CHAPTER XLII

“What would an Irish Fusilier do?”

They thought her a little strange at home that evening, but after a time Jack and Eileen vanished, and making a tremendous effort, she contrived to chatter to the aunties about her dispensing in a fairly brisk fashion. She did not, however, altogether blind them, and she was glad enough when the need ceased, and she could go to bed.

Eileen was sleeping with her mother, and Jack at the inn, so that she had his little room all to herself, and as soon as she was alone she flung herself down on the bed and burst into tears, overstrained nature finding no other mode of relief.

When she had had her cry out, she lay quite still and tried to think—tried to understand how it was that the question she had meant to settle once for all in the afternoon was more unsettled than ever. Why was it more unsettled? There could not possibly be any temptation of giving in. Giving in meant only one solution. It meant that she, Patricia Adair, would marry Lawrence Blake.

Oh! it was impossible—impossible!—the man she had over and over again asserted that she hated, and declared she would kill.

Then why was there any difficulty? Why this growing sense of a problem she could not solve?

Supposing Patricia Adair did marry Lawrence Blake. What of it?

But she tore the thought out of her mind. She would not suppose it.

It came back in another form—a series of mental pictures cruelly contrasting Shepherd’s Bush and the dispensary with Mourne Lodge. For Paddy knew well enough that under no circumstances would she accept a home from Jack and her sister—under no circumstances give up her work and her independence, to be dependent on any one’s bounty. No, she would go back to her work alone, and they would live at The Ghan House without her.

But how it hurt to think of it!

The dingy suburb, the grey street, her aunt’s everlasting platitudes, for of course she would live again at the doctor’s house—just grey, lifeless monotony, instead of the lake and the mountains.

And how he had understood!

“_Mavourneen, mavourneen, bears have understanding when they love as I love you_.”

She tried to crush out the recollection, conscious that her soul was sounding indefinable warnings as a far-off accompaniment. Oh, of course, he was fascinating—had she not always known it—known all her life that there were two Lawrence Blakes, and one as alluring as the other was repellant. Resolutely, she turned her thoughts to the unpleasing one; she who had somehow had special opportunities of clear sight. She remembered the old rumours of excess and extravagance. Had not her own father shaken his head gravely long ago, and said things he imagined she would not understand. Perhaps she did not then—but now! Unprincipled, unscrupulous, fast, wild, a gambler. “Wild oats,” she told herself—“Wild oats.” It was not that that built the barrier—this barrier that was as a grim spectre, waving ghostly arms between them. Could anything, even mercifully, write “wild oats” over his heartlessness? When she thought of those locked hands in the boat on the loch, her blood still boiled—of how very nearly Eileen’s delicate constitution had broken down altogether under her silent fretting—of how her mother had grieved and fretted likewise. She thought of his moods at home. How often—oh, how often—she had longed to strike him for the tone in which he sometimes spoke to his mother and sisters. For his selfishness, his coldness, his sneers. How often she had gone home pitying the girls such a brother, hating him with all her young enthusiasm. And then, further complicating everything, flashed again the recollection, even in those days, of his charm, if he happened to be in the right mood. Why, even Doreen and Kathleen were influenced by it; every one was. If Lawrence were in his charming mood, the whole house was sunny and gay, and Paddy had quickly enough forgotten old feuds, and immensely enjoyed a good-natured, wordy battle with him. When she hated him most, he had still had a lurking attraction for her, or she would not have bothered to cross swords. Only a lurking attraction is not love. The old spectre still stood firm, waving ghostly arms between them. And even if it were love, the feud still stood. Eileen might have forgiven and found other happiness. She might have trampled down all bitterness, but did that make the wrong less wrong—did it affect her, Paddy’s, view of the case? A personal wrong may be forgiven by the sufferer without in any way affecting an outside judgment. There is still the wrong in the abstract. True, vengeance is unchristian—but it was not vengeance she wanted any longer; could she—dare she—fly in the face of her own passionate sense of Loyalty? It seemed to Paddy that if she yielded to the wave that seemed like to sweep her off her feet, she not only let go her watchword of Loyalty, but she compromised with her half-formed, dimly seen ideal of Love. Always before her mind, if she thought of love in the future, had been the image of such men as the grand old General—the gentle, kindly doctor—the simple, manly, open-hearted Jack. Among such as these, how could she give such as Lawrence the place of honour? It was incredible that she should think of it. To do so, she must surely be disloyal to the past and disloyal to herself. But how resist him? Who could help her? She got up at last and went to the window. In the light of the stars, glimmering faintly across the garden, were the headstones—“where the dead people wait till God calls.”

