Part 32
“How can we pay her too much reverence, accord her a devotion too profound, to whom Archangels bend the knee and the Son of God accorded filial obedience? Being perfect Man, He is a perfect Son; the desire of such a Son must be to see His Mother honored. From a child I felt the incomparable beauty, the resistless charm, of that Divine Maternity.... I used to steal away alone to think of It. I used to say to myself, seeing you dressed for some dinner or ball, in all your laces and jewels, ‘My earthly mother is beautiful, but my heavenly Mother is far, far more fair!’ and I loved to imagine myself as a little child at Nazareth who had fallen down and lay crying with pain beside the well from whence she nightly drew her pitcher of fresh water, and whom she gathered in her arms and comforted. If love of the Mother of Jesus were prayer, surely I prayed to her then!”
Still there was no response. She sighed and resumed her seat beside the pillow; and said, stooping and touching with her lips the waxen hand:
“I ought to tell you that I wished and tried, to put many questions to the Sisters. But they had pledged their word to discuss with me no question of religious faith, and they were adamant--not at all to my delight. ‘But I am a heretic,’ I said to Sister Édouard-Antoine. ‘Am I not worth the effort to convince and enlighten?’ She said: ‘My dear, when Our Lord wishes to enlighten and convince you, He will do it from within, not from without!’ Now I have told you all there is to tell--nothing is kept back--no shadow lies between us. Are you not content with me now?”
“I shall know peace,” said the relentless voice from the pillow, “only when I have your promise--a pledge that, once given, I know my Ada will keep. Say to me: ‘Mother, I will never become a Romanist, or marry any man who holds the Catholic faith!’ That pledge once given will be kept by you, I know...!”
In her very feebleness lay the strength that was not to be gainsaid or resisted. Her daughter’s tears fell as she whispered in the dying ear:
“Dear little mother, when you have crossed the deep, swift river that separates Time from Eternity, and the Veil has fallen behind you, you will be so wise, so wise!... Not one of the kings, and priests, and prophets who lived of old, will have been so wise as you. Think, dearest and gentlest!--if, by the light that shines upon you then, you were to see that the ancient Faith is the true Faith and the Mother Church the One Church ... would you not grieve to know your Ada shut off from peace--deprived of the true and only Bread of Life--fettered and shackled, body and soul, by an irrevocable vow?... Would you not--”
Her voice broke and faltered. But the pale head upon the pillow made the negative sign, and she went on:
“Will not you--who have submitted yourself so meekly to the will of Almighty God in accepting this cup of death that He now offers you--leave the issue of affairs--in faith that He will do all for the best--to Him? and forbear to exact this promise, which my heart tells me will bring me sorrow and pain!”
* * * * *
In vain her pleading. The tongue that was already stiffening uttered one inexorable word.
“No!”
“Oh, then I promise, mother!” she cried through bursting tears. “And may God forgive me if I promise wrongly, seeing how much I love you, dearest dear!”
* * * * *
Ah me! the dying!--how pitiless they are! What heavy fetters their feebleness can rivet on our limbs, what galling yokes their parting wishes have power to lay upon our aching necks! How they stretch us on the rack with their strengthless hands; ruthlessly seize the levers, turn the jolting wheel; and wring from us, with tears of blood, and groanings of the flesh and of the spirit, the pledge we most shrink to give! and pass content, knowing we dare not break the promise given to one upon whom the grave is about to close.
“Promise me, my son,” I heard the worn-out drudge of a London insurance office say to his boy of twelve years, grasping the small warm hand in his, that was gaunt and cold, and damp with the sweat of death--“promise me that when I lie beside your mother in the cemetery you will never fail to visit our grave each Sunday; and lay upon it of the flowers that are in season, the freshest and best, as you have seen and helped me to do ever since she died! Promise me that weeds shall never grow above her resting-place; that dust and soil shall never smirch the stone we placed above her; and see that the fee to the man who mows the grass be regularly paid. Do not fail me in this, my little son!”
Little son, with wide blue eyes fixed in awe and terror upon the whitening stare of impending dissolution, sobbed out the asked-for promise, and the bankrupt died content.
