A Budget of News.
Paddy was out on the platform in half a twinkling, and with a little
cry of “Jack!” darted to meet him with hands outstretched. Jack caught
hold of both, and shook them until she was quite exhausted, and cried
for mercy. Lawrence stood looking on, and his brow grew black as
thunder. If Jack had only known it, in that one minute he had
practically all the revenge he need wish, for any fancied contempt in
the past.
“Can I give you a lift?” Lawrence said, when they would listen. “My
motor is here. How do, O’Hara! You look as if South America suited
you.”
“It did A1,” answered Jack, not even noticing Lawrence’s ill-concealed
anger—as indeed he had small occasion to. “What shall we do, Paddy,
walk or drive?”
“Oh, ride on the back of the train, of course!” she cried, “and home
through the garden, just like we did as children. Oh, Jack, I’ve had to
be so grown-up for two years. I absolutely refuse to be grown-up this
Christmas holiday—we will—we _must_ be children.”
“Anything you like,” he cried, with the utmost readiness. “Come along,”
as the train moved. “Send up Miss Paddy’s portmanteau. Good-by,
Lawrence!” and they sprang on to the step of the guard’s van and rode
the short distance of railway to the Parsonage garden, leaving Lawrence
to go home in the most unenviable frame of mind imaginable, which he
later vented upon the household generally in his cold and cutting
fashion, regardless of the fact that he was damping every one’s
Christmas.
But what cared Jack and Paddy?—least of all Paddy—for whom a joy seemed
to have dropped straight from, the skies. What a noise there was, to be
sure! and how Jack and Paddy _would_ talk at once, and make it
impossible for any single sentence to be coherent.
At last, in desperation, Paddy picked up the little table-bell and rang
it lustily. “If I can’t be heard, you shan’t, Jack,” she said, and, the
moment he opened his mouth, started ringing it again. Jack immediately
flew round the table to get the bell, and behold! if the two little
ladies weren’t collecting the breakables again, and casting agonising
glances at the cups and saucers and plates on the breakfast-table—just
for all the world as if two long years of separation had not rolled by
since the last scrimmage, and these two mad things were not a day
older. If Paddy had not been in such a state of eager excitement, she
must certainly have noticed sooner than she did an air of portent that
still prevailed, as of some momentous event not yet revealed.
As it was, they all went to the little church as usual, Jack and the
aunties sitting one side, and the Adairs on the other side, for the
sake of old times; and came home again, and had their Christmas dinner,
before Paddy got an inkling that further news was in the air. Up to
then the whole conversation nearly had run upon Jack’s adventures in
the Argentine, and she had plied him with such an endless string of
questions that there had really not been much opportunity for any other
subject.
After dinner, however, they collected round a big log fire for a cozy
afternoon, and a few minutes later a letter and parcel arrived by hand
for Paddy. Both were from Doreen Blake, the parcel containing a
handsome Christmas present, and the letter a piece of news that made
her give a little exclamation of pleased surprise.
“Only fancy!” she cried. “Doreen Blake is engaged. What fun! How I
wonder what he is like!”
The others looked up with interest.
“Evidently he has come over for Christmas, and it is only just
settled,” Paddy ran on. “I am pleased. Dear old Dorrie. He is a
barrister, and they met last September, in Scotland. Really,
engagements seem to be in the air. First Gwen Carew, then Doreen—and
now I wonder who will be the third.”
A kind of subdued murmur made her look up quickly, and something about
Jack and Eileen caught her attention for the first time. In spite of
herself, it sent a little chill to her heart. She folded her letter and
sat down on the floor, leaning against Aunt Jane’s lap.
“Now,” she remarked, “I’m ready to be told why Jack has come home in
this unexpected manner. You don’t any of you seem to have been very
communicative so far.”
“I like that!” exclaimed Jack, “when you haven’t given anybody a chance
to get a word in edgeways all day—but there! you always did monopolise
the whole conversation.”
“You’ve come back more uppish than ever, Jack,” she retorted. “Anybody
would think you had come in; for a fortune at least.”
This seemed to tickle them all quite unnecessarily, and Jack burst into
a hearty laugh.
