A quarter of an hour later, as I walked up to Derryaghy, Willie Breen,
the grocer’s son, a little boy of ten or eleven, ran out from the shop,
and, after gazing carefully up and down the road, slipped a small piece
of paper into my hand. One side of this paper was painted black; on the
other a single word, “Friday,” was printed in red ink. I put it in my
pocket and walked on without making any sign or uttering a word, which
was the proper etiquette to observe under these peculiar circumstances;
and in equal silence Willie returned to the shop.
When I reached the house, though I had been intending all along to ask
for Katherine, I suddenly asked for Gerald instead.
“Gerald isn’t down yet,” Mrs. Carroll informed me, coming into the hall
from the dining-room. “Probably he’s not even out of bed. Go up and
tell him to hurry. He’s in the room next yours. Katherine is seeing
about your lunch.”
Rather reluctantly I went up to Gerald’s room and tapped at his door.
“Come in,” he said, sleepily.
He was indeed still in bed, and, in spite of the fact of our
appointment, did not seem in any hurry to get out of it.
“Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed. “Good-morning.”
I felt uncomfortable, for I was sure he would think it queer my coming
into his room when I hardly knew him. “Good-morning,” I answered,
trying to imitate the tone he had used. “I was told to tell you to
hurry.”
He sat up and yawned. “It’s late, I suppose,” he murmured. “They hadn’t
sense enough to send me up my breakfast.”
“Do you always have breakfast in your room?” I asked.
He looked out of the window as if I did not interest him. “No,” he
answered, after a perceptible pause, “but I have it when I want to.”
I felt snubbed. I didn’t know whether to stay or go, but he decided
the matter by telling me to wait till he had had his bath, that he
shouldn’t be long. He put on a dressing-gown, and left me. When he came
back I didn’t know why he had asked me to stay, for he began to dress
without taking the slightest notice of me. I sat on the edge of the bed
and watched him. It seemed to me stupid that I should feel slightly
in awe of him, but there was no use pretending that I didn’t. I had
already made up my mind that I disliked him, yet somehow I could not be
indifferent to him――I wanted him to think me important, to admire me.
He was only a year older than I was, but he was infinitely more a man
of the world, and it was this, really, that impressed me. He dressed
very quickly, yet I noticed that the result was just as harmonious
as it had been last night. His clothes were of a light brown colour,
that was exactly the same shade as his hair, and a little darker than
his skin. A pale violet tie was loosely knotted over a cambric shirt.
His forehead was broad; his yellow-brown eyes were set widely apart,
and were neither large nor small; his nose was straight and his mouth
extraordinarily delicate. His ears seemed to me, too, to have their
own peculiar beauty. His skin was of a golden-brown colour, but clear
almost to transparency, and a tiny blue vein was faintly visible on his
left temple, running from the delicate eyebrow to the cheekbone. When
he listened his brows slightly wrinkled. I would have given a good
deal to have looked like him.
Suddenly I caught his eyes in the mirror watching me ironically. “Do
you know you were extremely rude to me yesterday?” he said, without
turning round.
I blushed and had nothing to reply.
“Well, I forgive you.” He patted me on the shoulder. “I’m ready now.
Come along.”
“Why wouldn’t you play properly when you were asked?” I blurted out, as
we went downstairs.
“I would have played if there had been anybody to play to. Neither
Katherine nor Aunt Clara knows _God save the Queen_ from the _Moonlight
Sonata_, and that Dick person is too absurd for words. I’ll play for
you some time when they aren’t there. And now I must have breakfast; I
won’t keep you very long.... What do you want all that for?” he asked,
as Katherine suddenly appeared with a large basket.
“For lunch; we’re not going to starve ourselves.”
“Poor Katherine; evidently you’re not. We can each take our own lunch;
a basket like that is only a nuisance.”
“You needn’t carry it,” said Katherine. “You and I will carry it by
turns,” she said to me.
“What’s the use of talking like that,” answered Gerald. “It doesn’t
mean anything. If that huge thing has to be dragged all the way I
shan’t go at all.”
