“Have you hurt yourself?”

  And then through the thunderous boom of the rising sea on the rock, came the breaking voice of my boy (he had broken his right arm) mingled with the sobs which his unconquered and unconquerable little soul was struggling to suppress —

  “We never minds a bit of hurt . . . we never minds nothing when we’re out asploring!”

  Meantime on shore there was a great commotion. My father was railing at Aunt Bridget, who was upbraiding my mother, who was crying for Father Dan, who was flying off for Doctor Conrad, who was putting his horse into his gig and scouring the parish in search of the two lost children.

  But Tommy the Mate, who remembered the conversation in the potting-shed and thought he heard the tinkle of a bell at sea, hurried off to the shore, where he found his boat bobbing on the beach, and thereby came to his own conclusions.

  By the light of a lantern he pulled out to St. Mary’s Rock, and there, guided by the howling of the dog, he came upon the great little explorers, hardly more than three feet above high water, lying together in the corn sack, locked in each other’s arms and fast asleep.

  There were no crowds and bands of music waiting for us when Tommy brought us ashore, and after leaving Martin with his broken limb in his mother’s arms at the gate of Sunny Lodge, he took me over to the Presbytery in order that Father Dan might carry me home and so stand between me and my father’s wrath and Aunt Bridget’s birch.

  Unhappily there was no need for this precaution. The Big House, when we reached it, was in great confusion. My mother had broken a blood vessel.

  TENTH CHAPTER

  During the fortnight in which my mother was confined to bed I was her constant companion and attendant. With the mighty eagerness of a child who knew nothing of what the solemn time foreboded I flew about the house on tiptoe, fetching my mother’s medicine and her milk and the ice to cool it, and always praising myself for my industry and thinking I was quite indispensable.

  “You couldn’t do without your little Mally, could you, mammy?” I would say, and my mother would smooth my hair lovingly with her thin white hand and answer:

  “No, indeed, I couldn’t do without my little Mally.” And then my little bird-like beak would rise proudly in the air.

  All this time I saw nothing of Martin, and only heard through Doctor Conrad in his conversations with my mother, that the boy’s broken arm had been set, and that as soon as it was better, he was to be sent to King George’s College, which was at the other end of Ellan. What was to be done with myself I never inquired, being so satisfied that my mother could not get on without me.

  I was partly aware that big letters, bearing foreign postage-stamps and seals and coats of arms, with pictures of crosses and hearts, were coming to our house. I was also aware that at intervals, while my mother was in bed, there was the sound of voices, as if in eager and sometimes heated conference, in the room below, and that my mother would raise her pale face from her pillow and stop my chattering with “Hush!” when my father’s voice was louder and sterner than usual. But it never occurred to me to connect these incidents with myself, until the afternoon of the day on which my mother got up for the first time.

  She was sitting before the fire, for autumn was stealing on, and I was bustling about her, fixing the rug about her knees and telling her if she wanted anything she was to be sure and call her little Mally, when a timid knock came to the door and Father Dan entered the room. I can see his fair head and short figure still, and hear his soft Irish voice, as he stepped forward and said:

  “Now don’t worry, my daughter. Above all, don’t worry.”

  By long experience my mother knew this for a sign of the dear Father’s own perturbation, and I saw her lower lip tremble as she asked:

  “Hadn’t Mary better run down to the garden?”

  “No! Oh no!” said Father Dan. “It is about Mary I come to speak, so our little pet may as well remain.”

  Then at a signal from my mother I went over to her and stood by her side, and she embraced my waist with a trembling arm, while the Father took a seat by her side, and, fumbling the little silver cross on his chain, delivered his message.

  After long and anxious thought — and he might say prayer — it had been decided that I should be sent away to a Convent. It was to be a Convent of the Sacred Heart in Rome. He was to take me to Rome himself and see me safely settled there. And they (meaning my father and Aunt Bridget) had promised him — faithfully promised him — that when the holidays came round he should be sent to bring me home again. So there was nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, nothing to . . . to . . .

  My mother listened as long as she could, and then — her beautiful white face distorted by pain — she broke in on the Father’s message with a cry of protest.

  “But she is so young! Such a child! Only seven years old! How can any one think of sending such a little one away from home?”

  Father Dan tried to pacify her. It was true I was very young, but then the Reverend Mother was such a good woman. She would love me and care for me as if I were her own child. And then the good nuns, God bless their holy souls. . . .

  “But Mary is all I have,” cried my mother, “and if they take her away from me I shall be broken-hearted. At such a time too! How cruel they are! They know quite well what the doctor says. Can’t they wait a little longer?”

  I could see that Father Dan was arguing against himself, for his eyes filled as he said:

  “It’s hard, I know it’s hard for you, my daughter. But perhaps it’s best for the child that she should go away from home — perhaps it’s all God’s blessed and holy will. Remember there’s a certain person here who isn’t kind to our little innocent, and is making her a cause of trouble. Not that I think she is actuated by evil intentions. . . .”

  “But she is, she is,” cried my mother, who was growing more and more excited.

  “Then all the more reason why Mary should go to the convent — for a time at all events.”

