Chapter 1

only feeling any misgivings when Mildred's melancholy eyes were looking at me.

Thus week followed week until we were close upon Christmas, and the girls, who were to be permitted to go home before the Feast, began to count the days to the holidays. I counted them too, and when anybody talked of her brother I thought of Martin Conrad, though his faithful little figure was fading away from me, and when anybody spoke of her parents I remembered my mother, for whom my affection never failed.

But, within a week from the time for breaking up, the Reverend Mother sent for me, and with a sinking heart I went to her room, knowing well what she was going to say.

"You are not to go home for the holidays this time, my child. You are to remain here, and Sister Angela is to stay to take care of you."

She had a letter from Father Dan, telling her that my mother was still unwell, and for this and other reasons it was considered best that I should not return at Christmas.

Father Dan had written a letter to me also, beginning, "My dear daughter in Jesus" and ending "Yours in Xt," saying it was not his fault that he could not fulfil his promise, but my father was much from home now-a-days and Aunt Bridget was more difficult than ever, so perhaps I should be happier at the Convent.

It was a bitter blow, though the bitterest part of it lay in the fear that the girls would think I was of so little importance to my people that they did not care to see me.

But the girls were too eager about their own concerns to care much about me, and even on the very last day and at the very last moment, when everything was bustle and joy, and boxes were being carried downstairs, and everybody was kissing everybody else and wishing each other a Happy Christmas, and then flying away like mad things, and I alone was being left, Alma herself, before she stepped into a carriage in which a stout lady wearing furs was waiting to receive her, only said:

"By-by, Margaret Mary! Take care of Sister Angela."

Next day the Reverend Mother went off to her cottage at Nemi, and the other nuns and novices to their friends in the country, and then Sister Angela and I were alone in the big empty, echoing convent--save for two elderly lay Sisters, who cooked and cleaned for us, and the Chaplain, who lived by himself in a little white hut like a cell which stood at the farthest corner of the garden.

We moved our quarters to a room in the front of the house, so as to look out over the city, and down into the piazza which was full of traffic, and after a while we had many cheerful hours together.

During the days before Christmas we spent our mornings in visiting the churches and basilicas where there were little illuminated models of the Nativity, with the Virgin and the Infant Jesus in the stable among the straw. The afternoons we spent at home in the garden, where the Chaplain, in his black soutane and biretta, was always sitting under the old tree, reading his breviary.

His name was Father Giovanni and he was a tall young man with a long, thin, pale face, and when Sister Angela first took me up to him she said:

"This is our Margaret Mary."

Then his sad face broke into warm sunshine, and he stroked my head, and sent me away to skip with my skipping-rope, while he and Sister Angela sat together under the tree, and afterwards walked to and fro in the avenue between the stone pines and the wall, until they came to his cell in the corner, where she craned her neck at the open door as if she would have liked to go in and make things more tidy and comfortable.

On Christmas Day we had currant cake in honour of the feast, and Sister Angela asked Father Giovanni to come to tea, and he came, and was quite cheerful, so that when the Sister, who was also very happy, signalled to me to take some mistletoe from the bottom of a picture I held it over his head and kissed him from behind. Then he snatched me up in his arms and kissed me back, and we had a great romp round the chairs and tables.

But the Ave Maria began to ring from the churches, and Father Giovanni (according to the rule of our Convent) having to go, he kissed me again, and then I said:

"Why don't you kiss Sister Angela too?"

At that they only looked at each other and laughed, but after a moment he kissed her hand, and then she went downstairs to see him out into the garden.

When she came back her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks were flushed, and, that night, when she took away her black and white whimple and gorget on going to bed, she stood before a looking-glass and wound her beautiful light hair round her finger and curled it over her forehead in the way it was worn by the ladies we saw in the streets.

I think it was two nights later that she told me I was to go to bed early because Father Giovanni was not well and she would have to go over to see him.

She went, and I got into bed, but I could not sleep, and while I lay waiting for Sister Angela I listened to some men who as they crossed the piazza were singing, in tremulous voices, to their mandolines and guitars, what I believed to be love songs, for I had begun to learn Italian.

"_Oh bella Napoli. Oh suol beato Onde soiridere volta il creato_."

It was late when Sister Angela came back and then she was breathing hard as if she had been running. I asked if Father Giovanni's sickness was worse, and she said no, it was better, and I was to say nothing about it. But she could not rest and at last she said:

"Didn't we forget to say our prayers, Mary?"

So I got up again and Sister Angela said one of the beautiful prayers out of our prayer-book. But her voice was very low and when she came to the words:

"O Father of all mankind, forgive all sinners who repent of their sins," she broke down altogether.

I thought she was ill, but she said it was only a cold she had caught in crossing the garden and I was to go to sleep like a good girl and think no more about her.

But in the middle of the night I awoke, and Sister Angela was crying.

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER

Most of the girls were depressed when they returned to school, but Alma was in high spirits, and on the first night of the term she crept over to my bed and asked what we had been doing during the holidays.

"Not a thing, eh?"

I answered that we had done lots of things and been very happy.

"Happy? In this gloomy old convent? You and Sister Angela alone?"

I told her we had two lay sisters-and then there was Father Giovanni.

"Father Giovanni? That serious old cross-bones?"

I said he was not always serious, and that on Christmas Day he had come to tea and kissed me under the mistletoe.

"Kissed you under the mistletoe!" said Alma, and then she whispered eagerly,

"He didn't kiss Sister Angela, did he?"

I suppose I was flattered by her interest, and this loosened my tongue, for I answered:

"He kissed her hand, though."

"Kissed her hand? My! . . . Of course she was very angry . . . wasn't she angry?"

I answered no, and in my simplicity I proceeded to prove this by explaining that Sister Angela had taken Father Giovanni down to the door, and when he was ill she had nursed him.

"Nursed him? In his own house, you mean?"

"Yes, at night, too, and she stayed until he was better, and caught a cold coming back."

"Well, I never!" said Alma, and I remember that I was very pleased with myself during this interview, for by the moonlight which was then shining into the room, I could see that Alma's eyes were sparkling.

The next night we recommenced our conferences in bed, when Alma told us all about her holiday, which she had spent "way up in St. Moritz," among deep snow and thick ice, skating, bobbing, lugging, and above all riding astride, and dragging a man on skis behind her.

"Such lots of fun," she said. And the best of it was at night when there were dances and fancy-dress balls with company which included all the smart people in Europe, and men who gave a girl such a good time if she happened to be pretty and was likely to have a dot.

Alma had talked so eagerly and the girls had listened so intently, that nobody was aware that Sister Angela had returned to the room until she stepped forward and said:

"Alma Lier, I'm ashamed of you. Go back to your bed, miss, this very minute."

The other girls crept away and I half covered my face with my bed-clothes, but Alma stood up to Sister Angela and answered her back.

"Go to bed yourself, and don't speak to me like that, or you'll pay for your presumption."

"Pay? Presumption? You insolent thing, you are corrupting the whole school and are an utter disgrace to it. I warned you that I would tell the Reverend Mother what you are and now I've a great mind to do it."

"Do it. I dare you to do it. Do it to-night, and to-morrow morning _I_ will do something."

"What will you do, you brazen hussy?" said Sister Angela, but I could see that her lip was trembling.

"Never mind what. If I'm a hussy I'm not a hypocrite, and as for corrupting the school, and being a disgrace to it, I'll leave the Reverend Mother to say who is doing that."

Low as the light was I could see that Sister Angela was deadly pale. There was a moment of silence in which I thought she glanced in my direction, and then stammering something which I did not hear, she left the dormitory.

It was long before she returned and when she did so I saw her creep into her cubicle and sit there for quite a great time before going to bed. My heart was thumping hard, for I had a vague feeling that I had been partly to blame for what had occurred, but after a while I fell asleep and remembered no more until I was awakened in the middle of the night by somebody kissing me in my sleep.

It was Sister Angela, and she was turning away, but I called her back, and she knelt by my bed and whispered:

"Hush! I know what has happened, but I don't blame you for it."

I noticed that she was wearing her out-door cloak, and that she was breathing rapidly, just as she did on the night she came from the chaplain's quarters, and when I asked if she was going anywhere she said yes, and if I ever heard anything against Sister Angela I was to think the best of her.

"But you are so good. . . ."

"No, I am not good. I am very wicked. I should never have thought of being a nun, but I'm glad now that I'm only a novice and have never taken the vows."

After that she told me to go to sleep, and then she kissed me again, and I thought she was going to cry, but she rose hurriedly and left the room.

Next morning after the getting-up bell had been rung, and I had roused myself to full consciousness, I found that four or five nuns were standing together near the door of the dormitory talking about something that had happened during the night--Sister Angela had gone!

Half an hour afterwards when full of this exciting event, the girls went bursting down to the Meeting Room they found the nuns in great agitation over an incident of still deeper gravity--Father Giovanni also had disappeared!

A convent school is like a shell on the shore of a creek, always rumbling with the rumour of the little sea it lives under; and by noon the girls, who had been palpitating with curiosity, thought they knew everything that had happened--how at four in the morning Father Giovanni and Sister Angela had been seen to come out of the little door which connected the garden with the street; how at seven they had entered a clothing emporium in the Corso, where going in at one door as priest and nun they had come out at another as ordinary civilians; how at eight they had taken the first train to Civita Vecchia, arriving in time to catch a steamer sailing at ten, and how they were now on their way to England.

By some mysterious instinct of their sex the girls had gathered with glistening eyes in front of the chaplain's deserted quarters, where Alma leaned against the wall with her insteps crossed and while the others talked she smiled, as much as to say, "I told you so."

As for me I was utterly wretched, and being now quite certain that I was the sole cause of Sister Angela's misfortune, I was sitting under the tree in the middle of the garden, when Alma, surrounded by her usual group of girls, came down on me.

"What's this?" she said. "Margaret Mary crying? Feeling badly for Sister Angela, is she? Why, you little silly, you needn't cry for her. She's having the time of her life, she is!"

At this the girls laughed and shuddered, as they used to do when Alma told them stories, but just at that moment the nun with the stern face (she was the Mother of the Novices) came up and said, solemnly:

"Alma Lier, the Reverend Mother wishes to speak to you."

"To me?" said Alma, in a tone of surprise, but at the next moment she went off jauntily.

Hours passed and Alma did not return, and nothing occurred until afternoon "rosary," when the Mother of the Novices came again and taking me by the hand said:

"Come with me, my child."

I knew quite well where we were going to, and my lip was trembling when we entered the Reverend Mother's room, for Alma was there, sitting by the stove, and close beside her, with an angry look, was the stout lady in furs whom I had seen in the carriage at the beginning of the holidays.

"Don't be afraid," said the Reverend Mother, and drawing me to her side she asked me to tell her what I had told Alma about Sister Angela.

I repeated our conversation as nearly as I could remember it, and more than once Alma nodded her head as if in assent, but the Reverend Mother's face grew darker at every word and, seeing this, I said:

"But if Sister Angela did anything wrong I'm sure she was very sorry, for when she came back she said her prayers, and when she got to 'Father of all mankind, forgive all sinners . . .'"

"Yes, yes, that will do," said the Reverend Mother, and then she handed me back to the Mother of the Novices, telling her to warn me to say nothing to the other children.

Alma did not return to us at dinner, or at recreation, or at chapel (when another chaplain said vespers), or even at nine o'clock, when we went to bed. But next morning, almost as soon as the Mother of the Novices had left the dormitory, she burst into the room saying:

"I'm leaving this silly old convent, girls. Mother has brought the carriage, and I've only come to gather up my belongings."

Nobody spoke, and while she wrapped up her brushes and combs in her nightdress, she joked about Sister Angela and Father Giovanni and then about Mildred Bankes, whom she called "Reverend Mother Mildred," saying it would be her turn next.

Then she tipped up her mattress, and taking a novel from under it she threw the book on to my bed, saying:

"Margaret Mary will have to be your story-teller now. By-by, girls!"

Nobody laughed. For the first time Alma's humour had failed her, and when we went downstairs to the Meeting Room it was with sedate and quiet steps.

The nuns were all there, with their rosaries and crosses, looking as calm as if nothing had occurred, but the girls were thinking of Alma, and when, after prayers, during the five minutes of silence for meditation, we heard the wheels of a carriage going off outside, we knew what had happened--Alma had gone.

We were rising to go to Mass when the Reverend Mother said,

"Children, I have a word to say to you. You all know that one of our novices has left us. You also know that one of our scholars has just gone. It is my wish that you should forget both of them, and I shall look upon it as an act of disobedience if any girl in the Convent ever mentions their names again."

All that day I was in deep distress, and when, night coming, I took my troubles to bed, telling myself I had now lost Alma also, and it was all my fault, somebody put her arms about me in the darkness and whispered:

"Mary O'Neill, are you awake?"

It was Mildred, and I suppose my snuffling answered her, for she said:

"You mustn't cry for Alma Lier. She was no friend of yours, and it was the best thing that ever happened to you when she was turned out of the convent."

SIXTEENTH CHAPTER

A child lives from hour to hour, and almost at the same moment that my heart was made desolate by the loss of my two friends it was quickened to a new interest.

Immediately after the departure of Sister Angela and Alma we were all gathered in the Meeting Room for our weekly rehearsal of the music of the Benediction--the girls, the novices, the nuns, the Reverend Mother, and a Maestro from the Pope's choir, a short fat man, who wore a black soutane and a short lace tippet.

Benediction was the only service of our church which I knew, being the one my mother loved best and could do most of for herself in the solitude of her invalid room, but the form used in the Convent differed from that to which I had been accustomed, and even the _Tantum ergo_ and the _O Salutaris Hostia_ I could not sing.

On this occasion a litany was added which I had heard before, and then came a hymn of the Blessed Virgin which I remembered well. My mother sang it herself and taught me to sing it, so that when the Maestro, swinging his little ivory baton, began in his alto voice--

"_Ave maris stella, Dei Mater alma--_"

I joined in with the rest, but sang in English instead of Latin Of all appeals to the memory that of music is the strongest, and after a moment I forgot that I was at school in Rome, being back in my mother's room in Ellan, standing by her piano and singing while she played. I think I must have let my little voice go, just as I used to do at home, when it rang up to the wooden rafters, for utterly lost to my surroundings I had got as far as--

"_Virgin of all virgins, To thy shelter take us--_"

when suddenly I became aware that I alone was singing, the children about me being silent, and even the Maestro's baton slowing down. Then I saw that all eyes were turned in my direction, and overwhelmed with confusion I stopped, for my voice broke and slittered into silence.

"Go on, little angel," said the Maestro, but I was trembling all over by this time and could not utter a sound.

Nevertheless the Reverend Mother said: "Let Mary O'Neill sing the hymn in church in future."

As soon as I had conquered my nervousness at singing in the presence of the girls, I did so, singing the first line of each verse alone, and I remember to have heard that the congregations on Sunday afternoons grew larger and larger, until, within a few weeks, the church was densely crowded.

Perhaps my childish heart was stirred by vanity in all this, for I remember that ladies in beautiful dresses would crowd to the bronze screen that separated us from the public and whisper among themselves, "Which is she?" "The little one in the green scarf with the big eyes!" "God bless her!"

But surely it was a good thing that at length life had began to have a certain joy for me, for as time went on I became absorbed in the life of the Convent, and particularly in the services of the church, so that home itself began to fade away, and when the holidays came round and excuses were received for not sending for me, the pain of my disappointment became less and less until at last it disappeared altogether.

If ever a child loved her mother I did, and there were moments when I reproached myself with not thinking of her for a whole day. These were the moments when a letter came from Father Dan, telling me she was less well than before and her spark of life had to be coaxed and trimmed or it would splutter out altogether.

But the effect of such warnings was wiped away when my mother wrote herself, saying I was to be happy as she was happy, because she knew that though so long separated we should soon be together, and the time would not seem long.

Not understanding the deeper meaning that lay behind words like these, I was nothing loath to put aside the thought of home until little by little it faded away from me in the distance, just as the island itself had done on the day when I sailed out with Martin Conrad on our great voyage of exploration to St. Mary's Rock.

Thus two years and a half passed since I arrived in Rome before the great fact befell me which was to wipe all other facts out of my remembrance.

It was Holy Week, the season of all seasons for devotion to the Sacred Heart, and our Convent was palpitating with the joy of its spiritual duties, the many offices, the masses for the repose of the souls in Purgatory, the preparations for Tenebrae, with the chanting of the Miserere, and for Holy Saturday and Easter Day, with the singing of the Gloria and the return of the Alleluia.

But beyond all this for me were the arrangements for my first confession, which, coming a little late, I made with ten or twelve other girls of my sodality, feeling so faint when I took my turn and knelt by the grating, and heard the whispering voice within, like something from the unseen, something supernatural, something divine, that I forgot all I had come to say and the priest had to prompt me.

And beyond that again were the arrangements for my first communion, which was to take place on Easter morning, when I was to walk in procession with the other girls, dressed all in white, behind a gilded figure of the Virgin, singing "Ave maris stella," through the piazza into the church, where one of the Cardinals, in the presence of the fathers and mothers of the other children, was to put the Holy Wafer on our tongues and we were to know for the first time the joy of communion with our Lord.

But that was not to be for me.

On the morning of Holy Wednesday the blow fell. The luminous grey of the Italian dawn was filtering through the windows of the dormitory, like the light in a tomb, and a multitude of little birds on the old tree in the garden were making a noise like water falling on small stones in a fountain, when the Mother of the Novices came to my bedside and said:

"You are to go to the Reverend Mother as soon as possible, my child."

Her voice, usually severe, was so soft that I knew something had happened, and when I went downstairs I also knew, before the Reverend Mother had spoken, what she was going to say.

"Mary," she said, "I am Sorry to tell you that your mother is ill."

I listened intently, fearing that worse would follow.

"She is very ill--very seriously ill, and she wishes to see you. Therefore you are to go home immediately."

The tears sprang to my eyes, and the Reverend Mother drew me to her side and laid my head on her breast and comforted me, saying my dear mother had lived the life of a good Christian and could safely trust in the redeeming blood of our Blessed Saviour. But I thought she must have some knowledge of the conditions of my life at home, for she told me that whatever happened I was to come back to her.

"Tell your father you _wish_ to come back to me," she said, and then she explained the arrangements that were being made for my journey.

I was to travel alone by the Paris express which left Rome at six o'clock that evening. The Mother of the Novices was to put me in a sleeping car and see that the greatest care would be taken of me until I arrived at Calais, where Father Donovan was to meet the train and take me home.

I cried a great deal, I remember, but everybody in the Convent was kind, and when, of my own choice, I returned to the girls at recreation, the sinister sense of dignity which by some strange irony of fate comes to all children when the Angel of Death is hovering over them, came to me also--poor, helpless innocent--and I felt a certain distinction in my sorrow.

At five o'clock the omnibus of the Convent had been brought round to the door, and I was seated in one corner of it, with the Mother of the Novices in front of me, when Mildred Bankes came running breathlessly downstairs to say that the Reverend Mother had given her permission to see me off.

Half an hour later Mildred and I were sitting in a compartment of the Wagon-Lit, while the Mother was talking to the conductor on the platform.

Mildred, whose eyes were wet, was saying something about herself which seems pitiful enough now in the light of what has happened since.

She was to leave the Convent soon, and before I returned to it she would be gone. She was poor and an orphan, both her parents being dead, and if she had her own way she would become a nun. In any case our circumstances would be so different, our ways of life so far apart, that we might never meet again; but if . . .

Before she had finished a bell rang on the platform, and a moment or two afterwards the train slid out of the station.

Then for the first time I began to realise the weight of the blow that had fallen on me. I was sitting alone in my big compartment, we were running into the Campagna, the heavens were ablaze with the glory of the sunset, which was like fields of glistening fire, but darkness seemed to have fallen on all the world.

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER

Early on Good Friday I arrived at Calais. It was a misty, rimy, clammy morning, and a thick fog was lying over the Channel.

Almost before the train stopped I saw Father Dan, with his coat collar turned up, waiting for me on the platform. I could see that he was greatly moved at the sight of me, but was trying hard to maintain his composure.

"Now don't worry, my child, don't worry," he said. "It will be all ri. . . . But how well you are looking! And how you have grown! And how glad your poor mother will be to see you!"

I tried to ask how she was. "Is she . . ."

"Yes, thank God, she's alive, and while there's life there's hope."

We travelled straight through without stopping and arrived at Blackwater at seven the same evening. There we took train, for railways were running in Ellan now, and down the sweet valleys that used to be green with grass, and through the little crofts that used to be red with fuchsia, there was a long raw welt of upturned earth.

At the station of our village my father's carriage was waiting for us and a strange footman shrugged his shoulders in answer to some whispered question of Father Dan's, and from that I gathered that my mother's condition was unchanged.

We reached home at dusk, just as somebody was lighting a line of new electric lamps that had been set up in the drive to show the way for the carriage under the chestnuts in which the rooks used to build and caw.

I knew the turn of the path from which the house could be first seen, and I looked for it, remembering the last glimpse I had of my mother at her window. Father Dan looked, too, but for another reason--to see if the blinds were down.

Aunt Bridget was in the hall, and when Father Dan, who had grown more and more excited as we approached the end of our journey, asked how my mother was now, poor thing, she answered:

"Worse; distinctly worse; past recognising anybody; so all this trouble and expense has been wasted."

As she had barely recognised me I ran upstairs with a timid and quiet step and without waiting to take off my outer clothes made my way to my mother's bedroom.

I remember the heavy atmosphere of the room as I opened the door. I remember the sense I had of its being lower and smaller than I thought. I remember the black four-foot bedstead with the rosary hanging on a brass nail at the pillow end. I remember my little cot which still stood in the same place and contained some of the clothes I had worn as a child, and even some of the toys I had played with.

A strange woman, in the costume of a nurse, turned to look at me as I entered, but I did not at first see my mother, and when at length I did see her, with her eyes closed, she looked so white and small as to be almost hidden in the big white bed.

Presently Father Dan came in, followed by Doctor Conrad and Aunt Bridget, and finally my father, who was in his shirt sleeves and had a pen in his ear, I remember.

Then Father Dan, who was trembling very much, took me by the hand and led me to my mother's side, where stooping over her, and making his voice very low, yet speaking as one who was calling into a long tunnel, he said:

"My daughter! My daughter! Here is our little Mary. She has come home to see you."

Never shall I forget what followed. First, my mother's long lashes parted and she looked at me with a dazed expression as if still in a sort of dream. Then her big eyes began to blaze like torches in dark hollows, and then (though they had thought her strength was gone and her voice would never be heard again) she raised herself in her bed, stretched out her arms to me, and cried in loud strong tones:

"Mally veen! My Mally veen!"

How long I lay with my arms about my mother, and my mother's arms about me I do not know. I only know that over my head I heard Father Dan saying, as if speaking to a child:

"You are happy now, are you not?"

"Yes, yes, I am happy now," my mother answered.

"You have everything you want?"

"Everything--everything!"

Then came my father's voice, saying:

"Well, you've got your girl, Isabel. You wanted her, so we sent for her, and here she is."

"You have been very good to me, Daniel," said my mother, who was kissing my forehead and crying in her joy.

When I raised my head I found Father Dan in great excitement.

"Did you see that then?" he was saying to Doctor Conrad.

"I would have gone on my knees all the way to Blackwater to see it."

"I couldn't have believed it possible," the Doctor replied.

"Ah, what children we are, entirely. God confounds all our reckoning. We can't count with His miracles. And the greatest of all miracles is a mother's love for her child."

"Let us leave her now, though," said the Doctor. "She's like herself again, but still . . ."

"Yes, let us leave them together," whispered Father Dan, and having swept everybody out before him (I thought Aunt Bridget went away ashamed) he stepped off himself on tiptoe, as if treading on holy ground.

Then my mother, who was holding my hand and sometimes putting it to her lips, said:

"Tell me everything that has happened."

As soon as my little tongue was loosed I told her all about my life at the Convent--about the Reverend Mother and the nuns and the novices and the girls (all except Sister Angela and Alma) and the singing of the hymn to the Virgin--talking on and on and on, without observing that, after a while, my mother's eyes had closed again, and that her hand had become cold and moist.

At length she said: "Is it getting dark, Mary?"

I told her it was night and the lamp was burning.

"Is it going out then?" she asked, and when I answered that it was not she did not seem to hear, so I stopped talking, and for some time there was silence in which I heard nothing but the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, the barking of a sheep dog a long way off, and the husky breathing in my mother's throat.

I was beginning to be afraid when the nurse returned. She was going to speak quite cheerfully, but after a glance at my mother she went out quickly and came back in a moment with Doctor Conrad and Father Dan.

I heard the doctor say something about a change, whereupon Father Dan hurried away, and in a moment there was much confusion. The nurse spoke of taking me to another room but the doctor said:

"No, our little woman will be brave," and then leading me aside he whispered that God was sending for my mother and I must be quiet and not cry.

Partly undressing I climbed into my cot and lay still for the next half hour, while the doctor held his hand on my mother's pulse and the nurse spread a linen cloth over a table and put four or five lighted candles on it.

I remember that I was thinking that if "God sending for my mother" meant that she was to be put into a box and buried under the ground it was terrible and cruel, and perhaps if I prayed to our Lady He would not find it in His heart to do so. I was trying to do this, beginning under my breath, "O Holy Virgin, thou art so lovely, thou art so gracious . . ." when the nurse said:

"Here they are back again."

Then I heard footsteps outside, and going to the window I saw a sight not unlike that which I had seen on the night of the Waits.

A group of men were coming towards the house, with Father Dan in the middle of them. Father Dan, with his coat hung over his arms like a cloak, was carrying something white in both hands, and the men were carrying torches to light him on his way.

I knew what it was--it was the Blessed Sacrament, which they were bringing to my mother, and when Father Dan had come into the room, saying "Peace be to this house," and laid a little white box on the table, and thrown off his coat, he was wearing his priest's vestments underneath.

Then the whole of my father's household--all except my father himself--came into my mother's room, including Aunt Bridget, who sat with folded arms in the darkness by the wall, and the servants, who knelt in a group by the door.

