CHAPTER XLIV

“I Cannot Come.”

For a whole week Lawrence knocked about London, and it was just as well for their peace of mind that none of those who cared for him saw him.

One Sunday afternoon he suddenly called a taxi and drove off to Shepherd’s Bush.

On asking for Miss Adair he was ushered in and led to the dingy, old-fashioned drawing-room. It was some time before a step approached, and then the doctor, with a keen look in his kindly eyes, entered alone.

Lawrence was watching the door with a fixed intentness that scarcely gave when the unexpected comer entered.

“My niece has a very bad headache,” the doctor said simply, as he shook hands. “She does not feel equal to seeing any one to-day. I am sorry you should have had this long drive for nothing.”

“Is she ill?” Lawrence asked bluntly.

“Oh, no, only ailing a little. The weather has been very trying the last week.”

The doctor studied the visitor carefully. Paddy’s hurried return had caused him much food for anxious thought, coupled with her evident low spirits and loss of appetite. He shot a bow at a venture.

“I think you come from Omeath?” he said.

Lawrence assented, but seemed lost in thought.

“Wouldn’t she see me just for a few minutes?” he asked. “I don’t want to worry her, but I have come from Omeath, and she might like to hear about them all at home.”

The doctor went away, but came back again alone.

“She is not well enough to-day,” he repeated. “She thanks you for calling and is sorry she cannot see you.”

And Lawrence was obliged to call a cab again and drive away. As he went down the steps he met a slim youth who regarded him somewhat fixedly, but Lawrence never even saw him. He would have been a little amused, perhaps, had he known that the same youth shook his fist threateningly after him from behind the safe shelter of the doctor’s front door.

“If you’re the cuss who’s worrying Paddy’s life out of her,” he mentally apostrophised Lawrence’s back, “I’d uncommonly like to have you in the dissecting-room,” which blood-curdling threat Basil was fortunately quite unable to carry out.

Lawrence went back to his club and wrote a letter to Paddy.

It was a beautiful letter. Nature had, of a truth, been erratic with this one of her children, for it seemed impossible that the writer of this letter and the man who could speak to his mother in a way that made her really ill for days could be one and the same.

It distressed Paddy beyond words. In spite of everything she might say, his suffering tore her heart. Yet her will held firm, and she would not tell him to come. She wrote him a little letter, however, in which he perceived that she no longer pretended to be repulsed by him, and that absence might be serving him better than a meeting just then. He held the letter long in his hand, and was conscious of a sudden swift regret. “If there were more girls like her,” was his thought, “how much better it would be for us men and for all the world. If I had only loved her sooner, or some one like her, I should have been a different man to-day.”

Ah, that eternal “if—if.” And meanwhile all things march on the same. The girls will not see, so the men do not heed, and there is folly and wrong and weakness where there might be strength and rich content. Where there is a great man there was a great woman before; and so it would seem Nature is always trying to point out to us that, though the Men have the strength, the Women have the power, and where they are strong and true all things are possible—for the fireside, the household, the sphere of influence at hand, the greatness of the nation itself. Be smart, be comely, be gay—why not?—only ring true also, and the men who admire you for your comeliness, will worship you for your goodness.

Lawrence kept his letter and read it often, but he did not go away. He liked feeling that he was there in the same city, breathing the same air, although she remained inexorable about seeing him. Often, in fits of despair, he thought he would go away, but always in the end he decided to remain.

He bought a racing motor, and seemed to find some relief in flying madly over the county at a terrible pace. Three times he was had up for furious driving, and the third time his fine was the heaviest ever exacted for a like cause, and he received a strong reprimand as well and a threat that a fourth offence would be even more strenuously dealt with.

He left the court laughing, and his friends began to wonder anxiously where his recklessness would end.

Gwen returned to town about the time of the third offence, and remonstrated forcibly with him, but made no visible effect.

“Have you seen Paddy again?” she asked him.

“She will not see me.”

Gwen knit her forehead in perplexity.

“I have written, and she has not answered,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of her. I must go and see her.”

“Not yet,” he said, and she looked up in surprise. His face, however, expressed nothing.

“I wrote to her, and she answered it,” he continued, “and I do not want her to be worried about me for the present. Stay away for a little while, Gwen. I think she would rather you did.”

So Gwen possessed her soul in patience for three weeks, to please Lawrence, and then went upon an unexpected errand.

Paddy was roaming about restlessly that dreary winter afternoon at the beginning of February when Gwen came. She had been out in the morning, and she kept trying to make up her mind to go out again for something to do, but instead she continued to roam about with that odd feeling of unrest, quite unable to settle down to anything.

