There was consternation among the cats at Tally Ho Lodge; a
consternation mingled with righteous resentment. Even the patriarchal
Susan could scarcely remember the time that the spare bedroom had been
anything else than an hospital, a nursery, and a secure parliament house
for him and his descendants; yet now, in his old age, and when he had,
after vast consideration of alternatives, allocated to himself the
lowest shelf of the wardrobe as a sleeping place, he was evicted at a
moment’s notice, and the folded-away bed curtains that had formed his
couch were even now perfuming the ambient air as they hung out of the
window over the hall door. Susan was too dignified to give utterance to
his wounded feelings; he went away by himself, and sitting on the roof
of the fowl-house, thought unutterable things. But his great-niece, Mrs.
Bruff, could not emulate his stoicism. Followed by her five latest
kittens, she strode through the house, uttering harsh cries of rage and
despair, and did not cease from her lamentations until Charlotte brought
the whole party into the drawing-room, and established them in the
waste-paper basket.
The worst part about the upheaval, as even the youngest and least
experienced of the cats could see, was that it was irrevocable. It was
early morning when the first dull blow of Norry’s broom against the
wainscot had startled them with new and strange apprehension, and
incredulity had grown to certainty, till the final moment when the sight
of a brimming pail of water urged them to panic-struck flight. It may be
admitted that Norry the Boat, who had not, as a rule, any special taste
for cleanliness, had seldom enjoyed anything more than this day of
turmoil, this routing of her ancient enemies. Miss Charlotte, to whom on
ordinary occasions the offended cat never appealed in vain, was now
bound by her own word. She had given orders that the spare room was to
be “cleaned down,” and cleaned down it surely should be. It was not,
strictly speaking, Norry’s work. Louisa was house and parlour-maid;
Louisa, a small and sullen Protestant orphan of unequalled sluggishness
and stupidity, for whose capacity for dealing with any emergency Norry
had a scorn too deep for any words that might conveniently be repeated
here. It was not likely that Louisa would be permitted to join in the
ardours of the campaign, when even Bid Sal, Norry’s own special
kitchen-slut and co-religionist, was not allowed to assist.
Norry the Boat, daughter of Shaunapickeen, the ferryman (whence her
title), and of Carroty Peg, his wife, was a person with whom few would
have cared to co-operate against her will. On this morning she wore a
more ferocious aspect than usual. Her roughly-waving hair, which had
never known the dignity of a cap, was bound up in a blue duster, leaving
her bony forehead bare; dust and turf-ashes hung in her grizzled
eyebrows, her arms were smeared with black-lead, and the skirt of her
dress was girt about her waist, displaying a petticoat of heavy Galway
flannel, long thin legs, and enormous feet cased in countrymen’s laced
boots. It was fifteen years now, Norry reflected, while she scrubbed the
floor and scraped the candle drippings off it with her nails, since Miss
Charlotte and the cats had come into the house, and since then the spare
room had never had a visitor in it. Nobody had stayed in the house in
all those years except little Miss Francie, and for her the cot had been
made up in her great-aunt’s room; the old high-sided cot in which her
grandmother had slept when she was a child. The cot had long since
migrated into the spare room, and from it Norry had just ejected the
household effects of Mrs. Bruff and her family, with a pleasure that was
mitigated only by the thought that Miss Francie was a young woman now,
and would be likely to give a good deal more trouble in the house than
even in the days when she stole the cockatoo’s sopped toast for her
private consumption, and christened the tom-cat Susan against everyone’s
wishes except her great-aunt’s.
Norry and the cockatoo were now the only survivors of the old _régime_
at Tally Ho Lodge, in fact the cockatoo was regarded in Lismoyle as an
almost prehistoric relic, dating, at the lowest computation, from the
days when old Mrs. Mullen’s fox-hunting father had lived there, and
given the place the name that was so remarkably unsuited to its
subsequent career. The cockatoo was a sprightly creature of some twenty
shrieking summers on the day that the two Miss Butlers, clad in
high-waisted, low-necked gowns, were armed past his perch in the hall by
their father, and before, as it seemed to the cockatoo, he had more than
half-finished his morning doze, they were back again, this time on the
arms of the two young men who, during the previous five months, had done
so much to spoil his digestion by propitiatory dainties at improper
hours. The cockatoo had no very clear recollection of the subsequent
departure of Dr. Mullen and his brother, the attorney, with their
brides, on their respective honeymoons, owing to the fact that Mr.
Mullen, the agent, brother of the two bridegrooms, had prised open his
beak, and compelled him to drink the healths of the happy couples in the
strongest and sweetest whisky punch.
The cockatoo’s memory after this climax was filled with vague comings
and goings, extending over unknown tracts of time. He remembered two
days of disturbance, on each of which a long box had been carried out of
the house by several men, and a crowd of people, dressed in black, had
eaten a long and clattering meal in the dining-room. He had always
remembered the second of these occasions with just annoyance, because,
in manœuvring the long box through the narrow hall, he had been knocked
off his perch, and never after that day had the person whom he had been
taught to call “Doctor” come to give him his daily lump of sugar.