Father Dan roused my mother by calling to her again, and after she had opened her eyes he began to read. Sometimes his voice seemed to be choked with sobs, as if the heart of the man were suffering, and sometimes it pealed out loudly as if the soul of the priest were inspiring him.

After Communion he gave my mother Extreme Unction--anointing the sweet eyes which had seen no evil, the dear lips which had uttered no wrong, and the feet which had walked in the ways of God.

All this time there was a solemn hush in the house like that of a church--no sound within except my father's measured tread in the room below, and none without except the muffled murmur which the sea makes when it is far away and going out.

When all was over my mother seemed more at ease, and after asking for me and being told I was in the cot, she said:

"You must all go and rest. Mary and I will be quite right now."

A few minutes afterwards my mother and I were alone once more, and then she called me into her bed and clasped her arms about me and I lay with my face hidden in her neck.

What happened thereafter seems to be too sacred to write of, almost too sacred to think about, yet it is all as a memory of yesterday, while other events of my life have floated away to the ocean of things that are forgotten and lost.

"Listen, darling," she said, and then, speaking in whispers, she told me she had heard all I had said about the Convent, and wondered if I would not like to live there always, becoming one of the good and holy nuns.

I must have made some kind of protest, for she went on to say how hard the world was to a woman and how difficult she had found it.

"Not that your father has been to blame--you must never think that, Mary, yet still . . ."

But tears from her tender heart were stealing down her face and she had to stop.

Even yet I had not realised all that the solemn time foreboded, for I said something about staying with my mother; and then in her sweet voice, she told me nervously, breaking the news to me gently, that she was going to leave me, that she was going to heaven, but she would think of me when she was there, and if God permitted she would watch over me, or, if that might not be, she would ask our Lady to do so.

"So you see we shall never be parted, never really. We shall always be together. Something tells me that wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, I shall know all about it."

This comforted me, and I think it comforted my mother also, though God knows if it would have done so, if, with her dying eyes, she could have seen what was waiting for her child.

It fills my heart brimful to think of what happened next.

She told me to say a _De Profundis_ for her sometimes, and to think of her when I sang the hymn to the Virgin. Then she kissed me and told me to go to sleep, saying she was going to sleep too, and if it should prove to be the eternal sleep, it would be only like going to sleep at night and awaking in the morning, and then we should be together again, and "the time between would not seem long."

"So good-night, darling, and God bless you," she said.

And as well as I could I answered her "Good-night!"

* * * * *

When I awoke from the profound slumber of childhood it was noon of the next day and the sun was shining. Doctor Conrad was lifting me out of bed, and Father Dan, who had just thrown open the window, was saying in a tremulous voice:

"Your dear mother has gone to God."

I began to cry, but he checked me and said:

"Don't call her back. She's on her way to God's beautiful Paradise after all her suffering. Let her go!"

So I lost her, my mother, my saint, my angel.

It was Easter Eve, and the church bells were ringing the Gloria.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER

After my mother's death there was no place left for me in my father's house.

Betsy Beauty (who was now called Miss Betsy and gave herself more than ever the airs of the daughter of the family) occupied half her days with the governess who had been engaged to teach her, and the other half in driving, dressed in beautiful clothes, to the houses of the gentry round about.

Nessy MacLeod, called the young mistress, had become my father's secretary, and spent most of her time in his private room, a privilege which enlarged her pride without improving her manners.

Martin Conrad I did not see, for in reward for some success at school the doctor had allowed him to spend his Easter holidays in London in order to look at Nansen's ship, the _Fram_, which had just then arrived in the Thames.

Hence it happened that though home made a certain tug at me, with its familiar sights and sounds, and more than once I turned with timid steps towards my father's busy room, intending to say, "Please, father, don't send me back to school," I made no demur when, six or seven days after the funeral, Aunt Bridget began to prepare for my departure.

"There's odds of women," said Tommy the Mate, when I went into the garden to say good bye to him "They're like sheep's broth, is women. If there's a head and a heart in them they're good, and if there isn't you might as well be supping hot water. Our Big Woman is hot water--but she'll die for all."

Within a fortnight I was back at the Convent, and there the Reverend Mother atoned to me for every neglect.

"I knew you would come back to me," she said, and from that hour onward she seemed to be trying to make up to me for the mother I had lost.

I became deeply devoted to her. As a consequence her spirit became my spirit, and, little by little, the religious side of the life of the Convent took complete possession of me.

At first I loved the church and its services because the Reverend Mother loved them, and perhaps also for the sake of the music, the incense, the flowers and the lights on the altar; but after I had taken my communion, the mysteries of our religion took hold of me--the Confessional with its sense of cleansing and the unutterable sweetness of the Mass.

For a long time there was nothing to disturb this religious side of my mind. My father never sent for me, and as often as the holidays came round the Reverend Mother took me with her to her country home at Nemi.

That was a beautiful place--a sweet white cottage, some twenty kilometres from Rome, at the foot of Monte Cavo, in the middle of the remains of a mediæval village which contained a castle and a monastery, and had a little blue lake lying like an emerald among the green and red of the grass and poppies in the valley below.

In the hot months of summer the place was like a Paradise to me, with its roses growing wild by the wayside; its green lizards running on the rocks; its goats; its sheep; its vineyards; its brown-faced boys in velvet, and its gleesome girls in smart red petticoats and gorgeous outside stays; its shrines and its blazing sunsets, which seemed to girdle the heavens with quivering bands of purple and gold.

Years went by without my being aware of their going, for after a while I became entirely happy.

I heard frequently from home. Occasionally it was from Betsy Beauty, who had not much to say beyond stories of balls at Government House, where she had danced with the young Lord Raa, and of hunts at which she had ridden with him. More rarely it was from Aunt Bridget, who usually began by complaining of the ever-increasing cost of my convent clothes and ended with accounts of her daughter's last new costume and how well she looked in it.

From Nessy MacLeod and my father I never heard at all, but Father Dan was my constant correspondent and he told me everything.

First of my father himself--that he had carried out many of his great enterprises, his marine works, electric railways, drinking and dancing palaces, which had brought tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of thousands of pounds to Ellan, though the good Father doubted the advantage of such innovations and lamented the decline of piety which had followed on the lust for wealth.

Next of Aunt Bridget--that she was bringing up her daughter in the ways of worldly vanity and cherishing a serpent in her bosom (meaning Nessy MacLeod) who would poison her heart some day.

Next, of Tommy the Mate--that he sent his "best respec's" to the "lil-missy" but thought she was well out of the way of the Big Woman who "was getting that highty-tighty" that "you couldn't say Tom to a cat before her but she was agate of you to make it Thomas."

Then of Martin Conrad--that he was at college "studying for a doctor," but his heart was still at the North Pole and he was "like a sea-gull in the nest of a wood pigeon," always longing to be out on the wild waves.

Finally of the young Lord Raa--that the devil's dues must be in the man, for after being "sent down" from Oxford he had wasted his substance in riotous living in London and his guardian had been heard to say he must marry a rich wife soon or his estates would go to the hammer.

Such was the substance of the news that reached me over a period of six years. Yet welcome as were Father Dan's letters the life they described seemed less and less important to me as time went on, for the outer world was slipping away from me altogether and I was becoming more and more immersed in my spiritual exercises.

I spent much of my time reading religious books--the life of Saint Teresa, the meditations of Saint Francis of Sales, and, above all, the letters and prayers of our Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, whose love of the Sacred Heart was like a flaming torch to my excited spirit.

The soul of Rome, too, seemed to enter into my soul--not the new Rome, for of that I knew nothing, but the old Rome, the holy city, that could speak to me in the silence of the night within the walls of my convent-school, with its bells of the Dominican and Franciscan monasteries on either side, its stories of miracles performed on the sick and dying by the various shrines of the Madonna, its accounts of the vast multitudes of the faithful who came from all ends of the earth to the ceremonials at St. Peter's, and, above all, its sense of the immediate presence of the Pope, half a mile away, the Vicar and mouthpiece of God Himself.

The end of it all was that I wished to become a nun. I said nothing of my desire to anybody, not even to the Reverend Mother, but day by day my resolution grew.

Perhaps it was natural that the orphaned and homeless girl should plunge with all this passion into the aurora of a new spiritual life; but when I think how my nature was made for love, human love, the love of husband and children, I cannot but wonder with a thrill of the heart whether my mother in heaven, who, while she was on earth, had fought so hard with my father for the body of her child, was now fighting with him for her soul.

I was just eighteen years of age when my desire to become a nun reached its highest point, and then received its final overthrow.

Mildred Bankes, who had returned to Rome, and was living as a novice with the Little Sisters of the Poor, was about to make her vows, and the Reverend Mother took me to see the ceremony.

Never shall I forget the effect of it. The sweet summer morning, tingling with snow-white sunshine, the little white chapel in the garden of the Convent, covered with flowers, the altar with its lighted tapers, the friends from without clad in gay costumes as for a festival, the bishop in his bright vestments, and then, Mildred herself, dressed as a bride in a beautiful white gown with a long white veil and attended by other novices as bridesmaids.

It was just like a marriage to look upon, except for the absence of a visible bridegroom, the invisible one being Christ. And the taking of the vows was like a marriage service too--only more solemn and sacred and touching--the bride receiving the ring on her finger, and promising to serve and worship her celestial lover from that day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as life should last and through the eternity that was to follow it.

I cried all through the ceremony for sheer joy of its loveliness; and when it was over and we went into the refectory, and Mildred told me she was returning to England to work among the fallen girls of London, I vowed in my heart, though I hardly understood what she was going to do, that I would follow her example.

It was something of a jar to go back into the streets, so full of noise and bustle; and all the way home with the Reverend Mother I was forming the resolution of telling her that very night that I meant to be a nun, for, stirred to the depths of my soul by what I had seen and remembering what my poor mother had wished for me, I determined that no other life would I live under any circumstances.

Then came the shock.

As we drew up at our door a postman was delivering letters. One of them was for the Reverend Mother and I saw in a moment that it was in my father's handwriting. She read it in silence, and in silence she handed it to me. It ran:

"_Madam,

"I have come to Rome to take back my daughter. I believe her education will now be finished, and I reckon the time has arrived to prepare her for the change in life that is before her.

"The Bishop of our diocese has come with me, and we propose to pay our respects to you at ten o'clock prompt to-morrow morning.

"Yours, Madam_,

"DANIEL O'NEILL."

NINETEENTH CHAPTER

I saw, as by a flash of light, what was before me, and my whole soul rose in rebellion against it. That my father after all the years during which he had neglected me, should come to me now, when my plans were formed, and change the whole current of my life, was an outrage--an iniquity. It might be his right--his natural right--but if so his natural right was a spiritual wrong--and I would resist it--to my last breath and my last hour I would resist it.

Such were the brave thoughts with which I passed that night, but at ten o'clock next morning, when I was summoned to meet my father himself, it was on trembling limbs and with a quivering heart that I went down to the Reverend Mother's room.

Except that his hair was whiter than before my father was not much changed. He rose as I entered, saying, "Here she is herself," and when I went up to him he put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my face.

"Quite a little Italian woman grown! Like your mother though," he said, and then speaking over my head to the Bishop, who sat on the other side of the room, he added:

"Guess this will do, Bishop, eh?"

"Perfectly," said the Bishop.

I was colouring in confusion at the continued scrutiny, with a feeling of being looked over for some unexplained purpose, when the Reverend Mother called me, and turning to go to her I saw, by the look of pain on her face that she, too, had been hurt by it.

She put me to sit on a stool by the side of her chair, and taking my right hand she laid it in her lap and held it there during the whole of the interview.

The Bishop, whom I had never seen before, was the first to speak. He was a type of the fashionable ecclesiastic, suave, smiling, faultlessly dressed in silk soutane and silver buckled shoes, and wearing a heavy gold chain with a jewelled cross.

"Reverend Mother," he said, "you would gather from Mr. O'Neill's letter that he wishes to remove his daughter immediately--I presume there will be no difficulty in his doing so?"

The Reverend Mother did not speak, but I think she must have bent her head.

"Naturally," said the Bishop, "there will be a certain delay while suitable clothes are being made for her, but I have no doubt you will give Mr. O'Neill your help in these preparations."

My head was down, and I did not see if the Reverend Mother bowed again. But the two gentlemen, apparently satisfied with her silence, began to talk of the best date for my removal, and just when I was quivering with fear that without a word of protest I was to be taken away, the Reverend Mother said:

"Monsignor!"

"Reverend Mother!"

"You are aware that this child"--here she patted my trembling hand--"has been with me for ten years?"

"I am given to understand so."

"And that during that time she has only once been home?"

"I was not aware--but no doubt it is as you say."

"In short, that during the greater part of her life she has been left to my undivided care?"

"You have been very good to her, very, and I'm sure her family are extremely grateful."

"In that case, Monsignor, doesn't it seem to you that I am entitled to know why she is being so suddenly taken away from me, and what is the change in life which Mr. O'Neill referred to in his letter?"

The smile which had been playing upon the Bishop's face was smitten away from it by that question, and he looked anxiously across at my father.

"Tell her," said my father, and then, while my heart thumped in my bosom and the Reverend Mother stroked my hand to compose me, the Bishop gave a brief explanation.

The time had not come when it would be prudent to be more definite, but he might say that Mr. O'Neill was trying to arrange a happy and enviable future for his daughter, and therefore he wished her to return home to prepare for it.

"Does that mean marriage?" said the Reverend Mother.

"It may be so. I am not quite prepared to . . ."

"And that a husband has already been found for her?"

"That too perhaps. I will not say . . ."

"Monsignor," said the Reverend Mother, sitting up with dignity "is that fair?"

"Fair?"

"Is it fair that after ten years in which her father has done nothing for her, he should determine what her life is to be, without regard to her wish and will?"

I raised my eyes and saw that the Bishop looked aghast.

"Reverend Mother, you surprise me," he said. "Since when has a father ceased to be the natural guardian of his child? Has he not been so since the beginning of the world? Doesn't the Church itself build its laws on that foundation?"

"Does it?" said the Reverend Mother shortly. And then (I could feel her hand trembling as she spoke): "Some of its servants do, I know. But when did the Church say that anybody--no matter who--a father or anybody else--should take the soul of another, and control it and govern it, and put it in prison? . . ."

"My good lady," said the Bishop, "would you call it putting the girl in prison to marry her into an illustrious family, to give her an historic name, to surround her with the dignity and distinction . . ."

"Bishop," said my father, raising his hand, "I guess it's my right to butt in here, isn't it?"

I saw that my father's face had been darkening while the Reverend Mother spoke, and now, rolling his heavy body in his chair so as to face her, he said:

"Excuse me, ma'am, but when you say I've done nothing for my gel here I suppose you'll allow I've kept her and educated her?"

"You've kept and educated your dogs and horses, also, I dare say, but do you claim the same rights over a human being?"

"I do, ma'am--I think I do. And when the human being happens to be my own daughter I don't allow that anybody else has anything to say."

"If her mother were alive would _she_ have nothing to say?"

I thought my father winced at that word, but he answered:

"Her mother would agree to anything I thought best."

"Her mother, so far as I can see, was a most unselfish, most submissive, most unhappy woman," said the Reverend Mother.

My father glanced quickly at me and then, after a moment, he said:

"I'm obliged to you, ma'am, much obliged. But as I'm not a man to throw words away I'll ask you to tell me what all this means. Does it mean that you've made plans of your own for my daughter without consulting me?"

"No, sir."

"Then perhaps it means that the gel herself . . ."

"That may be so or not--I cannot say. But when you sent your daughter to a convent-school . . ."

"Wrong, ma'am, wrong for once. It was my wife's sister--who thinks the gel disobedient and rebellious and unruly . . ."

"Then your wife's sister is either a very stupid or a very bad-hearted woman."

"Ma'am?"

"I have known your daughter longer than she has, and there isn't a word of truth in what she says."

It was as much as I could do not to fall on the Reverend Mother's neck, but I clung to her hand with a convulsive grasp.

"May be so, ma'am, may be no," said my father. "But when you talk about my sending my daughter to a convent-school I would have you know that I've been so busy with my business . . ."

"That you haven't had time to take care of the most precious thing God gave you."

"Ma'am," said my father, rising to his feet, "may I ask what right you have to speak to me as if . . ."

"The right of one who for ten years has been a mother to your motherless child, sir, while you have neglected and forgotten her."

At that my father, whose bushy eyebrows were heavily contracted, turned to the Bishop.

"Bishop," he said, "is this what I've been paying my money for? Ten years' fees, and middling high ones too, I'm thinking?"

And then the Bishop, apparently hoping to make peace, said suavely:

"But aren't we crossing the river before we reach the bridge? The girl herself may have no such objections. Have you?" he asked, turning to me.

I was trembling more than ever now, and at first I could not reply.

"Don't you wish to go back home with your father?"

"No, sir," I answered.

"And why not, please?"

"Because my father's home is no home to me--because my aunt has always been unkind to me, and because my father has never cared for me or protected me, and because . . ."

"Well, what else?"

"Because . . . because I wish to become a nun."

There was silence for a moment, and then my father broke into bitter laughter.

"So that's it, is it? I thought as much. You want to go into partnership with the Mother in the nun business, eh?"

"My mother wished me to become a nun, and I wish it myself, sir."

"Your mother was a baby--that's what she was."

"My mother was an angel, sir," I said, bridling up, "and when she was dying she hoped I should become a nun, and I can never become anything else under any circumstance."

"Bah!" said my father, with a contemptuous lift of the hand, and then turning to the Reverend Mother he said:

"Hark here, ma'am. There's an easy way and a hard way in most everything. I take the easy way first, and if it won't work I take the hard way next, and then it's stiff pulling for the people who pull against me. I came to Rome to take my daughter home. I don't feel called upon to explain why I want to take her home, or what I'm going to do with her when I get her there. I believe I've got the rights of a father to do what I mean to do, and that it will be an ugly business for anybody who aids and abets my daughter in resisting her father's will. So I'll leave her here a week longer, and when I come back, I'll expect her to be ready and waiting and willing--ready and waiting and willing, mind you--to go along with me."

After saying this my father faced about and with his heavy flat step went out of the room, whereupon the Bishop bowed to the Reverend Mother and followed him.

My heart was by this time in fierce rebellion--all that the pacifying life of the convent-school had done for me in ten years being suddenly swept away--and I cried:

"I won't do it! I won't do it!"

But I had seen that the Reverend Mother's face had suddenly become very white while my father spoke to her at the end and now she said, in a timid, almost frightened tone:

"Mary, we'll go out to Nemi to-day. I have something to say to you."

TWENTIETH CHAPTER

In the late afternoon of the same day we were sitting together for the last time on the terrace of the Reverend Mother's villa.

It was a peaceful evening, a sweet and holy time. Not a leaf was stirring, not a breath of wind was in the air; but the voice of a young boy, singing a love-song, came up from somewhere among the rocky ledges of the vineyards below, and while the bell of the monastic church behind us was ringing the Ave Maria, the far-off bell of the convent church at Gonzano was answering from the other side of the lake--like angels calling to each other from long distances in the sky.

"Mary," said the Reverend Mother, "I want to tell you a story. It is the story of my own life--mine and my sister's and my father's."

I was sitting by her side and she was holding my hand in her lap, and patting it, as she had done during the interview of the morning.

"They say the reason so few women become nuns is that a woman is too attached to her home to enter the holy life until she has suffered shipwreck in the world. That may be so with most women. It was not so with me.

"My father was what is called a self-made man. But his fortune did not content him. He wanted to found a family. If he had had a son this might have been easy. Having only two daughters, he saw no way but that of marrying one of us into the Italian nobility.

"My sister was the first to disappoint him. She fell in love with a young Roman musician. The first time the young man asked for my sister he was contemptuously refused; the second time he was insulted; the third time he was flung out of the house. His nature was headstrong and passionate, and so was my father's. If either had been different the result might not have been the same. Yet who knows? Who can say?"

The Reverend Mother paused for a moment. The boy's voice in the vineyard was going on.

"To remove my sister from the scene of temptation my father took her from Rome to our villa in the hills above Albano. But the young musician followed her. Since my father would not permit him to marry her he was determined that she should fly with him, and when she hesitated to do so he threatened her. If she did not meet him at a certain hour on a certain night my father would be dead in the morning."

The Reverend Mother paused again. The boy's voice had ceased; the daylight was dying out.

"My sister could not bring herself to sacrifice either her father or her lover. Hence she saw only one way left--to sacrifice herself."

"Herself?"

The Reverend Mother patted my hand. "Isn't that what women in tragic circumstances are always doing?" she said.

"By some excuse--I don't know what--she persuaded our father to change rooms with her that night--he going upstairs to her bedroom in the tower, and she to his on the ground floor at the back, opening on to the garden and the pine forest that goes up the hill.

"What happened after that nobody ever knew exactly. In the middle of the night the servants heard two pistol shots, and next morning my sister was found dead--shot to the heart through an open window as she lay in my father's bed.

"The authorities tried in vain to trace the criminal. Only one person had any idea of his identity. That was my father, and in his fierce anger he asked himself what he ought to do in order to punish the man who had killed his daughter.

"Then a strange thing happened. On the day before the funeral the young musician walked into my father's room. His face was white and wasted, and his eyes were red and swollen. He had come to ask if he might be allowed to be one of those to carry the coffin. My father consented. 'I'll leave him alone,' he thought. 'The man is punished enough.'

"All the people of Albano came to the funeral and there was not a dry eye as the cortège passed from our chapel to the grave. Everybody knew the story of my sister's hopeless love, but only two in the world knew the secret of her tragic death--her young lover, who was sobbing aloud as he staggered along with her body on his shoulder, and her old father, who was walking bareheaded and in silence, behind him."

My heart was beating audibly and the Reverend Mother stroked my hand to compose me--perhaps to compose herself also. It was now quite dark, the stars were coming out, and the bells of the two monasteries on opposite sides of the lake were ringing the first hour of night.

"That's my sister's story, Mary," said the Reverend Mother after a while, "and the moral of my own is the same, though the incidents are different.

"I was now my father's only child and all his remaining hopes centred in me. So he set himself to find a husband for me before the time came when I should form an attachment for myself. His choice fell on a middle-aged Roman noble of distinguished but impoverished family.

"'He has a great name; you will have a great fortune--what more do you want?' said my father.

"We were back in Rome by this time, and there--at school or elsewhere--I had formed the conviction that a girl must passionately love the man she marries, and I did not love the Roman noble. I had also been led to believe that a girl should be the first and only passion of the man who marries her, and, young as I was, I knew that my middle-aged lover had had other domestic relations.

"Consequently I demurred, but my father threatened and stormed, and then, remembering my sister's fate, I pretended to agree, and I was formally engaged.

"I never meant to keep my promise, and I began to think out schemes by which to escape from it. Only one way seemed open to me then, and cherishing the thought of it in secret, I waited and watched and made preparations for carrying out my purpose.

"At length the moment came to me. It was mid-Lent, and a masked ball was given by my fiancé's friends in one of the old Roman palaces. I can see it still--the great hall, ablaze with glowing frescoes, beautiful Venetian candelabras, gilded furniture, red and yellow damask and velvet, and then the throng of handsome men in many uniforms and beautiful women with rows of pearls falling from their naked throats.

"I had dressed myself as a Bacchante in a white tunic embroidered in gold, with bracelets on my bare arms, a tiger-skin band over my forehead, and a cluster of grapes in my hair.

"I danced every dance, I remember, most of them with my middle-aged lover, and I suppose no one seemed so gay and happy and heedless. At three o'clock in the morning I returned home in my father's carriage. At six I had entered a convent.

"Nobody in the outer world ever knew what had become of me, and neither did I know what happened at home after I left it. The rule of the convent was very strict. Sometimes, after morning prayers, the Superior would say, 'The mother of one of you is dead--pray for her soul,' and that was all we ever heard of the world outside.

"But nature is a mighty thing, my child, and after five years I became restless and unhappy. I began to have misgivings about my vocation, but the Mother, who was wise and human, saw what was going on in my heart. 'You are thinking about your father,' she said, 'that he is growing old, and needing a daughter to take care of him. Go out, and nurse him, and then come back to your cell and pray.'

"I went, but when I reached my father's house a great shock awaited me. A strange man was in the porter's lodge, and our beautiful palace was let out in apartments. My father was dead--three years dead and buried. After my disappearance he had shut himself up in his shame and grief, for, little as I had suspected it and hard and cruel as I had thought him, he had really and truly loved me. During his last days his mind had failed him and he had given away all his fortune--scattered it, no one knew how, as something that was quite useless--and then he died, alone and broken-hearted."

That was the end of the Reverend Mother's narrative. She did not try to explain or justify or condemn her own or her sister's conduct, neither did she attempt to apply the moral of her story to my own circumstances. She left me to do that for myself.

I had been spell-bound while she spoke, creeping closer and closer to her until my head was on her breast.

For some time longer we sat like this in the soft Italian night, while the fire-flies came out in clouds among the unseen flowers of the garden and the dark air seemed to be alive with sparks of light.

When the time came to go to bed the Reverend Mother took me to my room, and after some cheerful words she left me. But hardly had I lain down, shaken to the heart's core by what I had heard, and telling myself that the obedience of a daughter to her father, whatever he might demand of her, was an everlasting and irreversible duty, imposed by no human law-giver, and that marriage was a necessity, which was forced upon most women by a mysterious and unyielding law of God, when the door opened and the Reverend Mother, with a lamp in her hand, came in again.

"Mary," she said, "I forgot to tell you that I am leaving the Sacred Heart. The Sisters of my old convent have asked me to go back as Superior. I have obtained permission to do so and am going shortly, so that in any case we should have been parted soon. It is the Convent of. . . ."

Here she gave me the name of a private society of cloistered nuns in the heart of Rome.

"I hope you will write to me as often as possible, and come to see me whenever you can. . . . And if it should ever occur that . . . but no, I will not think of that. Marriage is a sacred tie, too, and under proper conditions God blesses and hallows it."

With that she left me in the darkness. The church bell was ringing, the monks of the Passionist monastery were getting up for their midnight offices.

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER

A week later I was living with my father in the Hotel Europa on the edge of the Piazza di Spagna.

He was kinder to me than he had ever been before, but he did not tell me what the plans were which he had formed for my future, and I was left to discover them for myself.

