The next weeks were full of hurry, hubbub and perturbation. Our house
was turned upside down. Milliners, sewing-maids and dressmakers were
working day and night. Flowers, feathers and silk remnants were flowing
like sea-wrack into every room. Orders were given, orders were retracted
and given again, and then again retracted.
Such flying up and down stairs! Everybody so breathless! Everybody so
happy! Every face wearing a smile! Every tongue rippling with laughter!
The big grey mansion which used to seem so chill and cold felt for the
first time like a house of joy.
In the midst of these busy preparations I had no time to think. My
senses were excited. I was dazed, stunned, wrapped round by a kind of
warm air of hot-house happiness, and this condition of moral
intoxication increased as the passing of the days brought fresh
developments.
Our neighbours began to visit us. My father had been right about the
great people of the island. Though they had stood off so long, they
found their account in my good fortune, and as soon as my marriage was
announced they came in troops to offer their congratulations.
Never, according to Tommy the Mate, had the gravel of our carriage drive
been so rucked up by the pawing feet of high-bred horses. But their
owners were no less restless. It was almost pitiful to see their
shamefacedness as they entered our house for the first time, and to
watch the shifts they were put to in order to account for the fact that
they had never been there before.
Aunt Bridget's vanity was too much uplifted by their presence to be
particular about their excuses, but my father's contempt of their
subterfuges was naked and undisguised, and I hardly know whether to feel
amused or ashamed when I think of how he scored off them, how he lashed
them to the bone, with what irony and sarcasm he scorched their
time-serving little souls.
When they were very great folks, the "aristocracy" of Ellan, he
pretended not to know who they were, and asked their names, their
father's names, and what parishes they came from.
"Some of the Christians of Balla-Christian, are you? Think of that now.
And me a born Ellanman, and not knowing you from Adam!"
When they were very near neighbours, with lands that made boundary with
our own, he pretended to think they had been twenty years abroad, or
perhaps sick, or even dead and buried.
"Too bad, ma'am, too bad," he would say. "And me thinking you were under
the sod through all the lonely years my poor wife was ill and dying."
But when they were insular officials, who "walked on the stars," and
sometimes snubbed him in public, the rapier of ridicule was too light
for his heavy hand, and he took up the sledge-hammer, telling them he
was the same man to-day as yesterday, and only his circumstances were
different--his daughter being about to become the lady of the first
house in the island, and none of them being big enough to be left out of
it.
After such scenes Aunt Bridget, for all her despotism within her own
doors, used to tremble with dread of our neighbours taking lasting
offence, but my father would say:
"Chut, woman, they'll come again, and make no more faces about it."
They did, and if they were shy of my father they were gracious enough
to me, saying it was such a good thing for society in the island that
Castle Raa was to have a lady, a real lady, at the head of it at last.
Then came their wedding presents--pictures, books, silver ornaments,
gold ornaments, clocks, watches, chains, jewellery, until my bedroom was
blocked up with them. As each fresh parcel arrived there would be a rush
of all the female members of our household to open it, after which Betsy
Beauty would say:
"What a lucky girl you are!"
I began to think I was. I found it impossible to remain unaffected by
the whirlwind of joyous turmoil in which I lived. The refulgence of the
present hour wiped out the past, which seemed to fade away altogether.
After the first few days I was flying about from place to place, and
wherever I went I was a subject for congratulation and envy.
If there were moments of misgiving, when, like the cold wind out of a
tunnel, there came the memory of the Reverend Mother and the story she
had told me at Nemi, there were other moments when I felt quite sure
that, in marrying Lord Raa, I should be doing a self-sacrificing thing
and a kind of solemn duty.
One such moment was when Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, who with his
clammy hands always made me think of an over-fatted fish, came to tell
him that, after serious legal difficulties, the civil documents had been
agreed to, for, after he had finished with my father, he drew me aside
and said, as he smoothed his long brown beard:
"You ought to be a happy girl, Mary. I suppose you know what you are
doing for your father? You are wiping out the greatest disappointment of
his life, and rectifying the cruelty--the inevitable cruelty--of the
law, when you were born a daughter after he had expected a son."
