‘Jest and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks, and wreathed smiles.
‘Where’s our beloved auntie?’ asks Mr. Fitzgerald, looking generally
round him from his seat on the tail of Betty’s gown.
It is the evening of the same day, and still divinely warm. Not yet has
night made its first approach, and from bush to bush the birds are
calling, as if in haste to get as much merriment out of the departing
day as time will give them. From here—in the bushes round the
tennis-ground, the one solitary court that Carew Barry and his cousin,
Dom Fitzgerald, have made with their own hands, after a hard tussle with
the Rector for the bit of ground, that seemed to him quite a big slice
off his glebe—to the big syringa-tree beyond, the sweet, glad music of
the birds swells and grows, filling the evening air with delicate
throbbings. Ever the little creatures seem to call one to another;
passionately sometimes, as if bursting their little throats in their
wild joy, and anon softly, pleadingly, but always calling, calling,
calling.
From the old-fashioned garden beyond comes the scent of the roses—all
old-world roses, as befits the garden, but none the less beautiful for
that. The rose céleste and the white rose unique, the cabbage rose and
the perfect rose of a hundred leaves, all lend their sweetness to the
air; indeed, on this June evening the place is ‘on fire with roses.’
The little group sitting on the edge of the tennis-ground seems very
happy and contented—lazy, perhaps, is a better word. Susan, as usual,
has Bonnie in her lap, and Tom, the baby, has fallen asleep with his
head on Betty’s knee. Jacky, still full of memories of the awful burglar
he had interviewed in the morning, is wondering whether he will raid the
village to-night, and if so, whether he will carry off Aunt Jemima;
whilst Carew, the eldest son, who is seventeen, and therefore a year
younger than Susan, is lazily dwelling on the best choice of a stream
for to-morrow’s fishing.
His cousin, Dom Fitzgerald, is the first to break the lovely spell of
silence that has fallen on them. He is a cousin of the Barrys, and a
nephew of their father and of Miss Jemima Barry also, the Rector’s
sister, who, since the death of her sister-in-law, has always lived with
them, and who, if a most exemplary person, is certainly what is commonly
described as ‘trying.’
The parish of Curraghcloyne is small, the income even smaller. But if
Providence, in giving Mr. Barry this parish as his special charge, had
been niggardly to him in money matters, it had certainly made up to him
lavishly in another respect—it had given him, for example, a large, and
what promised to be an ever-increasing, family, so increasing, indeed,
that it would ultimately have beaten the record but for the untimely
death of Mrs. Barry, who had faded out of life at Tom’s birth. She was
then just thirty-two, but she looked forty.
To her husband, however, gazing at her dead face, surrounded by its
lilies and white roses, she looked seventeen again—the age at which he
had married her—and though he was a man entirely wrapped up in his books
and theories, it is an almost certain thing that he never forgot her,
and that he mourned and lamented for her as few men whose lives are set
in smoother places do for their beloved.
Miss Barry, his sister, came on the death of his wife and took
possession of the house, Susan being then just thirteen. She had but a
bare sum wherewith to clothe and keep herself, and was therefore of
little use in helping the household where money was concerned; and it
was therefore with a sense of thankfulness that the Rector four years
ago accepted the charge of Dominick Fitzgerald, an orphan, and the son
of a stepbrother of his wife.
The poor, pretty wife was then a year dead, but he knew all about
Dominick’s people. The Rector himself came of a good old Irish family,
and his wife had been even more highly connected. Indeed, the lad who
came to Mr. Barry four years ago, though he had inherited little from
his father, would in all probability succeed to his uncle’s title and
five or six thousand a year—a small thing for a baronet, but, still,
worth having. Of course, there was always a chance that the uncle, a
middle-aged man, might marry, though he was consumptive and generally an
invalid; but all that lay in the future, and at present it was decided
that the boy should be given a profession; but having proved remarkably
idle and wild at school—though nothing disgraceful was ever laid to his
charge—his uncle in one of his intervals of good health had desired that
he should be sent down to Mr. Barry, for whom Sir Spencer Fitzgerald had
an immense respect and a little fear, for a few reasons that need not be
specified, though, if Sir Spencer only knew it, the Rector was the last
man in the world to betray the secrets of anyone.
The Rector accepted the charge gladly. He had passed several young men
(who had been private pupils of his before his marriage) very
successfully for the Civil Service, and he was doing his best for
Dominick now, whom from the very first he liked, in spite of the
reputation for idleness that came with him.