Our apartment was constantly visited by ecclesiastics--Monsignori, Archbishops, even one of the Cardinals of the Propaganda, brought there by Bishop Walsh (the Bishop of our own diocese), and I could not help but hear portions of their conversation.

"It will be difficult, extremely difficult," the Cardinal would say. "Such marriages are not encouraged by the Church, which holds that they are usually attended by the worst consequences to both wife and husband. Still--under the exceptional circumstances--that the bridegroom's family was Catholic before it was Protestant--it is possible, just possible. . . ."

"Cardinal," my father would answer, while his strong face was darkening, "excuse me, sir, but I'm kind of curious to get the hang of this business. Either it can be done or it can't. If it can, we'll just sail in and do it. But if it can't, I believe I'll go home quick and spend my money another way."

Then there would be earnest assurances that in the end all would be right, only Rome moved slowly, and it would be necessary to have patience and wait.

My father waited three weeks, and meantime he occupied himself in seeing the sights of the old city.

But the mighty remains which are the luminous light-houses of the past--the Forum with the broken columns of its dead centuries; the Coliseum with its gigantic ruins, like the desolate crater of a moon; the Campagna with its hollow, crumbling tombs and shattered aqueducts,--only vexed and irritated him.

"Guess if I had my way," he said, "I would just clean out this old stone-yard of monuments to dead men, and make it more fit for living ones."

At length the Bishop came to say that the necessary business had been completed, and that to mark its satisfactory settlement the Pope had signified his willingness to receive in private audience both my father and myself.

This threw me into a state of the greatest nervousness, for I had begun to realise that my father's business concerned myself, so that when, early the following morning (clad according to instructions, my father in evening dress and I in a long black mantilla), we set out for the Vatican, I was in a condition of intense excitement.

What happened after we got out of the carriage at the bronze gate near St. Peter's I can only describe from a vague and feverish memory. I remember going up a great staircase, past soldiers in many-coloured coats, into a vast corridor, where there were other soldiers in other costumes. I remember going on and on, through salon after salon, each larger and more luxurious than the last, and occupied by guards still more gorgeously dressed than the guards we had left behind. I remember coming at length to a door at which a Chamberlain, wearing a sword, knelt and knocked softly, and upon its being opened announced our names. And then I remember that after all this grandeur as of a mediæval court I found myself in a plain room like a library with a simple white figure before me, and . . . I was in the presence of the Holy Father himself.

Can I ever forget that moment?

I had always been taught in the Convent to think of the Pope with a reverence only second to that which was due to the Saints, so at first I thought I should faint, and how I reached the Holy Father's feet I do not know. I only know that he was very sweet and kind to me, holding out the delicate white hand on which he wore the fisherman's emerald ring, and smoothing my head after I had kissed it.

When I recovered myself sufficiently to look up I saw that he was an old man, with a very pale and saintly face; and when he spoke it was in such a soft and fatherly voice that I loved and worshipped him.

"So this is the little lady," he said, "who is to be the instrument in the hands of Providence in bringing back an erring family into the folds of Mother Church."

Somebody answered him, and then he spoke to me about marriage, saying it was a holy state, instituted by the Almighty under a natural law and sanctioned by our divine Redeemer into the dignity of a Sacrament, so that those who entered it might live together in peace and love.

"It is a spiritual and sacred union, my child," he said, "a type of the holy mystery of Christ's relation to His Church."

Then he told me I was to make the best possible preparation for marriage in order to obtain the abundant graces of God, and to approach the altar only after penance and communion.

"And when you leave the church, my daughter," he said, "do not profane the day of your marriage by any sinful thought or act, but remember to bear yourself as if Jesus Christ Himself were with you, as He was at the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee."

Then he warned me that when I entered into the solemn contract of holy matrimony I was to do so in the full consciousness that it could not be broken but by death.

"Whom God has joined together let no man put asunder--remember that, too, my daughter."

Finally he said something about children--that a Catholic marrying a person of another religion must not enter into any agreement whereby any of her children should be brought up in any other than the Catholic faith.

After that, and something said to my father which I cannot recall, he gave me his blessing, in words so beautiful and a voice so sweet that it fell on me like the soft breeze that comes out of the rising sun on a summer morning.

"May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob be with you, my daughter. May your marriage be a yoke of love and peace, and may you see your children's children to the third and fourth generation."

Then he raised me to my feet, and at a touch from the Chamberlain, I backed out of the room.

When the door had closed on me I drew a deep breath, feeling as if I had come out of the Holy of Holies, and when I reached the Piazza of St. Peter's and came again upon the sight and sound of common things--the cabs and electric cars--it was the same as if I had suddenly descended from heaven to earth.

After my audience with the Pope, following on the Reverend Mother's story, all my objections to marriage had gone, and I wished to tell my father so, but an opportunity did not arise until late the same night and then it was he who was the first to speak.

Being in good spirits, after a dinner to the ecclesiastics, he said, as soon as his guests had gone--speaking in the tone of one who believed he was doing a great thing for me--

"Mary, matters are not quite settled yet, but you might as well know right here what we're trying to fix up for you."

Then he told me.

I was to marry the young Lord Raa!

I was stunned. It was just as if the power of thought had been smitten out of me.

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER

That night, and during the greater part of the following day, I felt, without quite knowing why, as if I were living under the dark cloud of a gathering thunderstorm. All my fear of the world, and my desire to escape from it, had fallen upon me afresh. Hence it was not altogether by the blind leading of fate that half an hour before Ave Maria I entered the church of the Convent which the Reverend Mother had given me the name of.

The church was empty when I pushed past the leather hanging that covered the door, but the sacristan was lighting the candles for Benediction, so I went up to the bronze screen, the Cancello, that divides the public part from the part occupied by the Sisters, and knelt on the nearest step.

After a while the church-bell rang overhead, and then (the congregation having gathered in the meantime) the nuns came in by way of a corridor which seemed to issue out of the darkness from under a figure of the Virgin and Child.

They were all in white, snow-white from head to foot, with a glimmer of blue scapular beneath their outer garment, and they wore long thick veils which entirely concealed their features when they entered but were raised when they reached their seats and faced the altar.

Familiar as I was with similar scenes this one moved me as I had never before been moved--the silent white figures, with hands clasped on their breasts, coming in one by one with noiseless and unhurried footsteps, like a line of wraiths from another world.

But a still deeper emotion was to come to me.

As the last of the nuns entered, the Superior as I knew she would be, I recognised her instantly. It was my own Reverend Mother herself; and when, after kneeling to the altar, she came down to her seat nearest to the screen, immediately in front of the place where I knelt, I knew by the tremor of the clasped hands which held the rosary, that she had seen and recognised me.

I trembled and my heart thumped against my breast.

Then the priest entered and the Litany began. It was sung throughout. Almost the whole of the service was sung. Never had Benediction seemed so beautiful, so pathetic, so appealing, so irresistible.

By the time the _Tantum ergo_ had been reached and the sweet female voices, over the soft swell of the organ, were rising to the vaulted roof in sorrowful reparation for the sins of all sinners in the world who did not pray for themselves, the religious life was calling to me as it had never called before.

"Come away from the world," it seemed to say. "Obedience to your heavenly Father cancels all duty to your earthly one. Leave everything you fear behind you, and find peace and light and love."

The service was over, the nuns had dropped their veils and gone out as slowly and noiselessly as they had come in (the last of them with her head down): the sacristan with his long rod was extinguishing the candles on the altar; the church was growing dark and a lay-sister in black was rattling a bunch of keys at the door behind me before I moved from my place beside the rails.

Then I awoke as from a dream, and looking longingly back at the dark corridor down which the nuns had disappeared, I was turning to go when I became aware that a young man was standing beside me and smiling into my face.

"Mally," he said very softly, and he held out his hand.

Something in the voice made me giddy, something in the blue eyes made me tremble. I looked at him but did not speak.

"Don't you know me, Mally?" he said.

I felt as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck. A flood of joy was sweeping through me. At last I knew who it was.

It was Martin Conrad, grown to be a man, a tall, powerful, manly man, but with the same face still--an elusive ghost of the boy's face I used to look up to and love.

A few minutes later we were out on the piazza in front of the church, and with a nervous rush of joyous words he was telling me what had brought him to Rome.

Having just "scraped through" his examinations, and taken his degree--couldn't have done so if the examiners had not been "jolly good" to him--he had heard that Lieut. . . .--was going down to the great ice barrier that bounds the South Pole, to investigate the sources of winds and tides, so he had offered himself as doctor to the expedition and been accepted.

Sailing from the Thames ten days ago they had put into Naples that morning for coal, and taking advantage of the opportunity he had run up to Rome, remembering that I was at school here, but never expecting to see me, and coming upon me by the merest accident in the world--something having said to him, "Let's go in here and look at this queer old church."

He had to leave to-morrow at two, though, having to sail the same night, but of course it would be luck to go farther south than Charcot and make another attack on the Antarctic night.

I could see that life was full of faith and hope and all good things for him, and remembering some episodes of the past I said:

"So you are going 'asploring' in earnest at last?"

"At last," he answered, and we looked into each other's eyes and laughed as we stood together on the church steps, with little tender waves of feeling from our childhood sweeping to our feet.

"And you?" he said. "You look just the same. I knew you instantly. Yet you are changed too. So grown and so . . . so wonderfully. . . ."

I knew what he meant to say, and being too much of a child to pretend not to know, and too much of a woman (notwithstanding my nun-like impulses) not to find joy in it, I said I was glad.

"You've left the Convent, I see. When did that happen?"

I told him three weeks ago--that my father had come for me and we were going back to Ellan.

"And then? What are you going to do then?" he asked.

For a moment I felt ashamed to answer, but at last I told him that I was going home to be married.

"Married? When? To whom?"

I said I did not know when, but it was to be to the young Lord Raa.

"Raa? Did you say Raa? That . . . Good G----But surely you know. . . ."

He did not finish what he was going to say, so I told him I did not know anything, not having seen Lord Raa since I came to school, and everything having been arranged for me by my father.

"Not seen him since . . . everything arranged by your father?"

"Yes."

Then he asked me abruptly where I was staying, and when I told him he said he would walk back with me to the hotel.

His manner had suddenly changed, and several times as we walked together up the Tritoni and along the Du Marcelli he began to say something and then stopped.

"Surely your father knows. . . ."

"If he does, I cannot possibly understand. . . ."

I did not pay as much attention to his broken exclamations as I should have done but for the surprise and confusion of coming so suddenly upon him again; and when, as we reached the hotel, he said:

"I wonder if your father will allow me to speak. . . ."

"I'm sure he'll be delighted," I said, and then, in my great impatience, I ran upstairs ahead of him and burst into my father's room, crying:

"Father, whom do you think I have brought to see you--look!"

To my concern and discomfiture my father's reception of Martin was very cool, and at first he did not even seem to know him.

"You don't remember me, sir?" said Martin.

"I'm afraid I can't just place you," said my father.

After I had made them known to each other they sat talking about the South Pole expedition, but it was a chill and cheerless interview, and after a few minutes Martin rose to go.

"I find it kind of hard to figure you fellows out," said my father. "No money that I know of has ever been made in the Unknown, as you call it, and if you discover both Poles I don't just see how they're to be worth a two-cent stamp to you. But you know best, so good-bye and good luck to you!"

I went out to the lift with Martin, who asked if he could take me for a walk in the morning. I answered yes, and inquired what hour he would call for me.

"Twelve o'clock," he replied, and I said that would suit me exactly.

The Bishop came to dine with us that night, and after dinner, when I had gone to the window to look out over the city for the three lights on the Loggia of the Vatican, he and my father talked together for a long time in a low tone. They were still talking when I left them to go to bed.

TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER

At breakfast next morning my father told me that something unexpected had occurred to require that we should return home immediately, and therefore he had sent over to Cook's for seats by the noon express.

I was deeply disappointed, but I knew my father too well to demur, so I slipped away to my room and sent a letter to Martin, explaining the change in our plans and saying good-bye to him.

When we reached the station, however, I found Martin waiting on the platform in front of the compartment that was labelled with our name.

I thought my father was even more brusque with him than before, and the Bishop, who was to travel with us, was curt almost to rudeness. But Martin did not seem to mind that this morning, for his lower lip had the stiff setting which I had seen in it when he was a boy, and after I stepped into the carriage he stepped in after me, leaving the two men on the platform.

"Shall you be long away?" I asked.

"Too long unfortunately. Six months, nine--perhaps twelve, worse luck! Wish I hadn't to go at all," he answered.

I was surprised and asked why, whereupon he stammered some excuse, and then said abruptly:

"I suppose you'll not be married for some time at all events?"

I told him I did not know, everything depending on my father.

"Anyhow, you'll see and hear for yourself when you reach home, and then perhaps you'll. . . ."

I answered that I should have to do what my father desired, being a girl, and therefore. . . .

"But surely a girl has some rights of her own," he said, and then I was silent and a little ashamed, having a sense of female helplessness which I had never felt before and could find no words for.

"I'll write to your father," he said, and just at that moment the bell rang, and my father came into the compartment, saying:

"Now then, young man, if you don't want to be taken up to the North Pole instead of going down to the South one. . . ."

"That's all right, sir. Don't you trouble about _me_. I can take care of myself," said Martin.

Something in his tone must have said more than his words to my father and the Bishop, for I saw that they looked at each other with surprise.

Then the bell rang again, the engine throbbed, and Martin said, "Good-bye! Good-bye!"

While the train moved out of the station he stood bareheaded on the platform with such a woebegone face that looking back at him my throat began to hurt me as it used to do when I was a child.

I was very sad that day as we travelled north. My adopted country had become dear to me during my ten years' exile from home, and I thought I was seeing the last of my beautiful Italy, crowned with sunshine and decked with flowers.

But there was another cause of my sadness, and that was the thought of Martin's uneasiness about my marriage the feeling that if he had anything to say to my father he ought to have said it then.

And there was yet another cause of which I was quite unconscious--that like every other girl before love dawns on her, half of my nature was still asleep, the half that makes life lovely and the world dear.

To think that Martin Conrad was the one person who could have wakened my sleeping heart! That a word, a look, a smile from him that day could have changed the whole current of my life, and that. . . .

But no, I will not reproach him. Have I not known since the day on St. Mary's Rock that above all else he is a born gentleman?

And yet. . . . And yet. . . .

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

And yet I was a fool, or in spite of everything I should have spoken to Daniel O'Neill before he left Rome. I should have said to him:

"Do you know that the man to whom you are going to marry your daughter is a profligate and a reprobate? If you _do_ know this, are you deliberately selling her, body and soul, to gratify your lust of rank and power and all the rest of your rotten aspirations?"

That is what I ought to have done, but didn't do. I was afraid of being thought to have personal motives--of interfering where I wasn't wanted, of butting in when I had no right.

Yet I felt I _had_ a right, and I had half a mind to throw up everything and go back to Ellan. But the expedition was the big chance I had been looking forward to and I could not give it up.

So I resolved to write. But writing isn't exactly my job, and it took me a fortnight to get anything done to my satisfaction. By that time we were at Port Said, and from there I posted three letters,--the first to Daniel O'Neill, the second to Bishop Walsh, the third to Father Dan.

Would they reach in time? If so, would they be read and considered or resented and destroyed?

I did not know. I could not guess. And then I was going down into the deep Antarctic night, where no sound from the living world could reach me.

What would happen before I could get back? Only God could say.

M.C.

SECOND PART

MY MARRIAGE

TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

Notwithstanding my father's anxiety to leave Rome we travelled slowly and it was a week before we reached Ellan. By that time my depression had disappeared, and I was quivering with mingled curiosity and fear at the thought of meeting the man who was to be my husband.

My father, for reasons of his own, was equally excited, and as we sailed into the bay at Blackwater he pointed out the developments which had been made under his direction--the hotels, theatres, dancing palaces and boarding houses that lined the sea-front, and the electric railways that ran up to the tops of the mountains.

"See that?" he cried. "I told them I could make this old island hum."

On a great stone pier that stood deep into the bay, a crowd of people were waiting for the arrival of the steamer.

"That's nothing," said my father. "Nothing to what you see at the height of the season."

As soon as we had drawn up alongside the pier, and before the passengers had landed, four gentlemen came aboard, and my heart thumped with the thought that my intended husband would be one of them; but he was not, and the first words spoken to my father were--

"His lordship's apologies, sir. He has an engagement to-day, but hopes to see you at your own house to-morrow morning."

I recognised the speaker as the guardian (grown greyer and even less prepossessing) who had crossed with the young Lord Raa when he was going up to Oxford; and his companions were a smooth-faced man with searching eyes who was introduced as his lordship's solicitor from London, a Mr. Curphy, whom I knew to be my father's advocate, and my dear old Father Dan.

I was surprised to find Father Dan a smaller man than I had thought him, very plain and provincial, a little country parish priest, but he had the tender smile I always remembered, and the sweet Irish roll of the vowels that I could never forget.

"God bless you," he said. "How well you're looking! And how like your mother, Lord rest her soul! I knew the Blessed Virgin would take care of you, and she has, she has."

Three conveyances were waiting for us--a grand brougham for the Bishop, a big motor-car for the guardian and the London lawyer, and a still bigger one for ourselves.

"Well, s'long until to-morrow then," cried my father, getting up into the front row of his own ear, with the advocate beside him and Father Dan and myself behind.

On the way home Father Dan talked of the business that had brought me back, saying I was not to think too much of anything he might have said of Lord Raa in his letters, seeing that he had spoken from hearsay, and the world was so censorious--and then there was no measuring the miraculous influence that might be exercised by a good woman.

He said this with a certain constraint, and was more at ease when he spoke of the joy that ought to come into a girl's life at her marriage--her first love, her first love-letter, her wedding-day and her first baby, all the sweet and wonderful things of a new existence which a man could never know.

"Even an old priest may see that," he said, with a laugh and a pat of my hand.

We dropped Mr. Curphy at his house in Holmtown, and then my father sat with us at the back, and talked with tremendous energy of what he had done, of what he was going to do, and of all the splendours that were before me.

"You'll be the big woman of the island, gel, and there won't be a mother's son that dare say boo to you."

I noticed that, in his excitement, his tongue, dropping the suggestion of his adopted country, reverted to the racy speech of his native soil; and I had a sense of being with him before I was born, when he returned home from America with millions of dollars at his back, and the people who had made game of his father went down before his face like a flood.

Such of them as had not done so then (being of the "aristocracy" of the island and remembering the humble stock he came from) were to do so now, for in the second generation, and by means of his daughter's marriage, he was going to triumph over them all.

"We'll beat 'em, gel! My gough, yes, we'll beat 'em!" he cried, with a flash of his black eyes and a masterful lift of his eyebrows.

As we ran by the mansions of the great people of Ellan, he pointed them out to me with a fling of the arm and spoke of the families in a tone of contempt.

"See that? That's Christian of Balla-Christian. The man snubbed me six months ago. He'll know better six months to come. . . . That's Eyreton. His missus was too big to call on your mother--she'll call on you, though, you go bail. See yonder big tower in the trees? That's Folksdale, where the Farragans live. The daughters have been walking over the world like peacocks, but they'll crawl on it like cockroaches . . . Hulloh, here's ould Balgean of Eagle Hill, in his grand carriage with his English coachman. . . . See that, though? See him doff his hat to you, the ould hypocrite? He knows something. He's got an inkling. Things travel. We'll beat 'em, gel, we'll beat 'em! They'll be round us like bees about a honeypot."

It was impossible not to catch the contagion of my father's triumphant spirits, and in my different way I found myself tingling with delight as I recognised the scenes associated with my childhood--the village, the bridge, the lane to Sunny Lodge and Murphy's Mouth, and the trees that bordered our drive.

Nearly everything looked smaller or narrower or lower than I had thought, but I had forgotten how lovely they all were, lying so snugly under the hill and with the sea in front of them.

Our house alone when we drove up to it seemed larger than I had expected, but my father explained this by saying:

"Improvements, gel! I'll show you over them to-morrow morning."

Aunt Bridget (white-headed now and wearing spectacles and a white cap), Betsy Beauty (grown tall and round, with a kind of country comeliness) and Nessy MacLeod (looking like a premature old maid who was doing her best to be a girl) were waiting at the open porch when our car drew up, and they received me with surprising cordiality.

"Here she is at last!" said Aunt Bridget.

"And such luck as she has come home to!" said Betsy Beauty.

There were compliments on the improvement in my appearance (Aunt Bridget declaring she could not have believed it, she really could not), and then Nessy undertook to take me to my room.

"It's the same room still, Mary," said my Aunt, calling to me as I went upstairs. "When they were changing everything else I remembered your poor dear mother and wouldn't hear of their changing that. It isn't a bit altered."

It was not. Everything was exactly as I remembered it. But just as I was beginning for the first time in my life to feel grateful to Aunt Bridget, Nessy said:

"No thanks to her, though. If she'd had her way, she would have wiped out every trace of your mother, and arranged this marriage for her own daughter instead."

More of the same kind she said which left me with the impression that my father was now the god of her idolatry, and that my return was not too welcome to my aunt and cousin; but as soon as she was gone, and I was left alone, home began to speak to me in soft and entrancing whispers.

How my pulses beat, how my nerves tingled! Home! Home! Home!

From that dear spot everything seemed to be the same, and everything had something to say to me. What sweet and tender and touching memories!

Here was the big black four-post bed, with the rosary hanging at its head; and here was the praying-stool with the figure of Our Lady on the wall above it.

I threw up the window, and there was the salt breath of the sea in the crisp island air; there was the sea itself glistening in the afternoon sunshine; there was St Mary's Rock draped in its garment of sea-weed, and there were the clouds of white sea-gulls whirling about it.

Taking off my hat and coat I stepped downstairs and out of the house--going first into the farm-yard where the spring-less carts were still clattering over the cobble-stones; then into the cow-house, where the milkmaids were still sitting on low stools with their heads against the sides of the slow-eyed Brownies, and the milk rattling in their noisy pails; then into the farm-kitchen, where the air was full of the odour of burning turf and the still sweeter smell of cakes baking on a griddle; and finally into the potting-shed in the garden, where Tommy the Mate (more than ever like a weather-beaten old salt) was still working as before.

The old man looked round with his "starboard eye," and recognised me instantly.

"God bless my sowl," he cried, "if it isn't the lil' missy! Well, well! Well, well! And she's a woman grown! A real lady too! My gracious; yes," he said, after a second and longer look, "and there hasn't been the match of her on this island since they laid her mother under the sod!"

I wanted to ask him a hundred questions, but Aunt Bridget, who had been watching from a window, called from the house to say she was "mashing" a cup of tea for me, so I returned to the drawing-room where (my father being busy with his letters in the library) Betsy Beauty talked for half an hour about Lord Raa, his good looks, distinguished manners and general accomplishments.

"But aren't you just dying to see him?" she said.

I saw him the following morning.

TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

I was sitting in my own room, writing to the Reverend Mother, to tell her of my return home, when I heard the toot of a horn and raising my eyes saw a motor-car coming up the drive. It contained three gentlemen, one of them wore goggles and carried a silver-haired terrier on his knees.

A little later Nessy MacLeod came to tell me that Lord Raa and his party had arrived and I was wanted immediately.

I went downstairs hesitatingly, with a haunting sense of coming trouble. Reaching the door of the drawing-room I saw my intended husband for the first time--there being nothing in his appearance to awaken in me the memory of ever having seen him before.

He was on the hearthrug in front of the fire, talking to Betsy Beauty, who was laughing immoderately. To get a better look at him, and at the same time to compose myself, I stopped for a moment to speak to the three gentlemen (the two lawyers and Lord Raa's trustee or guardian) who were standing with my father in the middle of the floor.

He was undoubtedly well-dressed and had a certain air of breeding, but even to my girlish eyes he betrayed at that first sight the character of a man who had lived an irregular, perhaps a dissipated life.

His face was pale, almost puffy, his grey eyes were slow and heavy, his moustache was dark and small, his hair was thin over his forehead, and he had a general appearance of being much older than his years, which I knew to be thirty-three.

His manners, when I approached him, were courteous and gentle, almost playful and indulgent, but through all their softness there pierced a certain hardness, not to say brutality, which I afterwards learned (when life had had its tug at me) to associate with a man who has spent much of his time among women of loose character.

Betsy Beauty made a great matter of introducing us; but in a drawling voice, and with a certain play of humour, he told her it was quite unnecessary, since we were very old friends, having made each other's acquaintance as far back as ten years ago, when I was the prettiest little woman in the world, he remembered, though perhaps my manners were not quite cordial.

"We had a slight difference on the subject of kisses. Don't you remember it?"

Happily there was no necessity to reply, for my father came to say that he wished to show his lordship the improvements he had been making, and the rest of us were at liberty to follow them.

The improvements consisted chiefly of a new wing to the old house, containing a dining room, still unfurnished, which had been modelled, as I found later, on the corresponding room in Castle Raa.

With a proud lift of his white head my father pointed out the beauties of his new possession, while my intended husband, with his monocle to his eye, looked on with a certain condescension, and answered with a languid humour that narrowly bordered on contempt.

"Oak, sir, solid oak," said my father, rapping with his knuckles on the tall, dark, heavy wainscoting.

"As old as our hearts and as hard as our heads, I suppose," said Lord Raa.

"Harder than some, sir," said my father.

"Exactly," said Lord Raa in his slow drawl, and then there was general laughter.

The bell rang for luncheon, and we went into the plain old dining room, where Aunt Bridget placed her principal guest on her right and told him all about her late husband, the Colonel, his honours and military achievements.

I could see that Lord Raa was soon very weary of this, and more than once, sitting by his side, I caught the cynical and rather supercilious responses to which, under the gloss of his gracious manners, Aunt Bridget seemed quite oblivious.

I was so nervous and embarrassed that I spoke very little during luncheon, and even Aunt Bridget observed this at last.

"Mary, dear, why don't you speak?" she said.

But without waiting for my reply she proceeded to explain to his lordship that the strangest change had come over me since I was a child, when I had been the sauciest little chatterbox in the world, whereas now I was so shy that it was nearly impossible to get a word out of me.

