The east wind was crying round a small house in the outskirts of an
Irish country town. At nightfall it had stolen across the grey expanse
of Lough Moyle, and given its first shudder among the hollies and
laurestinas that hid the lower windows of Tally Ho Lodge from the too
curious passer-by, and at about two o’clock of the November night it was
howling so inconsolably in the great tunnel of the kitchen chimney, that
Norry the Boat, sitting on a heap of turf by the kitchen fire, drew her
shawl closer about her shoulders, and thought gruesomely of the Banshee.
The long trails of the monthly roses tapped and scratched against the
window panes, so loudly sometimes that two cats, dozing on the rusty
slab of a disused hothearth, opened their eyes and stared, with the
expressionless yet wholly alert scrutiny of their race. The objects in
the kitchen were scarcely more than visible in the dirty light of a
hanging lamp, and the smell of paraffin filled the air. High presses and
a dresser lined the walls, and on the top of the dresser, close under
the blackened ceiling, it was just possible to make out the ghostly
sleeping form of a cockatoo. A door at the end of the kitchen opened
into a scullery of the usual prosaic, not to say odorous kind, which was
now a cavern of darkness, traversed by twin green stars that moved to
and fro as the lights move on a river at night, and looked like
anything but what they were, the eyes of cats prowling round a scullery
sink.
The tall, yellow-faced clock gave the gurgle with which it was
accustomed to mark the half-hour, and the old woman, as if reminded of
her weariness, stretched out her arms and yawned loudly and dismally.
She put back the locks of greyish-red hair that hung over her forehead,
and, crouching over the fireplace, she took out of the embers a
broken-nosed tea-pot, and proceeded to pour from it a mug of tea, black
with long stewing. She had taken a few sips of it when a bell rang
startlingly in the passage outside, jarring the silence of the house
with its sharp outcry. Norry the Boat hastily put down her mug, and
scrambled to her feet to answer its summons. She groped her way up two
cramped flights of stairs that creaked under her as she went, and
advanced noiselessly in her stockinged feet across a landing to where a
chink of light came from under a door.
The door was opened as she came to it, and a woman’s short thick figure
appeared in the doorway.
“The mistress wants to see Susan,” this person said in a rough whisper;
“is he in the house?”
“I think he’s below in the scullery,” returned Norry; “but, my Law! Miss
Charlotte, what does she want of him? Is it light in her head she is?”
“What’s that to you? Go fetch him at once,” replied Miss Charlotte, with
a sudden fierceness. She shut the door, and Norry crept downstairs
again, making a kind of groaning and lamenting as she went.
Miss Charlotte walked with a heavy step to the fireplace. A lamp was
burning dully on a table at the foot of an old-fashioned bed, and the
high foot-board threw a shadow that made it difficult to see the
occupant of the bed. It was an ordinary little shabby bedroom; the
ceiling, seamed with cracks, bulged down till it nearly touched the
canopy of the bed. The wall paper had a pattern of blue flowers on a
yellowish background; over the chimney-shelf a filmy antique mirror
looked strangely refined in the company of the Christmas cards and
discoloured photographs that leaned against it. There was no sign of
poverty, but everything was dingy, everything was tasteless, from the
worn Kidderminster carpet to the illuminated text that was pinned to
the wall facing the bed.
Miss Charlotte gave the fire a frugal poke, and lit a candle in the
flame provoked from the sulky coals. In doing so some ashes became
embedded in the grease, and taking a hair-pin from the ponderous mass of
brown hair that was piled on the back of her head, she began to scrape
the candle clean. Probably at no moment of her forty years of life had
Miss Charlotte Mullen looked more startlingly plain than now, as she
stood, her squat figure draped in a magenta flannel dressing-gown, and
the candle light shining upon her face. The night of watching had left
its traces upon even her opaque skin. The lines about her prominent
mouth and chin were deeper than usual; her broad cheeks had a flabby
pallor; only her eyes were bright and untired, and the thick
yellow-white hand that manipulated the hair-pin was as deft as it was
wont to be.
When the flame burned clearly she took the candle to the bedside, and,
bending down, held it close to the face of the old woman who was lying
there. The eyes opened and turned towards the overhanging face: small,
dim, blue eyes, full of the stupor of illness, looking out of the
pathetically commonplace little old face with a far-away perplexity.
“Was that Francie that was at the door?” she said in a drowsy voice that
had in it the lagging drawl of intense weakness.
Charlotte took the tiny wrist in her hand, and felt the pulse with
professional attention. Her broad, perceptive finger-tips gauged the
forces of the little thread that was jerking in the thin network of
tendons, and as she laid the hand down she said to herself, “She’ll not
last out the turn of the night.”
