I could not do as Father Dan advised, being now enmeshed in the threads
of innumerable impulses unknown to myself, and therefore firmly
convinced that Martin's story was not only true, but a part of the whole
sordid business whereby a husband was being bought for me.
With this thought I went about all day, asking myself what I could do
even yet, but finding no answer until nine o'clock at night, when,
immediately after supper (we lived country fashion), Aunt Bridget said:
"Now then, off to bed, girls. Everybody must be stirring early in the
morning."
And then I slipped upstairs to my room, and replied to Father Dan.
Never had I written such a letter before. I poured my whole heart on to
the paper, saying what marriage meant to me, as the Pope himself had
explained it, a sacrament implying and requiring love as the very soul
of it, and since I did not feel this love for the man I was about to
marry, and had no grounds for thinking he felt it for me, and being sure
that other reasons had operated to bring us together, I begged Father
Dan, by his memory of my mother, and his affection for me, and his
desire to see me good and happy, to intervene with my father and the
Bishop, even at this late hour, and at the church door itself to stop
the ceremony.
It was late before I finished, and I thought the household was asleep,
but just as I was coming to an end I heard my father moving in the room
below, and then a sudden impulse came to me, and with a new thought I
went downstairs and knocked at his door.
"Who's there?" he cried. "Come in."
He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, shaving before a looking-glass
which was propped up against two ledgers. The lather on his upper lip
gave his face a fierce if rather grotesque expression.
"Oh, it's you," he said. "Sit down. Got to do this to-night--goodness
knows if I'll have time for it in the morning."
I took the seat in the ingle which Father Dan occupied on the night of
my birth. The fire had nearly burnt out.
"Thought you were in bed by this time. Guess I should have been in bed
myself but for this business. Look there"--he pointed with the handle of
his razor to the table littered with papers--"that's a bit of what I've
had to do for you. I kind o' think you ought to be grateful to your
father, my gel."