[Frontispiece: "THERE'S THIM THAT'LL NOT FORGIT" _Page_ 182]
A Little Irish Girl
BY
J. M. CALLWELL
Author of "A Champion of the Faith" "Little Curiosity"
"The Squire's Grandson" &c.
BLACKIE & SON LIMITED
LONDON AND GLASGOW
Printed in Great Britain by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE MISS CLARKSONS' EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT FOR YOUNG LADIES
II. COUSIN ANSEY'S LEGACY
III. NORAH'S FREAK
IV. WITHIN SOUND OF THE SEA
V. ENGLISH IDEAS AND IRISH WAYS
VI. COUSINS
VII. MOYROSS ABBEY
VIII. BALLINTAGGART CAVE
IX. THE GHOST IN THE MONK'S WALK
X. CAPTAIN LESTER, R.M.
XI. ON DRINANE HEAD
XII. DISCOMFITED
XIII. MALACHY'S ORATION
XIV. MR. O'BRIEN SEES A VISION OF THE PAST
XV. IT WAS ALL NORAH'S IDEA
XVI. PEACE AND HARMONY
A LITTLE IRISH GIRL
CHAPTER I
THE MISS CLARKSONS' EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT
FOR YOUNG LADIES
A goodly number of years ago there stood in one of the northern
suburbs of London a large, old-fashioned red-brick house. In former
days, somewhere about the middle of the last century, it had been a
stately family mansion. A broad flight of stone steps led up to the
hall-door, and in the iron railings on either side there still
remained the extinguishers with which the linkboys had been wont to
put their torches out, after escorting some fashionable lady home in
her sedan-chair from a gay rout or assembly.
Within doors, too, the stone-flagged hall, the wide staircase, and
the lofty rooms with their carved mantel-pieces and richly-decorated
ceilings, bore witness to the ancient glories of Treherne House.
Those glories, however, had long passed away. The original owners,
the Trehernes, had sold it many years before, when fashionable people
moved to other parts of London; and though the old house retained its
high-sounding name, it had known many vicissitudes and changed hands
many times since then. For some dozen years or so it had been owned
by three middle-aged sisters, the Miss Clarksons, the principals of a
large and flourishing school, or--to quote the inscription on the
huge brass plate affixed to the hall-door--of an educational
establishment for young ladies.
If anyone had chanced to stand in the entrance-hall of Treherne House
upon a certain sunny spring morning, he could not have failed to
perceive that this work of education was being carried on even more
vigorously than usual. A busy hum of voices pervaded the whole
house, and burst forth more loudly every now and again with the
opening of a class-room door, while somewhere far aloft indefatigable
fingers raced up and down the piano over sharps and flats in
persevering efforts to master a difficult passage.
Both pupils and teachers, indeed, were working at full pressure, for
the Easter holidays were barely three weeks off, and the examinations
which marked the conclusion of each school-term were to begin the
following week.
To Miss Euphemia, the youngest of the three Miss Clarksons, the care
of the juniors of the school was specially confided. She was at
present giving a geography lesson to her class, which numbered
fourteen or fifteen girls of ages ranging from eleven to thirteen, in
a large and dingy room on the ground-floor.
"Turkey in Asia lies between latitudes 30° and 41° North, longitudes
26° and 48° East," a flabby-looking, flaxen-haired girl was drawling
out. "It is bounded on the north by the Dardanelles, the Sea of
Marmora, the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus; upon the
east by Persia, upon the south by the Persian Gulf and Arabia, and on
the west by the Mediterranean."
"Very correctly answered indeed, Louisa, my dear. Constance Lane,
which are the principal rivers of Turkey in Asia?"
"The Euphrates and Tigris, falling into the Persian Gulf; the Kizil
Irmak, into the Black Sea; the Sihoon, Jihon, and Orontes, into the
Mediterranean; and the Jordan into the Dead Sea."
"Quite right also. Norah O'Brien, name the chief towns in the order
of their relative importance."
This time there was not the same ready response. Miss Euphemia
rapped her desk sharply with her pencil and spoke again.
"Norah O'Brien, be good enough to attend to the lesson instead of
staring out of the window! What have I just asked you?"
A well-meant nudge from a neighbour's elbow helped to bring the
little girl addressed to herself with a sudden start. She was the
youngest in the class, but sat nearly two-thirds up the row of girls;
and her eyes, as Miss Euphemia had said, had wandered away from the
dismal class-room, with its well-worn school furniture and walls hung
with smoke-stained maps, out through the window opposite to her.
There was not much to be seen there, only a wilderness of roofs and
walls, with the spring sunshine lying bright and hot upon them, and
three smutty sparrows chirping with might and main on the solitary
plane-tree that grew in the back-garden, and which, notwithstanding
London smoke and soot, was sending out fresh green buds all along its
grimy branches.
