The drive in the spring-cart was the first moment of comparative ease
from suffering that Julia had known that day. Her tormented brain was
cooled by the soft steady rush of air in her face, and the mouthful of
“potheen” that she had drunk had at first the effect of dulling all her
perceptions. The cart drove up the back avenue, and at the yard gate
Julia asked the man to put her down. She clambered out of the cart with
great difficulty, and going round to the hall door, went toilfully up
the steps and rang the bell. Sir Benjamin was out, Lady Dysart was out,
Mr. Dysart was out; so Gorman told her, with a doubtful look at the
black Sunday gown that seemed to him indicative of the bearer of a
begging petition, and he did not know when they would be in. He shut the
door, and Julia went slowly down the steps again.
She had begun to walk mechanically away from the house, when she saw Sir
Benjamin in his chair coming up a side walk. His face, with its white
hair, gold spectacles, and tall hat, looked so sane and dignified,
that, in spite of what Norry had said, she determined to carry out her
first intention of speaking to him. She shivered, though the sun blazed
hotly down upon her, as she walked towards the chair, not from
nervousness, but from the creeping sense of illness, and the ground rose
up in front of her as if she were going up-hill. She made a low bow to
her landlord, and James Canavan, who knew her by sight, stopped the
onward course of the chair.
“I wish to speak to you on an important matter, Sir Benjamin,” began
Julia in her best voice; “I was unable to see your agent, so I
determined to come to yourself.”
The gold spectacles were turned upon her fixedly, and the expression of
the eyes behind them was more intelligent than usual.
“Begad, that’s one of the tenants, James,” said Sir Benjamin, looking up
at his attendant.
“Certainly, Sir Benjamin, certainly; this lady is Miss Duffy, from
Gurthnamuckla,” replied the courtly James Canavan. “An old tenant, I
might almost say an old friend of your honour’s.”
“And what the devil brings her here?” inquired Sir Benjamin, glowering
at her under the wide brim of his hat.
“Sir Benjamin,” began Julia again, “I know your memory’s failing you,
but you might remember that after the death of my father, Hubert
Duffy--” Julia felt all the Protestant and aristocratic associations of
the name as she said it--“you made a promise to me in your office that I
should never be disturbed in my holding of the land.”
“Devil so ugly a man as Hubert Duffy ever I saw,” said Sir Benjamin,
with a startling flight of memory; “and you’re his daughter, are you?
Begad, the dairymaid didn’t distinguish herself!”
“Yes, I am his daughter, Sir Benjamin,” replied Julia, catching at this
flattering recognition. “I and my family have always lived on your
estate, and my grandfather has often had the honour of entertaining you
and the rest of the gentry, when they came fox-hunting through
Gurthnamuckla. I am certain that it is by no wish of yours, or of your
kind and honourable son, Mr. Christopher, that your agent is
pairsecuting me to make me leave the farm--” Her voice failed her,
partly from the suffocating anger that rose in her at her own words, and
partly from a dizziness that made the bath-chair, Sir Benjamin, and
James Canavan, float up and down in the air before her.
Sir Benjamin suddenly began to brandish his stick. “What the devil is
she saying about Christopher? What has Christopher to say to my tenants.
D--n his insolence! He ought to be at school!”
The remarkable grimaces which James Canavan made at Julia from the back
of the bath-chair informed her that she had lighted upon the worst
possible method of ingratiating herself with her landlord, but the
information came too late.
“Send that woman away, James Canavan!” he screamed, making sweeps at her
with his oak stick. “She shall never put her d--d splay foot upon my
avenue again. I’ll thrash her and Christopher out of the place! Turn her
out, I tell you, James Canavan!”
Julia stood motionless and aghast beyond the reach of the stick, until
James Canavan motioned to her to move aside; she staggered back among
the long arms of a _lignum vitæ_, and the bath-chair, with its still
cursing, gesticulating occupant, went by her at a round pace. Then she
came slowly and uncertainly out on to the path again, and looked after
the chariot wheels of the Cæsar to whom she had appealed.
