Miss Julia Duffy, the tenant of Gurthnamuckla, was a woman of few
friends. The cart track that led to her house was covered with grass,
except for two brown ruts and a narrow footpath in the centre, and the
boughs of the sycamores that grew on either side of it drooped low as if
ignoring the possibility of a visitor. The house door remained shut from
year’s end to year’s end, contrary to the usual kindly Irish custom; in
fact, its rotten timbers were at once supported and barricaded by a
diagonal beam that held them together, and was itself beginning to rot
under its shroud of cobwebs. The footpath skirted the duckpond in front
of the door, and led round the corner of the house to what had been in
the palmy days of Gurthnamuckla the stableyard, and wound through its
weedy heaps of dirt to the kitchen door.
Julia Duffy, looking back through the squalors of some sixty years,
could remember the days when the hall door used to stand open from
morning till night, and her father’s guests were many and thirsty,
almost as thirsty as he, though perhaps less persistently so. He had
been a hard-drinking Protestant farmer, who had married his own
dairy-woman, a Roman Catholic, dirty, thriftless, and a cousin of Norry
the Boat; and he had so disintegrated himself with whisky that his body
and soul fell asunder at what was considered by his friends to be the
premature age of seventy-two. Julia had always been wont to go to
Lismoyle church with her father, not so much as a matter of religious as
of social conviction. All the best bonnets in the town went to the
parish church, and to a woman of Julia’s stamp, whose poor relations
wear hoods and shawls over their heads and go to chapel, there is no
salvation out of a bonnet. After old John Duffy’s death, however,
bonnets and the aristocratic way of salvation seemed together to rise
out of his daughter’s scope. Chapel she despised with all the fervour of
an Irish Protestant, but if the farm was to be kept and the rent paid,
there was no money to spare for bonnets. Therefore Julia, in defiance of
the entreaties of her mother’s priest and her own parson, would have
nothing of either chapel or church, and stayed sombrely at home.
Marriage had never come near her; in her father’s time the necessary
dowry had not been forthcoming, and even her ownership of the farm was
not enough to counter-balance her ill-looks and her pagan habits.
As in a higher grade of society science sometimes steps in when religion
fails, so, in her moral isolation, Julia Duffy turned her attention to
the mysteries of medicine and the culture of herbs. By the time her
mother died she had established a position as doctor and wise woman,
which was immensely abetted by her independence of the ministrations of
any church. She was believed in by the people, but there was no liking
in the belief; when they spoke to her they called her Miss Duffy, in
deference to a now impalpable difference in rank as well as in
recognition of her occult powers, and they kept as clear of her as they
conveniently could. The payment of her professional services was a
matter entirely in the hands of the people themselves, and ranged,
according to the circumstances of the case, from a score of eggs or a
can of buttermilk, to a crib of turf or “the makings” of a homespun
flannel petticoat. Where there was the possibility of a fee it never
failed; where there was not, Julia Duffy gave her “yerreb tay” (_i.e._,
herb tea) and Holloway’s pills without question or hesitation.
No one except herself knew how vital these offerings were to her. The
farm was still hers, and, perhaps, in all her jealous unsunned nature,
the only note of passion was her feeling for the twenty acres that, with
the house, remained to her of her father’s possessions. She had owned
the farm for twenty years now, and had been the abhorrence and the
despair of each successive Bruff agent. The land went from bad to worse;
ignorance, neglect and poverty, are a formidable conjunction even
without the moral support that the Land League for a few years had
afforded her, and Miss Duffy tranquilly defied Mr. Lambert, offering him
at intervals such rent as she thought fitting, while she sub-let her
mossy, deteriorated fields to a Lismoyle grazier. Perhaps her nearest
approach to pleasure was the time at the beginning of each year when she
received and dealt with the offers for the grazing; then she tasted the
sweets of ownership, and then she condescended to dole out to Mr.
Lambert such payment “on account” as she deemed advisable, confronting
his remonstrances with her indisputable poverty, and baffling his
threats with the recital of a promise that she should never be disturbed
in her father’s farm, made to her, she alleged, by Sir Benjamin Dysart,
when she entered upon her inheritance.