He knew that on the day following the shabby funeral that was to swallow up the last remaining five-pound note of his miserable savings, his penniless child was to be taken by his sole living relative--a struggling tradesman resident in a remote London suburb--to help the uncle in his business as a tobacconist and newsvendor, clean the shop windows, carry out the papers, perform odd offices in the household, and generally fulfill the duties of an unpaid errand-boy, yet he died content!
No realization of the crushing weight of responsibility laid on those thin, childish shoulders; no thought of the desperate, fruitless effort to be made, Sunday after Sunday, to keep the extorted pledge, marred the moribund’s happy complacency in the undertaking given. Almost with his final breath he whispered something about the flowers in season, and the tidy gravestone, and the weeds that were never to be allowed to grow....
“Promise me, swear to me!” pants the departing wife to the man who has been faithful to his marriage-vow, but has realized every day since the glamour of the honeymoon faded, that his union with this woman has been a terrible mistake. “Let me go hence contented in the knowledge that you will never marry again, dear! I could not bear to think of you happy in the arms of another woman. Say, now, that it shall never be!”
She is thinking of one special woman as she feebly turns the thumbscrew, and forces her victim to open his jaws to take in the iron choke-pear of the prohibitive vow. He has not the courage or the inhumanity to resist her. Nay! it is impious to refuse to grant the wish of one about to die. So he yields, and she departs; and he goes lonely and unmated for all the days that are his upon earth.
And perhaps it may be the bitter punishment of those who have exacted from us these cruel promises; that, with eyes from which the films of earth have been purged for evermore, they may be fated to see them kept.
LIII
It was a calm, bright day, that third of December, with a mild, sweet westerly wind blowing between a blue, waveless sea and a blue, cloudless sky. So warm and genial the weather, that sandwich-board-men parading the streets of Folkestone behind blue-and-red double-crown bills announcing that Performances would be given at the Town Hall of that Thrilling Melodrama, “The Warlock of the Glen,” by Miss Arabella Smallsopp, of the Principal London Theaters, and a Full Company of Specially Engaged Artists, For Three Nights Only,--were fain to lean against the outer walls of public-houses--thus nefariously concealing from the public eye the colored pictorial representations of Miss Smallsopp in the _rôle_ of the persecuted Countess--Mr. Montague Barnstormer as the usurping Laird, and Master Pilkington as the infant Adalbert--and hide their streaming faces in pots of frothing beer.
And so, over the salty, creaking, tarry-smelling gangway to the deck of the Boulogne packet _Britannia_. A jovial Irish priest, a pair of prim English spinsters in green veils, their lapdogs and their maid, their manservant and their courier; with Dunoisse and a honeymooning couple, made up the list of the _Britannia’s_ after-cabin passengers. The bride was my Aunt Julietta; Fate would have it so.
For the impression created three brief years before upon the susceptible maiden fancy of my Aunt by the very ingratiating manners and handsome personality of a young foreign gentleman, by chance encountered in a railway-train, had faded; to be replaced by the highly-colored image of a large, loud, heavily-built, sturdily-limbed young man, holding the commission of a junior Captain in Her Majesty’s 444th Irish Regiment of Foot; a well-known fighting corps, distinguished in the annals of the British Army by the significant sobriquet of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins.”
You saw in Captain Golightly M’Creedy the eldest of fourteen children, begotten of an ancient warrior of Peninsular fame, a certain Lieutenant-General M’Creedy of Creedystown, County Cork, who had served twenty years in the 444th, had left three fingers and half a sword-hilt upon the field of Talavera, and wore a silver plate at the top of his skull, to testify to his having been cut down by a sergeant of French Light Infantry during the Battle of Barrosa, when in the act of capturing an eagle from the foe.
Having thus performed his duty by his country, the veteran thought, and with some reason, that his country owed something to him; and commissions for his sons Golightly, Thaddeus, and Considine being obtained by the paternal interest, these three young gentlemen--as innocent of polite education and technical information as the hairy “lepping” colts they hunted, and the half-bred pointers they shot over--were pitched into the General’s old regiment, and left to sink or swim.