"Hope I shall be able to get one word out of her, at least," said his lordship, whereupon Aunt Bridget smiled significantly and Betsy Beauty burst into fits of laughter.

Almost before the meal was over, my father rose from his seat at the head of the table, and indicating the lawyers who sat near to him, he said:

"These gentlemen and I have business to fix up--money matters and all that--so I guess we'll step into the library and leave you young people to look after yourselves."

Everybody rose to leave the room.

"All back for tea-time," said Aunt Bridget.

"Of course you don't want _me_," said Betsy Beauty with a giggle, and at the next moment I was alone with his lordship, who drew a long breath that was almost like a yawn, and said:

"Is there no quiet place we can slip away to?"

There was the glen at the back of the house (the Cape Flora of Martin Conrad), so I took him into that, not without an increasing sense of embarrassment. It was a clear October day, the glen was dry, and the air under the shadow of the thinning trees was full of the soft light of the late autumn.

"Ah, this is better," said his lordship.

He lit a cigar and walked for some time by my side without speaking, merely flicking the seeding heads off the dying thistles with his walking stick, and then ruckling it through the withered leaves with which the path was strewn.

But half way up the glen he began to look aslant at me through his monocle, and then to talk about my life in Rome, wondering how I could have been content to stay so long at the Convent, and hinting at a rumour which had reached him that I had actually wished to stay there altogether.

"Extraordinary! 'Pon my word, extraordinary! It's well enough for women who have suffered shipwreck in their lives to live in such places, but for a young gal with any fortune, any looks . . . why I wonder she doesn't die of _ennui_."

I was still too nervous and embarrassed to make much protest, so he went on to tell me with what difficulty he supported the boredom of his own life even in London, with its clubs, its race-meetings, its dances, its theatres and music halls, and the amusement to be got out of some of the ladies of society, not to speak of certain well-known professional beauties.

One of his great friends--his name was Eastcliff--was going to marry the most famous of the latter class (a foreign dancer at the "Empire"), and since he was rich and could afford to please himself, why shouldn't he?

When we reached the waterfall at the top of the glen (it had been the North Cape of Martin Conrad), we sat on a rustic seat which stands there, and then, to my still deeper embarrassment, his lordship's conversation came to close quarters.

Throwing away his cigar and taking his silver-haired terrier on his lap he said:

"Of course you know what the business is which the gentlemen are discussing in the library?"

As well as I could for the nervousness that was stifling me, I answered that I knew.

He stroked the dog with one hand, prodded his stick into the gravel with the other, and said:

"Well, I don't know what your views about marriage are. Mine, I may say, are liberal."

I listened without attempting to reply.

"I think nine-tenths of the trouble that attends married life--the breakdowns and what not--come of an irrational effort to tighten the marriage knot."

Still I said nothing.

"To imagine that two independent human beings can be tied together like a couple of Siamese twins, neither to move without the other, living precisely the same life, year in, year out . . . why, it's silly, positively silly."

In my ignorance I could find nothing to say, and after another moment my intended husband swished the loosened gravel with his stick and said:

"I believe in married people leaving each other free--each going his and her own way--what do you think?"

I must have stammered some kind of answer--I don't know what--for I remember that he said next:

"Quite so, that's my view of matrimony, and I'm glad to see you appear to share it. . . . Tell the truth, I was afraid you wouldn't," he added, with something more about the nuns and the convent.

I wanted to say that I didn't, but my nervousness was increasing every moment, and before I could find words in which to protest he was speaking to me again.

"Our friends in the library seem to think that you and I could get along together, and I'm disposed to think they're right--aren't you?"

In my ignorance and helplessness, and with the consciousness of what I was expected to do, I merely looked at him without speaking.

Then he fixed his monocle afresh, and, looking back at me in a curious way, he said:

"I don't think I should bore you, my dear. In fact, I should be rather proud of having a good-looking woman for my wife, and I fancy I could give you a good time. In any case"--this with a certain condescension--"my _name_ might be of some use to you."

A sort of shame was creeping over me. The dog was yawning in my face. My intended husband threw it off his knee.

"Shall we consider it a settled thing, then?" he asked, and when in my confusion I still made no reply (having nothing which I felt myself entitled to say), he said something about Aunt Bridget and what she had told him at luncheon about my silence and shyness, and then rising to his feet he put my arm through his own, and turned our faces towards home.

That was all. As I am a truthful woman, that was everything. Not a word from me, nay, not half a word, merely a passive act of silent acquiescence, and in my youthful and almost criminal innocence I was committed to the most momentous incident of my life.

But if there was no love-making, no fondling, no kissing, no courtship of any kind, and none of the delirious rapture which used to be described in Alma's novels, I was really grateful for that, and immensely relieved to find that matters could he completed without them.

When we reached the house, the bell was ringing for tea and my father was coming out of the library, followed by the lawyers.

"So that's all right, gentlemen?" he was saying.

"Yes, that's all right, sir," they were answering; and then, seeing us as we entered, my father said to Lord Raa:

"And what about you two?"

"We're all right also," said his lordship in his drawling voice.

"Good!" said my father, and he slapped his lordship sharply on the back, to his surprise, and I think, discomfiture.

Then with a cackle of light laughter among the men, we all trooped into the drawing room.

Aunt Bridget in her gold-rimmed spectacles and new white cap, poured out the tea from our best silver tea-pot, while Nessy MacLeod with a geranium in her red hair, and Betsy Beauty, with large red roses in her bosom, handed round the cups. After a moment, my father, with a radiant face, standing back to the fire, said in a loud voice:

"Friends all, I have something to tell you."

Everybody except myself looked up and listened, though everybody knew what was coming.

"We've had a stiff tussle in the library this afternoon, but everything is settled satisfactory--and the marriage is as good as made."

There was a chorus of congratulations for me, and a few for his lordship, and then my father said again:

"Of course there'll be deeds to draw up, and I want things done correct, even if it costs me a bit of money. But we've only one thing more to fix up to-day, and then we're through--the wedding. When is it to come off?"

An appeal was made to me, but I felt it was only formal, so I glanced across to Lord Raa without speaking.

"Come now," said my father, looking from one to the other. "The clean cut is the short cut, you know, and when I'm sot on doing a thing, I can't take rest till it's done. What do you say to this day next month?"

I bowed and my intended husband, in his languid way, said:

"Agreed!"

A few minutes afterwards the motor was ordered round, and the gentlemen prepared to go. Then the silver-haired terrier was missed, and for the first time that day his lordship betrayed a vivid interest, telling us its price and pedigree and how much he would give rather than lose it. But at the last moment Tommy appeared with the dog in his arms and dropped it into the car, whereupon my intended husband thanked him effusively.

"Yes," said Tommy, "I thought you set store by _that_, sir."

At the next moment the car was gone.

"Well, you _are_ a lucky girl," said Betsy Beauty; and Aunt Bridget began to take credit to herself for all that had come to pass, and to indicate the methods by which she meant to manage Castle Raa as soon as ever I became mistress of it.

Thus in my youth, my helplessness, my ignorance, and my inexperience I became engaged to the man who had been found and courted for me. If I acquiesced, I had certainly not been consulted. My father had not consulted me. My intended husband had not consulted me. Nobody consulted me. I am not even sure that I thought anybody was under any obligation to consult me. Love had not spoken to me, sex was still asleep in me, and my marriage was arranged before my deeper nature knew what was being done.

TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

The next weeks were full of hurry, hubbub and perturbation. Our house was turned upside down. Milliners, sewing-maids and dressmakers were working day and night. Flowers, feathers and silk remnants were flowing like sea-wrack into every room. Orders were given, orders were retracted and given again, and then again retracted.

Such flying up and down stairs! Everybody so breathless! Everybody so happy! Every face wearing a smile! Every tongue rippling with laughter! The big grey mansion which used to seem so chill and cold felt for the first time like a house of joy.

In the midst of these busy preparations I had no time to think. My senses were excited. I was dazed, stunned, wrapped round by a kind of warm air of hot-house happiness, and this condition of moral intoxication increased as the passing of the days brought fresh developments.

Our neighbours began to visit us. My father had been right about the great people of the island. Though they had stood off so long, they found their account in my good fortune, and as soon as my marriage was announced they came in troops to offer their congratulations.

Never, according to Tommy the Mate, had the gravel of our carriage drive been so rucked up by the pawing feet of high-bred horses. But their owners were no less restless. It was almost pitiful to see their shamefacedness as they entered our house for the first time, and to watch the shifts they were put to in order to account for the fact that they had never been there before.

Aunt Bridget's vanity was too much uplifted by their presence to be particular about their excuses, but my father's contempt of their subterfuges was naked and undisguised, and I hardly know whether to feel amused or ashamed when I think of how he scored off them, how he lashed them to the bone, with what irony and sarcasm he scorched their time-serving little souls.

When they were very great folks, the "aristocracy" of Ellan, he pretended not to know who they were, and asked their names, their father's names, and what parishes they came from.

"Some of the Christians of Balla-Christian, are you? Think of that now. And me a born Ellanman, and not knowing you from Adam!"

When they were very near neighbours, with lands that made boundary with our own, he pretended to think they had been twenty years abroad, or perhaps sick, or even dead and buried.

"Too bad, ma'am, too bad," he would say. "And me thinking you were under the sod through all the lonely years my poor wife was ill and dying."

But when they were insular officials, who "walked on the stars," and sometimes snubbed him in public, the rapier of ridicule was too light for his heavy hand, and he took up the sledge-hammer, telling them he was the same man to-day as yesterday, and only his circumstances were different--his daughter being about to become the lady of the first house in the island, and none of them being big enough to be left out of it.

After such scenes Aunt Bridget, for all her despotism within her own doors, used to tremble with dread of our neighbours taking lasting offence, but my father would say:

"Chut, woman, they'll come again, and make no more faces about it."

They did, and if they were shy of my father they were gracious enough to me, saying it was such a good thing for society in the island that Castle Raa was to have a lady, a real lady, at the head of it at last.

Then came their wedding presents--pictures, books, silver ornaments, gold ornaments, clocks, watches, chains, jewellery, until my bedroom was blocked up with them. As each fresh parcel arrived there would be a rush of all the female members of our household to open it, after which Betsy Beauty would say:

"What a lucky girl you are!"

I began to think I was. I found it impossible to remain unaffected by the whirlwind of joyous turmoil in which I lived. The refulgence of the present hour wiped out the past, which seemed to fade away altogether. After the first few days I was flying about from place to place, and wherever I went I was a subject for congratulation and envy.

If there were moments of misgiving, when, like the cold wind out of a tunnel, there came the memory of the Reverend Mother and the story she had told me at Nemi, there were other moments when I felt quite sure that, in marrying Lord Raa, I should be doing a self-sacrificing thing and a kind of solemn duty.

One such moment was when Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, who with his clammy hands always made me think of an over-fatted fish, came to tell him that, after serious legal difficulties, the civil documents had been agreed to, for, after he had finished with my father, he drew me aside and said, as he smoothed his long brown beard:

"You ought to be a happy girl, Mary. I suppose you know what you are doing for your father? You are wiping out the greatest disappointment of his life, and rectifying the cruelty--the inevitable cruelty--of the law, when you were born a daughter after he had expected a son."

Another such moment was when the Bishop came, in his grand carriage, to say that after much discussion he had persuaded his lordship to sign the necessary declaration that all the children of our union, irrespective of sex, should be brought up as Catholics, for taking me aside, as the advocate had done the day before, he said, in his suave voice, fingering his jewelled cross:

"I congratulate you, my child. Yours is a great and precious privilege--the privilege of bringing back to the Church a family which has been estranged from it for nineteen years."

At the end of a fortnight we signed the marriage settlement. The little ceremony took place in the drawing-room of my father's house. My intended husband, who had not been to see me in the meantime, brought with him (as well as his trustee and lawyer) a lady and a gentleman.

The lady was his maiden aunt, Lady Margaret Anslem, a fair woman of about forty, fashionably dressed, redolent of perfume, and (except to me, to whom she talked quite amicably) rather reserved and haughty, as if the marriage of her nephew into our family were a bitter pill which she had compelled herself to swallow.

The gentleman was a tall young man wearing a very high collar and cravat, and using a handkerchief with embroidered initials in the corner of it. He turned out to be the Hon. Edward Eastcliff--the great friend who, being rich enough to please himself, was about to marry the professional beauty.

I noticed that Aunt Bridget, with something of the instinct of the fly about the flame, immediately fixed herself upon the one, and that Betsy Beauty attached herself to the other.

Lord Raa himself looked as tired as before, and for the first half-hour he behaved as if he did not quite know what to do with himself for wretchedness and _ennui_.

Then the deeds were opened and spread out on a table, and though the gentlemen seemed to be trying not to discuss the contents aloud I could not help hearing some of the arrangements that had been made for the payment of my intended husband's debts, and certain details of his annual allowance.

Looking back upon that ugly hour, I wonder why, under the circumstances, I should have been so wounded, but I remember that a sense of discomfort amounting to shame came upon me at sight of the sorry bargaining. It seemed to have so little to do with the spiritual union of souls, which I had been taught to think marriage should be. But I had no time to think more about that before my father, who had signed the documents himself in his large, heavy hand, was saying.

"Now, gel, come along, we're waiting for your signature."

I cannot remember that I read anything. I cannot remember that anything was read to me. I was told where to sign, and I signed, thinking what must be must be, and that was all I had to do with the matter.

I was feeling a little sick, nevertheless, and standing by the tire with one foot on the fender, when Lord Raa came up to me at the end, and said in his drawling voice:

"So it's done."

"Yes, it's done," I answered.

After a moment he talked of where we were to live, saying we must of course pass most of our time in London.

"But have you any choice about the honeymoon," he said, "where we should spend it, I mean?"

I answered that he would know best, but when he insisted on my choosing, saying it was my right to do so, I remembered that during my time in the Convent the one country in the world I had most desired to see was the Holy Land.

Never as long as I live shall I forget the look in his lordship's grey eyes when I gave this as my selection.

"You mean Jerusalem--Nazareth--the Dead Sea and all that?" he asked.

I felt my face growing red as at a frightful _faux pas_, but his lordship only laughed, called me his "little nun," and said that since I had been willing to leave the choice to him he would suggest Egypt and Italy, and Berlin and Paris on the way back, with the condition that we left Ellan for London on the day of our marriage.

After the party from Castle Raa had gone, leaving some of their family lace and pearls behind for the bride to wear at her wedding, and after Aunt Bridget had hoped that "that woman" (meaning Lady Margaret) didn't intend to live at the Castle after my marriage, because such a thing would not fit in with her plans "at all, at all," I mentioned the arrangements for the honeymoon, whereupon Betsy Beauty, to whom Italy was paradise, and London glimmered in an atmosphere of vermillion and gold, cried out as usual:

"What a lucky, lucky girl you are!"

But the excitement which had hitherto buoyed me up was partly dispelled by this time, and I was beginning to feel some doubt of it.

TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

As my wedding-day approached and time ran short, the air of joy which had pervaded our house was driven out by an atmosphere of irritation. We were all living on our nerves. The smiles that used to be at everybody's service gave place to frowns, and, in Aunt Bridget's case, to angry words which were distributed on all sides and on all occasions.

As a consequence I took refuge in my room, and sat long hours there in my dressing-gown and slippers, hearing the hubbub that was going on in the rest of the house, but taking as little part in it as possible. In this semi-conventual silence and solitude, the excitement which had swept me along for three weeks subsided rapidly.

I began to think, and above all to feel, and the one thing I felt beyond everything else was a sense of something wanting.

I remembered the beautiful words of the Pope about marriage as a mystic relation, a sacred union of souls, a bond of love such as Christ's love for His Church, and I asked myself if I felt any such love for the man who was to become my husband.

I knew I did not. I reminded myself that I had had nearly no conversation with him, that our intercourse had been of the briefest, that I had seen him only three times altogether, and that I scarcely knew him at all.

And yet I was going to marry him! In a few days more I should be his wife, and we should be bound together as long as life should last!

Then I remembered what Father Dan had said about a girl's first love, her first love-letter, and all the sweet, good things that should come to her at the time of her marriage.

None of them had come to me. I do not think my thoughts of love were ever disturbed by any expectation of the delights of the heart--languors of tenderness, long embraces, sighs and kisses, and the joys and fevers of the flesh--for I knew nothing about them. But, nevertheless, I asked myself if I had mistaken the matter altogether. Was love really necessary? In all their busy preparations neither my father, nor my husband, nor the lawyers, nor the Bishop himself, had said anything about that.

I began to sleep badly and to dream. It was always the same dream. I was in a frozen region of the far north or south, living in a ship which was stuck fast in the ice, and had a great frowning barrier before it that was full of dangerous crevasses. Then for some reason I wanted to write a letter, but was unable to do so, because somebody had trodden on my pen and broken it.

It seems strange to me now as I look back upon that time, that I did not know what angel was troubling the waters of my soul--that Nature was whispering to me, as it whispers to every girl at the first great crisis of her life. But neither did I know what angel was leading my footsteps when, three mornings before my wedding-day, I got up early and went out to walk in the crisp salt air.

Almost without thinking I turned down the lane that led to the shore, and before I was conscious of where I was going, I found myself near Sunny Lodge. The chimney was smoking for breakfast, and there was a smell of burning turf coming from the house, which was so pretty and unchanged, with the last of the year's roses creeping over the porch and round the windows of the room in which I had slept when a child.

Somebody was digging in the garden. It was the doctor in his shirt sleeves.

"Good morning, doctor," I called, speaking over the fence.

He rested on his spade and looked up, but did not speak for a moment.

"Don't you know who I am?" I asked.

"Why yes, of course; you must be. . . ."

Without finishing he turned his head towards the porch and cried:

"Mother! Mother! Come and see who's here at last!"

Martin's mother came out of the porch, a little smaller, I thought, but with the same dear womanly face over her light print frock, which was as sweet as may-blossom.

She held up both hands at sight of me and cried:

"There, now! What did I tell you, doctor! Didn't I say they might marry her to fifty lords, but she wouldn't forget her old friends!"

I laughed, the doctor laughed, and then she laughed, and the sweetest part of it was that she did not know what we were laughing at.

Then I opened the gate and stepped up and held out my hand, and involuntarily she wiped her own hand (which was covered with meal from the porridge she was making) before taking mine.

"Goodness me, it's Mary O'Neill."

"Yes, it's I."

"But let me have a right look at you," she said, taking me now by both hands. "They were saying such wonderful things about the young misthress that I wasn't willing to believe them. But, no, no," she said, after a moment, "they didn't tell me the half."

I was still laughing, but it was as much as I could do not to cry, so I said:

"May I come in?"

"My goodness yes, and welcome," she said, and calling to the doctor to wash his hands and follow us, she led the way into the kitchen-parlour, where the kettle was singing from the "slowery" and a porridge-pot was bubbling over the fire.

"Sit down. Take the elbow-chair in the chiollagh [the hearth place]. There! That's nice. Aw, yes, you know the house."

Being by this time unable to speak for a lump in my throat that was hurting me, I looked round the room, so sweet, so homely, so closely linked with tender memories of my childhood, while Martin's mother (herself a little nervous and with a touching softness in her face) went on talking while she stirred the porridge with a porridge-stick.

"Well, well! To think of all the years since you came singing carols to my door! You remember it, don't you? . . . Of course you do. 'Doctor,' I said, 'don't talk foolish. _She'll_ not forget. _I_ know Mary O'Neill. She may be going to be a great lady, but haven't I nursed her on my knee?'"

"Then you've heard what's to happen?" I asked.

"Aw yes, woman, yes," she answered in a sadder tone, I thought. "Everybody's bound to hear it--what with the bands practising for the procession, and the bullocks roasting for the poor, and the fireworks and the illuminations, and I don't know what."

She was silent for a moment after that, and then in her simple way she said:

"But it's all as one if you love the man, even if he _is_ a lord."

"You think that's necessary, don't you?"

"What, _millish?_"

"Love. You think it's necessary to love one's husband?"

"Goodness sakes, girl, yes. If you don't have love, what have you? What's to keep the pot boiling when the fire's getting low and the winter's coming on, maybe? The doctor's telling me some of the fine ladies in London are marrying without it--just for money and titles and all to that. But I can't believe it, I really can't! They've got their troubles same as ourselves, poor things, and what's the use of their fine clothes and grand carriages when the dark days come and the night's falling on them?"

It was harder than ever to speak now, so I got up to look at some silver cups that stood on the mantelpiece.

"Martin's," said his mother, to whom they were precious as rubies. "He won them at swimming and running and leaping and climbing and all to that. Aw, yes, yes! He was always grand at games, if he couldn't learn his lessons, poor boy. And now he's gone away from us--looking for South Poles somewheres."

"I know--I saw him in Rome," said I.

She dropped her porridge-stick and looked at me with big eyes.

"Saw him? In Rome, you say? After he sailed, you mean?"

I nodded, and then she cried excitedly to the doctor who was just then coming into the house, after washing his hands under the pump.

"Father, she saw himself in Rome after he sailed."

There was only one _himself_ in that house, therefore it was not difficult for the doctor to know who was meant. And so great was the eagerness of the old people to hear the last news of the son who was the apple of their eye that I had to stay to breakfast and tell them all about our meeting.

While Martin's mother laid the tables with oat-cake and honey and bowls of milk and deep plates for the porridge, I told the little there was to tell, and then listened to their simple comments.

"There now, doctor! Think of that! Those two meeting in foreign parts that used to be such friends when they were children! Like brother and sister, you might say. And whiles and whiles we were thinking that some day . . . but we'll say no more about that now, doctor."

"No, we'll say no more about that now, Christian Ann," said the doctor.

Then there was a moment of silence, and it was just as if they had been rummaging among half-forgotten things in a dark corner of their house, and had come upon a cradle, and the child that had lived in it was dead.

It was sweet, but it was also painful to stay long in that house of love, and as soon as I had eaten my oat-cake and honey I got up to go. The two good souls saw me to the door saying I was not to expect either of them at the Big House on my wedding-day, because she was no woman for smart clothes, and the doctor, who was growing rheumatic, had given up his night-calls, and therefore his gig, so as to keep down expenses.

"We'll be at the church, though," said Martin's mother. "And if we don't see you to speak to, you'll know we're there and wishing you happiness in our hearts."

I could not utter a word when I left them; but after I had walked a little way I looked back, intending to wave my farewell, and there they were together at the gate still, and one of her hands was on the doctor's shoulder--the sweet woman who had chosen love against the world, and did not regret it, even now when the night was falling on her.

I had to pass the Presbytery on my way home, and as I did so, I saw Father Dan in his study. He threw up the window sash and called in a soft voice, asking me to wait until he came down to me.

He came down hurriedly, just as he was, in his worn and discoloured cassock and biretta, and walked up the road by my side, breathing rapidly and obviously much agitated.

"The Bishop is staying with me over the wedding, and he is in such a fury that . . . Don't worry. It will be all right. But . . ."

"Yes?"

"Did you see young Martin Conrad while you were in Rome?"

I answered that I did.

"And did anything pass between you . . . about your marriage, I mean?"

I told him all that I had said to Martin, and all that Martin had said to me.

"Because he has written a long letter to the Bishop denouncing it, and calling on him to stop it."

"To stop it?"

"That's so. He says it is nothing but trade and barter, and if the Church is willing to give its blessing to such rank commercialism, let it bless the Stock Exchange, let it sanctify the slave market."

"Well?"

"The Bishop threatens to tell your father. 'Who is this young man,' he says, 'who dares to . . .' But if I thought there was nothing more to your marriage than . . . If I imagined that what occurred in the case of your dear mother . . . But that's not all."

"Not all?"

"No. Martin has written to me too, saying worse--far worse."

"What does he say, Father Dan?"

"I don't really know if I ought to tell you, I really don't. Yet if it's true . . . if there's anything in it . . ."

I was trembling, but I begged him to tell me what Martin had said. He told me. It was about my intended husband--that he was a man of irregular life, a notorious loose liver, who kept up a connection with somebody in London, a kind of actress who was practically his wife already, and therefore his marriage with me would be--so Martin had said--nothing but "legalised and sanctified concubinage."

With many breaks and pauses my dear old priest told me this story, as if it were something so infamous that his simple and innocent heart could scarcely credit it.

"If I really thought it was true," he said, "that a man living such a life could come here to marry my little . . . But no, God could not suffer a thing like that. I must ask, though. I must make sure. We live so far away in this little island that . . . But I must go back now. The Bishop will be calling for me."

Still deeply agitated, Father Dan left me by the bridge, and at the gate of our drive I found Tommy the Mate on a ladder, covering, with flowers from the conservatory, a triumphal arch which the joiner had hammered up the day before.

The old man hardly noticed me as I passed through, and this prompted me to look up and speak to him.

"Tommy," I said, "do you know you are the only one who hasn't said a good word to me about my marriage?"

"Am I, missy?" he answered, without looking down. "Then maybe that's because I've had so many bad ones to say to other people."

I asked which other people.

"Old Johnny Christopher, for one. I met him last night at the 'Horse and Saddle.' 'Grand doings at the Big House, they're telling me,' says Johnny. 'I won't say no,' I says. 'It'll be a proud day for the grand-daughter of Neill the Lord when she's mistress of Castle Raa,' says Johnny. 'Maybe so,' I says, 'but it'll be a prouder day for Castle Raa when she sets her clane little foot in it.'"

TWENTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

I should find it difficult now, after all that has happened since, to convey an adequate idea of the sense of shame and personal dishonour which was produced in me by Father Dan's account of the contents of Martin's letter. It was like opening a door out of a beautiful garden into a stagnant ditch.

That Martin's story was true I had never one moment's doubt, first because Martin had told it, and next because it agreed at all points with the little I had learned of Lord Raa in the only real conversation I had yet had with him.

Obviously he cared for the other woman, and if, like his friend Eastcliff, he had been rich enough to please himself, he would have married her; but being in debt, and therefore in need of an allowance, he was marrying me in return for my father's money.

It was shocking. It was sinful. I could not believe that my father, the lawyers and the Bishop knew anything about it.

I determined to tell them, but how to do so, being what I was, a young girl out of a convent, I did not know.

Never before had I felt so deeply the need of my mother. If she had been alive I should have gone to her, and with my arms about her neck and my face in her breast, I should have told her all my trouble.

