngest in his arms.

But there are some men, and mostly those grave, shy, and reserved
men, who have always the truest and tenderest hearts, whom nothing
transforms so much as to be with children, especially if the children are
their own. They are given to hiding a great deal, but the father in them
can not be hid. Why should it? Every man who has anything really
manly in his nature knows well that to be a truly good father, carrying
out by sober reason and conscience those duties which in the mother
spring from instinct, is the utmost dignity to which his human nature
can attain.

Miss Oakley, like the rest of Avonsbridge, had long-known Dr. Grey's
history; how he had married early, or (ill-natured report said) been
married by, a widow lady, very handsome, and some years older than
himself. However, the sharpest insinuations ever made against their
domestic bliss were that she visited a good deal, while he was deeply
absorbed in his studies. And when, after a good many childless years,
she brought him a girl and boy, he became excessively fond of his
children. Whether this implied that he had been disappointed in his
wife, nobody could tell. He certainly did not publish his woes. Men
seldom do. At the birth of a third child Mrs. Grey died, and then the
widower's grief; though unobtrusive, was sufficiently obvious to make
Avonsbridge put all unkindly curiosity aside, and conclude that the
departed lady must have been the most exemplary and well-beloved of
wives and mothers.

All this, being town's talk, Christian already knew; more she had never
inquired, not even when she was engaged to him. Nor did Dr. Grey
volunteer any information. The strongest and most soothing part of his
influence over her was his exceeding silence. He had never troubled
her with any great demonstrations, nor frightened her with
questionings. From the time of their engagement he had seemed to take
every thing for granted, and to treat her tenderly, almost reverently,
without fuss or parade, yet with the consideration due from a man to his
future wife; so much so that she had hardly missed, what, indeed, in
her simplicity she hardly expected, the attention usually paid to an
affianced bride from the relatives of her intended. Dr. Grey had only
two, his own sister and his late wife's. These ladies, Miss Gascoigne
and Miss Grey, had neither called upon nor taken the least notice of
Miss Oakley. But Miss Oakley--if she thought about the matter at all--
ascribed it to a fact well recognized in Avonsbridge, as in most
University towns, that one might as soon expect the skies to fall as for a
college lady to cross, save for purely business purposes, the threshold
of a High Street tradesman. The same cause, she concluded, made
them absent from her wedding; and when Dr. Grey had said simply, "I
shall desire my sisters to send the children," Christian had inquired no
farther. Only for a second, hanging on the brink of this first meeting
with the children--her husband's children, hers that were to be--did her
heart fail her, and then she came forward to meet the little group.

Letitia and Arthur were thin, prim-looking, rather plain children; but
Oliver was the very picture of a father's darling, a boy that any
childless man would bitterly covet, any childless woman crave and
yearn for, with a longing that women alone can understand; a child
who, beautiful as most childhood is, had a beauty you rarely see--
bright, frank, merry, bold; half a Bacchus and half a Cupid, he was a
perfect image of the Golden Age. Though three years old, he was
evidently still "the baby," and rode on his father's shoulder with a
glorious tyranny charming to behold.

"Who's that?" said he, pointing his fat fingers and shaking his curls that
undulated like billows of gold.

"Papa, who's that?"

Hardly could there have been put by anyone a more difficult question.
Dr. Grey did not answer, but avoided it, taking the whole three to
Christian's side, and bidding them, in a rather nervous voice, to "kiss
this lady."

But that ceremony the two elder obstinately declined.

"I am a big boy, and I don't like to be kissed," said Arthur.

"Nurse told us, since we had no mamma of our own, we were not to
kiss any body but our aunts," added Letitia.

Dr. Grey looked terribly annoyed, but Christian said calmly, "Very
well, then shake hands only. We shall be better friends by-and-by."

They suffered her to touch a little hand of each, passively rather than
unwillingly, and let it go. For a minute or so the boy and girl stood
opposite her, holding fast by one another, and staring with all their
eyes; but they said nothing more, being apparently very "good"
children, that is, children brought up under the old-fashioned rules,
which are indicated in the celebrated rhyme,

_"Come when you're called,
Do as you're bid:
Shut the door after you,
And you'll never be chid."_

Therefore, on being told to sit down, they gravely took their places on
the sofa, and continued to stare.

The father and bridegroom looked on, silent as they. What could he
say or do? It was the natural and necessary opening up of that vexed
question--second marriages, concerning which moralists,
sentimentalists, and practical people argue forever, and never come to
any conclusion. Of course not, because each separate case should
decide itself. The only universal rule or law, if there be one, is that
which applies equally to the love before marriage; that as to a complete,
mutual first love, any after love is neither likely, necessary, nor
desirable; so, to anyone who has known a perfect first marriage--the
whole satisfaction of every requirement of heart and soul and human
affection--unto such, a second marriage, like a second love, would be
neither right nor wrong, advisable nor unadvisable, but simply
impossible.

What could he do--the father who had just given his children a new
mother, they being old enough not only to understand this, but
previously taught; as most people are so fatally ready to teach children,
the usual doctrine about step-mothers, and also quite ready to rebel
against the same?

The step-mother likewise, what could she do, even had she recognized
and felt all that the children's behavior implied?

