Finally he confessed to Margaret that he loved her, and that he “must marry her or be miserable.” She refused to listen to him as a lover, said he must marry a younger woman,—she was thirty-seven, and he but thirty,—but she would be his friend. For weeks he was dejected and unhappy. She debated the matter with her own heart. Should she, who had had many admirers, now marry a man her junior, and not of surpassing intellect, like her own? If she married him, it must be kept a secret till his father’s estate was settled, for marriage with a Protestant would spoil all prospect of an equitable division.
Love conquered, and she married the young Marquis Ossoli in December, 1847. He gave to Margaret the kind of love which lasts after marriage, veneration of her ability and her goodness. “Such tender, unselfish love,” writes Mrs. Story, “I have rarely before seen; it made green her days, and gave her an expression of peace and serenity which before was a stranger to her. When she was ill, he nursed and watched over her with the tenderness of a woman. No service was too trivial, no sacrifice too great for him. ’How sweet it is to do little things for you,’ he would say.”
To her mother, Margaret wrote, though she did not tell her secret, “I have not been so happy since I was a child, as during the last six weeks.”
But days of anxiety soon came, with all the horrors of war. Ossoli was constantly exposed to death, in that dreadful siege of Rome. Then Rome fell, and with it the hopes of Ossoli and his wife. There would be neither fortune nor home for a Liberal now—only exile. Very sadly Margaret said goodbye to the soldiers in the hospitals, brave fellows whom she honored, who in the midst of death itself, would cry “Viva l’ Italia!”
But before leaving Rome, a day’s journey must be made to Rieta, at the foot of the Umbrian Apennines. And for what? The most precious thing of Margaret’s life was there,—her baby. The fair child, with blue eyes and light hair like her own, had already been named by the people in the house, Angelino, from his beauty. She had always been fond of children. Emerson’s Waldo, for whom Threnody was written was an especial favorite; then “Pickie,” Mr. Greeley’s beautiful boy, and now a new joy had come into her heart, a child of her own. She wrote to her mother: “In him I find satisfaction, for the first time, to the deep wants of my heart. Nothing but a child can take the worst bitterness out of life, and break the spell of loneliness. I shall not be alone in other worlds, whenever Eternity may call me.... I wake in the night,—I look at him. He is so beautiful and good, I could die for him!”
When Ossoli and Margaret reached Rieta, what was their horror to find their child worn to a skeleton, half starved through the falsity of a nurse. For four weeks the distressed parents coaxed him back to life, till the sweet beauty of the rounded face came again, and then they carried him to Florence, where, despite poverty and exile, they were happy.