“Anything troubling you?” said the Major. “I worked out the financial terms as exactly as I could, and I don’t think I could bring any of the figures down.”
The figures! How crass these English could be! To hell with the figures! But Number Four—
“This fourth item,” said the Senator in a voice that trembled a little; “it will not be easy to persuade my wife or my daughter that it is desirable or necessary.”
“Not negotiable, I’m afraid,” said the Major. “All the Cornishes have been C. of E. since Reformation times.”
Like his daughter, the Senator was subject to sudden changes of mood. His fury left him naked and weak. What use to struggle? He was beaten.
He took out his fountain pen and signed the prettily written paper—both copies—in his bold, poorly formed hand.
“Thank you,” said the Major; “I’m glad we understand each other. If you would ask Mary-Jacobine to be at home tomorrow at eleven o’clock, I shall have the honour of calling upon the ladies.”
Surely the Senator might have argued a little more, said the Daimon Maimas. He buckled under very quickly, wouldn’t you say?
–No, I wouldn’t say that, said the Lesser Zadkiel. It was the temperament of the man, you see, as it was of his daughter. They were so good when they were cool but quite out of their element when they were overcome with feeling. Not that they didn’t feel, or couldn’t feel; not a bit. The trouble was that they felt so powerfully it utterly overset them and brought them sometimes near to panic. A Celtic temperament; a difficult heritage. Often they made terrible mistakes when an intelligent approach to feeling was called for. You know what happened? In later life the Senator became something of a philosopher, which is a great escape from feeling, and Mary-Jim acquired the trick of banishing or trivializing anything that was troublesome.
–What about the scene in the Cecil Hotel? said the Daimon.
–Oh, that was a real Celtic hullabaloo. Mary-Jacobine wept and vowed that she’d rather die than marry the Wooden Soldier, and after half an hour of that she caved in and said yes, she’d do it. Her parents didn’t browbeat her; it was the situation itself that overwhelmed her. It was panic and despair.
–Yes, indeed, said the Daimon. I had to deal with the same temperament in Francis, and sometimes it was hard work. He never became either a philosopher or a trivializer; he faced his troubles head-on. It was a lucky thing for him that he had me at his elbow, more than once.
–Yes, that’s what they call it; luck. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to observe the parents. It would be quite wrong to say that they sold their daughter to preserve their respectability; they wouldn’t have done that. But you have to understand what respectability meant to those people. It was much more than just What will the neighbours think? It was How will the poor child face the world with such a clouded beginning in life? It was What can I do to save my darling from hurt? It was emotion, disguising itself as reason, that governed the Senator. Marie-Louise had a good hard Norman head on her shoulders, but the Church had relieved her of any necessity to use it for thinking. She had done the best she knew, and failed. They faced real wretchedness in their terms. It wasn’t worry about London, which wouldn’t have cared even if it knew. It was Blairlogie. How Blairlogie would have gloried in the fall of a virgin McRory! How she would have felt the whip, all her life!
In Blairlogie, Aunt Mary-Ben McRory was, in her own phrase, “holding the fort” while her brother and his wife and dear Mary-Jim disported themselves in the fashionable world. She did not mind. She knew she had been born to serve, and she was willing to serve, and if any hint of longing or jealousy entered her mind she prayed it away at once. She was a mighty prayer. In her bedroom she had a little prie-dieu—padded but not overpadded on the kneeling portion—before a fine oleograph of a Murillo Virgin, and the worn upholstery on the kneeler showed how much it was used.
When she was not much older than Mary-Jim was now, God had made it plain to her that her portion was to serve. Dr. J.A. and many other people had referred to it as a freak accident, but she knew it was God’s way of defining her role in life.
It had happened at a Garden Party in Government House—or Rideau Hall as it was familiarly called—in Ottawa. That was during Lord Dufferin’s last months as Governor-General and Hamish had been asked, as a rising young man and already a political figure, to a Garden Party in late July. Being still unmarried he had taken his sister Mary-Ben, and for the occasion she had bought a splendid hat covered with black and white plumes. How romantic it had been! Delighting in the romanticism, she had wandered into the shrubbery, her mind on the romantic figure of Vergile Tisserant, who had been increasingly attentive, when suddenly—
It is now part of ornithological history, and even has its footnote in medical history, that at that time the Great Horned Owl—a species referred to by the Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton as “winged tigers among the most pronounced and savage birds of prey”—had been making occasional forays into the more inhabited parts of the country, and now and then had swooped upon humans, and especially upon ladies who were wearing those fashionable black and white hats; for to the owls they looked like skunks. As Mary-Ben strolled musing in the vice-regal shrubbery, an owl swooped, seized the hat, and soared away with it—and with a considerable portion of the wearer’s scalp in its terrible talons.
For weeks she had lain in hospital, her head swathed in bandages and her spirit in ruins. How had those girls in mythology survived the fearful, birdlike descents of Jove? But of course they had been singled out for a special destiny, hadn’t they? Had she been so chosen by the God of her own faith, and if so, for what? She found out when, little by little, the bandages were removed and her ravaged skull, with only a few locks of hair still remaining, was revealed. A wig was out of the question, for her scalp was now too tender to endure it. She had to make do with little caps, like turbans, of the softest materials. She never made any attempt to ornament the little caps, for she knew what they were. They were the head-dress of servitude, and she had been marked to serve. So—serve she did, in her brother’s household, with the little caps protecting her little skull. Not even Dr. J.A. had been so harsh as to mention that the swooping god had mistaken her for a skunk.
She had been keeper of her brother’s household for three years before his marriage to Marie-Louise Thibodeau and there was never any question that she should make way for the wife; no, indeed, she served her, and kept tedious duties from her, and when the first child was born she was invaluable, even suggesting the romantic name by which she was known. Marie-Louise, who found the social obligations of a rising man’s wife wholly agreeable, was glad enough to let Mary-Ben—who was known even more often as Aunt, as soon as Mary-Jim began to speak—see to the household.
Besides, Aunt had Taste, which can be a form of power in those who possess it.
Aunt’s taste and Aunt’s judgement came into full sway when Hamish decided to build a fine house, and move up to the hill which dominated the southern horizon of Blairlogie. Marie-Louise had no ideas about houses, but Aunt had enough for three, and it was she who told the builder what was wanted, and drew little pictures, and gently domineered over the workmen. It was a brick house, of course, and not just your common brick but a finely surfaced rosy brick, as impenetrable as tile. Because Hamish was in lumber, the interior finish had all the latest things in turned wood, matched wood, wooden lace worked on the band-saw, and, in the room called the library, wooden panelling, not as it is generally known, but in octagons of what looked like hardwood flooring, set on the bias. Hideous, but of course very hard for the workmen to do, said Dr. J.A., who always had an opinion, and usually a disagreeable one.