Complete works of hall c.., p.503
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 503
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.
