that you could easily get a key for this old chest of ours? Here’s
the keyhole, you see, all right. I’ve always kept it clear of moss.
And, I wonder, would you mind—if it didn’t give you a great deal of
trouble—getting one for me now? Without telling anybody else, I mean,
for of course they wouldn’t let me. I know I can have no legal right
to take anything out of it until I come of age; but that’s only the
_law_, and really when people are starving, one can’t be expected to
wait for years and years just on account of such nonsense. At the
best of times it seems a great pity to keep it lying here useless
for so long, but now it’s like locking up other people’s lives. If
I can’t get at it in time to do anything for them, I might as well
never have it at all—there’ll not be a soul left in Glendoula. You’ve
no idea how hateful it makes one feel. Sometimes it seems to me that
I’m nearly as bad as the wretches who go on carting off their wheat
and oats to sell in England. Only it isn’t my fault in reality, for
until you came I never had a chance of speaking to any possible
person about it. And then, Pierce, I was thinking that when we have
got this opened, you’d maybe help me to manage about selling the
silver. It must be worth a great deal of money: enough, at any rate,
to last while they are waiting for the potatoes; for we really had
very fine plate, I believe, though it mayn’t be quite so splendid as
old Timothy used to declare—he _is_ a little given to romancing. And,
of course, these times I don’t expect to find the yards of pearl and
ruby ropes that were in the _Glittering Hoard_! You do remember that
I told you, and that you promised about the key, don’t you, Pierce?”
she said anxiously, perplexed by his expression, for he was looking
hard at her with a sort of bewildered blank dismay, almost as if
something had frightened him—an effect which she had not included
among her many apprehensions.
He was taken wholly unprepared, because during her irresolution
Eileen naturally had shunned the perilous subject, and he had himself
for the time being entirely forgotten the existence of that old
childish myth. But now he did indeed remember it, as clearly as if it
had happened yesterday, instead of all those long years ago. There
had stood the little girl eagerly telling him her absurd story,
to which he listened with amused forbearance, thinking to himself
that he must not vex her by incredulity, and carelessly noticing
how swiftly her small face flushed, and how brightly her large eyes
shone in the excitement of her narrative. And to-day the same thing
seemed coming to pass again—but with differences. For here unchanged
in the sunshine was the dark stone block with its yellow dappling of
lichen, and that same clear voice came to him across it, speaking so
much in earnest that the transparent flower-flush rose and the glance
brightened just as of old. But the small child had grown into a tall
maiden, and her voice was the one that gave meaning to all the other
sounds in his world, and her absurd story no longer amused him in the
least, seemed liker breaking his heart, seemed the pronouncing of
an evil spell, that blurred the light of his eyes, and conjured up
a web of black forebodings over the fair horizon of his future. If
the soft-aired spring morning had suddenly began to scowl and keen
around him, and sting him with frozen pellets, it would have faintly
shadowed forth the transition. A man’s mood, however, may fall from
one level to another in much less time than it takes to tell, and
Eileen thought his answer came quickly.
“Don’t you know that you’re talking nonsense, Eileen?” he said.
She had never heard him speak so sharply, almost roughly—not even
when he had seen his case of mathematical instruments dropped by
Hughey Brian into the bottomless bog-hole, nor when he had come
upon the Donnellys’ little goat tethered with the remnant of
an urgently-needed and long-sought measuring-line. And she was
immediately aware that the very worst had befallen. Her plan was
impracticable, and she had disgusted Pierce by proposing it. The
poor Glendoula people must starve, and her cousin, who had been so
good-natured, could never like her any more. Probably he considered
her request worthy of a dishonestly-minded idiot, and was deeply,
perhaps justly, offended at her suggestion that he should take part
in such a transaction. Certainly, he would not hear of the scheme,
so all her hopes were scattered like mist before a hurrying wind,
and there again loomed the grim trouble ahead, with its inexorable
face turned unveiled upon her. Just at that moment, however, it was
partially screened by the interposition of a still uglier one, which
would thrust itself between, asking and answering a question with the
same tormenting result: What must Pierce be thinking of her? He had
surely meant worse than “nonsense.”
Amid this rude crowding in on her of disappointment jostling with
grief and mortification, Eileen clung half-consciously to the sense
that it behoved her by all means to retain the footing of her
self-possession, and she replied very gently: “Not exactly nonsense,
I think; but perhaps—I daresay it would be quite out of the question
to take these things now, and not even right. It seemed to me the
only way I could do any thing to help the people, but of course I
knew it mightn’t be possible at all. I don’t understand much about
the law. Don’t you think it’s getting rather cold up here? Perhaps
we’d be wiser to come back before the day clouds over.”