Eileen and her mother had come back to London again now, but only until the spring quarter, when, the lease of their house was up, and they hoped to have done with London for good.

The wedding was to take place in April, there was nothing to wait for, and several hearts eager enough to see it happily become a fact.

The Ghan House was being renovated throughout, and Eileen was busy with her trousseau—no time to spare between January and April.

Paddy helped a great deal. She did not like plain sewing—indeed, she very much disliked it, always contriving to prick herself badly and leave little danger signals, so to speak, where she had stitched. She might have been said to be preparing Eileen’s trousseau with her heart’s blood, only not with the meaning this phrase, beloved of serial writers, is generally intended to convey.

She had her own views as to quantities, which, however, as they did not at all fit in with her mother’s and Eileen’s, she wisely kept to herself. No use warring against the majority, and little matter either way. If the others thought dozens of everything necessary Paddy supposed it was all right, but, for her part, she wondered how so many clothes could possibly ever get worn, and where Eileen was going to keep them all when she was not wearing them.

“We might be making clothes for Jack as well,” she remarked once, surveying the growing piles; and when they told her laughingly Jack was getting his own dozens and half-dozens, she fairly gasped.

Nothing much had been said about that speedy flight of hers at Christmas. Both Eileen and the mother had attempted to win her confidence, but Paddy would not speak. Eileen had finally guessed.

“It is Lawrence, Paddy, isn’t it?” she asked.

Paddy, driven in a corner, consented, but would not go on.

Eileen had then fidgeted a little, and, blushing painfully, stammered:

“You would not let anything in reference to me two years ago influence you, I hope, Paddy.”

Paddy made no reply.

“Because, as it happened, you see, it was such a good thing. I could never have been as happy with any one else as I am with Jack. Tell me, Paddy?” looking hard into her sister’s eyes.

Paddy shook her head.

“I can’t tell you anything, Eily,” she answered. “Please don’t ask me.” And Eileen had to give in.

Jack tried when he came for a flying visit about wall-papers and paint and things, and it was then for the first time that they learnt of Paddy’s unlooked-for decision.

“What colour is your room to be, Paddy?” he asked. “I am waiting your orders.”

“You are very good,” a little uncomfortably, “but I’m not coming to live at The Ghan House.”

“Not coming to live at The Ghan House!” as if he could not believe his own ears, while Eileen and her mother looked up in amazement.

Paddy had to brace herself with the utmost determination.

“I have thought it all over carefully,” she said, “and I have decided to stay in London. I have developed a very independent spirit of late, somehow,” with a little smile, “and I mean to stick to my post.”

“But, my dear child—” began Mrs Adair in great distress, while Jack threw a newspaper at her head and said:

“Don’t talk rubbish, Paddy.”

Eileen looked dumbfounded.

“It is not rubbish,” Paddy went on bravely, “and nothing you can say will alter me. I have spoken to uncle about it, and he is going to let me live with them and pay something.” She paused a moment, drawing a pattern on the tablecloth. “He does not want me to pay,” she went on, “he says he will be only too glad to have me, but I would like to feel perfectly independent. He is lonely sometimes, and he always wanted a daughter.”

A mistiness crossed her eyes, and she smiled a little crooked smile as she added:

“Daddy always wanted a son, and I did my best. He is daddy’s brother, and he wants a daughter—I am going to do my best again. I never seem to quite ‘get there,’ do If—I am evidently destined only to shine as a substitute—to be only the-next-best-thing.”

“But, Paddy,” coming behind her and leaning over the table with his arm across her shoulders, “you hate London so,” coaxed Jack. “How are Eileen and I to be perfectly happy, thinking of you pining for fresh air here?”

“You must not think—it would only be silly—you will have each other and,”—there was a little catch in her voice—“mother.”

Mrs Adair looked up quickly; hitherto she had not spoken.

“No, Paddy,” she said, “I shall stay with you. I do not mind London at all now I have got used to it, and I could not leave you behind alone. I should not be happy at Omeath without you.”

But Paddy would not hear of it, and after a long discussion it was finally decided that she should remain with her uncle for six months. Having gained her point, she quickly drew their attention back to the wall-papers, which were eagerly discussed in their turn, amid the usual amount of nonsense and twitting on her part and Jack’s.

The next day she told her uncle that she had won her point, and was coming to them, at any rate for the present. Something like tears instantly dimmed the kindly doctor’s eyes; he had grown more than fond of his young dispenser and niece.

