Complete works of hall c.., p.236
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 236
The little cunning arts of her sex, the small deceits in which she had disguised herself fell away from her now. She said to herself, “I will stop the nonsense about the marriage with Pete.” It was mean, it was foolish, it was miserable trifling, it was wicked, it was a waste of life — above all, it was doing a great, great wrong to her love of Philip! How could she ever have thought of it?
Next morning she was up and was dressing when Grannie came into the room with a cup of tea. “I feel so much better,” she said “that I think I’ll go to Douglas by the coach today, mother.”
“Do, bogh,” said Grannie cheerfully, “and Pete shall go with you.”
“Oh, no; I must be quite alone, mother.”
“Aw, aw! A lil errand, maybe! Shopping is it? Presents, eh? Take your tay, then.” And Grannie rolled the blind, saying, “A beautiful morning you’ll have for it, too. I can see the spire as plain as plain.” Then, turning about, “Did you hear the bells this morning, Kitty?”
“Why, what bells, mammy?” said Kate, through a mouthful of bread and butter.
“The bells for Christian Killip. Her old sweetheart took her to church at last. He wouldn’t get rest at your father till he did — and her baby two years for Christmas. But what d’ye think, now? Robbie left her at the church door, and he’s off by the Ramsey packet for England. Aw, dear, he did, though. ‘You can make me marry her,’ said he, ‘but you can’t make me live with her,’ he said, and he was away down the road like the dust.”
“I don’t think I’ll go to Douglas to-day, mother,” said Kate in a broken voice. “I’m not so very well, after all.”
“Aw, the bogh!” said Grannie. “Making too sure of herself, was she? It’s the way with them all when they’re mending.”
With cheerful protestations Grannie helped her back to bed, and then went off with an anxious face to tell Cæsar that she was more ill than ever.
She was ill indeed; but her worst illness was of the heart. “If I go to him and tell him,” she thought, “he will marry me — yes. No fear that he will leave me at the church door or elsewhere. He will stay with me. We will be man and wife to the last. The world will know nothing. But I will know. As long as I live I will remember that he only sacrificed himself to repair a fault That shall never be — never, never!”
Cæsar came up in great alarm. He seemed to be living in hourly dread that some obstacle would arise at the last moment to stop the marriage. “Chut, woman!” he said play-. fully. “Have a good heart, Kitty. The sun’s not going down on you yet at all.”
That night there were loud voices from the bar-room. The talk was of the marriage which had taken place in the morning, and of its strange and painful sequel. John the Clerk was saying, “But you’d be hearing of the by-child, it’s like?”
“Never a word,” said somebody.
“Not heard of it, though? Fetching the child to the wedding to have the bad name taken off it — no? They were standing the lil bogh — it’s only three — two is it, Grannie, only two? — well, they were standing the lil thing under its mother’s perricut while the sarvice was saying.”
“You don’t say!”
“Aw, truth enough, sir! It’s the ould Manx way of legitimating. The parsons are knowing nothing of it, but I’ve seen it times.”
“John’s right,” said Mr. Jelly; “and I can tell you more — it was just that the man went to church for.”
“Wouldn’t trust,” said John the Clerk. “The woman wasn’t getting much of a husband out of it anyway.”
“No,” said Pete — he had not spoken before— “but the child was getting the name of its father, though.”
“That’s not mountains of thick porridge, sir,” said somebody. “Bobbie’s gone. What’s the good of a father if he’s doing nothing to bring you up?”
“Ask your son if you’ve got any of the sort,” said Pete; “some of you have. Ask me. I know middling well what it is to go through the world without a father’s name to my back. If your lad is like myself, he’s knowing it early and he’s knowing it late. He’s knowing it when he’s saying his bits of prayers atop of the bed in the gable loft: ‘God bless mother — and grandmother,’ maybe — there’s never no ‘father’ in his little texes. And he’s knowing it when he’s growing up to a lump of a lad and going for a trade, and the beast of life is getting the grip of him. Ten to one he comes to be a waistrel then, and, if it’s a girl instead, a hundred to nothing she turns out a — well, worse. Only a notion, is it? Just a parzon’s lie, eh? Having your father’s name is nothing — no? That’s what the man says. But ask the child, and shut your mouth for a fool.”
