“I Cannot Come.”
For a whole week Lawrence knocked about London, and it was just as well
for their peace of mind that none of those who cared for him saw him.
One Sunday afternoon he suddenly called a taxi and drove off to
Shepherd’s Bush.
On asking for Miss Adair he was ushered in and led to the dingy,
old-fashioned drawing-room. It was some time before a step approached,
and then the doctor, with a keen look in his kindly eyes, entered
alone.
Lawrence was watching the door with a fixed intentness that scarcely
gave when the unexpected comer entered.
“My niece has a very bad headache,” the doctor said simply, as he shook
hands. “She does not feel equal to seeing any one to-day. I am sorry
you should have had this long drive for nothing.”
“Is she ill?” Lawrence asked bluntly.
“Oh, no, only ailing a little. The weather has been very trying the
last week.”
The doctor studied the visitor carefully. Paddy’s hurried return had
caused him much food for anxious thought, coupled with her evident low
spirits and loss of appetite. He shot a bow at a venture.
“I think you come from Omeath?” he said.
Lawrence assented, but seemed lost in thought.
“Wouldn’t she see me just for a few minutes?” he asked. “I don’t want
to worry her, but I have come from Omeath, and she might like to hear
about them all at home.”
The doctor went away, but came back again alone.
“She is not well enough to-day,” he repeated. “She thanks you for
calling and is sorry she cannot see you.”
And Lawrence was obliged to call a cab again and drive away. As he went
down the steps he met a slim youth who regarded him somewhat fixedly,
but Lawrence never even saw him. He would have been a little amused,
perhaps, had he known that the same youth shook his fist threateningly
after him from behind the safe shelter of the doctor’s front door.
“If you’re the cuss who’s worrying Paddy’s life out of her,” he
mentally apostrophised Lawrence’s back, “I’d uncommonly like to have
you in the dissecting-room,” which blood-curdling threat Basil was
fortunately quite unable to carry out.
Lawrence went back to his club and wrote a letter to Paddy.
It was a beautiful letter. Nature had, of a truth, been erratic with
this one of her children, for it seemed impossible that the writer of
this letter and the man who could speak to his mother in a way that
made her really ill for days could be one and the same.
It distressed Paddy beyond words. In spite of everything she might say,
his suffering tore her heart. Yet her will held firm, and she would not
tell him to come. She wrote him a little letter, however, in which he
perceived that she no longer pretended to be repulsed by him, and that
absence might be serving him better than a meeting just then. He held
the letter long in his hand, and was conscious of a sudden swift
regret. “If there were more girls like her,” was his thought, “how much
better it would be for us men and for all the world. If I had only
loved her sooner, or some one like her, I should have been a different
man to-day.”
Ah, that eternal “if—if.” And meanwhile all things march on the same.
The girls will not see, so the men do not heed, and there is folly and
wrong and weakness where there might be strength and rich content.
Where there is a great man there was a great woman before; and so it
would seem Nature is always trying to point out to us that, though the
Men have the strength, the Women have the power, and where they are
strong and true all things are possible—for the fireside, the
household, the sphere of influence at hand, the greatness of the nation
itself. Be smart, be comely, be gay—why not?—only ring true also, and
the men who admire you for your comeliness, will worship you for your
goodness.
Lawrence kept his letter and read it often, but he did not go away. He
liked feeling that he was there in the same city, breathing the same
air, although she remained inexorable about seeing him. Often, in fits
of despair, he thought he would go away, but always in the end he
decided to remain.
He bought a racing motor, and seemed to find some relief in flying
madly over the county at a terrible pace. Three times he was had up for
furious driving, and the third time his fine was the heaviest ever
exacted for a like cause, and he received a strong reprimand as well
and a threat that a fourth offence would be even more strenuously dealt
with.
He left the court laughing, and his friends began to wonder anxiously
where his recklessness would end.
Gwen returned to town about the time of the third offence, and
remonstrated forcibly with him, but made no visible effect.
“Have you seen Paddy again?” she asked him.
“She will not see me.”
Gwen knit her forehead in perplexity.
“I have written, and she has not answered,” she said. “I don’t know
what to make of her. I must go and see her.”
“Not yet,” he said, and she looked up in surprise. His face, however,
expressed nothing.
“I wrote to her, and she answered it,” he continued, “and I do not want
her to be worried about me for the present. Stay away for a little
while, Gwen. I think she would rather you did.”
So Gwen possessed her soul in patience for three weeks, to please
Lawrence, and then went upon an unexpected errand.
Paddy was roaming about restlessly that dreary winter afternoon at the
beginning of February when Gwen came. She had been out in the morning,
and she kept trying to make up her mind to go out again for something
to do, but instead she continued to roam about with that odd feeling of
unrest, quite unable to settle down to anything.
