It was a cold east-windy morning near the middle of March, when the
roads were white and dusty, and the clouds were grey, and Miss Mullen,
seated in her new dining-room at Gurthnamuckla, was finishing her
Saturday balancing of accounts. Now that she had become a landed
proprietor, the process was more complicated than it used to be. A
dairy, pigs, and poultry cannot be managed and made to pay without
thought and trouble, and, as Charlotte had every intention of making
Gurthnamuckla pay, she spared neither time nor account books, and was
beginning to be well satisfied with the result. She had laid out a good
deal of money on the house and farm, but she was going to get a good
return for it, or know the reason why; and as no tub of skim milk was
given to the pigs, or barrow of turnips to the cows, without her
knowledge, the chances of success seemed on her side.
She had just entered, on the page headed Receipts, the sale of two pigs
at the fair, and surveyed the growing amount, in its neat figures with
complacency; then, laying down her pen, she went to the window, and
directed a sharp eye at the two men who were spreading gravel on the
reclaimed avenue, and straightening the edges of the grass.
“’Pon my word, it’s beginning to look like a gentleman’s avenue,” she
said to herself, eyeing approvingly the arch of the elm tree branches,
and the clumps of yellow daffodils, the only spots of light in the
colourless landscape, while the cawing of the building rooks had a
pleasant manorial sound in her ears. A young horse came galloping across
the lawn, with floating mane and tail, and an intention to jump the new
wooden railings that only failed him at the last moment, and resulted in
two soapy slides in the grass, that Charlotte viewed from her window
with wonderful equanimity. “I’ll give Roddy a fine blowing up when he
comes over,” she thought, as she watched the colt cutting capers among
the daffodils; “I’ll ask him if he’d like me to have his four precious
colts in to tea. He’s as bad about them as I am about the cats!” Miss
Mullen’s expression denoted that the reproof would not be of the
character to which Louisa was accustomed, and Mrs. Bruff, who had
followed her mistress into the window, sprang on a chair, and arching
her back, leaned against the well-known black alpaca apron with a
feeling that the occasion was exceptionally propitious. The movements of
Charlotte’s character, for it cannot be said to possess the power of
development, were akin to those of some amphibious thing, whose strong,
darting course under the water is only marked by a bubble or two, and it
required almost an animal instinct to note them. Every bubble betrayed
the creature below, as well as the limitations of its power of hiding
itself, but people never thought of looking out for these indications in
Charlotte, or even suspected that she had anything to conceal. There was
an almost blatant simplicity about her, a humorous rough and readiness
which, joined with her literary culture, proved business capacity, and
her dreaded temper seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least
of all of a romantic kind.
Having opened the window for a minute to scream abusive directions to
the men who were spreading gravel, she went back to the table, and,
gathering her account-books together, she locked them up in her
davenport. The room that, in Julia Duffy’s time, had been devoted to the
storage of potatoes, was now beginning life again, dressed in the faded
attire of the Tally Ho dining-room. Charlotte’s books lined one of its
newly-papered walls; the fox-hunting prints that dated from old Mr.
