The small town of Cluhir, ever avid, as are all small towns, of
sensation, was, did it only know it, about to enjoy a week that would
long be remembered in its history. Miss Mangan's marriage, which alone
would have made an epoch, was fixed for Thursday, December 12th; but
this, it need scarcely be said, was a matter that, though
soul-stirring, was devoid of the element of surprise. Not so, however,
was the sudden evacuation of Mount Music. Father Hogan's indefinite
information was as much as was generally known, but much that was not
generally known was confided to the discreet ears of Father Greer, and
he, almost alone of the inhabitants of Cluhir, was not surprised when
the news went abroad that the Mount Music carriage had conveyed Major
Dick and Lady Isabel to the station, and that so vast a mass of
luggage had accompanied them as to betoken a prolonged absence.
That the news should, in the first instance, have been communicated to
Father Greer by Dr. Mangan, was not remarkable, since Dr. Mangan's
professional advice had usefully reinforced his unofficial advocacy of
the move, and Father Greer was rarely ignorant for long of matters
that were found interesting by the Big Doctor.
Not merely for the sake of Major Talbot-Lowry's health had this
upheaval taken place; an even more imperious factor had been the state
of the family finances. The cloud of debt that had so long brooded
over Mount Music was lower and darker than ever it had been before.
Dick had at length been coerced into opening negotiations for the sale
of his property to his tenants, but although, in the fullness of time,
these might be expected to bear fruit, they were of no more immediate
assistance to this over-weighted survivor of a prehistoric species,
than is the suggestion to a horse to live in order that he may get
oats.
There was pressure in the air over Mount Music. Tradesmen, whose
suffering had been as long as their bills, began to turn, in what had
seemed like the sleep of exhaustion, and to talk about solicitors'
letters. Even Dr. Mangan had surprised and pained his friend, the
Major, by forgetting his wonted delicate reticence, and hinting, with
what struck Dick as singularly doubtful taste, at a repayment of those
loans that he had volunteered, offering as an excuse for doing so the
expenses consequent on his daughter's marriage. In addition to these
irritations, Major Talbot-Lowry had received what he justly considered
to be very annoying letters from a firm of Dublin solicitors, in
connection with various charges and mortgages on the Mount Music
property, which so they, informed him, had been "acquired" by them for
"a client," and were now to be called in. Alternatively, it was
suggested, an arrangement might be proposed, whereby the house and
demesne of Mount Music might be accepted in settlement of the sums in
question. The firm had been in communication with another creditor,
Dr. Mangan of Cluhir, and it was hoped that all Major Talbot-Lowry's
liabilities might be arranged for by the method they suggested.
Dick Talbot-Lowry received this announcement with the mixture of
indignation and contempt that might have been anticipated from an
old-established Pterodactyl, who has been warned that his hereditary
wallow in the Primeval Ooze is about to be wrested from him. Having
expressed these sentiments in suitable language, he said, lightly,
that Fairfax must raise as much on the property as would keep these
Dublin sharks quiet, and in the meantime he would shut up the house at
once and go to London. Temporary retrenchment was all that was
required. He would let the place. Some rich Englishman would jump at
the chance--
Major Dick had that optimism about his own affairs that is often
combined with a tranquil pessimism about the affairs of others. He
said that all he wanted was to get clear of the blood-sucking swarm of
hangers-on that infested the place. He wondered at his own folly in
having endured them for so long. And it would do Christian good to get
away. She had been looking rather pulled down--she missed the hunting,
of course. London would do her good--would be a change.
This, approximately, was what Dick said. What Lady Isabel said, being
an attenuated echo of Dick's observations, is negligible. What
Christian said was known only to Rinka, the eldest of the fox
terriers, who had a habit of sitting in the chair at which Christian,
knelt to say her prayers, and would then, with her bland and balmy
smile, extort confidences denied to any other living creature.
On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst
of all, the dismissals. The house (pending the materialisation of the
Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external
departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from
her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old
friendships. Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left,
alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old
wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with
the obliteration of her past life to be her task.
An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a
funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of
letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room
books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated rubbish that
life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all
valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of
good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark
days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up
and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt,
curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all
portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let
Christian out of her sight for a single instant.
The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the
onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it
seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one's own
little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters
of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one
insignificant segment of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw
her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to
have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what
they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes,
to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost. And on Monday
afternoon with the early darkness the storm began. There came first a
little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out
the land. There followed complete stillness; then a few scattered
drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling
roar, the wind came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the
cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the
windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or
death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of
its surprise attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room
to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long
passages snatching at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of
forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to
Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows and the
shaking clatter of doors within the house, and the shrieking rage of
the wind outside. She sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her
room. She had none of the fears that might, for another, have filled
the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have
taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing passages and knocks
on the shaking doors. She had always lived on the borderland, and was
naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so
often given her help, were, when she most needed help, silent.
"I have nothing left now," she said to herself, "but memories,
hungering memories--"
She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was
to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears
when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world
has power to break a heart?
Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that
endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then,
with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was
hurled upon the world. All that night, and all the following day, the
rain was like a wall about the house. It was flung in masses against
the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck. To look forth was
as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters,
eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried roof was mastered, and
in all its angles and valleys yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the
top story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the _tempi_, from a
ponderous _adagio_ to a racing _prestissimo_. Buckets and jugs and
baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the old Evans pair
waddling to and fro, elated, almost gratified, by the magnitude of
their task. And in the middle of the uproar, late in the afternoon, a
new sound joined in the chorus of the storm, the coarse and ugly
summons of a motor-horn. Old Evans spied at the car through the hall
window, and contrived to signal a command to go round to the back of
the house.
