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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 7. I Am Found - Chapter 115 |
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_ SEVENTH PART. I AM FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEENTH CHAPTER JULY 6. I feel so much better to-day. I hardly know what reaction of my whole being, physical and spiritual, has set in since yesterday, but my heart is lighter than for a long time, and sleep, which I had come to look upon as a lost blessing, came to me last night for four solid hours--beautiful and untroubled as a child's. * * * * * JULY 8. Martin writes that he expects to be here on the 12th. Letter full of joyous spirits. "Lots to tell you when I reach home, dearest." Strange! No mortal can imagine how anxious I am to get him back, yet I almost dread his coming. When he was away before, Time could not go fast enough for me. Now it is going too fast. I know what that means--the story I have to tell. How am I to tell it? * * * * * JULY 10. Only two days more and Martin will be here. Of course I must be up when he arrives. Nurse says No, but I say Yes. To be in bed when he comes would be too much a shock for him. "Servants are such domineering tyrants," says Christian Ann, who never had but one, and "the strange woman" was such a phantom in the house that the poor mistress was grateful to God when Hollantide came round and the ghost walked away of itself. My nurse is a dear, though. How glad I am now that I persuaded Christian Ann to let her stay. * * * * * JULY 12. Martin comes to-day, and the old doctor (with such a proud and stately step) has gone off to Blackwater to meet him. I am terribly weak (no pain whatever), but perfectly resolute on dressing and going downstairs towards tea-time. I shall wear a white tea-gown, which Sister Mildred gave me in London. Martin likes me best in white. * * * * * LATER. My Martin has come! We had counted it up that travelling across the island by motor-car he would arrive at five, so I was dressed and downstairs by four, sitting in the _chiollagh_ and watching the road through the window opposite. But he was half an hour late, and Christian Ann and I were in such a fever that anybody would have believed it to be half a century and that the world had stood still. We might have known what would happen. At Blackwater "the boys" (the same that "got up the spree" when Martin went away) had insisted on a demonstration. Then, on reaching our village, Martin had got down and shaken hands with everybody--the joiner and the grocer and the blacksmith and the widow who keeps the corner shop--so that it had taken him a quarter of an hour to get through, amid a general chorus of "The boy he is, though!" and "No pride at all at all!" After that he drove home at top speed, and my quick ears caught the musical hum of the motor as it crossed the bridge. Good gracious, what excitement! "Quick nurse, help me to the gate." I got there just in time to hear a shout, and to see a precipitate bound out of the car and then . . . what an embrace! It is such a good thing my Martin is a big, brawny person, for I don't know how I should have got back to the house, being so weak and breathless just then, if his strong arm had not been round my waist. Dr. O'Sullivan had come too, looking as gay as a humming-bird, and after I had finished with Martin I kissed him also (having such a largesse of affection to distribute generally), whereupon he blushed like a boy, bless him, and stammered out something about St. Patrick and St. Thomas, and how he wouldn't have believed anybody who had said there was anything so sweet, etc. Martin said I was looking so well, and he, too, declared he wouldn't have believed any man who had sworn I could have looked so much better in the time. My nervous thermometer must have gone up by leaps and bounds during the next hour, for immediately after tea the old doctor ordered me back to bed, though I refused to go until he had faithfully promised that the door to the staircase should be kept open, so that I could hear what was said downstairs. What lots of fun they had there! Half the parish must have come in "to put a sight" on Martin after his investiture, including old Tommy the Mate, who told everybody over and over again that he had "known the lad since he was a lump" and "him and me are same as brothers." The old doctor's stately pride must have been something to see. It was "Sir Martin" here and "Sir Martin" there, until I could have cried to hear him. I felt just as foolish myself, too, for though I cannot remember that my pulse gave one extra beat when they made me "your ladyship," now that Martin has become. . . . But that's what we women are, you see! At length Martin's big voice came up clear above the rest, and then the talk was about the visit to Windsor. Christian Ann wanted to know if he wasn't "freckened" to be there, "not being used of Kings," whereupon he cried: "What! Frightened of another man--and a stunning good one, too!" And then came a story