There was a hush and a hum after that, and Kate, who had reached from the bed to open the door, clutched it with a feverish grasp.
“But Christian Killip is nothing but a trollop, anyway, sir,” said Cæsar.
“Every cat is black in the night, father — the girl’s in trouble,” said Pete. “No, no! If I’d done wrong by a woman, and she was having a child by me, I’d marry her if she’d take me, though I’d come to hate her like sin itself.”
Grannie in the kitchen was wiping her eyes at these brave words, but Kate in the bedroom was tossing in a delirium of wrath. “Never, never, never!” she thought.
Oh, yes, Philip would marry her if she imposed herself upon him, if she hinted at a possible contingency. He, too, was a brave man; he also had a lofty soul — he would not shrink. But no, not for the wealth of worlds.
Philip loved her, and his love alone should bring him to her side. No other compulsion should be put upon him, neither the thought of her possible future position, nor of the consequences to another. It was the only justice, the only safety, the only happiness now or in the time to come.
“He shall marry me for my sake,” she thought, “for my own sake — my own sake only.”
Thus in the wild disorder of her soul — the tempest of conflicting passions — her pride barred up the one great way.
XVII.
There was no help for it after all — she must go on as she had begun, with the old scheme, the old chance, the old gambling hazard. Heart-sick and ashamed, waiting for Philip, and listening to every step, she kept her room two days longer. Then Cæsar came and rallied her.
“Gough bless me, but nobody will credit it,” he said. “The marriage for Monday, and the bride in bed a Wednesday. People will say it isn’t coming off at all.”
This alarmed her. It partly explained why Philip did not come. If he thought there was no danger of the marriage, he would be in no hurry to intervene. Next day (Thursday) she struggled up and dressed in a light wrapper, feeling weak and nervous, and looking pale and white like apple-blossom nipped by frost. Pete would have carried her downstairs, but she would not have it. They established her among a pile of cushions before a fire in the parlour, with its bowl of sea-birds’ eggs that had the faint, unfamiliar smell — its tables of old china that shook and rang slightly with every step and sound. The kitchen was covered with the litter of dressmakers preparing for the wedding. There were bodices to try on, and decisions to give on points of style. Kate agreed to everything. In a weak and toneless voice she kept on telling them to do as they thought hest. Only when she heard that Pete was to pay did she assert her will, and that was to limit the dresses to one.
“Sakes alive now, Kirry,” cried Nancy, “that’s what I call ruining a good husband — the man was willing to buy frocks for a boarding-school.”
Pete came, sat on a stool at her feet, and told stories. They were funny stories of his life abroad, and now and again there came bursts of laughter from the kitchen, where they were straining their necks to catch his words through the doors, which they kept ajar. But Kate hardly listened. She showed signs of impatience sometimes, and made quick glances around when the door opened, as if expecting somebody. On recovering herself at these moments, she found Pete looking up at her with the big, serious, moist eyes of a dog.
He began to tell of the house he had taken, to excuse himself for not consulting her, and to describe the progress of the furnishing.
“I’ve put it all in the hands of Cannell & Quayle, Kitty,” he said, “and they’re doing it beautiful. Marble slabs, bless you, like a butcher’s counter; carpets as soft as daisies, and looking-glasses as tall as a man.”
Kate had not heard him. She was trying to remember all she knew of the courts of the island — where they were held, and on what days.
“Have you seen Philip lately?” she asked.
“Not since Monday,” said Pete. “He’s in Douglas, working like mad to be here on Monday, God bless him!”
“What did he say when he heard we had changed the day?”
“Wanted to get out of it first. ‘I’m sailing on Tuesday,’ said he.”
“Did you tell him that I proposed it?”
