Before I speak of what happened at school, I must say how and when I
first became known to the doctor's boy.
It was during the previous Christmastide. On Christmas Eve I awoke in
the dead of night with the sense of awakening in another world. The
church-bells were ringing, and there was singing outside our house,
under the window of my mother's room. After listening for a little while
I made my voice as soft as I could and said:
"Mamma, what is it'?"
"Hush, dear! It is the Waits. Lie still and listen," said my mother.
I lay as long as my patience would permit, and then creeping over to the
window I saw a circle of men and women, with lanterns, and the frosty
air smoking about their red faces. After a while they stopped singing,
and then the chain of our front door rattled, and I heard my father's
loud voice asking the singers into the house.
They came in, and when I was back in bed, I heard them talking and then
laughing in the room below, with Aunt Bridget louder than all the rest,
and when I asked what she was doing my mother told me she was serving
out bunloaf and sherry-wine.
I fell asleep before the incident was over, but as soon as I awoke in
the morning I conceived the idea of singing the Waits myself. Being an
artful little thing I knew that my plan would be opposed, so I said
nothing about it, but I got my mother to play and sing the carol I had
heard overnight, until my quick ear had mastered both tune and words,
and when darkness fell on Christmas night I proceeded to carry out my
intention.
In the heat of my impatience I forgot to put on cloak or hat, and
stealing out of the house I found myself in the carriage drive with
nothing on but a pair of thin slippers and the velvet frock that left my
neck and arms so bare. It was snowing, and the snow-flakes were whirling
round me and making me dizzy, for in the light from my mother's window
they seemed to come up from the ground as well as down from the sky.
When I got out of the light of the window, it was very dark, and I could
only see that the chestnuts in the drive seemed to have white blankets
on them which looked as if they had been hung out to dry. It was a long
time before I got to the gate, and then I had begun to be nervous and to
have half a mind to turn back. But the thought of the bunloaf and the
sherry-wine buoyed me up, and presently I found myself on the high road,
crossing a bridge and turning down a lane that led to the sea, whose
moaning a mile away was the only sound I could hear.
I knew quite well where I was going to. I was going to the doctor's
house. It was called Sunny Lodge, and it was on the edge of Yellow Gorse
Farm. I had seen it more than once when I had driven out in the carriage
with my mother, and had thought how sweet it looked with its whitewashed
walls and brown thatched roof and the red and white roses which grew
over the porch.
I was fearfully cold before I got there. The snow was in my slippers and
down my neck and among the thickening masses of my hair. At one moment I
came upon some sheep and lambs that were sheltering under a hedge, and
they bleated in the silence of the night.
But at last I saw the warm red windows of the doctor's cottage, and
coming to the wicket gate, I pushed it open though it was clogged with
snow, and stepped up to the porch. My teeth were now chattering with
cold, but as well as I could I began to sing, and in my thin and creachy
voice I had got as far as--
"_Ch'ist was born in Bef-lem,
Ch'ist was born in Bef-lem,
Ch'ist was born in Bef-lem,
An' in a manger laid_. . . ."
when I heard a rumbling noise inside the house.
Immediately afterwards the door was opened upon me, and a woman whom I
knew to be the doctor's wife looked down into my face with an expression
of bewilderment, and then cried:
"Goodness gracious me, doctor--if it isn't little Mary O'Neill, God
bless her!"
"Bring her in at once, then," said the voice of Doctor Conrad from
within, and at the next moment I found myself in a sort of
kitchen-parlour which was warm with a glowing turf fire that had a
kettle singing over it, and cosy and bright with a ragwork hearth-rug, a
dresser full of blue pottery and a sofa settle covered with red cloth.
I suppose the sudden change to a warm room must have caused me to faint,
for I have no recollection of what happened next, except that I was
sitting on somebody's lap and that she was calling me _boght millish_
(little sweet) and _veg-veen_ (little dear) while she rubbed my
half-frozen limbs and did other things that were, I am sure, all womanly
and good.
When I came to myself Doctor Conrad was saying I would have to sleep
there that night, and he must go over to the Big House and tell my
mother what had happened. He went, and by the time he came back, I had
been bathed in a dolly-tub placed in front of the fire, and was being
carried upstairs (in a nightdress many sizes too large for me) to a
little dimity-white bedroom, where the sweet smelling "scraas" under the
sloping thatch of the roof came down almost to my face.
I know nothing of what happened during the night, except that I was
feeling very hot, and that as often as I opened my eyes the doctor's
wife was leaning over me and speaking in a soft voice that seemed far
away. But next day I felt cooler and then Aunt Bridget came in her satin
mantle and big black hat, and said something, while standing at the end
of my bed, about people paying the penalty when they did things that
were sly and underhand.
Towards evening I was much easier, and when the doctor came in to see me
at night he said:
"How are we this evening? Ah, better, I see. Distinctly better!"
And then turning to his wife he said:
"No need to stay up with her to-night, Christian Ann."
"But won't the _boght millish_ be afraid to be left alone?" she asked.
I said I shouldn't, and she kissed me and told me to knock at the wall
if I wanted anything. And then, with her husband's arm about her waist,
the good soul left me to myself.
I don't know how I knew, but I did know that that house was a home of
love. I don't know how I knew, but I did know, that that sweet woman,
who had been the daughter of a well-to-do man, had chosen the doctor out
of all the men in the world when he was only a medical student fresh
from Germany or Switzerland. I don't know how I knew, but I did know,
that leaving father and mother and a sheltered home she had followed her
young husband when he first came to Ellan without friends or
connections, and though poor then and poor still, she had never
regretted it. I don't know how I knew, but I did know, that all this was
the opposite of what had happened to my own dear mother, who having
everything yet had nothing, while this good creature having nothing yet
had all.