The ring of the trowel travelled far on the wind across the heather, a
voice of civilization, saying pertinent, unhesitating things to a
country where all was loose, and limitless, and inexact. Up here, by the
shores of Lough Turc, people had, from all ages, told the time by the
sun, and half-an-hour either way made no difference to any one;
now--most wondrous of all impossibilities--the winter sunrise was daily
heralded by the steely shriek of an engine whirling truckloads of men to
their work across the dark and dumb bog-lands. The trout in the lakes no
longer glided to safety at the recurrence of the strange tremor and
clatter that accompanied the twilights, the wild duck no longer
splashed into wing along the water’s surface, and the people scattered
among the hillsides already counted as their chiefest landmark the red
gable of the new railway-station.
Every morning saw a villageful of men shot into it; bricklayers working
high up in the gable, stone-cutters dressing limestone blocks with
infinite chip and clink, workmen shovelling gravel, and over all the
voice of the ganger arising at intervals in earnest, profuse profanity.
The Dublin artisans worked in silence, except when one or other trolled
forth one of the ditties of his class--genteel romance, with a waltz
refrain, or obscure vulgarity of the three-penny music-hall, yet
representing to the singer the songs of Zion in a strange land; while
the local gang used every chance of proximity to carry on a low growl of
conversation. Whether it was the party of twenty whose picks and spades
were gradually levelling and filling the unfinished platform, or the two
whose voices ascended in Irish from the depths of the well that they
were sinking, the general topic was the same, and was one that
intimately concerned Mr. Glasgow.
“Jim Mulloy’s brother told me he seen the paymasther ’ere yestherday in
Letther Kyle,” said a withered little man, who was mixing mortar with
extraordinary deliberation. “He was comin’ out o’ the bank, an’ he
havin’ the brown bag with him.”
“Maybe it’s little chance oursel’ has of it, whether or no,” responded
his satellite, a red-faced youth, whose occupation of eternally shaking
sand through a sieve might well foster pessimism. “Don’t ye know well
thim isn’t workin’ for nothin’”--indicating the bricklayers on the
gable, and the portly and prosperous stonemasons, chipping away in
professional silence. “Short thim fellows’d be leggin’ it away to Dublin
if they wasn’t gettin’ their pay; an’ d----d well Glasgow knows it’s
the likes of us must be waitin’ on him!”
The man who was supplying the sand tilted his barrow up on end and
leaned on the handles, secure in the knowledge that the ganger was
engaged at the other side of the station in raining down expletives upon
the heads of the sinkers of the well.
“It’s what they’re sayin’ beyond,” he remarked, jerking his head in the
direction of the men working at the platform, “that what has him
desthroyed is the bog of Tully. Eight months now they’re sthrivin’ to
fill that spot.”
“An’ if they were eight months more,” said the man who was mixing the
mortar, “they’ll not fill it.” He took off the tin lid of his pipe and
stirred up its embers with a horny fore-finger. “Betther for him not to
be intherfarin’ with the likes o’ that place.”
The pessimist with the sieve laughed with the superiority of youth, and
of a reader of the _Daily Independent_.
“There’s wather runnin’ undher the ground there in every place,” went on
the same speaker, “me father knew that well--sure the bog itsel’ is
only sittin’ on it. There’s holes up in Cahirdreen that’s sixty feet
deep, and wather runnin’ in the bottom o’ them. ’Tis out undher Tully
that wather goes. Sure there was a man had a grand heifer--God knows
ye’d sooner be lookin’ at her than atin’ yer dinner--she fell down in
one o’ them holes, and went away undher the ground with the wather. As
sure as I’m alive, they heard her screeching up through the bog!”
The reader of the _Independent_ was half-staggered, and the ganger, who
had advanced upon the party with the quietness of a dangerous bull, here
broke upon the conversation in gross and fervid oratory.
“They’re gettin’ it in style down there,” said one of the platform
party. “By damn, if he comes to talkin’ to me, I’ll throw down the
shovel and ax him where is me three weeks’ wages!”
“Maybe ye will, Mortheen,” rejoined his next-door neighbour, “an’ maybe
this time next week ye’ll be afther him axing him to take ye back.”
“Is it _him_?” replied the undaunted Mortheen; “little I’d think of
breaking his snout for him, or Glasgow’s ayther!”
As he spoke, the whistle of an engine, thinned by distance, made itself
heard, and away on the horizon the steam cloud blossomed like a silver
flower against the sunny sky.
When the engine and its accompanying brake-van drew up at the station,
Glasgow’s eye could discover no flaw in the exemplary and dead silent
industry that prevailed. The shovelfuls flung by Mortheen were heavier
and more frequent than those of his fellows, and even the spectacle of
Lady Susan emerging in sables from the van and passing among the buckets
and heaps of lime, did not seem to be noticed by so much as the lift of
an eyelid. It was almost one o’clock, and the ganger, transformed into
an official of submissive urbanity, sounded his whistle for the
dinner-hour. The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds,
and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into
the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the
desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step.
