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Updated: June 10, 2025
I had trembled when I thought of these solemn and sonorous words in the solitude of my own room, but now that they were spoken before the congregation I had no fear, no misgiving, nothing but a sense of rapture and consecration. The last words being spoken and Lord Raa and I being man and wife, we stepped into the sacristy to sign the register, and not even there did my spirit fail me.
If there were moments of misgiving, when, like the cold wind out of a tunnel, there came the memory of the Reverend Mother and the story she had told me at Nemi, there were other moments when I felt quite sure that, in marrying Lord Raa, I should be doing a self-sacrificing thing and a kind of solemn duty. One such moment was when Mr.
"Get yourself to the other side of my gate, or I'll fling you into the road," he cried; and then, returning to the porch, he re-entered the house and clashed the door behind him. Father Dan used to say that for some moments more the groom from Castle Raa could be heard shouting the name of the doctor to the lighted windows of my mother's room.
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.
At the next moment I was conscious that a bell had been rung in the chancel; that the organ had stopped; that the coughing and hemming in the church had ceased; that somebody was saying "Stand here, my lord"; that Lord Raa, with a nervous laugh, was asking "Here?" and taking a place by my side; that the lighted altar, laden with flowers, was in front of me; and that the Bishop in his vestments, Father Dan in his surplice and white stole, and a clerk carrying a book and a vessel of holy water were beginning the service.
Years went by without my being aware of their going, for after a while I became entirely happy. I heard frequently from home. Occasionally it was from Betsy Beauty, who had not much to say beyond stories of balls at Government House, where she had danced with the young Lord Raa, and of hunts at which she had ridden with him.
But the service, which had this effect upon me, appeared to have an exactly opposite effect on Lord Raa. His nervousness increased visibly, though he did his best to conceal it by a lightness of manner that sometimes looked like derision.
What remained were the family jewels which had come to me as Lady Raa; but that was a name I was never more to bear, a person I was never more to think about, so I could not permit myself to take anything that belonged to her. The only thing left to me was my money.
With the air of a man with a grievance the High Bailiff took a big book out of the desk, and a smaller one off a shelf, and then we sat in a half circle, and the ceremony began. It was very brief and cold like a matter of business. As far as I can remember it consisted of two declarations which Lord Raa and I made first to the witnesses present and afterwards to each other.
The old Lord Raa of Castle Raa, head of the O'Neills, the same that had sworn at my grandmother, after many years in which he had lived a bad life abroad where he had contracted fatal maladies, returned to Ellan to die. More than ever now my father chewed the cud of his great disappointment.
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