He departed to the dining-room, while Katherine and I were left
standing in the hall, the basket between us.
“We needn’t take any drinkables,” I began, “there’ll be plenty of
water.”
“I haven’t put in any,” said Katherine.
We sat down in the porch to wait for Gerald. When he rejoined us, which
he did very leisurely, I glanced at his shoes, and suggested that he
should change them for something more substantial.
“Why? We’re not going through ploughed fields, are we? I haven’t any
hob-nails even if we were.” A panama hat shaded his face and he swung
a light cane in his hand. I knew at once we should have difficulty in
getting him any distance, and was very nearly proposing he should stay
at home.
“Why aren’t we driving?” he asked.
“Such nonsense!” exclaimed Katherine. “If Aunt Clara had wanted us to
drive she would have said so.”
“I don’t mind making inquiries,” Gerald intimated. “I somehow feel it’s
the proper thing to drive.”
“You’re not to say anything about it; Aunt Clara won’t like it, I know.”
“I’ll drive with our young friend Peter, here,” he said airily, tapping
me on the shoulder with his cane.
I could see Katherine was becoming impatient; Gerald was the only one
who was perfectly cool. “About carrying Katherine’s lunch,” he began.
“Hadn’t we better get a stick and put it through the handle of this
thing?” He kicked the basket lightly. “Then two of us could struggle
with it together.”
The idea was a good one, and we put it into practice.
Our road kept all the way by the coast: on the right, the mountains;
on the left, a strip of waste land, varying in width, and covered with
dry, sapless grass upon which, nevertheless, there were goats feeding;
below this, the steep drop down to the sea. Shadowless in the strong
sun, the road wound on ahead, white with dust, like a pale ribbon on
the green and russet landscape. We had gone about a mile when Gerald
suddenly announced, “I’m not going any further; it’s too hot.”
This brought us again to a standstill. “It’s so like you to spoil
everything,” said Katherine.
“What am I spoiling? I suppose I can please myself. Only, since I’m
not coming, I’d advise you to chuck some of that grub away.” He took
his cigarette-case from his pocket and offered me a cigarette, which I
refused. He lit one himself.
“You know very well that if you go home Aunt Clara will think I
ought to have come with you, or at any rate be back for lunch,” said
Katherine quietly.
“How should I know such absurd things? And I can’t help what she
thinks, can I?”
“We could have stayed out all day.”
Gerald had begun to whistle an air very softly, and I recognized it as
something he had played last night. His eyes were fixed on the distant
horizon, and he seemed slightly bored.
“Perhaps if we were to bathe it might make a difference――who knows?
Suppose young Peter and I bathe while you watch the basket here in this
pleasant sunny spot; or you could walk on slowly with it, and we might
in the end even overtake you?”
I turned to Katherine. “Come along,” I said brusquely. “What’s the use
of bothering about him?”
He looked at me and coloured faintly. “Then I’m to say you won’t be
home till dinner-time?” he asked, speaking directly to his sister.
Katherine hesitated. “Shall he say that?”
“Let him say what he likes,” I returned, shortly.
We moved on together, and I did not look back, though Katherine did,
more than once. “I’ll make no more arrangements with your brother,” I
remarked.
Katherine was silent. “Perhaps we should come another day instead?” she
began presently, and in a hesitating way.
“You mean you are going to give in to him?” I said, making up my mind
that there should be no other day, so far as I was concerned.
She was again silent, and meanwhile we continued to walk on. I could
see she was uncertain as to what she ought to do, that she did not
want to disappoint me, and that, on the other hand, she was not sure
about Gerald. “He’s offended at something,” she began. “He takes
offence very easily.... He thinks you didn’t want him.”
“Why should he think that?”
“I don’t know.... But it is something of that sort, I’m sure.”
I was going to say that I did not care a straw what he thought, but
checked myself. “He didn’t appear to me to be offended,” I replied. “It
was simply that he thought it too much fag.”
“You don’t know him,” said Katherine.
