The Earl's promise

Not all Grace’s persuasions could induce Mrs. Brady on the following morning to touch any breakfast. By special request Miss Moffat had been permitted to pass the night in a dressing-room opening into Nettie’s apartment, and until overpowered by weariness she fell into a broken sleep, she heard the widow tossing from side to side, moaning now and then, at intervals breathing many sighs, but weeping never.

With her own hands Miss Moffat made her a tiny morsel of toast, and took that and a cup of tea to her bedside; but Nettie refused to eat, not querulously or with any effusion of manner, but with a settled determination difficult to hope to sway.

Nevertheless, her friend thought she would try. “Dear Nettie,” she said, “you ought to eat.”

“I cannot; it would choke me,” was the reply.

“I am afraid you will bring on an illness.”

“Oh! if I could only die,” and she buried her face in the pillow.

Grace went downstairs again.

As has been already stated her knowledge of mortal, physical, or deep mental sickness was not large; and if her knowledge of the latter had been, she might well have felt puzzled how to deal with Nettie.

After her breakfast she sat down for a few minutes to think, and whilst she was deep in meditation Susan entered.

“The mistress would take nothing, then,” she remarked, looking at the tray Grace had carried all unavailingly to Mrs. Brady.

“No.”

“I thought you wouldn’t get her to eat. I have tried her hard enough, I can tell you. You don’t seem to have been hungry yourself,” she went on, glancing at the dish of bacon swimming in grease and the new-laid eggs that, poached in fat, floated in company with the unsavoury-looking slices.

“I was not,” answered Miss Moffat.

“It is not a heartsome place to come to, you’re thinking, likely,” suggested the woman.

“I was thinking what I could do for Mrs. Brady,” Grace replied. “She ought to have something. Is there any wine in the house?”

“There is whisky,” was the answer.

Grace groaned mentally. “I wonder if she would take a little milk,” she said audibly.

“You can try. Will I bring you some?”

There was a secret triumph in the tone, as though she suspected the attempt would prove futile. And she was right. Nettie would have nothing but water. Of that she drank incessantly.

“I am parched,” she said in answer to Grace’s remonstrances. “My lips are so dry they bleed;” and as she removed her handkerchief from them, Grace saw it was stained with crimson spots.

What would Grace not have given for Mrs. Hartley’s counsel? Good women, and kind and true, lived at Kingslough, but somehow she felt at that juncture Mrs. Hartley’s hard worldly sense would prove more useful than all the well-meant sympathy amiable but incompetent people could offer.

Besides, Nettie herself would have none of Kingslough, either in the way of pity or help.

All the morning Maryville was besieged with callers, notes, cards, and inquiries.

“They can come now,” said Nettie bitterly, as she watched car and carriage and messenger depart unsatisfied. “They think I can go back and take the old up where I left off that morning. They do not know; how should they?”

Dinner-time arrived. With a bang, Susan set down on one side of the table at the other side of which Grace sat writing, a dish of potatoes piled high and another of herrings floating in a fresh sea of grease.

“Maybe it’s not good enough for you,” said the woman, with a sneer, “but it’s all there is in the house.”

“You mistake,” said Grace; “it is quite good enough for me, but I do not think it is anything like good enough for Mrs. Brady.” And she took her place at table whilst Susan flounced out of the room only to turn back and inquire whether she would “be plazed to drink water or milk.”

Had she followed Mrs. Hartley’s instructions Grace would have said water. As it was, the national partiality for milk common to the Irish ladies at that period, and which perhaps with the moist climate had share in their lovely complexions, extinguished all English lights, and so she chose the latter, thereby mollifying Susan, who thought “she might not be so stuck-up after all, maybe.”

Of potatoes and milk Grace made her meal with relish, it must be confessed, and spite of her sorrow. The potatoes were capital, the milk rich. The herrings she could not fancy, the lake of slowly congealing fat in which they reposed effectually warned her from them. While she ate she thought, “Let Susan be what she would, or perhaps would not, she, Miss Moffat, could not put that wrong right if she kept her at arms’ length for ever. On the whole, had she not better try to conciliate this woman, who, spite of her position, seemed friendly to Nettie? Perhaps,” thought Grace, “because she knows if this door closes behind her, none other would open to receive her.”

