The Woman Thou Gavest Me; Being the Story of Mary O'Neill. Sir Hall Caine
now," said my father, looking from one to the other. "The clean cut is the short cut, you know, and when I'm sot on doing a thing, I can't take rest till it's done. What do you say to this day next month?"
I bowed and my intended husband, in his languid way, said:
"Agreed!"
A few minutes afterwards the motor was ordered round, and the gentlemen prepared to go. Then the silver-haired terrier was missed, and for the first time that day his lordship betrayed a vivid interest, telling us its price and pedigree and how much he would give rather than lose it. But at the last moment Tommy appeared with the dog in his arms and dropped it into the car, whereupon my intended husband thanked him effusively.
"Yes," said Tommy, "I thought you set store by that, sir."
At the next moment the car was gone.
"Well, you are a lucky girl," said Betsy Beauty; and Aunt Bridget began to take credit to herself for all that had come to pass, and to indicate the methods by which she meant to manage Castle Raa as soon as ever I became mistress of it.
Thus in my youth, my helplessness, my ignorance, and my inexperience I became engaged to the man who had been found and courted for me. If I acquiesced, I had certainly not been consulted. My father had not consulted me. My intended husband had not consulted me. Nobody consulted me. I am not even sure that I thought anybody was under any obligation to consult me. Love had not spoken to me, sex was still asleep in me, and my marriage was arranged before my deeper nature knew what was being done.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER
The next weeks were full of hurry, hubbub and perturbation. Our house was turned upside down. Milliners, sewing-maids and dressmakers were working day and night. Flowers, feathers and silk remnants were flowing like sea-wrack into every room. Orders were given, orders were retracted and given again, and then again retracted.
Such flying up and down stairs! Everybody so breathless! Everybody so happy! Every face wearing a smile! Every tongue rippling with laughter! The big grey mansion which used to seem so chill and cold felt for the first time like a house of joy.
In the midst of these busy preparations I had no time to think. My senses were excited. I was dazed, stunned, wrapped round by a kind of warm air of hot-house happiness, and this condition of moral intoxication increased as the passing of the days brought fresh developments.
Our neighbours began to visit us. My father had been right about the great people of the island. Though they had stood off so long, they found their account in my good fortune, and as soon as my marriage was announced they came in troops to offer their congratulations.
Never, according to Tommy the Mate, had the gravel of our carriage drive been so rucked up by the pawing feet of high-bred horses. But their owners were no less restless. It was almost pitiful to see their shamefacedness as they entered our house for the first time, and to watch the shifts they were put to in order to account for the fact that they had never been there before.
Aunt Bridget's vanity was too much uplifted by their presence to be particular about their excuses, but my father's contempt of their subterfuges was naked and undisguised, and I hardly know whether to feel amused or ashamed when I think of how he scored off them, how he lashed them to the bone, with what irony and sarcasm he scorched their time-serving little souls.
When they were very great folks, the "aristocracy" of Ellan, he pretended not to know who they were, and asked their names, their father's names, and what parishes they came from.
"Some of the Christians of Balla-Christian, are you? Think of that now. And me a born Ellanman, and not knowing you from Adam!"
When they were very near neighbours, with lands that made boundary with our own, he pretended to think they had been twenty years abroad, or perhaps sick, or even dead and buried.
"Too bad, ma'am, too bad," he would say. "And me thinking you were under the sod through all the lonely years my poor wife was ill and dying."
But when they were insular officials, who "walked on the stars," and sometimes snubbed him in public, the rapier of ridicule was too light for his heavy hand, and he took up the sledge-hammer, telling them he was the same man to-day as yesterday, and only his circumstances were different—his daughter being about to become the lady of the first house in the island, and none of them being big enough to be left out of it.
After such scenes Aunt Bridget, for all her despotism within her own doors, used to tremble with dread of our neighbours taking lasting offence, but my father would say:
"Chut, woman, they'll come again, and make no more faces about it."
They did, and if they were shy of my father they were gracious enough to me, saying it was such a good thing for society in the island that Castle Raa was to have a lady, a real lady, at the head of it at last.
Then came their wedding presents—pictures, books, silver ornaments, gold ornaments, clocks, watches, chains, jewellery, until my bedroom was blocked up with them. As each fresh parcel arrived there would be a rush of all the female members of our household to open it, after which Betsy Beauty would say:
"What a lucky girl you are!"
I began to think I was. I found it impossible to remain unaffected by the whirlwind of joyous turmoil in which I lived. The refulgence of the present hour wiped out the past, which seemed to fade away altogether. After the first few days I was flying about from place to place, and wherever I went I was a subject for congratulation and envy.
If there were moments of misgiving, when, like the cold wind out of a tunnel, there came the memory of the Reverend Mother and the story she had told me at Nemi, there were other moments when I felt quite sure that, in marrying Lord Raa, I should be doing a self-sacrificing thing and a kind of solemn duty.
One such moment was when Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, who with his clammy hands always made me think of an over-fatted fish, came to tell him that, after serious legal difficulties, the civil documents had been agreed to, for, after he had finished with my father, he drew me aside and said, as he smoothed his long brown beard:
"You ought to be a happy girl, Mary. I suppose you know what you are doing for your father? You are wiping out the greatest disappointment of his life, and rectifying the cruelty—the inevitable cruelty—of the law, when you were born a daughter after he had expected a son."
Another such moment was when the Bishop came, in his grand carriage, to say that after much discussion he had persuaded his lordship to sign the necessary declaration that all the children of our union, irrespective of sex, should be brought up as Catholics, for taking me aside, as the advocate had done the day before, he said, in his suave voice, fingering his jewelled cross:
"I congratulate you, my child. Yours is a great and precious privilege—the privilege of bringing back to the Church a family which has been estranged from it for nineteen years."
At the end of a fortnight we signed the marriage settlement. The little ceremony took place in the drawing-room of my father's house. My intended husband, who had not been to see me in the meantime, brought with him (as well as his trustee and lawyer) a lady and a gentleman.
The lady was his maiden aunt, Lady Margaret Anslem, a fair woman of about forty, fashionably dressed, redolent of perfume, and (except to me, to whom she talked quite amicably) rather reserved and haughty, as if the marriage of her nephew into our family were a bitter pill which she had compelled herself to swallow.
The gentleman was a tall young man wearing a very high collar and cravat, and using a handkerchief with embroidered initials in the corner of it. He turned out to be the Hon. Edward Eastcliff—the great friend who, being rich enough to please himself, was about to marry the professional beauty.
I noticed that Aunt Bridget, with something of