And we continued to trudge along, our feet white with dust. It really
_was_ very hot, and I was glad I had so little clothing on――merely a
light cotton tennis-shirt under my jacket. When we reached a low grey
bridge that spanned a shallow mountain stream we branched inland. This
was the Bloody Bridge, I told Katherine, and a religious massacre had
once taken place here. I pointed out the remains of an old church,
with its fallen tombs, and after resting for a few minutes we began
to climb the valley, which was the walk I had proposed to take them.
This valley was wonderfully beautiful, widening out gradually, and
gradually ascending; on each side of it steep dark mountains, covered
with heather, and grass, and gorse, and hidden streams which flowed
into the broader, deeper stream we followed. The colouring was rich
and splendid――dull gold, bronze, dark green and even black, with the
brighter purple of the heather woven through it, and the long, narrow,
pale, silver streak of water, glittering and gleaming, far, far up,
till in the end it was lost over the edge of a higher valley which
crossed ours at right angles.
“These are the Mourne Mountains?” Katherine asked gazing up at them.
“I’ve seen them from the Isle of Man. On a clear day you can make them
out quite distinctly.”
She began to talk to me about mountains, about Switzerland, where she
had been last spring, and I felt ashamed never to have been anywhere.
Yet, while she was describing it, I had an instinct that I should not
like Switzerland. By some chance I indeed pictured it very much as,
later on, I was actually to find it. Katherine’s enthusiasm could not
remove this conviction: in fact, what she said, secretly strengthened
my idea that it must be an odious country, and, years later, amid all
the showy banality of its picturesqueness, I remembered this particular
walk, and my own beautiful dark country rose up before me, with its
sombre hills, its dreamy, changing sky.
But at the time I had nothing to say, I had no comparisons to make, I
had seen nothing. “I should like to go to a big city like London or
Paris,” I told her, “not to live there, but to see it.”
“I don’t believe you’d like it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.... You’re so much a part of all this.” She glanced up at
the hills.
“Do _you_ like cities?”
“Oh, I simply love them; but then I’m quite different.”
“I’d like the picture galleries any way,” I declared.
“Are you fond of pictures?”
“I’ve not seen many――only reproductions.”
“I’m fond of them too. There was a splendid picture in the Academy this
year of a girl skating. She was holding a muff up to her face so that
it covered her mouth and chin, but she was awfully pretty, and when you
came into the room you would just think she was a real person. And the
snow was so nice, with a sort of pink light on it. If you come over to
London I’ll take you to see everything.”
But again, just as in the case of Switzerland, my instinct told me I
should detest this picture. For a moment I had a feeling of depression;
it seemed to me of infinite importance that Katherine should like the
things that I liked.
“I don’t care for pretty pictures,” I said. “I hate everything pretty,”
I went on almost angrily.
“Would you rather have ugly ones?” asked Katherine, laughing, as if
she had caught me in an absurdity. I had no answer to give, though I
knew myself exactly what I meant. I felt lonely and melancholy. Then I
looked at Katherine. She was very beautiful, and in a quite different
way from her brother. And suddenly I knew where I had seen her
before――her eyes, at least――they were the eyes of Prudence Carroll....
I gazed at her, seeking some further resemblance, but could discover
none. Her skin was very white, save where in her cheeks it flushed to a
soft radiant glow. Her brown, crisp hair was pulled back straight from
her forehead, though one or two little tufts had got loose and waved
in the faint wind. Her nose and mouth had the same delicate beauty as
Gerald’s, but her expression was quite different, and it was there
that her greatest beauty lay.... Yes, there again was a resemblance to
Prudence Carroll――her expression was the same as Prudence Carroll’s.
She had the same eyes, the same expression ... perhaps, then, the
same spirit.... A sort of daydream had begun to weave itself into my
thoughts.
“How far can we go this way?” Katherine interrupted me.
“As far as you can see. There is another valley beyond. We could go
along it and home over Slieve Donard, but it is a long distance.”
We climbed slowly, not talking very much. It was past noon now, and
hotter than ever, and when we reached a deep green pool under a
waterfall we stopped to bathe our hands and faces in it. Its cool
sweetness was alluring, as if a water-sprite sang up through it into
the hot sunlight, and the white spray sparkled in the sun. “It would be
splendid for a bathe,” I murmured.
