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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 1. My Girlhood - Chapter 23 |
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_ FIRST PART. MY GIRLHOOD TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER At breakfast next morning my father told me that something unexpected had occurred to require that we should return home immediately, and therefore he had sent over to Cook's for seats by the noon express. I was deeply disappointed, but I knew my father too well to demur, so I slipped away to my room and sent a letter to Martin, explaining the change in our plans and saying good-bye to him. When we reached the station, however, I found Martin waiting on the platform in front of the compartment that was labelled with our name. I thought my father was even more brusque with him than before, and the Bishop, who was to travel with us, was curt almost to rudeness. But Martin did not seem to mind that this morning, for his lower lip had the stiff setting which I had seen in it when he was a boy, and after I stepped into the carriage he stepped in after me, leaving the two men on the platform. "Shall you be long away?" I asked. "Too long unfortunately. Six months, nine--perhaps twelve, worse luck! Wish I hadn't to go at all," he answered. I was surprised and asked why, whereupon he stammered some excuse, and then said abruptly: "I suppose you'll not be married for some time at all events?" I told him I did not know, everything depending on my father. "Anyhow, you'll see and hear for yourself when you reach home, and then perhaps you'll. . . ." I answered that I should have to do what my father desired, being a girl, and therefore. . . . "But surely a girl has some rights of her own," he said, and then I was silent and a little ashamed, having a sense of female helplessness which I had never felt before and could find no words for. "I'll write to your father," he said, and just at that moment the bell rang, and my father came into the compartment, saying: "Now then, young man, if you don't want to be taken up to the North Pole instead of going down to the South one. . . ." "That's all right, sir. Don't you trouble about _me_. I can take care of myself," said Martin. Something in his tone must have said more than his words to my father and the Bishop, for I saw that they looked at each other with surprise. Then the bell rang again, the engine throbbed, and Martin said, "Good-bye! Good-bye!" While the train moved out of the station he stood bareheaded on the platform with such a woebegone face that looking back at him my throat began to hurt me as it used to do when I was a child. I was very sad that day as we travelled north. My adopted country had become dear to me during my ten years' exile from home, and I thought I was seeing the last of my beautiful Italy, crowned with sunshine and decked with flowers. But there was another cause of my sadness, and that was the thought of Martin's uneasiness about my marriage the feeling that if he had anything to say to my father he ought to have said it then. And there was yet another cause of which I was quite unconscious--that like every other girl before love dawns on her, half of my nature was still asleep, the half that makes life lovely and the world dear. To think that Martin Conrad was the one person who could have wakened my sleeping heart! That a word, a look, a smile from him that day could have changed the whole current of my life, and that. . . . But no, I will not reproach him. Have I not known since the day on St. Mary's Rock that above all else he is a born gentleman? And yet. . . . And yet. . . .
"Do you know that the man to whom you are going to marry your daughter is a profligate and a reprobate? If you _do_ know this, are you deliberately selling her, body and soul, to gratify your lust of rank and power and all the rest of your rotten aspirations?" That is what I ought to have done, but didn't do. I was afraid of being thought to have personal motives--of interfering where I wasn't wanted, of butting in when I had no right. Yet I felt I _had_ a right, and I had half a mind to throw up everything and go back to Ellan. But the expedition was the big chance I had been looking forward to and I could not give it up. So I resolved to write. But writing isn't exactly my job, and it took me a fortnight to get anything done to my satisfaction. By that time we were at Port Said, and from there I posted three letters,--the first to Daniel O'Neill, the second to Bishop Walsh, the third to Father Dan. Would they reach in time? If so, would they be read and considered or resented and destroyed? I did not know. I could not guess. And then I was going down into the deep Antarctic night, where no sound from the living world could reach me. What would happen before I could get back? Only God could say. M.C. _ |
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