Goliath, Thady, and young Con, after some rasping experiences, mastered the small amount of professional knowledge that was held in those days to be indispensable to the status of an officer and a gentleman. Indeed, by the time the Rathkeale Ragamuffins, with flying colors, banging of drums, and blaring of brazen instruments, marched into the provincial garrison town of Dullingstoke, in the genteeler suburbs of which stood the family mansion of my grandparents, Captain Goliath M’Creedy had attained some degree of reputation in his regiment as a smart officer and a show man.
You saw him at this era as a strapping young Celt of thirty, with thick sandy whiskers and a thicker brogue, who could top the regulation three bottles of port with a jorum or so of whisky-punch; walk home to his quarters while men of weaker head were being conveyed to theirs in wheelbarrows; and consume vast quantities of bacon and eggs, washed down by bitter ale, at breakfast, when hardened seniors were calling for green apples and glasses of gin, and pallid juniors nibbled captain’s biscuits as they quenched their red-hot coppers with soda-water. But what did my Aunt Julietta see in him, I should like to know?
Why did not her gentle affections rather twine about the Captain’s younger brother, Lieutenant Thady, who sang Irish ballads with the sweetest of tenor voices, played juvenile leading parts in private theatricals, and won regimental steeplechases on his leggy Irish thoroughbred, to the admiration of the gentler sex and the envy of the males? Or Ensign Con, who had the biggest blue eyes and the smallest waist you can imagine; wrote poetry which was understood to be of home manufacture, in feminine albums--painted groups of impossible flowers and marvelous landscapes upon fans and fire-screens--waltzed like an angel, and was generally admitted to be a ladies’ man.
Why should my gentle Aunt adore Captain Goliath, who gambled, and swore horribly when he lost; who loved strong liquors, to the detriment of his figure and complexion; who had fought duels and perforated with pistol-bullets the bodies of two gentlemen who had impugned his honor; who kept fighting-cocks in his quarters, and the steel spurs wherewith he armed these feathered warriors for the combat in a neat leather pocket-case; who would consume raw beefsteaks, bend pokers, and lift ponies for wagers, and win them; and spend the money in carousing with his friends; and who had once--oh, hideous thought!--backed himself to kill three rats with his teeth against the Major’s bull-terrier bitch Fury, and accounted for the rodents with half-a-minute out of five to spare?...
In the lifetime of my grandfather, thrice Mayor of Dullingstoke, a peppery old sea-dog, who had settled down as far from his professional element as possible,--had amassed a considerable fortune in the tanning-trade, and had made it the business of his later years to keep his large family of daughters single--no young men were ever admitted within his doors. It is on record that no sooner had the sable border of woe upon the edge of my widowed grandmother’s notepaper narrowed to the quarter-inch significant of tempered sorrow than--each of my aunts having inherited a nice little landed property under the paternal will--in addition to a snug sum, comfortably invested in Three Per Cent. Consols--the bachelor officers of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins” began to buzz like hungry wasps about the six fair honey-pots that adorned my grandmother’s tea-table.
Ordinarily of a frugal mind, she is said to have been lavish in her expenditure of plum-cake, home-made jams, preserved ginger, and best Souchong upon these festal occasions, accounting for her prodigality to a female friend in these words:
“I grudge nothing, Georgiana, that helps to get rid of the girls!”
Honest Captain Goliath, introduced at the ladies’ tea-table by Lieutenant Thady--who had a knack at making acquaintances which the clumsier Captain did not possess, was at first attracted by the showier charms of my Aunt Marietta, which, you will perhaps remember?--were of the lofty, aquiline, disdainful kind. He stared at the young lady a good deal, and tugged his sandy whiskers, and breathed hard, as he paid her clumsy compliments, punctuated with “Egad!” and “By Jove!” He was rather at a loss when his long legs were inserted under my grandmother’s polished mahogany. He liked the rich plum-cake, but tea was a beverage abhorred of his manly soul.
“Women’s slops,” the young officer mentally termed the infusion beloved of the sex, as he took three lumps of sugar, and stirred the boiling liquid so clumsily with a fiddle-headed silver teaspoon that--splash!--he overset the cup.... My Aunts Harrietta and Emmelina, who were timid, screamed aloud.... My Aunts Elisabetta and Claribella, who were sitting upon either side of Lieutenant Thady, tittered, being giddily inclined.