of how the King had asked if he hadn't been in fear of icebergs, and how he had answered No, you could strike more of them in a day in London (meaning icy-hearted people) than in a life-time in the Antarctic. I suppose I must have laughed at that, for the next I heard was: "Hush! Isn't that Mary!" "Aw, yes, the poor _veg veen_," said a sad voice. It was Christian Ann's. At the bottom of her heart I shall always be the child who "sang carvals to her door." What a wonderful day! I shall not sleep a wink to-night, though. To-morrow I must tell him. * * * * * JULY 13. I intended to tell Martin this morning, but I really couldn't. I was going downstairs to breakfast, holding on to the bannisters at one side and using nurse's shoulder as my other crutch, when I saw the brightest picture I have ever beheld. Baby and Martin were on hands and knees on the rag-work hearthrug, face to face--Martin calling her to come, Isabel lifting up her little head to him, like a fledgling in a nest, and both laughing with that gurgling sound as of water bubbling out of a bottle. This sight broke all the breath out of me at the very first moment. And when Martin, after putting me into my place in the _chiollagh_, plunged immediately into a rapturous account of his preparations for our departure--how we were to be married by special license at the High Bailiff's on the tenth (if that date would do), how I was to rest a day and then travel up to London on the twelfth, and then rest other four days (during which warm clothes could be bought for me), and sail by the _Orient_ on the sixteenth--I could not find it in my heart to tell him then of the inexorable fate that confronted us. It was cowardice, I knew, and sooner or later I should have to pay for it. But when he went on to talk about baby, and appealed to his mother to say if she wouldn't look after Girlie when I was gone, and Christian Ann (in such a different tone) said Yes, she would look after Girlie when I was gone, I decided that I dared not tell him at all--I would die rather than do so. The end of it all is that I have arranged with Christian Ann, the old doctor, and Father Dan that Time and Martin's own observation are to tell him what is going to happen, and none of us are to say anything about it. What a deceiver I am, though! I put it all down to my unselfish love for Martin. It would be such a blow to him--disturbing his plans, upsetting everything, perhaps causing him to postpone his Expedition, or even to abandon it altogether. "Let the truth fall soft on him. He'll see it soon enough. Don't let us be cruel." The dear sweet, unsuspecting old darlings have taken it all in--all my vain and cowardly selfishness. I am to play the part of pretending to fall in with Martin's plans, and they are to stand by and say nothing. Can I do it? I wonder, I wonder! * * * * * JULY 15. I am becoming quite a great actress! It's astonishing to see how I develop my deceptions under all sorts of veils and disguises. Martin told me to-day that he had given up the idea of leaving me at Wellington and had determined to take me on to Winter Quarters, having met, on the way to Windsor, some great specialist in my kind of malady (I wonder how much he knows of it), who declared that the climate of the Antarctic would act on me like magic. Such glorious sunshine in summer! Such crisp, dry, stimulating air! New life with every breath! Such a stunning little house, too, so cosy and comfortable! And then the men whom he would leave behind while he slipped down South--they would worship me! "How splendid! How glorious!" I cried. "How delightful to be mistress over a houseful of big, hungry, healthy boys, who come in out of the snow and want to eat up everything!" Sometimes I feel myself being carried away by my own acting, and then I see the others (Christian Ann and the old doctor and Father Dan) dropping their heads or stealing out of the room. I wish I were not so weak. I feel no pain whatever. Only this temperature during the nights and the ever-deepening exhaustion in the mornings. * * * * * JULY 16. I am keeping it up! To-day I was alone with Martin for a long hour in the garden-house. Weather soft and beautiful, the heavens blue, and gleams of sunshine coming through the trellis-work. Merely to sit beside my darling with his odour of health is to feel a flood of bodily strength coursing through me, enough to make me forget that I am a frail thing myself, who could be blown away by a puff of wind. But to hear him talk on his own subject is to be lifted up to the highest reaches of the soul. I always say there is a dumb poet in every explorer; but the poet wasn't dumb to-day when Martin talked about the cyclone or anticyclone, or whatever it is which covers the region of the South Pole like a cap, and determines the weather of a great part of the habitable globe. "We are going to take from God his word and pass it on to the world," he said. After that he made reference (for the first time since his return) to the difficulties of our position, saying what a