  My mother began to waver, and she said:

  “Let her be sent to a Convent in the island then.”

  “I thought of that, but there isn’t one,” said Father Dan.

  “Then . . . then . . . then take her to the Presbytery,” said my mother. “Dear, dear Father,” she pleaded, “let her live with you, and have somebody to teach her, and then she can come to see me every day, or twice a week, or even once a week — I am not unreasonable.”

  “It would be beautiful,” said Father Dan, reaching over to touch my arm. “To have our little Mary in my dull old house would be like having the sun there always. But there are reasons why a young girl should not be brought up in the home of a priest, so it is better that our little precious should go to Rome.”

  My mother was breaking down and Father Dan followed up his advantage.

  “Then wisha, my daughter, think what a good thing it will be for the child. She will be one of the children of the Infant Jesus first, then a child of Mary, and then of the Sacred heart itself. And then remember, Rome! The holy city! The city of the Holy Father! Why, who knows, she may even see himself some day!”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” said my mother, and then turning with her melting eyes to me she said:

  “Would my Mary like to go — leaving her mamma but coming home in the holidays — would she?”

  I was going to say I would not, because mamma could not possibly get on without me, but before I could reply Aunt Bridget, with her bunch of keys at her waist, came jingling into the room, and catching my mother’s last words, said, in her harsh, high-pitched voice.

  “Isabel! You astonish me! To defer to the will of a child! Such a child too! So stubborn and spoiled and self-willed! If we say it is good for her to go she must go!”

  I could feel through my mother’s arm, which was still about my waist, that she was trembling from head to foot, but at first she did not speak and Aunt Bridget, in her peremptory way, went on:

  “We say it is good for you, too, Isabel, if she is not to hasten your death by preying on your nerves and causing you to break more blood vessels. So we are consulting your welfare as well as the girl’s in sending her away.”

  My mother’s timid soul could bear no more. I think it must have been the only moment of anger her gentle spirit ever knew, but, gathering all her strength, she turned upon Aunt Bridget in ungovernable excitement.

  “Bridget,” she said, “you are doing nothing of the kind. You know you are not. You are only trying to separate me from my child and my child from me. When you came to my house I thought you would be kinder to my child than a anybody else, but you have not been, you have been cruel to her, and shut your heart against her, and while I have been helpless here, and in bed, you have never shown her one moment of love and kindness. No, you have no feeling except for your own, and it never occurs to you that having brought your own child into my house you are trying to turn my child out of it.”

  “So that’s how you look at it, is it?” said Aunt Bridget, with a flash of her cold grey eyes. “I thought I came to this house — your house as you call it — only out of the best intentions, just to spare you trouble when you were ill and unable, to attend to your duties as a wife. But because I correct your child when she is wilful and sly and wicked. . . .”

  “Correct your own child, Bridget O’Neill!” cried my mother, “and leave mine to me. She’s all I have and it isn’t long I shall have her. You know quite well how much she has cost me, and that I haven’t had a very happy married life, but instead of helping me with her father. . . .”

  “Say no more,” said Aunt Bridget, “we don’t want you to hurt yourself again, and to allow this ill-conditioned child to be the cause of another hemorrhage.”

  “Bridget O’Neill,” cried my mother, rising up from her chair, “you are a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition. You know as well as I do that it wasn’t Mary who made me ill, but you — you, who reproached me and taunted me about my child until my heart itself had to bleed. For seven years you have been doing that, and now you are disposing of my darling over my head without consulting me. Has a mother no rights in her own child — the child she has suffered for, and loved and lived for — that other people who care nothing for it should take it away from her and send it into a foreign country where she may never see it again? But you shall not do that! No, you shall not’! As long as there’s breath in my body you shall not do it, and if you attempt. . . .”

  In her wild excitement my mother had lifted one of her trembling hands into Aunt Bridget’s face while the other was still clasped about me, when suddenly, with a look of fear on her face, she stopped speaking. She had heard a heavy step on the stairs. It was my father. He entered the room with his knotty forehead more compressed than usual and said:

  “What’s this she shall not do?”

  My mother dropped back into her seat in silence, and Aunt Bridget, wiping’ her eyes on her black apron — she only wept when my father was present — proceeded to explain.

  It seems I am a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition and though, I’ve been up early and late and made myself a servant for seven years I’m only in this house to turn my sister’s child out of it. It seems too, that we have no business — none of us have — to say what ought to be done for this girl — her mother being the only person who has any rights in the child, and if we attempt . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  In his anger and impatience my father could listen no longer and in his loud voice he said:

  “Since when has a father lost control of his own daughter? He has to provide for her, hasn’t he? If she wants anything it’s to him she has to look for it, isn’t it? That’s the law I guess, eh? Always has been, all the world over. Then what’s all this hustling about?”

  My mother made a feeble effort to answer him.

  “I was only saying, Daniel . . .”

  “You were saying something foolish and stupid. I reckon a man can do what he likes with his own, can’t he? If this girl is my child and I say she is to go somewhere, she is to go.” And saying this my father brought down his thick hand with a thump on to a table.