But the day that enunciated itself most stridently from the cockatoo’s
past life was that on which the doctor’s niece had, after many short
visits, finally arrived with several trunks, and a wooden case from
which, when opened, sprang four of the noisome creatures whom Miss
Charlotte, their owner, had taught him to call “pussies.” A long era of
persecution then began for him, of robbery of his food, and even attacks
upon his person. He had retaliated by untiring mimicry, by delusive
invitations to food in the manner of Miss Charlotte, and lastly, by the
strangling of a too-confiding kitten, whom he had lured, with maternal
mewings, within reach of his claws. That very day Miss Charlotte’s hand
avenged the murder, and afterwards conveyed him, a stiff guilty lump of
white feathers, to the top of the kitchen press, from thenceforth never
to descend, except when long and patient picking had opened a link of
his chain, or when, on fine days, Norry fastened him to a branch of the
tall laurel that overhung the pig-stye. Norry was his only friend, a
friendship slowly cemented by a common hatred of the cats and Louisa;
indeed, it is probable that but for occasional conversation with Norry
he would have choked from his own misanthropic fury, helpless, lonely
spectator as he was of the secret gluttonies of Louisa, and the
maddening domestic felicity of the cats.
But on this last day of turbulence and rout he had been forgotten. The
kitchen was sunny and stuffy, the blue-bottles were buzzing their
loudest in the cobwebby window, one colony of evicted kittens was
already beginning to make the best of things in the turf heap, and the
leaves of the laurel outside were gleaming tropically against the
brilliant sky, with no one to appreciate them except the pigs. When it
came to half-past twelve o’clock the cockatoo could no longer refrain,
and fell to loud and prolonged screamings. The only result at first was
a brief stupefaction on the part of the kittens, and an answering outcry
from the fowl in the yard; then, after some minutes, the green baize
cross-door opened, and a voice bellowed down the passage:
“Biddy! Bid Sal!” (_fortissimo_), “can’t ye stop that bird’s infernal
screeching?” There was dead silence, and Miss Mullen advanced into the
kitchen and called again.
“Biddy’s claning herself, Miss Mullen,” said a small voice from the
pantry door.
“That’s no reason you shouldn’t answer!” thundered Charlotte; “come out
here yourself and put the cockatoo out in the yard.”
Louisa the orphan, a short, fat, white-faced girl of fourteen, shuffled
out of the pantry with her chin buried in her chest, and her round
terrified eyes turned upwards to Miss Charlotte’s face.
“I’d be in dhread to ketch him,” she faltered.
Those ladies who considered Miss Mullen “eccentric, but so kind-hearted,
and so clever and agreeable,” would have been considerably surprised if
they had heard the terms in which she informed Louisa that she was
wanting in courage and intelligence; but Louisa’s face expressed no
surprise, only a vacancy that in some degree justified her mistress’s
language. Still denouncing her retainers, Miss Charlotte mounted nimbly
upon a chair, and seizing the now speechless cockatoo by the wings,
carried him herself out to the yard and fastened him to his accustomed
laurel bough.
She did not go back to the kitchen, but, after a searching glance at
the contents of the pigs’ trough, went out of the yard by the gate that
led to the front of the house. Rhododendrons and laurels made a dark
green tunnel about her, and, though it was June, the beech leaves of
last November lay rotting on each side of the walk. Opposite the hall
door the ground rose in a slight slope, thickly covered with evergreens,
and topped by a lime-tree, on whose lower limbs a flock of black turkeys
had ranged themselves in sepulchral meditation. The house itself was
half stifled with ivy, monthly roses, and virginian creeper; everywhere
was the same unkempt profusion of green things, that sucked the sunshine
into themselves, and left the air damp and shadowed. Charlotte had the
air of thinking very deeply as she walked slowly along with her hands in
the pockets of her black alpaca apron. The wrinkles on her forehead
almost touched the hair that grew so low down upon it as to seem like a
wig that had been pulled too far over the turn of the brow, and she kept
chewing at her heavy underlip as was her habit during the processes of
unobserved thought. Then she went into the house, and, sitting down at
the davenport in the dining-room, got out a sheet of her best notepaper,
and wrote a note to Pamela Dysart in her strong, commercially clear
hand.
Afternoon tea had never flourished as an institution at Tally Ho Lodge.
