Muslin by George Moore

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

Alice's eyes filled with tears.

'You might go up to Dublin,' she said, 'and live in lodgings.'

'And what excuse should I give to mother?' said May, who in her despair
had not courage to deny the possibility of the plan.

'You needn't tell her where you are,' replied Alice; and then she
hesitated, feeling keenly conscious of the deception she was practising.
But her unswerving common sense coming, after a moment's reflection, to
her aid, she said: 'You might say that you were going to live in the
convent. Go to the Mother Superior, tell her of your need, beg of her,
persuade her to receive and forward your letters; and in that way, it
seems to me that no one need be the wiser of what is going to happen.'

The last words were spoken slowly, as if with a sense of shame at being
forced to speak thus. May raised her face, now aflame with hope and joy.

'I wonder if it is possible to--' A moment after the light died out of
her face, and she said:

'But how shall I live? Who will support me? I cannot ask mother for
money without awakening suspicion.'

'I think, May, I shall be able to give you almost all the money you
want,' replied Alice in a hesitating and slightly embarrassed manner.

'You, Alice?'

'But I haven't told you; I have been writing a good deal lately for
newspapers, and have made nearly twenty pounds. That will be all you
will want for the present, and I shall be able, I hope, to make
sufficient to keep you supplied.'

'I don't think that anyone was ever as good as you, Alice. You make me
feel ashamed of myself.'

'I am doing only what anyone else would do if they were called upon. But
we have been sitting here a long time now, and before we go back to the
tennis-ground we had better arrange what is to be done. When do you
propose leaving?'

'I had better leave at once. It is seven months ago now--no one suspects
as yet.'

'Well, then, when would you like me to send you the money? You can have
it at once if you like.'

'Oh, thanks, dear; mother will give me enough to last me a little while,
and I will write to you from Dublin. You are sure no one sees your
letters at Brookfield?'

'Quite sure; there's not the slightest danger.' She did not question the
advice she had given, and she felt sure that the Reverend Mother, if a
proper appeal were made to her common sense, would consent to conceal
the girl's fault. Two months would not be long passing, but the expenses
of this time would be heavy, and she, Alice, would have to meet them
all. She trembled lest she might fail to do so, and she tried to reckon
them up. It would be impossible to get rooms under a pound a week, and
to live, no matter how cheaply, would cost at least two pounds; three
pounds a week, four threes are twelve! The twenty pounds would scarcely
carry her over a month, she would not be well for at least two; and then
there was the doctor, the nurse, the flannels for the baby. Alice tried
to calculate, thinking plainly and honestly. If a repulsive detail rose
suddenly up in her mind, she did not shrink, nor was she surprised to
find herself thinking of such things; she did so as a matter of course,
keeping her thoughts fixed on the one object of doing her duty towards
her friend. And how to do this was the problem that presented itself
unceasingly for solution. She felt that somehow she would have to earn
twenty pounds within the next month. Out of the _Lady's Paper_, in which
'Notes and Sensations of a Plain Girl at Dublin Castle,' was still
running, she could not hope to make more than thirty shillings a week; a
magazine had lately accepted a ten-page story worth, she fancied, about
five pounds, but when they would print it and pay her was impossible to
say. She could write the editor an imploring letter, asking him to
advance her the money. But even then there was another nine pounds to
make up. And to do this seemed to her an impossibility. She could not
ask her father or mother; she would only do so if the worst came to the
worst. She would write paragraphs, articles, short stories, and would
send them to every editor in London. One out of three might turn up
trumps.