There was nobody but Aunt Bridget, and little as I had ever expected to go to her under any circumstances, with many misgivings and after much hesitation I went.

It was the morning before the day of my marriage. I followed my aunt as she passed through the house like a biting March wind, scolding everybody, until I found her in her own room.

She was ironing her new white cap, and as I entered (looking pale, I suppose) she flopped down her flat iron on to its stand and cried:

"Goodness me, girl, what's amiss? Caught a cold with your morning walks, eh? Haven't I enough on my hands without that? We must send for the doctor straight. We can't have _you_ laid up now, after all this trouble and expense."

"It isn't that, Auntie."

"Then in the name of goodness what is it?"

I told her, as well as I could for the cold grey eyes that kept looking at me through their gold-rimmed spectacles. At first my aunt listened with amazement, and then she laughed outright.

"So _you've_ heard that story, have you? Mary O'Neill," she said, with a thump of her flat iron, "I'm surprised at you."

I asked if she thought it wasn't true.

"How do I know if it's true? And what do I care whether it is or isn't? Young men will be young men, I suppose."

She went on with her ironing as she added:

"Did you expect you were marrying a virgin? If every woman asked for that there would be a nice lot of old maids in the world, wouldn't there?"

I felt myself flushing up to the forehead, yet I managed to say:

"But if he is practically married to the other woman. . . ."

"Not he married. Whoever thinks about marriage in company like that? You might as well talk about marriage in the hen coop."

"But all the same if he cares for her, Auntie. . . ."

"Who says he cares for her? And if he does he'll settle her off and get rid of her before he marries you."

"But will that be right?" I said, whereupon my aunt rested her iron and looked at me as if I had said something shameful.

"Mary O'Neill, what do you mean? Of course it will be right. He shouldn't have two women, should he? Do you think the man's a barn-door rooster?"

My confusion was increasing, but I said that in any case my intended husband could not care for _me_, or he would have seen more of me.

"Oh, you'll see enough of him by and by. Don't you worry about that."

I said I was not sure that he had made me care much for him.

"Time enough for that, too. You can't expect the man to work miracles."

Then, with what courage was left me, I tried to say that I had been taught to think of marriage as a sacrament, instituted by the Almighty so that those who entered it might live together in union, peace and love, whereas . . .

But I had to stop, for Aunt Bridget, who had been looking at me with her hard lip curled, said:

"Tut! That's all right to go to church with on Sunday, but on weekdays marriage is no moonshine, I can tell you. It's a practical matter. Just an arrangement for making a home, and getting a family, and bringing up children--that's what marriage is, if you ask me."

"But don't you think love is necessary?"

"Depends what you mean by love. If you mean what they talk about in poetry and songs--bleeding hearts and sighs and kisses and all that nonsense--no!" said my aunt, with a heavy bang on her ironing.

"That's what people mean when they talk about marrying for love, and it generally ends in poverty and misery, and sensible women have nothing to do with it. Look at me," she said, spitting on the bottom of her iron, "do you think I married for love when I married the colonel? No indeed! 'Here's a quiet respectable man with a nice income,' I said, 'and if I put my little bit to his little bit we'll get along comfortably if he _is_ a taste in years,' I said. Look at your mother, though. She was one of the marrying-for-love kind, and if we had let her have her way where would she have been afterwards with her fifteen years as an invalid? And where would you have been by this time? No," said Aunt Bridget, bringing down her flat-iron with a still heavier bang, "a common-sense marriage, founded on suitability of position and property, and all that, is the only proper sort of match. And that's what's before you now, girl, so for goodness' sake don't go about like the parish pan, letting every busybody make mischief with you. My Betsy wouldn't if she had your chance--I can tell you that much, my lady."

I did not speak. There was another bang or two of the flat-iron, and then,

"Besides, love will come. Of course it will. It will come in time. If you don't exactly love your husband when you marry him you'll love him later on. A wife ought to teach herself to love her husband. I know I had to, and if. . . ."

"But if she can't, Auntie?"

"Then she ought to be ashamed of herself, and say nothing about it."

It was useless to say more, so I rose to go.

"Yes, go," said Aunt Bridget. "I'm so bothered with other people's business that my head's all through-others. And, Mary O'Neill," she said, looking after me as I passed through the door, "for mercy's sake do brighten up a hit, and don't look as if marrying a husband was like taking a dose of jalap. It isn't as bad as that, anyway."

It served me right. I should have known better. My aunt and I spoke different languages; we stood on different ground.

Returning to my room I found a letter from Father Dan. It ran--

_"Dear Daughter in Jesus,

"I have been afraid to go far into the story we spoke about from fear of offending my Bishop, but I have inquired of your father and he assures me that there is not a word of truth in it.

"So I am compelled to believe that our good Martin must have been misinformed, and am dismissing the matter from my mind. Trusting you will dismiss it from your mind also,

"Yours in Xt.,

"D.D."_

TWENTY-NINTH CHAPTER

I could not do as Father Dan advised, being now enmeshed in the threads of innumerable impulses unknown to myself, and therefore firmly convinced that Martin's story was not only true, but a part of the whole sordid business whereby a husband was being bought for me.

With this thought I went about all day, asking myself what I could do even yet, but finding no answer until nine o'clock at night, when, immediately after supper (we lived country fashion), Aunt Bridget said:

"Now then, off to bed, girls. Everybody must be stirring early in the morning."

And then I slipped upstairs to my room, and replied to Father Dan.

Never had I written such a letter before. I poured my whole heart on to the paper, saying what marriage meant to me, as the Pope himself had explained it, a sacrament implying and requiring love as the very soul of it, and since I did not feel this love for the man I was about to marry, and had no grounds for thinking he felt it for me, and being sure that other reasons had operated to bring us together, I begged Father Dan, by his memory of my mother, and his affection for me, and his desire to see me good and happy, to intervene with my father and the Bishop, even at this late hour, and at the church door itself to stop the ceremony.

It was late before I finished, and I thought the household was asleep, but just as I was coming to an end I heard my father moving in the room below, and then a sudden impulse came to me, and with a new thought I went downstairs and knocked at his door.

"Who's there?" he cried. "Come in."

He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, shaving before a looking-glass which was propped up against two ledgers. The lather on his upper lip gave his face a fierce if rather grotesque expression.

"Oh, it's you," he said. "Sit down. Got to do this to-night--goodness knows if I'll have time for it in the morning."

I took the seat in the ingle which Father Dan occupied on the night of my birth. The fire had nearly burnt out.

"Thought you were in bed by this time. Guess I should have been in bed myself but for this business. Look there"--he pointed with the handle of his razor to the table littered with papers--"that's a bit of what I've had to do for you. I kind o' think you ought to be grateful to your father, my gel."

I told him he was very kind, and then, very nervously, said:

"But are you sure it's quite right, sir?"

Not catching my meaning he laughed.

"Right?" he said, holding the point of his nose aside between the tips of his left thumb and first finger. "Guess it's about as right as law and wax can make it."

"I don't mean that, sir. I mean. . . ."

"What?" he said, facing round.

Then trembling and stammering I told him. I did not love Lord Raa. Lord Raa did not love me. Therefore I begged him for my sake, for his sake, for everybody's sake (I think I said for my mother's sake also) to postpone our marriage.

At first my father seemed unable to believe his own ears.

"Postpone? Now? After all this money spent? And everything signed and sealed and witnessed!"

"Yes, if you please, sir, because. . . ."

I got no farther, for flinging down his razor my father rose in a towering rage.

"Are you mad? Has somebody been putting the evil eye on you? The greatest match this island has ever seen, and you say postpone--put it off, stop it, that's what you mean. Do you want to make a fool of a man? At the last moment, too. Just when there's nothing left but to go to the High Bailiff and the Church! . . . But I see--I see what it is. It's that young Conrad--he's been writing to you."

I tried to say no, but my father bore me down.

"Don't go to deny it, ma'am. He has been writing to every one--the Bishop, Father Dan, myself even. Denouncing the marriage if you plaze."

My father, in his great excitement, was breaking with withering scorn into his native speech.

"Aw yes, though, denouncing and damning it, they're telling me! Mighty neighbourly of him, I'm sure! Just a neighbour lad without a penny at his back to take all that throuble! If I had known he felt like that about it I might have axed his consent! The imperence, though! The imperence of sin! A father has no rights, it seems! A daughter is a separate being, and all to that! Well, well! Amazing thick, isn't it?"

He was walking up and down the room with his heavy tread, making the floor shake.

"Then that woman in Rome--I wouldn't trust but she has been putting notions into your head, too. All the new-fangled fooleries, I'll go bail. Women and men equal, not a ha'p'orth of difference between them! The blatherskites!"

I was silenced, and I must have covered my face and cried, for after a while my father softened, and touching my shoulder he asked me if a man of sixty-five was not likely to know better than a girl of nineteen what was good for her, and whether I supposed he had not satisfied himself that this marriage was a good thing for me and for him and for everybody.

"Do you think I'm not doing my best for you, gel--my very best?"

I must have made some kind of assent, for he said:

"Then don't moither me any more, and don't let your Aunt Bridget moither me--telling me and telling me what I might have done for her own daughter instead."

At last, with a kind of rough tenderness, he took me by the arm and raised me to my feet.

"There, there, go to bed and get some sleep. We'll have to start off for the high Bailiff's early in the morning."

My will was broken down. I could resist no longer. Without a word more I left him.

Returning to my room I took the letter I had been writing to Father Dan and tore it up piece by piece. As I did so I felt as if I were tearing up a living thing--something of myself, my heart and all that was contained in it.

Then I threw open the window and leant out. I could hear the murmur of the sea. I felt as if it were calling to me, though I could not interpret its voice. The salt air was damp and it refreshed my eyelids.

At length I got into bed, shivering with cold. When I had put out the light I noticed that the moon, which was near the full, had a big yellow ring of luminous vapour around it.

THIRTIETH CHAPTER

My sleep that night was much troubled by dreams. It was the same dream as before, again and again repeated--the dream of frozen regions and of the great ice barrier, and then of the broken pen.

When I awoke in the hazy light of the dawn I thought of what the Pope had said about beginning my wedding-day with penance and communion, so I rose at once to go to church.

The dawn was broadening, but the household was still asleep, only the servants in the kitchen stirring when I stepped through a side door, and set out across the fields.

The dew was thick on the grass, and under the gloom of a heavy sky the day looked cold and cheerless. A wind from the south-east had risen during the night, the sea was white with breakers, and from St. Mary's Rock there came the far-off moaning of surging waves.

The church, too, when I reached it, looked empty and chill. The sacristan in the dim choir was arranging lilies and marguerites about the high altar, and only one poor woman, with a little red and black shawl over her head and shoulders, was kneeling in the side chapel where Father Dan was saying Mass, with a sleepy little boy in clogs to serve him.

The woman was quite young, almost as young as myself, but she was already a widow, having lately lost her husband "at the herrings" somewhere up by Stornoway, where he had gone down in a gale, leaving her with one child, a year old, and another soon to come.

All this she told me the moment I knelt near her. The poor thing seemed to think I ought to have remembered her, for she had been at school with me in the village.

"I'm Bella Quark that was," she whispered. "I married Willie Shimmin of the Lhen, you recollect. It's only a month this morning since he was lost, but it seems like years and years. There isn't nothing in the world like it."

She knew about my marriage, and said she wished me joy, though the world was "so dark and lonely for some." Then she said something about her "lil Willie." She had left him asleep in her cottage on the Curragh, and he might awake and cry before she got back, so she hoped Father Dan wouldn't keep her long.

I was so touched by the poor thing's trouble that I almost forgot my own, and creeping up to her side I put my arm through hers as we knelt together, and that was how the Father found us when he turned to put the holy wafer on our tongues.

The wind must have risen higher while I was in the church, for when I was returning across the fields it lashed my skirts about my legs so that I could scarcely walk. A mist had come down and made a sort of monotonous movement in the mountains where they touched the vague line of the heavy sky.

I should be afraid to say that Nature was still trying to speak to me in her strange inarticulate voice, but I cannot forget that a flock of yearlings, which had been sheltering under a hedge, followed me bleating to the last fence, and that the moaning of the sea about St. Mary's Rock was the last sound I heard as I re-entered the house.

Everything there was running like a mill-race by this time. The servants were flying to and fro, my cousins were calling downstairs in accents of alarm, Aunt Bridget was answering them in tones of vexation, and my father was opening doors with a heavy push and closing them with a clash.

They were all so suddenly pacified when I appeared that it flashed upon me at the moment that they must have thought I had run away.

"Goodness gracious me, girl, where have you been?" said Aunt Bridget.

I told her, and she was beginning to reproach me for not ordering round the carriage, instead of making my boots and stockings damp by traipsing across the grass, when my father said:

"That'll do, that'll do! Change them and take a snack of something. I guess we're due at Holmtown in half an hour."

I ate my breakfast standing, the car was brought round, and by eight o'clock my father and I arrived at the house of the High Bailiff, who had to perform the civil ceremony of my marriage according to the conditions required by law.

The High Bailiff was on one knee before the fire in his office, holding a newspaper in front of it to make it burn.

"Nobody else here yet?" asked my father.

"Traa dy liooar" (time enough), the High Bailiff muttered.

He was an elderly man of intemperate habits who spent his nights at the "Crown and Mitre," and was apparently out of humour at having been brought out of bed so early.

His office was a room of his private house. It had a high desk, a stool and a revolving chair. Placards were pinned on the walls, one over another, and a Testament, with the binding much worn, lay on a table. The place looked half like a doctor's consulting room, and half like a small police court.

Presently Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, came in, rather irritatingly cheerful in that chill atmosphere, and, half an hour late, my intended husband arrived, with his London lawyer and his friend Eastcliff.

My mind was far from clear and I had a sense of seeing things by flashes only, but I remember that I thought Lord Raa was very nervous, and it even occurred to me that early as it was he had been drinking.

"Beastly nuisance, isn't it?" he said to me aside, and then there was something about "this legal fuss and fuddlement."

With the air of a man with a grievance the High Bailiff took a big book out of the desk, and a smaller one off a shelf, and then we sat in a half circle, and the ceremony began.

It was very brief and cold like a matter of business. As far as I can remember it consisted of two declarations which Lord Raa and I made first to the witnesses present and afterwards to each other. One of them stated that we knew of no lawful impediment why we should not be joined together in matrimony, and the other declared that we were there and then so joined.

I remember that I repeated the words automatically, as the High Bailiff in his thick alcoholic voice read them out of the smaller of his books, and that Lord Raa, in tones of obvious impatience, did the same.

Then the High Bailiff opened the bigger of his books, and after writing something in it himself he asked Lord Raa to sign his name, and this being done he asked me also.

"Am I to sign, too?" I asked, vacantly.

"Well, who else do you think?" said Mr. Curphy with a laugh. "Betsy Beauty perhaps, eh?"

"Come, gel, come," said my father, sharply, and then I signed.

I had no longer any will of my own. In this as in everything I did whatever was asked of me.

It was all as dreary and lifeless as an empty house. I can remember that it made no sensible impression upon my heart. My father gave some money (a few shillings I think) to the High Bailiff, who then tore a piece of perforated blue paper out of the bigger of his books and offered it to me, saying:

"This belongs to you."

"To me?" I said.

"Who else?" said Mr. Curphy, who was laughing again, and then something was said by somebody about marriage lines and no one knowing when a wise woman might not want to use them.

The civil ceremony of my marriage was now over, and Lord Raa, who had been very restless, rose to his feet, saying:

"Beastly early drive. Anything in the house to steady one's nerves, High Bailiff?"

The High Bailiff made some reply, at which the men laughed, all except my father. Then they left me and went into another room, the dining-room, and I heard the jingling of glasses and the drinking of healths while I sat before the fire with my foot on the fender and my marriage lines in my hand.

My brain was still numbed. I felt as one might feel if drowned in the sea and descending, without quite losing consciousness, to the depths of its abyss.

I remember I thought that what I had just gone through differed in no respect from the signing of my marriage settlement, except that in the one case I had given my husband rights over my money, my father's money, whereas in this case I seemed to have given him rights over myself.

Otherwise it was all so cold, so drear, so dead, so unaffecting.

The blue paper had slipped out of my hand on to the worn hearthrug when my helpless meditations were interrupted by the thrumming and throbbing of the motor-car outside, and by my father, who was at the office door, saying in his loud, commanding voice:

"Come, gel, guess it's time for you to be back."

Half an hour afterwards I was in my own room at home, and given over to the dressmakers. I was still being moved automatically--a creature without strength or will.

THIRTY-FIRST CHAPTER

I have only an indefinite memory of floating vaguely through the sights and sounds of the next two hours--of everybody except myself being wildly excited; of my cousins railing repeatedly from unseen regions of the house: of Aunt Bridget scolding indiscriminately; of the dressmakers chattering without ceasing as they fitted on my wedding dress; of their standing off from me at intervals with cries of delight at the success of their efforts; of the wind roaring in the chimney; of the church-bells ringing in the distance; of the ever-increasing moaning of the sea about St. Mary's Rock; and finally of the rumbling of the rubber wheels of several carriages and the plash of horses' hoofs on the gravel of the drive.

When the dressmakers were done with me I was wearing an ivory satin dress, embroidered in silver, with a coronal of myrtle and orange blossoms under the old Limerick lace of the family veil, as well as a string of pearls and one big diamond of the noble house I was marrying into. I remember they said my black hair shone with a blue lustre against the sparkling gem, and I dare say I looked gay on the outside anyway.

At last I heard a fluttering of silk outside my room, and a running stream of chatter going down the stairs, followed by the banging of carriage doors, and then my father's deep voice, saying:

"Bride ready? Good! Time to go, I guess."

He alone had made no effort to dress himself up, for he was still wearing his every-day serge and his usual heavy boots. There was not even a flower in his button-hole.

We did not speak very much on our way to church, but I found a certain comfort in his big warm presence as we sat together in the carriage with the windows shut, for the rising storm was beginning to frighten me.

"It will be nothing," said my father. "Just a puff of wind and a slant of rain maybe."

The little church was thronged with people. Even the galleries were full of the children from the village school. There was a twittering overhead like that of young birds in a tree, and as I walked up the nave on my father's arm I could not help but hear over the sound of the organ the whispered words of the people in the pews on either side of us.

"Dear heart alive, the straight like her mother she is, bless her!"

"Goodness yes, it's the poor misfortunate mother come to life again."

"Deed, but the daughter's in luck, though."

Lord Raa was waiting for me by the communion rail. He looked yet more nervous than in the morning, and, though he was trying to bear himself with his usual composure, there was (or I thought there was) a certain expression of fear in his face which I had never seen before.

His friend and witness, Mr. Eastcliff, wearing a carnation button-hole, was by his side, and his aunt, Lady Margaret, carrying a sheaf of beautiful white flowers, was standing near.

My own witnesses and bridesmaids, Betsy Beauty and Nessy MacLeod, in large hats, with soaring black feathers, were behind me. I could hear the rustle of their rose-coloured skirts and the indistinct buzz of their whispered conversation, as well as the more audible reproofs of Aunt Bridget, who in a crinkly black silk dress and a bonnet like a half moon, was telling them to be silent and to look placid.

At the next moment I was conscious that a bell had been rung in the chancel; that the organ had stopped; that the coughing and hemming in the church had ceased; that somebody was saying "Stand here, my lord"; that Lord Raa, with a nervous laugh, was asking "Here?" and taking a place by my side; that the lighted altar, laden with flowers, was in front of me; and that the Bishop in his vestments, Father Dan in his surplice and white stole, and a clerk carrying a book and a vessel of holy water were beginning the service.

Surely never was there a sadder ceremony. Never did any girl under similar circumstances feel a more vivid presentiment of the pains and penalties that follow on a forced and ill-assorted marriage. And yet there came to me in the course of the service such a startling change of thought as wiped out for a while all my sadness, made me forget the compulsion that had been put upon me, and lifted me into a realm of spiritual ecstasy.

The Bishop began with a short litany which asked God's blessing on the ceremony which was to join together two of His children in the bonds of holy wedlock. While that was going on I was conscious of nothing except the howling of the wind about the church windows and the far-off tolling of the bell on St. Mary's Rock--nothing but this and a voice within me which seemed to say again and again, "I don't love him! I don't love him!"

But hardly had the actual ceremony commenced when I began to be overawed by the solemnity and divine power of the service, and by the sense of God leaning over my littleness and guiding me according to His will.

What did it matter how unworthy were the preparations that had led up to this marriage if God was making it? God makes all marriages that are blessed by His Church, and therefore He overrules to His own good ends all human impulses, however sordid or selfish they may be.

After that thought came to me nothing else seemed to matter, and nothing, however jarring or incongruous, was able to lower the exaltation of my spirit.

But the service, which had this effect upon me, appeared to have an exactly opposite effect on Lord Raa. His nervousness increased visibly, though he did his best to conceal it by a lightness of manner that sometimes looked like derision.

Thus when the Bishop stepped down to us and said:

"James Charles Munster, wilt thou take Mary here present for thy lawful wife, according to the rite of our holy Mother the Church," my husband halted and stammered over his answer, saying beneath his breath, "I thought I was a heretic."

But when the corresponding question was put to me, and Father Dan thinking I must be nervous, leaned over me and whispered, "Don't worry, child, take your time," I replied a loud, clear, unfaltering voice:

"I will."

And again, when my husband had to put the ring and the gold and silver on the salver (he fumbled and dropped them as he did so, and fumbled and dropped them a second time when he had to take them up after they had been blessed, laughing too audibly at his own awkwardness), and then repeat after the Bishop:

"With this ring I thee wed; this gold and silver I thee give; with my body I thee worship; and with all my worldly goods I thee endow," he tendered the ring slowly and with an obvious effort.

But I took it without trembling, because I was thinking that, in spite of all I had heard of his ways of life, this solemn and sacred sacrament made him mine and no one else's.

It is all very mysterious; I cannot account for it; I only know it was so, and that, everything considered, it was perhaps the strangest fact of all my life.

I remember that more than once during the ceremony Father Dan spoke to me softly and caressingly, as if to a child, but I felt no need of his comforting, for my strength was from a higher source.

I also remember that it was afterwards said that all through the ceremony the eyes of the newly-wedded couple seemed sedulously to shun each other, but if I did not look at my husband it was because my marriage was like a prayer to me, carrying me back, with its sense of purity and sanctity, to the little sunlit church in Rome where Mildred Bankes had taken her vows.

After the marriage service there was Nuptial Mass and Benediction (special dispensation from Rome), and that raised to a still higher pitch the spiritual exaltation which sustained me.

Father Dan read the Epistle beginning "Let wives be subject to their husbands," and then the Bishop read the Gospel, concluding, "Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh: what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

I had trembled when I thought of these solemn and sonorous words in the solitude of my own room, but now that they were spoken before the congregation I had no fear, no misgiving, nothing but a sense of rapture and consecration.

The last words being spoken and Lord Raa and I being man and wife, we stepped into the sacristy to sign the register, and not even there did my spirit fail me. I took up the pen and signed my name without a tremor. But hardly had I done so when I heard a rumbling murmur of voices about me--first the Bishop's voice (in such a worldly tone) and then my father's and then my husband's, and then the voices of many others, in light conversation mingled with trills of laughter. And then, in a moment, in a twinkling, as fast as a snowflake melts upon a stream, the spell of the marriage service seemed to break.

I have heard since that my eyes were wet at that moment and I seemed to have been crying all through the ceremony. I know nothing about that, but I do know that I felt a kind of internal shudder and that it was just as if my soul had suddenly awakened from an intoxicating drug.

The organ began to play the Wedding March, and my husband, putting my arm through his, said, "Come."

There was much audible whispering among the people waiting for us in the church, and as we walked towards the door I saw ghostly faces smiling at me on every side, and heard ghostly voices speaking in whispers that were like the backward plash of wavelets on the shore.

"Sakes alive, how white's she's looking, though," said somebody, and then somebody else said--I could not help but hear it--

"Dear heart knows if her father has done right for all that."

I did not look at anybody, but I saw Martin's mother at the back, and she was wiping her eyes and saying to some one by her side--it must have been the doctor--

"God bless her for the sweet child veen she always was, anyway."

The storm had increased during the service; and the sacristan, who was opening the door for us, had as much as he could do to hold it against the wind, which came with such a rush upon us when we stepped into the porch that my veil and the coronal of myrtle and orange blossoms were torn off my head and blown back into the church.

"God bless my sowl," said somebody--it was Tommy's friend, Johnny Christopher--"there's some ones would he calling that bad luck, though."

A band of village musicians, who were ranged up in the road, struck up "The Black and Grey" as we stepped out of the churchyard, and the next thing I knew was that my husband and I were in the carriage going home.

He had so far recovered from the frightening effects of the marriage service that he was making light of it, and saying:

"When will this mummery come to an end, I wonder?"

The windows of the carriage were rattling with the wind, and my husband had begun to talk of the storm when we came upon the trunk of a young tree which had been torn up by the roots and was lying across the road, so that our coachman had to get down and remove it.

"Beastly bad crossing, I'm afraid. Hope you're a good sailor. Must be in London to-morrow morning, you know."

The band was playing behind us. The leafless trees were beating their bare boughs in front. The wedding bells were pealing. The storm was thundering through the running sky. The sea was very loud.

At my father's gate Tommy the Mate, with a serious face, was standing, cap in hand, under his triumphal arch, which (as well as it could for the wind that was tearing its flowers and scattering them on the ground) spelled out the words "God bless the Happy Bride."

When we reached the open door of the house a group of maids were waiting for us. They were holding on to their white caps and trying to control their aprons, which were swirling about their black frocks. As I stepped out of the carriage they addressed me as "My lady" and "Your ladyship." The seagulls, driven up from the sea, were screaming about the house.

My husband and I went into the drawing-room, and as we stood together on the hearthrug I caught a glimpse of my face in the glass over the mantelpiece. It was deadly white, and had big staring eyes and a look of faded sunshine. I fixed afresh the pearls about my neck and the diamond in my hair, which was much disordered.

