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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 5. I Become A Mother - Chapter 72 |
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_ FIFTH PART. I BECOME A MOTHER SEVENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
The dinner-bell rang while I was dressing, and on going downstairs a few minutes afterwards I found that there had been no attempt to wait for me. Already the whole party were assembled at the table, my husband being at the foot of it, and Alma (incredible as it may seem) in the place of the hostess at the head. This in my altered mood, was more than I could bear, so, while the company made some attempt to welcome me with rather crude salutations, and old Mrs. Lier cried, "Come along here, my pore dear, and tell me how you've gotten on while we've been away" (indicating an empty seat by her side), I walked boldly up to Alma, put my hand on the back of her chair and said, "If you please." Alma looked surprised. But after a moment she carried off the difficult situation by taking the seat which had been reserved for me beside her mother, by congratulating me on my improved appearance and herself on relief from the necessity of filling my place and discharging my responsible duties. My husband, with the rest of the company, had looked up at the awkward incident, and I thought I saw by his curious grimace that he supposed my father (of whom he was always in fear) had told me to assert myself. But Alma, with surer instinct, was clearly thinking of Martin, and almost immediately she began to speak of him. "So your great friend has just gone, dearest. The servants are crazy about him. We've missed him again, you see. Too bad! I hope you gave him our regrets and excuses--did you?" The evil one must have taken hold of me by this time, for I said: "I certainly did not, Alma." "Why not, my love?" "Because we have a saying in our island that it's only the ass that eats the cushag"--a bitter weed that grows in barren places. Alma joined in the general laughter which followed this rather intemperate reply, and then led off the conversation On the incidents of the cruise. I gathered that, encouraged by her success in capturing the Bishop by her entertainment, she had set herself to capture the "aristocracy" of our island by inviting them to a dance on the yacht, while it lay at anchor off Holmtown, and the humour of the moment was to play battledore and shuttlecock with the grotesque efforts of our great people (the same that had figured at my wedding) to grovel before my husband and his guests. "I say, Jimmy," cried Mr. Vivian in his shrill treble, "do you remember the old gal in the gauze who--etc . . . ?" "But do you remember," cried Mr. Eastcliff, "the High Bailiff or Bum Bailiff with the bottle-nose who--etc . . . ?" "Killing, wasn't it, Vivian?" said one of the ladies. "Perfectly killing," said everybody. This shocking exhibition of bad manners had not gone on very long before I became aware that it was being improvised for my benefit. After Alma had admitted that the Bishop was a "great flirt" of hers, and Mr. Vivian, amid shouts of laughter, had christened him her "crush," she turned to me and said, with her smiling face slightly drawn down on one side: "Mary, my love, you will certainly agree that your islanders who do not eat cushags, poor dears, are the funniest people alive as guests." "Not funnier," I answered, "than the people who laugh at them as hosts." It was not easy to laugh at that, so to cover Alma's confusion the men turned the talk to their usual topic, horses and dogs, and I heard a great deal about "laying on the hounds," which culminated in a rather vulgar story of how a beater who "wasn't nippy on his pins" had been "peppered from behind," whereupon he had "bellowed like a bull" until "soothed down by a sov." I cannot say how long the talk would have continued in this manner if old Mrs. Lier, addressing herself to me, had not struck a serious subject. It was about Alma's dog, which was dead. The poor wheezy, spaniel had died in the course of the cruise, though what the cause of its death was nobody knew, unless it had been fretting for its mistress during the period of quarantine which the absurd regulations of government had required on our return from abroad. The dog having died at sea, I presumed it had been buried there, but no, that seemed to shock the company as an unfeeling supposition. The ship's carpenter had made a coffin for it--a beautiful one of mahogany with a plate-glass inset at the head, and a gilt-lettered inscription below, giving the dog's name, Prue, and its age, three. In this condition it had been brought ashore, and was now lying in a kind of state in Alma's dressing-room. But to-morrow it was to be buried in the grounds, probably in the glen, to which the company, all dressed in black, were to follow in procession as at a human funeral. I was choking with anger and horror at the recital of these incredible arrangements, and at the close of it I said in a clear, emphatic voice: "I must ask you to be good enough not to do that, please." "Why not, my dear?" said Alma. "Because I do not wish and cannot