An Irish Cousin; vol. 1/2

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.”

CHAPTER V.

IMPRESSIONS

I concluded that, improbable as it appeared, this was the under-housemaid, and reflected with some astonishment on the incongruities of the Durrus establishment. However, I afterwards found she held no official position, but was a satellite of the under-housemaid’s, privately imported by her as a species of body-servant or slave. In fact, at the risk of digressing, I may here add that in process of time I discovered that the illicit apprenticeship of a young relation was a common custom of the Durrus servants, and in the labyrinthine remoteness of the servants’ quarters they could be concealed without fear of attracting the master’s eye.

In spite of its top dressing of grease, the fire was not a tempting one to sit over, and I roamed round the large ill-lighted room, taking in with leisurely wonderment the style of its decorations. It was, in startling contrast to the rest of the house, painted and papered in semi-aesthetic hues, pale sage-green and pink being the prevailing colours. This innovation of culture had not, however, extended itself to the furniture, which was of the solidly ugly type prevalent fifty years ago.

Heavy mahogany tables, each duly set forth with books and daguerrotypes, stood inconveniently about, causing a congestion among the lesser furniture. The pictures, which had been taken down at the repapering of the room, leaned against the wall with their faces inwards. I turned one of the nearest to me, expecting to come upon a family portrait, but found it represented a Turk of truculent aspect, worked in Berlin wool—a testimony to the amount of spare time at the disposal of the ladies of Durrus. The thick coating of dust on my fingers which was the result of this investigation did not encourage me to make any further researches, and an examination of the old china on the marble cheffonier between the windows had equally disastrous results. In one corner there was an ancient grand piano, which to my astonishment proved to be in good tune. I had not been playing for very long when Willy came in, and, without speaking, placed himself beside me.

“Well, I declare!” he said, as I finished playing one of Schubert’s impromptus, “it’s a long time since I heard that old piano. I got it tuned the other day on purpose for you, and you know how to knock sparks out of it, anyhow! I heard Henrietta O’Neill playing that piece once, and it didn’t sound half so well—though, I can tell you, she thinks no end of herself.”

“By-the-by, Willy, why did you stop me when I began to speak of Mr. O’Neill?”

“O’Neill,” corrected Willy.

“Oh, well, O’Neill,” I said peevishly. “But what was the harm of talking about him?”

“No harm, as far as I am concerned, but the governor hates him like poison. I believe they had some row in my grand-father’s time—I don’t know exactly what-and they never made it up since. But there’s no regular quarrel; I go to all their parties, and I think the governor rather likes Nugent and the girls.”

“What is Madam O’Neill like?”

“Oh, I get along with her first-rate,” said Willy, stretching out one of his long legs, and serenely studying the gold-embroidered clock on his sock. “But other people say she’s rather a bitter old pill; and I can tell you, she has the two girls in great order!”

I began to play as he finished speaking; but his thoughts had travelled on to my other unlucky remark at dinner, for he presently interrupted me by saying in an uncertain way—

“Oh! you know that girl we were talking of at dinner, the one you saw at the gate—Anstice Brian her name is—her mother is a bit queer in her head, and she’d be very apt to give you a start if you didn’t know her ways. She’s a harmless poor creature, but she wanders about these bright nights, and she gets into the house sometimes.”

I probably looked as alarmed as I felt, for he laughed protectingly, and, drawing his chair a little closer to mine, said reassuringly—

“Never fear! She’s not half as silly as they say; and do you think I’d let her be about if there was any chance at all of her frightening you?”

“What is she like? Is she an old woman?”—ignoring the reproachful warmth of this last observation.

“Is it old Moll Hourihane? She’s as old as two men—or she looks it, anyhow. She used to be my nurse till she went off her head.”

“I thought you said her name was Brian,” I said.

“That’s only her husband’s name. The women mostly stick to their own names in this country when they’re married.”

“And you’re quite sure she’s not dangerous?” I said, feeling only half reassured.

“No more than I am myself”—with a glance to see if I were going to contradict this assertion. “She has a sort of dumb madness—like a hound, you know—and she’ll never speak; though I dare say after all that’s no great loss,” he concluded.

I was by this time feeling very sleepy, and hoping I should soon be able to escape to my own room, when the door opened, and my uncle came solemnly in.

“I have come, Theodora, my dear, to suggest an early retirement on your part.”