Alas! (I say "alas!" for this was as sad a thing as the other) she did not
recognize it. She scarcely noticed it at all. In her countenance was no
annoyance--no sharp pain, that even in that first bridal hour she was not
first and sole, as every woman may righteously wish to be. There came
to her no sting of regret, scarcely unnatural, to watch another woman's
children already taking the first and best of that fatherly love which it
would be such exquisite joy to see lavished upon her own. Alas! poor
Christian! all these things passed over her as the wind passes over a
bare February tree, stirring no emotions, for there were none to stir.
Her predominating feeling was a vague sense of relief in the presence
of the children, and of delight in the exceeding beauty of the youngest.

"This is Oliver. I remember you told me his name. Will he come to
me? children generally do," said she in a shy sort of way, but still
holding out her arms. In her face and manner was that inexplicable
motherliness which some girls have even while nursing their dolls
--some never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children--
never!

Master Oliver guessed this by instinct, as children always do. He
looked at her intently, a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then
broke into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed.
Christian, the solitary governess, first the worse than orphan, and then
the real orphan, without a friend or relative in the world, felt a child
clinging round her neck--a child toward whom, by the laws of God and
man, she was bound to fulfill all the duties of a mother--duties which,
from the time when she insisted on having a "big doll," that she might
dress it, not like a fine lady, but "like a baby," had always seemed to
her the very sweetest in all the world. Her heart leaped with a sudden
ecstasy, involuntary and uncontrollable.

"My bonny boy!" she murmured, kissing the top of that billowy curl
which extended from brow to crown--"my curl"--for Oliver
immediately and proudly pointed it to her. "And to think that his
mother never saw him. Poor thing! poor thing!"

Dr. Grey turned away to the window. What remembrances, bitter or
sweet, came over the widower's heart, Heaven knows! But he kept
them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things that were
incommunicable and inevitable, and especially all things that could
have given pain to any human being. He only said on returning,

"I knew, Christian, from the first, that you would be a good mother to
my children."

She looked up at him, the tears in her eyes, but with a great light
shining in them too.

"I will try."

Poor Christian! If her hasty marriage, or any other mistake of her life,
needed pardon, surely it might be won for the earnest sincerity of this
vow, and for its self-forgetful, utter humility--"I will try."

For another half hour, at her entreaty, the children staid, though Letitia
and Arthur never relaxed from their dignified decorum farther than to
inform her that they were sometimes called "Titia" and "Atty;" that
their nurse was named Phillis; and that she had remained in the carriage
because "she said she would not come in." Still, having expected
nothing, the young step-mother was not disappointed. And when the
three left, Oliver having held up his rosy mouth voluntarily for "a good
large kiss," the sweetness of the caress lingered on her mouth like a
chrism of consecration, sanctifying her for these new duties which
seemed to have been sent to her without her choice, almost without her
volition; for she often felt, when she paused to thing at all, as if in the
successive links of circumstances which had brought about her
marriage, she had been a passive agent, led on step by step, like a
person half asleep. Would she ever awake?

When Mrs. Ferguson, re-entering, ready with any amount of sympathy,
found the young step-mother kissing her hand to the retreating carriage
with a composed smile, which asked no condolence, and offered no
confidences, the good lady was, to say the least, surprised. "But," as
she afterward confessed to at least two dozen of her most intimate
friends, "there always was something so odd, so different from most
young ladies about Miss. Oakley." However, to the young lady herself
she said nothing, except suggesting, rather meekly, that it was time to
change her dress.

"And just once more let me beg you to take my shawl--my very best--
instead of your own, which you have had a year and a half. Ah!"
sighing, "if you had only spent more money on your wedding clothes!"

"How could I?" said Christian, and stopped, seeing Dr. Grey enter.
This was the one point on which she had resisted him. She could not
accept her trousseau from her husband's generosity. It had been the last
struggle of that fierce, poverty-nurtured independence, which nothing
short of perfect love could have extinguished into happy humility, and
she had held to her point resolute and hard; so much so, that when, with
a quiet dignity peculiarly his own, Dr. Grey had yielded, she had
afterward almost felt ashamed. And even now a slight blush came in
her cheek when she heard him say cheerfully,

"Do not trouble her, Mrs. Ferguson, about her shawl. You know I have
taken her--that is, we have taken one another 'for better, for worse,' and
it is little matter what sort of clothes she wears."

Christian, as she passed him, gave her husband a grateful look.
Grateful, alas! Love does not understand, or even recognize, gratitude.

But when the door closed after her, Dr. Grey's eyes rested on it like
those of one who misses a light.

He sat down covering his mouth--his firmly-set but excessively
sensitive month with his hand, an attitude which was one of his
peculiarities; for he had many, which the world excused because of his
learning, and his friends--well, because of himself.

If ever there was a man who without the slightest obtrusiveness, or self-
assertion of any kind, had unlimited influence over those about him, it
was Arnold Grey. Throughout a life spent entirely within the college
walls, he had, from freshman to fellow, from thence to tutor, and so on
to the early dignity of mastership, the most extraordinary faculty of
making people do whatsoever he liked---ay, and enjoy the doing of it.
Friends, acquaintances, undergraduates, even down to children and
servants, all did, more or less, sooner or later, the good pleasure of Dr.
Grey. Perhaps the secret of this was that his "pleasure" was never
merely his own. None wield such absolute power over others as those
who think little about themselves.

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