Part 5. I Become A Mother - Chapter 74

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_ FIFTH PART. I BECOME A MOTHER
SEVENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

Early next day Doctor Conrad came to see me. I thought it significant that he came in my father's big motor-car--a car of great speed and power.

I was in my dressing-gown before the fire in the boudoir, and at the first glance of his cheerful face under his iron-grey head I knew what Alma had said in the letter which had summoned him.

In his soft voice he asked me a few questions, and though I could have wished to conceal the truth I dared not. I noticed that his face brightened at each of my replies, and at the end of them he said:

"There is nothing to be alarmed at. We shall be better than ever by-and-by."

Then in his sweet and delicate way (as if he were saying something that would be very grateful) he told me what I knew already, and I listened with my head down and my face towards the fire.

He must have been disappointed at the sad way I received his news, for he proceeded to talk of my general health; saying the great thing in such a case as mine was to be cheerful, to keep a good heart, and to look hopefully to the future.

"You must have pleasant surroundings and the society of agreeable people--old friends, old schoolfellows, familiar and happy faces."

I said "Yes" and "Yes," knowing only too well how impossible it all was; and then his talk turned on general topics--my father, whose condition made his face very grave, and then his wife, Christian Ann, whose name caused his gentle old eyes to gleam with sunshine.

She had charged him with a message to me.

"Tell her," she had said, "I shall never forget what she did for me in the autumn, and whiles and whiles I'm thanking God for her."

That cut me to the quick, but I was nearly torn to pieces by what came next.

"Christian Ann told me to say too that Sunny Lodge is longing for you. 'She's a great lady now,' said she, 'but maybe great ladies have their troubles same as ourselves, poor things, and if she ever wants to rest her sweet head in a poor woman's bed, Mary O'Neill's little room is always waiting for her.'"

"God bless her!" I said--it was all I _could_ say--and then, to my great relief, he talked on other subjects.

The one thing I was afraid of was that he might speak of Martin. Heaven alone, which looks into the deep places of a woman's heart in her hour of sorest trial, knows why I was in such dread that he might do so, but sure I am that if he had mentioned Martin at that moment I should have screamed.

When he rose to go he repeated his warnings.

"You'll remember what I said about being bright and cheerful?"

"I'll try."

"And keeping happy and agreeable faces about you?"

"Ye-s."

Hardly had he left the room when Alma came sweeping into it, full of I her warmest and insincerest congratulations.

"There!" she cried, with all the bitter honey of her tongue. "Wasn't I right in sending for the doctor? Such news, too! Oh, happy, happy you! But I must not keep you now, dearest. You'll be just crazy to write to your husband and tell him all about it."

Alma's mother was the next to visit me. The comfortable old soul, redolent of perfume and glittering with diamonds, began by congratulating herself on her perspicacity.

"I knew it," she said. "When I saw as how you were so and so, I said to Alma as I was sure you were that way. 'Impossible,' said Alma, but it's us married women to know, isn't it?"

After that, and some homely counsel out of her own experience--to take my breakfast in bed in future, avoiding tea, &c.;,--she told me how fortunate I was to have Alma in the house at such a moment.

"The doctor says you're to be kept bright and cheerful, and she's such a happy heart, is Alma. So crazy about you too! You wouldn't believe it, but she's actually talking of staying with you until the December sailing, at all events."

The prospect of having Alma two months longer, to probe my secret soul as with a red-hot iron, seemed enough to destroy me, but my martyrdom had only begun.

Next day, Aunt Bridget came, and the bright glitter of the usually cold grey eyes behind her gold-rimmed spectacles told me at a glance that her visit was not an unselfish one.

"There now," she said, "you've got to thank me for this. Didn't I give you good advice when I told you to be a little blind? It's the only way with husbands. When Conrad came home with the news I said, 'Betsy, I must get away to the poor girl straight.' To be sure I had enough on my hands already, but I couldn't leave you to strangers, could I?"

Hearing no response to this question, Aunt Bridget went on to say that what was coming would be a bond between me and my husband.

"It always is. It was in my case, anyway. The old colonel didn't behave very well after our marriage, and times and times I was telling myself I had made a rue bargain; but when Betsy came I thought, 'I might have done better, but I might have done worse, and he's the father of my offspring, anyway.'"

Hearing no response to this either, Aunt Bridget went on to talk of Alma and her mother. Was not this the woman I suspected with my husband--the young one with the big eyes and "the quality toss with her?" Then why did I have a person like that about the house?

"If you need bright and cheerful company, what's amiss with your aunt and your first cousin? Some people are selfish, but I thank the saints I don't know what selfishness is. I'm willing to do for you what I did for your poor mother, and _I_ can't say more than that, can I?"

I must have made some kind of response, for Aunt Bridget went on to say it might be a sacrifice, but then she wouldn't be sorry to leave the Big House either.

"I'm twenty years there, and now I'm to be a servant to my own stepchild. Dear heart knows if I can bear it much longer. The way that Nessy is carrying on with your father is something shocking. I do believe she'll marry the man some day."

To escape from a painful topic I asked after my father's health.

"Worse and worse, but Conrad's news was like laughing-gas to the man. He would have come with me to-day, but the doctor wouldn't hear of it. He'll come soon though, and meantime he's talking and talking about a great entertainment."

"Entertainment?"