Butler’s reign at Tally Ho hung above the chimney-piece, and the maroon
rep curtains were those at which Francie had stared during her last and
most terrific encounter with their owner. The air of occupation was
completed by a basket on the rug in front of the fire with four
squeaking kittens in it, and by the Bible and the grey manual of
devotion out of which Charlotte read daily prayers to Louisa the orphan
and the cats. It was an ugly room, and nothing could ever make it
anything else, but with the aid of the brass-mounted grate, a few bits
of Mrs. Mullen’s silver on the sideboard, and the deep-set windows, it
had an air of respectability and even dignity that appealed very
strongly to Charlotte. She enjoyed every detail of her new possessions,
and unlike Norry and the cats, felt no regret for the urban charms and
old associations of Tally Ho. Indeed, since her aunt’s death, she had
never liked Tally Ho. There was a strain of superstition in her that,
like her love of land, showed how strongly the blood of the Irish
peasant ran in her veins; since she had turned Francie out of the house
she had not liked to think of the empty room facing her own, in which
Mrs. Mullen’s feeble voice had laid upon her the charge that she had not
kept; her dealings with table-turning and spirit-writing had expanded
for her the boundaries of the possible, and made her the more accessible
to terror of the supernatural. Here, at Gurthnamuckla, there was nothing
to harbour these suggestions; no brooding evergreens rustling outside
her bedroom window, no rooms alive with the little incidents of a past
life, no doors whose opening and shutting were like familiar voices
reminding her of the footsteps that they had once heralded. This new
house was peopled only by the pleasant phantoms of a future that she had
fashioned for herself out of the slightest and vulgarest materials, and
her wakeful nights were spent in schemings in which the romantic and the
practical were logically blended.
Norry the Boat did not, as has been hinted, share her mistress’s
satisfaction in Gurthnamuckla. For four months she had reigned in its
kitchen, and it found no more favour in her eyes than on the day when
she, with her roasting-jack in one hand and the cockatoo’s cage in the
other, had made her official entry into it. It was not so much the new
range, or the barren tidyness of the freshly-painted cupboards; these
things had doubtless been at first very distressing. But time had stored
the cupboards with the miscellanies that Norry loved to hoard, and Bid
Sal had imparted a home-like feeling to the range by wrenching the hinge
of the oven-door so that it had to be kept closed with the poker. Even
the unpleasantly dazzling whitewash was now turning a comfortable yellow
brown, and the cobwebs were growing about the hooks in the ceiling. But
none of these things thoroughly consoled Norry. Her complaints, it is
true, did not seem adequate to account for her general aspect of
discontent. Miss Mullen heard daily lamentations over the ravages
committed by Mr. Lambert’s young horses on the clothes bleaching on the
furze-bushes, the loss of “the clever little shcullery that we had in
Tally Ho,” and the fact that “if a pairson was on his dying bed for the
want of a grain o’ tay itself, he should thravel three miles before he’d
get it,” but the true grievance remained locked in Norry’s bosom. Not to
save her life would she have admitted that what was really lacking in
Gurthnamuckla was society. The messengers from the shops, the
pedlar-woman; above all, the beggars; of these she had been deprived at
a blow, and life had become a lean ill-nurtured thing without the news
with which they had daily provided her. Billy Grainy and Nance the Fool
were all that remained to her of this choice company, the former having
been retained in his offices of milk-seller, messenger, and post-boy,
and the latter, like Abdiel, faithful among the faithless, was
undeterred by the distance that had discouraged the others of her craft,
and limped once a week to Gurthnamuckla for the sake of old times and a
mug of dripping.
By these inadequate channels a tardy rill of news made its way to Miss
Mullen’s country seat, but it came poisoned by the feeling that every
one else in Lismoyle had known it for at least a week, and Norry felt
herself as much aggrieved as if she had been charged “pence apiece” for
stale eggs.
It was therefore the more agreeable that, on this same raw, grey
Saturday morning, when Norry’s temper had been unusually tried by a
search for the nest of an out-lying hen, Mary Holloran, the Rosemount
lodgewoman, should have walked into the kitchen.
“God save all here!” she said, sinking on to a chair, and wiping away
with her apron the tears that the east wind had brought to her eyes;
“I’m as tired as if I was afther walking from Galway with a bag o’
male!”
“Musha, then, _cead failthe_, Mary,” replied Norry with unusual
geniality; “is it from Judy Lee’s wake ye’re comin’?”
“I am, in throth; Lord ha’ mercy on her!” Mary Holloran raised her eyes
to the ceiling and crossed herself, and Norry and Bid Sal followed her
example. Norry was sitting by the fire singeing the yellow carcase of a
hen, and the brand of burning paper in her hand heightened the effect of
the gesture in an almost startling way. “Well now,” resumed Mary
Holloran, “she was as nice a woman as ever threw a tub of clothes on the
hill, and an honest poor craythure through all. She battled it out
well, as owld as she was.”