“Why doesn’t Francie come in?” murmured the old woman again in the
fragmentary, uninflected voice that seems hardly spared from the unseen
battle with death.
“It wasn’t her you asked me for at all,” answered Charlotte. “You said
you wanted to say good-bye to Susan. Here, you’d better have a sip of
this.”
The old woman swallowed some brandy and water, and the stimulant
presently revived unexpected strength in her.
“Charlotte,” she said, “it isn’t cats we should be thinking of now. God
knows the cats are safe with you. But little Francie, Charlotte; we
ought to have done more for her. You promised me that if you got the
money you’d look after her. Didn’t you now, Charlotte? I wish I’d done
more for her. She’s a good little thing--a good little thing--” she
repeated dreamily.
Few people would think it worth their while to dispute the wandering
futilities of an old dying woman, but even at this eleventh hour
Charlotte could not brook the revolt of a slave.
“Good little thing!” she exclaimed, pushing the brandy bottle noisily in
among a crowd of glasses and medicine bottles, “a strapping big woman of
nineteen! You didn’t think her so good the time you had her here, and
she put Susan’s father and mother in the well!”
The old lady did not seem to understand what she had said.
“Susan, Susan!” she called quaveringly, and feebly patted the crochet
quilt.
As if in answer, a hand fumbled at the door and opened it softly. Norry
was standing there, tall and gaunt, holding in her apron, with both
hands, something that looked like an enormous football.
“Miss Charlotte!” she whispered hoarsely, “here’s Susan for ye. He was
out in the ashpit, an’ I was hard set to get him, he was that wild.”
Even as she spoke there was a furious struggle in the blue apron.
“God in Heaven! ye fool!” ejaculated Charlotte. “Don’t let him go!” She
shut the door behind Norry. “Now, give him to me.”
Norry opened her apron cautiously, and Miss Charlotte lifted out of it a
large grey tom-cat.
“Be quiet, my heart’s love,” she said, “be quiet.”
The cat stopped kicking and writhing, and, sprawling up on to the
shoulder of the magenta dressing-gown, turned a fierce grey face upon
his late captor. Norry crept over to the bed, and put back the dirty
chintz curtain that had been drawn forward to keep out the draught of
the door. Mrs. Mullen was lying very still; she had drawn her knees up
in front of her, and the bedclothes hung sharply from the small point
that they made. The big living old woman took the hand of the other old
woman who was so nearly dead, and pressed her lips to it.
“Ma’am, d’ye know me?”
Her mistress opened her eyes.
“Norry,” she whispered, “give Miss Francie some jam for her tea
to-night, but don’t tell Miss Charlotte.”
“What’s that she’s saying?” said Charlotte, going to the other side of
the bed. “Is she asking for me?”
“No, but for Miss Francie,” Norry answered.
“She knows as well as I do that Miss Francie’s in Dublin,” said
Charlotte roughly; “’twas Susan she was asking for last. Here, a’nt,
here’s Susan for you.”
She pulled the cat down from her shoulder, and put him on the bed, where
he crouched with a twitching tail, prepared for flight at a moment’s
notice.
He was within reach of the old lady’s hand, but she did not seem to know
that he was there. She opened her eyes and looked vacantly round.
“Where’s little Francie? You mustn’t send her away, Charlotte; you
promised you’d take care of her; didn’t you, Charlotte?”
“Yes, yes,” said Charlotte quickly, pushing the cat towards the old
lady; “never fear, I’ll see after her.”
Old Mrs. Mullen’s eyes, that had rested with a filmy stare on her
niece’s face, closed again, and her head began to move a little from one
side to the other, a low monotonous moan coming from her lips with each
turn. Charlotte took her right hand and laid it on the cat’s brindled
back. It rested there, unconscious, for some seconds, while the two
women looked on in silence, and then the fingers drooped and contracted
like a bird’s claw, and the moaning ceased. There was at the same time a
spasmodic movement of the gathered-up knees, and a sudden rigidity fell
upon the small insignificant face.
Norry the Boat threw herself upon her knees with a howl, and began to
pray loudly. At the sound the cat leaped to the floor, and the hand that
had been placed upon him in the only farewell his mistress was to take,
dropped stiffly on the bed. Miss Charlotte snatched up the candle, and
held it close to her aunt’s face. There was no mistaking what she saw
there, and, putting down the candle again, she plucked a large silk
handkerchief from her pocket, and, with some hideous preliminary
heavings of her shoulders, burst into transports of noisy grief.