“Trust me for not forgetting that at all. ‘Aw, then,’ says he, ‘there’s no choice left,’ he says.”
Kate’s pale face became paler, the dark circles about her eyes grew yet more dark. “I think I’ll go back to bed, mother,” she said in the same toneless voice.
Pete helped her to the foot of the stairs. The big, moist eyes were looking at her constantly. She found it hard to keep an equal countenance.
“But will you be fit for it, darling?” said Pete.
“Why, of course she’ll be fit, sir,” said Cæsar. “What girl is ever more than middling the week before she’s married?”
Next day she persuaded her father to take her to Douglas. She had little errands there that could not be done in Ramsey. The morning was fine but cold. Pete helped her up in the gig, and they drove away. If only she could see Philip, if only Philip could see her, he would know by the look of her face that the marriage was not of her making — that compulsion of some sort was being put on her. She spent four hours going from shop to shop, lingering in the streets, but seeing nothing of Philip. Her step was slow and weary, her features were pinched and starved, but Cæsar could scarcely get her out of the town. At length the daylight began to fail, and then she yielded to his importunities.
“How short the days are now,” she said with a sigh, as they ran into the country.
“Yes, they are a cock’s stride shorter in September,” said Cæsar; “but when a woman once gets shopping, Midsummer day itself won’t do — she’s wanting the land of the midnight sun.”
Pete lifted her out of the gig in darkness at the door of the “Fairy,” and, his great arms being about her, he carried her into the house and set her down in the fire-seat. She would have struggled to her feet if she had been able; she felt something like repulsion at his touch; but he looked at her with the mute eloquence of love, and she was ashamed.
The house was full of gossips that night. They talked of the marriage customs of old times. One described the “pay-weddings,” where the hat went round, and every guest gave something towards the cost of the breakfast and the expenses of beginning housekeeping — rude forefather of the practice of the modern wedding present. Another pictured the irregular marriages made in public-houses in the days when the island had three breweries and thirty drinking shops to every thousand of its inhabitants. The publican laid two sticks crosswise on the floor, and said to the bride and bridegroom —
“Hop over the sticks and lie crossed on the floor, And you’re man and wife for nevermore.”
There was some laughter at this, but Kate sat in the fire-seat and sipped her tea in silence, and Pete said quietly, “Nothing to laugh at, though. I remember a girl over Foxal way that was married to a man like that, and then he went off to Kinsale, and got kept for the herring riots — d’ye mind them? She was a strapping girl, though, and when the man was gone the boys came bothering her, first one and then another, and good ones among them too. And honour bright for all, they were for taking her to the parzon about right But no! Did they think she was for committing beggamy? She was married to one man, and wasn’t that enough for a dacent girl anyway. And so she wouldn’t and she didn’t, and last of all her own boy came back, and they lived together man and wife, and what for shouldn’t they?”
This question from the man who was on the point of going to church was received with shouts of laughter, through which the voice of Grannie rose in affectionate remonstrance, saying, “Aw, Pete, it’s ter’ble to hear you, bogh.”
“What’s there ter’ble about that, Grannie?” said Pete. “Isn’t it the Almighty and not the parzon that makes the marriage?”
“Aw, boy veen, boy veen,” cried Grannie, “you was used to be a good man, but you have fell off very bad.”
Kate was in a fever of eagerness. She wanted to open her heart to Pete, to beg him to spare her, to tell him that it was impossible that they should ever marry. Pete would see that Philip was her husband by every true law, human and divine. In this mood she lived through much of the following day, Friday, tossing and turning in bed, for the exhaustion of the day in Douglas had confined her to her room again.
In the evening she came downstairs, and was established in the fire-seat as before. There were four or five old women in the kitchen spinning yarn for a set of blankets which Grannie intended for a wedding present. “When the day’s work was nearly done, two or three old men, the old husbands of the old women, came to carry their wheels home again. Then, as the wheels whirred for the last of the twist, Pete set the old crones to tell stories of old times.