He avoided looking at Willy, and I felt that the effects of my ill-timed remarks at dinner had not yet died out. He looked haggard and troubled, and a sudden pity and sense of kinship impelled me to raise my cheek towards him as he took my hand to say good night. He stooped his head as if to kiss me, but checked himself, and after an instant of hesitation his moustache touched my forehead.

There was something repelling in his manner, but I felt that he was not unconscious of the sympathy I had intended to express. He turned and left the room, and I heard him go back to the library and shut himself in, the sound of the closing door emphasizing his solitariness.

I went upstairs with the feeling of isolation again strongly upon me. The wind had risen, and on the walls of the draughty corridor each gust made the old pictures shake in their mouldering frames. At intervals, through the panes of the large skylight overhead, the moon’s light dropped in pale wavering squares on the floor of the hall below. I leaned over the balustrades watching the spectral alternations of light and darkness, as the clouds swept across the moon, till the objects beneath me seemed to take intermitting motion from the flitting of the moonbeams.

As I looked, the dim lamp in the hall flickered and went out. A gust from below circled round the corridor, lifting the hair upon my forehead and almost extinguishing my candle as it passed me.

Perhaps I was overtired and nervous, but a causeless fear possessed me—the old unreasoning dread of some vague pursuit out of the darkness, that I had not felt since I was a child. I gave a terrified glance over my shoulder at the swaying pictures, and then, shielding my candle with my hand, I ignominiously ran down the corridor into my own room.

CHAPTER VI.

AN IRISH SUNDAY.

The words at first mingled with the dreams which had all night disturbed my sleep. On being repeated, the unfamiliar accent, accompanied by the clink of a cup and saucer, made me open my eyes. A pleasant-looking, red-haired girl was standing by my bed, tray in hand.

“You’re after having a great sleep, miss. I was twice here before, and there wasn’t a stir out of you.”

“Is it very late?” I asked, with an alarming recollection of my uncle’s punctuality.

“Oh, not at all, miss. The masther’s only just after having his breakfast.”

“What!” I gasped. “You should have called me earlier.”

“Oh, there’s no hurry, miss! Sure he always ates his breakfast by himself, and there’s no sayin’ how late it’ll be before Masther Willy’s down.”

Calmed by this assurance, I did not hurry myself over my dressing, but from time to time stopped to look at the view from my windows.

It was a quiet October day, with a grey yet luminous sky, that lit with a grave radiance the group of yellow elms that divided the avenue from a heathery expanse of turf-bog, with low hills beyond. From the other window, which was almost over the hall door, I could see to the left a dark belt of trees that went round to the back of the house; and in front, at the foot of the lawn, the curve of a little bay. This was separated from the larger waters of Durrusmore Harbour by a low promontory, along whose ridge a meagre line of fir trees was etched against the grey sky. Leaning out of the window, and looking westwards towards the mouth of the harbour, I saw the Atlantic lying broad and white under the light of the soft clear morning.

I went downstairs, and as I passed along the corridor, I felt, even on this still day, the air circulating freely through broken panes in the skylight and the staircase window, making it easy to account for the ghostly eddyings of the wind the night before.

Willy had apparently made an effort on my behalf at early rising, and I found him making tea when I came into the dining-room. He came forward to meet me with a complacency in which I detected a consciousness of the added smartness of his Sunday attire; and, having satisfactorily ascertained the fact that I had slept well, he installed me behind the urn to pour out the superfluously strong tea which he had just brewed.

I experienced undeniable relief in the absence of Uncle Dominick, whom at this moment I saw pacing up and down a walk leading from the house to the sea. Willy saw the direction of my eyes.

“I hope you’re not insulted by only me breakfasting with you,” he said, with ungrammatical gallantry. “You can breakfast with the governor whenever you like, but you will have to be down at eight o’clock to do that!”

I intimated with fitting politeness that I was satisfied with the present arrangement, and we began our tête-à-tête meal in great amity. Willy, indeed, was an excellent host. He plied me with everything on the table, eating his own breakfast and talking all the time with unaffected zest and vigour, and I began to feel as if the time I had known him could be reckoned in months instead of hours.

The necessity of writing to announce my safe arrival to Aunt Jane was one that had already forced itself upon my notice.

“I thought you’d be wanting to write a letter,” Willy said, conducting me into the drawing-room after breakfast, “and I got the place ready for you.”

I sat down at the old-fashioned writing-table, and found that he had anticipated my wants with a lavish hand. Through the window I saw him, a few minutes afterwards, sauntering down the drive towards the lodge, smoking a cigarette, with two little white dogs flashing in circles round him; and as I watched him, I came to the conclusion that at first sight I had underestimated my cousin.

