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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 80 |
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_ FIFTH PART. I BECOME A MOTHER EIGHTIETH CHAPTER
Looking down the table I told myself that it must be the very home of idle gossip and the hot-bed of tittle-tattle. I was wrong. Hardly had I been in the house a day when I realised that my fellow-guests were the most reserved and self-centred of all possible people. One old gentleman who wore a heavy moustache, and had been a colonel in the Indian army, was understood to be a student of Biblical prophecy, having collected some thousands of texts which established the identity of the British nation with the lost tribes of Israel. Another old gentleman, who wore a patriarchal beard and had taken orders without securing a living, was believed to be writing a history of the world and (after forty years of continuous labour) to have reached the century before Christ. An elderly lady with a benign expression was said to be a tragic actress who was studying in secret for a season at the National Theatre. Such, and of such kind, were my house-mates; and I have since been told that every great city has many such groups of people, the great prophets, the great historians, the great authors, the great actors whom the world does not know--the odds and ends of humanity, thrown aside by the rushing river of life into the gulley-ways that line its banks, the odd brothers, the odd sisters, the odd uncles, the odd aunts, for whom there is no place in the family, in society, or in the business of the world. It was all very curious and pathetic, yet I think I should have been safe, for a time at all events, in this little corner of London into which chance had so strangely thrown me, but for one unfortunate happening. That was the arrival of the daily newspaper. There was never more than a single copy. It came at eight in the morning and was laid on the dining-room mantelpiece, from which (by an unwritten law of the house) it was the duty as well as the honour of the person who had first finished breakfast to take it up and read the most startling part of the news to the rest of the company. Thus it occurred that on the third morning after my arrival I was startled by the voice of the old colonel, who, standing back to the fire, with the newspaper in his hand, cried: "Mysterious Disappearance of a Peeress." "Read it," said the old clergyman. The tea-cup which I was raising to my mouth trembled in my hand, and when I set it down it rattled against the saucer. I knew what was coming, and it came. The old colonel read: _"A telegram from Blackwater announces the mysterious disappearance of the young wife of Lord Raa, which appears to have taken place late on Thursday night or in the early hours of Friday morning. "It will be remembered that the missing lady was married a little more than a year ago, and her disappearance is the more unaccountable from the fact that during the past month she has been actively occupied in preparing for a fete in honour of her return home after a long and happy honeymoon. "The pavilion in which the fete was to have been held had been erected on a headland between Castle Raa and a precipitous declivity to the sea, and the only reasonable conjecture is that the unhappy lady, going out on Thursday night to superintend the final preparations, lost her way in the darkness and fell over the cliffs. "The fact that the hostess was missing was not generally known in Ellan until the guests had begun to arrive for the reception on Friday evening, when the large assembly broke up in great confusion. "Naturally much sympathy is felt for the grief-stricken husband."_ * * * * * After the colonel had finished reading I had an almost irresistible impulse to scream, feeling sure that the moment my house-mates looked into my face they must see that I was the person indicated. They did not look, and after a chorus of exclamations ("Most mysterious!" "What can have become of her?" "On the eve of her fete too!") they began to discuss disappearances in general, each illustrating his point by reference to the subject of his own study. "Perfectly extraordinary how people disappear nowadays," said one. "Extraordinary, sir?" said the old colonel, looking over his spectacles, "why should it be extraordinary that one person should disappear when whole nations--the ten tribes for example. . . ." "But that's a different thing altogether," said the old clergyman. "Now if you had quoted Biblical examples--Elisha or perhaps Jonah. . . ." After the discussion had gone on for several minutes in this way I rose from the table on my trembling limbs and slipped out of the room. It would take long to tell of the feverish days that followed--how newspaper correspondents were sent from London to Ellan to inquire into the circumstances of my disappearance; how the theory of accident gave place to the theory of suicide, and the theory of suicide to the theory of flight; how a porter on the pier at Blackwater said he had carried my trunk to the steamer that sailed on Thursday midnight, thinking I was a maid from the great house until I had given him half-a-crown (his proper fee being threepence); how two female passengers had declared that a person answering to my description had sailed with them to Liverpool; how these clues had been followed up and had led to nothing; and how, finally, the correspondents had concluded the whole incident of my disappearance could not be more mysterious if I had been dropped from mid-air into the middle of the Irish Sea. But then came another development. My father, who was reported to have received the news of my departure in a way that suggested he had lost control of his senses (raging and storming at my husband like a man demented), having come to the conclusion that I, being in a physical condition peculiar to women, had received a serious shock resulting in a loss of memory, offered five hundred pounds reward for information that would lead to my discovery, which was not only desirable to allay the distress of my heart-broken family but urgently necessary to settle important questions of title and inheritance. With this offer of a reward came a description of my personal appearance. _"Age 20, a little under medium height; slight; very black hair; lustrous dark eyes; regular features; pale face; grave expression; unusually sunny smile."