“Faith thin, an’ if she did die itself she was in the want of it,” said
Norry sardonically; “sure there isn’t a winther since her daughther wint
to America that she wasn’t anointed a couple of times. I’m thinking the
people th’ other side o’ death will be throuncin’ her for keepin’ them
waitin’ on her this way!”
Mary Holloran laughed a little and then wiped her face with the corner
of her apron, and sighed so as to restore a fitting tone to the
conversation.
“The neighbours was all gethered in it last night,” she observed; “they
had the two rooms full in it, an’ a half gallon of whisky, and porther
and all sorts. Indeed, her sisther’s two daughthers showed her every
respect; there wasn’t one comin’ in it, big nor little, but they’d fill
them out a glass o’ punch before they’d sit down. God bless ye, Bid
Sal,” she went on, as if made thirsty by the recollection; “have ye a
sup o’ tay in that taypot that’s on th’ oven? I’d drink the lough this
minute!”
“Is it the like o’ that ye’d give the woman?” vociferated Norry in
furious hospitality, as Bid Sal moved forward to obey this behest; “make
down the fire and bile a dhrop of wather the way she’ll get what’ll not
give her a sick shtummuck. Sure, what’s in that pot’s the lavin’s afther
Miss Charlotte’s breakfast for Billy Grainy when he comes with the post;
and good enough for the likes of him.”
“There was a good manny axing for ye last night,” began Mary Holloran
again, while Bid Sal broke up a box with the kitchen cleaver, and
revived the fire with its fragments and a little paraffin oil. “And you
a near cousin o’ the corp’. Was it herself wouldn’t let you in it?”
“Whether she’d let me in it or no I have plenty to do besides running to
every corp’-house in the counthry,” returned Norry with an acerbity that
showed how accurate Mary Holloran’s surmise had been; “if thim that was
in the wake seen me last night goin’ out to the cow that’s afther
calvin’ with the quilt off me bed to put over her, maybe they’d have
less chat about me.”
Mary Holloran was of a pacific turn, and she tried another topic. “Did
ye hear that John Kenealy was afther summonsing me mother before the
Binch?” she said, unfastening her heavy blue cloak and putting her feet
up on the fender of the range.
“Ah, God help ye, how would I hear annything?” grumbled Norry; “it’d be
as good for me to be in heaven as to be here, with ne’er a one but Nance
the Fool comin’ next or nigh me.”
“Oh, indeed, that’s the thruth,” said Mary Holloran with polite but
transient sympathy. “Well, whether or no, he summonsed her, and all the
raison he had for putting that scandal on her, was thim few little hins
and ducks she have, that he seen different times on his land, themselves
and an owld goat thravellin’ the fields, and not a bit nor a bite before
them in it that they’d stoop their heads to, only what sign of grass was
left afther the winther, and faith! that’s little. ’Twas last Tuesday,
Lady-Day an’ all, me mother was bringin’ in a goaleen o’ turf, an’ he
came thundherin’ round the house, and every big rock of English he had
he called it to her, and every soort of liar and blagyard--oh, indeed,
his conduck was not fit to tell to a jackass--an’ he summonsed her
secondly afther that. Ye’d think me mother’d lose her life when she seen
the summons, an’ away she legged it into Rosemount to meself, the way
I’d spake to the masther to lane heavy on Kenealy the day he’d bring her
into coort. ‘An’ indeed,’ says I to the masther, ‘is it to bring me
mother into coort!’ says I; ‘sure she’s hardly able to lave the bed,’
says I, ‘an owld little woman that’s not four stone weight! She’s not
that size,’ says I--” Mary Holloran measured accurately off the upper
joints of her first two fingers--“‘Sure ye’d blow her off yer hand! And
Kenealy sayin’ she pelted the pavement afther him, and left a backward
sthroke on him with the shovel!’ says I. But in any case the masther
gave no satisfaction to Kenealy, and he arbithrated him the way he
wouldn’t be let bring me mother into coort, an’ two shillin’ she paid
for threspass, and thank God she’s able to do that same, for as desolate
as Kenealy thinks her.”