Occasionally, and of necessity, a laboured repast had been served at
five o’clock by the trembling Louisa; occasions on which the afternoon
caller had not only to suffer the spectacle of a household being shaken
to its foundations on her behalf, but had subsequently to eat of the
untempting fruit of these struggles. On the afternoon, however, of the
day following that of the cleansing of the spare room, timely
preparations had been made. Half the round table in the centre of the
drawing-room had been covered with a cloth, and on it Louisa, in the
plenitude of her zeal, had prepared a miniature breakfast; loaf,
butter-cooler, and knives and forks, a truly realistic touch being
conferred by two egg-cups standing in the slop-basin. A vase of
marigolds and pink sweet-pea stood behind these, a fresh heap of
shavings adorned the grate, the piano had been opened and dusted, and a
copy of the “Indiana Waltzes” frisked on the desk in the breeze from the
open window.
Charlotte sat in a low armchair and surveyed her drawing-room with a
good deal of satisfaction. Her fingers moved gently through the long fur
at the back of Mrs. Bruff’s head, administering, almost unconsciously,
the most delicately satisfactory scratching about the base of the wide,
sensitive ears, while her eyes wandered back to the pages of the novel
that lay open on her lap. She was a great and insatiable reader,
surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and
unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never
forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact that she
“took in the _English Times_ and the _Saturday Review_, and read every
word of them,” but it was hinted that the bookshelves that her own
capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a large proportion of works
of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, “and,” it was generally added
in tones of mystery, “many of them French.”
It was half-past five o’clock, and the sharpest of several showers that
had fallen that day had caused Miss Mullen to get up and shut the
window, when the grinding of the gate upon the gravel at the end of the
short drive warned her that the expected guest was arriving. As she got
to the hall door one of those black leather band-boxes on wheels, known
in the south and west of Ireland as “jingles” or inside cars, came
brushing under the arch of wet evergreens, and she ran out on to the
steps.
“Well, my dear child, welcome to Tally Ho!” she began in tones of
effusive welcome, as the car turned and backed towards the doorstep in
the accustomed way, then seeing through the half-closed curtains that
there was nothing inside it except a trunk and a bonnet box, “Where in
the name of goodness is the young lady, Jerry? Didn’t you meet her at
the train?”
“I did to be sure,” replied Jerry; “sure she’s afther me on the road
now. Mr. Lambert came down on the thrain with her, and he’s dhrivin’ her
here in his own thrap.”
While he was speaking there was the sound of quick trotting on the road,
and Miss Mullen saw a white straw hat and a brown billycock moving
swiftly along over the tops of the evergreens. A dog-cart with a
white-faced chestnut swung in at the gate, and Miss Fitzpatrick’s hat
was immediately swept off her head by a bough of laburnum. Its owner
gave a shrill cry and made a snatch at the reins, with an idea
apparently of stopping the horse.
“No, you don’t,” said Mr. Lambert, intercepting the snatch with his whip
hand; “you’re going to be handed over to your aunt just as you are.”
Half a dozen steps brought them to the door, and the chestnut pulled up
with his pink nose almost between the curtains of the inside car. It was
hard to say whether Miss Mullen had heard Lambert’s remark, which had
certainly been loud enough to enable her to do so, but her only reply
was an attack upon the carman.
“Take your car out o’ that, ye great oaf!” she vociferated “can’t ye
make way for your betters?” Then with a complete change of voice, “Well,
me dear Francie, you’re welcome, you’re welcome.”
The greeting was perceptibly less hearty than that which had been
squandered on the trunk and bonnet-box; but an emotion _réchauffé_
necessarily loses flavour. Francie had jumped to the ground with a
reckless disregard of the caution demanded by the steps of a dog-cart,
and stooping her hatless head, kissed the hard cheek that Charlotte
tendered for her embrace.
“Thank you very much, I’m very glad to come,” she said, in a voice whose
Dublin accent had been but little modified by the six years that had
lightly gone over her since the August Sunday when she had fled from
Tommy Whitty in the milkman’s cart. “And look at me the show I am
without my hat! And it’s all his fault!” with a lift of her blue eyes to
Lambert, “he wouldn’t let me stop and pick it up.”
Charlotte looked up at her with the wide smile of welcome still stiff
upon her face. The rough golden heap of curls on the top of Francie’s
head was spangled with raindrops and her coat was grey with wet.
“Well, if Mr. Lambert had had any sense,” said Miss Mullen, “he’d have
let you come in the covered car. Here, Louisa, go fetch Miss
Fitzpatrick’s hat.”
“Ah, no, sure she’ll get all wet,” said Francie, starting herself before
the less agile Louisa could emerge from behind her mistress, and running
down the drive.
“Did you come down from Dublin to-day, Roddy?” said Charlotte.
“Yes, I did,” answered Mr. Lambert, turning his horse as he spoke; “I
had business that took me up to town yesterday, so it just happened that
I hit off Francie. Well, good evening. I expect Lucy will be calling
round to see you to-morrow or next day.”
He walked his horse down the drive, and as he passed Francie returning
with her hat he leaned over the wheel and said something to her that
made her shake her head and laugh. Miss Charlotte was too far off to
hear what it was.