Chapter 22

The clear blue eyes were dull, the breathing quick, the skin dry and hot; and on the following day four leeches had to be applied to her ankle. They relieved her somewhat, and, when she had taken her draught, she sank to sleep. But as the night grew denser, Alice was suddenly awakened by someone speaking wildly in her ear: 'Take me away, dear! I am sick of home; I want to get away from all these spiteful girls. I know they are laughing at me because Violet cut me out with the Marquis. We shall be married, shan't we, the moment we arrive in Dublin? It's horrible to be married at the registrar's, but it's better than not being married at all. But do you think they will catch us up? It would be dreadful to be taken back home, I couldn't bear it. Oh, do drive on; we don't seem to be moving. You see that strange tree on the right, we haven't passed it yet; I don't think we ever shall. Whip up that bay horse; don't you see he is turning round, wants to go back? I am sure that this isn't the road; that man at the corner told you a lie. I know he was mocking at us--I saw it in his eye. . . . Look, look, Edward! Oh, look--it is papa, or Lord Dungory, I can't tell which, he won't lift his cloak.' And then the vision would fade, and she would fancy herself in the wood, arguing once again with Mrs. Lawler. 'No, what you say isn't true; he never loved you. How could he? You are an old woman. Let me pass--let me pass. Why do you speak to me? We don't visit, we never did visit you. No; it was not at our house you met Edward. You were on the streets; and Edward shall not, he could not, think of running away with you--will you, darling? Oh, help me, help me out of this dreadful wood. I want to go home, but I can't walk. That terrible bird is still watching me, and I dare not pass that tree till you drive it away.'

The two beds, with their white curtains and brass crowns, showed through the pale obscurity, broken only by the red-glowing basin where a night-light burnt, and the long tongues of flame that the blazing peat scattered from time to time across the darkened ceiling. The solitude of the sleeping house grew momentarily more intense in Alice's brain, and she trembled as she strove to soothe her sister, and covered the hot feverish arms over with the bedclothes.

'What sort of night has Olive had?' Mrs. Barton asked when she came in about eight.

'Not a very quiet one; I am afraid she's a little delirious.'

'Dr. Reed promised to be here early. How do you feel, dear?' Mrs. Barton asked, leaning over the bed.

'Oh, very ill; I can scarcely breathe, and I have such a pain in my side.'

'Your lips look very sore, dear; do they hurt you?'--Olive only moaned dismally--and, looking anxiously at her elder daughter, she said:

'And you, too, Alice, are not looking well. You are tired, and mustn't sit up another night with your sister. To-night I'll take your place.'

'Oh, mother, no! I assure you it is a pleasure to me to nurse Olive. I am very well indeed; do not think about me.'

'Indeed, I will think about you, and you must do as I tell you. I'll look after Olive, and you must try and get a good night's rest We will take it in turns to nurse her. And now come down to breakfast. Barnes, you'll not think of leaving Miss Olive until we come back; and, if any change occurs, ring for me immediately.'

When Dr. Reed arrived, Alice was again sitting by the bedside.

'And how is our patient to-day?'

'I cannot say she is any better; she has a distressing cough, and last night I am afraid she was a little delirious.'

'Ah, you say the cough is distressing?'

'I am afraid I must call it distressing; is that a very bad sign?'

'Probably there is not much wrong, but it would be better to ascertain the condition of the patient, and then we may be able to do something to relieve her.'

The doctor drew a stethoscope from his pocket, and they lifted the patient into a sitting position.

'I should like to examine her chest;' and his fingers moved to unfasten her night-gown.

'Don't expose me,' she murmured feebly.

'Now, Olive dear, remember it is only the doctor; let him examine you.'

Olive's eyes were a dull filmy blue, the lips were covered with sores, and there was a redness over the cheekbones--not the hectic flush of phthisis, but a dusky redness. And the patient was so weak that during the stethoscopic examination her head fell from side to side as she was moved, and when the doctor pressed her right side her moans were pregnant with pain.

'Now let me see the tongue. Dry and parched.'

'Shall I die, doctor?' the girl asked feebly and plaintively as she sank amidst the pillows.