glorious thing it would be to escape to that great free region from the world of civilisation, with its effete laws and worn-out creeds which enslave humanity. "Only a month to-day until we start, and you'll be well enough to travel then, dearest." "Yes, yes, only a month to-day, and I shall be well enough then, dearest." Oh, Mary O'Neill! How much longer will you be able to keep it up, dear? * * * * * JULY 17. Martin brought the proofs of his new book from London, and to-day in the summer-house (bluebells paling out and hanging their heads, but the air full of the odour of fruit trees) he and Dr. O'Sullivan and I have been correcting "galleys"--the doctor reading aloud, Martin smoking his briar-root pipe, and I (in a crater of cushions) supposed to be sitting as judge and jury. Such simple, straight, natural writing! There may have been a thousand errors but my ears heard none of them. The breathless bits about the moments when death was near; the humorous bits about patching the tent with the tails of their shirts when an overturned lamp burnt a hole in the canvas--this was all I was conscious of until I was startled by the sound of a sepulchral voice, groaning out "Oh Lord a-massy me!" and by the sight of a Glengarry cap over the top of the fuchsia hedge. Old Tommy was listening from the road. We sat late over our proofs and then, the dew having begun to fall, Martin said he must carry me indoors lest my feet should get wet--which he did, with the result that, remembering what had happened on our first evening at Castle Raa, I had a pretty fit of hysterics as soon as we reached the house. "Let's skip, Commanther," was the next thing I heard, and then I was helped upstairs to bed. * * * * * JULY 18. What a flirt I am becoming! Having conceived the idea that Dr. O'Sullivan is a little wee bit in love with me too, I have been playing him off against Martin. It was so delicious (after all I have gone through) to have two magnificent men, out of the heroic youth of the world, waiting hand and foot on one little woman, that the feminine soul in me to-day couldn't resist the temptation to an innocent effort at coquetry. So before we began business on the proofs I told Martin that, if he was determined to leave me behind at winter quarters while he went away to the Pole, he must allow Dr. O'Sullivan to remain behind to take care of me. Of course the doctor rose to my bait like a dear, crying: "He will too--by St. Patrick and St. Thomas he will, and a mighty proud man he'll be entirely. . . ." But good gracious! A momentary shadow passed over Martin's face, then came one of his big broad smiles, then out shot his clinched fist, and . . . the poor doctor and his garden seat were rolling over each other on the grass. However, we got through without bloodshed, and did good day's work on the book. I must not write any more. I have always written in my own book at night, when I haven't been able to get any kind of Christian sleep; but I'm weaker now, so must stop, lest I shouldn't have strength enough for Martin's. * * * * * JULY 20. Oh dear! I am dragging all these other poor dears into my deceptions. Christian Ann does not mind what lies, or half-lies, she has to tell in order to save pain to her beloved son. But the old doctor! And Father Dan! To-day itself, as Martin's mother would say, I had to make my poor old priest into a shocking story-teller. I developed a cough a few weeks ago, and though it is not really of much account I have been struggling to smother it while Martin has been about, knowing he is a doctor himself, and fearing his ear might detect the note. But this afternoon (whether a little damp, with a soft patter of sweet rain on the trees and the bushes) I had a rather bad bout, at which Martin's face looked grave, until I laughed and said: "It's nothing! I've had this sort of cough every summer since I was born--haven't I, Father Dan?" "Ye-es." I shall have to remember that in my next confession, but what Father Dan is to do I really don't know. * * * * * JULY 21. I have been rather down to-day about a newspaper that came to me anonymously from Paris, with a report marked for my special delectation. "FASHIONABLE MARRIAGE OF AN ENGLISH PEER AND AN AMERICAN HEIRESS." My husband's and Alma's! It took place at the American Embassy, and was attended by great numbers of smart people. There was a long account of the grandeur of the bride's dress and of the splendour of the bridegroom's presents. They have taken an apartment on the Champs Elysees and will spend most of the year in Paris. Ah well, why should I trouble about a matter that so little concerns me? Alma is still beautiful; she will be surrounded by admirers; her salon will be frequented by the fashionable parasites of Europe and America. As for my husband, the straw-fire of his wife's passion for him will soon burn out, especially now that she has gained what she wanted--his name, his title. * * * * * Martin carried me upstairs to bed to-night. I was really feeling weaker than usual, but we made a great game of