Their employer’s picnic-party was already established in the
newly-roofed kitchen of the new station, by a fire of chips and bits of
plank. A luncheon-basket stood on a carpenter’s bench, a
champagne-bottle on the window-sill, and Lady Susan and Slaney were
sitting on boxes by the fire, eating game pie. Lady Susan had violets in
her toque, and possessed more strikingly than usual that air of being
very handsome that is not always given to handsome people. Behind her
the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a
myriad sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the grey and
faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a
background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host.
“How far do you want us to walk?” she said, looking over her shoulder at
the view, “all the way to that wood there? How silly of you to say the
bikes would be no use!”
“I don’t dispute the fact that they would have been of use to you and
Major Bunbury,” replied her host, cutting the wires of the second bottle
of champagne.
“It’s so contemptible of you not to learn the bike,” she went on, with a
manner half discontented, half brusque. “It’s all prejudice.”
“I’m beginning to cultivate prejudice,” said Glasgow, retaining the cork
with skill, “it’s so respectable. Churchwardens and generals and heads
of departments are always prejudiced.”
“I didn’t know that you were so wonderfully addicted to respectability,”
said Lady Susan, with a laugh and a look that made Slaney feel rather
hot--“since when, may I ask?” Lady Susan was too careless and too
little disposed for the toils of finesse to foster a flirtation for its
own sake; when she did find a sufficing motive, these same qualities
created a startling directness of method.
“Since when?” repeated Glasgow. “Oh, since I took to church-going, I
suppose. Perhaps Miss Morris could tell you!”
Slaney had become accustomed to these morsels flung to the memory of a
past, but they never failed to remind her of the moment when she had
placed herself for ever at a disadvantage.
“I’m not a very good authority,” she said, with a smile as cold as the
January wind; “Uncle Charles has a better memory for things connected
with church-going.”
The intention to be unresponsive often makes itself felt more
disagreeably than a repartee. It annoyed Glasgow, even while he set it
down as an indirect tribute to his desertion.
“I refuse to be described as a thing connected with church-going,” he
said, looking straight at her and laughing; “I thought I had other
associations.”
Major Bunbury looked up quickly, not at Glasgow, but at Slaney. Her
flushed silence was obvious enough for any one, except Lady Susan, who
merely supposed that champagne at luncheon was having its almost
inevitable result on the complexion. Perhaps it was by contrast that
Glasgow’s habitual pallor seemed pastiness, and his easy manner
something that struck Major Bunbury as being like bad form.
“I say,” remarked Lady Susan, “when are we to go on and see this
wonderful waterfall, or whatever it is? Where are the cigarettes? Let’s
light up before we start.”
“I think you’d better not,” said Glasgow, “the men will be back
directly.”
“Well, what do they matter?”
“I think you’d better not,” he repeated, in that intimate tone that
seemed so uncalled for.
Lady Susan put up her eyebrows with an expression of petulant inquiry,
and something as near a pout as was possible for a person not versed in
the habit, but she shut her cigarette-case. Major Bunbury thought he had
never seen her look so foolish.
“Is she going to lose her head about him?” was the question that was
suddenly driven in upon him. Until to-day, he thought she was merely
occupying idleness and exhibiting indifferent taste.
He and Slaney walked behind her and Glasgow along the muddy road, in
that double _tête-à-tête_ now become inevitable; the wind blew cold and
sweet off the lake and off the bog--cold, and sweet, and inimitably
Irish, like Slaney herself, as Major Bunbury was at this moment capable
of expressing it, if he had known that he was making the comparison. His
mind had unconsciously stored up many such impressions of her, to what
end it had not occurred to him to inquire. The road crossed a
trout-stream, and by the bridge Glasgow and Lady Susan turned off and
began to follow the bank of the little river through a stunted and
intricate wood. In the track by which they made their way it was not
possible to walk side by side; Bunbury went first, sometimes holding
back a branch, sometimes giving her his hand when the rocks of the river
brink thrust their slippery shoulders across the way. They spoke little,
and by the gift of imaginative sympathy that was hers for those who
interested her, she knew that his silence was vexed with misgiving about
Lady Susan.
The river was brimming full, and, as it raced, the black water and the
cold froth washed in deep eddies between the rocks; the sunlit bank
opposite was red with withered bracken and sedge; the soft booming of a
waterfall came to the ear. Passing round the curve they saw the thick
and creamy column of water plunge from its edge of low crag to its ruin
among the boulders; above it two or three battered fir-trees stood on
the high ground, grey and straight and rigid beside the lavish rush and
confusion.
Lady Susan was leaning against one of the fir-trees, smoking her
cigarette, and looking fixedly and dreamily at the water; Glasgow, with
her fur-lined coat on his arm, was standing very close to her, looking
as if he had said something to which she had not as yet replied. She did
not move when Slaney and Bunbury joined them, and was unaffectedly
uninterested in general conversation. Slaney had never thought her so
handsome; her eyes seemed to look out of her heart and into a remote
place unseen of others, instead of summing up things around her with her
wonted practical glance.
It was against all theories of woman-kind, yet the fact remained that
Slaney liked Lady Susan.