There were not many women who dared even think of adopting a conciliatory policy under such circumstances; but in many ways Grace’s position was exceptional.

After all, what is the good of virtue if it be not sufficiently certain of its own standing to walk just once and away on the same side of the road with vice, and refrain from drawing its skirts decorously around it?

Grace’s virtue, at all events, was made of sufficiently strong stuff to risk all the results of such a companionship. She hated the sin she felt had been done, as probably those to whom the nature of sin is almost a mystery alone are able—with an abhorrence, a detestation, a contempt, a loathing, akin to the feelings with which a man who had bathed from his earliest youth might look upon a disease produced by filth, and the lack of all ordinary physical cleanliness; but—black tangled hair, unkempt, unbraided, bold eyes, insolence, brazen defiance notwithstanding—she was sorry for the sinner.

Where vice flaunts past dressed in the latest fashion, driving a lovely pair of ponies, assuming the most recent fashionable manner whether that manner be modest or forward, we may call it picturesque, and forget, if we choose, the ghastly death’s head lurking beneath the rouge and paint and powder plastered on the face of Sin’s last successful child; but when we come to see some of Sin’s despised daughters, some of those who have been cut off by their unjust parent with less even than the traditional shilling, I think the observer must be less than man or woman—more fiend than either can prove on occasion—who shall fail to consider for what inconceivably small wages the devil gets immortal souls to work his ends.

If his employés would strike, what an involuntary lock-out from Hell here and Hell hereafter the world should witness!

“Susan,” began Miss Moffat, as the handmaiden having piled plate and vegetable dish on the top of the herrings, was about to remove the dinner appointments on the extemporised tray,—“do not you think Mrs. Brady ought to see a doctor?”

“I think it’s time she saw somebody,” agreed Susan.

“Would not it be well to send one of the men with a note to Mr. Hanlon, asking him to call?”

“It’s no use,” answered Susan shaking her head. “Mr. Hanlon he came up the day of the inquest; he had to come, and after the crowner was gone he wanted to see mistress. In course, I asked him to step in here and told her, and you’d have thought she’d have taken my head off. I was glad enough to get out of the room. I would not like to be the one who should tell her Mr. Hanlon was here again.”

“Why, I thought she always liked him,” said Grace fairly puzzled.

“I can’t say for that, it was hard to tell who Mrs. Brady liked or did not like—she is a mighty secret woman in her ways, but the master hated him and forbid him the house. Most like she minds all that.”

“Poor Nettie, how fond she must have been of him after all!” murmured Grace, speaking her thoughts out loud.

“Fond of the master, is it you mean!” asked Susan. “Fond of him; that she wasn’t, that she could not be, I’ll take my Bible oath. Why, Miss—” and in her energy she banged the herrings and superstructure on the table again—“he treated her worse nor a slave. If it had not been for the children, she’d have gone over and over and over again. I have seen it in her face when she has been sitting beside the fire, thinking, thinking; or when maybe she has left the room after giving him one look. He’s gone and there’s no need for us to send the bad word after him; but no black negro ever had a worse time of it than the woman that’s now a widow; and whatever she is fretting about—and if I was you Miss, I would not trouble my head concerning that matter—it is not her murdered husband.”

“I am afraid you are not fond of Mrs. Brady,” suggested Grace. Perhaps the exact speech the unities might have suggested at such a crisis would not have been composed of the same or even similar words, but certainly an astute lawyer or a clever worldly woman would have put just the same question.

“An’ saving your presence, Miss, who could be fond of her?” inquired Susan. “She’s secret as the grave. He might beat or starve or blackguard her as he liked, and she answered never a word. Never to one did she come for pity or help. I have heard them say Miss, old women, not like me, that over and over again they wanted to talk with her about her trouble, and she put them back. She was that proud Miss, flesh and blood could not thole her.”

“Proud,” Grace repeated, and she looked at the room, she glanced at the table.

“Ay, just proud,” was the answer; “folks are often as proud of the things they want to have as of those they have got, and if they can’t get all they want they turn sulky, just—just as she did,” finished Susan, and without leaving Grace time for a reply, she took up the herring-dish and its belongings and disappeared.