Another such moment was when the Bishop came, in his grand carriage, to
say that after much discussion he had persuaded his lordship to sign the
necessary declaration that all the children of our union, irrespective
of sex, should be brought up as Catholics, for taking me aside, as the
advocate had done the day before, he said, in his suave voice, fingering
his jewelled cross:
"I congratulate you, my child. Yours is a great and precious
privilege--the privilege of bringing back to the Church a family which
has been estranged from it for nineteen years."
At the end of a fortnight we signed the marriage settlement. The little
ceremony took place in the drawing-room of my father's house. My
intended husband, who had not been to see me in the meantime, brought
with him (as well as his trustee and lawyer) a lady and a gentleman.
The lady was his maiden aunt, Lady Margaret Anslem, a fair woman of
about forty, fashionably dressed, redolent of perfume, and (except to
me, to whom she talked quite amicably) rather reserved and haughty, as
if the marriage of her nephew into our family were a bitter pill which
she had compelled herself to swallow.
The gentleman was a tall young man wearing a very high collar and
cravat, and using a handkerchief with embroidered initials in the corner
of it. He turned out to be the Hon. Edward Eastcliff--the great friend
who, being rich enough to please himself, was about to marry the
professional beauty.
I noticed that Aunt Bridget, with something of the instinct of the fly
about the flame, immediately fixed herself upon the one, and that Betsy
Beauty attached herself to the other.
Lord Raa himself looked as tired as before, and for the first half-hour
he behaved as if he did not quite know what to do with himself for
wretchedness and _ennui_.
Then the deeds were opened and spread out on a table, and though the
gentlemen seemed to be trying not to discuss the contents aloud I could
not help hearing some of the arrangements that had been made for the
payment of my intended husband's debts, and certain details of his
annual allowance.
Looking back upon that ugly hour, I wonder why, under the circumstances,
I should have been so wounded, but I remember that a sense of discomfort
amounting to shame came upon me at sight of the sorry bargaining. It
seemed to have so little to do with the spiritual union of souls, which
I had been taught to think marriage should be. But I had no time to
think more about that before my father, who had signed the documents
himself in his large, heavy hand, was saying.
"Now, gel, come along, we're waiting for your signature."
I cannot remember that I read anything. I cannot remember that anything
was read to me. I was told where to sign, and I signed, thinking what
must be must be, and that was all I had to do with the matter.
I was feeling a little sick, nevertheless, and standing by the tire
with one foot on the fender, when Lord Raa came up to me at the end, and
said in his drawling voice:
"So it's done."
"Yes, it's done," I answered.
After a moment he talked of where we were to live, saying we must of
course pass most of our time in London.
"But have you any choice about the honeymoon," he said, "where we should
spend it, I mean?"
I answered that he would know best, but when he insisted on my choosing,
saying it was my right to do so, I remembered that during my time in the
Convent the one country in the world I had most desired to see was the
Holy Land.
Never as long as I live shall I forget the look in his lordship's grey
eyes when I gave this as my selection.
"You mean Jerusalem--Nazareth--the Dead Sea and all that?" he asked.
I felt my face growing red as at a frightful _faux pas_, but his
lordship only laughed, called me his "little nun," and said that since I
had been willing to leave the choice to him he would suggest Egypt and
Italy, and Berlin and Paris on the way back, with the condition that we
left Ellan for London on the day of our marriage.
After the party from Castle Raa had gone, leaving some of their family
lace and pearls behind for the bride to wear at her wedding, and after
Aunt Bridget had hoped that "that woman" (meaning Lady Margaret) didn't
intend to live at the Castle after my marriage, because such a thing
would not fit in with her plans "at all, at all," I mentioned the
arrangements for the honeymoon, whereupon Betsy Beauty, to whom Italy
was paradise, and London glimmered in an atmosphere of vermillion and
gold, cried out as usual:
"What a lucky, lucky girl you are!"
But the excitement which had hitherto buoyed me up was partly dispelled
by this time, and I was beginning to feel some doubt of it.