Indeed, Dom Fitzgerald had fallen into the family circle as though it
had been made for him, and had grown to be quite a brother to his
new-found cousins. He at once grew fond of Susan, and became on the spot
a chum of Carew’s, who was reading with his father for the army and
expected to pass next year. And he quarrelled all day long with Betty,
who accepted him as a ‘pal’ from the moment of his appearing. Betty
inclined towards slang.
As for the children, they all loved him; and, indeed, it must be said
that he loved them, and spent a considerable amount of the fifty pounds
allowed him for yearly pocket-money upon them.
‘Well, where is she?’ persists he, turning a lazy eye from one to
another, at last resting it on Susan.
‘She has gone down to Father Murphy’s about Jane,’ says Susan
reluctantly. ‘You know Jane is always breaking everything, and to-day
she broke that old cup of our great-grandmother’s, and Aunt Jemima was
very angry. She has gone to tell Father Murphy about it, and to say she
will never take a Roman Catholic servant again unless he punishes Jane
severely.’
‘And Father Murphy will laugh,’ says Carew, with a shrug. ‘He knows she
must take Catholic servants or do without them. All the Protestant girls
of that class here are farmers’ daughters, and either won’t go into
service at all, or else only to Lady O’Donovan’s or the O’Connors’.’
‘Oh, you should have heard Jane!’ cries Betty, going off into one of her
peals of laughter. ‘When Aunt Jemima had reduced her to a rage, she came
in weeping to me. All the forlorn hopes fall back upon me.’
‘True, even this poor old forlorn one,’ says Dom promptly, seizing his
opportunity to lift his head from her gown to drop it upon her lap.
After which there is a scuffle.
‘Oh, never mind Dom!’ says Susan impatiently. ‘What did Jane say to you
about the cup?’
‘She said——Go away, Dom.’
‘I’m sure she didn’t,’ says Dom, with an aggrieved air. ‘It’s an
aspersion on my character, Susan. You don’t believe this, do you?’
‘She said,’ goes on Betty, very properly taking no notice of the
interruption: ‘“Law, Miss Betty, miss, did ye iver hear the like o’
that? Did ye iver hear such a row about nothin’?”’
‘“It wasn’t about nothing,” I said; “because you know how even father
valued that cup, though an uglier thing I never saw in my life.”’
‘“Fegs, I don’t know what ye call anythin’,” said Jane (she was crying
all the time; you know how she can roar); “but yer aunt herself tould me
that that cup is a hundhred years ould if a day, an’ wid that to make
sich a screech over it! Faix, it must have bin rotten wid age, miss; an’
no wondher it come to bits in me hands.”’
They are all delighted with the story.
‘I don’t think Aunt Jemima would have been so cross with poor Jane,’
says Susan, in a low tone and with a glance round her to make sure of no
one’s being within hearing, ‘but for those eggs this morning.’
‘The eggs under the speckled hen?’ asks Jacky; ‘I heard her speaking
about them. Won’t they come out?’
Susan shakes her head, and Carew and Dominick edge a little out of
sight. The latter, under a pretence of feeling too warm, hides his face
under the big straw hat that Betty has thrown upon the grass beside her.
‘They should have come out ten days ago,’ says Susan; ‘but they’—she
casts an uncertain glance at Carew, who has turned over and is now lying
with his face upon his arms, and is evidently developing ague-fever—‘but
they didn’t.’
‘Were they all addled?’ asks Jacky, with amazement.
‘No; they were all boiled,’ says Susan.
‘Boiled!’ says little Bonnie, sitting up with an effort. ‘Who boiled
them—the hen?’
At this there is a stifled roar from under Betty’s hat, whereupon the
owner of it lifts it and discovers Mr. Fitzgerald plainly on the point
of apoplexy.
‘Just the sort of thing one would expect from you,’ says she scornfully.
‘No wonder you want to hide your face; but you shan’t do it under my
hat, anyhow.’
‘Oh, Carew, think of that poor hen waiting and waiting for three weeks,
and then for ten days more; I call it horrid,’ says Susan. ‘I really
think you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you two.’
‘Ought we? Then we will be,’ says Dom; ‘never shall it be said that I
shirked my duty, at all events. Carew, get out of that, and be ashamed
of yourself instantly.’
‘Oh, that’s all very fine,’ says Betty, ‘trying to get out of it like
that; but let me tell you that I think——’
However, what Betty may think of people who put boiled eggs under
sitting hens is for ever lost to posterity, because at this moment Jane,
with red eyes and a depressed demeanour, comes hurrying up to them
across the small lawn, a covered basket in her hand.