My Aunt Marietta, who was wearing a sweet new pink _barége_, suffered the complete ruin of a beflounced side-breadth, and, it must be owned, took the unlucky incident with a very bad grace; even permitting herself to utter the word “Clumsy,” and toss her head in contempt of the crimson Captain’s profuse if incoherently expressed regrets. While my Aunt Julietta, in whose lap the agitated sweep of the young man’s elbow had deposited a plate of bread-and-butter, butter side down--bade him “Never mind!” in so soft a tone of kindness, accompanying the words with a glance so bright and gentle, that the utterance and the look bowled Goliath over as completely as the elder Philistine, his namesake, was, cycles of centuries ago, by the brook-stone hurled from the young David’s sling.
“Indeed and indeed, Miss Juley,” the Captain stuttered, “with all the good-will in the worruld a man can do no more than apologize, that has had the bad luck to do damage to a young lady’s dress. And though you’re so kind and amiable as to make no very great shakes of it, begad! I see your own elegant gown is spoilt entirely by the clumsy divvle--begging your pardon for the word!--that would walk from here to London--supposing you’d accept it!--to get you a purtier gown!”
The Captain dropped a glove in the hall when he went away. It had his initials marked inside in great big sprawling characters; but even without the inky “G. M’C.” my Aunt Julietta would have known to whom it belonged....
Ah! in what a pure, sweet hiding-place it was lying, that clumsy hand-cover of dogskin,--while the Captain was routing in the litter of bills, and writs, and dunning-letters that strewed the table in his quarters, and cursing at his soldier-servant for losing his things. And he came to tea yet again, and one of his extra-sized feet accidentally touched, beneath the shelter of the well-spread board, a little foot in a velvet sandal-slipper; and She blushed like an armful of roses, and He crimsoned to the parting of his sandy curls. And thenceforwards the Captain’s wooing proceeded smoothly enough, save for a few manifestations of jealousy on the part of Lieutenant Thady, who was inclined to resent the appropriation of my Aunt Julietta’s smiles.
“For I inthrojuiced you--and you’d heard me say the black-eyed wan was the natest pacer of the sthring--and you’ve cut me out with her--so you have!--and begad! the thing’s joocedly unfair!”
Upon which Captain Goliath extracted a shilling from his waistcoat-pocket, and suggested that the goddess of Chance be called in to decide the issue.
“I’m wit’ you!” said the Lieutenant, with alacrity. “And the best two out of three takes Black Eyes!”
“Done!” agreed his senior, rubbing the edge of his coin carelessly with a stout, muscular thumb. “And the loser will have his pick of the five girrls that’s left. He’ll not have a pin to choose between them in the way of fortune, for the old man left them share and share alike; but the fella that gets the high-nosed wan”--in these disrespectful terms the Captain alluded to my Aunt Marietta--“will have a vixen, take my word for it! Call, now! Heads or tails?--shame or honor?”
Lieutenant Thady called “Tails,” and Captain Goliath spun, and the Lieutenant lost the toss three times running, unaware that the astute Captain carried a double-headed shilling for contingencies of this kind.
A few days later, with the consent of my grandmother--now beginning to realize that the sacrifice of her best plum-cake and Souchong had not been all in vain--the Captain drove my Aunt Julietta out in the family chaise. That drive was, at the outset, a painful experience for Browney, the younger of the stout, elderly carriage pair, who was attached to the vehicle. Never had such pace been got out of him before. Never had such scientific handling of the reins, such artistic touches of the whip, been known to the experience of that respectable cob. But it is on record that he returned home at his own pace, with an engaged couple behind him; and that when my Aunt Julietta was assisted to descend by the hand of the _brave and gallant man_, to whom, as she wrote to her confidential friend, the daughter of Sir Wackton Tackton, “I have plighted the _fondest vow_ that a _woman’s lips_ may _breathe_,” she went to the sedate animal’s head and thanked him for the happiest day in all her maiden life, and kissed him on the nose.
