And when the last limb had been distributed, he turned his crimson face and gleaming eyeglass upon me.
“And why haven’t we seen you out with the hounds lately, Miss Sarsfield?” he began, in a wheezy, luscious voice, with a suspicion of brogue in it. “Nugent brought home such accounts of your doings that I went out myself in hopes of seeing you show us all the way.”
I modestly disclaimed all credit for the glories of the run which had made such a sensation. “And I have only been able to go out once or twice since,” I added; “the meets have been so far away, and Willy has only two horses.”
“Ah! I wish you’d let me give you a mount. Your father has done as much for me many a day when I was a youngster; and I think you and I ought to be great friends”—this with a gaze of deep feeling from the unglazed eye.
“Thank you; you are very kind,” I murmured discomposedly, looking towards the little madam to see if she were noting the behaviour of her lord.
But no; the pink ribbons and marabout tufts of her elaborate cap were nodding complacently towards Willy, who was talking to her with enviable ease and fluency.
Willy’s skill in talking to elderly ladies amounted to inspiration. At present both Madam O’Neill and Miss Bessie Burke were hanging on his words, with every appearance of rapt interest; while I, the beloved of old men, could make no fitting rejoinder to the advances of my host. “But then,” I reflected, in self-extenuation, “old women are infinitely preferable to old men.”
“Ah yes!” The O’Neill went on, “how much you remind me of your father! The same wonderful dark eyes——”
“Mine are grey,” I interrupted, in as repressive a manner as possible.
The objects in question immediately underwent a close scrutiny.
“No matter—no matter; they have the same depth of expression. ‘That eye’s dark charm ’twere vain to tell,’ eh? Isn’t that what Byron says?”
Of the appropriateness of the quotation my plate alone was in a position to give an opinion, as on it my eyes were immovably fixed.
“I say, sir,” said Nugent, suddenly, from across the table, “did you know that Miss Watson was a great fortune-teller? You ought to show her your hand.”
Nothing loth, O’Neill laid his fat white hand on the table for Miss Watson’s inspection. She at once opened the campaign in a masterly manner, by pronouncing it to be that of a “flirt,” and I felt that the chieftain’s entertainment need no longer be a matter of anxiety to me.
Looking at his father with a peculiar expression, in which amusement seemed to predominate, Nugent listened for a minute or two to Miss Watson’s ingenious insinuations and pronouncements. Then he turned to me.
“Do you believe in chiromancy, Miss Sarsfield? It seems to me an adaptable sort of science.”
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Luncheon was over. The elders of the party had returned to the drawing-room, where they were seated in a state of contented satiety, discussing their servants, their gardens, and the Church of Ireland Sustentation Fund, according to their age and kind.
In the billiard-room, a four-handed game was going on. Willy and Miss Watson were playing Connie and Mr. Barrett; and, as billiards was not one of my accomplishments, I preferred, notwithstanding polite offers of instruction, to sit in a window-seat and look on.
Nugent at first undertook the office of marker; but as he tried at the same time to explain the intricacies of the game to me, complications in the scoring soon arose, accompanied by violent altercations with the players. Finally, he was expelled with ignominy, it having been proved that he had marked Miss Watson’s most brilliant break to her opponents.
“I thought I should never have come alive out of that,” he said, sitting down in the window beside me; “Miss Watson looked as if she was going to convince me with the butt end of her cue, and I have no ambition to have a row with Willy. I shouldn’t have much of a chance.”
I thought, nevertheless, that he looked well able to take care of himself, as he leaned back against the window-shutter, and began to roll a cigarette, while the sun slanted in upon his light, firm figure and well-shaped head, striking a pleasant dazzle into his blue eyes as he glanced at the players.
“Do you know Mr. Jimmy Barrett?” he asked, in cautious tones, as that youth, his freckled face pink with anxiety, sprawled across the table to play his stroke.
“No, I don’t know him, but I remember seeing him out hunting.”
“He’s a very fine rider, but that’s about all he’s good for. From the appearance of things at present, he will have cut the cloth in the course of the next five minutes. If Connie is going to give lessons in billiards, she ought to keep a private table for her disciples.”
Nugent had laid his tobacco-pouch on the seat beside him while he was speaking; it was covered with crimson plush, and his monogram, sumptuously worked in gold thread, adorned the flap. I thought it, on the whole, rather vulgar.
“I am thankful that I was not decoyed into playing,” I said. “I must say all my sympathies are with Mr. Barrett; he did not want to play in the least, and I am sure he does not look as if he were enjoying himself.”