This dignified composure seemed to Pierce as it were a seal set upon
his fear, the document of which her fantastic story had supplied,
and he dejectedly turned down the hill-path with her in silence. The
sullen-looking stone which they left behind them, a blot on the sunny
sward, might have been a little ancient altar to some unpropitious
God, whence they were taking home, sorrowfully, discomfortable
oracles. In truth, one of them had there said farewell to an old
hope, and the other struck up an acquaintance with a new fear; both
experiences apt to arouse pre-occupying meditations. Neither of the
cousins gave much heed to their surroundings as they went. The small
wild clouds flirted the sunshine about as if flocks of white wings
were flickering by; here and there they flung down the shadows which
make one marvel how their “little-seeming substance” can be the cause
of such deep purple stains. But now nobody marked them, nor the
far-off pipe of the plover, nor the fragrance of the basking herbage
underfoot.
Thus they presently came to the gapped dyke leading into the first
field, and all the way neither of them had spoken a word. Now, at
that moment it happened that Eileen was looking very straight before
her, with her head held rather high, and her eyes steadily opened,
to give the tears a chance of going back the way they had come, and
walking warily as one who felt how even the quiver of an eyelash
might be fatal. Yet these precautions defeated themselves, for they
were the reason why she stumbled at the flat stepping-stones, so that
Pierce had to save her from falling just as he had done nearly nine
years before. This time, however, he did not let her go again with a
laugh. He held her close and said: “Oh, my darling, my sweetheart,
don’t be vexed, don’t be vexed. It will be all right, never fear.
We’ll pull them through—all of them—safely somehow. Don’t think about
that old silver any more; and you won’t mind what I said just now?
I’m a stupid brute, you see, sweetheart; but there’s nothing on earth
that I wouldn’t do for you.”
While she listened to this statement, Eileen went through, in an
intensified form, an experience somewhat resembling that of the
bygone summer morning when the unknown Pierce had first spoken to
her: a sudden surging up of dread, that wave-like took her off her
feet for the instant, but only to lift her unharmed into a new
world, most beautifully strange, and shut out from all troubles
of the mere earth with the light that never was on land or sea. A
reflection of it in her eyes encouraged him to pursue that line
of argument, and he said a great deal more, all much to the same
purport, as they went down the steep green fields, where the
young bracken-fronds were uncoiling their flossy silken whorls
beneath last season’s weather-beaten brown plumes, and the golden
blossom-flakes were melting off the tall winter furzes; and then on
between the fledged boles of the elm-grove, and under the scented
shadow of the laurel-walk, until at the hall-door Eileen ran away
to make a solitary survey of the unexplored regions in which she
had wonderfully arrived. Just for the moment Pierce felt gratefully
disposed towards the big stone, which had, at all events, given him
his cue.
* * * * *
But later on that afternoon he spoke very bitterly to his Aunt
Geraldine, whom he found alone in the book-room. The hearing of
candid opinions is a privilege not uncommonly enjoyed by spinster
aunts.
“You’ve kept her moping here all these years,” he said, “without
companions or amusement or occupation, till it’s no wonder that she
has taken up queer fancies. Why, it was enough to drive her—to make
anybody unlike other people. Surely you might have managed better for
her somehow.”
“It really wouldn’t have been easy,” his aunt said, but meekly on the
defensive; “we always have had so little ready money, and then your
poor Aunt Gerald’s wretched health is another difficulty. Besides
that, I never noticed anything odd about Eileen. She always seems
contented and cheerful enough, and I thought she was a sensible
sort of child, and very quiet. Just once or twice, now that I
think of it, she has said something that rather puzzled me about a
plate-chest, but I had no idea she had any delusion of the kind.”
“Yes, that’s just where it is; nobody has cared to look after her or
take any trouble about her,” Pierce said, wrathful and reproachful,
a little unreasonably; so fresh was his discovery that concern for
Eileen’s welfare ought to be the prime consideration in every rightly
ordered mind. He did not surmise, either, that he was upbraiding a
friend. Yet such was the case. For, from the very first evening,
their Aunt Geraldine had guessed whither things were tending, and
ever since had been watching their course, a melancholy sort of
Prospero, who was powerless to work any wonders, and whose joy at
nothing could be much, but who did feel some pleasure in the growing
likelihood that her favourite sister’s son would some day reign in
the wreck of the old place, and take charge of the person whom she
had always regarded half-pityingly, half-impatiently as “Eileen,
poor child.” Therefore the cropping up of this ominous obstacle was
a disappointment by which she felt so cast down that she had not
the spirit to rebut with any energy the accusation of contributory
negligence.