Almost immediately the other carriages returned, and relatives and guests began to pour into the room and offer us their congratulations. First came my cousins, who were too much troubled about their own bedraggled appearance to pay much attention to mine. Then Aunt Bridget, holding on to her half-moon bonnet and crying:

"You happy, happy child! But what a wind! There's been nothing like it since the day you were born."

My father came next, like a gale of wind himself, saying:

"I'm proud of you, gel. Right proud I am. You done well."

Then came Lady Margaret, who kissed me without saying many words, and finally a large and varied company of gaily-dressed friends and neighbours, chiefly the "aristocracy" of our island, who lavished many unnecessary "ladyships" upon me, as if the great name reflected a certain glory upon themselves.

I remember that as I stood on the hearthrug with my husband, receiving their rather crude compliments, a vague gaiety came over me, and I smiled and laughed, although my heart was growing sick, for the effect of the wedding-service was ebbing away into a cold darkness like that of a night tide when the moonlight has left it.

It did not comfort me that my husband, without failing in good manners, was taking the whole scene and company with a certain scarcely-veiled contempt which I could not help but see.

And neither did it allay my uneasiness to glance at my father, where he stood at the end of the room, watching, with a look of triumph in his glistening black eyes, his proud guests coming up to me one by one, and seeming to say to himself, "They're here at last! I've bet them! Yes, by gough, I've bet them!"

Many a time since I have wondered if his conscience did not stir within him as he looked across at his daughter in the jewels of the noble house he had married her into--the pale bride with the bridegroom he had bought for her--and thought of the mockery of a sacred union which he had brought about to gratify his pride, his vanity, perhaps his revenge.

But it was all over now. I was married to Lord Raa. In the eyes equally of the law, the world and the Church, the knot between us was irrevocably tied.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

I am no mystic and no spiritualist, and I only mention it as one of the mysteries of human sympathy between far-distant friends, that during a part of the time when my dear one was going through the fierce struggle she describes, and was dreaming of frozen regions and a broken pen, the ship I sailed on had got itself stuck fast in a field of pack ice in latitude 76, under the ice barrier by Charcot Bay, and that while we were lying like helpless logs, cut off from communication with the world, unable to do anything but groan and swear and kick our heels in our bunks at every fresh grinding of our crunching sides, my own mind, sleeping and waking, was for ever swinging back, with a sort of yearning prayer to my darling not to yield to the pressure which I felt so damnably sure was being brought to bear on her.

M.C.

THIRD PART

MY HONEYMOON

THIRTY-SECOND CHAPTER

When the Bishop and Father Dan arrived, the bell was rung and we went in to breakfast.

We breakfasted in the new dining-room, which was now finished and being used for the first time.

It was a gorgeous chamber beblazoned with large candelabra, huge mirrors, and pictures in gold frames--resembling the room it was intended to imitate, yet not resembling it, as a woman over-dressed resembles a well-dressed woman.

My father sat at the head of his table with the Bishop, Lady Margaret and Aunt Bridget on his right, and myself, my husband, Betsy Beauty and Mr. Eastcliff on his left. The lawyers and the trustee were midway down, Father Dan with Nessy MacLeod was at the end, and a large company of our friends and neighbours, wearing highly-coloured flowers on their breasts and in their buttonholes, sat between.

The meal was very long, and much of the food was very large--large fish, large roasts of venison, veal, beef and mutton, large puddings and large cheeses, all cut on the table and served by waiters from Blackwater. There were two long black lines of them--a waiter behind the chair of nearly every other guest.

All through the breakfast the storm raged outside. More than once it drowned the voices of the people at the table, roaring like a wild beast in the great throat of the wide chimney, swirling about the lantern light, licking and lashing and leaping at the outsides of the walls like lofty waves breaking against a breakwater, and sending up a thunderous noise from the sea itself, where the big bell of St. Mary's Rock was still tolling like a knell.

Somebody--it must have been Aunt Bridget again--said there had been nothing like it since the day of my birth, and it must be "fate."

"Chut, woman!" said my father. "We're living in the twentieth century. Who's houlding with such ould wife's wonders now?"

He was intensely excited, and, his excitement betrayed itself, as usual, in reversion to his native speech. Sometimes he surveyed in silence, with the old masterful lift of his eyebrows, his magnificent room and the great guests who were gathered within it; sometimes he whispered to the waiters to be smarter with the serving of the dishes; and sometimes he pitched his voice above the noises within and without and shouted, in country-fashion, to his friends at various points of the table to know how they were faring.

"How are you doing, Mr. Curphy, sir?"

"Doing well, sir. Are you doing well yourself, Mr. O'Neill, sir?"

"Lord-a-massy yes, sir. I'm always doing well, sir."

Never had anybody in Ellan seen so strange a mixture of grandeur and country style. My husband seemed to be divided between amused contempt for it, and a sense of being compromised by its pretence. More than once I saw him, with his monocle in his eye, look round at his friend Eastcliff, but he helped himself frequently from a large decanter of brandy and drank healths with everybody.

There were the usual marriage pleasantries, facetious compliments and chaff, in which to my surprise (the solemnity of the service being still upon me) the Bishop permitted himself to join.

I was now very nervous, and yet I kept up a forced gaiety, though my heart was cold and sick. I remember that I had a preternatural power of hearing at the same time nearly every conversation that was going on at the table, and that I joined in nearly all the laughter.

At a more than usually loud burst of wind somebody said it would be a mercy if the storm did not lift the roof off.

"Chut, man!" cried my father. "Solid oak and wrought iron here. None of your mouldy old monuments that have enough to do to keep their tiles on."

"Then nobody," said my husband with a glance at his friend, "need be afraid of losing his head in your house, sir?"

"Not if he's got one to come in with, sir."

Betsy Beauty, sitting next to Mr. Eastcliff, was wondering if he would do us the honour to visit the island oftener now that his friend had married into it.

"But, my dear Betsy," said my husband, "who would live in this God-forsaken place if he could help it?"

"God-forsaken, is it?" said my father. "Maybe so, sir--but that's what the cuckoo said after he had eaten the eggs out of the thrush's nest and left a mess in it."

Aunt Bridget was talking in doleful tones to Lady Margaret about my mother, saying she had promised her on her death-bed to take care of her child and had been as good as her word, always putting me before her own daughter, although her ladyship would admit that Betsy was a handsome girl, and, now that his lordship was married, there were few in the island that were fit for her.

"Why no, Mrs. MacLeod," said my husband, after another significant glance at his friend, "I dare say you've not got many who can make enough to keep a carriage?"

"Truth enough, sir," said my father. "We've got hundreds and tons that can make debts though."

The breakfast came to an end at length, and almost before the last of the waiters had left the room my father rose to speak.

"Friends all," he said, "the young married couple have to leave us for the afternoon steamer."

"In this weather?" said somebody, pointing up to the lantern light through which the sky was now darkening.

"Chut! A puff of wind and a slant of rain, as I've been saying to my gel here. But my son-in-law, Lord Raa," (loud cheers followed this description, with some laughter and much hammering on the table), "my son-in-law says he has to be in London to-morrow, and this morning my daughter has sworn obedience. . . . What's that, Monsignor? Not obedience exactly? Something like it then, so she's bound to go along with him. So fill up your glasses to the brim and drink to the bride and bridegroom."

As soon as the noise made by the passing of decanters had died down my father spoke again.

"This is the proudest day of my life. It's the day I've worked for and slaved for and saved for, and it's come to pass at last."

There was another chorus of applause.

"What's that you were saying in church, Mr. Curphy, sir? Time brings in its revenges? It does too. Look at me."

My father put his thumbs in the arm-pits of his waistcoat.

"You all know what I am, and where I come from."

My husband put his monocle to his eye and looked up.

"I come from a mud cabin on the Curragh, not a hundred miles from here. My father was kill . . . but never mind about that now. When he left us it was middling hard collar work, I can tell you--what with me working the bit of a croft and the mother weeding for some of you--some of your fathers I mane--ninepence a day dry days, and sixpence all weathers. When I was a lump of a lad I was sworn at in the high road by a gentleman driving in his grand carriage, and the mother was lashed by his . . . but never mind about that neither. I guess I've hustled round considerable since then, and this morning I've married my daughter into the first family in the island."

There was another burst of cheering at this, but it was almost drowned by the loud rattling of the rain which was now falling on the lantern light.

"Monsignor," cried my father, pitching his voice still higher, "what's that you were saying in Rome about the mills of God?"

Fumbling his jewelled cross and smiling blandly the Bishop gave my father the familiar quotation.

"Truth enough, too. The mills of God grind slowly but they're grinding exceeding small. Nineteen years ago I thought I was as sure of what I wanted as when I got out of bed this morning. If my gel here had been born a boy, my son would have sat where his lordship is now sitting. But all's well that ends well! If I haven't got a son I've got a son-in-law, and when I get a grandson he'll be the richest man that ever stepped into Castle Raa, and the uncrowned king of Ellan."

At that there was a tempest of cheers, which, mingling with the clamour of the storm, made a deafening tumult.

"They're saying a dale nowadays about fathers and children--daughters being separate beings, and all to that. But show me the daughter that could do better for herself than my gel's father has done for her. She has a big fortune, and her husband has a big name, and what more do they want in this world anyway?"

"Nothing at all," came from various parts of the room.

"Neighbours," said my father, looking round him with a satisfied smile, "I'm laying you dry as herrings in a hould, but before I call on you to drink this toast I'll ask the Bishop to spake to you. He's a grand man is the Bishop, and in fixing up this marriage I don't in the world know what I could have done without him."

The Bishop, still fingering his jewelled cross and smiling, spoke in his usual suave voice. He firmly believed that the Church had that morning blessed a most propitious and happy union. Something might be said against mixed marriages, but under proper circumstances the Church had never forbidden them and his lordship (this with a deep bow to my husband) had behaved with great liberality of mind.

As for what their genial and rugged host had said of certain foolish and dangerous notions about the relations of father and child, he was reminded that there were still more foolish and dangerous ones about the relations of husband and wife.

From the earliest ages of the Church, however, those relations had been exactly defined. "Let wives be subject to their husbands," said the Epistle we had read this morning, and no less conclusive had been our closing prayer, asking that the wife keep true faith with her husband, being lovely in his eyes even as was Rachel, wise as was Rebecca, and dutiful as was Sara.

"Beautiful!" whispered Aunt Bridget to Lady Margaret. "It's what I always was myself in the days of the dear Colonel."

"And now," said the Bishop, "before you drink this toast and call upon the noble bridegroom to respond to it," (another deep bow to my husband), "I will ask for a few words from the two legal gentlemen who have carried out the admirably judicious financial arrangements without which this happy marriage would have been difficult if not impossible."

Then my husband's lawyer, with a supercilious smile on his clean-shaven face, said it had been an honour to him to assist in preparing the way for the "uncrowned king of Ellan." ("It _has_, sir," cried my father in a loud voice which straightened the gentleman's face instantly); and finally Mr. Curphy, speaking through his long beard, congratulated my father and my husband equally on the marriage, and gave it as his opinion that there could be no better use for wealth than to come to the rescue of an historic family which had fallen on evil times and only required a little money to set it on its feet again.

"The bride and bridegroom!" cried my father; and then everybody rose and there was much cheering, with cries of "His lordship," "His lordship."

All through the speech-making my husband had rolled uneasily in his chair. He had also helped himself frequently from the decanter, so that when he got up to reply he was scarcely sober.

In his drawling voice he thanked the Bishop, and said that having made up his mind to the marriage he had never dreamt of raising difficulties about religion. As to the modern notions about the relations of husband and wife, he did not think a girl brought up in a convent would give him much trouble on that subject.

"Not likely," cried my father. "I'll clear her of that anyway."

"So I thank you for myself and for my family," continued my husband, "and . . . Oh, yes, of course," (this to Lady Margaret). "I thank you for my wife also, and . . . and that's all."

I felt sick and cold and ashamed. A rush of blood came under the skin of my face that must have made me red to the roots of my hair.

In all this speaking about my marriage there had not been one word about myself--myself really, a living soul with all her future happiness at stake. I cannot say what vague impulse took possession of me, but I remember that when my husband sat down I made a forced laugh, though I knew well that I wanted to cry.

In an agony of shame I was beginning to feel a wild desire to escape from the room and even from the house, that I might breathe in some of the free wind outside, when all at once I became aware that somebody else was speaking.

It was Father Dan. He had risen unannounced from his seat at the end of the table. I saw his sack coat which was much worn at the seams; I saw his round face which was flushed; I heard the vibrating note in his soft Irish voice which told me he was deeply moved; and then I dropped my head, for I knew what was coming.

THIRTY-THIRD CHAPTER

"Mr. O'Neill," said Father Dan, "may your parish priest take the liberty of speaking without being spoken to?"

My father made some response, and then a hush fell over the dining-room. Either the storm ceased for a time, or in my great agitation it seemed to do so, for I did not hear it.

"We have heard a great deal about the marriage we have celebrated to-day, but have we not forgotten something? What _is_ marriage? Is it the execution of a contract? Is it the signing of a register? Is it even the taking of an oath before an altar? No. Marriage is the sacred covenant which two souls make with each other, the woman with the man, the man with the woman, when she chooses him from all other men, when he chooses her from all other women, to belong to each other for ever, so that no misfortune, no storm of life, no sin on either side shall ever put them apart. That's what marriage is, and all we have been doing to-day is to call on God and man to bear witness to that holy bond."

My heart was beating high. I raised my head, and I think my eyes must have been shining. I looked across at the Bishop. His face was showing signs of vexation.

"Mr. O'Neill, sir," cried Father Dan, raising his trembling voice, "you say your daughter has a big fortune and her husband has a big name, and what more do they want in this world? I'll tell you what they want, sir. They want love, love on both sides, if they are to be good and happy, and if they've got that they've got something which neither wealth nor rank can buy."

I had dropped my head again, but under my eyelashes I could see that the company were sitting spell-bound. Only my husband was shuffling in his seat, and the Bishop was plucking at his gold chain.

"My Bishop," said Father Dan, "has told us of the submission a wife owes to her husband, and of her duty to be lovely and wise and faithful in his eyes. But isn't it the answering thought that the husband on his part owes something to the wife? Aren't we told that he shall put away everything and everybody for her sake, and cleave to her and cling to her and they shall be one flesh? Isn't that, too, a divine commandment?"

My heart was throbbing so loud by this time that the next words were lost to me. When I came to myself again Father Dan was saying:

"Think what marriage means to a woman--a young girl especially. It means the breaking of old ties, the beginning of a new life, the setting out into an unknown world on a voyage from which there can be no return. In her weakness and her helplessness she leaves one dependency for another, the shelter of a father for the shelter of a husband. What does she bring to the man she marries? Herself, everything she is, everything she can be, to be made or marred by him, and never, never, never to be the same to any other man whatsoever as long as life shall last."

More than ever now, but for other reasons, I wanted to fly from the room.

"Friends," cried Father Dan, "we don't know much of the bridegroom in this parish, but we know the bride. We've known her all her life. We know what she is. I do, anyway. If you are her father, Mr. O'Neill, sir, I am her father also. I was in this house when she was born. I baptized her. I took her out of the arms of the angel who bore her. So she's my child too, God bless her. . . ."

His voice was breaking--I was sobbing--though he was speaking so loudly I could scarcely hear him--I could scarcely see him--I only knew that he was facing about in our direction and raising his trembling hand to my husband.

"She is my child, too, I say, and now that she is leaving us, now that you are taking her away from us, I charge you, my lord, to be good and faithful to her, as you will have to answer for her soul some day."

What else he said I do not know. From that moment I was blind and deaf to everything. Nevertheless I was conscious that after Father Dan had ceased to speak there was a painful silence. I thought the company seemed to be startled and even a little annoyed by the emotion so suddenly shot into their midst. The Bishop looked vexed, my father looked uncomfortable, and my husband, who had been drinking glass after glass of brandy, was muttering something about "a sermon."

It had been intended that Mr. Eastcliff should speak for the bridesmaids, and I was afterwards told by Betsy Beauty that he had prepared himself with many clever epigrams, but everybody felt there could be no more speaking of any kind now. After a few awkward moments my father looked at his watch and said it was about time for us to start if we were to catch the steamer, so I was hurried upstairs to change for our journey.

When I came down again, in my tailor-made travelling dress with sables, the whole company was in the hall and everybody seemed to be talking at the same time, making a noise like water in a weir.

I was taken possession of by each in turn. Nessy MacLeod told me in an aside what an excellent father I had. Betsy Beauty whispered that Mr. Eastcliff was so handsome and their tastes were so similar that she hoped I would invite him to Castle Raa as soon as I came back. Aunt Bridget, surrounded by a group of sympathising ladies (including Lady Margaret, who was making an obvious effort to be gracious) was wiping her eyes and saying I had always been her favourite and she had faithfully done her duty by me.

"Mary, my love," she said, catching my eye, "I'm just telling her ladyship I don't know in the world what I'll do when you are gone."

My husband was there too, wearing a heavy overcoat with the collar up, and receiving from a group of insular gentlemen their cheerful prognostics of a bad passage.

"'Deed, but I'm fearing it will be a dirty passage, my lord."

"Chut!" said my father. "The wind's from the south-west. They'll soon get shelter."

The first of our two cars came round and my husband's valet went off in advance with our luggage. Then the second car arrived, and the time came for our departure. I think I kissed everybody. Everybody seemed to be crying--everybody except myself, for my tears were all gone by this time.

Just as we were about to start, the storm, which must certainly have fallen for a while, sprang up suddenly, and when Tommy the Mate (barely recognisable in borrowed black garments) opened the door the wind came rushing into the house with a long-drawn whirr.

I had said good-bye to the old man, and was stepping into the porch when I remembered Father Dan. He was standing in his shabby sack coat with a sorrowful face in a dark corner by the door, as if he had placed himself there to see the last of me. I wanted to put my arms around his neck, but I knew that would be wrong, so I dropped to my knees and kissed his hand and he gave me his blessing.

My husband, who was waiting by the side of the throbbing automobile, said impatiently:

"Come, come, dear, don't keep me in the rain."

I got into the landaulette, my husband got in after me, the car began to move, there were cries from within the house ("Good-bye!" "Good luck") which sounded like stifled shrieks as they were carried off by the wind without, and then we were under weigh.

As we turned the corner of the drive something prompted me to look back at my mother's window--with its memories of my first going to school.

At the next moment we were crossing the bridge--with its memories of Martin Conrad and William Rufus.

At the next we were on the road.

THIRTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

"Thank God, that's over," said my husband. Then, half apologetically, he added: "You didn't seem to enjoy it any more than myself, my dear."

At the entrance to our village a number of men stood firing guns; in the middle a group of girls were stretching a rope across the road; a number of small flags, torn by the wind and wet with the rain, were rattling on flagstaffs hung out from some of the window sills; a few women, with shawls over their heads, were sheltering on the weather side of their porches to see us pass.

My husband was impatient of our simple island customs. Once or twice he lowered the window of the car, threw out a handful of silver and at the same time urged the chauffeur to drive quicker. As soon as we were clear of the village he fell back in his seat, saying:

"Heavens, how sleepy I am! No wonder either! Late going to bed last night and up so early this morning."

After a moment he began to yawn, and almost before he could have been aware of it he had closed his eyes. At the next moment he was asleep.

It was a painful, almost a hideous sleep. His cheeks swelled and sank; his lips parted, he was breathing heavily, and sometimes gaping like a carp out of water.

I could not detach my eyes from his face, which, without eyes to relieve it, seemed to be almost repulsive now. It would be difficult to describe my sensations. I felt dreadfully humiliated. Even my personal pride was wounded. I remembered what Father Dan had said about husband and wife being one flesh, and told myself that _this_ was what I belonged to, what belonged to me--_this!_ Then I tried to reproach and reprove myself, but in order to do so I had to turn my eyes away.

Our road to Blackwater lay over the ridge of a hill much exposed to the wind from the south-west. When we reached this point the clouds seemed to roll up from the sea like tempestuous battalions. Torrential rain fell on the car and came dripping in from the juncture of the landaulette roof. Some of it fell on the sleeper and he awoke with a start.

"Damn--"

He stopped, as if, caught in guilt, and began to apologise again.

"Was I asleep? I really think I must have been. Stupid, isn't it? Excuse me."

He blinked his eyes as if to empty them of sleep, looked me over for a moment or two in silence, and then said with a smile which made me shudder:

"So you and I are man and wife, my dear!"

I made no answer, and, still looking fixedly at me, he said:

"Well, worse things might have happened after all--what do _you_ think?"

Still I did not answer him, feeling a certain shame, not to say disgust. Then he began to pay me some compliments on my appearance.

"Do you know you're charming, my dear, really charming!"

That stung me, and made me shudder, I don't know why, unless it was because the words gave me the sense of having been used before to other women. I turned my eyes away again.

"Don't turn away, dear. Let me see those big black eyes of yours. I adore black eyes. They always pierce me like a gimlet."

He reached forward as he spoke and drew me to him. I felt frightened and pushed him off.

"What's this?" he said, as if surprised.

But after another moment he laughed, and in the tone of a man who had had much to do with women and thought he knew how to deal with them, he said:

"Wants to be coaxed, does she? They all do, bless them!"

Saying this he pulled me closer to him, putting his arm about my waist, but once more I drew and forcibly pushed him from me.

His face darkened for an instant, and then cleared again.

"Oh, I see," he said. "Offended, is she? Paying me out for having paid so little court to her? Well, she's right there too, bless her! But never mind! You're a decidedly good-looking little woman, my dear, and if I have neglected you thus far, I intend to make up for it during the honeymoon. So come, little gal, let's be friends."

Taking hold of me again, he tried to kiss me, putting at the same time his hand on the bosom of my dress, but I twisted my face aside and prevented him.

"Oh! Oh! Hurt her modesty, have I?" he said, laughing like a man who was quite sure both of himself and of me. "But my little nun will get over that by and by. Wait awhile! Wait awhile!"

By this time I was trembling with the shock of a terror that was entirely new to me. I could not explain to myself the nature of it, but it was there, and I could not escape from it.

Hitherto, when I had thought of my marriage to Lord Raa I had been troubled by the absence of love between us; and what I meant to myself by love--the love of husband and wife--was the kind of feeling I had for the Reverend Mother, heightened and deepened and spiritualised, as I believed, by the fact (with all its mysterious significance) that the one was a man and the other a woman.

But this was something quite different. Not having found in marriage what I had expected, I was finding something else, for there could be no mistaking my husband's meaning when he looked at me with his passionate eyes and said, "Wait awhile!"

I saw what was before me, and in fear of it I found myself wishing that something might happen to save me. I was so frightened that if I could have escaped from the car I should have done so. The only thing I could hope for was that we should arrive at Blackwater too late for the steamer, or that the storm would prevent it from sailing. What relief from my situation I should find in that, beyond the delay of one day, one night (in which I imagined I might be allowed to return home), I did not know. But none the less on that account I began to watch the clouds with a feverish interest.

They were wilder than ever now--rolling up from the south-west in huge black whorls which enveloped the mountains and engulfed the valleys. The wind, too, was howling at intervals like a beast being slaughtered. It was terrible, but not so terrible as the thing I was thinking of. I was afraid of the storm, and yet I was fearfully, frightfully glad of it.

My husband, who, after my repulse, had dropped back into his own corner of the car, was very angry. He talked again of our "God-forsaken island," and the folly of living in it, said our passage would be a long one in any case, and we might lose our connection to London.

"Damnably inconvenient if we do. I've special reasons for being there in the morning," he said.

At a sharp turn of the road the wind smote the car as with an invisible wing. One of the windows was blown in, and to prevent the rain from driving on to us my husband had to hold up a cushion in the gap.

This occupied him until we ran into Blackwater, and then he dropped the cushion and put his head out, although the rain was falling heavily, to catch the first glimpse of the water in the bay.

It was in terrific turmoil. My heart leapt up at the sight of it. My husband swore.

We drew up on the drenched and naked pier. My husband's valet, in waterproofs, came to the sheltered side of the car, and, shouting above the noises of the wind in the rigging of the steamer, he said:

"Captain will not sail to-day, my lord. Inshore wind. Says he couldn't get safely out of the harbour."

My husband swore violently. I was unused to oaths at that time and they cut me like whipcord, but all the same my pulse was bounding joyfully.

"Bad luck, my lord, but only one thing to do now," shouted the valet.

"What's that?" said my husband, growling.

"Sleep in Blackwater to-night, in hopes of weather mending in the morning."

Anticipating this course, he had already engaged rooms for us at the "Fort George."

My heart fell, and I waited for my husband's answer. I was stifling.

"All right, Hobson. If it must be, it must," he answered.

I wanted to speak, but I did not know what to say. There seemed to be nothing that I could say.

A quarter of an hour afterwards we arrived at the hotel, where the proprietor, attended by the manageress and the waiters, received us with rather familiar smiles.

THIRTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

When I began to write I determined to tell the truth and the whole truth. But now I find that the whole truth will require that I should invade some of the most sacred intimacies of human experience. At this moment I feel as if I were on the threshold of one of the sanctuaries of a woman's life, and I ask myself if it is necessary and inevitable that I should enter it.

I have concluded that it _is_ necessary and inevitable--necessary to the sequence of my narrative, inevitable for the motive with which I am writing it.

Four times already I have written what is to follow. In the first case I found that I had said too much. In the second I had said too little. In the third I was startled and shocked by the portrait I had presented of myself and could not believe it to be true. In the fourth I saw with a thrill of the heart that the portrait was not only true, but too true. Let me try again.

I entered our rooms at the hotel, my husband's room and mine, with a sense of fear, almost of shame. My sensations at that moment had nothing in common with the warm flood of feeling which comes to a woman when she finds herself alone for the first time with the man she loves, in a little room which holds everything that is of any account to her in the world. They were rather those of a young girl who, walking with a candle through the dark corridors of an empty house at night, is suddenly confronted by a strange face. I was the young girl with the candle; the strange face was my husband's.

We had three rooms, all communicating, a sitting-room in the middle with bedrooms right and left. The bedroom on the right was large and it contained a huge bed with a covered top and tail-boards. That on the left was small, and it had a plain brass and iron bedstead, which had evidently been meant for a lady's maid. I had no maid yet. It was intended that I should engage a French one in London.