_ It would be impossible for me to say with what perturbation I heard these reports read out by the old colonel and the old clergyman. Even the nervous stirring of my spoon and the agitated clatter of my knife and fork made me wonder that my house-mates did not realise the truth, which must I thought, be plainly evident to all eyes. They never did, being so utterly immersed in their own theories. But all the same I sometimes felt as if my fellow guests in that dingy house in Bloomsbury were my judges and jury, and more than once, in my great agitation, when the reports came near to the truth, I wanted to cry. "Stop, stop, don't you see it is I?" That I never did so was due to the fact that, not knowing what legal powers my father might have to compel my return to Ellan, the terror that sat on me like a nightmare was that of being made the subject of a public quarrel between my father and my husband, concerning the legitimacy of my unborn child, with the shame and disgrace which that would bring not only upon me but upon Martin. I had some reason for this fear. After my father's offer of a reward there came various spiteful paragraphs (inspired, as I thought, by Alma and written by the clumsier hand of my husband) saying it was reported in Ellan that, if my disappearance was to be accounted for on the basis of flight, the only "shock" I could have experienced must be a shock of conscience, rumour having for some time associated my name with that of a person who was not unknown in connection with Antarctic exploration. It was terrible. Day by day the motive of my disappearance became the sole topic of conversation in our boarding-house. I think the landlady must have provided an evening as well as a morning paper, for at tea in the drawing-room upstairs the most recent reports were always being discussed. After a while I realised that not only my house-mates but all London was discussing my disappearance. It was a rule of our boarding-house that during certain hours of the day everybody should go out as if he had business to go to, and having nothing else to do I used to walk up and down the streets. In doing so I was compelled to pass certain newsvendors' stalls, and I saw for several days that nearly every placard had something about "the missing peeress." When this occurred I would walk quickly along the thoroughfare with a sense of being pursued and the feeling which a nervous woman has when she is going down a dark corridor at night--that noiseless footsteps are coming behind, and a hand may at any moment be laid on her shoulder. But nobody troubled me in the streets and the only person in our boarding-house who seemed to suspect me was our landlady. She said nothing, but when my lip was quivering while the old colonel read that cruel word about Martin I caught her little grey eyes looking aslant at me. One afternoon, her sister, the milliner, came to see me according to her promise, and though she, too, said nothing, I saw that, while the old colonel and the old clergyman were disputing on the hearthrug about some disappearance which occurred thousands of years ago, she was looking fixedly at the fingers with which, in my nervousness, I was ruckling up the discoloured chintz of my chair. Then in a moment--I don't know why--it flashed upon me that my travelling companion was in correspondence with my father. That idea became so insistent towards dinner-time that I made pretence of being ill (which was not very difficult) to retire to my room, where the cockney chambermaid wrung handkerchiefs out of vinegar and laid them on my forehead to relieve my headache--though she increased it, poor thing, by talking perpetually. Next morning the landlady came up to say that if, as she assumed from my name, I was Irish and a Catholic, I might like to receive a visit from a Sister of Mercy who called at the house at intervals to attend to the sick. I thought I saw in a moment that this was a subterfuge, but feeling that my identity was suspected I dared not give cause for further suspicion, so I compelled myself to agree. A few minutes later, having got up and dressed, I was standing with my back to the window, feeling like one who would soon have to face an attack, when a soft footstep came up my corridor and a gentle hand knocked at my door. "Come in," I cried, trembling like the last leaf at the end of a swinging bough. And then an astonishing thing happened. A young woman stepped quietly into the room and closed the door behind her. She was wearing the black and white habit of the Little Sisters of the Poor, but I knew her long, pale, plain-featured face in an instant. A flood of shame, and at the same time a flood of joy swept over me at the sight of her. It was Mildred Bankes. _ |
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