'GARDNER STREET,
'MOUNTJOY SQUARE.
'DARLING ALICE,
'I have been in Dublin now more than a week. I did not write to you
before because I wished to write to tell you that I had done all you
told me to do. The first thing I did was to go to the convent. Would you
believe it, the new Rev. Mother is Sister Mary who we knew so well at
St. Leonards! She has been transferred to the branch convent in Dublin;
she was delighted to see me, but the sight of her dear face awoke so
many memories, so many old associations, that I burst out crying, and it
seemed to me impossible that I should ever be able to find courage to
tell her the truth. None will ever know what it cost me to speak the
words. They came to me all of a sudden, and I told her everything. I
thought she would reproach me and speak bitterly, but she only said, "My
poor child, I am sorry you hadn't strength to resist temptation; your
trial is a dreadful one." She was very, very kind. Her face lighted up
when I spoke of you, and she said: "Sweet girl; she was always an angel;
one of these days she will come back to us. She is too good for the
world." Then I insisted that it was your idea that I should seek help
from the convent, but she said that it was my duty to go to my mother
and tell her the whole truth. Oh, my darling Alice, I cannot tell you
what a terrible time I went through. We were talking for at least two
hours, and it was only with immense difficulty that I at last succeeded
in making her understand what kind of person poor mamma is, and how
hopeless it would be to expect her to keep any secret, even if her
daughter's honour was in question. I told her how she would run about,
talking in her mild unmeaning way of "poor May and that shameful Mr.
Scully;" and, at last, the Rev. Mother, as you prophesied she would, saw
the matter in its proper light, and she has consented to receive all my
letters, and if mother writes, to give her to understand that I am safe
within the convent walls. It is very good of her, for I know the awful
risk she is wilfully incurring so as to help me out of my trouble.

'The house I am staying in is nice enough, and the landlady seems a kind
woman. The name I go by is Mrs. Brandon (you will not forget to direct
your letters so), and I said that my husband was an officer, and had
gone out to join his regiment in India. I have a comfortable bedroom on
the third floor. There are two windows, and they look out on the street.
The time seems as if it would never pass; the twelve hours of the day
seem like twelve centuries. I have not even a book to read, and I never
go out for fear of being seen. In the evening I put on a thick veil and
go for a walk in the back streets. But I cannot go out before nine; it
is not dark till then, and I cannot stop out later than ten on account
of the men who speak to you. My coloured hair makes me look fast, and I
am so afraid of meeting someone I know, that this short hour is as full
of misery as those that preceded it. Every passer-by seems to know me,
to recognize me, and I cannot help imagining that he or she will be
telling my unfortunate story half an hour after in the pitiless
drawing-rooms of Merrion Square. Oh, Alice darling, you are the only
friend I have in the world. If it were not for you, I believe I should
drown myself in the Liffey. No girl was ever so miserable as I. I cannot
tell you how I feel, and you cannot imagine how forlorn it all is; and I
am so ill. I am always hungry, and always sick, and always longing. Oh,
these longings; you may think they are nothing, but they are dreadful.
You remember how active I used to be, how I used to run about the
tennis-court; now I can scarcely crawl. And the strange sickening
fancies: I see things in the shops that tempt me, sometimes it is a dry
biscuit, sometimes a basket of strawberries; but whatever it is, I stand
and look at it, long for it, until weary of longing and standing with a
sort of weight weighing me down, and my stays all rucking up to my neck,
I crawl home. There I am all alone; and I sit in the dark, on a wretched
hard chair by the window; and I cry; and I watch the summer night and
all the golden stars, and I cannot say what I think of during all these
long and lonely hours; I only know that I cannot find energy to go to
bed. And I never sleep a whole night through; the cramp comes on so
terribly that I jump up screaming. Oh, Alice, how I hate _him!_ When I
think of it all I see how selfish men are; they never think of us--they
only think of themselves. You would scarcely know me if you saw me now;
all my complexion--you know what a pretty complexion it was--is all red
and mottled. When you saw me a fortnight ago I was all right: it is
extraordinary what a change has come about. I think it was the journey
and the excitement; there would be no concealing the truth now. It is
lucky I left Galway when I did.

'Mother gave me five pounds on leaving home. My ticket cost nearly
thirty shillings, a pound went in cabs and hotel expenses, and my
breakfasts brought my bill up yesterday to two pounds--I cannot think
how, for I only pay sixteen shillings for my room--and when it was paid
I had only a few shillings left. Will you, therefore, send the money you
promised, if possible, by return of post?
'Always affectionately yours,
'MAY GOULD.'