"Chief towns," good-naturedly whispered a big girl who sat beside
Norah, the one who had already given her that friendly midge. But
Norah, whose thoughts had strayed away far beyond the back-garden and
its sparrows, and who had only been brought back to stern reality by
the rapping of Miss Euphemia's pencil and the sudden, sharp question
fired off at her like a pistol-shot, was too confused and bewildered
to profit by the kindly hint. The silence of the class made her
aware that a reply of some sort was expected from her, and answering,
not Miss Euphemia's question, but the train of thought in which she
had herself been engaged, she stammered out:
"Tuesday fortnight, Miss Euphemia."
There was a general titter from all the girls. Tuesday fortnight was
the day on which the school was to break up for the Easter holidays,
so no one had any difficulty in guessing where Norah's thoughts had
drifted to. A frown from Miss Euphemia and another tap of her pencil
brought instant silence however.
"Norah O'Brien, go to the bottom of the class! You will not
accompany the rest of the school upon their walk this afternoon. You
will remain indoors and write out the geography lesson instead. If I
have to call you to order again for inattention I shall be compelled
to report you to Miss Clarkson."
There was no penalty more dreaded by all the girls in Treherne House
than to be reported to Miss Clarkson, the severe and stately ruler of
the educational establishment, and to be summoned to appear in her
special sanctum for reprimand and admonition. It was with no little
dismay, therefore, that Norah gathered up her books and moved down
the class to the place assigned to her, seating herself below a
little girl with pretty pink cheeks and long silky curls, who till
then had occupied the lowest place with all apparent contentment.
Lily Allardyce was the next youngest girl in the school to Norah, and
they were close friends and companions. She gave Norah's hand a
little consolatory squeeze as she moved up to make room for her, and
whispered:
"Never mind, Norah, it's ever so much nicer when we're together than
when you're up near the top of the class. It's Fräulein's turn to go
out with us to-day, and I'll coax her to let me buy something to
bring home to you."
Lily was the little heiress of the school, and always more abundantly
provided with pocket-money than anybody else. Her parents were
wealthy people, who delighted in heaping presents of clothes, of
books, of playthings, and of expensive trifles of every kind upon
their only child. It was strange that she and Norah should have come
to be such allies, for not only in their appearance, but in their
tastes and dispositions, and in all other respects, they were as
great a contrast as two children nearly of an age could possibly be.
Lily, as already said, was a soft, fair, pink and white little thing,
always beautifully dressed in the daintiest of frocks. No one had
ever seen Lily flushed, or tossed, or untidy. She was always
well-behaved too; a quiet, plodding little maiden who was not
brilliant in any way, but who learned her lessons steadily and never
got into scrapes, except when she was led into them by her more
venturesome companion.
One of her brothers had once teasingly, but not at all inaptly,
described Norah as "short and dark, like a winter's day". She was so
small as to look much less than her eleven years, and she had a thick
shock of short black hair which resembled a pony's shaggy mane more
than anything else. With her turned-up nose and rather wide mouth
Norah would have been undeniably plain, if not absolutely ugly, if it
had not been for her dark-blue eyes--Irish eyes, Norah loved to have
them called. In general those eyes of Norah's were brimful of fun
and mischief, but on this particular morning they looked as though
tears were much nearer to them than laughter, for together with her
Irish eyes Norah had inherited the quick Irish temperament with all
its April-day changes of mood. Usually she was the ringleader in
every frolic and in every piece of mischief that was set on foot, and
at once the torment and the delight of her teachers. She was so
bright and intelligent that when she gave her mind to her lessons she
could master them in half the time that it took the rest of the class
to plod through them, and girls considerably her seniors were wont to
consult her about difficulties in their sums and exercises.
Unhappily, however, there were very frequent occasions when Norah's
mind was not given to her lessons, but was running on all sorts of
other things, so that it was no uncommon experience to her to find
herself, as at present, sent to the bottom of the class with a
punishment in prospect. Not even the strictest of her governesses,
however, could retain their displeasure against her very long, and as
for the girls, they one and all adored little Norah. The elder ones
petted and made much of her, and amongst the juniors, youngest of all
though she was, she had constituted herself the leading spirit, the
originator of freaks and schemes of daring which would never have
occurred to any of them except herself.
"I'm Irish, you know, it all comes of that," Norah would say modestly
when complimented on her fertility of invention.