There was something to me half amusing and half touching in the anxiety of his little housewifely attentions to me. He was really unusually thoughtful for others; from various things he had said, it was evident that his father had allowed the whole management of the place to devolve on him, and I fell to idle speculation as to whether he ordered dinner, and if he were particular about the housemaids wearing white muslin caps; and I was only aroused from these, and other equally interesting reflections by hearing the clock strike the hour at which I had been warned I must get ready for church.

My uncle was standing on the steps, with his Prayer-book in his hand, when I came downstairs. He wished me good morning, with a polite apology for not having met me at breakfast, and stood looking about him, with eyelids narrowed by the white glare from the sea, till a minute afterwards the wagonnette in which we were going to church came to the door. My uncle and I got in behind; while Willy, with Mick by his side, sat on the box and drove. Once outside the gate, we took a road running at right angles to that by which I had arrived. It went round the head of Durrusmore Harbour, and, leaving the sea behind, turned inland through large woods, which my uncle told me were part of the demesne of Clashmore, The O’Neill’s place.

The road was level, and soft with the fallen red beech leaves, and the brown horses took us along it at a pace that showed they were none the worse for their journey the night before. The rough stone walls on either side of the road were covered with moss and small ferns. Here and there the wood was pierced by narrow rides—vistas in which the clumps of withering bracken repeated the brown and gold of the trees above.

“We’re going to draw this place on Friday,” said Willy, pausing in the steady flow of his conversation with Mick to give me the information. “Blackthorn will carry Miss Theo right enough, wouldn’t he, Mick? and I’ll ride the new mare.”

The village of Rathbarry, which we had now entered, consisted of a single street of low, dirty-looking cottages, their squalid uniformity varied at frequent intervals by the more prosperous shuttered face of a public-house. At the end of the street, a gateway led into a graveyard, surrounded by ill-thriven elm trees, in the middle of which stood the church. It was an ugly, oblong building, with a square tower at the west end, from which proceeded a clanging as of a cracked basin battered with a spoon.

“We’re in good time,” said Willy, drawing up with a flourish before the porch. “That’s the hurry-bell only begun now, so we’ve five minutes to spare. Look, Theo! there’s the Clashmore carriage. Did you ever see such brutes as those chestnuts?”

Before, however, I had time to reply, Uncle Dominick hurried me into the church, and we took our places in opposite corners of a singularly uncomfortable square pew. As we sat confronting each other in the half-empty church, we heard in the porch Willy’s voice raised in agreeable converse. Apparently his remarks were of a complimentary sort, for a girl’s voice rejoined, “Oh, nonsense, Willy!” with a laugh.

“Disgraceful!” muttered my uncle, under his breath; and the next moment three ladies swept up the aisle, followed by Willy, on whose face still beamed a slightly fatuous smile.

He immediately sat down beside me, and in a rapid whisper instructed me as to the more prominent members of the congregation.

“Those are the O’Neills”—indicating the ladies he had come in with. “Connie’s the little fair one. And look! those are the Jackson Crolys! You’d better sit up and behave, as they’ll be watching you all the time. I know they all want to see what you’re like!”

“Hush! don’t talk!” I whispered back. “Here’s the clergyman.”

The service was very long. The music, which consisted of the clergyman’s daughter accompanying herself on a harmonium, with casual vocal assistance from a couple of school-children, was of an unexhilarating kind. Willy fidgeted, admired his boots, trimmed his nails, and tried to utilize every possible opening for conversation. Uncle Dominick, on the contrary, devoted his whole attention to the service, and answered all the responses with austere punctiliousness, even going so far as to try and track the clergyman’s daughter in her devious course through the hymns.

From the corner which had been allotted to me in my uncle’s pew I could not see the clergyman, and, though his voice resounded through the church, his very pronounced Cork accent made it difficult for me to understand more than a word here and there in his discourse.

The high sides of the pew debarred me from even the solace of inspecting the congregation, and, in the absence of other occupation, I could not altogether conceal the interest that I felt in the remark which Willy was laboriously spelling on his fingers for my edification. Becoming conscious, however, that Uncle Dominick’s eye, while fixed upon the preacher, had included us in its observations, I transferred my attention to the mural tablets, which on either side of the church set forth the perfections of dead-and-gone O’Neills and Sarsfields.