The tears started to Alice's eyes as she read the letter. She did not
consider if May might have spared her the physical details with which
her letter abounded; she did not stay to think of the cause, of the
result; for the moment she was numb to ideas and sensations that were
not those of humble human pity for humble human suffering: like the
waters of a new baptism, pity made her pure and whole, and the false
shame of an ancient world fell from her. Leaning her head on her strong,
well-shaped hand, she set to arranging her little plans for her friend's
help--plans that were charming for their simplicity, their sweet
homeliness. The letter she had just read had come by the afternoon post,
and if she were to send May the money she wrote for that evening, it
would be necessary to go into Gort to register the letter. Gort was two
miles away; and if she asked for the carriage her mother might propose
that the letters should be sent in by a special messenger. This of
course was impossible, and Alice, for the first time in her life found
herself obliged to tell a deliberate lie. For a moment her conscience
stood at bay, but she accepted the inevitable and told her mother that
she had some MSS. to register, and did not care to entrust them to other
hands. It was a consolation to know that eighteen pounds were safely
despatched, but she was bitterly unhappy, and the fear that money might
be wanting in the last and most terrible hours bound her to her desk as
with a chain; and when her tired and exhausted brain ceased to formulate
phrases, the picture of the lonely room, the night walks, and the
suffering of the jaded girl, stared her in the face with a terrible
distinctness. Her only moments of gladness were when the post brought a
cheque from London. Sometimes they were for a pound, sometimes for
fifteen shillings. Once she received five pounds ten--it was for her
story. On the 10th of September she received the following letter:

'DARLING ALICE,
'Thanks a thousand times for your last letter, and the money enclosed.
It came in the nick of time, for I was run almost to my last penny. I
did not write before, because I didn't feel in the humour to do
anything. Thank goodness! I'm not sick any more, though I don't know
that it isn't counterbalanced by the dreadful faintness and the constant
movement. Isn't it awful to sit here day after day, watching myself, and
knowing the only relief I shall get will be after such terrible pain? I
woke up last night crying with the terror of it. Cervassi says there are
cases on record of painless confinements, and in my best moods I think
mine is to be one of them. I know it is wrong to write all these things
to a good girl like you, but I think talking about it is part of the
complaint, and poor sinner me has no one to talk to. Do you remember my
old black cashmere? I've been altering it till there's hardly a bit of
the original body left; but now the skirt is adding to my troubles by
getting shorter and shorter in front. It is now quite six inches off the
ground, and instead of fastening it I have to pin the placket-hole, and
then it falls nearly right. . . . Only three weeks longer, and then. . .
But there, I won't look forward, because I know I am going to die, and
all the accounting for it, and everything else, will be on your
shoulders. Good-bye, dear; I shan't write again, at least not till
afterwards. And if there is an afterward, I shall never be able to thank
you properly; but still I think it will be a weight off you. Is it so,
dear? Do you wish I were dead? I know you don't. It was unkind to write
that last line; I will scratch it out. You will not be angry, dear. I am
too wretched to know what I am writing, and I want to lie down.
'Always affectionately yours,
'MAY GOULD.'

Outside the air was limpid with sunlight, and the newly mown meadow was
golden in the light of evening. The autumn-coloured foliage of the
chestnuts lay mysteriously rich and still, harmonizing in measured tones
with the ruddy tints of the dim September sunset. The country dozed as
if satiated with summer love. Heavy scents were abroad--the pungent
odours of the aftermath. A high baritone voice broke the languid
silence, and, in embroidered smoking-jacket and cap, Mr. Barton twanged
his guitar. Milord had been thrown down amid the hay; and Mrs. Barton
and Olive were showering it upon him. The old gentleman's legs were in
the air.

Crushing the letter, Alice's hands fell on the table; she burst into
tears. But work was more vital than tears; and, taking up her pen, she
continued her story--penny journal fiction of true love and unending
happiness in the end. A month later she received this note:

'DEAREST,
'Just a line in pencil--I mustn't sit up--to tell you it is all over,
and all I said was "Thank God, thank God!" over and over again, as each
pain went. It is such a relief; but I mustn't write much. It is such a
funny screwed-up-looking baby, and I don't feel any of those maternal
sentiments that you read about--at least not yet. And it always cries
just when I am longing to go to sleep. Thank you again and again for all
you have done for me and been to me. I feel awfully weak.
'Always affectionately yours,
'MAY GOULD.'