“Lambert’s a fine arbithrator,” said Norry, dispassionately. “Here, Bid
Sal, run away out to the lardher and lave this within in it,” handing
over the singed hen, “and afther that, go on out and cut cabbages for
the pigs. Divil’s cure to ye! Can’t ye make haste! I suppose ye think
it’s to be standin’ lookin’ at the people that ye get four pounds a year
an’ yer dite! Thim gerrls is able to put annyone that’d be with them
into a decay,” she ended, as Bid Sal reluctantly withdrew, “and there’s
not a word ye’ll say but they’ll gallop through the counthry tellin’
it.” Then, dropping into a conversational tone, “Nance was sayin’
Lambert was gone to Dublin agin, but what signifies what the likes of
her’d say; it couldn’t be he’d be goin’ in it agin and he not home a
week from it.”
Mary Holloran pursed up her mouth portentously.
“Faith he _could_ go in it, and it’s in it he’s gone,” she said,
beginning upon a new cup of tea, as dark and sweet as treacle, that
Norry had prepared for her. “Ah, musha! Lord have mercy on thim that’s
gone; ’tis short till they’re forgotten!”
Norry contented herself with an acquiescing sound, devoid of
interrogation, but dreary enough to be encouraging. Mrs. Holloran’s
saucer had received half the contents of her cup, and was now delicately
poised aloft on the outspread fingers of her right hand, while her right
elbow rested on the table according to the etiquette of her class, and
Norry knew that the string of her friend’s tongue would loosen of its
own accord.
“Seven months last Monday,” began Mary Holloran in the voice of a
professional reciter; “seven months since he berrid her, an’ if he gives
three more in the widda ye may call me a liar.”
“Tell the truth!” exclaimed Norry, startled out of her self-repression
and stopping short in the act of poking the fire. “D’ye tell me it’s to
marry again he’d go, an’ the first wife’s clothes on his cook this
minit?”
Mary Holloran did not reveal by look or word the gratification that she
felt. “God forbid I’d rise talk or dhraw scandal,” she continued with
the same pregnant calm, “but the thruth it is an’ no slandher, for the
last month there’s not a week--arrah what week--no, but there’s hardly
the day, but a letther goes to the post for--for one you know well, an’
little boxeens and re_jes_tered envelopes an’ all sorts. An’ letthers
coming from that one to him to further ordhers! Sure I’d know the
writin’. Hav’n’t she her name written the size of I don’t know what on
her likeness that he have shtuck out on the table.”
Mary Holloran broke off like a number of a serial story, with a
carefully interrupted situation, and sipped her tea assiduously. Norry
advanced slowly from the fireplace with the poker still clutched in her
hand, and her glowing eyes fixed upon her friend, as if she were
stalking her.
“For the love o’ God, woman!” she whispered, “is it Miss Francie?”
“Now ye have it,” said Mary Holloran.
Norry clasped her hands, poker and all, and raised them in front of her
face, while her eyes apparently communed with a familiar spirit at the
other end of the kitchen. They puzzled Mary Holloran, who fancied she
discerned in them a wild and quite irrelevant amusement, but before
further opinions could be interchanged, a dragging step was heard at the
back door, a fumbling hand lifted the latch, and Billy Grainy came in
with the post-bag over his shoulder and an empty milk-can in his hand.