James Canavan’s coat-tails were standing out behind him as he drove the
bath-chair round the corner of the path, and Sir Benjamin’s imprecations
came faintly back to her as she stood waiting till the throbbing
giddiness should cease sufficiently for her to begin the homeward
journey that stretched, horrible and impossible, before her. Her head
ached wildly, and as she walked down the avenue she found herself
stumbling against the edge of the grass, now on one side and now on the
other. She said to herself that the people would say she was drunk, but
she didn’t care now what they said. It would be shortly till they saw
her a disgraced woman, with the sheriff coming to put her out of her
father’s house on to the road. She gave a hard, short sob as this
occurred to her, and she wondered if she would have the good luck to
die, supposing she let herself fall down on the grass, and lay there in
the burning sun and took no more trouble about anything. Her thoughts
came to her slowly and with great difficulty, but, once come, they
whirled and hammered in her brain with the reiteration of chiming bells.
She walked on, out of the gate, and along the road to Lismoyle,
mechanically going in the shade where there was any, and avoiding the
patches of broken stones, as possibly a man might who was walking out to
be shot, but apathetically unconscious of what was happening.
At about this time the person whose name Julia Duffy had so
unfortunately selected to conjure with was sitting under a tree on the
slope opposite the hall door at Tally Ho, reading aloud a poem of
Rossetti’s.
“Her eyes were like the wave within,
Like water reeds the poise
Of her soft body, dainty thin;
And like the water’s noise
Her plaintive voice.
“For him the stream had never welled
In desert tracts malign
So sweet; nor had he ever felt
So faint in the sunshine
Of Palestine.”
Francie’s attention, which had revived at the description of the Queen,
began to wander again. The sound in Christopher’s voice told that the
words were touching something deeper than his literary perception, and
her sympathy answered to the tone, though the drift of the poem was dark
to her. The music of the lines had just power enough upon her ear to
predispose her to sentiment, and at present, sentiment with Francie
meant the tender repose of her soul upon the thought of Mr. Gerald
Hawkins.
A pause at turning over a leaf recalled her again to the fact of
Christopher, with a transition not altogether unpleasant; she looked
down at him as he lay on the grass, and began to wonder, as she had
several times wondered before, if he really were in love with her.
Nothing seemed more unlikely. Francie admitted it to herself as she
watched his eyes following the lines in complete absorption, and knew
that she had neither part nor lot in the things that touched him most
nearly.
But the facts were surprising, there was no denying that. Even without
Charlotte to tell her so she was aware that Christopher detested the
practice of paying visits even more sincerely than most men, and was
certainly not in the habit of visiting in Lismoyle. Except to see her,
there was no reason that could bring him to Tally Ho. Surer than all
fact, however, and rising superior to mere logic, was her instinctive
comprehension of men and their ways, and sometimes she was almost sure
that he came, not from kindness, or from that desire to improve her mind
which she had discerned and compassionated, but because he could not
help himself. She had arrived at one of these thrilling moments of
certainty when Christopher’s voice ceased upon the words, “Thy jealous
God,” and she knew that the time had come for her to say something
appropriate.
“Oh thank you, Mr. Dysart--that’s--that’s awfully pretty. It’s a sort of
religious thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Christopher, looking at her with a
wavering smile, and feeling as if he had stepped suddenly to the ground
out of a dream of flying; “the hero’s a pilgrim, and that’s always
something.”
“I know a lovely song called ‘The Pilgrim of Love,’” said Francie
timidly; “of course it wasn’t the same thing as what you were reading,
but it was awfully nice too.”