Thus Captain Goliath M’Creedy and my Aunt Julietta became definitely betrothed. And the Lieutenant, after some hesitation between blue eyes and brown, arch, coquettish ringlets and Grecian coils, “plumped,” as he afterwards said, for my Aunt Elisabetta.
And Ensign Con, being ordered by his seniors to choose a bride of three-hundred a year pin-money from amongst my grandmother’s remaining daughters, wrote her a note in his best round-hand, soliciting an interview upon a “mater of importanse very near my hart”; and upon the receipt of an elegant billet naming a fitting hour, set out, attired in his best; curled, pomatumed, gloved, and booted beyond anything you can imagine, to conquer Fate.
Perhaps the brain behind those cerulean orbs of my Uncle Con’s was of rather soft consistency. Or it may be that the sight of my grandmother sitting in her best parlor, arrayed in her stiffest black silk gown--endued with her most imposing widow’s cap and weepers--waiting, with folded mittens, to hear that yet another of the pound-cakes cast upon the waters had not been sacrificed in vain--was calculated to make havoc of stronger wits and daunt a stouter courage. Suffice it to say that, having started out from barracks with the firm intention of returning as a man definitely engaged--preferably to my Aunt Emmelina rather than to my Aunt Claribella (young ladies between whose respective persons Con had hesitated, uncertain as the proverbial donkey between the bundles of hay)--the Ensign tottered back to quarters, a blighted being, engaged to my Aunt Marietta, whose Roman profile and haughty manners had from the first stricken terror to the young man’s soul.
He must have made wild work with his wooing, unlucky Con! for my grandmother subsequently confided to her bosom friend, Georgiana, that at one moment her firm conviction had been that the young man, with a maturity of taste and judgment rare in one so young, was proposing marriage to herself. In vain Con’s fraternal counselors advised him to go back, explain that he had got the wrong girl, and change her! Con could not muster the pluck! And so my Aunt Emmelina, who had loved the handsome young booby, never married; and Con was a henpecked husband to the ending of his days.
There was a triple wedding, so that one breakfast and one cake might do duty for three brides, a flying visit to London to do the lions; and now you saw my Aunt Julietta, a wife of two days, starting on her honeymoon-trip to Boulogne with the idol of her soul. Be sure that she recognized the deposed idol in their handsome fellow-traveler; that my aunt’s fresh English face had completely faded from Dunoisse’s memory may be guessed.
But the natural chagrin of my Aunt at this discovery was to give place to pangs of a less romantic kind. She had studied French fashions in the illuminating pages of the _Ladies’ Mentor_, had mastered the French language sufficiently to spell out a “Moral Tale” of Marmontel, or a page of Lamartine, or even a verse of Victor Hugo; and had compounded French dishes from English recipes. But she had never previously crossed the restless strip of Channel that divides her native isle of Britain from the shores of Gallia. And in those days nobody had ever heard of a real gentlewoman who was not very seriously incommoded, if not absolutely indisposed, at sea.
Conceive, then, my Aunt Julietta upon this smoothest of crossings, being dreadfully prostrated by the malady of the wave. Imagine her flattening her bridal bonnet--a sweet thing in drawn peach-blossom satin, with a wreath of orange-blooms inside the brim--into a cocked hat against the stalwart shoulder of her martial lord, as she reiterated agitated entreaties to be taken immediately on shore--picture her subsiding, in all the elegance of her flounced plaid poplin--a charming thing in large checks of pink, brown, and bottle-green--and her mantle of beaver-trimmed _casimir_, into a mere wisp of seasick humanity, distinguishable afterwards as a moaning bundle of shawls--prone upon a red plush sofa in a saloon cabin--ministered to by a stewardess with brandy-and-water and smelling-salts.
While the _Britannia’s_ other first-class passengers gathered for the one o’clock dinner about the long table in the adjoining saloon, whence the clashing of knives and forks and the robust savors of the leg of boiled mutton with caper sauce, turnips, and potatoes--the porter and ale that washed these down; the apple-pudding that followed, and the Dutch cheese that came in with the materials for gin-hot and whisky-toddy--penetrated to the sufferer, moaning on the other side of the dividing partition of painted planks.