Chapter Twenty Nine.
“O Love, Thy Day sets Darkling.”
The same proud, fearless strength of nature which had allowed Mona to give herself up so unreservedly to this wonderful, all-absorbing love, once she were sure of it, now enabled her to suffer and make no sign. She was not one to wear the willow ostentatiously. Suffield, indeed, was lost in amazement over what he had termed her cool way of taking it. His wife, however, who could see below the surface, knew what a smouldering volcano this “coolness” covered. Sadly, too, she recalled her own words, “Wait until it comes, Mona, and then tell me how enjoyable you find it.” Well, “it” had come, and could anything be a more disastrous, more complete wreck? She would watch her relative with a kind of awed wonder; for Mona never made direct allusion to anything that had gone before. A trifle graver, more reserved perhaps; otherwise as serene, as imperturbable as before. Yet deep down in her heart the wound bled, ached, and throbbed—and that almost unbearably. For she could not move a step without being reminded of the times that were past—if she needed reminding. No way could she turn her eyes without being so reminded. Every object, every feature in the surroundings was fraught with such associations.
Then she would force herself to look things in the face—to take to herself a kind of reckless, bizarre comfort. She had youth, and the glow of healthful beauty throbbed warm and strong within her. The world was great. Life was all before her. And she had pride. She could face the whole world with such an armoury.
There was one thing which, so far as the outside world was concerned, rendered her position easier. There had been no regular engagement. Nothing formal or binding had so much as been hinted at between them. They had been content to live on, penetrating deeper and deeper into the golden mazes of love; no thought for the end, no thought of a barred gate across their way, beyond which should lie a smooth, dead-level road, unending in its placid monotony. Nothing therefore had been “broken off,” nothing claiming explanations, and, more hateful than all, laying her open to condolences.
But the fact that there had been nothing definite between them had its drawbacks. She could not shut herself up; and at times, when visiting among their acquaintances, she would be forced to listen to remarks which cleft her heart, but which she must bear and show no sign; to strictures on the absent one which made her blood surge and boil with suppressed wrath. One such occasion befell about a month after his departure, the time and place being an afternoon call, and the offender Mrs Shaston, who, she suspected, was talking not without design, expatiating to a roomful of people upon what a snake in the grass had been so providentially hunted out of their midst. The hot, passionate blood coursed madly in Mona’s veins, and her eyes began to flash. Suddenly they met those of Father O’Driscoll, who, with his hands crossed on the head of his stick, was seated on the other side of the room as though not hearing what went on. Suddenly the old man leaned across towards the speaker.
“Is it Mr Musgrave ye’re talking about, Mrs Shaston?” he said in his gentle Irish tone.
“Yes. He was once a great friend of yours, Father O’Driscoll, if I remember rightly,” and there was a scarcely veiled sneer underlying the remark.
“Was once a great friend of mine?” repeated the old priest quietly, but in a tone clear enough to be audible to all in the room. “But he is still a great friend of mine, Mrs Shaston, though I doubt if we shall ever meet again, I’m sorry to say.”
It was like flinging a bomb into that côterie of scandalmongers. The lady stared, wrathful—then smiled sweetly. The magistrate’s wife was not an easy person to “put down.”
“As a clergyman you would of course take a charitable view of things, Father O’Driscoll,” she answered, “and I’m sure it’s quite nice to hear you. But we poor every-day people—”
“See here, Mrs Shaston,” broke in the old man, in his most genial tone. “I remember in the old days in Cork springing a riddle on some of the fellows; there was a lot of talk going on at the time, I forget what it was all about, something political most likely. This was it: Why is Shandon steeple like every question? D’ye think they could answer it? They couldn’t at all. The answer was ‘Because there are two sides to it; a dark one and a light one.’”
The application of this was pretty obvious, and gave rise to a constrained sort of silence. Pausing just long enough to lend effect to this, the old man went on, in his frank, merry way. “And the best of the joke is, that some of the fellows, although they’d been born and raised in old Cork, didn’t know that Shandon steeple had two sides at all. I give ye my word they didn’t. They thought it was all dark or all light all round.”