“I deny that he was decoyed into playing,” said Nugent, argumentatively, lighting his cigarette and leaning back again with an air of leisurely satisfaction; “and, anyhow, he is not a case in point. The mere fact that you are an American is about fifty points in your favour. You would probably lick all our heads off by the sheer force of instinct and power of intimidation.” He took up his tobacco-pouch, and looked at it absently. “Yes, you’re a great nation. For instance, this very fine thing is of Yankee origin, and I don’t believe the worker of it had ever done anything of the kind before. It was done, as the Irishman played the fiddle, ‘by main strength,’ and yet look at it!”
“It’s very gay,” I said, regarding it with chilly disfavour.
Nugent looked at me meditatively, as he put it back into his pocket. “Does that mean professional jealousy?” he asked. “Are you also a worker of tobacco-pouches?”
“I can’t work any more than I can play billiards,” I said, with some enjoyment of the admission.
“No? What a pity!” said Nugent, a little inattentively. “Do you know, I once taught an American girl billiards, and after she had played for a week, she used to beat me pretty nearly every time.”
“But I think I told you before I was not an American girl,” I said energetically. “Every one here persists in calling me American, and I am nothing of the kind; I am Irish!”
“It seems to me you are very anxious to ‘go back on’ your native land,” he said, looking at me through his half-closed eyelids; “you won’t allow yourself to be called American, and you don’t even speak the language.”
“That is the regular British fallacy. You all expect us to talk through our noses, and say, ‘Wal, stranger.’”
“Not at all. I am awfully well up in modern American fiction, and I know all about the Boston young woman and her high-class conversation. I assure you, there is no one on earth that I should be so much afraid of.”
“I am sure you took that idea from Henry James’s ‘Bostonians,’ but they are not all as superior and conscientious as Olive Chancellor was in that. Certainly I am not, and I lived for a long time in Boston.”
“Really!” he said, opening his eyes; “I had no idea of that. I think,” he went on, after a moment’s pause, “you might have mentioned it before, and saved me from giving myself away as I did.”
“You have said nothing very compromising so far,” I said, stooping down to help Henrietta’s dachshund in an attempt to scramble on to my lap; “but I thought it kinder to warn you while there was yet time.”
He laughed rather foolishly, and slowly knocked the ash off his cigarette against the window-sash. “All the same,” he said, “I think I was quite right in what I said. By the way, I got a lot of new fiddle music to-day. I wonder if you would come and have a look at it? Perhaps we could try over some?”
“I am afraid it is rather late,” I said hesitatingly. “I should like to do so very much, but I think the game must be nearly over, and we ought to go home then; it gets dark so quickly.”
“Well, perhaps you would allow me to bring it over to Durrus some day? My sister is very slow at reading music, and I think I remember your saying that you did not mind playing accompaniments.”
I did remember saying so quite well, and also the manner in which the intimation had been received; but I magnanimously determined to let bygones be bygones, and consented with a good grace.
The game was, as I had said, coming to a conclusion. Willy was playing, and evidently playing extremely well—striding round the table with silent purposeful rapidity, while Miss Watson triumphantly proclaimed the score as his break mounted. Connie, ignoring the dejection of her unhappy little partner, was leaning back against the wall, humming a little bitter tune, with the air of having lost all interest in the proceedings.
“I think Connie looks as if she had enough of Jimmy’s billiard-playing,” said Nugent, with brotherly discernment; “she doesn’t like being beaten a bit. There’s an end of Willy’s break. Now, Jimmy,” he called out, “they only want three of game—42 plays 97; it’s a good game to win!”
Mr. Barrett advanced to the table, looking with a sickly smile to his partner for an encouragement which he did not receive. Nugent and I left our window, and came closer to see the finish of the game. We had not long to wait. Taking prolonged aim at the red ball, Mr. Barrett dealt his own a faltering tap; it rolled slowly across the table, and, without touching either of the other balls, sank unobtrusively into a side pocket.
“Three to us. Game!” said Miss Watson. “I think we did pretty well, Mr. Sarsfield. I told you you were good at games as soon as I looked at your hand.”
“Why, have you had your fortune told, Willy?” I said.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “Are you quite sure you’ve told me everything?”—turning from me to Miss Watson.
“Oh dear, no! not more than half. I shall think about your hand, and tell you the rest another day,” said Miss Watson, with great suavity. “Irishmen’s hands are so puzzling—so contradictory, you know; but I suppose all Irish people are that, aren’t they?”
“Never mind, Mr. Barrett,” I heard Connie saying; “we will play them again some other time. Now, good people, won’t you all come and have some tea?” she continued. “You had better not lose time, or there will be none left. Mr. Horan gets through tea and cake like a Sunday school—four cups at least, and two slices with every cup! So if you and Willie are going to have any more palmistry, Georgie, we certainly shall not wait for you.”
