Alone in my room at last, I threw myself down on my knees and thanked God in broken words for my happiness. Joy enfolded my spirit like a misty veil of happiness through which the future was touched with the light of the eternal hills. With the rosary between my fingers and the lovely Latin words of the Angelical Salutation on my lips, I thought of my mother too and longed passionately for her to know of the wonderful thing that had come to me, so that even in my prayers my thoughts flew out from me across the rolling spaces of stars to the still place of peace where my faith told me her soul rested, waiting; and when at last I rose from my knees it was with a strange feeling that she knew, that her mother-spirit was with me, enfolding me, rejoicing with me that all was well, that not tragedy but wonderful, undreamed-of happiness had come to her Deirdre for whom she had feared so much.
Afterwards I thought to fall swiftly into the waves of silence and oblivion with my dream in my heart. But late as it was, Judy, who had just come in, lingered before the mirror brushing her hair, and she would talk. She had gone into Mrs Valetta’s hut and stayed for quite an hour, and now in her pink dressing-gown, her fair hair down her back, she was full of little endless languid words that had no meaning for me wrapped in my new found happiness. I closed my eyes and strove to sleep in spite of her, but she presently said something that dragged me back from sleep and in one moment blurred out the radiance of my dream.
“And I want to warn you of one thing, Deirdre. Don’t be beguiled into a flirtation with Anthony Kinsella. He’s the most dangerous man in the country.”
After an ice-cold moment I answered her in a voice that sounded to me like some one else’s.
“What do you mean, Judy? Why do you say that to me?”
She was plaiting her hair then, and had a hairpin between her lips so that her voice was a little indistinct, but her words fell like gunshots into my ears.
“Well, you seemed to like him, rather. You were a good deal together this evening, weren’t you? Of course I know that you are well able to take care of yourself, but a flirtation with Tony Kinsella should not be embarked upon even by the most experienced hand. For one thing, he is married.”
My heart stopped beating in my breast, and a pain that I thought would have choked me shot up from it to my throat. For a little time I was in such purely physical pain that I believed I was dying. My eyes blurred over, and dimly as through a great darkness I saw Judy’s face reflected in the glass, the gleam of her rings as her fingers moved in and out of her fair pale hair, while her voice went monotonously, relentlessly on.
“I always knew there was something, but until Mrs Valetta told me to-night I did not know what it was. She has known him for years in Kimberley and at the Cape. It appears that when he was twenty-five (a good many years ago I should say) he married a very lovely girl belonging to an old Cape family—she and Mrs Valetta were at school together. He was wildly in love with his wife, but she like most Cape girls was a desperate flirt, and no sooner were they married than she began indulging in perhaps harmless flirtations, but extremely indiscreet ones, considering whom she had married. They began to be unhappy, and then suddenly came an awful climax when he almost killed some soldier man in Cape Town (the man’s recovery was a miracle) and then separated from his wife, but first of all he sent her to England, and insisted on her staying there. He gave her a large income but he has never lived with her since, and she has never been out here, though every one knows she is still alive. The worst feature of the business is the way he has always carried on intrigues with women ever since, nearly always married women. His method is peculiar. He commences a friendship with a woman, becomes her devoted slave, and gets her well talked about, and when she is wildly in love with him and ready to throw her bonnet over the windmill he calmly backs out, tells the woman it was her friendship he wanted, not her love, and walks off. Did you ever hear of anything so horrible? Evidently the idea is to get revenge on all women for his own wife’s infidelities, but it seems incredibly brutal, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” I said, suffocating with pain and anger and distress. “He is incapable of such—” I sank among my pillows again but I could not shut out Judy’s cruel words.