The Woman Thou Gavest Me; Being the Story of Mary O'Neill. Sir Hall Caine
at once to go to church.
The dawn was broadening, but the household was still asleep, only the servants in the kitchen stirring when I stepped through a side door, and set out across the fields.
The dew was thick on the grass, and under the gloom of a heavy sky the day looked cold and cheerless. A wind from the south-east had risen during the night, the sea was white with breakers, and from St. Mary's Rock there came the far-off moaning of surging waves.
The church, too, when I reached it, looked empty and chill. The sacristan in the dim choir was arranging lilies and marguerites about the high altar, and only one poor woman, with a little red and black shawl over her head and shoulders, was kneeling in the side chapel where Father Dan was saying Mass, with a sleepy little boy in clogs to serve him.
The woman was quite young, almost as young as myself, but she was already a widow, having lately lost her husband "at the herrings" somewhere up by Stornoway, where he had gone down in a gale, leaving her with one child, a year old, and another soon to come.
All this she told me the moment I knelt near her. The poor thing seemed to think I ought to have remembered her, for she had been at school with me in the village.
"I'm Bella Quark that was," she whispered. "I married Willie Shimmin of the Lhen, you recollect. It's only a month this morning since he was lost, but it seems like years and years. There isn't nothing in the world like it."
She knew about my marriage, and said she wished me joy, though the world was "so dark and lonely for some." Then she said something about her "lil Willie." She had left him asleep in her cottage on the Curragh, and he might awake and cry before she got back, so she hoped Father Dan wouldn't keep her long.
I was so touched by the poor thing's trouble that I almost forgot my own, and creeping up to her side I put my arm through hers as we knelt together, and that was how the Father found us when he turned to put the holy wafer on our tongues.
The wind must have risen higher while I was in the church, for when I was returning across the fields it lashed my skirts about my legs so that I could scarcely walk. A mist had come down and made a sort of monotonous movement in the mountains where they touched the vague line of the heavy sky.
I should be afraid to say that Nature was still trying to speak to me in her strange inarticulate voice, but I cannot forget that a flock of yearlings, which had been sheltering under a hedge, followed me bleating to the last fence, and that the moaning of the sea about St. Mary's Rock was the last sound I heard as I re-entered the house.
Everything there was running like a mill-race by this time. The servants were flying to and fro, my cousins were calling downstairs in accents of alarm, Aunt Bridget was answering them in tones of vexation, and my father was opening doors with a heavy push and closing them with a clash.
They were all so suddenly pacified when I appeared that it flashed upon me at the moment that they must have thought I had run away.
"Goodness gracious me, girl, where have you been?" said Aunt Bridget.
I told her, and she was beginning to reproach me for not ordering round the carriage, instead of making my boots and stockings damp by traipsing across the grass, when my father said:
"That'll do, that'll do! Change them and take a snack of something. I guess we're due at Holmtown in half an hour."
I ate my breakfast standing, the car was brought round, and by eight o'clock my father and I arrived at the house of the High Bailiff, who had to perform the civil ceremony of my marriage according to the conditions required by law.
The High Bailiff was on one knee before the fire in his office, holding a newspaper in front of it to make it burn.
"Nobody else here yet?" asked my father.
"Traa dy liooar" (time enough), the High Bailiff muttered.
He was an elderly man of intemperate habits who spent his nights at the "Crown and Mitre," and was apparently out of humour at having been brought out of bed so early.
His office was a room of his private house. It had a high desk, a stool and a revolving chair. Placards were pinned on the walls, one over another, and a Testament, with the binding much worn, lay on a table. The place looked half like a doctor's consulting room, and half like a small police court.
Presently Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, came in, rather irritatingly cheerful in that chill atmosphere, and, half an hour late, my intended husband arrived, with his London lawyer and his friend Eastcliff.
My mind was far from clear and I had a sense of seeing things by flashes only, but I remember that I thought Lord Raa was very nervous, and it even occurred to me that early as it was he had been drinking.
"Beastly nuisance, isn't it?" he said to me aside, and then there was something about "this legal fuss and fuddlement."
With the air of a man with a grievance the High Bailiff took a big book out of the desk, and a smaller one off a shelf, and then we sat in a half circle, and the ceremony began.
It was very brief and cold like a matter of business. As far as I can remember it consisted of two declarations which Lord Raa and I made first to the witnesses present and afterwards to each other. One of them stated that we knew of no lawful impediment why we should not be joined together in matrimony, and the other declared that we were there and then so joined.
I remember that I repeated the words automatically, as the High Bailiff in his thick alcoholic voice read them out of the smaller of his books, and that Lord Raa, in tones of obvious impatience, did the same.
Then the High Bailiff opened the bigger of his books, and after writing something in it himself he asked Lord Raa to sign his name, and this being done he asked me also.
"Am I to sign, too?" I asked, vacantly.
"Well, who else do you think?" said Mr. Curphy with a laugh. "Betsy Beauty perhaps, eh?"
"Come, gel, come," said my father, sharply, and then I signed.
I had no longer any will of my own. In this as in everything I did whatever was asked of me.
It was all as dreary and lifeless as an empty house. I can remember that it made no sensible impression upon my heart. My father gave some money (a few shillings I think) to the High Bailiff, who then tore a piece of perforated blue paper out of the bigger of his books and offered it to me, saying:
"This belongs to you."
"To me?" I said.
"Who else?" said Mr. Curphy, who was laughing again, and then something was said by somebody about marriage lines and no one knowing when a wise woman might not want to use them.
The civil ceremony of my marriage was now over, and Lord Raa, who had been very restless, rose to his feet, saying:
"Beastly early drive. Anything in the house to steady one's nerves, High Bailiff?"
The High Bailiff made some reply, at which the men laughed, all except my father. Then they left me and went into another room, the dining-room, and I heard the jingling of glasses and the drinking of healths while I sat before the fire with my foot on the fender and my marriage lines in my hand.
My brain was still numbed. I felt as one might feel if drowned in the sea and descending, without quite losing consciousness, to the depths of its abyss.
I remember I thought that what I had just gone through differed in no respect from the signing of my marriage settlement, except that in the one case I had given my husband rights over my money, my father's money, whereas in this case I seemed to have given him rights over myself.
Otherwise it was all so cold, so drear, so dead, so unaffecting.
The blue paper had slipped out of my hand on to the worn hearthrug when my helpless meditations were interrupted by the thrumming and throbbing of the motor-car outside, and by my father, who was at the office door, saying in his loud, commanding voice:
"Come,