In the drawing-room, we found Madam O’Neill, Henrietta, and Mr. Horan sitting over the tea-table; the latter with his handkerchief spread over his knees, and a general greasiness of aspect suggestive of buttered toast. The Burkes had gone, and, to my unbounded relief, The O’Neill did not appear.
“It’s just as I said,” whispered Connie; “there isn’t an atom of toast or hot cake left. Did you see mamma just now hiding the sponge-cake behind the slop-basin to get it out of his way? I see the Burkes have gone,” she went on. “If you could only have heard old Mimi singing your praises before you came to-day! She said it was ‘deloightful to have that sweet young creature settled in the country,’ and that, ‘considering you had been brought up among the Americans, you really spoke English as well as she did.’ Was not that what she said, Nugent?”
Her brother laughed, and sat down beside me.
“You see, what I told you is quite true,” he said, “though perhaps I did not put it as nicely as Miss Burke did. As an American young lady, you are a failure in these parts.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” I replied. “If you had not formed a preconceived idea that I was a Yankee, I know you would have noticed my Cork brogue at once.”
While we were talking, Willy came up.
“Are you nearly done your tea?” he demanded. “The trap is at the door some time.”
He remained standing before me, as if he expected me to get up at once. That something had annoyed him was evident, and, feeling that delay was unadvisable, I swallowed my tea with all possible despatch, and made my adieux.
Nugent came to the hall door with us.
“Then, may I come over on Tuesday?” he said, tucking in the rug for me, while Willy silently picked up the reins, and took the whip out of the rest, “or any other day that would suit you would do for——” The rest of the sentence was lost, as Willy, without further ceremony, drove away.
“Very well—Tuesday!” I screamed back, as we whirled down the avenue. “My dear Willy, I don’t know why you were in such a desperate hurry,” I went on, rather crossly.
“Well, how was I to know he had anything more to say?” retorted Willy, with equal ill-temper. “I’m sure he had plenty of time to settle everything before we left the house. I wasn’t going to keep the mare standing, if he chose to go on prating there.”
“I don’t suppose another five seconds would have done her any mortal injury, and I think you might have risked it for the sake of civility.”
He did not answer, and we drove along in silence, Willy maintaining a demeanour of unbending severity, and affecting to be altogether occupied with his driving.
“Very well,” I said to myself, “if he likes to sulk, he may; I won’t take any notice of him.”
No word was spoken for at least a mile. Alaska trotted steadily on, under the leafless beeches, and along the road by the sea, till she at length slackened to walk up a hill.
“Are you cold, Theo?” Willy did not turn his head, but I felt that the olive branch had been extended.
“Not particularly,” I said, as indifferently as possible.
“I put a wrap into the trap for you”—stretching a long arm over the back of the seat, and dragging a cloak from the depths. “You must be perished in that thin coat. Here, let me put this round you.”
He wrapped me in it with unnecessary care, and while he was doing so he said suddenly,
“I’m awfully sorry if I was rude to you. You know that——” His voice broke, and he stopped as suddenly as he had begun. I put up my hand to fasten the cloak for myself, and was rather startled to find it caught and fervently squeezed.
“Oh!” I said, withdrawing my hand sharply, “you were not in the least rude to me. I did not mind a bit. We had a very pleasant day on the whole, I think,” I continued inconsequently; “and did you see how beautifully I behaved to The O’Neill?”
I fancy Willy looked a little disappointed at his apology being disposed of so quickly.
“No, I can’t say I did,” he answered, in an injured way. “I had plenty to do talking to the madam.”
“Yes, I saw you. I was looking at you with the deepest admiration all through lunch. And, by the way, what do you think of Miss Watson? She seems to be a wonderful billiard-player.”
“I thought you were too busy talking to Nugent to notice what we were doing,” said Willy, with some return of sulkiness. “It didn’t look as if you found it so hard to talk to him, as you’re always saying you do.”
“But I assure you we were looking at the game, Willy. I don’t understand billiards, so you can’t expect me to watch every stroke.”
“Well, I only know that I spoke to you one time, and you were so much taken up with talking about Boston or something, that you never even heard me.”
“Then you must have said it absolutely in a whisper,” I said, in heated self-defence. “Mr. O’Neill was not saying anything in the least interesting, only that he should never have thought I had been brought up in America.”
“H’m!” said Willy, in a more mollified tone. “He must have meant that for a compliment. I know what he thinks of Yankee girls. He’s told me many a queer story of one he met at Cannes last winter.”
