Маргарет Олифант
The Two Marys
Mrs Underwood relapsed into speechless misery. Against such an accusation as this, what could she say? She who never missed church, nor ceased to profess her belief in Providence. She was silenced altogether. She wept and sighed the name of Geoff now and then; but there was nothing more to say.
Geoff went down to the City without loss of a moment. He secured berths in a steamer which was to sail in three days; and with a bound of pleasure and conscious pride in his heart found himself engaged for his passage across the Atlantic. He went home very soberly, but with the blood coursing in his veins. He had taken such an initiative now as he had never been able to take in all his life before. He had emancipated himself at last. It was, however, with a little apprehension that he turned homeward. Whether his mother would impede his way with weeping, whether the sisters would reject his escort, he could not tell; but his fears in both cases were unnecessary. Mrs Underwood had been reduced to subjection some time before he got home. And as for Grace and Milly, they were neither excited about his proposal nor disposed to refuse it. They took it as the most natural thing in the world. There was a gleam of brightness, he thought, in Milly’s face, but Grace paid very little attention. Geoffrey was a little cast down when he perceived that they saw nothing at all heroic in his mission, nothing that anybody would think twice about. But he had to console himself with Miss Anna’s declaration that a fortnight on board ship would settle all questions. He himself felt a great confidence that everything would come right in the end.
Thus the difficulty was brought to a conclusion, in a way little contemplated by the Canadian who once had been Leonard Crosthwaite, and had broken his heart for his cousin Anna. When the young people were gone, the two ladies from Grove Road made a little pilgrimage to the great, grey, dismal London cemetery in which all that remained of him lay – where Mrs Underwood laid some flowers, and Anna gazed with eyes that looked as if they could penetrate the very secrets of the grave, upon the mound under which the lover of her youth slept in peace. What were the thoughts that had lain concealed within his breast for thirty years, yet which had brought him, carrying fear and confusion which he little anticipated, to her dwelling, the first day he spent in England, no one could tell. He had carried all that mystery with him to the other world.
And after a while Geoffrey Underwood came safely back from the terrible voyage which had so much alarmed his mother, bringing with him, exactly as Miss Anna had foreseen and commanded, his young wife. She was far too young a wife, her mother thought, to venture so far; but Milly did not think so. How to do without Grace, and to think for herself, was more difficult to Milly than the distance and the voyage. But she did what was a great deal easier than thinking for herself – she transferred all the responsibility to her husband. Nothing could be handsomer than the marriage settlement which Miss Anna made. She made the little bride her own representative, with the larger share of the fortune. And the Canadian family were well pleased, and asked no more. Indeed, all that Mrs Yorke desired was that nothing should be said about this strange illumination thrown at the last upon the husband who had been hers for twenty years, and who now seemed to be stolen from her and changed into another man. She would not listen to any explanations on the subject; the sound of the other name was odious to her. She took even from her boy, Leonard, that name of his which came from his father’s old life, and jealously called him Robert, which was his second name.
Almost a year elapsed before the young pair came home. They arrived on a bright April afternoon, when the sun was shining over the great smoke. The windows were open: the lawn all green with spring, and set in a frame of English primroses, looked as fresh as the bride herself, who recognised it, and the difference in it, with a little cry of pleasure. Mrs Underwood threw herself, as was natural, upon the wonderful son who had been delivered from the seas, who had not been drowned, or swallowed by a whale, who had come safely through marriage, and all the other terrific dangers to which he had been exposed; but Miss Anna walked across the room with a little stately limp, casting aside her stick, and took little Milly in her arms. “Welcome!” she said, “little girl with the dove’s eyes. I always said I would accept one, but only one, compromise!”