“Musha, more power to ye, Billy!” said Mary Holloran, concealing her
disgust at the interruption with laudable good breeding, and making a
grimace of lightning quickness at Norry, expressive of the secrecy that
was to be observed; “’tis you’re the grand post-boy!”
“Och thin I am,” mumbled Billy sarcastically, as he let the post-bag
slip from his shoulders to the table, “divil a boot nor a leg is left on
me with the thravelling!” He hobbled over to the fireplace, and, taking
the teapot off the range, looked into it suspiciously. “This is a quare
time o’ day for a man to be atin’ his breakfast! Divil dom the bit I’d
ate in this house agin’ if it wasn’t for the nathure I have for the
place--”
Norry banged open a cupboard, and took from it a mug with some milk in
it, and a yellow pie-dish, in which were several stale ends of loaves.
“Take it or lave it afther ye!” she said, putting them down on the
table. “If ye had nathure for risin’ airly out o’ yer bed the tay
wouldn’t be waitin’ on ye this way, an’ if ourselves can’t plaze ye, ye
can go look for thim that will. ‘Thim that’s onaisy let thim quit!’”
Norry cared little whether Billy Grainy was too deaf to take in this
retort or no. Mary Holloran and her own self-respect were alike
gratified, and taking up the post-bag she proceeded with it to the
dining-room.
“Well, Norry,” said Charlotte jocularly, looking round from the
bookshelf that she was tidying, “is it only now that old thief’s brought
the post? or have ye been flirting with him in the kitchen all this
time?”
Norry retired from the room with a snarl of indescribable scorn, and
Charlotte unlocked the bag and drew forth its contents. There were three
letters for her, and she laid one of them aside at once while she read
the other two. One was from a resident in Ferry Lane, an epistle that
began startlingly, “Honored Madman,” and slanted over two sides of the
note-paper in lamentable entreaties for a reduction of the rent and a
little more time to pay it in. The other was an invitation from Mrs.
Corkran to meet a missionary, and tossing both down with an equal
contempt, she addressed herself to the remaining one. She was in the act
of opening it when she caught sight of the printed name of a hotel upon
its flap, and she suddenly became motionless, her eyes staring at the
name, and her face slowly reddening all over.
“Bray!” she said between her teeth, “what takes him to Bray, when he
told me to write to him to the Shelbourne?”
She opened the letter, a long and very neatly written one, so neat, in
fact, as to give to a person who knew Mr. Lambert’s handwriting in all
its phases the idea of very unusual care and a rough copy.
“My dear Charlotte,” it began, “I know you will be surprised at the
news I have to tell you in this letter, and so will many others;
indeed I am almost surprised at it myself.” Charlotte’s left hand
groped backwards till it caught the back of a chair and held on to
it, but her eyes still flew along the lines. “You are my oldest and
best friend, and so you are the first I would like to tell about
it, and I would value your good wishes far beyond any others that
might be offered to me, especially as I hope you will soon be my
relation as well as my friend. I am engaged to Francie Fitzpatrick,
and we are to be married as soon as possible.”
The reader sat heavily down upon the chair behind her, her colour
fading from red to a dirty yellow as she read on. “I am aware that
many will say that I am not showing proper respect towards poor
dear Lucy in doing this, but you, or any one that knew her well,
will support me in saying that I never was wanting in that to her
when she was alive, and that she would be the last to wish I should
live a lonely and miserable life now that she is gone. It is a
great pleasure to me to think that she always had such a liking for
Francie, for her own sake as well as because she was your cousin.