Eileen and her mother had come back to London again now, but only until
the spring quarter, when, the lease of their house was up, and they
hoped to have done with London for good.
The wedding was to take place in April, there was nothing to wait for,
and several hearts eager enough to see it happily become a fact.
The Ghan House was being renovated throughout, and Eileen was busy with
her trousseau—no time to spare between January and April.
Paddy helped a great deal. She did not like plain sewing—indeed, she
very much disliked it, always contriving to prick herself badly and
leave little danger signals, so to speak, where she had stitched. She
might have been said to be preparing Eileen’s trousseau with her
heart’s blood, only not with the meaning this phrase, beloved of serial
writers, is generally intended to convey.
She had her own views as to quantities, which, however, as they did not
at all fit in with her mother’s and Eileen’s, she wisely kept to
herself. No use warring against the majority, and little matter either
way. If the others thought dozens of everything necessary Paddy
supposed it was all right, but, for her part, she wondered how so many
clothes could possibly ever get worn, and where Eileen was going to
keep them all when she was not wearing them.
“We might be making clothes for Jack as well,” she remarked once,
surveying the growing piles; and when they told her laughingly Jack was
getting his own dozens and half-dozens, she fairly gasped.
Nothing much had been said about that speedy flight of hers at
Christmas. Both Eileen and the mother had attempted to win her
confidence, but Paddy would not speak. Eileen had finally guessed.
“It is Lawrence, Paddy, isn’t it?” she asked.
Paddy, driven in a corner, consented, but would not go on.
Eileen had then fidgeted a little, and, blushing painfully, stammered:
“You would not let anything in reference to me two years ago influence
you, I hope, Paddy.”
Paddy made no reply.
“Because, as it happened, you see, it was such a good thing. I could
never have been as happy with any one else as I am with Jack. Tell me,
Paddy?” looking hard into her sister’s eyes.
Paddy shook her head.
“I can’t tell you anything, Eily,” she answered. “Please don’t ask me.”
And Eileen had to give in.
Jack tried when he came for a flying visit about wall-papers and paint
and things, and it was then for the first time that they learnt of
Paddy’s unlooked-for decision.
“What colour is your room to be, Paddy?” he asked. “I am waiting your
orders.”
“You are very good,” a little uncomfortably, “but I’m not coming to
live at The Ghan House.”
“Not coming to live at The Ghan House!” as if he could not believe his
own ears, while Eileen and her mother looked up in amazement.
Paddy had to brace herself with the utmost determination.
“I have thought it all over carefully,” she said, “and I have decided
to stay in London. I have developed a very independent spirit of late,
somehow,” with a little smile, “and I mean to stick to my post.”
“But, my dear child—” began Mrs Adair in great distress, while Jack
threw a newspaper at her head and said:
“Don’t talk rubbish, Paddy.”
Eileen looked dumbfounded.
“It is not rubbish,” Paddy went on bravely, “and nothing you can say
will alter me. I have spoken to uncle about it, and he is going to let
me live with them and pay something.” She paused a moment, drawing a
pattern on the tablecloth. “He does not want me to pay,” she went on,
“he says he will be only too glad to have me, but I would like to feel
perfectly independent. He is lonely sometimes, and he always wanted a
daughter.”
A mistiness crossed her eyes, and she smiled a little crooked smile as
she added:
“Daddy always wanted a son, and I did my best. He is daddy’s brother,
and he wants a daughter—I am going to do my best again. I never seem to
quite ‘get there,’ do If—I am evidently destined only to shine as a
substitute—to be only the-next-best-thing.”
“But, Paddy,” coming behind her and leaning over the table with his arm
across her shoulders, “you hate London so,” coaxed Jack. “How are
Eileen and I to be perfectly happy, thinking of you pining for fresh
air here?”
“You must not think—it would only be silly—you will have each other
and,”—there was a little catch in her voice—“mother.”
Mrs Adair looked up quickly; hitherto she had not spoken.
“No, Paddy,” she said, “I shall stay with you. I do not mind London at
all now I have got used to it, and I could not leave you behind alone.
I should not be happy at Omeath without you.”
But Paddy would not hear of it, and after a long discussion it was
finally decided that she should remain with her uncle for six months.
Having gained her point, she quickly drew their attention back to the
wall-papers, which were eagerly discussed in their turn, amid the usual
amount of nonsense and twitting on her part and Jack’s.
The next day she told her uncle that she had won her point, and was
coming to them, at any rate for the present. Something like tears
instantly dimmed the kindly doctor’s eyes; he had grown more than fond
of his young dispenser and niece.