There had been a time when a barefooted serving-girl had suffered under
Miss Duffy’s rule; but for the last few years the times had been bad,
the price of grazing had fallen, and the mistress’s temper and the diet
having fallen in a corresponding ratio, the bondwoman had returned to
her own people and her father’s house, and no successor had been found
to take her place. That is to say, no recognised successor. But, as fate
would have it, on the very day that “Moireen Rhu” had wrapped her shawl
about her head, and stumped, with cursings, out of the house of bondage,
the vague stirrings that regulate the perambulations of beggars had
caused Billy Grainy to resolve upon Gurthnamuckla as the place where he
would, after the manner of his kind, ask for a walletful of potatoes and
a night’s shelter. A week afterwards he was still there, drawing water,
bringing in turf, feeding the cow, and receiving, in return for these
offices, his board and lodging and the daily dressing of a sore shin
which had often coerced the most uncharitable to hasty and nauseated
alms-giving. The arrangement glided into permanency, and Billy fell into
a life of lazy routine that was preserved from stagnation by a daily
expedition to Lismoyle to sell milk for Miss Duffy, and to do a little
begging on his own account.
Gurthnamuckla had still about it some air of the older days when Julia
Duffy’s grandfather was all but a gentleman, and her drunken father and
dairymaid mother were in their cradles. The tall sycamores that bordered
the cart track were witnesses to the time when it had been an avenue,
and the lawn-like field was yellow in spring with the daffodils of a
former civilisation. The tops of the trees were thick with nests, and
the grave cawing of rooks made a background of mellow, serious
respectability that had its effect even upon Francie. She said something
to this intent as she and Lambert jogged along the grass by the track.
“Nice!” returned her companion with enthusiasm, “I should think it was!
I’d make that one of the sweetest little places in the country if I had
it. There’s no better grass for young horses anywhere, and there’s
first-class stabling. I can tell you you’re not the only one that thinks
it’s a nice place,” he continued, “but this old devil that has it won’t
give it up; she’d rather let the house rot to pieces over her head than
go out of it.”
They rode past the barricaded hall door, and round the corner of the
house into the yard, and Lambert called for Miss Duffy for some time in
vain. Nothing responded except the turkey cock, who answered each call
with an infuriated gobble, and a donkey, who, in the dark recesses of a
cow-house, lifted up his voice in heartrending rejoinder. At last a
window fell down with a bang in the upper story, and the mistress of the
house put out her head. Francie had only time to catch a glimpse of a
thin dirty face, a hooked nose, and unkempt black hair, before the
vision was withdrawn, and a slipshod step was heard coming downstairs.
When Miss Duffy appeared at her kitchen door, she had flung a shawl
round her head, possibly to conceal the fact that her crinkled mat of
hair held thick in it, like powder, the turf ashes of many sluttish
days. Her stained and torn black skirt had evidently just been unpinned
from about her waist, and was hitched up at one side, showing a frayed
red Galway petticoat, and that her feet had recently been thrust into
her boots was attested by the fact that their laces trailed on the
ground beside her. In spite of these disadvantages, however, it was with
a manner of the utmost patronage that she greeted Mr. Lambert.
“I would ask you and the young leedy to dismount,” she continued, in the
carefully genteel voice that she clung to in the wreck of her fortunes,
“but I am, as you will see,” she made a gesture with a dingy hand,
“quite ‘in dishabilly,’ as they say; I’ve been a little indisposed,
and--”
“Oh, no matter, Miss Duffy,” interrupted Lambert, “I only wanted to say
a few words to you on business, and Miss Fitzpatrick will ride about the
place till we’re done.”
Miss Duffy’s small black eyes turned quickly to Francie.
“Oh, indeed, is that Miss Fitzpatrick? My fawther knew her
grandfawther. I am much pleased to make her acquaintance.”
She inclined her head as she spoke, and Francie, with much disposition
to laugh, bowed hers in return; each instant Miss Duffy’s resemblance,
both in feature and costume, to a beggar woman who frequented the corner
of Sackville Street, was becoming harder to bear with fortitude, and she
was delighted to leave Lambert to his _tête-à-tête_ and ride out into
the lawn, among the sycamores and hawthorns, where the black mare
immediately fell to devouring grass with a resolve that was quite beyond
Francie’s power to combat.