it. Nurse went first, behind a mountain of pillows; Martin and I came next, with his arms about my body and mine around his neck; and Dr. O'Sullivan last, carrying two tall brass candlesticks. How we laughed! We all laughed together, as if trying to see which of us could laugh the loudest. Only Christian Ann looked serious, standing at the bottom of the stairs, nursing baby in her nightdress. It is three o'clock in the morning as I write, and I can hear our laughter still--only it sounds like sobbing now. * * * * * JULY 22. Have heard something to-day that has taken all the warmth of life out of me. It is about my father, whom the old doctor still attends. Having been told of my husband's marriage he has announced his intention of claiming my child if anything happens to me! What his object may be I do not know. He cannot be thinking of establishing a claim to my husband's title--Isabel being a girl. Remembering something his lawyer said about the marriage settlement when I consulted him on the subject of divorce, I can only assume that (now he is poor) he is trying to recover the inheritance he settled on my husband. It frightens me--raising my old nightmare of a lawsuit about the legitimacy of my child. I want to speak to Martin about it. Yet how can I do so without telling him the truth which I have been struggling so hard to conceal? * * * * * JULY 23. Oh, Mary O'Neill, what are you coming to? I told Martin about father's threat, only I gave it another colour. He had heard of the Reverend Mother's visit, so I said the rumour had reached my father that I intended to enter a convent, and he had declared that, if I did so, he would claim my child from Christian Ann, being its nearest blood relation. "Can he do so--when I am . . . when we are gone?" I asked. I thought Martin's strong face looked sterner than I had ever seen it. He made a vague reply and left me soon afterwards on some sort of excuse. About an hour later he came back to carry me upstairs, and just as he was setting me down, and Christian Ann was coming in with the candles, he whispered: "Don't worry about Girlie. I've settled that matter, I'm thinking." What has he done, I wonder?
What I had done is easily told. I had gone straight to Daniel O'Neill himself, intending to know the truth of the story and to act accordingly. Already I knew enough to scent mischief. I could not be so stupefied into blindness of what was going on under my eyes as not to see that the dirty question of money, and perhaps the dirtier question of the aims and expectations of the woman MacLeod, were at the root of the matter that was distressing my darling. Daniel O'Neill had left the Big House and gone to live in his mother's old cottage for two reasons--first, to delude the law into the idea that he was himself utterly ruined by the bankruptcy to which he had brought the whole island; and next, to gratify the greed of his mistress, who wanted to get him to herself at the end, so that he might be persuaded to marry her (if it were only on his death-bed) and so establish, against any claim of his daughter's, her widow's rights in what a husband leaves behind him--which is half of everything in Ellan. What connection this had with the man's desire to get hold of the child I had yet to learn; but I meant to learn it without another hour's delay, so I set off for the cottage on the curragh. It was growing dark, and not being sure of my way through the ever-changing bypaths of the bog land, I called on Father Dan to guide me. The old priest seemed to know my errand (the matter my darling had communicated as a secret being common knowledge), and at first he looked afraid. "Well . . . yes, yes . . . why shouldn't I?" he said, and then, "Yes, I will, I will"--with the air of a man who had made up his mind to a daring enterprise. Our curragh is a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea, undrained, only partly cultivated, half covered with sedge and sallow bushes, and consequently liable to heavy mists. There was a mist over it that night, and hence it was not easy even for Father Dan (accustomed to midnight visits to curragh cottages) to find the house which had once been the home of "Neale the Lord." We rooted it out at last by help of the parish constable, who was standing at the corner of a by-road talking to the coachman of a gorgeous carriage waiting there, with its two splendid horses smoking in the thick night air. When, over the shingle of what we call "the street," we reached the low straggling crofter-cottage under its thick trammon tree (supposed to keep off the evil spirits), I rapped with my knuckles at the door, and it was opened by a tall scraggy woman with a candle in her hand. This was Nessy MacLeod, harder and uglier than ever, with her red hair combed up, giving her the appearance of a bunch of carrots over two stalks of rhubarb. Almost before I had time to say that we had come to see Mr. O'Neill, and to step into the house while saying so, a hoarse, husky, querulous man's voice cried from within: "Who is