Complete works of hall c.., p.557
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 557
How we laughed! We all laughed together, as if trying to see which of us could laugh the loudest. Only Christian Ann looked serious, standing at the bottom of the stairs, nursing baby in her nightdress.
It is three o’clock in the morning as I write, and I can hear our laughter still — only it sounds like sobbing now.
JULY 22. Have heard something to-day that has taken all the warmth of life out of me. It is about my father, whom the old doctor still attends. Having been told of my husband’s marriage he has announced his intention of claiming my child if anything happens to me!
What his object may be I do not know. He cannot be thinking of establishing a claim to my husband’s title — Isabel being a girl. Remembering something his lawyer said about the marriage settlement when I consulted him on the subject of divorce, I can only assume that (now he is poor) he is trying to recover the inheritance he settled on my husband.
It frightens me — raising my old nightmare of a lawsuit about the legitimacy of my child. I want to speak to Martin about it. Yet how can I do so without telling him the truth which I have been struggling so hard to conceal?
JULY 23. Oh, Mary O’Neill, what are you coming to?
I told Martin about father’s threat, only I gave it another colour. He had heard of the Reverend Mother’s visit, so I said the rumour had reached my father that I intended to enter a convent, and he had declared that, if I did so, he would claim my child from Christian Ann, being its nearest blood relation.
“Can he do so — when I am . . . when we are gone?” I asked.
I thought Martin’s strong face looked sterner than I had ever seen it. He made a vague reply and left me soon afterwards on some sort of excuse.
About an hour later he came back to carry me upstairs, and just as he was setting me down, and Christian Ann was coming in with the candles, he whispered:
“Don’t worry about Girlie. I’ve settled that matter, I’m thinking.”
What has he done, I wonder?
MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD
What I had done is easily told. I had gone straight to Daniel O’Neill himself, intending to know the truth of the story and to act accordingly.
Already I knew enough to scent mischief. I could not be so stupefied into blindness of what was going on under my eyes as not to see that the dirty question of money, and perhaps the dirtier question of the aims and expectations of the woman MacLeod, were at the root of the matter that was distressing my darling.
Daniel O’Neill had left the Big House and gone to live in his mother’s old cottage for two reasons — first, to delude the law into the idea that he was himself utterly ruined by the bankruptcy to which he had brought the whole island; and next, to gratify the greed of his mistress, who wanted to get him to herself at the end, so that he might be persuaded to marry her (if it were only on his death-bed) and so establish, against any claim of his daughter’s, her widow’s rights in what a husband leaves behind him — which is half of everything in Ellan.
What connection this had with the man’s desire to get hold of the child I had yet to learn; but I meant to learn it without another hour’s delay, so I set off for the cottage on the curragh.
It was growing dark, and not being sure of my way through the ever-changing bypaths of the bog land, I called on Father Dan to guide me. The old priest seemed to know my errand (the matter my darling had communicated as a secret being common knowledge), and at first he looked afraid.
“Well . . . yes, yes . . . why shouldn’t I?” he said, and then, “Yes, I will, I will” — with the air of a man who had made up his mind to a daring enterprise.
Our curragh is a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea, undrained, only partly cultivated, half covered with sedge and sallow bushes, and consequently liable to heavy mists. There was a mist over it that night, and hence it was not easy even for Father Dan (accustomed to midnight visits to curragh cottages) to find the house which had once been the home of “Neale the Lord.”
We rooted it out at last by help of the parish constable, who was standing at the corner of a by-road talking to the coachman of a gorgeous carriage waiting there, with its two splendid horses smoking in the thick night air.
When, over the shingle of what we call “the street,” we reached the low straggling crofter-cottage under its thick trammon tree (supposed to keep off the evil spirits), I rapped with my knuckles at the door, and it was opened by a tall scraggy woman with a candle in her hand.
This was Nessy MacLeod, harder and uglier than ever, with her red hair combed up, giving her the appearance of a bunch of carrots over two stalks of rhubarb.
