Up the Hill and Over

by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

"You told me very little. It was plain enough. You had come a bad cropper. Some girl, I gathered. You had lost her, you blamed yourself. You talked a great deal of nonsense. I inferred—the usual thing!"

"You were mistaken. It was at once better and worse than that. But let's begin at the beginning. My father was a fairly wealthy man—but a dreamer. He made his money by a clever invention and lost it by an investment little short of idiotic. Like many unpractical men he had rather fancied himself as a man of business and the disillusion killed him. He—shot himself. My mother, my sister and myself were left, with nothing save a small sum in the bank and the deed of the modest house we lived in. Adela was twenty-one and I was nineteen. We sold the house, moved into rooms; Adela learned shorthand and went into an office. I wanted to do the same. But mother was adamant. I must finish my college course and take my degree; she and Adela could manage until I could make it up to them later. It was hard, but it seemed the only sensible thing to do—

"I faced the task of working my way through college with a thankful heart, for though I pretended that I did not care, it would have been a terrible thing to have given up my life's ambition. The thought of Adela trudging to the office hurt—it was the touch of the spur. I needn't tell you, you can guess how I worked! People were kind. One summer, old Doctor Inglis, whose amiable hobby it was to help young medical students, engaged me for the holidays as his chauffeur and general helper at a wage which would see me through my next term. It seemed an unusual piece of luck, for he lived only twenty miles from my mother's home and an electric tram connected the towns. One night I went with Adela to a Church Social—of all places—and that is where the story really begins, for it was at the Social that I met Molly Weston. It seemed the most casual of all accidents, for you can imagine that I did not frequent churches in those days, and Molly, too, had come there by chance. She was dressed in pink, her cheeks were pink, she wore a pink rose in her hair. She was the prettiest little fairy that ever smiled and pouted her way into a boy's heart. Before I left her I was madly in love—a boy's first headlong passion. Adela was amazed, teased me in her elderly sister way but never for a moment took it seriously. Molly was a mere bird of passage, an American girl staying with friends for a brief time, therefore my infatuation was a humorous thing. But it was not so simple as that. Molly stayed on, Dr. Inglis was indulgent, we met continually. If her friends knew of it they did not care. It was just a flirtation of their pretty guest's. As a serious factor I was quite beneath the horizon, a young fellow working his way through college, and with, later on, a mother and sister to support.

"Molly understood the situation. At least she knew all the facts. I doubt if she ever understood them. She was one of those helpless, clinging girls who never seem to understand anything clearly. I remember well how I used to agonise in explanation, trying to make her see our difficulties and to face them with me. But when I had talked myself into helpless silence she would ruffle my hair and say, 'But you really do love me, don't you, Harry?' or 'I don't care what we have to do, so long as mother doesn't know.'

"I soon found out that her one strong emotion was fear of her mother. She was fond of her but she feared her as weak natures fear the strong, especially when bound to them by ties of blood. I was allowed to see her photograph—the picture of a grim hard face instinct with an almost terrible strength. No wonder my pretty Molly was her slave. One would have deemed it impossible that they were mother and daughter. Molly, it appears, was like her father, and he, poor man, had been long dead. Molly would do anything, promise anything, if only her mother might not know. She had not the faintest scruple in deceiving her, but this I laid, and still lay, to the strength of her love for me.

"She did love me. She must have loved me—else how could her timid nature have taken the risk it did?

"Summer fled by like a flash. Molly stayed with her friends as long as she could find an excuse and then went on for a brief week in Toronto. It was the week, of course, that I returned to college. We hoped that she could extend her stay, but her mother wrote 'Come home,' and there was no appeal from that. Then I did a desperate thing. Without Molly's knowledge I wrote to her mother telling her that I loved her daughter and begging, as a man begs for his life, to be allowed to ask her to wait for me. The letter was a lie in that it concealed the fact that my love was already confessed but I felt it necessary to shield Molly. I received no answer to the letter, but Molly received a telegram, 'Come home at once.'

"I can leave you to imagine the scene—my despair, Molly's tears! Never for an instant did she dream of disobeying and I—I felt that if she went I should lose her forever.

"Willits, there is something in me, devil or angel, which will not give up. Nothing has ever conquered it yet and Molly was like wax in my hands—so long as 'Mother' need not know. I do not attempt to excuse myself; what I did was dastardly, but it did not seem so then. The night before she left, she stole away from home. I had a license and we were married by a Methodist minister. He knew neither of us and probably forgot the whole incident immediately. It was a marriage only in name for we said good-bye at Molly's door. She left next morning. I never saw her again."

Into the silence which followed, the professor's words dropped dryly.