it, Nessy?" It's Father Dan, and Martin . . . I mean Sir. . . ." "That'll do," I said, and the next moment we were in the living-room--a bare, bleak, comfortless Curraghman's kitchen. A more incongruous sight than we saw there human eyes never beheld. Daniel O'Neill, a shadow of the big brute creature he once was, a shrivelled old man, with his bony hands scored and contracted like an autumn leaf, his shrunken legs scarcely showing through his baggy trousers, his square face whiter than the wall behind it, and a piece of red flannel hanging over his head like a cowl, sat in the elbow-chair at the side of the hearth-fire, while at a deal table, which was covered with papers that looked like law deeds and share certificates (being stamped and sealed), sat the Bishop of the island, and its leading lawyer, Mr. Curphy. On hearing my name and seeing me enter the house, Daniel O'Neill lost all control of himself. He struggled to his feet by help of a stick, and as I walked up to him he laid hold of me. "You devil!" he cried. "You infernal villain! You. . . ." But it is of no use to repeat what else he said in the fuming of his rage, laying hold of me by the collar of my coat, and tugging at it as if he would drag me to his feet. I was half sorry for the man, badly as I thought of him, so I only opened his hand (easy enough to do, for the grip was gone from it) and said: "You're an old man, sir, and you're a sick man--don't tempt me to forget that you are the father of Mary O'Neill. Sit down." He sat down, breathless and broken, without another word. But the Bishop, with a large air of outraged dignity, faced about to poor Father Dan (who was standing near the door, turning his round hat in his trembling hands) and said: "Father Donovan, did you know that Mr. O'Neill was very ill?" "I did, Monsignor," said Father Dan. "And that a surgeon is coming from London to perform an operation upon him--did you know that?" "I did, Monsignor." "Did you know also that I was here to-night to attend with Mr. Curphy to important affairs and perhaps discharge some sacred duties?" "I knew that too, Monsignor." "Then," said the Bishop, pointing at me, "how dare you bring this man here--this man of all others, who has been the chief instrument in bringing shame and disgrace upon our poor sick friend and his deeply injured family?" "So that's how you look at it, is it, Monsignor?" "Yes, sir, that is how I look at it, and I am sorry for a priest of my Church who has so weakened his conscience by sympathy with notorious sinners as to see things in any other light." "Sinners, Bishop?" "Didn't you hear me, Father Donovan? Or do you desire me to use a harder name for them--for one of them in particular, on whom you have wasted so much weak sentimentality, to the injury of your spiritual influence and the demoralisation of your parish. I have warned you already. Do you wish me to go further, to remove you from your Presbytery, or perhaps report your conduct to those who have power to take the frock off your back? What standard of sanctity for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony do you expect to maintain while you degrade it by openly associating with a woman who has broken her marriage vows and become little better . . . I grieve to say it [with a deep inclination of the head towards the poor wreck in the elbow-chair] little better than a common. . . ." I saw the word that was coming, and I was out in an instant. But there was somebody before me. It was Father Dan. The timid old priest seemed to break in one moment the bonds of a life-long tyranny. "What's that you say, Monsignor?" he cried in a shrill voice. "_I_ degrade the sacrament of Holy Matrimony? Never in this world! But if there's anybody in the island of Ellan who has done that same every day of his life, it's yourself, and never more cruelly and shamefully than in the case we're talking of at this present speaking." "I'm not used to this kind of language from my clergy, Father Donovan," began the Bishop, but before he could say more Father Dan caught him up by crying: "Perhaps not, Monsignor. But you've got to hear for once, and that's now. When this man [pointing to Daniel O'Neill] for his own purposes wanted to marry his daughter (who was a child and had no choice in the matter) to one of another faith, a man who didn't believe in the sacrament of marriage as we know it, who was it that paved the way for him?" "You actually mean that _I_. . . ." "I mean that without your help, Monsignor, a good girl could never have been married to a bad man. You didn't act in ignorance, either. When somebody told you--somebody who is here now--that the man to whom you were going to marry that innocent girl was a notorious loose liver, a profligate, a reprobate, a betrayer of women, and a damned scoundrel. . . ." "Go on, Father Dan; that's God's own name for him," I said, when the old priest caught his breath for a moment, terrified by the word that had burst from his lips. "Let's have an end of this," said the Bishop mightily. "Wait a bit, sir," I