Almost before I had time to say that we had come to see Mr. O’Neill, and to step into the house while saying so, a hoarse, husky, querulous man’s voice cried from within:
“Who is it, Nessy?”
It’s Father Dan, and Martin . . . I mean Sir. . . .”
“That’ll do,” I said, and the next moment we were in the living-room — a bare, bleak, comfortless Curraghman’s kitchen.
A more incongruous sight than we saw there human eyes never beheld.
Daniel O’Neill, a shadow of the big brute creature he once was, a shrivelled old man, with his bony hands scored and contracted like an autumn leaf, his shrunken legs scarcely showing through his baggy trousers, his square face whiter than the wall behind it, and a piece of red flannel hanging over his head like a cowl, sat in the elbow-chair at the side of the hearth-fire, while at a deal table, which was covered with papers that looked like law deeds and share certificates (being stamped and sealed), sat the Bishop of the island, and its leading lawyer, Mr. Curphy.
On hearing my name and seeing me enter the house, Daniel O’Neill lost all control of himself. He struggled to his feet by help of a stick, and as I walked up to him he laid hold of me.
“You devil!” he cried. “You infernal villain! You. . . .”
But it is of no use to repeat what else he said in the fuming of his rage, laying hold of me by the collar of my coat, and tugging at it as if he would drag me to his feet.
I was half sorry for the man, badly as I thought of him, so I only opened his hand (easy enough to do, for the grip was gone from it) and said:
“You’re an old man, sir, and you’re a sick man — don’t tempt me to forget that you are the father of Mary O’Neill. Sit down.”
He sat down, breathless and broken, without another word. But the Bishop, with a large air of outraged dignity, faced about to poor Father Dan (who was standing near the door, turning his round hat in his trembling hands) and said:
“Father Donovan, did you know that Mr. O’Neill was very ill?”
“I did, Monsignor,” said Father Dan.
“And that a surgeon is coming from London to perform an operation upon him — did you know that?”
“I did, Monsignor.”
“Did you know also that I was here to-night to attend with Mr. Curphy to important affairs and perhaps discharge some sacred duties?”
“I knew that too, Monsignor.”
“Then,” said the Bishop, pointing at me, “how dare you bring this man here — this man of all others, who has been the chief instrument in bringing shame and disgrace upon our poor sick friend and his deeply injured family?”
“So that’s how you look at it, is it, Monsignor?”
“Yes, sir, that is how I look at it, and I am sorry for a priest of my Church who has so weakened his conscience by sympathy with notorious sinners as to see things in any other light.”
“Sinners, Bishop?”
“Didn’t you hear me, Father Donovan? Or do you desire me to use a harder name for them — for one of them in particular, on whom you have wasted so much weak sentimentality, to the injury of your spiritual influence and the demoralisation of your parish. I have warned you already. Do you wish me to go further, to remove you from your Presbytery, or perhaps report your conduct to those who have power to take the frock off your back? What standard of sanctity for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony do you expect to maintain while you degrade it by openly associating with a woman who has broken her marriage vows and become little better . . . I grieve to say it [with a deep inclination of the head towards the poor wreck in the elbow-chair] little better than a common. . . .”
I saw the word that was coming, and I was out in an instant. But there was somebody before me. It was Father Dan. The timid old priest seemed to break in one moment the bonds of a life-long tyranny.
“What’s that you say, Monsignor?” he cried in a shrill voice. “I degrade the sacrament of Holy Matrimony? Never in this world! But if there’s anybody in the island of Ellan who has done that same every day of his life, it’s yourself, and never more cruelly and shamefully than in the case we’re talking of at this present speaking.”
“I’m not used to this kind of language from my clergy, Father Donovan,” began the Bishop, but before he could say more Father Dan caught him up by crying:
“Perhaps not, Monsignor. But you’ve got to hear for once, and that’s now. When this man [pointing to Daniel O’Neill] for his own purposes wanted to marry his daughter (who was a child and had no choice in the matter) to one of another faith, a man who didn’t believe in the sacrament of marriage as we know it, who was it that paved the way for him?”