permit it," I answered. There was an awkward pause after this unexpected pronouncement, and when the conversation was resumed my quick ears (which have not always added to my happiness) caught the half-smothered words: "Getting a bit sidey, isn't she?" Nevertheless, when I rose to leave the dining-room, Alma wound her arm round my waist, called me her "dear little nun," and carried me off to the hall. There we sat about the big open fire, and after a while the talk became as free, as it often is among fashionable ladies of a certain class. Mr. Eastcliff's Camilla told a slightly indelicate anecdote of a "dresser" she had had at the theatre, and then another young woman (the same who "adored the men who went to the deuce for a woman") repeated the terms of an advertisement she had seen in a Church newspaper: "A parlour-maid wants a situation in a family where a footman is kept." The laughter which followed this story was loud enough, but it was redoubled when Alma's mother, from the depths of an arm-chair, said, with her usual solemnity, that she "didn't see nothing to laugh at" in that, and "the pore girl hadn't no such thought as they had." Again I was choking with indignation, and in order to assert myself once for all I said: "Ladies, I will ask you to discontinue this kind of conversation. I don't like it." At last the climax came. About ten days after Martin left me I received a telegram, which had been put ashore at Southampton, saying, "Good-bye! God bless you!" and next day there came a newspaper containing an account of his last night at Tilbury. He had given a dinner to a number of his friends, including his old commander and his wife, several other explorers who happened to be in London, a Cabinet Minister, and the proprietor of the journal which had promoted his expedition. They had dined in the saloon of the "Scotia" (how vividly I remembered it!), finishing up the evening with a dance on deck in the moonlight; and when the time came to break up, Martin had made one of his sentimental little speeches (all heart and not too much grammar), in which he said that in starting out for another siege of the South Pole he "couldn't help thinking, with a bit of a pain under the third button of his double-breasted waistcoat, of the dear ones they were leaving behind, and of the unknown regions whither they were tending where dancing would be forgotten." I need not say how this moved me, being where I was, in that uncongenial company; but by some mischance I left the paper which contained it on the table in the drawing-room, and on going downstairs after breakfast next morning I found Alma stretched out in a rocking-chair before the fire in the hail, smoking a cigarette and reading the report aloud in a mock heroic tone to a number of the men, including my husband, whose fat body (he was growing corpulent) was shaking with laughter. It was as much as I could do to control an impulse to jump down and flare out at them, but, being lightly shod, I was standing quietly in their midst before they were aware of my presence. "Ah," said Alma, with the sweetest and most insincere of her smiles, "we were just enjoying the beautiful account of your friend's last night in England." "So I see," I said, and, boiling with anger underneath, I quietly took the paper out of her hand between the tips of my thumb and first finger (as if the contamination of her touch had made it unclean) and carried it to the fire and burnt it. This seemed to be the end of all things. The tall Mr. Eastcliff went over to the open door and said: "Deuced fine day for a motor drive, isn't it?" That gentleman had hitherto shown no alacrity in establishing the truth of Alma's excuse for the cruise on the ground of his visit to "his friend who had taken a shoot in Skye;" but now he found himself too deeply interested in the Inverness Meeting to remain longer, while the rest of the party became so absorbed in the Perth and Ayr races, salmon-fishing on the Tay, and stag-shooting in the deer-forests of Invercauld, that within a week thereafter I had said good-bye to all of them. All save Alma. I was returning from the hall after the departure of a group of my guests when Alma followed me to my room and said: "My dear, sweet girl, I want you to do me the greatest kindness." She had to take her mother to New York shortly; but as "that dear old dunce" was the worst of all possible sailors, it would be necessary to wait for the largest of all possible steamers, and as the largest steamers sailed from Liverpool, and Ellan was so near to that port, perhaps I would not mind . . . just for a week or two longer. . . . What _could_ I say? What I did say was what I had said before, with equal weakness and indiscretion, but less than equal danger. A word, half a word, and almost before it was spoken, Alma's arms were about my neck and she was calling me her "dearest, sweetest, kindest friend in the world." My maid Price was present at this interview, and hardly had Alma left the boudoir when she was twitching at my arm and whispering in my ear: "My lady, my lady, don't you see what the woman wants? She's watching you." _ |
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