Almost immediately on entering the sitting-room my husband, who had not yet recovered from his disappointment, left me to go downstairs, saying with something like a growl that he had telegrams to send to London and instructions to give to his man Hobson.

Without taking off my outer things I stepped up to the windows, which were encrusted with salt from the flying spray. The hotel stood on a rocky ledge above the harbour, and the sound of the sea, beating on the outer side of the pier, came up with a deafening roar. The red-funnelled steamer we should have sailed by lay on the pier's sheltered side, letting down steam, swaying to her creaking hawsers, and heaving to the foam that was surging against her bow.

I was so nervous, so flurried, so preoccupied by vague fears that I hardly saw or heard anything. Porters came up with our trunks and asked me where they were to place them, but I scarcely know how I answered them, although I was aware that everything--both my husband's luggage and mine--was being taken into the large bedroom. A maid asked if she ought to put a light to the fire, and I said "Yes . . . no . . . yes," and presently I heard the fire crackling.

After awhile my husband came back in a better temper and said:

"Confounded nuisance, but I suppose we must make the best of it."

He laughed as he said this, and coming closer and looking me over with a smile which was at the same time passionate and proud, he whispered:

"Dare say we'll not find the time long until to-morrow morning. What do _you_ think, my little beauty?"

Something in his voice rather than in his question made my heart beat, and I could feel my face growing hot.

"Not taken off your things yet?" he said. "Come, let me help you."

I drew out my hat-pins and removed my hat. At the same moment my husband removed my sables and cloak, and as he did so he put his arms about me, and held me close to him.

I shuddered. I tried not to, but I could not help it. My husband laughed again, and said:

"Not got over it yet, little woman? Perhaps that's only because you are not quite used to me."

Still laughing he pulled me still closer to him, and putting one of his hands under my chin he kissed me on the mouth.

It will be difficult and perhaps it will be ridiculous to say how my husband's first kiss shocked me. My mouth felt parched, I had a sense of intense disgust, and before I was quite aware of what I was doing I had put up both hands to push him off.

"Come, come, this is going too far," he said, in a tone that was half playful, half serious. "It was all very well in the automobile; but here, in your own rooms, you know. . . ."

He broke off and laughed again, saying that if my modesty only meant that nobody had ever kissed me before it made me all the more charming for him.

I could not help feeling a little ashamed of my embarrassment, and crossing in front of my husband I seated myself in a chair before the fire. He looked after me with a smile that made my heart tremble, and then, coming behind my chair, he put his arms about my shoulders and kissed my neck.

A shiver ran through me. I felt as if I had suffered a kind of indecency. I got up and changed my place. My husband watched me with the look of a man who wanted to roar with laughter. It was the proud and insolent as well as passionate look of one who had never so much as contemplated resistance.

"Well, this is funny," he said. "But we'll see presently! We'll see!"

A waiter came in for orders, and early as it was my husband asked for dinner to be served immediately. My heart was fluttering excitedly by this time and I was glad of the relief which the presence of other people gave me.

While the table was being laid my husband talked of the doings of the day. He asked who was "the seedy old priest" who had given us "the sermon" at the wedding breakfast--he had evidently forgotten that he had seen the Father before.

I told him the "seedy old priest" was Father Dan, and he was a saint if ever there was one.

"A saint, is he?" said my husband. "Wish saint were not synonymous with simpleton, though."

Then he gave me his own views of "the holy state of matrimony." By holding people together who ought to be apart it often caused more misery and degradation of character than a dozen entirely natural adulteries and desertions, which a man had sometimes to repair by marriage or else allow himself to be regarded as a seducer and a scoundrel.

I do not think my husband was conscious of the naive coarseness of all this, as spoken to a young girl who had only just become his wife. I am sure he was not aware that he was betraying himself to me in every word he uttered and making the repugnance I had begun to feel for him deepen into horror.

My palms became moist, and again and again I had to dry them with my handkerchief. I was feeling more frightened and more ashamed than I had ever felt before, but nevertheless when we sat down to dinner I tried to compose myself. Partly for the sake of appearance before the servants, and partly because I was taking myself to task for the repugnance I felt towards my husband, I found something to say, though my voice shook.

My husband ate ravenously and drank a good deal. Once or twice, when he insisted on pouring out champagne for me, I clinked glasses with him. Although every moment at table was increasing my fear and disgust, I sometimes allowed myself to laugh.

Encouraged by this he renewed his endearments even before the waiters had left the room, and when they had gone, with orders not to return until he rang, and the door was closed behind them, he switched off the lights, pushed a sofa in front of the fire, put me to sit on it, sat down beside me and redoubled his tenderness.

"How's my demure little nun now?" he said. "Frightened, wasn't she? They're all frightened at first, bless them!"

I could smell the liquor he had been drinking. I could see by the firelight the prominent front tooth (partly hidden by his moustache) which I had noticed when I saw him first, and the down of soft hair which grew as low on his hands as his knuckles. Above all I thought I could feel the atmosphere of other women about him--loose women, bad women as it seemed to me--and my fear and disgust began to be mixed with a kind of physical horror.

For a little while I tried to fight against this feeling, but when he began to put his arms about me, calling me by endearing names, complaining of my coldness, telling me not to be afraid of him, reminding me that I belonged to him now, and must do as he wished, a faintness came over me, I trembled from head to foot and made some effort to rise.

"Let me go," I said.

"Nonsense," he said, laughing and holding me to my seat. "You bewitching little woman! You're only teasing me. How they love to tease, these charming little women!"

The pupils of his eyes were glistening. I closed my own eyes in order to avoid his look. At the next moment I felt his hand stray down my body and in a fury of indignation I broke out of his arms and leapt to my feet.

When I recovered my self-possession I was again looking out of the window, and my husband, who was behind me, was saying in a tone of anger and annoyance:

"What's the matter with you? I can't understand. What have I done? Good heavens, we are man and wife, aren't we?"

I made no answer. My heart which had been hot with rage was becoming cold with dread. It seemed to me that I had suffered an outrage on my natural modesty as a human being, a sort of offence against my dignity as a woman.

It was now dark. With my face to the window I could see nothing. The rain was beating against the glass. The sea was booming on the rocks. I wanted to fly, but I felt caged--morally and physically caged.

My husband had lit a cigarette and was walking up and down the sitting-room, apparently trying to think things out. After awhile he approached me, out his hand on my shoulder and said:

"I see how it is. You're tired, and no wonder. You've had a long and exhausting day. Better go to bed. We'll have to be up early."

Glad to escape from his presence I allowed him to lead me to the large bedroom. As I was crossing the threshold he told me to undress and get into bed, and after that he said something about waiting. Then he closed the door softly and I was alone.

THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

There was a fire in the bedroom and I sat down in front of it. Many forces were warring within me. I was trying to fix my thoughts and found it difficult to do so.

Some time passed. My husband's man came in with the noiseless step of all such persons, opened one of the portmanteaux and laid out his master's combs and brushes on the dressing table and his sleeping suit on the bed. A maid of the hotel followed him, and taking my own sleeping things out of the top tray of my trunk she laid them out beside my husband's.

"Good-night, my lady," they said in their low voices as they went out on tiptoe.

I hardly heard them. My mind, at first numb, was now going at lightning speed. Brought face to face for the first time with one of the greatest facts of a woman's life I was asking myself why I had not reckoned with it before.

I had not even thought of it. My whole soul had been so much occupied with one great spiritual issue--that I did not love my husband (as I understood love), that my husband did not love me--that I had never once plainly confronted, even in my own mind, the physical fact that is the first condition of matrimony, and nobody had mentioned it to me or even hinted at it.

I could not plead that I did not know of this condition. I was young but I was not a child. I had been brought up in a convent, but a convent is not a nursery. Then why had I not thought of it?

While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband's movements in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed.

"Don't keep me long, little girl."

I shuddered but made no reply.

At last he knocked softly and said he was coming in. I was still crouching over the fire as he came up behind me.

"Not in bed yet?" he said. "Then I must put you to bed."

Before I could prevent him he had lifted me in his arms, dragged me on to his knee and was pulling down my hair, laughing as he did so, calling me by coarse endearing names and telling me not to fight and struggle.

But the next thing I knew I was back in the sitting-room, where I had switched up the lights, and my husband, whose face was distorted by passion, was blazing out at me.

"What do you mean?" he said. "I'm your husband, am I not? You are my wife, aren't you? What did you marry for? Good heavens, can it be possible that you don't know what the conditions of matrimony are? Is that what comes of being brought up in a convent? But has your father allowed you to marry without. . . . And your Aunt--what in God's name has the woman been doing?"

I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my husband intercepted me.

"Don't be a fool," he said, catching at my wrist. "Think of the servants. Think what they'd say. Think what the whole island would say. Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?"

I returned and sat by the table. My husband lit another cigarette. Nervously flicking the ends off with the index finger of his left hand, and speaking quickly, as if the words scorched his lips, he told me I was mistaken if I supposed that he wanted a scene like this. He thought he could spend his time better. I was equally mistaken if I imagined that he had desired our marriage at all. Something quite different might have happened if he could have afforded to please himself.

He had made sacrifices to marry me, too. Perhaps I had not thought of that, but did I suppose a man of his class wanted a person like my father for his father-in-law. And then my Aunt and my cousins--ugh!

The Bishop, too! Was it nothing that a man had been compelled to make all those ridiculous declarations? Children to be brought up Catholics! Wife not to be influenced! Even to keep an open mind himself to all the muss and mummery of the Church!

It wasn't over either. That seedy old "saint" was probably my confessor. Did any rational man want another man to come between him and his wife--knowing all he did and said, and everything about him?

I was heart-sick as I listened to all this. Apparently the moral of it was that if I had been allowed to marry without being instructed in the first conditions of married life my husband had suffered a gross and shocking injustice.

The disgust I felt was choking me. It was horribly humiliating and degrading to see my marriage from my husband's point of view, and when I remembered that I was bound fast to the man who talked to me like this, and that he could claim rights in me, to-night, to-morrow, as long as I lived, until death parted us, a wild impulse of impotent anger at everybody and everything made me drop my head on to the table and burst into tears.

My husband misunderstood this, as he misunderstood everything. Taking my crying for the last remnant of my resistance he put his arms round my shoulders again and renewed his fondling.

"Come, don't let us have any more conjugal scenes," he said. "The people of the hotel will hear us presently, and there will be all sorts of ridiculous rumours. If your family are rather common people you are a different pair of shoes altogether."

He was laughing again, kissing my neck (in spite of my shuddering) and saying:

"You really please me very much, you do indeed, and if they've kept you in ignorance, what matter? Come now, my sweet little woman, we'll soon repair that."

I could bear no more. I _must_ speak and I did. Leaping up and facing round on him I told him my side of the story--how I had been married against my will, and had not wanted him any more than he had wanted me; how all my objections had been overruled, all my compunctions borne down; how everybody had been in a conspiracy to compel me, and I had been bought and sold like a slave.

"But you can't go any farther than that," I said. "Between you, you have forced me to marry you, but nobody can force me to obey you, because I won't."

I saw his face grow paler and paler as I spoke, and when I had finished it was ashen-white.

"So that's how it is, is it?" he said, and for some minutes more he tramped about the room, muttering inaudible words, as if trying to account to himself for my conduct. At length he approached me again and said, in the tone of one who thought he was making peace:

"Look here, Mary. I think I understand you at last. You have some other attachment--that's it, I suppose. Oh, don't think I'm blaming you. I may be in the same case myself for all you know to the contrary. But circumstances have been too strong for us and here we are. Well, we're in it, and we've got to make the best of it and why shouldn't we? Lots of people in my class are in the same position, and yet they get along all right. Why can't we do the same? I'll not be too particular. Neither will you. For the rest of our lives let each of us go his and her own way. But that's no reason why we should be strangers exactly. Not on our wedding-day at all events. You're a damned pretty woman and I'm. . . . Well, I'm not an ogre, I suppose. We are man and wife, too. So look here, we won't expect too much affection from each other--but let's stop this fooling and be good friends for a little while anyway. Come, now."

Once more he took hold of me, as if to draw me back, kissing my hands as he did so, but his gross misinterpretation of my resistance and the immoral position he was putting me into were stifling me, and I cried:

"No, I will not. Don't you see that I hate and loathe you?"

There could be no mistaking me this time. The truth had fallen on my husband with a shock. I think it was the last thing his pride had expected. His face became shockingly distorted. But after a moment, recovering himself with a cruel laugh that made my hot blood run cold, he said:

"Nevertheless, you shall do as I wish. You are my wife, and as such you belong to me. The law allows me to compel you and I will."

The words went shrieking through and through me. He was coming towards me with outstretched arms, his teeth set, and his pupils fixed. In the drunkenness of his rage he was laughing brutally.

But all my fear had left me. I felt an almost murderous impulse. I wanted to strike him on the face.

"If you attempt to touch me I will throw myself out of the window," I said.

"No fear of that," he said, catching me quickly in his arms.

"If you do not take your hands off me I'll shriek the house down," I cried.

That was enough. He let me go and dropped back from me. At the next moment I was breathing with a sense of freedom. Without resistance on my husband's part I entered the little bedroom to the left and locked the door behind me.

THIRTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

Some further time passed. I sat by the fireless grate with my chin in my hand. If the storm outside was still raging I did not hear it. I was listening to the confused sounds that came from the sitting-room.

My husband was pacing to and fro, muttering oaths, knocking against the furniture, breaking things. At one moment there was a crash of glass, as if he had helped himself to brandy and then in his ungovernable passion flung the decanter into the fire grate.

Somebody knocked at the sitting-room. It must have been a waiter, for through the wall I heard the muffled sound of a voice asking if there had been an accident. My husband swore at the man and sent him off. Hadn't he told him not to come until he was rung for?

At length, after half an hour perhaps, my husband knocked at the door of my little room.

"Are you there?" he asked.

I made no answer.

"Open the door."

I sat motionless.

"You needn't be afraid. I'm not going to do anything. I've something to say."

Still I made no reply. My husband went away for a moment and then came back.

"If you are determined not to open the door I must say what I've got to say from here. Are you listening?"

Sitting painfully rigid I answered that I was.

Then he told me that what I was doing would entitle him to annul our marriage--in the eyes of the Church at all events.

If he thought that threat would intimidate me he was mistaken--a wave of secret joy coursed through me.

"It won't matter much to me--I'll take care it won't--but it will be a degrading business for you--invalidity and all that. Are you prepared for it?"

I continued to sit silent and motionless.

"I daresay we shall both be laughed at, but I cannot help that. We can't possibly live together on terms like these."

Another wave of joy coursed through me.

"Anyhow I intend to know before I leave the island how things are to be. I'm not going to take you away until I get some satisfaction. You understand?"

I listened, almost without breathing, but I did not reply.

"I'm think of writing a letter to your father, and sending Hobson with it in the car immediately. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Well, you know what your father is. Unless I'm much mistaken he's not a man to have much patience with your semi-romantic, semi-religious sentiments. Are you quite satisfied?"

"Quite."

"Very well! That's what I'll do, then."

After this there was a period of quiet in which I assumed that my husband was writing his letter. Then I heard a bell ring somewhere in the corridor, and shortly afterwards there was a second voice in the sitting-room, but I could not hear the words that were spoken. I suppose it was Hobson's low voice, for after another short interval of silence there came the thrum and throb of a motor-car and the rumble of india-rubber wheels on the wet gravel of the courtyard in front of the hotel.

Then my husband knocked at my door again.

"I've written that letter and Hobson is waiting to take it. Your father will probably get it before he goes to bed. It will be a bad break on the festivities he was preparing for the village people. But you are still of the same mind, I suppose?"

I did not speak, but I rose and went over to the window. For some reason difficult to explain, that reference to the festivities had cut me to the quick.

My husband must have been fuming at my apparent indifference, and I felt as if I could see him looking at me, passionate and proud.

"Between the lot of you I think you've done me a great injustice. Have you nothing to say?"

Even then I did not answer.

"All right! As you please."

A few minutes afterwards I heard the motor-car turning and driving away.

The wind had fallen, the waves were rolling into the harbour with that monotonous moan which is the sea's memory of a storm, and a full moon, like a white-robed queen, was riding through a troubled sky.

THIRTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

The moon had died out; a new day had dawned; the sea was lying as quiet as a sleeping child; far out on the level horizon the sky was crimsoning before the rising sun, and clouds of white sea-gulls were swirling and jabbering above the rocks in the harbour below the house before I lay down to sleep.

I was awakened by a hurried knocking at my door, and by an impatient voice crying:

"Mary! Mary! Get up! Let me in!"

It was Aunt Bridget who had arrived in my husband's automobile. When I opened the door to her she came sailing into the room with her new half-moon bonnet a little awry, as if she had put it on hurriedly in the dim light of early morning, and, looking at me with her cold grey eyes behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, she began to bombard me with mingled ridicule and indignant protest.

"Goodness me, girl, what's all this fuss about? You little simpleton, tell me what has happened!"

She was laughing. I had hardly ever heard Aunt Bridget laugh before. But her vexation soon got the better of her merriment.

"His lordship's letter arrived in the middle of the night and nearly frightened us out of our senses. Your father was for coming away straight, and it would have been worse for you if he had. But I said: 'No, this is work for a woman, I'll go,' and here I am. And now tell me, what in the name of goodness does this ridiculous trouble mean?"

It was hard to say anything on such a subject under such circumstances, especially when so challenged, but Aunt Bridget, without waiting for my reply, proceeded to indicate the substance of my husband's letter.

From this I gathered that he had chosen (probably to save his pride) to set down my resistance to ignorance of the first conditions of matrimony, and had charged my father first and Aunt Bridget afterwards with doing him a shocking injustice in permitting me to be married to him without telling me what every girl who becomes a wife ought to know.

"But, good gracious," said my Aunt Bridget, "who would have imagined you _didn't_ know. I thought every girl in the world knew before she put up her hair and came out of short frocks. My Betsy did, I'm sure of that. And to think that you--you whom we thought so cute, so cunning. . . . Mary O'Neill, I'm ashamed of you. I really, really am! Why, you goose" (Aunt Bridget was again trying to laugh), "how did you suppose the world went on?"

The coarse ridicule of what was supposed to be my maidenly modesty cut me like a knife, but I could not permit myself to explain, so my Aunt Bridget ran on talking.

"I see how it has been. It's the fault of that Reverend Mother at the convent. What sort of a woman is she? Is she a woman at all, I wonder, or only a piece of stucco that ought to be put up in a church corner! To think she could have you nine years and never say one word about. . . . Well, well! What has she been doing with you? Talking about the mysteries, I suppose--prayers and retreats and novenas, and the spiritual bridegroom and the rest of it, while all the while. . . . But you must put the convent out of your head, my girl. You are a married woman now. You've got to think of your husband, and a husband isn't a spiritual bridegroom I can tell you. He's flesh and blood, that's what a husband is, and you can't expect _him_ to spend his time talking about eternity and the rosary. Not on his wedding-day, anyway."

I was hot in my absurd embarrassment, and I dare say my face was scarlet, but Aunt Bridget showed me no mercy.

"The way you have behaved is too silly for anything. . . . It really is. A husband's a husband, and a wife's a wife. The wife has to obey her husband. Of course she has. Every wife has to. Some don't like it. I can't say that I liked it very much myself. But to think of anybody objecting. Why, it's shocking! Nobody ever heard of such a thing."

I must have flushed up to my forehead, for I became conscious that in my Aunt Bridget's eyes there had been a kind of indecency in my conduct.

"But, come," she said, "we must be sensible. It's timidity, that's what it is. I was a little timid myself when I was first married, but I soon got over it. Once get over your timidity and you will be all right. Sakes alive, yes, you'll be as happy as the day is long, and before this time to-morrow you'll wonder what on earth you made all this fuss about."

I tried to say that what she predicted could never be, because I did not love my husband, and therefore . . . but my Aunt Bridget broke in on me, saying:

"Mary O'Neill, don't be a fool. Your maiden days are over now, and you ought to know what your husband will do if you persist."

I jumped at the thought that she meant he would annul our marriage, but that was not what she was thinking of.

"He'll find somebody else--that's what he'll do. Serve you right, too. You'll only have yourself to blame for it. Perhaps you think you'll be able to do the same, but you won't. Women can't. He'll be happy enough, and you'll be the only one to suffer, so don't make a fool of yourself. Accept the situation. You may not like your husband too much. I can't say I liked the Colonel particularly. He took snuff, and no woman in the world could keep him in clean pocket handkerchiefs. But when a sensible person has got something at stake, she puts up with things. And that's what you must do. He who wants fresh eggs must raise his own chickens, you know."

Aunt Bridget ran on for some time longer, telling me of my father's anger, which was not a matter for much surprise, seeing how he had built himself upon my marriage, and how he had expected that I should have a child, a son, to carry on the family.

"Do you mean to disappoint him after all he has done for you? It would be too silly, too stupid. You'd be the laughing-stock of the whole island. So get up and get dressed and be ready and willing to go with his lordship when he sails by this afternoon's steamer."

"I can't," I said.

"You can't? You mean you won't?"

"Very well, Auntie, I won't."

At that Aunt Bridget stormed at me for several minutes, telling me that if my stubborn determination not to leave the island with my husband meant that I intended to return home she might inform me at once that I was not wanted there and I need not come.

"I've enough on my hands in that house already, what with Betsy unmarried, and your father doing nothing for her, and that nasty Nessy MacLeod making up to him. You ungrateful minx! You are ruining everything! After all I've done for you too! But no matter! If you _will_ make your bed I shall take care that you lie on it."

With that, and the peak of her half-moon bonnet almost dancing over her angry face, Aunt Bridget flounced out of my room.

Half an hour afterwards, when I went into the sitting-room, I found my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, waiting for me. He looked down at me with an indulgent and significant smile, which brought the colour rushing back to my face, put me to sit by his side, touched my arm with one of his large white clammy hands, stroked his long brown beard with the other, and then in the half-reproving tone which a Sunday-school teacher might have used to a wayward child, he began to tell me what the consequences would be if I persisted in my present conduct.

They would be serious. The law was very clear on marital rights. If a wife refused to live with her husband, except on a plea of cruelty or something equally plausible, he could apply to the court and compel her to do so; and if she declined, if she removed herself from his abode, or having removed, refused to return, the Court might punish her--it might even imprison her.

"So you see, the man is the top dog in a case like this, my dear, and he can compel the woman to obey him."

"Do you mean," I said, "that he can use force to compel her?"

"Reasonable force, yes. I think that's so. And quite right, too, when you come to think of it. The woman has entered into a serious contract, and it is the duty of the law to see that she fulfills the conditions of it."

I remembered how little I had known of the conditions of the contract I had entered into, but I was too heart-sick and ashamed to say anything about that.

"Aw yes, that's so," said the advocate, "force, reasonable force! You may say it puts a woman in a worse position as a wife than she would be if she were a mistress. That's true, but it's the law, and once a woman has married a man, the only escape from this condition of submission is imprisonment."

"Then I would rather that--a thousand times rather," I said, for I was hot with anger and indignation.

Again the advocate smiled indulgently, patted my arm, and answered me as if I were a child.

"Tut, tut, my dear, tut, tut! You've made a marriage that is founded on suitability of position, property and education, and everything will come right by and by. Don't act on a fit of pique or spleen, and so destroy your happiness, and that of everybody about you. Think of your father. Remember what he has done to make this marriage. I may tell you that he has paid forty thousand pounds to discharge your husband's debts and undertaken responsibility for an allowance of six thousand a year beside. Do you want him to lose all that money?"

I was so sick with disgust at hearing this that I could not speak, and the advocate, who, in his different way, was as dead to my real feelings as my husband had been, went on to say:

"Come, be reasonable. You may have suffered some slight, some indignity. No doubt you have. Your husband is proud and he has peculiarities of temper which we have all to make allowances for. But even if you could establish a charge of cruelty against him and so secure a separation--which you can't--what good would that do you? None at all--worse than none! The financial arrangements would remain the same. Your father would be a frightful loser. And what would you be? A married widow! The worst condition in the world for a woman--especially if she is young and attractive, and subject to temptations. Ask anybody who knows--anybody."

I felt as if I would suffocate with shame.

"Come now," said the advocate in his superior way, taking my hand as if he were going to lead me like a child to my husband, "let us put an end to this little trouble. His lordship is downstairs and he has consented--kindly and generously consented--to wait an hour for your answer. But he must leave the island by the afternoon steamer, and if. . . ."

"Then tell him he must leave it without me," I said, as well as I could for the anger that was choking me.

The advocate looked steadily into my face. I think he understood the situation at last.

"You mean that--really and truly mean it?" he asked.

"I do," I answered, and unable to say or hear any more without breaking out on him altogether I left the room.

THIRTY-NINTH CHAPTER

Down to this moment I had put on a brave front though my very heart had been trembling; but now I felt that all the weight of law, custom, parental authority and even religion was bearing me down, down, down, and unless help came I must submit in the long run.

I was back in the small bedroom, with my hot forehead against the cold glass of the window, looking out yet seeing nothing, when somebody knocked at the door, softly almost timidly. It was Father Dan, and the sight of his dear face, broken up with emotion, was the same to me as the last plank of a foundering ship to a sailor drowning at sea.

My heart was so full that, though I knew I ought not, I threw my arms about his neck and burst into a flood of tears. The good old priest did not put me away. He smoothed my drooping head and patted my shoulders and in his sweet and simple way he tried to comfort me.

"Don't cry! Don't worry! It will be all right in the end, my child."

There was something almost grotesque in his appearance. Under his soft clerical outdoor hat he was wearing his faded old cassock, as if he had come away hurriedly at a sudden call. I could see what had happened--my family had sent him to reprove me and remonstrate with me.

He sat on a chair by my bed and I knelt on the floor at his feet, just as my mother used to do when I was a child and she was making her confession. Perhaps he thought of that at the same moment as myself, for the golden light of my mother's memory lay always about him. For some moments we did not speak. I think we were both weeping.

At length I tried to tell him what had happened--hiding nothing, softening nothing, speaking the simple and naked truth. I found it impossible to do so. My odd-sounding voice was not like my own, and even my words seemed to be somebody else's. But Father Dan understood everything.