And then, turning to a fellow-compatriot of his, Father O’Driscoll asked whether that particular curiosity of their native city had escaped her notice too, and having launched forth, manoeuvred from one droll anecdote to another, of course leading the conversation farther and farther from the topic of Roden Musgrave; whither indeed it did not return upon that occasion.
By accident or design, Grace Suffield and her cousin took their leave at the same time as the old priest.
“Why do you never come out and see us, Father O’Driscoll?” said Mona, as they gained the street. Her eyes were eloquent with thanks, with unbounded appreciation of the tactful, yet unequivocal manner in which he had championed the absent. “We have not the claim upon your time which your own people have, still you might ride out and see us now and then.”
“Ah, don’t be putting it that way, Miss Ridsdale. Sure, we’re always very good friends in spite of our differences, are we not, Mrs Suffield?”
“I can’t answer that, Father O’Driscoll, until you positively promise to come out and dine with us at the very earliest opportunity,” replied Grace. “My husband will drive in and fetch you and take you back again, if you will only fix the day. If you don’t, why, then I sha’n’t believe you mean what you say.”
“Our friends do come and see us, Father O’Driscoll,” added Mona with meaning; and her eyes again were eloquent, for they said, “You at least were his friend. You at least lifted up one voice on his behalf, and that with no uncertain sound, when all tongues clamoured against him. I want to say more about it, and—perhaps about him” And it is probable that their meaning was read aright, for the required promise was readily given, and as, having bidden the ladies good-bye, Father O’Driscoll took his way down the street, he shook his head sadly to himself as he thought over what had happened; for the heart of this sweet-natured old man was very full of the pain and trouble and separation which had come upon these two.
Beyond the successful working out of it, Lambert had not taken much by his vindictive scheme. In fact, he had taken rather less than nothing; for if he expected to find the road now clear, or at any rate rapidly becoming so, into Mona’s good graces, why, then he never made a greater mistake in his life. She would hardly speak to him, and then only to snub him pitilessly, and with a cold and haughty politeness which left him no road open for a colourably dignified retreat. His revenge must be its own reward. Well, at all events, he had that.
So had Sonnenberg, but he, at any rate, fell into evil case. For he was a good bit of a Lothario of a kind, was this vindictive and plotting child of Israel, and somehow it happened that during the height of his exultation over the utter discomfiture of his enemy, a great and mighty fall awaited himself; for in the very thick of an intrigue whose central figure was a native damsel, “black but comely,” he was surprised by a party of Kaffirs, and most soundly and unmercifully thrashed. Now prominent among the thrashers was the thrashee’s former store-boy, Tom; wherefore the rumour failed not to creep around, that Roden Musgrave had bequeathed a debt of vengeance and a largess to that sometime warrior; and, in short, that Sonnenberg had walked blindly into what was nothing less than a cunningly devised and successfully baited trap. Whether this was so or not, we are uncertain. But the evil Jew, though his bruised bones smarted for many a long day from the whack of the Kaffir kerries, dared make no public stir, by reason of the very circumstances of the case, towards securing the punishment of his assailants; wherefore these went unpunished, and laughed openly.
So time went on, and weeks grew into months, and even the strange affair of Roden Musgrave became ancient history in Doppersdorp, and discussion thereof began to pall, except upon “old Buzfuz,” who was never tired of publicly thanking Heaven for having chosen him as its instrument in unmasking and driving from their midst a most wicked and dangerous impostor; and Roden’s successor, a good-hearted sort of youth of the very ordinary type, fell desperately in love with Mona, but at a distance; and Grace Suffield thought regretfully over that terrible night in the post-cart, and wondered uncomfortably if they had not given their support to a very great act of injustice; and her husband ceased to think any more about it; and things jogged along in Doppersdorp pretty much as they had always done. And some wag, of malice aforethought, turned loose the whole of Emerson’s “Chamber of Horrors,” the ingredients composing which spread themselves over the township, and took a week to collect, save such as incontinently retreated to their native wilds, and two snakes which got into the bank-house and bit Emerson’s native boy, involving much treatment from Lambert, for which their owner had to pay, swearing terribly.
Thus several months went by.