II

It was only comparatively speaking a big house at all, though it made

some architectural pretensions with its pillared front and porch and

balustraded roof. Its lower windows looked out of a spacious hall, and

a few ill-proportioned sitting-rooms; upstairs rambling passages and

wide-floored lobbies cramped the uncomfortable bedchambers. Disrepair

prevailed within and without, ranging from the rough work of wind and

weather to the minuter operations of mouse and moth. Even at its best,

all had been ugly and inconvenient enough. Nevertheless to become

mistress thereof Lady Winifred had not merely left a far statelier

and more luxurious establishment, but had quitted it under a cloud of

disapproval, with an assurance that she was taking a long step down in

the world. For her Captain was a person so impecunious and impossible,

with such an unsuccessful past career, and such unsatisfactory future

prospects, that nobody could imagine what she saw in him, and everybody

thought the worse of her for seeing it, whatever it might be. The

marriage was just not discountenanced and forbidden outright, but most

austere visages were turned upon it, and the wedding, Lady Astermount’s

maid declared, “couldn’t have been quieter if an affliction had

occurred in the family only the previous week.”

Notwithstanding that inauspicious send-off, however, Captain and Lady

Winifred O’Reilly passed a surprisingly pleasant year at this shabby

old house of his among the bog-lands. Lonesome and monotonous are the

bog-lands, and creep up very close to the Big House; but it stands set

in a miniature glen of its own, with a wreath of shrubberies around

it, and during the months after they arrived the O’Reillys busied

themselves much about additional trees and evergreens, wherewith

to screen their domain more effectually from the dreary outlook

and roughly sweeping winds in the years that were to come. Many

improvements, too, had to be made in neglected plots of garden ground,

where the Captain looked at geraniums and pansies and carnations

through another person’s eyes, until at last he saw something in them

himself, and learned with extreme pride to call them by their proper

names. This lore gave him more pleasure on the whole than he had ever

derived from his familiarity with the colours worn by jockeys or

stamped on playing cards, studies which had hitherto engrossed a larger

share of his attention. His wife and he diversified their gardening

with long rides together on steeds not expensively high bred.

Clonmalroan opinion waxed somewhat critical when the pair came trotting

by. Her ladyship, they said, didn’t look the size of a wren perched on

that big, rawny baste of a chestnut, with an ugly, coarse gob of a head

on him too, and the brown mare was something slight for his Honour, who

must ride well up to fourteen stone. But the riders themselves were

satisfied with their mounts.

Their contentment had showed no signs of waning in that mild November

weather, with its pearl-white mists and wafted odour of burning weeds,

when the likelihood of his going out loomed up suddenly on their

horizon. The certain news came one morning, while they were working

away near the back gate, where their small bog stream flows under

steep banks, on which they had designed a plantation of rhododendrons.

In the black peat soil these thrive amain, and by next June would

have lit a many-hued glow in the shadowy little glen. Lady Winifred

tried hard not to see that this interruption of their labours was to

the Captain scarcely such an unmitigated calamity as to herself. Her

recognition of the fact made her feel doubly desolate; not that there

was more difference in their sentiments than had to be in the nature

of things, or than left him otherwise than miserable at their parting.

She tried further to go on with the plantation, as he would no doubt

return in time to see it in blossom; but she was relieved when a spell

of bad weather presently set in and let her stay indoors. Yet indoors

it seemed as if the whole solitude of the great bog had pressed into

the empty house. All day it said, wherever she went, upstairs or

downstairs, one word to vex her: _Gone_. But at night she had various

fortunes in dreams good and evil.

And every morning at breakfast, in the low, broad-windowed bookroom,

she sat opposite to the Captain’s place, just as usual, except that

the place was empty. She chose that seat because from it she could

watch for old Christy Denny coming by from Salinbeg post-office with

the mail-bag. That window looked out on a small lawn, bounded by a

shrubbery through which a path ran leading round a corner of the house

to the front door. The laurel bushes straggled into frequent gaps,

so that between them the approach of a passer-by could be fitfully

descried. And any morning might bring the letter for her, the foreign

letter. To think of how it was perhaps in those very moments journeying

towards her in the battered old brown bag made her so hungry and

thirsty that she sometimes forgot to pour out her tea, or cut the

over-large loaf. Nor was she always disappointed. Every now and then a

letter did come, and in its re-reading she would find a refuge through

the terrors of the day, as in a flattering dream by night. All the

while, indeed, she knew that she was in a fool’s paradise: that, being

so many weeks old, it could give her no assurance of its writer’s

safety. The hands that had folded its sheets might ere now have grown

cold beside some far-off stream, where geysers of deadly hail broke

out rattling on the hills, and the wide air was as full of murderous

stings as a swamp of sweltering venom. She might more rationally rely

upon the newspapers with their flashed tidings. But these she never

dared open herself, and she could not forbear to hang her hopes upon

that delusive correspondence.

