Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/468

40 That faint cleaving doubt which he had never been able to shake off in Rebecca Murdoch's presence, was fatally set at rest forever, he had seen her face, then, before—seven years before, on his birthday, in the bedroom of the lonely inn. "The woman of the dream!"

"Be warned, oh, my son! be warned! Isaac! Isaac! let her go, and do you stop with me!"

Something darkened the parlor window, as those words were said. A sudden chill ran through him, and he glanced sidelong at the shadow. Rebecca Murdock had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the low window blind.

"I have promised to marry, mother," he said, "and marry I must."

The tears came into his eyes as he spoke, and dimmed his sight; but he could just discern the fatal face outside moving away again from the window.

His mother's head sank lower.

"Are you faint?" he whispered.

"Broken-hearted, Isaac."

He stooped down and kissed her. The shadow, as he did so, returned to the window; and the fatal face peered in curiously once more.

Three weeks after that day, Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All that was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man's moral nature, seemed to have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it unassailable in his heart.

After that first interview in the cottage parlor, no consideration would induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son's wife again, or even to talk of her when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage. This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of anything but the fearfully exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman and the spectre woman of Isaac's dream. Rebecca, on her side, neither felt nor expressed the slightest sorrow at the estrangement between herself and her mother-in-law. Isaac, for the sake of peace, had never contradicted her first idea that age and long illness had affected Mrs. Scatchard's mind. He even allowed his wife to upbraid