"I know! I know!" he said, and then, to my great relief, interrupting my halting explanations, he gave his own interpretation of my husband's letter.

There was a higher love and there was a lower love and both were necessary to God's plans and purposes. But the higher love must come first, or else the lower one would seem to be cruel and gross and against nature.

Nature was kind to a young girl. Left to itself it awakened her sex very gently. First with love, which came to her like a whisper in a dream, like the touch of an angel on her sleeping eyelids, so that when she awoke to the laws of life the mysteries of sex did not startle or appal her.

But sex in me had been awakened rudely and ruthlessly. Married without love I had been suddenly confronted by the lower passion. What wonder that I had found it brutal and barbarous?

"That's it, my child! That's it! I know! I know!"

Then he began to blame himself for everything, saying it was all his fault and that he should have held out longer. When he saw how things stood between me and my husband he should have said to my father, to the Bishop, and to the lawyers, notwithstanding all their bargainings: "This marriage must not go on. It will lead to disaster. It begins to end badly."

"But now it is all over, my child, and there's no help for it."

I think the real strength of my resistance to Aunt Bridget's coarse ridicule and the advocate's callous remonstrance must have been the memory of my husband's threat when he talked about the possible annulment of our marriage. The thought of that came back to me now, and half afraid, half ashamed, with a fluttering of the heart, I tried to mention it.

"Is there no way out?" I asked.

"What way can there be?" said Father Dan. "God knows I know what pressure was put upon you; but you are married, you have made your vows, you have given your promises. That's all the world sees or cares about, and in the eyes of the law and the Church you are responsible for all that has happened."

With my head still buried in Father Dan's cassock I got it out at last.

"But annulment! Isn't that possible--under the circumstances?" I asked.

The good old priest seemed to be too confused to speak for a moment. Then he explained that what I hoped for was quite out of the question.

"I don't say that in the history of the Church marriages have not been annulled on equally uncertain grounds, but in this case the civil law would require proof--something to justify nullity. Failing that there would have to be collusion either on one side or both, and that is not possible--not to you, my child, not to the daughter of your mother, that dear saint who suffered so long and was silent."

More than ever now I felt like a ship-broken man with the last plank sinking under him. The cold mysterious dread of my husband was creeping back, and the future of my life with him stood before me with startling vividness. In spite of all my struggling and fighting of the night before I saw myself that very night, the next night, and the next, and every night and day of my life thereafter, a victim of the same sickening terror.

"Must I submit, then?" I said.

Father Dan smoothed my head and told me in his soft voice that submission was the lot of all women. It always had been so in the history of the world, and perhaps it always would be.

"Remember the Epistle we read in church yesterday morning: 'Wives submit yourselves to your husbands.'"

With a choking sensation in my throat I asked if he thought I ought to go away with my husband when he left the island by the afternoon steamer.

"I see no escape from it, my poor child. They sent me to reprove you. I can't do that, but neither can I encourage you to resist. It would be wrong. It would be cruel. It would only lead you into further trouble."

My mouth felt parched, but I contrived to say:

"Then you can hold out no hope for me?"

"God knows I can't."

"Although I do not love this man I must live with him as his wife?"

"It is hard, very hard, but there seems to be no help for it."

I rose to my feet, and went back to the window. A wild impulse of rebellion was coming over me.

"I shall feel like a bad woman," I said.

"Don't say that," said Father Dan. "You are married to the man anyway."

"All the same I shall feel like my husband's mistress--his married mistress, his harlot."

Father Dan was shocked, and the moment the words were out of my mouth I was more frightened than I had ever been before, for something within seemed to have forced them out of me.

When I recovered possession of my senses Father Dan, nervously fumbling with the silver cross that hung over his cassock, was talking of the supernatural effect of the sacrament of marriage. It was God Who joined people together, and whom God joined together no man might put asunder. No circumstances either, no trial or tribulation. Could it be thought that a bond so sacred, so indissoluble, was ever made without good effect? No, the Almighty had His own ways with His children, and this great mystery of holy wedlock was one of them.

"So don't lose heart, my child. Who knows what may happen yet? God works miracles now just as He did in the old days. You may come . . . yes, you may come to love your husband, and then--then all will be well."

Suddenly out of my despair and my defiance a new thought came to me. It came with the memory of the emotion I had experienced during the marriage service, and it thrilled me through and through.

"Father Dan?" I said, with a nervous cry, for my heart was fluttering again.

"What is it, my child?"

It was hard to say what I was thinking about, but with a great effort I stammered it out at last. I should be willing to leave the island with my husband, and live under the same roof with him, and bear his name, so that there might be no trouble, or scandal, and nobody except ourselves might ever know that there was anything dividing us, any difference of any kind between us, if he, on his part, would promise--firmly and faithfully promise--that unless and until I came to love him he would never claim my submission as a wife.

While I spoke I hardly dared to look at Father Dan, fearing he would shake his head again, perhaps reprove me, perhaps laugh at me. But his eyes which had been moist began to sparkle and smile.

"You mean that?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And you will go away with him on that condition?"

"Yes, yes."

"Then he must agree to it."

The pure-minded old priest saw no difficulties, no dangers, no risks of breakdown in my girlish scheme. Already my husband had got all he had bargained for. He had got my father's money in exchange for his noble name, and if he wanted more, if he wanted the love of his wife, let him earn it, let him win it.

"That's only right, only fair. It will be worth winning, too--better worth winning than all your father's gold and silver ten times over. I can tell him that much anyway."

He had risen to his feet in his excitement, the simple old priest with his pure heart and his beautiful faith in me.

"And you, my child, you'll try to love him in return--promise you will."

A shiver ran through me when Father Dan said that--a sense of the repugnance I felt for my husband almost stifled me.

"Promise me," said Father Dan, and though my face must have been scarlet, I promised him.

"That's right. That alone will make him a better man. He may be all that people say, but who can measure the miraculous influence of a good woman?"

He was making for the door.

"I must go downstairs now and speak to your husband. But he'll agree. Why shouldn't he? I know he's afraid of a public scandal, and if he attempts to refuse I'll tell him that. . . . But no, that will be quite unnecessary. Good-bye, my child! If I don't come back you'll know that everything has been settled satisfactorily. You'll be happy yet. I'm sure you will. Ah, what did I say about the mysterious power of that solemn and sacred sacrament? Good-bye!"

I meant what I had said. I meant to do what I had promised. God knows I did. But does a woman ever know her own heart? Or is heaven alone the judge of it?

At four o'clock that afternoon my husband left Ellan for England. I went with him.

FORTIETH CHAPTER

Having made my bargain I set myself to fulfil the conditions of it. I had faithfully promised to try to love my husband and I prepared to do so.

Did not love require that a wife should look up to and respect and even reverence the man she had married? I made up my mind to do that by shutting my eyes to my husband's obvious faults and seeing only his better qualities.

What disappointments were in store for me! What crushing and humiliating disillusionments!

On the night of our arrival in London we put up at a fashionable hotel in a quiet but well-known part of the West-end, which is inhabited chiefly by consulting physicians and celebrated surgeons. Here, to my surprise, we were immediately discovered, and lines of visitors waited upon my husband the following morning.

I thought they were his friends, and a ridiculous little spurt of pride came to me from heaven knows where with the idea that my husband must be a man of some importance in the metropolis.

But I discovered they were his creditors, money-lenders and bookmakers, to whom he owed debts of "honour" which he had been unable or unwilling to disclose to my father and his advocate.

One of my husband's visitors was a pertinacious little man who came early and stayed late. He was a solicitor, and my husband was obviously in some fear of him. The interviews between them, while they were closeted together morning after morning in one of our two sitting-rooms, were long and apparently unpleasant, for more than once I caught the sound of angry words on both sides, with oaths and heavy blows upon the table.

But towards the end of the week, my husband's lawyer arrived in London, and after that the conversations became more pacific.

One morning, as I sat writing a letter in the adjoining room, I heard laughter, the popping of corks, the jingling of glasses, and the drinking of healths, and I judged that the, difficult and disagreeable business had been concluded.

At the close of the interview I heard the door opened and my husband going into the outer corridor to see his visitors to the lift, and then something prompted me--God alone knows what--to step into the room they had just vacated.

It was thick with tobacco smoke. An empty bottle of champagne (with three empty wine glasses) was on the table, and on a desk by the window were various papers, including a sheet of foolscap which bore a seal and several signatures, and a thick packet of old letters bound together with a piece of purple ribbon.

Hardly had I had time to recognise these documents when my husband returned to the room, and by the dark expression of his face I saw instantly that he thought I had looked at them.

"No matter!" he said, without any preamble. "I might as well tell you at once and have done with it."

He told me. The letters were his. They had been written to a woman whom he had promised to marry, and he had had to buy them back from her. Although for three years he had spent a fortune on the creature she had shown him no mercy. Through her solicitor, who was a scoundrel, she had threatened him, saying in plain words that if he married anybody else she would take proceedings against him immediately. That was why, in spite of the storm, we had to come up to London on the day after our wedding.

"Now you know," said my husband. "Look here" (holding out the sheet of foolscap), "five thousand pounds--that's the price I've had to pay for marrying."

I can give no idea of the proud imperiousness and the impression of injury with which my husband told his brutal story. But neither can I convey a sense of the crushing shame with which I listened to it. There was not a hint of any consciousness on his part of my side of the case. Not a suggestion of the clear fact that the woman he had promised to marry had been paid off by money which had come through me. Not a thought of the humiliation he had imposed upon his wife in dragging her up to London at the demand of his cast-off mistress.

When my husband had finished speaking I could not utter a word. I was afraid that my voice would betray the anger that was boiling in me. But I was also degraded to the very dust in my own eyes, and to prevent an outburst of hysterical tears I ran back to my room and hid my face in my pillow.

What was the good of trying to make myself in love with a man who was separated from me by a moral chasm that could never be passed? What was the good? What was the good?

FORTY-FIRST CHAPTER

But next morning, having had time to think things out in my simple and ignorant way, I tried to reconcile myself to my position. Remembering what Aunt Bridget had said, both before my marriage and after it, about the different moralities of men and women, I told myself I had placed my standard too high.

Perhaps a husband was not a superior being, to be regarded with respect and reverence, but a sort of grown-up child whom it was the duty of a wife to comfort, coax, submit to and serve.

I determined to do this. Still clinging to the hope of falling in love with my husband, I set myself to please him by every means within my power, even to the length of simulating sentiments which I did not feel.

But what a task I was setting myself! What a steep and stony Calvary I was attempting to climb!

After the degrading business with the other woman had been concluded I thought we should have left England immediately on the honeymoon tour which my husband had mapped out for us, but he told me that would not be convenient and we must remain in London a little longer. We stayed six weeks altogether, and never did a young wife pass a more cheerless and weary time.

I had no friends of my own within reach, and to my deep if secret mortification no woman of my husband's circle called upon me. But a few of his male friends were constantly with us, including Mr. Eastcliff, who had speedily followed us from Ellan, and a Mr. Vivian, who, though the brother of a Cabinet Minister, seemed to me a very vain and vapid person, with the eyes of a mole, a vacant smile, a stupid expression, an abrupt way of speaking through his teeth, and a shrill voice which gave the impression of screeching against the wind.

With these two men, and others of a similar kind, we passed many hours of nearly every day, lunching with them, dining with them, walking with them, driving with them, and above all playing bridge with them in one of our sitting rooms in the hotel.

I knew nothing of the game to begin with, never having touched a card in my life, but in accordance with the theories which I believed to be right and the duties I had imposed upon myself, I took a hand with my husband when he could find nobody better to be his partner.

The results were very disheartening. In spite of my desire to please I was slow to learn, and my husband's impatience with my mistakes, which confused and intimidated me, led to some painful humiliations. First he laughed, next he sneered, then he snapped me up in the midst of my explanations and apologies, and finally, at a moment of loss, he broke out on me with brutal derision, saying he had never had much opinion of my intellect, but was now quite sure that I had no more brains than a rabbit and could not say Boo to a goose.

One day when we were alone, and he was lying on the couch with his vicious little terrier by his side, I offered to sing to him. Remembering how my voice had been praised, I thought it would be pleasant to my husband to see that there was something I really could do. But nine years in a convent had left me with next to no music but memories of the long-breathed harmonies of some of the beautiful masses of our Church, and hardly had I begun on these when my husband cried:

"Oh, stop, stop, for heaven's sake stop, or I shall think we're attending a funeral."

Another day I offered to read to him. The Reverend Mother used to say I was the best reader she had ever heard, but perhaps it was not altogether my husband's fault if he formed a different opinion. And indeed I cannot but think that the holy saints themselves would have laughed if they had heard me reading aloud, in the voice and intonation which I had assumed for the meditations of St. Francis of Assisi, the mystic allusions to "certs," and "bookies," and "punters," and "evens," and "scratchings," which formed the substance of the sporting journals that were my husband's only literature.

"Oh, stop it, stop it," he cried again. "You read the 'Winning Post' as if it were the Book of Revelation."

As time passed the gulf that separated me from my husband became still greater. If I could have entertained him with any kind of gossip we might have got on better. But I had no conversation that interested him, and he had little or none that I could pretend to understand. He loved the town; I loved the country; he loved the night and the blaze of electric lights; I loved the morning and the sweetness of the sun.

At the bottom of my heart I knew that his mind was common, low and narrow, and that his tastes were gross and vulgar, but I was determined to conquer the repulsion I felt for him.

It was impossible. If I could have struck one spark from the flint of his heart the relations between us might have been different. If his look could have met my look in a single glance of understanding I could have borne with his impatience and struggled on.

But nothing of this kind ever happened, and when one dreary night after grumbling at the servants, cursing his fate and abusing everybody and everything, he put on his hat and went out saying he had "better have married Lena [the other woman] after all," for in that case he would have had "some sort of society anyway," the revulsion I had felt on the night of my marriage came sweeping over me like a wave of the sea, and I asked myself again, "What's the good? What's the good?"

FORTY-SECOND CHAPTER

Nevertheless next day I found myself taking my husband's side against myself.

If he had sacrificed anything in order to marry me it was my duty to make it up to him.

I resolved that I _should_ make it up to him. I would study my husband's likes and dislikes in every little thing. I would share in his pleasures and enter into his life. I would show him that a wife was something other and better than any hired woman in the world, and that when she cast in her lot with her husband it was for his own sake only and not for any fortune he could spend on her.

"Yes, yes, that's what I'll do," I thought, and I became more solicitous of my husband's happiness than if I had really and truly loved him.

A woman would smile at the efforts which I made in my inexperience to make my husband forget his cast-off mistress, and indeed some of them were very childish.

The first was a ridiculous failure.

My husband's birthday was approaching and I wished to make him a present. It was difficult to know what to select, for I knew little or nothing of his tastes or wants; but walking one day in a street off Oxford Street I saw, in the window of a shop for the sale of objects of ecclesiastical _vertu_, among crosses and crucifixes and rosaries, a little ivory ink-stand and paper-holder, which was surmounted by a figure of the Virgin.

I cannot for the life of me conceive why I thought this would be a suitable present for my husband, except that the face of Our Lady was so young, so sweet, so beautiful, and so exquisitely feminine that it seemed impossible that any man in the world should not love her. But however that might be I bought her, and carrying her home in a cab, I set her on my husband's desk without a word, and then stood by, like the mother of Moses, to watch the result.

There was no result--at first at all events. My husband was several hours in the room with my treasure without appearing to be aware of its presence. But towards evening his two principal friends came to play bridge with him, and then, from the ambush of my own apartments, I heard the screechy voice of Mr. Vivian saying:

"Dash it all, Jimmy, you don't say you're going to be a Pape?"

"Don't fret yourself, old fellow," replied my husband. "That's my wife's little flutter. Dare say the poor fool has had to promise her priest to make me a 'vert.'"

My next experiment was perhaps equally childish but certainly more successful.

Seeing that my husband was fond of flowers, and was rarely without a rose in his buttonhole, I conceived the idea of filling his room with them in honour of his birthday. With this view I got up very early, before anybody in the hotel was stirring, and hurried off to Covent Garden, through the empty and echoing streets, while the air of London was fresh with the breath of morning and the big city within its high-built walls seemed to dream of the green fields beyond.

I arrived at the busy and noisy square just as the waggons were rolling in from the country with huge crates of red and white roses, bright with the sunshine and sparkling with the dew. Then buying the largest and loveliest and costliest bunch of them (a great armful, as much as I could hold), I hurried back to the hotel and set them in vases and glasses in every part of my husband's room--his desk, his sideboard, his mantelpiece, and above all his table, which a waiter was laying for breakfast--until the whole place was like a bridal bower.

"Ah, this is something like," I heard my husband say as he came out of his bedroom an hour or two afterwards with his vicious terrier at his heels.

I heard no more until he had finished breakfast, and then, while drawing on his gloves for his morning walk, he said to the waiter, who was clearing the table,

"Tell your Manageress I am much obliged to her for the charming flowers with which she has decorated my room this morning."

"But it wasn't the manageress, my lord," said the waiter.

"Then who was it?"

"It was her . . . her ladyship," said the waiter.

"O-oh!" said my husband in a softer, if more insinuating tone, and a few minutes afterwards he went out whistling.

God knows that was small reward for the trouble I had taken, but I was so uplifted by the success of my experiment that I determined to go farther, and when towards evening of the same day a group of my husband's friends came to tell him that they had booked a box at a well-known musical comedy theatre, I begged to be permitted to join them.

"Nonsense, my dear! Brompton Oratory would suit you better," said my husband, chucking me under the chin.

But I persisted in my importunities, and at length Mr. Eastcliff said:

"Let her come. Why shouldn't she?"

"Very well," said my husband, pinching my cheek. "As you please. But if you don't like it don't blame _me_."

It did not escape me that as a result of my change of front my husband had risen in his own esteem, and that he was behaving towards me as one who thought he had conquered my first repugnance, or perhaps triumphantly ridden over it. But in my simplicity I was so fixed in my determination to make my husband forget the loss of his mistress that I had no fear of his familiarities and no misgivings about his mistakes.

All that was to come later, with a fresh access of revulsion and disgust.

FORTY-THIRD CHAPTER

I had seen enough of London by this time to know that the dresses which had been made for me at home were by no means the _mode_; but after I had put on the best-fitting of my simple quaker-like costumes with a string of the family pearls about my neck and another about my head, not all the teaching of the good women of the convent could prevent me from thinking that my husband and his friends would have no reason to be ashamed of me.

We were a party of six in all, whereof I was the only woman, and we occupied a large box on the first tier near the stage, a position of prominence which caused me a certain embarrassment, when, as happened at one moment of indefinable misery, the opera glasses of the people in the dress-circle and stalls were turned in our direction.

I cannot say that the theatre impressed me. Certainly the building itself did not do so, although it was beautifully decorated in white and gold, for I had seen the churches of Rome, and in my eyes they were much more gorgeous.

Neither did the audience impress me, for though I had never before seen so many well-dressed people in one place, I thought too many of the men, when past middle life, seemed fat and overfed, and too many of the women, with their plump arms and bare shoulders, looked as if they thought of nothing but what to eat and what to put on.

Nor did the performers impress me, for though when the curtain rose, disclosing the stage full of people, chiefly girls, in delicate and beautiful toilettes, I thought I had never before seen so many lovely and happy faces, after a while, when the faces fell into repose, I thought they were not really lovely and not really happy, but hard and strained and painful, as if life had been very cruel.

And, above all, I was not impressed by the play, for I thought, in my ignorance of such productions, that I had never heard anything so frivolous and foolish, and more than once I found myself wondering whether my good nuns, if they could have been present, would not have concluded that the whole company had taken leave of their senses.

There was, however, one thing which did impress me, and that was the leading actor. It was a woman, and when she first came on to the stage I thought I had never in my life seen anybody so beautiful, with her lovely soft round figure, her black eyes, her red lips, her pearly white teeth, and a smile so sunny that it had the effect of making everybody in the audience smile with her.

But the strange thing was--I could not account for it--that after a few minutes I thought her extremely ugly and repellent, for her face seemed to be distorted by malice and envy and hatred and nearly every other bad passion.

Nevertheless she was a general favourite, for not only was she applauded before she did anything, but everything she said, though it was sometimes very silly, was accompanied by a great deal of laughter, and everything she sang, though her voice was no great matter, was followed by a chorus of applause.

Seeing this, and feeling that her appearance had caused a flutter of interest in the box behind me, I laughed and applauded also, in accordance with the plan I had prepared for myself, of sharing my husband's pleasures and entering into his life, although at the bottom of my heart I really thought the joy was not very joyful or the mirth very merry.

This went on for nearly an hour, and then a strange thing happened. I was leaning forward on the velvet barrier of the box in front of me, laughing and clapping my hands with the rest, when all at once I became aware that the lady had wheeled about, and, walking down the stage in the direction of our box, was looking boldly back at me.

I could not at first believe it to be so, and even now I cannot say whether it was something in her face, or something whispered at my back which flashed it upon my mind that this was the woman my husband ought to have married, the woman whose place I had taken, the woman of the foolscap document and the letters in the purple ribbon.

After that I could play my poor little part no longer, and though I continued to lean on the yellow velvet of the barrier in front of me I dropped my eyes as often as that woman was on the stage, and hoped and prayed for the end of the performance.

It came at length with a crash of instruments and voices, and a few minutes afterwards my husband and I were in the cab on our way back to the hotel.

I was choking with mingled anger and shame--anger at my husband for permitting me to come to a place in which I could be exposed to a public affront from his cast-off mistress, shame at the memory of the pitiful scheme for entering into his life which had fallen to such a welter of wreck and ruin.

But my husband himself was only choking with laughter.

"It was as good as a play," he said. "Upon my soul it was! I never saw anything funnier in the whole course of my life."

That served him, repeated again and again, until we reached the hotel, when he ordered a bottle of wine to be sent upstairs, and then shook with suppressed laughter as we went up in the lift.

Coming to our floor I turned towards my bedroom, wishing to be alone with my outraged feelings, but my husband drew me into one of our sitting-rooms, telling me he had something to say.

He put me to sit in an arm-chair, threw off his overcoat, lit a cigarette, as well as he could for the spurts and gusts of his laughter, and then, standing back to the fire-place, with one hand in his pocket and his coat-tail over his arm, he told me the cause of his merriment.

"I don't mind telling you that was Lena," he said. "The good-looking girl in the scarlet dress and the big diamonds. She spotted me the moment she stepped on to the stage. Must have guessed who you were, too. Did you see how she looked at you? Thought I had brought you there to walk over her. I'm sure she did!"

There was another gust of laughter and then--

"She'd been going about saying I had married an old frump for the sake of her fortune, and when she saw that you could wipe her off the face of the earth without a gown that was worth wearing, she was ready to die with fury."

There was another gust of laughter through the smoke that was spurting from his mouth and then--

"And you, too, my dear! Laughing and applauding! She thought you were trying to crow over her! On her own particular barn-door, too! Upon my soul, it was too amusing. I wonder she didn't throw something at you. She's like that when she's in her tantrums."

The waiter came in with the wine and my husband poured out a glass for me.

"Have a drink. No? Well, here's to your health, my dear. I can't get over it. I really can't. Lena's too funny for anything. Why, what else do you think she's been saying? She's been saying I'll come back to her yet. Yes, 'I'll give him six months to come crawling back to me,' she said to Eastcliff and Vivian and some of the other fellows at the Club. Wonder if she thinks so now? . . . I wonder?"

He threw away his cigarette, drank another glass of the wine, came close up to me and said in a lower tone, which made my skin creep as with cold.

"Whether she's right or wrong depends on you, though."

"On me?"

"Why, yes, of course. That's only natural. One may have all the goodwill in the world, but a man's a man, you know."

I felt my lips quivering with anger, and in an effort to control myself I rose to go, but my husband drew me back into my chair and sat on the arm of it.

"Don't go yet. By the way, dear, I've never thanked you for the beautiful flowers with which you decorated my room this morning. Charming! But I always knew you would soon come round to it."

"Come round to what?" I said, but it was just as if somebody else were speaking.

"_You_ know. Of course you know. When that simple old priest proposed that ridiculous compact I agreed, but I knew quite well that it would soon break down. Not on my side, though. Why should it? A man can afford to wait. But I felt sure you would soon tire of your resistance. And you have, haven't you? Oh, I'm not blind. I've seen what's been going on, though I've said nothing about it."

Again I tried to rise, and again my husband held me to my seat, saying:

"Don't be ashamed. There's no reason for that. You were rather hard on me, you know, but I'm going to forget all about it. Why shouldn't I? I've got the loveliest little woman in the world, so I mean to meet her half way, and she's going to get over her convent-bred ideas and be my dear little darling wife. Now isn't she?"

I could have died of confusion and the utter degradation of shame. To think that my poor efforts to please him, my vain attempts to look up to him and reverence him, my bankrupt appeals to the spiritual woman in me that I might bring myself to love him, as I thought it was my duty to do, should have been perverted by his gross and vulgar mind into overtures to the animal man in him--this was more than I could bear. I felt the tears gushing to my eyes, but I kept them back, for my self-pity was not so strong as my wrath.

I rose this time without being aware of his resistance.

"Let me go to bed," I said.

"Certainly! Most certainly, my dear, but. . . ."

"Let me go to bed," I said again, and at the next moment I stepped into my room.

He did not attempt to follow me. I saw in a mirror in front what was taking place behind me.

My husband was standing where I had left him with a look first of amazement and then of rage.

"I can't understand you," he said. "Upon my soul I can't! There isn't a man in the world who could." After that he strode into his own bedroom and clashed the door after him.

"Oh, what's the good?" I thought again.

It was impossible to make myself in love with my husband. It was no use trying.

FORTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

I must leave it to those who know better than I do the way to read the deep mysteries of a woman's heart, to explain how it came to pass that the only result of this incident was to make me sure that if we remained in London much longer my husband would go back to the other woman, and to say why (seeing that I did not love him) I should have become feverishly anxious to remove him from the range of this temptation.

Yet so it was, for the very next morning, I wrote to my father saying I had been unwell and begging him to use his influence with my husband to set out on the Egyptian trip without further delay.

My father's answer was prompt. What he had read between the lines of my