One midwinter morning she came down to breakfast with her heart set

more than ever eagerly upon the arrival of old Christy. Partly because

she had not had a letter for longer than usual, and partly because it

was Saturday, and on Sunday no mail comes in Salinbeg. This last was of

course no reason at all for expecting a letter; but it did seem to her

almost improbable that Fate could intend such harshness as to make her

wait two whole days and nights before she could begin hoping again. So

she looked out of the window with shining eyes, and set about crumbling

the bread on her plate before she had tasted a bit, and thought Christy

was late before he had well started on his two-mile trudge. It was hard

weather, and on the corner of lawn she looked into lay a sprinkling of

frozen snow; only a sprinkling; she had seen it whiter last June with

daisies spread to the sun. But the frost was keen, as she would have

felt by the air blowing through the open window if she had been at

leisure to consider anything except the possibility of their bringing

the sound of footsteps on the hardened path.

Old Christy was late really, and she listened in vain. When at length

he did come, she saw him first, a shadow moving along within the still

shadow of the laurels. Just opposite to the window a gap in them made

a ragged arch, and Lady Winifred knew that if Christy had anything

special for her he would come through the opening and straight across

the grass to her, instead of following the path round the house to the

hall door. For a minute, a half-happy minute of doubt, she watched him

nearing the fateful place, fearful, hopeful, blindly impatient, and

then--stunned. Old Christy had gone past the gap, hurrying a little it

seemed, as if he wished to get out of sight. This in fact he did. “Sure

now, the mistress’s face is all eyes these times,” he said to Mrs Keogh

in the kitchen, “and lookin’ at me they do be like as if she thought

bad of me not bringin’ her aught. But bedad if she could see to the

bottom of me heart, she’d know it’s sorry I am I haven’t got somethin’

for her at the bottom of th’ ould bag. Troth would she so;” and Mrs

Keogh replied: “Ah, sure it’s frettin’ she is; goodness may pity the

crathur, she’s frettin’. And doesn’t ait what would fatten a sparrow.

It’s my belief she’ll do no good.”

The mistress did not appear to be fretting as she sat without motion,

and still gazed out over the lawn. Though its aspect was quite

unchanged, it had become a grave wherein her hope, newly slain, must

lie buried until the sun had set and risen, and again set and risen.

Even by the uncertain measure of years, the mistress was very young

yet, and otherwise younger still, so that the edges of the experiences

which make up life had not been worn smooth for her, to expedite their

slipping past. A whole day looked nearly as interminable to her as

to a small child, who gets out of bed with no clear prospect of ever

getting into it again. And now her own bedtime lay beyond more than

twelve leaden-footed hours, so early was this desolate, sunny morning.

It seemed late, however, to some of her neighbours, who were keeping

round eyes on her movements, and considered her as tardy as she had

been thinking Christy. Perhaps a chirp or a rustle may have reached

and prompted her unawares, or perhaps she merely acted from habit, but

by-and-by she got up and scattered her plateful of crumbs upon the

rimy window ledge, where they lay like a little drift of discoloured

snow. As she strewed them she said to herself bitterly towards Fate,

and ruthfully towards fellow-victims: “Why should the birds go hungry

because I have no letter?” and she was careful to shut down the window

sash, lest the sleek black cat should, according to custom, lurk

ambushed within to pounce upon a preoccupied prey. Then she stood

aside, half hidden by the faded crimson curtain, and looked out at

nothing with a cold ache in her heart.

The small birds arrived in headlong haste. Some of them were almost

pecking before the window closed. For the frost’s tyranny had made of

not a few among them desperate characters, fluttering with reckless

enterprise. Even a scutty wren ventured out of cover, and advanced

along the ledge in a dotted line of tiny hops, scarcely less smooth

than a mouse’s run. A robin redbreast alighting brought a gleam of

colour something brighter than a withered beech leaf and duller than

a poppy petal. Two tomtits in comic motley suits disputed with tragic

audacity the claims of all their _biggers_--thrushes, blackbirds,

finches and sparrows. The whole party twittered and fluttered and

wrangled together, blithe and pugnacious, but the spreader of the feast

gave no heed to any of its incidents. She smiled neither at the abrupt

gobblings of the large golden bill, nor at the absurd defiances of the

blue-and-yellow dwarfs. Her act of charity seemed to have gained her

nothing. Then all at once, at some caprice of panic, the assembled

birds whisked themselves down from the window-stool into the gravel

walk below. Each one of them bore off in his beak a breadcrumb which

looked like a little white envelope, and gave him the appearance of a

letter-carrier. The sudden movement caught Lady Winifred’s attention,

and she was struck by the fantastic resemblance. But at the same moment

she remembered keenly how she had been reft of her hope for that day

and the next; and immediately, as if the frost at her heart were broken

up, she saw the mock letters through a rain of tears. She had not

foregone her recompense after all.