There was nothing indeed of which she was so proud as of her Irish
name and her Irish descent, although she herself had never set foot
in Ireland in all her life. She did her best--not very
successfully--to cultivate an Irish brogue, and no one could have
displeased her more than by spelling her Christian name without the
concluding _h_, which marked it as distinctively Irish. The shabby
black frock which Norah wore, adorned by more than one
unscientifically-cobbled rent, with cuffs and collar of frayed-out
crape, betokened that she must be in mourning for someone near to
her, not long dead; and there were times, as all her companions knew,
when even in her wildest and merriest moods some chance word
carelessly uttered would call up old memories and send Norah in
floods of tears into some dark corner to sob her heart out in
passionate grief and fruitless longings.
Poor Norah's troubles were weighing very heavily upon her on this
first morning of our making her acquaintance. It was her first term
at school, and as has been seen, the holidays were close at hand.
Already the forty girls at Treherne House talked of little else but
what each of them hoped and intended to do during those happy weeks;
Norah alone, out of the whole forty, had no home to go to, no plans
or projects to make. Lily Allardyce, however, had promised to ask
leave to bring her down with her to her home in Hampshire, and Norah
knew that Lily's parents were not the least likely to refuse her
anything which she might ask.
On this very morning, however, Lily had had a letter from her mother,
to tell her that she and her father were so pleased by Miss
Clarkson's report of her conduct and progress during the term, that
they had determined, as a reward for her diligence, to take her to
Paris in the holidays, and to let her have her first glimpse of
foreign life.
"You shall come to us in summer instead, Norah," Lily had said
consolingly. "We shall have six weeks' holidays then instead of
three, and there will be picnics and boating parties, and ever so
much more fun than we'd have had now."
To poor Norah, however, the prospect of a longer and pleasanter visit
several months off seemed but meagre compensation for three weeks of
loneliness and desertion in the immediate future. Even the Miss
Clarksons themselves were going to the sea-side for the holidays, and
she would be left to inhabit the gaunt, empty rooms, with no other
company than Fräulein Glock, the German governess. She had loyally
done her best to conceal her disappointment and to enter into Lily's
delight at the promised trip, but it was hardly to be wondered at if
her eyes strayed wistfully out of the prison-like school-room to the
sunshine outside, or if her thoughts wandered away from Turkey in
Asia and its towns and rivers back to her old home on Hampstead
Heath, and to the joyous, untroubled home life which had been
interrupted so rudely by her father's death six months before.
It had been a very easy-going, harum-scarum household in which Norah
had grown up, almost as Irish in its ways as if it had been situated
amongst the old ancestral possessions of the O'Briens on the wild
west coast of Ireland instead of in an eminently orderly and
respectable suburb of London. Norah's father, Piers O'Brien, with
his cheery, genial manner, his unfailing spirits, and the soft Irish
accent which he had never lost, had been the life and soul of the
little home on the green heights of Hampstead. He had been its
mainstay and support too, for it was the brilliant, racy articles for
newspapers and magazines, which flowed so freely from his pen, that
furnished the means for providing for the wants of the household.
But coming out from London one wet night in the previous autumn Piers
O'Brien had caught a severe chill. A sudden and serious illness
followed. There were a few days of agonized anxiety and distress,
and then all was over, and the young O'Briens found themselves left,
orphaned and well-nigh penniless, to face the world as best they
could.
Their mother had died long before, quite beyond Norah's memory; but
Norah had never felt the want of a mother's love, her elder sister
Anstace, with her sweet womanly ways, had filled the vacant place so
completely. Anstace was the second of the family; the eldest was
Roderick, the tall brother of whom they were all so proud, who had
just finished his college career with honours and distinction, and
who was to have gone to the bar. He was twenty-one, and Anstace was
two years younger, and after her there had been a stretch of seven
years before the next brother, Manus, the special object of Norah's
devotion, had made his appearance. Norah herself, the fourth and
youngest, made the little family circle complete.
Roderick and Anstace were both very young to have such a heavy load
of anxiety and responsibility thrust suddenly upon them. Careless
and easy-going in money matters as in everything else, their father
had not troubled himself about laying up any provision for the
future, and when once the expenses of his illness and the funeral had
been paid, there was but little left. The brother and sister,
however, set themselves to bear their burden bravely. They decided
with all promptitude that what little money remained, together with
all that they could spare from their own scanty earnings, must be
devoted to the two children and to their education, whilst they made
shift to provide for themselves as best they could.
Anstace in former days had been a favourite pupil in the Miss
Clarksons' educational establishment, and she had always kept up
friendly relations with its principals. They now offered to take
Norah into Treherne House on very much reduced terms, an offer which
Roderick and Anstace most gratefully accepted. A cheap school, too,
was, after some trouble, found for Manus in Kent. Roderick,
relinquishing his hopes of the bar, accepted employment as a lawyer's
clerk with as much apparent cheerfulness as if he had never looked
forward to any other career, while Anstace became governess in the
family of the doctor who had attended their father in his last
illness, who had come to know their circumstances and was anxious to
befriend them.