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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 2. My Marriage - Chapter 29 |
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_ SECOND PART. MY MARRIAGE TWENTY-NINTH CHAPTER
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. _ |
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