Neither she nor Pierce had spoken of the circumstances that lent the
matter its menacing aspect, but they were uppermost in the mind of
each. What made Eileen’s futile story sound so warningly in their
ears was the remembered existence of that baneful spectre whose
mischief might be traced among the annals of the Fitzmaurice family,
as well in the notorious eccentricities which had preluded poor
Sir Gerald’s last desperate act, as in the more or less pronounced
oddities and deficiencies which had wrought the history of this
kinsman and the other into a tragedy with a grotesquer plot.
“I can’t think what has put such a notion into her head,” Miss
Fitzmaurice said dejectedly. The workings of Eileen’s mind could
hardly indeed have been more remote from her observation if they
had gone on in a different planet. “But, after all, Pierce, if one
considers how young she is—scarcely more than a child.”
“No reasonable child would believe anything so preposterous,” Pierce
replied with gloom. “A rough lump of a boulder with moss growing in
the cracks!”
“And did you tell her so?” asked his aunt.
“Well, no, not exactly; we began talking about something else, and
I thought I’d better see whether you knew anything about it; but
apparently you don’t,” said Pierce.
“Oh, you must just laugh her out of it,” his aunt said, laughing
nervously herself, and had not any more helpful suggestion to offer.
Pierce left the interview dissatisfied and unreassured.
* * * * *
Towards sunsetting, however, he found himself once more on the summit
of Slieve Ardgreine. He had promised to go and see after Barney
Foyle, who had been “took bad wid the road-sickness” on the day
before, and as the Foyles’ cabin stood by the side of the Clonmoragh
road, his shortest route was up and down through the Nick of Time.
The sight of the solitary boulder, squatting there starkly black
amid the flushed western glow, made him realise his trouble with
much searching of heart. It seemed a symbol, or something more than
a symbol, a visible tangible embodiment of the obstruction which had
thrust itself into the clear path of his desires. Now, Pierce Wilmot
was alike by nature and training a person who could not, without
great and grudging reluctance, admit impediments to his progress
along the way wherein he would go; and in this case he felt more loth
than ever before. As he crossed the stretch of sward towards the gap,
he eyed the dark mass with a hot thrill of resentment, as if against
somebody who had wittingly baulked and baffled him. Yet withal it
was for him so obviously nothing more than just an ordinary lump of
limestone, that in view of it Eileen’s quaint belief took a stronger
tinge of unreason. Nor did he possess, to soften it down, any
knowledge of how the seed had been sown in her mind, and had grown
up, fostered and never disturbed, through the long years of a lonely
childhood. So, for a few paces, his heart sank and sank, till it
reached depths where a poignant pity was the most endurable element
in his mood.
But before he reached the Nick of Time, an idea that flashed across
him made him deviate several yards to the right, and walk up to the
big stone. He stood still beside it, reflecting for a while, and
then gave it a slight kick, as though to mark his arrival at some
definite conclusion. At that moment he was saying to himself: “In
any case it would be better out of this; and I’ll do it the first
thing to-morrow, by Jove I will! Then I’ll bring her up here, and the
chances are that when once she’s seen it in fragments she’ll never
give the matter another thought. There was that young fellow the
Barnards knew, who got rid of a curious hallucination in much the
same sort of way. They burned an old paper on which he had taken it
into his head that the safety of the whole world depended; and when
he found that nothing happened, he grew perfectly rational about it.
And so will she. For indeed she’s as sensible as anybody can be,
except just on that one point, which won’t signify an atom, if it’s
taken in time. It’s a good job the notion occurred to me. Ay, that’s
the kind of key I must get you, sweetheart—poor little Bright-Eyes.
However, I’ll take good care that she shan’t be vexed about it. So
there’ll be a short end of you, you old _stookawn_, and joy go with
you,” he said half-aloud, with a defiant flourish of his blackthorn
towards the big stone, which, as he turned his back upon it, flung a
long, murky shadow after him, like a scowl, over the sheeny grass.