XXIV

Then Alice heard that the baby was dead, and that a little money would
be required to bury it. Another effort was made, the money was sent; and
the calm of the succeeding weeks was only disturbed by an uneasy desire
to see May back in Galway, and hear her say that her terrible secret was
over and done with for ever. One day she was startled by a quick
trampling of feet in the corridor, and May rushed into the room. She
threw herself into Alice's arms and kissed her with effusion, with
tears. The girls looked at each other long and nervously. One was pale
and over-worn, her spare figure was buttoned into a faded dress, and her
hair was rolled into a plain knot. The other was superb with health, and
her face was full of rose-bloom. She was handsomely dressed in green
velvet, and her copper hair flamed and flashed beneath a small bonnet
with mauve strings.

'Oh, Alice, how tired and pale you look! You have been working too hard,
and all for me! How can I thank you? I shall never be able to thank
you--I cannot find words to tell you how grateful I am--but I am
grateful, Alice, indeed I am.'

'I am sure you are, dear. I did my best for you, it is true; and thank
heaven I succeeded, and no one knows--I do not think that anyone even
suspects.'

'No, not a soul. We managed it very well, didn't we? And the Reverend
Mother behaved splendidly--she just took the view that you said she
would. She saw that no good would come of telling mamma about me when I
made her understand that if a word were said my misfortune would be
belled all over the country in double-quick time. But, Alice dear, I had
a terrible time of it, two months waiting in that little lodging, afraid
to go out for fear someone would recognize me; it was awful. And often I
hadn't enough to eat, for when you are in that state you can't eat
everything, and I was afraid to spend any money. You did your best to
keep me supplied, dear, good guardian angel that you are.' Then the
impulsive girl flung herself on Alice's shoulders, and kissed her. 'But
there were times when I was hard up--oh, much more hard up than you
thought I was, for I didn't tell you everything; if I had, you would
have worried yourself into your grave. Oh, I had a frightful time of it!
If one is married one is petted and consoled and encouraged; but alone
in a lodging--oh, it was frightful.'

'And what about the poor baby?' said Alice.

'The poor little thing died, as I wrote you, about ten days after it was
born. I nursed it, and I was sorry for it. I really was; but of course
. . . well, it seems a hard thing to say, but I don't know what I should
have done with it if it had lived. Life isn't so happy, is it, even
under the best of circumstances?'

The conversation came to a sudden close. At last the nervous silence
that intervened was broken by May:

'We were speaking about money. I will repay you all I owe you some day,
Alice dear. I will save up all the money I can get out of mother. She is
such a dear old thing, but I cannot understand her. Not a penny did she
send me for the first six weeks, and then she sent me L25; and it was
lucky she did, for the doctor's bill was something tremendous. And I
bought this dress and bonnet with what was left . . . I ought to have
repaid you first thing, but I forgot it until I had ordered the dress.'

'I assure you it does not matter, May; I shall never take the money from
you. If I did, it would take away all the pleasure I have had in serving
you.'

'Oh, but I will insist, Alice dear; I could not think of such a thing.
But there's no use in discussing that point until I get the money. . . .
Tell me, what do you think of my bonnet?'

'I think it very nice indeed, and I never saw you looking better.'

And thus ended May Gould's Dublin adventure. It was scarcely spoken of
again, and when they met at a ball given by the officers stationed in
Galway, Alice was astonished to find that she experienced no antipathy
whatever towards this rich-blooded young person. 'My dear guardian
angel, come and sit with me in this corner; I'd sooner talk to you than
anyone--we won't go down yet a while--we'll make the men wait;' and when
she put her arms round Alice's waist and told her the last news of
Violet and her Marquis, Alice abandoned herself to the caress and heard
that thirty years ago the late Marquis had entered a grocer's shop in
Galway to buy a pound of tea for an importuning beggar: 'And what do you
think, my dear?--It was Mrs. Scully who served it out to him; and do you
know what they are saying?--that it is all your fault that Olive did not
marry Kilcarney.'

'My fault?'

'Your fault, because you gave the part of the beggar-maid to Violet, and
if Olive had played the beggar-maid and hadn't married Kilcarney, the
fault would have been laid at your door just the same.'