“Bathe if you want to; I can walk on and you can overtake me.”
I remembered Gerald, however, and refused to do this, being full to the
brim just now of unselfishness and chivalry. “We might have our lunch
here,” I suggested. “Then we could hide the basket somewhere, and not
be bothered by it again till we are going home.”
We spread a napkin on a broad flat stone, and our lunch on top of that.
I now discovered why the basket had been so heavy, but, though it had
been a nuisance carrying it, its contents were extremely welcome. We
had almost finished when a peculiar feeling rather than a sound made
me look up, and I saw a man standing not more than three or four yards
from us. It was as if he had risen out of the earth. When you are
under the impression that you are miles away from any human being,
such a sudden apparition is a little startling, nor was the appearance
of this visitor reassuring. He was large and pale, with short brown
hair, and at the back of his head he wore a cap, like a boy’s cap,
which was too small for him. His clothes, without being ragged, were
stained and worn, and of a nondescript, brownish colour. He was young,
probably between twenty-five and thirty, and strongly built. There was
something coldly malevolent in the pale, clean-shaved face, something
indescribably corrupt and cruel, which seemed to stare out of the
hard brown eyes, and to hover about the smiling lips. He stood before
us, looking down in obvious enjoyment of our discomfiture, making
no movement to pass on. It was curious that features so perfectly
regular, features neither bloated nor disfigured, could give so vivid
an impression of ugliness. It was the ugliness of something positively
evil, and my first feeling was one of instinctive repugnance and
disgust, as if I had been touched by an obscene and noxious creature. I
felt, I can’t say why, that I was in the presence of something actively
dangerous, and not only to my body, but reaching beyond that: I felt
as if I were in the presence of some form of spiritual corruption or
decay, that I knew nothing about, and that yet I had a horror of, as
a young rabbit is afraid of a hawk. That prolonged, impudent stare,
passing over me, seemed to leave a trail of filth, of slime, of
something that defiled like a loathsome caress. His eyes slid from me
to Katherine with the same repulsive scrutiny. What was he doing here?
He was no country man. As my first startled feeling passed, my temper
began to rise. “What do you want?” I asked. “How much longer are you
going to stand there?”
He laughed almost noiselessly, though he still neither moved nor spoke.
It was as if the sound of his laugh touched a spring within me, and I
lifted a sharp piece of stone lying near my feet. I felt a sudden rage,
an extraordinary desire to destroy. I could actually feel my lips draw
back ever so little, just like the lips of an angry terrier. I had no
longer the faintest sensation of fear: on the contrary, what I wanted
was for him to make a movement forward, a gesture that I could take
as threatening. And the rough, natural weapon I had picked up must
have acquired a sudden appearance of dangerousness, for our visitor
drew back and his face altered. Then he laughed more loudly and on a
different note as he passed on his way down the valley. I felt elated.
Somehow, I was certain my stone would not have missed its mark, and
that there would have been no hesitation, no lack of force, on the
part of the wielder. Katherine and I watched him as he retreated, now
disappearing from our sight, and now again appearing, but always at a
point farther down.
“Well, he’s gone,” I said. “He was horrible looking.” I faced her with
a proud consciousness of having behaved very well.
“Do you know what _you_ looked like?” asked Katherine. And before I
could answer: “You looked just like David when he threw the stone.”
I blushed. Then, “I never cared much for David,” I answered
ungraciously, and moreover untruly, for I was, secretly, extremely
pleased and flattered.
“Neither did I till a minute ago, but that was because I didn’t know
what he was like.”
My blush deepened. “Well, the beast’s gone at any rate,” I said to
cover my gratification. “I will tell Michael when we get home. He can’t
be prowling about here for any good.”
“Who is Michael?”
“One of our policemen――the decentest.”
* * * * *
We hid the basket under the heather. A quiet had fallen upon us,
through which the noise of the splashing water seemed to weave itself
in patterns and arabesques of sound.
