THE MASTER OF DURRUS.
“My father’s brother; but no more like my father than I to Hercules.”
As the carriage drew up at the hall door it was opened by a stout
elderly man, who came forward with such empressement that for a moment I
thought it was my uncle. Before, however, I had time to speak, he said
with much excitement--
“Your honour’s welcome, Miss Sarsfield!”
Willy checked further remark on his part by shovelling our many parcels
into his arms; but as soon as we had got into the hall, he let them all
go, and caught hold of my hand and kissed it.
“Glory be to God that I should have lived to see this day! I never
thought I’d be bringing Masther Owen’s child into this house. Thank God!
thank God!”
“Come, Roche, that will do for a start,” said Willy, laughing. “Keep the
rest for another day. Here’s the master.”
Roche hastily let go my hand, as a tall bowed figure came across the
hall to meet me.
“Well, my dear Theodora, so you have found your way at last to these
western wilds,” said my uncle, and kissed me on the forehead, taking
both my hands in his as he did so.
His manner was an extreme contrast to Willy’s affable familiarity, and I
was struck by the absence of Irish accent in his voice, which had a
mellifluous propriety of intonation.
He led me into the room he had just left, a small library, and placed a
chair for me in front of the fireplace.
“You must be cold after your long journey. Sit down and warm yourself,”
he said politely, adding another log to the furnace that was blazing in
the old brass-mounted grate.
He rubbed his long white hands together and drew back, so as to let the
light of the lamp fall on my face.
“And your--a--relatives in America--you left them quite well, I hope? I
dare say they resent your desertion of them very bitterly?” He laughed a
little.
I made some perfunctory reply, and sat warming one frozen foot after the
other, while my uncle stood with his back to the lamp, and surveyed me
with guarded intentness.
I had expected him to be perhaps formal, in an old-world, courteous way;
but this strained and glacial geniality was a very different thing, and
disconcerted me considerably.
“How unlike he is to Willy! I wish he would not stare at me like that. I
don’t think he is a bit glad to see me,” I thought, with hasty
inconsequence. “Why does he not speak? Well, I will,” and I made an
ordinary remark about my journey. My voice seemed to startle him from a
reverie. He put his hand to his eyes, and made some alteration in the
lamp before replying.
It was a distinct relief when, at this juncture, Willy came in, and
offered to show me the way to my room. We passed through the dark
entrance-hall, whose depths were inadequately lighted by a cheap lamp,
its orange light forming a dingy halo that contended hopelessly with the
surrounding gloom. At the end of the hall was a broad flight of stairs,
that at the first landing branched into two narrower flights leading to
a corridor running round the hall. Passing along one side of this
corridor, Willy opened a door at the end of it.
“Here you are,” he said; “and I told them to bring you up a cup of tea;
I thought you looked as if you wanted it”--with which he took his
departure.
I was grateful for Willy’s unexpected thoughtfulness in the matter of
the tea. My uncle’s reception had chilled me. I was tired by my long
journey, and the darkness and silence of the house had a depressing
effect upon my spirits. For weeks this arrival at Durrus had been
constantly in my mind, and now that it was over, the only definite
emotions it seemed to have produced were disappointment and dejection.
I looked round me as I sipped my tea, and did not feel enlivened by what
I saw. The room was large and bare. The paper and the curtains of the
two windows were alike detestable in colour and pattern. The enormous
bed had once been a four-poster, but the posts had been cut down, and
four meaningless stumps bore witness to the mutilation it had undergone.
A colossal wardrobe loomed in a far-off corner; a round table of
preposterous size occupied the centre of the room. Six persons could
comfortably have dined at the dressing-table. In fact, the whole room
appeared to have been fitted up for the reception of a giantess, and was
quite out of proportion to my moderate stature of five feet seven.
I have always disliked more than one door in a bedroom, as it seems to
me to afford to ghosts and burglars unnecessary facilities; and my
dislike of my gaunt apartment reached its climax when I saw a door in
the corner on the farther side of the fireplace from the door into the
corridor. It had been papered over along with the walls, and its
consequent unobtrusiveness had almost the effect of intentional
concealment. I opened it, and found that it led into a moderate-sized
bedroom. The moonlight which came through the uncurtained window lay in
greenish-white patches on the uncarpeted floor, and showed a few pieces
of furniture, shrouded in sheets and huddled in one corner. In spite of
its chill bareness, an effect of recent occupancy was given to it by a
chair that stood sideways in the window with an air of definiteness, and
underneath and beside it I noticed a few tattered books.
I went back to my own room with an unexplainable shudder, slamming the
door behind me, and proceeded to dress for dinner with all speed.
With the unfailing punctuality of a newcomer, I left my room as the gong
sounded, and, hurrying down, found my uncle and Willy waiting for me in
the library.
The dining-room was a large and imposing room. A moderate number of
portraits of the most orthodox ancestral type hung, interspersed with
mezzotints of impassioned Irish clergymen, on its panelled walls. A high
old sideboard of what seemed to me an unusual shape stretched up to the
ceiling on one side of the room, and the plate upon it twinkled in the
blaze of the fire.