Having studied these for a few minutes with the mild sceptical interest usually excited by the tabulated virtues of the unknown departed, I leaned back in my corner, and, in doing so, noticed a brass upon the wall slightly behind my uncle’s seat. My eye was immediately caught by my father’s name.

I glanced by a natural transition to my uncle, whose head all but intervened between me and the brass. His expression of sombre melancholy harmonized well with the words “his sorrowing brother.”

I could guess what must have been his grief at the death of an only brother, from whom he had been perforce alienated. Till then I had scarcely realized how closely linked their lives must once have been, and I resolved that his chilly manner should not deter me from some day inducing him to speak to me of my father.

As I made up my mind to this, the clergyman’s voice ceased, and the congregation rose at the end of the sermon. We walked out of church close behind the O’Neills, and outside the porch Madam O’Neill stopped to shake hands with my uncle. Then, turning to me—

“I need not ask to be introduced to you, my dear. I knew your poor father very well indeed in days gone by.” This was said in a dry attenuated voice, but through the elaborate pattern of her Maltese lace veil, her eyes looked kindly at me. She was small and refined looking, with little artificial airs and graces which told that she had been a beauty in her day; and what remained of a delicate complexion was carefully sheltered from the harmless light of the grey sky by a thick parasol.

Uncle Dominick’s impatience to get away only gave me time to say a word or two in answer to her salutation.

“Come, Theodora,” he said, with the smile that lifted his moustache and showed all his teeth. “We must not keep the horses waiting;” and bidding the madam and her two daughters, who had been standing behind her, good-bye, he led the way down to the gate.

Willy was already on the box of the wagonnette, and was talking to a dark, quiet-looking young man who was standing with one foot on the wheel.

“Then you’ll see about having those earths stopped,” Willy said, leaning over, and emphasizing what he was saying with the handle of the whip on his hearer’s shoulder. “Oh, here they are! Theo, let me introduce Mr. O’Neill. I was just telling him he must be sure and have a fox for you at Clashmore this week.”

“I shall do my best,” said Mr. O’Neill, as he took off his hat; but he did not look particularly enthusiastic as he spoke.

We had no sooner driven off, than Willy twisted round on the box to speak to me.

“Well, what do you think of Nugent?” he said rather eagerly.

“He is nice looking,” I replied critically; “but I do not like his expression. I cannot say he is what I should call either cheerful or agreeable looking.”

“Oh, he’s not half a bad chap,” said Willy, with a leniency which was possibly the result of the pleasure with which young men listen to the depreciation of their fellows. “He’s jolly enough sometimes; but he can put on a bit of side when he likes, and I dare say he thinks he is thrown away down here. Henrietta’s like him in that sort of way, but Connie has no nonsense about her.”

I decided that Connie’s was the laugh that I had heard in the porch before service, and thought that of the two I should be more likely to prefer Henrietta.

Ever since we had left church the sky had been darkening, and when we reached Durrusmore Harbour, the distant headlands were almost hidden in a white mist. The south-west wind blew it towards us from the sea, and by the time we got home a thick fine rain was coming steadily down.

Lunch, with Uncle Dominick at the head of the table, was a more serious business than breakfast had been, and old Roche’s shuffling ministrations added to the general solemnity. I was, however, amused by the affectionate solicitude with which he nudged me in the elbow with the dish of potatoes, indicating with his thumb a specially floury one, and concluded that this was the singular method he took of showing that his regard for my father had extended itself to me.

When lunch was over Willy announced his intention of walking to Clashmore, to see about borrowing a side-saddle for me, he said—an act of self-sacrifice which I was not slow to attribute to the fascinations of Miss Connie O’Neill. Uncle Dominick retired to a private den at the end of a dark passage leading from the hall to the back of the house; and a few minutes later, Willy, in a voluminous mackintosh, set forth on his errand, followed by the fox terriers in a state of amiable frenzy, the result of the abhorred Sunday morning incarceration. I became aware that I was thrown upon my own resources, and, with the prospect of a wet afternoon before me, I felt my spirits sinking perceptibly.

To finish my letter to Aunt Jane was at least better than doing nothing. I took up a strong position in front of the library fire, and disconsolately applied myself to filling the big sheet of foreign paper on which I had embarked in the morning.

CHAPTER VII.

MOLL.