“You actually mean that I. . . .”
“I mean that without your help, Monsignor, a good girl could never have been married to a bad man. You didn’t act in ignorance, either. When somebody told you — somebody who is here now — that the man to whom you were going to marry that innocent girl was a notorious loose liver, a profligate, a reprobate, a betrayer of women, and a damned scoundrel. . . .”
“Go on, Father Dan; that’s God’s own name for him,” I said, when the old priest caught his breath for a moment, terrified by the word that had burst from his lips.
“Let’s have an end of this,” said the Bishop mightily.
“Wait a bit, sir,” I said, and then Father Dan went on to say how he had been told there was nothing to my story, and how he had been forbidden to inquire into it.
“That’s how you made me a party to this wicked marriage, God and his Holy Mother pardon me! And now that it has come to the end you might have expected, and the poor helpless child who was bought and sold like a slave is in the position of the sinner, you want me to cut her off, to turn the hearts of all good people against her, to cast her out of communion, to make her a thing to point the finger at — me, her spiritual father who baptized her, taking her out of the arms of the angel who bore her and giving her to Christ — or if I won’t you’ll deprive me of my living, you’ll report me to Rome, you’ll unfrock me. . . .”
“Do it, Monsignor,” cried Father Dan, taking a step nearer to the Bishop and lifting a trembling hand over his head. “Do it, if our holy Church will permit you, and I’ll put a wallet on my old shoulders and go round the houses of my parish in my old age, begging a bite of bread and a basin of meal, and sleeping under a thorn bush, rather than lay my head on my pillow and know that that poor victim of your wicked scheming is in the road.”
The throbbing and breaking of the old priest’s voice had compelled me to drop my head, and it was not until I heard the sneck of the lock of the outer door that I realised that, overcome by his emotion, he had fled from the house.
“And now I guess you can follow your friend,” said Daniel O’Neill.
“Not yet, sir,” I answered; “I have something to say first.”
“Well, well, what is it, please?” said the lawyer sharply and insolently, looking to where I was standing with folded arms at one side of the hearth-place.
“You’ll hear soon enough, Master Curphy,” I answered.
Then, turning back to Daniel O’Neill, I told him what rumour had reached my dear one of his intentions with regard to her child, and asked him to say whether there was any truth in it.
“Answer the man, Curphy,” said Daniel O’Neill, and thereupon the lawyer, with almost equal insolence, turned to me and said:
“What is it you wish to know, sir?”
“Whether, if Mary O’Neill is unable from any cause to keep control of her child (which God forbid!), her father intends to take possession of it.”
“Why shouldn’t he? If the mother dies, for instance, her father will be the child’s legal guardian.”
“But if by that time the father is dead too — what then?”
“Then the control of the child will — with the consent of the court — devolve upon his heir and representative.”
“Meaning this lady?” I asked, pointing to the woman MacLeod, who was now standing at the back of Daniel O’Neill’s chair.
“Possibly.”
“And what will she do with it?”
“Do with it?”
The lawyer was running his fingers through his long beard and trying to look perplexed.
“Mr. Curphy, I’ll ask you not to pretend to be unable to understand me. If and when this lady gets possession of Mary O’Neill’s child, what is she going to do with it?”
“Very well,” said the advocate, seeing I meant business, “since my client permits me to speak, I’ll tell you plainly. Whatever the child’s actual parentage . . . perhaps you know best. . . .”
“Go on, sir.”
“Whatever the child’s parentage, it was born in wedlock. Even the recent divorce proceedings have not disturbed that. Therefore we hold that the child has a right to the inheritance which in due time should come to Mary O’Neill’s offspring by the terms of the settlement upon her husband.”