'Die! no, not if you take care of yourself and do what you are told.'

'But tell me, Dr. Reed,' Alice asked. 'You can tell me the truth.'

'She'll get well if she takes care of herself. It is impossible to say. No one can predict the turn pneumonia will take.'

'Pneumonia! What is that?'

'Congestion of the lungs, or rather an advanced stage of it. It is more common in men than in women, and it is the consequence of long exposure to wet and cold.'

'Is it very dangerous?'

'Very; and now let me tell you that it is all-important that the temperature of the room should not be allowed to vary. I attended a case of it some three or four miles from here, but the damp of the cabin was so great that it was impossible to combat the disease. The cottage, or rather hovel, was built on the edge of a soft spongy bog, and so wet was it that the woman had to sweep the water every morning from the floor, where it collected in great pools. I am now going to visit an evicted family, who are living in a partially roofed shed fenced up by the roadside. The father is down with fever, and lies shivering, with nothing to drink but cold water. His wife told me that last week it rained so heavily that she had to get up three times in the night to wring the sheets out.'

'And why were they evicted?'

'Oh, that is a long story; but it is a singularly characteristic one. In the first place, he was an idle fellow; he got into difficulties and owed his landlord three years' rent. Then he got into bad hands, and was prevented from coming to terms with his landlord. There was a lot of jobbing going on between the priest and the village grocer, and finally it was arranged that the latter should pay off the existing debt if the landlord could be forced into letting him the farm at a "fair rent," that is to say, thirty per cent reduction on the old rent. In recognition of his protecting influence, the priest was to take a third of the farm off the grocer's hands, and the two were then to conjointly rack-rent poor Murphy for the remaining third portion, which he would be allowed to retain for a third of the original rent; but the National League heard of their little tricks, and now the farm is boycotted, and Murphy is dying in the ditch for the good of his _counthry_.'

'I thought boycotting was ended, that the League had lost all power.'

'It has and it hasn't. Sometimes a man takes a farm and keeps it in defiance of his neighbours; sometimes they hunt him out of it. It is hard to come to a conclusion, for when in one district you hear of rents being paid and boycotted farms letting freely, in another, only a few miles away, the landlords are giving reductions, and there are farms lying waste that no one dare look at. In my opinion the fire is only smouldering, and when the Coercion Act expires the old organization will rise up as strong and as triumphant as before. This is a time of respite for both parties.'

The conversation then came to a sudden pause. Alice felt it would be out of place for her to speak her sympathies for the Nationalistic cause, and she knew it would be unfair to lead the doctor to express his. So at the end of a long silence, during which each divined the other's thoughts, she said:

'I suppose you see a great deal of the poor and the miseries they endure?'

'I have had good opportunities of studying them. Before I came here I spent ten years in the poorest district in Donegal. I am sure there wasn't a gentleman's house within fifteen miles of me.'

'And didn't you feel very lonely?'

'Yes, I did, but one gets so used to solitude that to return to the world, after having lived long in the atmosphere of one's own thoughts, is painful. The repugnance that grows on those who live alone to hearing their fellow-creatures express their ideas is very remarkable. It must be felt to be understood; and I have often wondered how it was that I never met it in a novel.'

'It would be very difficult to write. Do you ever read fiction?'

'Yes, and enjoy it. In my little home amid the northern bogs, I used to look forward when I had finished writing, to reading a story.'

'What were you writing?'

'A book.'

'A book!' exclaimed Alice, looking suddenly pleased and astonished.

'Yes, but not a work of fiction--I am afraid I am too prosaic an individual for that--a medical work.'

'And have you finished your book?'

'Yes, it is finished, and I am glad to say it is in the hands of a London publisher. We have not yet agreed about the price, but I hope and believe that, directly and indirectly, it will lead to putting me into a small London practice.'

'And then you will leave us?'

'I am afraid so. There are many friends I shall miss--that I shall be very sorry to leave, but--'

'Oh, of course it would not do to miss such a chance.'