* * * * *
The next morning did not smile upon anyone’s undertakings; rather,
it might be said to survey them unsympathetically through a blank,
expressionless mask. For Letterglas and all its neighbouring glens
were full of a white fog. It was not merely the soft mist that
clings about distant tree-clumps and cabin-clusters when the sun is
still low, and uncurls slowly, peeling off from round them, while
he climbs, giving one an impression that the landscape is a fragile
work of art, not yet quite finished careful unpacking out of delicate
cotton-wool wrappings. All the night through a vast white cloud
had been adrift thither from the westward, over seas, hanging low
always, and sometimes trailing on the very face of the water like a
huge disabled pinion. Beneath it the dim blue tide had crept to the
limitary foot of the cliffs, furtively, as if from an ambush; but the
wavering ribbon of weed and froth set no boundary for the thronging
vapour-masses, which passed on wafted inland through rifts and over
crests, till at length the escorting breeze dropped and left them
halted motionless, a crowd checked by invisible barriers. Round about
Glendoula they made all the valleys into one, spanning the ravines
with ghostly causeways and bridges, and levelling the peaks, lost
among aërial snowfields. The curd-white impenetrable wall looked at
a few yards’ distance so dense and solid that the thought of walking
through it almost took away one’s breath, and people about to emerge
from it loomed along with such dim, unsubstantial shapes that their
voices sounded startlingly loud and near.
Yet, notwithstanding these obstructive conditions, work was going
on in Letterglas valley, where wheel-barrows trundled to and fro
invisibly, tilting out clattering loads, and picks swung unseen till
one stood close to the wielder’s elbow. Pierce, the inspector, had
made his way thither, gropingly, at an early hour, having a special
job in view, which he was anxious to get done as soon as might be.
But since a field of vision wider than the present was desirable for
his operations, he consulted the weather-wise among his men as to the
probability of the fog clearing off. In old Murtagh Reilly’s opinion,
which was highly esteemed upon such points, this might be expected to
take place before they were much older.
“I wouldn’t wonder if it was very apt to be givin’ itself a heft
agin we’re done breakfast, your honour,” he said; “and once it fairly
gits a rise on it, it won’t be long streelin’ itself off out of your
way. It’s quare somewhiles to see the rate them mists ’ill be skytin’
up the hillside at, and not a breath of win’ stirrin’ that ’ud
thrimble the feather of steam whiffin’ out of an ould kettle’s spout,
let alone liftin’ a big cloud fit to thatch a townland.”
“Sure it’s the sun shinin’ on the wrong side of them does be drawin’
them up,” said Christy Martin instructively, “like as if they was a
wet shirt shrinkin’ in front of the fire. The flannen’s a terror for
cocklin’ up into nothin’ if the hate’s too strong for it.”
“I dunno where the great likeness is then,” said old Reilly, who had
not a taste for instruction.
“Maybe there’s not, Christy,” said Christy’s brother Willy; “very
belike there is not. But all the same, you and me’d be glad enough
of a pinny for ivery time we’ve seen the sun comin’ out red on this
side, lookin’ the livin’ moral of a hot cinder burnin’ through a
blanket.”
“Have it your own way, lads,” said old Reilly, sublimely abandoning
the whole expanse of the heavens to them with a comprehensive
flourish of his hand. “Howsomiver, your honour, if you was axin’ me,
I’d say this day’s apter than not to be takin’ up prisintly, or next
door to it, as thick as it is this instiant minyit.”
Old Reilly seemed to have said truly, for by the time that everybody
rose from the sodded bank, on which some of them had been eating
slices of bread as they sat—others were in the same plight as John
O’Mahony, who remarked humorously that it saved a dale of throuble
to have your breakfast yisterday or else to-morra—there was a
perceptible curtailment in the flowing drapery of the hill-slopes,
and a thinning of its texture, paler shimmering brightness running
through it here and there, to show that the opaque folds might shake
out into diaphanous tissues of pearl and silver.
Accordingly, a small knot of men by-and-by detached themselves from
the rest, and began to ascend towards the Nick of Time, whose gap
was still hidden by an ample curtain. Pierce was one of the party,
which carried up with it a supply of gritty black grains and sundry
coercive-looking tools. He invited Murtagh Reilly to accompany them,
but the old man cried off the expedition. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll stop
where I am,” he said, “for these times when there does be a notorious
curse on the counthry, and the hungry-grass growin’ over ivery inch
of it, troth it’s as much as a man’s life’s worth—and if that’s no
great things, it’s the most he has—to be settin’ his misfortnit fut
e’er a step further than he’s bound. But you’ve a plinty of the lads
along widout me, your honour.”
