Dread and Wrath.
“Who is she?” she asked at last, with her customary out-spokenness.
“Do you mean the big portrait?” carelessly.
“Yes.”
“Miss Gwendoline Grant-Carew.”
Paddy gazed at the portrait silently for another space, and then
remarked:
“She is very beautiful.”
“Yes, very,” dryly.
Again Paddy was silent.
If she had tried she could not have analysed her feelings just then.
She was only conscious that in some way the photograph was a shock to
her. Though she had scarcely confessed it to herself, she undoubtedly
shared the opinion of the neighbourhood, that Lawrence was paying
Eileen such marked attention with a view to marriage, and since the
incident of the clasped hands she had grown to think of him as a
prospective brother-in-law. Unaccountable divination told her the rest.
“Why do you look at her like that?” asked Lawrence at last. “Don’t you
like her?”
“No,” said Paddy slowly, “I hate her.”
“But how can you,” he laughed, “when you don’t even know her? As a
matter of fact she is just your sort. Up to any fun, full of life, and
not the least bit conceited, though half Calcutta is at her feet.”
“Calcutta,” echoed Paddy a little sharply.
“Yes, why not?”
Again there was a moment’s silence.
“Doreen told me you were going to India,” she said at last. “Is it
true?”
“Yes.”
He picked up a paper knife and toyed with it. Something in Paddy’s
honest face made him avoid her gaze.
“When are you going?” she asked.
“In about three weeks.”
She gulped down an exclamation.
“For long?”
“What a list of questions!” with light sarcasm; “it feels like an
examination paper.”
But Paddy would not be put off. She fidgeted restlessly with a letter
weight, and then asked again:
“Are you going for long?”
“I haven’t the least idea.”
“And this—er—Miss Gwendoline Grant-Carew,” with a slight curl of her
lips, “you are engaged to her, or—going to be?”
“Can’t a man have a chum’s photograph on his table without being
engaged to her?”
“I don’t know. I am not a man.”
There was a long pause, then she added: “I don’t know much about men,
either, but I believe a good many of them think it very amusing and
entertaining to make love to three or four girls at once, and not care
a snap of their fingers for any one of them. It may be amusing, but to
my thinking, it is the trick of a scoundrel. I’d hate such a man,” and
she tossed her head and drew up her slight form, with a defiance that
was almost a challenge.
Lawrence paled slightly, but he watched her with his keen eyes in a way
that bespoke a sudden and unusual interest.
He tried, however, to counteract the sense of strain in the situation,
by chaffing her.
“I believe your real name is Patricia,” he said, “but this is the first
time I have seen you look the part. I shall have to start calling you
‘Patricia the Great.’”
She flashed a glance of scorn at him.
“‘Patricia,’ to me, means loyalty,” she said, with significance. “You
may call me what you like, but whether it is Paddy or Patricia,
‘loyalty’ is my watchword.”
He felt almost as if she had struck him. As if a glove, flung
passionately down, should lie on the floor between them. He got up from
his chair, and half turned away, at a momentary loss for words.
“I hear the band,” she said, and moved toward the door.
And it was noticeable this time that Lawrence had not heard it, and
instead of leading he followed. Moreover, there was something about
Paddy’s manner that forebade him offering his arm, and at the ball-room
door she turned her back on him without a word, and commenced
chattering to her next partner.
It would be difficult to describe the feelings of the different
occupants of the omnibus which took the party from the Vicarage and the
Ghan House home again that night, but undoubtedly the elder folks were
now the gayest.
The General was very lively, doubtless because he had got through the
evening without the dreaded mishap to his clothes, and was at the same
time relieved from the weight of anxiety they occasioned.
Miss Jane had enjoyed herself immensely, and was lively also, and even
little Miss Mary was aroused to an unusual gaiety for her. Mrs Adair
saw the subdued light of happiness glowing in Eileen’s eyes, and
anxiety gave place to hopefulness.
But for Paddy and Jack, there was only increased dread, though they
both strove bravely to continue to hide it beneath an assumed
merriment.
Paddy saw, as her mother, the light in Eileen’s eyes, and something
seemed to grow cold within her, and she bit her teeth together,
murmuring savagely, “I’ll kill him, if he’s been trifling with her.”
Jack saw it, too, and his hopes grew weak, for he believed he was
already worsted; and he saw, with an inward yearning, the vision of all
the happy, careless, sunny days at Omeath passing slowly and surely
away. “What should he do?” he asked, “and where should he go?”
His two devoted aunts noticed there was something wrong later on,
before separating for the night, and in Miss Jane’s bedroom, they asked
each other anxiously.
“What is it?—what is wrong with our boy?”
Miss Mary having the greater intuition, was the first to offer a
solution. “Can it be Eileen?” she asked with dread—“Eileen and Lawrence
Blake?”
They looked into each other’s eyes with a sudden sense of awakening.
“Surely not—” murmured Miss Jane, but her face belied her words.
“Oh, sister,” breathed little tender-hearted Miss Mary, “if it is true
he will suffer so. I can’t bear to think of our boy suffering,” and two
big tears gathered in her eyes.
“Don’t fret, sister,” said Miss Jane bravely, blinking back a
suspicious moisture in her own eyes, “I don’t think it can have gone
far enough for that. You see we have lately somehow associated Eileen
and Lawrence, and Jack, of course, knew, so he would be guarded against
caring too much. Probably it is just the sudden realisation that a
change must come over their old happy life, and he will quickly get
accustomed to it. There is still Paddy, and I have always hoped so—”
she paused, and then concluded with a little smile, “What a dear, wild,
irresponsible pair they would make!”
Across at The Ghan House, in a room from which a bright light shone
through the trees, in view of Jack’s window, the two other sisters were
taking off their pretty dresses, and preparing to slip into their two
dainty little white beds. Now and then they laughed over something that
had happened at the ball, but for the most part Eileen was dreamy and
Paddy preoccupied.
“Was Lawrence very nice to-night?” asked the latter at last, longing to
know what had transpired.
“Yes,” Eileen answered simply. Paddy looked round suddenly and opened
her lips to speak, but something in her sister’s face held her back.
She was going to ask if he had told her about going to India, but
realising how it might hurt Eileen if he had not, she changed her mind.
“I can’t—I can’t,” she said to herself. “She looks so happy. I can’t
damp it; if he has been playing with her, I will kill him—kill him—kill
him,” and she clenched her hands together and tumbled into bed,
forgetting for the time her own trouble in her wrath against Lawrence.