said, and then Father Dan went on to say how he had been told there was nothing to my story, and how he had been forbidden to inquire into it. "That's how you made _me_ a party to this wicked marriage, God and his Holy Mother pardon me! And now that it has come to the end you might have expected, and the poor helpless child who was bought and sold like a slave is in the position of the sinner, you want me to cut her off, to turn the hearts of all good people against her, to cast her out of communion, to make her a thing to point the finger at--me, her spiritual father who baptized her, taking her out of the arms of the angel who bore her and giving her to Christ--or if I won't you'll deprive me of my living, you'll report me to Rome, you'll unfrock me. . . ." "Do it, Monsignor," cried Father Dan, taking a step nearer to the Bishop and lifting a trembling hand over his head. "Do it, if our holy Church will permit you, and I'll put a wallet on my old shoulders and go round the houses of my parish in my old age, begging a bite of bread and a basin of meal, and sleeping under a thorn bush, rather than lay my head on my pillow and know that that poor victim of your wicked scheming is in the road." The throbbing and breaking of the old priest's voice had compelled me to drop my head, and it was not until I heard the sneck of the lock of the outer door that I realised that, overcome by his emotion, he had fled from the house. "And now I guess you can follow your friend," said Daniel O'Neill. "Not yet, sir," I answered; "I have something to say first." "Well, well, what is it, please?" said the lawyer sharply and insolently, looking to where I was standing with folded arms at one side of the hearth-place. "You'll hear soon enough, Master Curphy," I answered. Then, turning back to Daniel O'Neill, I told him what rumour had reached my dear one of his intentions with regard to her child, and asked him to say whether there was any truth in it. "Answer the man, Curphy," said Daniel O'Neill, and thereupon the lawyer, with almost equal insolence, turned to me and said: "What is it you wish to know, sir?" "Whether, if Mary O'Neill is unable from any cause to keep control of her child (which God forbid!), her father intends to take possession of it." "Why shouldn't he? If the mother dies, for instance, her father will be the child's legal guardian." "But if by that time the father is dead too--what then?" "Then the control of the child will--with the consent of the court--devolve upon his heir and representative." "Meaning this lady?" I asked, pointing to the woman MacLeod, who was now standing at the back of Daniel O'Neill's chair. "Possibly." "And what will she do with it?" "Do with it?" The lawyer was running his fingers through his long beard and trying to look perplexed. "Mr. Curphy, I'll ask you not to pretend to be unable to understand me. If and when this lady gets possession of Mary O'Neill's child, what is she going to do with it?" "Very well," said the advocate, seeing I meant business, "since my client permits me to speak, I'll tell you plainly. Whatever the child's actual parentage . . . perhaps you know best. . . ." "Go on, sir." "Whatever the child's parentage, it was born in wedlock. Even the recent divorce proceedings have not disturbed that. Therefore we hold that the child has a right to the inheritance which in due time should come to Mary O'Neill's offspring by the terms of the settlement upon her husband." It was just as I expected, and every drop of my blood boiled at the thought of my darling's child in the hands of that frozen-hearted woman. "So that is the law, is it?" "That is the law in Ellan." "In the event of Mary O'Neill's death, and her father's death, her child and all its interests will come into the hands of. . . ." "Of her father's heir and representative." "Meaning, again, this lady?" "Probably." The woman at the back of the chair began to look restless. "I don't know, sir," she said, "if your repeated references to me are intended to reflect upon my character, or my ability to bring up the child well and look after its interests properly." "They are, madam--they most certainly and assuredly are," I answered. "Daniel!" she cried. "Be quiet, gel," said Daniel O'Neill. "Let the man speak. We'll see what he has come for presently. Go on, sir." I took him at his word, and was proceeding to say that as I understood things it was intended to appeal to the courts in order to recover (nominally for the child) succession to the money which had been settled on Mary O'Neill's husband at the time of their marriage, when the old man cried, struggling again to his feet: "There you are! The money! It's the money the man's after! He took my daughter, and now he's for taking my fortune--what's left of it, anyway. He shan't, though! No, by God he shan't! . . . Go back to your woman, sir. Do you hear me?