She broke a little branch off a low-growing ash tree, to keep away the
flies that were doing their best to spoil the pleasure of a perfect
afternoon, and sat there, fanning herself lazily, while the mare, with
occasional impatient tugs at the reins and stampings at the flies,
cropped her way onwards from one luscious tuft to another. The Lismoyle
grazier’s cattle had collected themselves under the trees at the farther
end of the lawn, where a swampy pool still remained of the winter
encroachments of the lake. In the sunshine at the other side of the
wall, a chain of such pools stretched to the broad blue water, and grey
limestone rocks showed above the tangle of hemlock and tall spikes of
magenta foxgloves. A white sail stood dazzlingly out in the turquoise
blue of a band of calm, and the mountains on the farther side of the
lake were palely clothed in thinnest lavender and most ethereal green.
It might have been the unexpected likeness that she had found in Julia
Duffy to her old friend the beggar woman that took Francie’s thoughts
away from this idyll of perfected summer to the dry, grey Dublin streets
that had been her uttermost horizon a week ago. The milkman generally
called at the Fitzpatricks’ house at about this hour; the clank of his
pint measure against the area railings, even his pleasantries with
Maggie the cook, relative to his bestowing an extra “sup for the cat,”
were suddenly and sharply present with her. The younger Fitzpatrick
children would be home from school, and would be raging through the
kitchen seeking what they might devour in the interval before the six
o’clock dinner, and she herself would probably have been engaged in a
baking game of tennis in the square outside her uncle’s house. She felt
very sorry for Aunt Tish when she thought of that hungry gang of sons
and daughters and of the evil days that had come upon the excellent and
respectable Uncle Robert, and the still more evil days that would come
in another fortnight or so, when the whole bursting party had squeezed
themselves into a little house at Bray, there to exist for an indefinite
period on Irish stew, strong tea, and a diminished income. There was a
kind of understanding that when they were “settled” she was to go back
to them, and blend once more her five and twenty pounds a year with the
Fitzpatrick funds; but this afternoon, with the rich summer stillness
and the blaze of buttercups all about her, and the unfamiliar feeling of
the mare’s restless shoulder under her knee, she was exceedingly glad
that the settling process would take some months at least. She was not
given to introspection, and could not have said anything in the least
interesting about her mental or moral atmosphere; she was too uneducated
and too practical for any self-communings of this kind; but she was
quite certain of two things, that in spite of her affection for the
Fitzpatricks she was very glad she was not going to spend the summer in
Dublin or Bray, and also, that in spite of certain bewildering aspects
of her cousin Charlotte, she was beginning to have what she defined to
herself as “a high old time.”
It was somewhere about this period in her meditations that she became
aware of a slight swishing and puffing sound from the direction of the
lake, and a steam-launch came swiftly along close under the shore. She
was a smart-looking boat, spick and span as white paint and a white
funnel with a brass band could make her, and in her were seated two men;
one, radiant in a red and white blazer, was steering, while the other,
in clothes to which even distance failed to lend enchantment, was
menially engaged in breaking coals with a hammer. The boughs of the
trees intervened exasperatingly between Francie and this glittering
vision, and the resolve to see it fully lent her the power to drag the
black mare from her repast, and urge her forward to an opening where she
could see and be seen, two equally important objects.
She had instantly realised that these were those heroes of romance, “the
Lismoyle officers,” the probabilities of her alliance with one of whom
had been the subject of some elegant farewell badinage on the part of
her bosom friend, Miss Fanny Hemphill. Francie’s acquaintance with the
British army had hitherto been limited to one occasion when, at a
Sandymount evening band performance, “one of the officers from Beggars’
Bush Barracks”--so she had confided to Miss Hemphill--had taken off his
hat to her, and been very polite until Aunt Tish had severely told him
that no true gentleman would converse with a lady without she was
presented to him, and had incontinently swept her home. She could see
them quite plainly now, and from the fact that the man who had been
rooting among the coals was now sitting up, evidently at the behest of
the steersman, and looking at her, it was clear that she had attracted
attention too. Even the black mare pricked her ears, and stared at this
new kind of dragon-fly creature that went noisily by, leaving a feathery
smear on the air behind it, and just then Mr. Lambert rode out of the
stableyard, and looked about him for his charge.