Christopher looked up at her, and was almost convinced that she must
have absorbed something of the sentiment if not the sense of what he had
read, her face was so sympathetic and responsive. With that expression
in her limpid eyes it gave him a peculiar sensation to hear her say the
name of Love; it was even a delight, and fired his imagination with the
picturing of what it would be like to hear her say it with all her
awakened soul. He might have said something that would have suggested
his feeling, in the fragmentary, inferential manner that Francie never
knew what to make of, but that her eyes strayed away at a click of the
latch of the avenue gate, and lost their unworldliness in the sharp and
easy glance that is the unvalued privilege of the keen-sighted.
“Who in the name of goodness is this?” she said, sitting up and gazing
at a black figure in the avenue; “it’s some woman or other, but she
looks very queer.”
“I can’t see that it matters much who it is,” said Christopher
irritably, “so long as she doesn’t come up here, and she probably will
if you let her see you.”
“Mercy on us! she looks awful!” exclaimed Francie incautiously; “why,
it’s Miss Duffy, and her face as red as I don’t know what--oh, she’s
seen us!”
The voice had evidently reached Julia Duffy’s ears; she came stumbling
on, with her eyes fixed on the light blue dress under the beech tree,
and when Christopher had turned, and got his eye-glass up, she was
standing at the foot of the slope, looking at him with a blurred
recognition.
“Mr. Dysart,” she said in a hoarse voice, that, combined with her
flushed face and staring eyes, made Christopher think she was drunk,
“Sir Benjamin has driven me out of his place like a beggar; me, whose
family is as long on his estate as himself; and his agent wants to drive
me out of my farm that was promised to me by your father I should never
be disturbed in it.”
“You’re Miss Duffy from Gurthnamuckla, are you not?” interrupted
Christopher, eyeing her with natural disfavour, as he got up and came
down the slope towards her.
“I am, Mr. Dysart, I am,” she said defiantly, “and you and your family
have a right to know me, and I ask you to do me justice, that I shall
not be turned out into the ditch for the sake of a lying double-faced
schemer--” Her voice failed, as it had failed before when she spoke to
Sir Benjamin, and the action of her hand that carried on her meaning had
a rage in it that hid its despair.
“I think if you have anything to say you had better write it,” said
Christopher, beginning to think that Lambert had some excuse for his
opinion of Miss Duffy, but beginning also to pity what he thought was a
spectacle of miserable middle-aged drunkenness; “you may be sure that no
injustice will be done to you--”
“Is it injustice?” broke in Julia, while the fever cloud seemed to roll
its weight back for a moment from her brain; “maybe you’d say there was
injustice if you knew all I know. Where’s Charlotte Mullen, till I tell
her to her face that I know her plots and her thricks? ’Tis to say that
to her I came here, and to tell her ’twas she lent money to Peter Joyce
that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him secondly, the way he’d
go bankrupt on me, and she’s to have my farm and my house that my
grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of the
gentry--”
Her voice had become wilder and louder, and Christopher, uncomfortably
aware that Francie could hear this indictment of Miss Mullen as
distinctly as he did, intervened again.
“Look here, Miss Duffy,” he said in a lower voice, “it’s no use talking
like this. If I can help you I will, but it would be a good deal better
if you went home now. You--you seem ill, and it’s a great mistake to
stay here exciting yourself and making a noise. Write to me, and I’ll
see that you get fair play.”
Julia threw back her head and laughed, with a venom that seemed too
concentrated for drunkenness.
“Ye’d better see ye get fair play yerself before you talk so grand about
it!” She pointed up at Francie. “Mrs. Dysart indeed!”--she bowed with a
sarcastic exaggeration, that in saner moments she would not have been
capable of--“Lady Dysart of Bruff, one of these days I suppose!”--she
bowed again. “That’s what Miss Charlotte Mullen has laid out for ye,”
addressing herself to Christopher, “and ye’ll not get away from that one
till ye’re under her foot!”
She laughed again; her face became vacant and yet full of pain, and she
staggered away down the avenue, talking violently and gesticulating with
her hands.