  It was the first time he had laid claim to me, and perhaps that acted on my mother, as she said, submissively:

  “Very well, dear. You know best what is best for Mary, and if you say — you and Bridget and . . . and Father Dan. . . .”

  “I do say, and that’s enough. So just go to work and fix up this Convent scheme without future notice. And hark here, let me see for the future if a man can’t have peace from these two-cent trifles for his important business.”

  My mother was crushed. Her lips moved again, but she said nothing aloud, and my father turned on his heel, and left the room, shaking the floor at every step under the weight of his sixteen stone. At the next moment, Aunt Bridget, jingling her keys, went tripping after him.

  Hardly had they gone when my mother broke into a long fit of coughing, and when it was over she lay back exhausted, with her white face and her tired eyes turned upwards. Then I clasped her about the neck, and Father Dan, whose cheeks were wet with tears patted her drooping hand.

  My darling mother! Never once have I thought of her without the greatest affection, but now that I know for myself what she must have suffered I love best to think of her as she was that day — my sweet, beautiful, timid angel — standing up for one brief moment, not only against Aunt Bridget, but against the cruelty of all the ages, in the divine right of her outraged motherhood.

  ELEVENTH CHAPTER

  My mother’s submission was complete. Within twenty-four hours she was busy preparing clothes for my journey to Rome. The old coloured pattern book was brought out again, material was sent for, a sewing-maid was engaged from the village, and above all, in my view, an order was dispatched to Blackwater for a small squirrel-skin scarf, a large squirrel-skin muff, and a close-fitting squirrel-skin hat with a feather on the side of it.

  A child’s heart is a running brook, and it would wrong the truth to say that I grieved much in the midst of these busy preparations. On the contrary I felt a sort of pride in them, poor innocent that I was, as in something that gave me a certain high superiority over Betsy Beauty and Nessy MacLeod, and entitled me to treat them with condescension.

  Father Dan, who came more frequently than ever, fostered this feeling without intending to do so, by telling me, whenever we were alone, that I must be a good girl to everybody now, and especially to my mother.

  “My little woman would be sorry to worry mamma, wouldn’t she?” he would whisper, and when I answered that I would be sorrier than sorry, he would say:

  “Wisha then, she must be brave. She must keep up. She must not grieve about going away or cry when the time comes for parting.”

  I said “yes” and “yes” to all this, feeling very confidential and courageous, but I dare say the good Father gave the same counsel to my mother also, for she and I had many games of make-believe, I remember, in which we laughed and chattered and sang, though I do not think I ever suspected that the part we played was easier to me than to her.

  It dawned on me at last, though, when in the middle of the night, near to the time of my going away, I was awakened by a bad fit of my mother’s coughing, and heard her say to herself in the deep breathing that followed:

  “My poor child! What is to become of her?”

  Nevertheless all went well down to the day of my departure. It had been arranged that I was to sail to Liverpool by the first of the two daily steamers, and without any awakening I leapt out of bed at the first sign of daylight. So great was my delight that I began to dance in my nightdress to an invisible skipping rope, forgetting my father, who always rose at dawn and was at breakfast in the room below.

  My mother and I breakfasted in bed, and then there was great commotion. It chiefly consisted for me in putting on my new clothes, including my furs, and then turning round and round on tiptoe and smiling at myself in a mirror. I was doing this while my mother was telling me to write to her as often as I was allowed, and while she knelt at her prayer stool, which she used as a desk, to make a copy of the address for my letters.

  Then I noticed that the first line of her superscription “Mrs. Daniel O’Neill” was blurred by the tears that were dropping from her eyes, and my throat began to hurt me dreadfully. But I remembered what Father Dan had told me to do, so I said:

  “Never mind, mammy. Don’t worry — I’ll be home for the holidays.”

  Soon afterwards we heard the carriage wheels passing under the window, and then Father Dan came up in a white knitted muffler, and with a funny bag which he used for his surplice at funerals, and said, through a little cloud of white breath, that everything was ready.

  I saw that my mother was turning round and taking out her pocket-handkerchief, and I was snuffling a little myself, but at a sign from Father Dan, who was standing at the threshold. I squeezed back the water in my eyes and cried:

  “Good-bye mammy. I’ll be back for Christmas,” and then darted across to the door.

  I was just passing through it when I heard my mother say “Mary” in a strange low voice, and I turned and saw her — I can see her still — with her beautiful pale face all broken up, and her arms held out to me.

  Then I rushed back to her, and she clasped me to her breast crying, “Mally veen! My Mally veen!” and I could feel her heart beating through her dress and hear the husky rattle in her throat, and then all our poor little game of make-believe broke down utterly.

  At the next moment my father was calling upstairs that I should be late for the steamer, so my mother dried her own eyes and then mine, and let me go.

  Father Dan was gone when I reached the head of the stairs but seeing Nessy MacLeod and Betsy Beauty at the bottom of them I soon recovered my composure, and sailing down in my finery I passed them in stately silence with my little bird-like head in the air.

  I intended to do the same with Aunt Bridget, who was standing with a shawl over her shoulders by the open door, but she touched me and said:

 

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