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Please God she may disappoint your expectations and come back strong and well. But if she does not, and I have to return alone, and if I find that her child has been removed from the protection in which she left it, do you know what I shall do?" "Go to the courts, I presume," said the lawyer. "Oh dear, no! I'll go to no courts, Mr. Curphy.
Curphy, speaking through his long beard, congratulated my father and my husband equally on the marriage, and gave it as his opinion that there could be no better use for wealth than to come to the rescue of an historic family which had fallen on evil times and only required a little money to set it on its feet again.
In this as in everything I did whatever was asked of me. It was all as dreary and lifeless as an empty house. I can remember that it made no sensible impression upon my heart. "To me?" I said. "Who else?" said Mr. Curphy, who was laughing again, and then something was said by somebody about marriage lines and no one knowing when a wise woman might not want to use them.
With that, and the peak of her half-moon bonnet almost dancing over her angry face, Aunt Bridget flounced out of my room. Half an hour afterwards, when I went into the sitting-room, I found my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, waiting for me.
Just a neighbour lad without a penny at him. And now the world's trusting him with fifty thousand pounds, they're telling me!" "Well, many are called but few are chosen," said Mr. Curphy with another laugh. After that, and some broken conversation, Aunt Bridget expressed a desire to see the house, as the evening was closing in and they must soon be going back.
Then the High Bailiff opened the bigger of his books, and after writing something in it himself he asked Lord Raa to sign his name, and this being done he asked me also. "Am I to sign, too?" I asked, vacantly. "Well, who else do you think?" said Mr. Curphy with a laugh. "Betsy Beauty perhaps, eh?" "Come, gel, come," said my father, sharply, and then I signed. I had no longer any will of my own.
Curphy, my father's advocate, who with his clammy hands always made me think of an over-fatted fish, came to tell him that, after serious legal difficulties, the civil documents had been agreed to, for, after he had finished with my father, he drew me aside and said, as he smoothed his long brown beard: "You ought to be a happy girl, Mary. I suppose you know what you are doing for your father?
We can set Curphy to work ourselves." "But I have seen Mr. Curphy also," I said. "And what did he say?" I told him what the lawyer had said and he was aghast. "Good heavens! What an iniquity! In England too! But never mind! There are other countries where this relic of the barbaric ages doesn't exist. We'll go there. We must get you a divorce somehow." My time had come.
Curphy, who smiled his usual bland smile and combed his long beard while he thanked me for acting on his advice not to allow a fit of pique to break up a marriage which was so suitable from points of property and position. "How happy your father must be to see the fulfilment of his hopes," he said. "Just when his health is failing him, too! How good! How gratifying!"
The place looked half like a doctor's consulting room, and half like a small police court. Presently Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, came in, rather irritatingly cheerful in that chill atmosphere, and, half an hour late, my intended husband arrived, with his London lawyer and his friend Eastcliff.
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