When an hour afterwards she returned to claim the table-cloth, Miss Moffat had vanished.

Over the fields she was gone to visit Mrs. Scott. Now making her way across a meadow where, as is the Irish fashion, the hay had been gathered into about twenty small stacks, hay ropes binding the grass together; now treading lightly between potatoe rigs, now skirting a field of oats or barley, she came at length by a different route to any she had heretofore traversed to the homestead of the Castle Farm.

Straight into the kitchen Grace walked. Upstairs she heard the sound of movement and voices, and upstairs after knocking vainly on the dresser she proceeded.

A stifled shriek was the first sound which greeted her, the next was,—

“Miss Grace, go down again into the open air. And may God Himself preserve you from all evil. We have got the faver.”

Sound of dread in Ireland! If there be a cowardly spot in the nature of Irish men and women even at the present day, it is their blind, unreasoning dread of infection.

Reared amongst those who held this horror, Grace at sound of Mrs. Scott’s news involuntarily drew back. Next instant she stood by Reuben’s bedside.

The lad was dying. Even her inexperience grasped that; and falling on her knees and burying her face in the coverlet, she wept tears she had been longing to shed ever since she entered Maryville.

“Miss Grace,” it was the mother who spoke and touched her, “ye can’t save him. Why should ye kill yourself?”

“And you?” asked Grace, looking at mother and friend.

“We are in the hands of God,” was the reply.

“So am I,” said Miss Moffat, and took the lad’s white fingers in her own.

“Who is attending him,” she asked.

“Mr. Hanlon—who but him? He had a right to do all he could for us; and I’ll say that, in his benefit, he has done it.

“Why was it his right?” asked Grace, ignoring all the rest of the sentence save that which jarred on her ear.

“Because him, and men like him, made the good man what—what— There, God help us, Miss Grace! Go away or you’ll be hearing me raving worse than my poor lad did when first he lay bad, and likely be taken yourself.”

“I am not afraid,” said Grace, but she moved towards the door as she spoke. “Mrs. Scott, I shall see Amos to-morrow I hope; what am I to tell him?”

“Tell him what you’ve seen, Miss Grace.”

“And what else?” asked her visitor.

“I don’t just understand. Oh! yes, I do. Downstairs if you please, Miss. I’ll follow you.”

In the sunlight Grace waited for her to come down, and involuntarily as she looked at the flood of golden light in which the landscape was steeped, she could not help thinking that as the rain falleth on the just and the unjust, so the sun shines on the happy and the miserable.

Whilst she was vainly trying to solve this great problem of nature’s lack of sympathy, Mrs. Scott joined her, keeping at a respectful distance.

“I know what you mean, Miss Grace,” began the woman, who had grown old suddenly; “but, between you and me and him, it’s no use talking of innocency if the other thing be guiltiness. He did it, and if I had been in his place, I’d ha’ done it myself.”

These people—neither the man nor the woman—nor men nor women like them, were likely to take refuge in falsehood, and conviction entered Grace’s heart at that moment. If Amos had sinned, he would have told how it all came about ere now. Had his been the hands that struck his enemy down, he would have waited for no warrant but given himself up, and with obstinate honesty endured the consequences of his guilt.

Or it might be that in the natural terror induced by the accomplishment of such a deed, and the horror of the consequences certain to ensue, he would have fled. Either the sturdy endurance or the frantic fear would not have been out of keeping with the hard, stubborn, straightforward nature—but resolutely to maintain his innocence even to his own lawyer—to offer no explanation as to whether the blow was dealt in cold blood or after bitter altercation—Grace could not reconcile such a line of conduct with anything she could remember of Scott, and out of the fulness of her heart she spoke, “As certainly as you stand there I believe Amos never killed that man.”

“Do you think you’ll make a jury believe that, Miss Grace?” asked Mrs. Scott, holding a blue-checked apron to her face, down which tears were coursing. “Well, well—one trouble is almost driven out by another—when Reuben’s gone, there’ll be no one to think about but the master.”

In this she chanced to be mistaken, however. When Reuben was gone, she herself lay fighting for dear life with the fever which had passed by her husband; leaving him, so most people said, for a worse fate than death by the visitation of God.