* * * * *
Just at the same time, Larry M‘Farlane also set off up the slope,
by a different route from the others, however, and with a different
goal. He was taking the shortest way to the Big House down at the
bottom of Glendoula. The fog there had begun to recede a little
earlier than in Letterglas, but still muffled things very closely,
making mysteries of the most familiar objects, and Larry, who, to
judge by his headlong bounds and plunges all the way, might have
been racing for at least his life, collided more than once with a
tree-trunk when he came among the plantations. And he reached the
house panting, only to run up against more hampering blocks of delay.
For in the kitchen was nobody except Mrs Dunlop, the cook, busied
with frizzling preparations for the breakfast, and all she could be
got to say was, “Aw, ax Mr Gabbett, Larry man; he’ll be apt to know
if she’s after goin’ out, and if she isn’t, she might be indures
yit.” And when he rushed on to the pantry, old Timothy, who had
overheard the voice of an unfavoured visitor, shot the bolt of the
door, and was long deaf to all thumps and calls. In fact, Larry, the
urgency of whose errand divided every minute infinitely, was turning
away in despair, when the old man shouted a surly, “What’s a-wantin?”
and he had to waste another tormenting interval before a churlish
chink opened.
“Wantin’ to spake to Miss Eileen?” said old Timothy. “Then want’ll be
your master, me hayro of war, for I seen her goin’ out a while back.
So if that’s what all you had the prancin’ in the passage for, like a
cross-tempered carriage-horse kep’ standin’ in a could win’——”
“Murther alive and wirrasthrew and bad luck to it,” Larry said,
“what’ll I do at all now? And which way did she go, Mr Gabbett? Was
it up Slieve Ardgreine she wint, do you suppose? For it’s biddin’ her
keep off goin’ up it I’d be.”
“Well to be sure, and set you up. Yourself’s the great one to be
givin’ your orders. And how the mischief could I be tellin’ you where
she’s went, except be the sound of the hall-door clappin’? But I
dunno what’d take her sthreelin’ very far up the hill, unless she was
wishful to lose herself body and bones in the thick of the fog that
you might take and cut like the side of a rick. And if you’re from
the place where they’re workin’, sure you’d ha’ met her comin’ along,
supposin’ she’s gone that way.”
“I might ha’ passed her by twinty times over unbeknownst, up about
the top of the fields, where you couldn’t see a goat’s horns and tail
together,” said Larry; “nor I wasn’t keepin’ along be the path the
most part of the way; I just slapped down the shortest I could. But
if I’d had the wit of an ould blind crow, I would ha’ sted on her own
path, and then I might ha’ stopped her. But I’ll be hard set now to
git a chance of findin’ her at all.”
With that, Larry bolted away too hurriedly for any further questions,
thus frustrating the curiosity of old Timothy, left wondering “What
for in the nation the bosthoon would be warnin’ Miss Eileen off the
hill,” a riddle for which he could invent himself no plausible
answer.
* * * * *
Larry’s surmise was partly right, Eileen having in reality been
on her leisurely way up Slieve Ardgreine while he sped hot-foot
down it. She had slept little in the night, and would have almost
grudged that little, had it not been for the pleasantness of waking
to the recollection that she was not only dreaming. The last time
she did so, the silvery lines framing the shuttered window, though
but faint as yet, convinced her that it could not be too early
to get up. Rising, she was fascinated by the spectacle of one of
the snow-whitest and stillest fogs she had ever seen in the dozen
years or so during which she had been capable of meteorological
observations; and she stood looking on at it for some time. But when
the fabric of the spacious pavilion began to give ground a little
and sway to and fro, restoring glimpses of a substantial world and
shifting them away again, no longer contented with her watch from the
window, she determined to run out and survey more thoroughly this
rare aspect of things. On the way downstairs she stopped to tap at
her mother’s door, very softly—a velvet-suited bee would have made
more noise flying against it—hoping to be let in, and fearing to
rouse a sleeper. An answer did set out to her, but the feeble drowsy
voice failed to reach her, so she stole on cautiously, a little sorry
that she must put off her good morning until she should return.
Eileen was wearing a favourite blue and white mousseline-de-laine,
and had not forgotten to fasten its collar with her silver key. Over
her head she had thrown a grey woollen shawl, because the April
morning air was soft rather than warm. It was a somewhat shabby old
shawl, and Eileen vainly reflected that if she met anybody she could
just slip it off and be carrying it on her arm.