“Tell us of the days when you were young, Anne,” said Pete to an ancient dame of eighty. Her husband of eighty-four sat sucking his pipe by her side.
“Well,” said old Anne, stretching her arms to the yarn, “I was as near going foreign, same as yourself, sir, just as near, now, as makes no matter. It was the very day I married this man, and his brother was making a start for Austrillya. Jemmy was my ould sweetheart, only I had given him up because he was always stealing my pocket-handkerchers. But he came that morning and tapped at my window, and ‘Will you come, Anne?’ says he, and I whipped on my perricut and stole out and down to the quay with him. But my heart was losing me when I saw the white horses on the water, and home I came and went to church with this one instead.”
While old Anne told her story her old husband opened his mouth wider and wider, until the pipe-shank dropped out of his toothless gums on to his waistcoat. Then he stretched his left arm and brought down his clenched hand with a bang on to her shoulder.
“And have you been living with me better than sixty years,” said he, “and never telling me that before?”
Pete tried to pacify his ancient jealousy, but it was not to be appeased, and he shouldered the wheel and hobbled off, saying, “And I sent out two pound five to put a stone on the man’s grave!”
There was loud laughter when the old couple were gone, but Pete said, nevertheless, “A sacret’s a sacret, though, and the ould lady had no right to tell it. It was the dead man’s sacret too, and she’s fouled the ould man’s memory. If a person’s done wrong, the best thing he can do next is to say darned little about it.”
Kate rose and went off to bed. Another door had been barred to her, and she felt sick and faint.
XVIII.
The next day was Saturday. Kate remembered that Philip came to Ballure on Saturdays. She felt sure that he would come to Sulby also. Let him only set eyes on her, and he would divine the trouble that had taken the colour out of her cheeks. Then he would speak to Pete and to her father; he would deliver her; he would take everything upon himself. Thus all day long, like a white-eyed gambler who has staked his last, she waited and listened and watched. At breakfast she said to herself, “He will come this morning.” At dinner, “He will come this evening.” At supper, “He will come tonight.”
But Philip did not come, and she grew hysterical as well as restless. She watched the clock; the minutes passed with feet of lead, but the hours with wings of fire. She was now like a criminal looking for a reprieve. Every time the clock warned to strike, she felt one hour nearer her doom.
The strain was wearing her out. She reproached Philip for leaving her to this cruel uncertainty, and she suffered the pangs of one who tries at the same time to love and to hate. Then she reproached herself with altering the date of the marriage, and excused Philip on the grounds of her haste. She felt like a witch who was burning by her own spell. Hope was failing her, and Will was breaking down as well. Nevertheless, she determined that the wedding should be postponed.
That was on Saturday night. On Sunday morning she had gone one step farther. The last pitiful shred of expectation that Philip would intervene seemed then to be lost, and she had resolved that, come what would, she should not marry at all. No need to appeal to Pete; no necessity to betray the secret of Philip. All she had to do was to say she would not go on with the wedding, and no power on earth should compel her.
With this determination, and a feeling of immense relief, she went downstairs. Cæsar was coming in from the preaching-room, and Pete from the new house at Ramsey. They sat down to dinner. After dinner she would speak out. Cæsar sharpened the carving-knife on the steel, and said, “We’ve taken the girl Christian Killip back to communion to-day.”
“Poor thing,” said Grannie, “pity she was ever put out of it, though.”
“Maybe so, — maybe no,” said Cæsar. “Necessary anyway; one scabby sheep infects the flock.”
“And has marriage daubed grace on the poor sheep’s sore then, Cæsar?” said Pete.
“She’s Mistress Robbie Teare and a dacent woman, sir,” said Cæsar, digging into the beef, “and that’s all the truck a Christian church has got with it.”
Kate did not eat her dinner that day, and neither did she speak out as she had intended. A supernatural power seemed to have come down at the last moment and barred up the one remaining pathway of escape. She was in the track of the storm. The tempest was ready to fall on her. Where could she fly for shelter?