They fell to discussing the patient, and when the doctor left, Alice proceeded to carry out his instructions concerning the patient, and, these being done, she sat down by the bedside and continued her thoughts of him with a sense of pleasure. She remembered that she had always liked him. Yes, it was a liking that dated as far back as the spinsters' ball at Ballinasloe. He was the only man there in whom she had taken the slightest interest. They were sitting together on the stairs when that poor fellow was thrown down and had his leg broken. She remembered how she had enjoyed meeting him at tennis-parties, and how often she had walked away with him from the players through the shrubberies; and above all she could not forget--it was a long sweet souvenir--the beautiful afternoon she had spent with him, sitting on the rock, the day of the picnic at Kinvarra Castle. She had forgotten, or rather she had never noticed, that he was a short, thick-set, middle-aged man, that he wore mutton-chop whiskers, and that his lips were overhung by a long dark moustache. His manners were those of an unpolished and somewhat commonplace man. But while she thought of his grey eyes her heart was thrilled with gladness, and as she dreamed of his lonely life of labour and his ultimate hopes of success, all her old sorrows and fears seemed to have evaporated. Then suddenly and with the unexpectedness of an apparition the question presented itself: Did she like him better than Harding? Alice shrank from the unpleasantness of the thought, and did not force herself to answer it, but busied herself with attending to her sister's wants.

While the dawn of Alice's happiness, Olive lay suffering in all the dire humility of the flesh. Hourly her breathing grew shorter and more hurried, her cough more frequent, and the expectoration that accompanied it darker and thicker in colour. The beautiful eyes were now turgid and dull, the lids hung heavily over a line of filmy blue, and a thick scaly layer of bloody tenacious mucus persistently accumulated and covered the tiny and once almost jewel-like teeth. For three or four days these symptoms knew no abatement; and it was over this prostrated body, weakened and humiliated by illness, that Alice and Dr. Reed read love in each other's eyes, and it was about this poor flesh that their hands were joined as they lifted Olive out of the recumbent position she had slipped into, and built up the bowed-in pillows. And as it had once been all Olive in Brookfield, it was now all Alice; the veil seemed suddenly to have slipped from all eyes, and the exceeding worth of this plain girl was at last recognized. Mrs. Barton's presence at the bedside did not soothe the sufferer; she grew restless and demanded her sister. And the illness continued, her life in the balance till the eighth day. It was then that she took a turn for the better; the doctor pronounced her out of danger, and two days after she lay watching Alice and Dr. Reed talking in the window. 'Were they talking about her?' she asked herself. She did not think they were. It seemed to her that each was interested in the other. 'Laying plans,' the sick girl said to herself, 'for themselves.' At these words her senses dimmed, and when she awoke she had some difficulty in remembering what she had seen.

XXVII

'Ah, _ce cher Milord, comme il est beau, comme il est parfait!_' exclaimed Mrs. Barton, as she led him to his chair and poured out his glass of sherry.

But there was a gloom on his face which laughter and compliments failed for a moment to dissipate--at last he said:

'Ah, Mrs. Barton, Mrs. Barton! if I hadn't this little retreat to take refuge in, to hide myself in, during some hours of the day, I should not be able to bear up--Brookfield has prolonged my life for--'

'I cannot allow such sad thoughts as these,' said Mrs. Barton laughing, and waving her white hands. 'Who has been teasing _notre cher_ Milord? What have dreadful Lady Jane and terrible Lady Sarah been doing to him?'