"To celebrate the forthcoming event, of course, though nobody is to know that except ourselves, it seems. Just a house-warming in honour of your coming home after your marriage--that's all it's to be on the outside, anyway."

I made some cry of pain, and Aunt Bridget said:

"Oh, I know what you're going to say--why doesn't he wait? I'll tell you why if you'll promise not to whisper a word to any one. Your father is a sick man, my dear. Let him say what he likes when Conrad talks about cancer, he knows Death's hand is over him. And thinking it may fall before your time has come, he wants to take time by the forelock and see a sort of fulfilment of the hope of his life--and you know what that is."

It was terrible. The position in which I stood towards my father was now so tragic that (wicked as it was) I prayed with all my heart that I might never look upon his face again.

I was compelled to do so. Three days after Aunt Bridget's visit my father came to see me. The day was fine and I was walking on the lawn when his big car came rolling up the drive.

I was shocked to see the change in him. His face was ghastly white, his lips were blue, his massive and powerful head seemed to have sunk into his shoulders, and his limbs were so thin that his clothes seemed to hang on them; but the stern mouth was there still, and so was the masterful lift of the eyebrows.

Coming over to meet me with an uncertain step, he said:

"Old Conrad was for keeping me in bed, but I couldn't take rest without putting a sight on you."

After that, and some plain speech out of the primitive man he always was and will be (about it's being good for a woman to have children because it saved her from "losing her stomach" over imaginary grievances), he led me, with the same half-contemptuous tenderness which he used to show to my mother, back to the house and into the drawing-room.

Alma and her mother were there, the one writing at a desk, the other knitting on the sofa, and they rose as my father entered, but he waved them back to their places.

"Set down, ma'am. Take your seat, mother. I'm only here for a minute to talk to my gel about her great reception."

"Reception?" said Alma.

"Hasn't she told you about it?" he said, and being answered that I had not, he gave a rough outline of his project, whereupon Alma, whose former attitude towards my father had changed to one of flattery and subservience, lifted her hands and cried:

"How splendid! Such an inspiration! Only think, my love, you were to be kept bright and cheerful, and what could be better for that purpose?"

In the torment of my soul I urged one objection after another--it would be expensive, we could not afford it.

"Who asks you to afford it? It's my affair, isn't it?" said my father.

I was unwell, and therefore unable to undertake the hard work of such an entertainment--but that was the worst of excuses, for Alma jumped in with an offer of assistance.

"My dearest child," she said, "you know how happy I shall be to help you. In fact, I'll do all the work and you shall have all the glory."

"There you are, then," cried my father, slapping me on the shoulder, and then, turning to Alma, he told her to set to work without a day's delay.

"Let everything be done correct even if it costs me a bit of money."

"Yes, sir."

"A rael big thing, ma'am, such as nobody has ever seen before."

"Yes indeed, sir."

"Ask all the big people on the island--Nessy MacLeod shall send you a list of them."

"I will, sir."

"That'll do for the present--I guess I must be going now, or old Conrad will be agate of me. So long, gel, so long."

I was silenced, I was helpless, I was ashamed.

I did not know then, what now I know, that, besides the desire of celebrating the forthcoming birth of an heir, my father had another and still more secret object--that of throwing dust in the eyes of his advocates, bankers, and insular councillors, who (having expected him to make money for them by magic) were beginning to whisper that all was not well with his financial schemes.

I did not know then, what now I know, that my father was at that moment the most tragic figure in Ellan except myself, and that, shattered in health and shaken in fortune, he was indulging in this wild extravagance equally to assert his solvency and to gratify his lifelong passion under the very wing of Death.

But oh, my wild woe, my frantic prayers! It was almost as if Satan himself were torturing me.

The one terror of the next few days was that my husband might return home, for I knew that at the first moment of his arrival the whole world of make-believe which my father and Alma were setting up around me would tumble about my head like a pack of cards.

He did not come, but he wrote. After saying that his political duties would keep him in London a little longer, he said:

"I hear that your father is getting you to give a great reception in honour of our home-coming. But why _now_, instead of three months ago? _Do you know the reason?_"

As I read these last words I felt an icy numbness creeping up from my feet to my heart. My position was becoming intolerable. The conviction was being forced upon me that I had no right in my husband's house.

It made no difference that my husband's house was mine also, in the sense that it could not exist without me--I had no right to be there.

It made no difference that my marriage had been no marriage--I had no right to be there.

It made no difference that the man I had married was an utterly bad husband--I had no right to be there.

It made no difference that I was not really an adulterous wife--I had no right to be there.

Meanwhile Price, my maid, but my only real friend in Castle Raa, with the liberty I allowed her, was unconsciously increasing my torture. Every night as she combed out my hair she gave me her opinion of my attitude towards Alma, and one night she said:

"Didn't I tell you she was only watching you, my lady? The nasty-minded thing is making mischief with his lordship. She's writing to him every day. . . . How do I know? Oh, I don't keep my eyes and my ears open downstairs for nothing. You'll have no peace of your life, my lady, until you turn that woman out of the house."

Then in a fit of despair, hardly knowing what I was doing, I covered my face with my hands and said:

"I had better turn myself out instead, perhaps."

The combing of my hair suddenly stopped, and at the next moment I heard Price saying in a voice which seemed to come from a long way off:

"Goodness gracious me! Is it like that, my lady?" _

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