--your woman, and tell her that neither you nor she shall touch one farthing of my fortune. I'm seeing to that now. It's what we're here for to-night--before that damnable operation to-morrow, for nobody knows what will come of it. She has defied me and ruined me, and made me the byword of the island, God's curse on her. . . ." "Daniel! Daniel!" cried the MacLeod woman, trying to pacify the infuriated madman and to draw him back to his seat. I would have given all I had in the world if Daniel O'Neill could have been a strong man at that moment, instead of a poor wisp of a thing with one foot in the grave. But I controlled myself as well as I could and said: "Mr. O'Neill, your daughter doesn't want your fortune, and as for myself, you and your money are no more to me than an old hen sitting on a nest of addled eggs. Give it to the lady at the back of your chair--she has earned it, apparently." "Really," said the Bishop, who had at length recovered from Father Dan's onslaught. "Really, Sir What-ever-your-name is, this is too outrageous--that you should come to this lonely house at this time of night, interrupting most urgent business, not to speak of serious offices, and make injurious insinuations against the character of a respectable person--you, sir, who had the audacity to return openly to the island with the partner of your sin, and to lodge her in the house of your own mother--your own mother, sir, though Heaven knows what kind of mother it can be who harbours her son's sin-laden mistress, his woman, as our sick friend says. . . ." Lord! how my hands itched! But controlling myself again, with a mighty effort I said: "Monsignor, I don't think I should advise you to say that again." "Why not, sir?" "Because I have a deep respect for your cloth and should be sorry to see it soiled." "Violence!" cried the Bishop, rising to his feet. "You threaten me with violence? . . . Is there no policeman in this parish, Mr. Curphy?" "There's one at the corner of the road, Bishop," I said. "I brought him along with me. I should have brought the High Bailiff too, if there had been time. You would perhaps be no worse for a few witnesses to the business that seems to be going on here." Saying this, as I pointed to the papers on the table, I had hit harder than I knew, for both the Bishop and the lawyer (who had also risen) dropped back into their seats and looked at each other with expressions of surprise. Then, stepping up to the table, so as to face the four of them, I said, as calmly and deliberately as I could: "Now listen to me. I am leaving this island in about three weeks time, and expect to be two years--perhaps three years--away. Mary O'Neill is going with me--as my wife. She intends to leave her child in the care of my mother, and I intend to promise her that she may set her mind at ease that it shall never under any circumstances be taken away. You seem to have made up your minds that she is going to die. Please God she may disappoint your expectations and come back strong and well. But if she does not, and I have to return alone, and if I find that her child has been removed from the protection in which she left it, do you know what I shall do?" "Go to the courts, I presume," said the lawyer. "Oh dear, no! I'll go to no courts, Mr. Curphy. I'll go to the people who have set the courts in motion--which means that I'll go to _you_ and _you_ and _you_ and _you_. Heaven knows how many of us may be living when that day comes; but as surely as I am, if I find that the promise I made to Mary O'Neill has been a vain one, and that her child is under this woman's control and the subject of a lawsuit about this man's money, and she in her grave, as surely as the Lord God is above us there isn't one soul of you here present who will be alive the following morning." That seemed to be enough for all of them. Even old Daniel O'Neill (the only man in the house who had an ounce of fight in him) dropped his head back in his chair, with his mouth wide open and his broken teeth showing behind his discoloured lips. I thought Father Dan would have been waiting for me under the trammon on "the street," but he had gone back to the Presbytery and sent Tommy the Mate to lead me through the mist and the by-lanes to the main road. The old salt seemed to have a "skute" into the bad business which had brought out the Bishop and the lawyer at that late hour, and on parting from me at the gate of Sunny Lodge he said: "Lord-a-massy me, what for hasn't ould Tom Dug a fortune coming to him?" And when I asked him what he would do with a fortune if he had one he answered: "Do? Have a tunderin' [thundering] good law-shoot and sattle some o' them big fellas." Going to bed in the "Plough" that night, I had an ugly vision of the scene being enacted in the cottage on the curragh (a scene not without precedent in the history of the world, though the priesthood as a whole is so pure and noble)--the midnight marriage of a man dying in unnatural hatred of his own daughter (and she the sweetest woman in the world) while the priest and the prostitute divided the spoils. [END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM] _ |
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