Feeling suffocated by the four walls of the little room, she hastily threw a shawl round her head, slipped into a big coat, and crept noiselessly out of the house, down the little path, and through the wicket-gate into the churchyard, where a beautiful Maltese cross marked the spot where the brave old soldier was taking his well-earned rest.

“Daddy,” she whispered, “daddy, try and help me now. There isn’t any one else who would understand.”

She leaned her face against the cold granite. It was comforting to be there. “What shall I do, daddy? I know you understand all about it, and how it is so difficult. Daddy—darling old daddy—what would an Irish Fusilier do?”

She clung against the cross yearningly, and in the night air, with the calm stars looking down, the waves whispering on the beach, and her beloved mountains all around, she grew calmer and stronger. It pleased her to whisper her thoughts to the night, as if the unseen spirit of her beloved dead listened near.

“Ought I to run away, daddy? I remember how often you have said only a selfish, vain-glorious officer will risk his men against desperate odds, rather than retreat. ‘Retreat, if wiser, and take up a better position—never mind the dispatches home—save your men and win the glory as well; it is sometimes nobler to retreat than to go on.’ Is that what I must do, daddy? I feel there are desperate odds against me. Would it be braver to retreat? Is that what an Irish Fusilier would do? You, at least, will understand that I was not a coward.”

She pressed her lips against the granite for love of the grand and simple soul it stood to commemorate.

“Daddy,” she whispered, and there was a tiny, wistful smile on the fascinating mouth. “I’m not an Irish Fusilier, but, perhaps, I’m the-next-best-thing.”

Then she went quietly back to bed, with her mind made up.

But the next morning, it was only by a great physical and mental effort that she was able to appear at all like herself at the breakfast-table, and when the meal was finished she was glad to slip away unobserved.

Eileen’s suspicions, however, had been previously roused in the night by a light step in the passage, and, afterward, a dim figure crossing the garden. She was tactful enough to say nothing of this, but at the same time determined to try and find out if anything was wrong, and how she could help. In this Paddy had cause to be grateful, because her plans could scarcely he carried out without Eileen’s help.

When her sister sought her upstairs, and asked in a quiet, firm way, “What is the matter, Paddy? Something has happened to you,” she only hesitated a second, and then replied with as much calmness as she could muster:

“Yes, Eily, I’m in rather a difficulty. I was going to ask you and Jack to help me.”

“Paddy, we will do anything—anything,” Eileen cried earnestly.

“I know you will, but it isn’t much I want—only that I am going back to London to-night, and I want you to help me manage it without any more questions and explanations than can possibly be helped.”

At first, Eileen was dumbfounded and greatly distressed, but Paddy was evidently desperately in earnest and meant to go.

“Don’t ask me anything, Eily, if you really want to help,” she said wearily. “Just break it to mother and the aunties a little while before I start and help to arrange some excuse for me to any others who ask questions.”

In the end it was all managed so, and Jack prepared to go to Greenore with her and see her safely on the boat for Holyhead, from whence she would go straight back to her uncle’s.

At the last moment Aunt Jane stole softly into her bedroom—Aunt Jane, whose heart had always leaned to Paddy, just as Aunt Mary’s had leaned to Eileen.

“My child,” she said very tenderly, “I can see that you are in some great trouble, and I shall not know how to keep from fretting about you, because you have always been as my own child to me, and I would rather suffer myself than see you suffer. Only we may not choose who shall be glad and who sad, and no doubt if we could, things would only be worse in the end. But you won’t forget your ‘old maid’ auntie by the loch, darling, whose heart will ache silently, thinking of you day and night.”

The tears gushed from Paddy’s eyes, and for a moment she seemed about to break down altogether, but in a few minutes she had managed to pull herself together again.

“Are you sure you must go away alone like this?” Aunt Jane asked yearningly.

“Yes, auntie, quite sure. I love you so much for coming to me now, but you mustn’t make me break down. Please help me to keep up, auntie, just until I get away.”

And Miss Jane did—having her own cry out later by herself—while the steamer started into the black, wintry night, and Jack stood watching it from Greenore pier, with a mist before his eyes and a queer huskiness in his throat. Just when life was opening for him with all its sweetest and best, it seemed hard, indeed, that Paddy—his old chum and playmate—should be assailed with this trouble of which she would not speak, and in which apparently none of them could help her. Jack cared just as much as his present happiness made it possible for him to care about anything. Long ago, though he only remembered it with a smile, the sole problem of his life had been which of the sisters he loved the best. Fate had tipped the balance to the elder’s side, without in any measure depreciating the other; but Jack never knew, and never would know, what a difference that final choice had made to Paddy.