"If I let dhraw the bolts," he said to Barty Mangan at the kitchen
entrance, "the door would fall flat on me!"
"I wouldn't be surprised at all," Barty replied. "Hardly I could force
the car into the storm."
Christian was sitting on the floor by the fireplace in the hall, in
the last of the daylight, examining and burning the contents of a
drawer full of miscellaneous papers, as the visitor made his
unexpected entrance from the back, and Barty, recognising his own
improbability and unsuitability on such a day and at such a time, fell
to confused apologies that were as incoherent, and seemed as unlikely
ever to end, as the buzzing of an imprisoned bee on the window-pane.
The fact at length, however, emerged, that there was a map of the
Mount Music estate hanging in the library, and that the Major having
promised to lend it to Dr. Mangan, had forgotten to do so.
"Some question of boundaries--a little grazing form m' fawther
has--" Barty said, nervously.
The map was found, was rolled, and wrapped up, and yet Barty sat on.
He talked incessantly, feverishly. He talked so fast, in his low
voice, that, in the clamour of the storm, Christian could only
distinguish an occasional word. She had a nightmare feeling as if a
train were roaring through an endless tunnel, and that she and Barty
were the sole passengers, and would never see daylight or know quiet
again. His long, lean body was hooped into a very low and deep
armchair, his thin hands clasped his knees; his immense dark eyes,
fixed on Christian's face, gave her the impression that what he was
saying was without relation to what he was thinking. In the direful
gloom of the hall, with the rain and wind threshing on the
half-shuttered windows, and the inconstant light of the burning logs
the sole illuminant, his pale face, with the wing of black hair on his
forehead, looked like the face of a strayed occupant of another sphere
who had resumed such an aspect as he had worn in his coffin.
"Ireland's a queer old place just now, Miss Christian," Barty hurried
on. "Everything's changing hands, and everyone's changing sides. You
don't know what'll happen next!"
"I wish I were not changing sides too," said Christian, catching at a
sentence, in a momentary lull of the roaring in the chimney. "Sides of
the Channel, I mean--I prefer this side!"
"Do you? Do you?" said Barty, intensely. "I'm glad you do! I feel
often as if no one cared for this miserable country except for what
they could get out of it! At the election it would have sickened you,
the bargaining, and the humbugging, and the lies. Larry was the only
man that ran straight, and they jockeyed him--"
"I'm sure _you_ ran straight," said Christian, with sympathy in
her voice. Piercing her weariness and preoccupation was the feeling
that he had something to say that lay under this babble of
conversation. He was wrapping himself in a cloak of verbiage, but
above the cloak his tormented eyes met hers, and the pain in them hurt
her.
"Me? Oh, I only ran after Larry. I thought it was a shabby thing of
the Unionists not to have supported him--" he stopped abruptly,
remembering Major Talbot-Lowry's abstention, remembering also the
feud, of which he knew only that he had never wholly divined its
origin, between Coppinger's Court and Mount Music. He cursed himself
for a fool. He had not meant to talk politics, but what he had come
through the storm to say was so difficult. He looked at Christian with
agony. Had she minded what he said about the Unionists? He began to
talk again, very fast and incoherently.
"Miss Christian, I said awhile ago everything was changing in Ireland.
There's big changes coming, even hereabouts, things I couldn't believe
would ever happen. I've recently learned a--a fact--a statement that
I'm not at liberty to repeat. I was--I may say that I was shocked--but
Miss Christian--" the agony in his eyes was in his voice. "Oh! Miss
Christian, for God's sake, believe that I knew nothing of it till this
day!"
He stood up, steadying himself with a hand on one of the high marble
pillars of the mantelpiece.
"Knew nothing of what?" said Christian, thinking she had mistaken what
he had said.
"I can't tell you--you'll know soon enough--only I'm just asking you
to believe that I had neither part nor lot in it!"
Christian had risen, and was standing up; he came a step nearer.
"I just want you to understand, Miss Christian, that in this world
there is no one I regard like you--no one, nor ever was, nor ever will
be--but don't mind that, I only want to say that if there is anything
in this earthly world that it's in my power to do for you, or that I
could help you in anny shape or form, you will be showing the kindness
and mercy of God if you will let me do it for you."
He was trembling, and his voice shook, but his nervousness was gone.
"The kindness and mercy of God!" he said again. "I would feel it to be
that--oh, God! I would!" The tortured spirit in his eyes had given
place to another spirit, whose emotion Christian could neither mistake
nor respond to, yet its kinship with the immutable fidelity that was
in her heart made an appeal that she could not refuse.
"Be sure I will ask you," she said, with the pity that her own
heart-loneliness had taught her in her voice. "I can't understand what
it is that you think may happen; it seems to me as if--" She broke
off, held by the thought that disaster could hardly have another arrow
in its quiver for her. "You may be sure if I think you can help me, I
will ask you. I know I could rely on you," she said, pushing back her
own trouble, meeting his wild eyes with hers, steadfast and
compassionate.
"I'm more than thankful--grateful--you've only to speak--" he
stumbled and stammered with words that were all inadequate to his
feeling. "I won't detain you; I'm taking your time too long as it
is--and I'll have a job to get home too, the river's rising every
minute, and so is the storm--" He somehow talked himself out of the
room.
Christian returned to her work of destruction. The situation in
general had not been made easier for her by Barty's tragic offer of
assistance in some mysterious and advancing stress, or by the
certainty that she tried to shake, but could not, of what his eyes had
said to her.
But Barty, as he drove home through the storm, felt himself to be a
new man, consecrate and apart, ennobled by her promise to rely on him,
glorified by her look; and thanked God that, when the trouble came,
she would remember that he had had neither part nor lot in it.