It was my intention to have put off the marriage for a year, but I
heard a couple of days ago from Robert Fitzpatrick that the
investment that Francie’s little fortune had been put into was in a
very shaky state, and that there is no present chance of dividends
from it. He offered to let her live with them as usual, but they
have not enough to support themselves. Francie was half starved
there, and it is no place for her to be, and so we have arranged to
be married very quietly down here at Bray, on the twentieth--just a
week from to-day. I will take her to London, or perhaps a little
further for a week or so, and about the first or second week in
April I hope to be back in Rosemount. I know, my dear Charlotte, my
dear old friend, that this must appear a sudden and hasty step, but
I have considered it well and thoroughly. I know too that when
Francie left your house there was some trifling little quarrel
between you, but I trust you will forget all about that, and that
you will be the first to welcome her when she returns to her new
home. She begs me to say that she is sorry for anything she said to
annoy you, and would write to you if she thought you would like to
hear from her. I hope you will be as good a friend to her as you
have always been to me, and will be ready to help and advise her in
her new position. I would be greatly obliged to you if you would
let the Lismoyle people know of my marriage, and of the reasons
that I have told you for hurrying it on this way; you know yourself
how glad they always are to get hold of the wrong end of a story. I
am going to write to Lady Dysart myself. Now, my dear Charlotte, I
must close this letter. The above will be my address for a week,
and I will be very anxious to hear from you. With much love from
Francie and myself, I remain your attached friend,
RODERICK LAMBERT.”
A human soul, when it has broken away from its diviner part and is left
to the anarchy of the lower passions, is a poor and humiliating
spectacle, and it is unfortunate that in its animal want of self-control
it is seldom without a ludicrous aspect. The weak side of Charlotte’s
nature was her ready abandonment of herself to fury that was, as often
as not, wholly incompatible with its cause, and now that she had been
dealt the hardest blow that life could give her, there were a few
minutes in which rage, and hatred, and thwarted passion took her in
their fierce hands, and made her for the time a wild beast. When she
came to herself she was standing by the chimney-piece, panting and
trembling; the letter lay in pieces on the rug, torn by her teeth, and
stamped here and there with the semicircle of her heel; a chair was
lying on its side on the floor, and Mrs. Bruff was crouching aghast
under the sideboard, looking out at her mistress with terrified inquiry.
Charlotte raised her hand and drew it across her mouth with the
unsteadiness of a person in physical pain, then, grasping the edge of
the chimney-piece, she laid her forehead upon it and drew a few long
shuddering breaths. It is probable that if anyone had then come into the
room, the human presence, with its mysterious electric quality, would
have drawn the storm outwards in a burst of hysterics; but solitude
seems to be a non-conductor, and a parched sob, that was strangled in
its birth by an imprecation, was the only sound that escaped from her.
As she lifted her head again her eyes met those of a large cabinet
photograph of Lambert that stared brilliantly at her with the handsome
fatuity conferred by an over-touched negative. It was a recent one,
taken during one of those visits to Dublin whose object had been always
so plausibly explained to her, and, as she looked at it, the biting
thought of how she had been hoodwinked and fooled, by a man to whom she
had all her life laid down the law, drove her half mad again. She
plucked it out of its frame with her strong fingers, and thrust it hard
down into the smouldering fire.
“If it was hell I’d do the same for you!” she said, with a moan like
some furious feline creature, as she watched the picture writhe in the
heat, “and for her too!” She took up the poker, and with it drove and
battered the photograph into the heart of the fire, and then, flinging
down the poker with a crash that made Louisa jump as she crossed the
hall, she sat down at the dinner-table and made her first effort at
self-control.
“His old friend!” she said, gasping and choking over the words; “the
cur, the double-dyed cur! Lying and cringing to me, and borrowing my
money, and--and--” even to herself she could not now admit that he had
gulled her into believing that he would eventually marry her--“and
sneaking after her behind my back all the time! And now he sends me her
love--her love! Oh, my God Almighty--” she tried to laugh, but instead
of laughter came tears, as she saw herself helpless, and broken, and
aimless for the rest of her life--“I won’t break down--I won’t break
down--” she said, grinding her teeth together with the effort to repress
her sobs. She staggered blindly to the sideboard, and, unlocking it,
took out a bottle of brandy. She put the bottle to her mouth and took a
long gulp from it, while the tears ran down her face.