It was just as I expected, and every drop of my blood boiled at the thought of my darling’s child in the hands of that frozen-hearted woman.
“So that is the law, is it?”
“That is the law in Ellan.”
“In the event of Mary O’Neill’s death, and her father’s death, her child and all its interests will come into the hands of. . . .”
“Of her father’s heir and representative.”
“Meaning, again, this lady?”
“Probably.”
The woman at the back of the chair began to look restless.
“I don’t know, sir,” she said, “if your repeated references to me are intended to reflect upon my character, or my ability to bring up the child well and look after its interests properly.”
“They are, madam — they most certainly and assuredly are,” I answered.
“Daniel!” she cried.
“Be quiet, gel,” said Daniel O’Neill. “Let the man speak. We’ll see what he has come for presently. Go on, sir.”
I took him at his word, and was proceeding to say that as I understood things it was intended to appeal to the courts in order to recover (nominally for the child) succession to the money which had been settled on Mary O’Neill’s husband at the time of their marriage, when the old man cried, struggling again to his feet:
“There you are! The money! It’s the money the man’s after! He took my daughter, and now he’s for taking my fortune — what’s left of it, anyway. He shan’t, though! No, by God he shan’t! . . . Go back to your woman, sir. Do you hear me? — your woman, and tell her that neither you nor she shall touch one farthing of my fortune. I’m seeing to that now. It’s what we’re here for to-night — before that damnable operation to-morrow, for nobody knows what will come of it. She has defied me and ruined me, and made me the byword of the island, God’s curse on her. . . .”
“Daniel! Daniel!” cried the MacLeod woman, trying to pacify the infuriated madman and to draw him back to his seat.
I would have given all I had in the world if Daniel O’Neill could have been a strong man at that moment, instead of a poor wisp of a thing with one foot in the grave. But I controlled myself as well as I could and said:
“Mr. O’Neill, your daughter doesn’t want your fortune, and as for myself, you and your money are no more to me than an old hen sitting on a nest of addled eggs. Give it to the lady at the back of your chair — she has earned it, apparently.”
“Really,” said the Bishop, who had at length recovered from Father Dan’s onslaught. “Really, Sir What-ever-your-name is, this is too outrageous — that you should come to this lonely house at this time of night, interrupting most urgent business, not to speak of serious offices, and make injurious insinuations against the character of a respectable person — you, sir, who had the audacity to return openly to the island with the partner of your sin, and to lodge her in the house of your own mother — your own mother, sir, though Heaven knows what kind of mother it can be who harbours her son’s sin-laden mistress, his woman, as our sick friend says. . . .”
Lord! how my hands itched! But controlling myself again, with a mighty effort I said:
“Monsignor, I don’t think I should advise you to say that again.”
“Why not, sir?”
“Because I have a deep respect for your cloth and should be sorry to see it soiled.”
“Violence!” cried the Bishop, rising to his feet. “You threaten me with violence? . . . Is there no policeman in this parish, Mr. Curphy?”
“There’s one at the corner of the road, Bishop,” I said. “I brought him along with me. I should have brought the High Bailiff too, if there had been time. You would perhaps be no worse for a few witnesses to the business that seems to be going on here.”
Saying this, as I pointed to the papers on the table, I had hit harder than I knew, for both the Bishop and the lawyer (who had also risen) dropped back into their seats and looked at each other with expressions of surprise.
Then, stepping up to the table, so as to face the four of them, I said, as calmly and deliberately as I could:
“Now listen to me. I am leaving this island in about three weeks time, and expect to be two years — perhaps three years — away. Mary O’Neill is going with me — as my wife. She intends to leave her child in the care of my mother, and I intend to promise her that she may set her mind at ease that it shall never under any circumstances be taken away. You seem to have made up your minds that she is going to die. Please God she may disappoint your expectations and come back strong and well. But if she does not, and I have to return alone, and if I find that her child has been removed from the protection in which she left it, do you know what I shall do?”
