"Yes, yes, I know," said my mother, and then turning with her melting eyes to me she said:
"Would my Mary like to go—leaving her mamma but coming home in the holidays—would she?"
I was going to say I would not, because mamma could not possibly get on without me, but before I could reply Aunt Bridget, with her bunch of keys at her waist, came jingling into the room, and catching my mother's last words, said, in her harsh, high-pitched voice.
"Isabel! You astonish me! To defer to the will of a child! Such a child too! So stubborn and spoiled and self-willed! If we say it is good for her to go she must go!"
I could feel through my mother's arm, which was still about my waist, that she was trembling from head to foot, but at first she did not speak and Aunt Bridget, in her peremptory way, went on:
"We say it is good for you, too, Isabel, if she is not to hasten your death by preying on your nerves and causing you to break more blood vessels. So we are consulting your welfare as well as the girl's in sending her away."
My mother's timid soul could bear no more. I think it must have been the only moment of anger her gentle spirit ever knew, but, gathering all her strength, she turned upon Aunt Bridget in ungovernable excitement.
"Bridget," she said, "you are doing nothing of the kind. You know you are not. You are only trying to separate me from my child and my child from me. When you came to my house I thought you would be kinder to my child than a anybody else, but you have not been, you have been cruel to her, and shut your heart against her, and while I have been helpless here, and in bed, you have never shown her one moment of love and kindness. No, you have no feeling except for your own, and it never occurs to you that having brought your own child into my house you are trying to turn my child out of it."
"So that's how you look at it, is it?" said Aunt Bridget, with a flash of her cold grey eyes. "I thought I came to this house—your house as you call it—only out of the best intentions, just to spare you trouble when you were ill and unable, to attend to your duties as a wife. But because I correct your child when she is wilful and sly and wicked. … "
"Correct your own child, Bridget O'Neill!" cried my mother, "and leave mine to me. She's all I have and it isn't long I shall have her. You know quite well how much she has cost me, and that I haven't had a very happy married life, but instead of helping me with her father. … "
"Say no more," said Aunt Bridget, "we don't want you to hurt yourself again, and to allow this ill-conditioned child to be the cause of another hemorrhage."
"Bridget O'Neill," cried my mother, rising up from her chair, "you are a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition. You know as well as I do that it wasn't Mary who made me ill, but you—you, who reproached me and taunted me about my child until my heart itself had to bleed. For seven years you have been doing that, and now you are disposing of my darling over my head without consulting me. Has a mother no rights in her own child—the child she has suffered for, and loved and lived for—that other people who care nothing for it should take it away from her and send it into a foreign country where she may never see it again? But you shall not do that! No, you shall not'! As long as there's breath in my body you shall not do it, and if you attempt. … "
In her wild excitement my mother had lifted one of her trembling hands into Aunt Bridget's face while the other was still clasped about me, when suddenly, with a look of fear on her face, she stopped speaking. She had heard a heavy step on the stairs. It was my father. He entered the room with his knotty forehead more compressed than usual and said:
"What's this she shall not do?"
My mother dropped back into her seat in silence, and Aunt Bridget, wiping' her eyes on her black apron—she only wept when my father was present—proceeded to explain.
It seems I am a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition and though, I've been up early and late and made myself a servant for seven years I'm only in this house to turn my sister's child out of it. It seems too, that we have no business—none of us have—to say what ought to be done for this girl—her mother being the only person who has any rights in the child, and if we attempt … "
"What's that?"
In his anger and impatience my father could listen no longer and in his loud voice he said:
"Since when has a father lost control of his own daughter? He has to provide for her, hasn't he? If she wants anything it's to him she has to look for it, isn't it? That's the law I guess, eh? Always has been, all the world over. Then what's all this hustling about?"
My mother made a feeble effort to answer him.
"I was only saying, Daniel … "
"You were saying something foolish and stupid. I reckon a man can do what he likes with his own, can't he? If this girl is my child and I say she is to go somewhere, she is to go." And saying this my father brought down his thick hand with a thump on to a table.
It was the first time he had laid claim to me, and perhaps that acted on my mother, as she said, submissively:
"Very well, dear. You know best what is best for Mary, and if you say—you and Bridget and … and Father Dan. … "
"I do say, and that's enough. So just go to work and fix up this Convent scheme without future notice. And hark here, let me see for the future if a man can't have peace from these two-cent trifles for his important business."
My mother was crushed. Her lips moved again, but she said nothing aloud, and my father turned on his heel, and left the room, shaking the floor at every step under the weight of his sixteen stone. At the next moment, Aunt Bridget, jingling her keys, went tripping after him.
Hardly had they gone when my mother broke into a long fit of coughing, and when it was over she lay back exhausted, with her white face and her tired eyes turned upwards. Then I clasped her about the neck, and Father Dan, whose cheeks were wet with tears patted her drooping hand.
My darling mother! Never once have I thought of her without the greatest affection, but now that I know for myself what she must have suffered I love best to think of her as she was that day—my sweet, beautiful, timid angel—standing up for one brief moment, not only against Aunt Bridget, but against the cruelty of all the ages, in the divine right of her outraged motherhood.
ELEVENTH CHAPTER
My mother's submission was complete. Within twenty-four hours she was busy preparing clothes for my journey to Rome. The old coloured pattern book was brought out again, material was sent for, a sewing-maid was engaged from the village, and above all, in my view, an order was dispatched to Blackwater for a small squirrel-skin scarf, a large squirrel-skin muff, and a close-fitting squirrel-skin hat with a feather on the side of it.
A child's heart is a running brook, and it would wrong the truth to say that I grieved much in the midst of these busy preparations. On the contrary I felt a sort of pride in them, poor innocent that I was, as in something that gave me a certain high superiority over Betsy Beauty and Nessy MacLeod, and entitled me to treat them with condescension.
Father Dan, who came more frequently than ever, fostered this feeling without intending to do so, by telling me, whenever we were alone, that I must be a good girl to everybody now, and especially to my mother.
"My little woman would be sorry to worry mamma, wouldn't she?" he would whisper, and when I answered that I would be sorrier than sorry, he would say:
"Wisha then, she must be brave. She must keep up. She must not grieve about going away or cry when the time