Willy did not come home till dinner-time, when he reappeared in exceedingly good humour. I, on the contrary, felt the vague ill-temper of a person who has spent a wet Sunday afternoon in solitude, and I found dinner long and dull. In the drawing-room after dinner, I sought the resource of music to raise my spirits; but I was debarred from even this last consolation, for Willy implored me to “let the piano alone,” as his father disapproved of music on Sunday.

We finally settled down in armchairs by the fire, and I discovered that Willy possessed in a high degree the feminine faculty of sitting over a fire and talking about nothing in particular. He pretended to no superiority to the minor gossip which forms the ripples in the current of country life, and he had quite a special gift of recounting small facts with accuracy and detail, and without any endeavour to exalt his talent as a story-teller. His tales had, in consequence, a certain intrinsic freshness and merit, and till bedtime we maintained a desultory, but on the whole interesting conversation.

When I got up to my room, I found it full of smoke and extremely cold. The window had been opened to let out the smoke, and the chintz curtains rustled and flapped in the draught. Making up my mind after a few minutes that even turf smoke was preferable to the cold disquiet of the wind, I went to the window to close it, and noticed with a good deal of amusement that, the pulley being broken, the housemaid had supported the sash with one of my brushes.

There was something in this misplaced ingenuity which was eminently characteristic of the slipshod manner of life at Durrus, and by force of contrast my thoughts travelled back to my mother’s orderly household. I leaned against the shutter and looked out, beset by poignant recollections of a time when life without my mother seemed an impossibility, and when Durrus was no more to me than a place in a fairy story.

The wind had blown away most of the fog, and the rain had ceased, but a thin haze still blunted the keenness of the moonlight. I gazed at the dark shapes of the trees in the shrubbery till I lost the sense of their reality, and they came and went like dreams in the uncertain light. In my ears was still the throb and tremor which seven days and nights spent in listening to the screw of the Alaska had imprinted on my brain, and my thoughts and surroundings seemed alike hurrying on in time to its pulsations. I was at length roused to realities by a sound which at first seemed part of the light chafing of the laurel leaves, but which in a few moments became detached and distinct from the vague noises of the autumn night.

It came nearer, and gave the impression of some stealthy advance in the wet grass under the trees. At length, at the verge of their shadow, just opposite my window, I heard the gravel crunch under a soft footstep. The next instant a woman’s figure slid into the dim light, and came out across the broad gravel sweep with a rhythmical swaying gait, as though moving to music.

Half-way to the house she stopped, and, raising her arms above her head with a wild gesture, she began to step to and fro with jaunty liftings and bendings of her body, as though she were taking part in a dance. Backwards and forwards she paced with measured precision; then, placing her hands on her hips, she danced with fantastic lightness and vigour some steps of an Irish jig. Suddenly, however, she checked herself; she knelt down, and, turning a pale face to the sky, she crossed her hands on her breast and remained motionless.

Her absolute stillness had in it an intensity almost more dreadful than the strange movements she had previously gone through, and I stood staring in inert terror at the grey kneeling figure, with a face as white as that which was still turned rigidly skywards in what appeared to be the extremity of supplication. Just then the moon shone sharply out, hardening and fixing in a moment the limits of light and darkness, and, as if with a sudden movement, it flung the shadow of the praying woman on the ground before her. She started, and slowly rose to her feet, and, with her hands still crossed on her bosom, turned her face towards me. I saw the moonlight glisten in her wide-open eyes, which were fixed, not on me, but on the window of the room next to mine. Then opening her arms wide, she let them fall to her side with an extravagant obeisance, and sidled back into the impenetrable shadow of the trees.

There was I know not what unearthly suggestion about this weird dance and agonized devotion, that seemed to paralyze my mind, and render it incapable of any thought except fear. I stood bewilderedly looking at the spot where the darkness had swallowed up her figure; but before I had time to collect my ideas, she reappeared at a little distance, and, as well as I could see, turned up a path which led through the shrubbery in the direction of the lodge.

As she passed out of sight, I suddenly remembered what Willy had said to me about Anstey’s half-witted mother. This strange dancer was, then, no ghost nor dream-creature, sent on a special errand to me, as I had first feared, and then, with returning courage, had almost hoped might be the case.

She was only “old Moll Hourihane.” It was a simple explanation, and perhaps a humiliating one; but, in spite of my anxiety to possess a ghost-story of my own, I accepted it with relief. I shut the window and locked my door, and, though still trembling all over with cold and excitement, I went to bed, thankful that “Mad Moll” had introduced herself to me from without, instead of first appearing to me within the walls of Durrus.

CHAPTER VIII.

SCHOOLING.