“You all seem rather easily amused,” said Paddy, “or else I am getting
very dense. What is the joke?”
“Only that you fired a shot at random and made a bull’s-eye,” laughed
Jack.
Paddy looked more puzzled than ever, but suddenly she leaned forward
and exclaimed:
“You don’t mean that you have come in for a fortune, Jack?”
“Not exactly,” he answered, “only a trifle of 20,000 pounds.”
“_You’ve_ got 20,000 pounds?” incredulously.
“Yes. An obliging relative of my mother’s, I had scarcely heard of,
died a little while ago and left no other heirs but me.”
For a moment Paddy was too astonished to speak, and they all watched
her with eager happiness in their eyes. Undoubtedly there was more to
come. At last she looked up with a twinkle.
“My! if you’d only had it a bit sooner, Jack,” she said, “we might have
bought up all the chocolate in Mrs White’s shop, and all the
bull’s-eyes, and all the licorice. Goodness! what a feast we would have
had.”
“We’ll do lots better than that,” he cried. “We’ll have new boats, and
new rifles, and new fishing-rods.”
“I’m thinking that isn’t quite what brought Jack home after all,”
remarked Miss Jane.
“Ask Eileen,” said Jack, in a way that made Eileen blush.
“What, more secrets!” cried Paddy. “It seems to me you’d better just
start at the beginning, and tell me everything that has been going on
behind my back in this barefaced fashion.”
“Yes, only unfortunately we don’t quite know where the beginning is, do
we, Eileen?”
“It’s too bad, Paddy, to tease you so,” put in Eileen quickly. “The
real truth is that last summer, when you didn’t happen to be at home to
see, letters from the Argentine began to come much oftener, and were
not handed round for public perusal as usual. And then—You go on Jack,”
smiling at him.
“And then,” said Jack readily enough, “some one wanted desperately to
go along with the letters, and for some time could not find a way. At
last, some one wrote and asked if he might come if he could find ways
and means, and all unbeknown to every one but themselves, letter-writer
and recipient arranged a little plan, if they could only manage to
bring it off. While still in doubt as to ways and means, distant
relative most obligingly dies, and then it is hey presto! and catch the
next boat.”
Paddy crossed the fireside circle in a flash, and flung herself upon
Eileen.
“Oh, Eily, Eily,” she cried, “you are engaged?—are you really engaged
to Jack?”
“Yes, Paddy,” and her voice and eyes spoke all she could not say.
“Oh, I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I feel as if I must just hug you both!
and the aunties too, and every one. What a lovely Christmas present, a
new brother.”
“But that isn’t really all,” cried Jack. “We’re going to live at The
Ghan House. Only think of it! and you and your mother are to have the
west wing all to yourselves, and live there with us just as long as
ever you will.”
After that every one joined in, and the rest of the afternoon was spent
in discussing numerous projects, interesting to all alike. Paddy joined
in likewise with seeming eagerness, but deep down in her heart, minute
by minute, a certain dragging weight made itself more and more
apparent. She would not for worlds have said so yet, for fear she might
damp their happiness, but she knew quite well she would not go and live
at The Ghan House with Jack and Eileen. An indefinable something, she
hardly knew what, made her shrink instinctively and very certainly from
such an arrangement. No, she would prefer to go back to her dispensing,
and be independent, even if it was London, and she had to go alone.
There were tears on Paddy’s eyelashes that night when she fell asleep.
It seemed to her as if a sudden, most unlooked-for weight of loneliness
were crushing her, and her whole soul longed and longed for the father
sleeping quietly in the churchyard close beside her. She did not for
one moment grudge Jack and Eileen their happiness—only just at first,
just until she had got used to the new order and readjusted her own
feelings a little—it was not easy to rejoice without one single qualm
of painful remembrance.
