Mrs Ogilvy’s wound took a long time to heal, but it did heal in the end. She was very weak, but had for a long time that wonderful exemption from care which is usually the privilege of the dying, though she did not die. Perhaps there was no time of her life when she was happier than during these weeks of illness. Susie was by her bedside night and day. Robbie came in continually, a large shadow standing over her, staying but a moment at first, then longer, sitting by her, talking to her, answering her questions. I do not know that there was soon or fundamentally a great moral improvement in Robbie; but he had been startled into anxiety and kindness, and a little went a long way with those two women, who loved him. For there was little doubt in any mind, except perhaps in his own, that Susie loved him too, with something of the same tolerant, all-explaining, all-pardoning love which was in his mother’s heart. She had done so all her life, waiting for him all those years, through which he never thought of her: that did not matter to Susie,--nobody had ever touched her faithful simple heart but he. She would not perhaps have been an unhappy woman had he never come back: she would have gone on looking for him with a vague and visionary hope, which would have lent a grace to her gentle being, maiden-mother as she had been born. And even this wild episode, which she never quite understood, which she never desired to understand, made no difference to Susie. She forgave it all to the man who was dead, and shed tears over the horror of his fate; but she put easily all the blame upon him. Robbie had been faithful to the death for him, would have gone away instead of him to save him. It covered Lew with a shining mantle of charity that he called forth so much that was noble in his friend.
The minister, who was shamed to the heart, and wounded in his _amour propre_ beyond expression by the desertion of Mrs Ainslie, and by the conviction, slowly forced upon him, that she had deceived him, and was no exquisite English lady of high pretensions but an adventuress--felt that the only amends he could make to himself and the world was to carry out his intention of marrying, and that as quickly as possible. Providence, as he piously said, directed his eyes to one of those kind old maids who fill up the crevices of the world, and who are often so humbly ready to take that position of nurse-housekeeper-wife, in which perhaps they can be of more use to their generation than in their solitude, and which satisfies, I suppose, the wish to belong to somebody, and be the first in some life, as well as the mother-yearning in their hearts. Such a blessed solution of the difficulty enchanted the parish, and satisfied the boys and the little girls, who had now unlimited petting to look forward to--and set Susie free. She married Robert Ogilvy soon after his mother’s recovery. Fortunately Mrs Ogilvy was never conscious of the details of the tragedy, and did not know ever what had lain there in the moonlight across her threshold. I doubt if she could have come and gone cheerfully as she did over that door-stone had she ever known. And the young ones full of their own life forgot--and the family of three continued in the Hewan in love and content. Robbie never became a model man. He never did anything, notwithstanding the fulness of his life and strength. He had no impulse to work--rather the reverse: his impulses were all in the way of idleness; he lounged about and occupied himself with trifles, and gardened a little, and carpentered a little, and was never weary. It fretted the two women often, sometimes the length of despair, especially Susie, who would burst out into regrets of all his talents lost, and the great things he might have done. But Mrs Ogilvy did not echo those regrets: she was well enough aware what Robbie’s talents were, and the great things which he would never have done. She represented to her daughter-in-law that if he had been weary of the quiet, if he had grown moody, tired of his idleness, tired of his life, as some men do, there would then have been occasion to complain. “But he is just very happy, God bless him!” his mother said. “And you and me, Susie, we are two happy women; and the Lord be thanked for all He has done for us, and no suffered me to go down famished and fasting to the grave.”