'I shall never forget this morning, no, not if I lived to a thousand,' the old gentleman murmured plaintively. 'Oh, the scenes--the scenes I have been through! Cecilia, as I told you yesterday, has been filling the house with rosaries and holywater-fonts; Jane and Sarah have been breaking these, and the result has been tears and upbraidings. Last night at dinner I don't really know what they didn't say to each other; and then the two elder ones fell upon me and declared that it was all my fault, that I ought never to have sent my daughter to a Catholic convent. I was obliged to shut myself up in the study and lock the door. Then this morning, when I thought it was all over, it began again worse than ever; and then in the middle of it all, when Jane asked Cecilia how many Gods there were in the roll of bread she was eating if the priest were to bless it--if a Papist wasn't one who couldn't worship God till somebody had turned Him into a biscuit--a most injudicious observation, I said so at the time, and I must apologize to you, my dear Mrs. Barton, for repeating it, but I am really so upset that I scarcely know what I am saying. Well, Jane had no sooner spoken than Cecilia overthrew the teacups and said she wasn't going to stay in the house to hear her religion insulted, and without another word she walked down to the parish priest and was baptized a Catholic; nor is that all. She returned with a scapular round her neck, a rosary about her waist, and a Pope's medal in her hand. I really thought Jane and Sarah would have fainted; indeed I am sure they would have fainted if Cecilia hadn't declared that she was going to pack up her things and return at once to St. Leonards and become a nun. Such an announcement as this was, of course, far beyond fainting, and . . . but no, I will not attempt to describe it, but I can assure you I was very anxious to get out of the house.'

'Cecilia going to be a nun; oh, I am so glad!' exclaimed Olive. 'It is far the best thing she could do, for she couldn't hope to be married.'

'Olive, Olive!' said Mrs. Barton, 'you shouldn't speak so openly. We should always consider the religious prejudices of others. Of course, as Catholics we must be glad to hear of anyone joining the true Church, but we should remember that Milord is going to lose his daughter.'

'I assure you, my dear Mrs. Barton, I have no prejudices. I look upon all religions as equally good and equally bad, but to be forced to live in a perpetual discussion in which teacups are broken, concerning scapulars, bacon and meal shops, and a school which, putting aside the question of expense, makes me hated in the neighbourhood, I regard as intolerable; and when I go home this evening, I shall tell Jane that the school must be put down or carried on in a less aggressive way. I assure you I have no wish to convert the people; they are paying their rents very well now, and I think it absurd to upset them; and the fact of having received Cecilia into the Church might incline the priest very much towards us.'

'And Cecilia will be so happy in that beautiful convent!' suggested Mrs. Barton.

'_C'est le génie du Catholicisme de nous débarrasser des filles laides._'

And upon this expression of goodwill towards the Church of Rome Cecilia's future life was discussed with much amiability. Mrs. Barton said she would make a sweet little nun; Olive declared that she would certainly go to St. Leonard's to see her 'professed'; and Milord's description of Lady Sarah's and Lady Jane's ill-humour was considered very amusing, and just as he was about to recount some new incident--one that had escaped his memory till then--the door opened and the servant announced Dr. Reed.

'Now, what can he want? Olive is quite well. He looks at her tongue and feels her pulse. How do you do, Dr. Reed? Here is your patient, whom you will find in the best health and spirits.'

As he was about to reply, Alice came into the room, and she tried to carry on the conversation naturally. But the silence of Mrs. Barton and Milord made this difficult; Dr. Reed was not a ready talker, and this morning his replies were more than ever awkward and constrained. At last it dawned on Alice that he wanted to speak to her alone; and in answer to a remark he had made concerning the fever dens in Gort she said:

'I wanted to ask you a question or two about typhoid fever, Dr. Reed; one of my heroines is going to die of it, and I should like to avoid medical impossibilities. May I show you the passage?'

'Certainly, Miss Barton; I shall be delighted to help you--if I can.'

As soon as Alice left the room to fetch her manuscript the doctor hurriedly bade his patient, Milord, and Mrs. Barton, good-bye.

'Aren't you going to wait to see Alice?' Mrs. Barton asked.

'I have to speak to the boy in charge of my car; I shall see Miss Barton as she comes downstairs.'

Mrs. Barton looked as if she thought this arrangement not a little singular, but she said nothing; and when Alice came running downstairs with a roll of MSS. in her hand, she attempted to explain her difficulty to the doctor. He made a feeble attempt to listen to the passage she read aloud to him; and when their eyes met across the paper she saw he was going to propose to her.

'Will you walk down the drive with me? and we will talk of that as we go along.'

Her hat was on the hall-table; she took it up, and in silence walked with him out on the gravel.

'Will I put the harse up, sor?' cried the boy from the outside car.

'No; follow me down the avenue.'