The following day a lively call from Doreen and her _fiancé_ on
horseback cheered her considerably and helped her still better to hide
everything from the rest; and the day after there was a little teasing
and good-humoured raillery about a parcel from South Africa which had
been forwarded from England. It contained a beautiful white
ostrich-feather boa, and there was a delightful letter with it, begging
her to accept it as a Christmas token, all of which told its own tale
of constancy and steady persistence on the part of the lonely
Englishman exiled there, and still dreaming of her when he had time to
dream at all. Jack made most of such an opportunity and gave her little
peace, and Paddy took it in excellent part, because she was glad of
anything that would help to blind them to a certain circumstance nearer
home.
In the evening they had one of their wild “scrimmage” parties, for the
sake of old times, and to every one’s astonishment, Lawrence arrived
with the Mourne Lodge party. He had, of course, heard the news, and
professed to have accepted his invitation for the express purpose of
congratulating the happy pair. This certainly was open to doubt, though
the genuineness of his congratulations was equally certainly not so.
Paddy fought shy of him from the first moment, and as she was naturally
the ringleader of the scrimmage party, whereas he played Bridge in the
study, it was perfectly easy to avoid an encounter. Only, as it
happened, for that evening at least, Fortune was on Lawrence’s side.
The scrimmage party were playing a game in which one of their number
had to go out of the room, and it chanced to be Paddy’s turn just when
Lawrence, being “dummy,” strolled into the hall for a smoke.
Before she knew of his presence, he had walked up to her and said:
“Paddy, do you know you are sitting under the mistletoe?”
Paddy gave a start, blushed in a way that made her inwardly furious,
and moved to the other end of the oak chest upon which she had been
seated.
“You needn’t be so haughty,” he laughed. “You know perfectly well I’ve
kissed you lots of times, only unfortunately it was when I didn’t want
to. I remember once the master scolding me because I made such a point
of kissing Eileen, and ignoring you. I argued that you were such an
ugly little brute, and invented the fable that you hated kissing.”
“It was no fable.”
“Wasn’t it?” humorously. “Nature never gave a mouth like that to a
woman who hated kissing. Some day I’ll remind you of that, Paddy.”
“I loathed you,” she remarked, refusing to be drawn. “You were the most
objectionable, bad-tempered, conceited little beast that ever wore a
silly little top hat and Eton suit.”
He laughed with a relish.
“That’s better!” approvingly. “It’s impossible not to think there is
something the matter with you, when you are not dealing out bombs of
some sort. Why were you looking so woebegone when I came from the
study, out here all alone in the hall?”
“I was not looking woebegone.”
“Oh, yes, you were—just as if I shouldn’t know.” There was a pause,
then he said with unexpected gentleness: “You were thinking about
Eileen and O’Hara getting engaged, and you being left out in the cold.”
He put his hand on hers suddenly: “Mavourneen,” he said in a voice of
enthralling softness, “you were lonesome.”
For one moment she left her hand in his, and then sprang to her feet
with a bound: “An objectionable, bad-tempered, conceited little beast,
that’s what you were,” and she slipped past him back to the
drawing-room.
Lawrence remained a few seconds longer, and in his face was a strange
mingling of yearning and satisfaction. That one moment had been passing
sweet, the very most he had had to encourage him all through—yet how it
made him hunger for more! And she had looked sad when he found her, he
had seen it distinctly—the little droop about the lips—the little air
of unwonted thoughtfulness.
Ah! she must come now—there must be no more delay—surely with Eileen’s
engagement a recognised fact he could make headway at last. Surely this
was the moment to strike hard. He would take his opportunity.
There were again tears on Paddy’s lashes that night, and she tossed
restlessly. She shut her eyes, and shut her ears, and tried to shut her
mind—but nothing would wholly drown those few words, coming as they did
in her first hours of loneliness—nor the ravishing sweetness of the
tones: “Mavourneen, you were lonesome.”
It was like a spell upon her. Some unreal enchantment that possessed
her spirit. Of course it must be broken. Things could not go as they
were. Once for all she must _make_ him see the uselessness of his
quest, and it must be soon. That Eileen was healed and comforted did
not make the smallest difference. The past was still the past. The
handwriting still glowed on the wall. Over his coveted happiness—over
any happiness for them together—was writ large the sentence of old:
“Tekel—Found Wanting.”
In this mood, and feeling very resolute, Paddy started out two days
later, to deliver judgment.