“Shall we go up higher?” I asked, and without answering me Katherine
began to climb the hill-side, and I followed her over dry, springy,
fragrant heather, and between huge mossy boulders that had lain
undisturbed for centuries. We stopped to look at a fly-catching plant,
that curious, unpleasant mixture of the animal and the vegetable.
Katherine had never seen one before, and she examined the outspread,
concave disc, with the skeletons, the grey husks of flies, adhering to
its green surface. We found a bee struggling on his back on the purple
flower of a thistle, waving his legs in the air, a ridiculous picture
of intoxication. But in spite of these interruptions the silence
that had crept over us lingered still. When we reached a place where
the ground rose steeply for a yard or two I gave Katherine my hand
to help her, and when we came to more level ground we still went on
hand in hand. And with this light contact there came to me a strange,
thrilling pleasure, intense yet dreamy, unlike anything I had ever
known before. I did not look at my companion. When I spoke, telling her
to avoid a patch of soft ground that had here spread across the path,
the sound of my own voice astonished me, so unfamiliar was it, even
trembling slightly; and I felt my limbs trembling. But why should it be
so? What was there? Why was I nervous? Nothing had happened but this
short easy climb hand in hand. I threw my hat from me and flung myself
down among the heather, lying with my hands clasped behind my head,
and my face turned up to the dark blue sky. Far, far below us, the
sea, blue and deep, broad, beautiful and free, lay shimmering in the
hot sun. I had a sensation of intense happiness, physical and mental,
into which I seemed to be sinking deep and deeper. I felt my eyes grow
moist, and I turned away my head that my companion might not see my
face.
Presently I looked round. Katherine was sitting beside me, gazing
straight out at the distant sea. The broad brim of her black hat
shadowed her face. The deep blue of her eyes seemed darker than before;
they had the blue now of the eyes Renoir so often painted, and that I
have seen nowhere else. I wanted to say something, I hardly knew what.
I hovered shyly on the verge of it, like a timid bather on the brink
of the sea, but there was no one to push me in, and my plunge was not
taken.
“It’s jolly nice here!” Those feeble words were all I could find to
express the rapid rush of emotion that had shaken my whole being.
The vast and complex forces of nature were stirring within me almost
as unconsciously as the new leaf germinates in the growing plant.
Yet there was something which, without any words at all, I must
have expressed, had there been an observer to see it. I mean the
helplessness of youth, its pathetic credulity and good faith, its
brightness and briefness in the face of those hoary old hills, and of
feelings that were almost as ancient.
I sat up and clasped my hands about my knees. “I wonder what it will be
like living in town?” I said.
“Yes, you’re going away next month, aren’t you? Aunt Clara told me.”
“My father wanted me to try for a post in a Government office. There
is a boy who lives here who is going to do that: he is working for his
exam. now.” Then I added, I don’t know why; “Mrs. Carroll is paying for
me, and will be afterwards, when I go to college. I’m to go to one of
the English universities――Oxford, I think. Of course my father couldn’t
afford to send me, and indeed he’d rather I didn’t go at all. He let me
decide, however, though there was really only one thing that made him
give in.”
“What?”
“My mother once sent money to be used for my education, and he would
not take it.”
Katherine was mystified, and, as I saw this, it dawned on me that I
should not have spoken. I had taken it for granted that she knew all
about me.
“You know, my mother doesn’t live at home,” I explained; and then, to
change the subject, I took the piece of paper Willie Breen had given me
that morning from my pocket.
“Can you guess what that is?” I asked.
She turned it over.
“It means that on Friday there will be a meeting of a kind of club we
have,” I said. “It is a night club. The whole thing is a secret. We
have supper round a fire, and talk, and tell yarns, and all that.”
“Outside?”
“Yes; over on the golf-links usually.”
“But why at night?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Pretty late too――about half-past eleven or twelve. I
got it up last year with some of the boys who were staying down here.
And then, afterwards, I kept it up with two or three of the chaps at
school. This year I got sick of it, and I’ve only been to one meeting.”
“At night! It must be rather queer. I love the sea at night. Are you
allowed to bring visitors?”
“There is no rule; there are no rules of any kind. Would you like to
come?”