The pale cheeks of Lord Rosshill's seven daughters waxed a hectic red;
the Ladies Cullen grew more angular, and smiled and cawed more cruelly;
Mrs. Barton, the Brennans, and Duffys cackled more warmly and
continuously; and Bertha, the terror of the _debutantes_, beat the big
drum more furiously than ever. The postscripts to her letters were
particularly terrible: 'And to think that the grocer's daughter should
come in for all this honour. It is she who will turn up her nose at us
at the Castle next year.' 'Ah, had I known what was going to happen it
is I who would have pulled the fine feathers out of her.' Day after day,
week after week, the agony was protracted, until every heart grew weary
of the strain put upon it and sighed for relief. But it was impossible
to leave off thinking and talking; and the various accounts of
orange-blossoms and the bridesmaids that in an incessant postal stream
were poured during the month of January into Galway seemed to provoke
rather than abate the marriage fever. The subject was inexhaustible, and
little else was spoken of until it was time to pack up trunks and
prepare for the Castle season. The bride, it was stated, would be
present at the second Drawing-Room in March.

Nevertheless Alice noticed that the gladness of last year was gone out
of their hearts; none expected much, and all remembered a little of the
disappointments they had suffered. A little of the book had been read;
the lines of white girls standing about the pillars in Patrick's Hall,
the empty waltz tunes and the long hours passed with their chaperons
were terrible souvenirs to pause upon. Still they must fight on to the
last; there is no going back--there is nothing for them to go back to.
There is no hope in life for them but the vague hope of a husband. So
they keep on to the last, becoming gradually more spiteful and puerile,
their ideas of life and things growing gradually narrower, until, in
their thirty-fifth or fortieth year, they fall into the autumn heaps, to
lie there forgotten, or to be blown hither or thither by every wind that
blows.

Two of Lord Rosshill's daughters had determined to try their luck again,
and a third was undecided; the Ladies Cullen said that they had their
school to attend to and could not leave Galway; poverty compelled the
Brennans and Duffys to remain at home. Alice would willingly have done
the same, but, tempted by the thin chance that she might meet with
Harding, she yielded to her mother's persuasions. Harding did not return
to Dublin, and her second season was more barren of incident than the
first. The same absence of conviction, the same noisy gossiping and
inability to see over the horizon of Merrion Square, the same servile
adoration of officialism, the same meanness committed to secure an
invitation to the Castle, the same sing-song waltz tunes, the same
miserable, mocking, melancholy, muslin hours were endured by the same
white martyrs.

And if the Castle remained unchanged, Mount Street lost nothing of its
original aspect. Experience had apparently taught Mrs. Barton nothing;
she knew but one set of tricks--if they failed she repeated them: she
was guided by the indubitableness of instinct rather than by the more
wandering light that is reason. Mr. Barton, who it was feared might talk
of painting, and so distract the attention from more serious matters,
was left in Galway, and amid eight or nine men collected here, there,
and everywhere out of the hotels and barrack-rooms, the three ladies sat
down to dinner.

Mrs. Barton, who could have talked to twenty men, and have kept them
amused, was severely handicapped by the presence of her daughters.
Olive, at the best of times, could do little more than laugh; and as
Alice never had anything to say to the people she met at her mother's
house, the silences that hung over the Mount Street dinner-table were
funereal in intensity and length. From time to time questions were asked
relating to the Castle, the weather, and the theatre.

Therefore, beyond the fact that neither Lord Kilcarney nor Mr. Harding
was present, the girls passed their second season in the same manner as
their first. _Les deux pieces de resistance_ at Mount Street were a
dissipated young English lord and a gouty old Irish distiller, and Mrs.
Barton was making every effort to secure one of these. A pianist was
ordered to attend regularly at four o'clock. And now if Alice was
relieved of the duty of spelling through the doleful strains of 'Dream
Faces,' she was forced to go round and round with the distiller until an
extra glass of port forced the old gentleman to beg mercy of Mrs.
Barton. At one o'clock in the morning the young lord used to enter the
Kildare Street Club weary. But not much way was made with either, and
when one returned to London and the other to a sick-bed, Olive abandoned
herself to a series of flirtations. At the Castle she danced with all
who asked her, and she sat out dances in the darkest corners of the most
distant rooms with every officer stationed in Dublin. Mrs. Barton never
refused an invitation to any dance, no matter how low, and in all the
obscure 'afternoons' in Mount Street and Pembroke Street Olive's blonde
cameo-like face was seen laughing with every official of Cork Hill and
the gig-men of Kildare Street.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22