“Francie!” he called with perceptible impatience; “what are you at down
there?”
The steam-launch had by this time passed the opening, and Francie turned
and rode towards him. Her hat was a good deal on the back of her head,
and her brilliant hair caught the sunshine; the charm of her supple
figure atoned for the crookedness of her seat, and her eyes shone with
an excitement born of the delightful sight of soldiery.
“Oh, Mr. Lambert, weren’t those the officers?” she cried, as he rode up
to her; “which was which? Haven’t they a grand little steamer?”
Lambert’s temper had apparently not been improved by his conversation
with Julia Duffy; instead of answering Miss Fitzpatrick he looked at her
with a clouded brow, and in his heart he said, “Damn the officers!”
“I wonder which of them is the captain?” continued Francie; “I suppose
it is the little fair one; he was much the best dressed, and he was
making the other one do all the work?”
Lambert gave a scornful laugh.
“I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself. I’ll engage it won’t be
long before you know all about them. You’ve made a good start already.”
“Oh, very well,” replied Francie, letting fall both the reins in order
to settle her hat; “some day you’ll be asking me something, and I won’t
tell you, and then you’ll be sorry.”
“Some day you’ll be breaking your neck, and then _you’ll_ be sorry,”
retorted Lambert, taking up the fallen reins.
They rode out of the gate of Gurthnamuckla in silence, and after a mile
of trotting, which was to Francie a period of mingled pain and anxiety,
the horses slackened of their own accord, and began to pick their way
gingerly over the smooth sheets of rock that marked the entry of the
road into the stony tract mentioned in the last chapter. Francie took
the opportunity for a propitiatory question.
“What were you and the old woman talking about all that time? I thought
you were never coming.”
“Business,” said Lambert shortly; then viciously, “if any conversation
with a woman can ever be called business.”
“Oho! then you couldn’t get her to do what you wanted!” laughed Francie;
“very good for you too! I think you always get your own way.”
“Is that your opinion?” said Lambert, turning his dark eyes upon her;
“I’m sorry I can’t agree with you.”
The fierce heat had gone out of the afternoon as they passed along the
lonely road, through the country of rocks and hazel bushes; the sun was
sending low flashes into their eyes from the bright mirror of the lake;
the goats that hopped uncomfortably about in the enforced and detested
_tête-à-tête_ caused by a wooden yoke across their necks, cast blue
shadows of many-legged absurdity on the warm slabs of stone; a carrion
crow, swaying on the thin topmost bough of a thorn-bush, a blot in the
mellow afternoon sky, was looking about him if haply he could see a
wandering kid whose eyes would serve him for his supper; and a couple of
miles away, at Rosemount, Mrs. Lambert was sending down to be kept hot
what she and Charlotte had left of the Sally Lunn.
Francie was not sorry when she found herself again under the trees of
the Lismoyle highroad, and in spite of the injuries which the pommels of
the saddle were inflicting upon her, and the growing stiffness of all
her muscles, she held gallantly on at a sharp trot, till her hair-pins
and her hat were loosed from their foundations, and her green habit rose
in ungainly folds. They were nearing Rosemount when they heard wheels
behind them. Lambert took the left side of the road, and the black mare
followed his example with such suddenness, that Francie, when she had
recovered her equilibrium, could only be thankful that nothing more than
her hat had come off. With the first instinct of woman she snatched at
the coils of hair that fell down her back and hung enragingly over her
eyes, and tried to wind them on to her head again. She became horribly
aware that a waggonette with several people in it had pulled up beside
her, and, finally, that a young man with a clean-shaved face and an
eyeglass was handing her her hat and taking off his own.
Holding in her teeth the few hair-pins that she had been able to save
from the wreck, she stammered a gratitude that she was far from feeling;
and when she heard Lambert say, “Oh, thank you, Dysart, you just saved
me getting off,” she felt that her discomfiture was complete.