We sat down at the long table; and while Willy and his father were
absorbed in overcoming the usual embarrassments offered by soup to the
wearers of moustaches, I amused myself with speculations as to who was
responsible for the subtle combination of yellow and magenta dahlias
that adorned the table. I concluded that the artist must have been the
old butler, Roche; and as, at the thought, I involuntarily looked
towards him, I found his eyes fixed upon me with the abstracted gaze of
one who is trying to trace a likeness. Our eyes met, and he shuffled
away, but I felt sure that he had been searching for a resemblance to
the refined, well-cut, humorous face which, from a miniature of thirty
years ago, I knew must be what he remembered of my father.
“It is quite an unusual pleasure to Willy and me to see a charming young
lady at our bachelor-table--eh, Willy?” said Uncle Dominick, lifting his
face from his now empty soup-plate, and smiling at me.
Willy, whose flow of language seemed checked by his father’s presence,
gave an assenting grunt.
“It is a long time since there has been a Miss Sarsfield at Durrus, and
it is thirty years since she died. You will find Willy and I are sad
barbarians, and we shall have to trust to you to civilize us.”
I am singularly unfitted to deal with the compliments of elderly
gentlemen. On this occasion I failed as signally as usual to attain the
requisite quality of playful confusion, and diverted the conversation by
a question about a claret-coloured ancestor, who had been staring at me
from his frame over the fireplace ever since we had sat down to dinner.
“That is my grandfather,” said my uncle. “Dick the Drinker, they called
him. He neither is nor was an ornament to the family; but his wife, the
beautiful Kate Coppinger, is worth looking at. In fact, my dear”--with
another smile and a little bow--“directly I saw you I was reminded of a
miniature which we have of her.”
“I hope she looks Irish,” I responded. “I have always tried to live up
to my idea of an Irish girl; but though my hair is dark, I haven’t got
violet eyes.”
“No, nor any one else either. I never heard of them out of a book,” said
Willy, abruptly.
It was almost his first contribution to the conversation; but his father
took no more notice of him than if he had not spoken, and went on eating
his dinner, taking longer over each mouthful than any one I had ever
seen.
“Then, am I not like the Sarsfields?” I asked.
My uncle paused and looked hard at me for a second or two, letting his
heavy eyebrows drop over his eyes, with a peculiar change of
expression.
“In some ways, perhaps,” he said shortly. Then, turning to Willy,
“Nugent O’Neill was here this afternoon to see you about the stopping of
some earths. I told him to come over and dine here some day next week.
Not”--turning to me--“that he is much of a ladies’ man, but he is a
gentlemanlike young fellow enough; very unlike his father,” he added, in
a bitter tone.
“Why, is Mr. O’Neill very objectionable?” I said.
I felt an unmistakable kick under the table, and Willy, with an
admonitory wink, slurred over my question by saying--
“I can tell you, O’Neill would be pretty mad if he heard you calling him
_Mr._ He’s _The_ O’Neill, and his wife’s Madam O’Neill, and they
wouldn’t call the queen their cousin.”
My uncle silently continued his dinner, but I noticed how unpleasant his
expression had become since The O’Neill was mentioned.
I finally made up my mind that his face was one I should never care for.
He was decidedly a handsome man, though unusually old-looking for his
age, which could not have been more than sixty.
His thick dark eyebrows lay like a bar across his high forehead. A long
hooked nose drooped over an iron-grey moustache, which, when he smiled,
lifted in a peculiar way, and showed long and slightly prominent yellow
teeth. His unwholesomely pallid skin was deeply lined, and hung in folds
under the dark sunken eyes, giving a look of age which was further
contributed to by the stoop in his square shoulders. As I glanced from
him to Willy, I concluded that the latter’s blonde commonplace good
looks must have been inherited from his mother.
Rousing himself from the morose silence into which he had fallen, my
uncle proceeded to apply himself to the task of entertaining me by a
dissertation on the trade and agriculture of California. I soon found
that he had all the desire to impart information which characterizes
those whose knowledge of a subject is taken from pamphlets; but I
listened with all politeness to his description of the country in which
I had lived most of my life. Willy maintained a discreet silence, but
from time to time bestowed on me glances of sympathy and approbation.
Evidently Willy did not know how to talk to his father.
As dinner progressed, I observed that, if Roche allowed his master’s
glass to remain empty, he was at once given a sign to refill it, and my
uncle became more and more diffusely instructive.
During dessert a pause at length gave me an opportunity of changing the
conversation.
“I saw such a pretty girl at your gate lodge as we drove in,” I said.
“She looked delightful in the moonlight, with a shawl thrown over her
head.”
If Uncle Dominick had looked black at the mention of The O’Neill, he
became doubly so at this apparently inoffensive remark. Glancing for
explanation to Willy, I was amazed to see that he had become crimson,
and was elaborately trying to show his want of interest in the subject
by balancing a fork on the edge of his wine-glass.
“Yes,” said my uncle; “she is a good-looking girl enough, and no one
knows it better than she does. When people in that class of life are
taken out of their proper place”--with great severity--“they at once
begin to presume.”
Willy upset his wine-glass with a sudden jerk. For my part, I was so
taken aback by this tirade, that I thought my safest plan lay in
immediate flight. Willy got up with alacrity, and, following me from the
room, opened the drawing-room door. He looked confused and annoyed.
“Can you take care of yourself in there for a while?” he said. “I’ll be
with you in a few minutes.”
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