Katherine hesitated. Then she laughed. “Yes. Would it matter?”
“There’ll be nobody but boys there.”
“But you’d take me; and of course, Gerald would come.”
“I’ll take you if you’ll come by yourself,” I said.
“Without Gerald? I couldn’t. What harm would he do?”
I did not say; but without Gerald I knew I could carry the thing off,
with him it would be difficult. “You’d have to promise not to tell
anybody,” I explained.
“Of course. If I told, I shouldn’t be there myself.”
“But I mean even afterwards.”
“I’ll not tell.”
For a minute or two we looked down the hill-side, bathed in the
afternoon sun; then I made up my mind. “If you can promise that Gerald
won’t talk about it I’ll take you. But won’t you find it difficult to
get out?” I added immediately afterwards.
“No; we’ll simply sit up later than the others. They seem to go to bed
about ten.”
“But the lodge-gate will be locked.”
“I can easily manage about that.”
I regretted having mentioned the matter at all, yet I hadn’t the
courage to draw back. “I’ll tell you on Friday morning exactly when to
be ready,” I said.
We sat silent. Katherine had taken off her hat and it lay on the ground
beside her; she was fastening a bunch of heather into her blue and
white muslin dress.
“Have you looked at the portraits in the long passage yet?” I asked
suddenly.
“Yes; not very particularly, but I noticed there were some.”
“Did you see one of a dark lady standing by a spinet, holding a bunch
of flowers?”
“I don’t remember. Who is she?”
“Prudence Carroll,” I answered. “Look at her when you go in.”
Katherine had completed her task. “Why?” she inquired, turning to me.
“I think she is very like you――or you are very like her.”
“I shall see; but suppose I don’t care for her?”
“Then you can say I’m a fool. But you will care for her――at any rate, I
do. I don’t mean that your features are just the same as hers.”
“And I’m not dark, am I?”
“No; at all events not _so_ dark. However, you will see what I
mean――perhaps you will see.”
“You’re not sure? It can’t be so very striking then.”
“That’s just what it is――it _is_ striking. It mayn’t, however, be
exactly obvious to everybody. When I first saw you, I kept wondering
who you were like. I couldn’t get at it for a long time――then I knew.”
“Well, I never even heard of her, but I’m shockingly ignorant of my
ancestors.”
“She wasn’t an ancestor: she was never married; the likeness isn’t
physical.”
“Oh, then I shan’t see it. Besides, I never _do_ see likenesses, even
when they’re much less mysterious than this.”
“I don’t know,――perhaps, in a way, it is mysterious. I can see it more
clearly sometimes than others. I don’t think I should see it at all if
you were asleep or dead.”
“What a horrid idea!” She laughed, but not quite easily.
“Do you not feel that these hills are familiar to you?” I asked
dreamily. “I can imagine a person coming to some house like Derryaghy
for the first time, and then finding that he knew this room and that,
where this passage led to, what view he should see when he looked out
through that little window at the top of the stairs. Or it might be
that two people would come there together, and everything they said
would sound like an echo from something that had been spoken before,
and each, while they waited for it, would know the answer, before it
had left the other’s lips.”
“I’m not sure that I follow you,” said Katherine prosaically, “but I
imagine you are trying to make out that I may be what-do-you-call-her
Carroll come to life again. You’re the strangest boy I ever met.”
“You told me I was like David. But――but――pretend it for a moment. Say
you were Prudence Carroll, then who should I be?”
“I haven’t any idea. Perhaps the apprentice of the artist who painted
her picture, if he had an apprentice.”
I considered this. It had never occurred to me before. But I could not
get back, I could not discover even a faint gleam. It was not the time;
I was too saturated with my actual surroundings.
I did not pursue the subject, for I saw it had no interest for
Katherine. Besides, I wanted to be quiet. I thought if we sat in
silence, if I held her hand; above all, if we sat in silence close
together, her arms about me, my cheek against her cheek, the past might
swim up into the present, and we should know. But instead of that we
began to talk, to talk of things that did not matter, until, by and by,
we got up to return home.