It was a wild autumn evening, full of wind and leaves. The great green pasture-lands, soaked and soddened with rain, rolled their monotonous green turf to the verge of the blown beech-trees, about which the rooks drifted in picturesque confusion. Now they soared like hawks, or on straightened wings were carried down a furious gust across the tumultuous waves of upheaved yellow, and past the rift of cold crimson that is tossed like a banner through the shadows of evening.

'I came here to tell you that I am going away; that I am leaving Ireland for ever. I've bought the practice I spoke to you of in Notting Hill.'

'Oh, I am so glad!'

'Thank you! But there is another and more important matter on which I should like to speak to you. For a long time back I had resolved to leave Ireland a sad or an entirely happy man. Which shall it be? You are the only woman I ever loved--will you be my wife?'

'Yes, I will.'

'I was afraid to ask you before. But,' he added, sighing, 'I shan't be able to give you a home like the one you are leaving. We shall have to be very economical; we shall not have more than three hundred a year to live upon. Will you be satisfied with that?'

'I hope, indeed--I am sure we shall get on very well. You forget that I can do something to keep myself,' she added, smiling. 'I have two or three orders.'

She passed her arm through Dr. Reed's; and as he unfolded his plans to her, he held her hand warmly and affectionately in his: and as the twilight drifted it was wrapped like a veil about them. The rooks in great flitting flocks passed over their heads, the tempestuous crimson of the sky had been hurled further away, and only the form of the grey horse, that the boy had allowed to graze, stood out distinctly in the gloom that descended upon the earth.

XXVIII

On the very first opportunity she could find Alice told her mother that Dr. Reed had proposed to her, and that she had accepted him. Mrs. Barton said it was disgraceful, and that she would never hear of such a marriage; and when the doctor called next day she acquainted him with her views on the subject. She told him he had very improperly taken advantage of his position to make love to her daughter; she really didn't know how he could ever have arrived at the conclusion that a match was possible, and that for the future his visits must cease at Brookfield. And when Alice heard what had passed between Dr. Reed and her mother she wrote, assuring him that her feelings towards him would remain uninfluenced by anything that anyone might say. All the same, it might be as well, having regard for what had happened, that the marriage should take place with the least possible delay.

She took this letter down to the post-office herself, and when she returned she entered the drawing-room and told Mrs. Barton what she had done.

'I wish you had shown me the letter before you sent it. There is nothing we need advice about so much as a letter.'

'Yes, mother,' replied Alice, deceived by the gentleness of Mrs. Barton's manner; 'but we seemed to hold such widely different views on this matter that there did not seem to be any use in discussing it.'

'Mother and daughter should never hold different views; my children's interests are my interests--what interests have I now but theirs?'

'Oh, mother! Then you will consent to this marriage?'

Mrs. Barton's face always changed expression before a direct question. 'My dear, I would consent to anything that would make you happy; but it seems to me impossible that you could be happy with Dr. Reed. I wonder how you could like him. You do not know--I mean, you do not realize what the intimacies of married life are. They are often hard to put up with, no matter who the man may be, but with one who is not a gentleman--'

'But, mother, Dr. Reed seems to me to be in every way a gentleman. Who is there more gentlemanly in the country? I am sure that from every point of view he is preferable to Mr. Adair or Sir Charles, or Sir Richard or Mr. Ryan, or his cousin, Mr. Lynch.'

'My darling child, I would sooner see you laid in your coffin than married to either Mr. Ryan or Mr. Lynch; but that is not the question. It is, whether you had not better wait for a few years before you throw yourself away on such a man as Dr. Reed. I know that you have been greatly tried; nothing is so trying to a girl as to come out with her sister who is the belle of the season, and I must say you have shown a great deal of pluck; and perhaps I haven't been considerate enough. But I, too, have had my disappointments--Olive's affairs did not, as you know, turn out as well as I had expected, and to see you now marry one who is so much beneath us!'

'Mother, dear, he is not beneath us. There is no one who has earned his career but Dr. Reed; he owes nothing to anyone; he has done it all by his own exertions; and now he has bought a London practice.'