“It will be as good as having a daughter,” he said, a little huskily.

Paddy laughed. “It is my particular _forte_,” she said, “to be the-next-best-thing.”

Her aunt was no less pleased.

“Really, my dear,” she remarked, folding her hands contentedly upon her ample front, “I shall be very pleased to have you. I don’t like girls, as a rule—they’re all so flighty and flirty, and fond of gew-gaws and things, but you are somehow different. You are not as interested in the church guilds and parish meetings as I could wish, and you are a little wanting in respect to poor Mr Dickinson,” naming the meek young curate; “but you are young yet, and by and by you will see how empty and shallow and vain are all amusements compared with church work and the beautiful church services.”

Paddy had her doubts, but she kept them to herself, and just then Basil came in to give his opinion.

“The guv’nor says you’re going to stay here after March,” he exclaimed. “How beastly, jolly, thundering nice!”

“My dear boy!” gasped his mother, horror-struck; “what an extraordinary way of expressing yourself.”

“Says what I mean pretty straight, anyhow. I guess I’ll have a key of the dispensary and only allow Paddy in at her proper hours. If we don’t mind she’ll go messing about with those silly old medicines half the day.”

So it was all arranged, and Paddy was somewhat relieved, but her heart was unusually heavy on that February afternoon, with the weight of a longing that, in its steady insistence, was beginning to undermine those strong defences of hers, built up by that spirit of fanaticism so strangely blended with her open, generous nature.

It had been there for some time now, this creeping, growing longing, but until the Christmas holiday it had been given such short shrift, it scarcely dared to hold up its head. Whenever it did, seizing advantage of some soft moment, it was almost immediately stamped on by the warrior-like, fanatical Paddy, nursing her sense of injury, and armour-plating herself against a softness her heart clamoured more and more strongly to yield to.

But during the Christmas holiday the longing had developed an ache, which gave it a new power. The ache of an incredible loneliness, which seemed to come down suddenly out of nowhere. And always when the ache was strongest, it seemed to sound insistently in her ears and in her soul just one sentence: “Mavourneen, mavourneen, bears have understanding when they love as I love you...”

And with the sentence came other thoughts. Thoughts that thrilled and frightened her both at once, setting her heart beating to a strange new measure. It was a measure she had experienced for the first time that afternoon in his den, when all the others were paired off, and they two left alone together. When, sitting quietly at his fireside, she had felt as if her little world were entirely changed, and she left in a position that required much readjusting all round. And it was so difficult to readjust herself. With Eileen and Jack married and living at The Ghan House, and her mother with them, what was to be her place in the general scheme? Was there, indeed, nothing for her but that independent spirit, and the dispensary, and this fighting against an ache that threatened to overpower her heart? And then would come the thought, suppose she gave up fighting?... suppose... suppose... But there Paddy usually stopped short—a strange new world she was shyly afraid of lay beyond that word, and the fanatical spirit was promptly re-enforced. Of course she could not give up fighting. It was monstrous to think it; and for a little while the old flash would be in her eyes, and the old resolute set of the lips.

And then, at the first “letting go,” back would come the same engrossing memory: “Mavourneen, mavourneen, bears have understanding when they love as I love you.”

Ah, what understanding he had, what wild allurement!

Fancy played with her then, laughing at the fanatic, snapping light fingers at the warrior-spirit. “Supposing you were to let yourself go,” said Fancy, “and to swim out into the comforting warmth of that understanding, shutting away the loneliness with it, and letting all the readjusting solve itself into just sitting by a fireside that was all your own for ever...!”

How the ache and the longing grew when Fancy triumphed, how alluringly the voice sounded.

So it came to a day when Paddy the Fearless asked herself a question, and left it unanswered because she was afraid. But though she spoke no reply, perhaps it was given just as poignantly in a bright head buried in a pillow, and a little reluctant whisper, breathed to the feathers: “Oh, Lawrence, I can’t help it. I want you. I want you.”

And the next afternoon, that sombre February day, she stood in the window still remembering, still vainly wrestling and puzzling, when a taxi drew up at the door, and Gwen stepped out.

“Wait,” she said to the driver and ran up the steps with a haste that was somewhat startling.

Paddy went out into the hall and opened the door herself, and immediately Gwen exclaimed: “Oh, I’m so glad you’re in, Paddy. Lawrence has been hurt in a motor smash. He wants to see you badly, and I said I would take you. Be quick, won’t you? I don’t like leaving him. He is in great pain, and one never knows...”