“It will be as good as having a daughter,” he said, a little huskily.
Paddy laughed. “It is my particular _forte_,” she said, “to be
the-next-best-thing.”
Her aunt was no less pleased.
“Really, my dear,” she remarked, folding her hands contentedly upon her
ample front, “I shall be very pleased to have you. I don’t like girls,
as a rule—they’re all so flighty and flirty, and fond of gew-gaws and
things, but you are somehow different. You are not as interested in the
church guilds and parish meetings as I could wish, and you are a little
wanting in respect to poor Mr Dickinson,” naming the meek young curate;
“but you are young yet, and by and by you will see how empty and
shallow and vain are all amusements compared with church work and the
beautiful church services.”
Paddy had her doubts, but she kept them to herself, and just then Basil
came in to give his opinion.
“The guv’nor says you’re going to stay here after March,” he exclaimed.
“How beastly, jolly, thundering nice!”
“My dear boy!” gasped his mother, horror-struck; “what an extraordinary
way of expressing yourself.”
“Says what I mean pretty straight, anyhow. I guess I’ll have a key of
the dispensary and only allow Paddy in at her proper hours. If we don’t
mind she’ll go messing about with those silly old medicines half the
day.”
So it was all arranged, and Paddy was somewhat relieved, but her heart
was unusually heavy on that February afternoon, with the weight of a
longing that, in its steady insistence, was beginning to undermine
those strong defences of hers, built up by that spirit of fanaticism so
strangely blended with her open, generous nature.
It had been there for some time now, this creeping, growing longing,
but until the Christmas holiday it had been given such short shrift, it
scarcely dared to hold up its head. Whenever it did, seizing advantage
of some soft moment, it was almost immediately stamped on by the
warrior-like, fanatical Paddy, nursing her sense of injury, and
armour-plating herself against a softness her heart clamoured more and
more strongly to yield to.
But during the Christmas holiday the longing had developed an ache,
which gave it a new power. The ache of an incredible loneliness, which
seemed to come down suddenly out of nowhere. And always when the ache
was strongest, it seemed to sound insistently in her ears and in her
soul just one sentence: “Mavourneen, mavourneen, bears have
understanding when they love as I love you...”
And with the sentence came other thoughts. Thoughts that thrilled and
frightened her both at once, setting her heart beating to a strange new
measure. It was a measure she had experienced for the first time that
afternoon in his den, when all the others were paired off, and they two
left alone together. When, sitting quietly at his fireside, she had
felt as if her little world were entirely changed, and she left in a
position that required much readjusting all round. And it was so
difficult to readjust herself. With Eileen and Jack married and living
at The Ghan House, and her mother with them, what was to be her place
in the general scheme? Was there, indeed, nothing for her but that
independent spirit, and the dispensary, and this fighting against an
ache that threatened to overpower her heart? And then would come the
thought, suppose she gave up fighting?... suppose... suppose... But
there Paddy usually stopped short—a strange new world she was shyly
afraid of lay beyond that word, and the fanatical spirit was promptly
re-enforced. Of course she could not give up fighting. It was monstrous
to think it; and for a little while the old flash would be in her eyes,
and the old resolute set of the lips.
And then, at the first “letting go,” back would come the same
engrossing memory: “Mavourneen, mavourneen, bears have understanding
when they love as I love you.”
Ah, what understanding he had, what wild allurement!
Fancy played with her then, laughing at the fanatic, snapping light
fingers at the warrior-spirit. “Supposing you were to let yourself go,”
said Fancy, “and to swim out into the comforting warmth of that
understanding, shutting away the loneliness with it, and letting all
the readjusting solve itself into just sitting by a fireside that was
all your own for ever...!”
How the ache and the longing grew when Fancy triumphed, how alluringly
the voice sounded.
So it came to a day when Paddy the Fearless asked herself a question,
and left it unanswered because she was afraid. But though she spoke no
reply, perhaps it was given just as poignantly in a bright head buried
in a pillow, and a little reluctant whisper, breathed to the feathers:
“Oh, Lawrence, I can’t help it. I want you. I want you.”
And the next afternoon, that sombre February day, she stood in the
window still remembering, still vainly wrestling and puzzling, when a
taxi drew up at the door, and Gwen stepped out.
“Wait,” she said to the driver and ran up the steps with a haste that
was somewhat startling.
Paddy went out into the hall and opened the door herself, and
immediately Gwen exclaimed: “Oh, I’m so glad you’re in, Paddy. Lawrence
has been hurt in a motor smash. He wants to see you badly, and I said I
would take you. Be quick, won’t you? I don’t like leaving him. He is in
great pain, and one never knows...”