We rounded a turn in the road, and in the twilight I could see the Durrus woods spreading darkly down to the sea. It would take another ten minutes to reach home, and, though Willy was simmering down, I knew that we were still on dangerous ground.
“What did Miss Watson say of your hand?” I asked, with the view of changing the conversation. “Did she tell you that you had ‘no sense of humour, and homicidal tendencies, combined with unusual conscientiousness’? That’s what a man once told me.”
“No,” answered Willy, quite seriously; “she didn’t say very much about my character. She was looking at my line of heart most of the time, I think. She told me that I would have ‘two great passions’ in my life, and that I was to be married soon.” He stopped, and looked at me.
“How exciting!” I said hurriedly. “My man did not tell me any of those interesting sort of things.”
“She said my line of fate was broken,” resumed Willy, “whatever that may mean. She told me I had a very good line of intellect, but it wasn’t properly developed. I dare say the last part of that’s true enough,” he added, with a sigh. “I never got a chance to learn anything when I was a boy. The governor sent me from one dirty little school to another for a couple or three years, and then the national schoolmaster had a go at me, and that’s about all the education I ever had.”
“I dare say you get on just as well without being very good at classics and those sort of things. And, you see, you passed your exam. for your captaincy in the West Cork quite easily,” I said, with a rather lame attempt at consolation.
“That’s quite a different thing; any fool could do that. What makes me sick is to see Nugent and chaps like him, who have been to Harrow and Oxford, and all the rest of it—and here I’ve been stuck all my life, without a chance to get level with them. It’s when I’m talking to you that I feel what an ignorant brute I am!”
“I hate to hear you talk like that, Willy,” I said, really distressed. “I never thought you so—not for an instant. On the contrary, I think you know more than any one I ever met—about practical things; and if you don’t look where you’re going, you will drive over that old woman who is going in at the gate”—as we turned sharply off the road at the Durrus lodge—“and I believe it is that dreadful old Moll, too. I am thankful to say I have not seen her for ever so long.”
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It was early in December, a showery, blustry afternoon; but I was sitting out of doors in the hay. The men had been cutting away the great rick in the haggard; they had taken a slice off it, down almost to the ground, and I had burrowed myself a comfortable bed among the soft trusses, with my back against the bristling, newly shorn wall of hay that towered above me like a gable. The dogs were standing beside me in different attitudes of intensest attention, their eyes fixed, like mine, upon a hole in the foundations of the rick, from which at this moment a pair of legs in corduroys and gaiters were protruding.
“Have you come to them yet?” I called out.
A muffled grunt was all that I could hear in answer; but after a moment or two, the body belonging to the legs was drawn out of the hole.
“I’ve got one of the brutes,” said Willy, holding up his hand, with a ferret hanging limply from it. “I don’t know how I’ll get the other; those rats must be miles back in the rick. I’ll have to go up for one of the young Sweenys to help me to move some of the stones under the rick.”
“I think in that case I shall go home,” I said. “I suppose you’ll take hours over it.”
“Oh no! Do wait a bit; we won’t be any time. You can have my coat if you’re cold,” said Willy, dropping the reclaimed ferret into its bag. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
He climbed the wall of the haggard, and took a short cut across the field to where the whitewashed walls of Sweeny’s cottage showed through the red twigs of the leafless fuchsia hedge that incongruously surrounded it.
I took out my watch as soon as he had started, and saw that it was half-past three. Willy seemed to have forgotten that this Tuesday afternoon was the one on which Nugent had said he would come over. I had taken care to say something about it at breakfast, but had done it so lamely and inopportunely that I was not sure whether Willy had heard me; and a kind of awkwardness had prevented me from reminding him of it when he had asked me after luncheon to come out with him to the haggard, where a thriving colony of rats had been that morning discovered.
Willy and I were now on terms of the most absolute intimacy. His daily companionship had become second nature to me—something which I accepted as a matter of course, which gave me no trouble, and was in all ways pleasant. But, for all that, I had begun to find out that in some occult way I was a little afraid of him. He was unexpectedly and minutely observant, and, where I was concerned, appeared to be able to take in my doings with the back of his head. It was this gift, combined with his unostentatious acuteness, that made me sometimes feel foolish when I least wished it, and lately had made any mention of Nugent’s name a difficulty to me.
At all events, at this particular moment I did not feel disposed to explain matters, and I settled myself again in the hay, hoping that the capture of the ferret would allow me, by the natural course of things, to get home in time without having to remind Willy of my expected visitor.
The demesne farm, as it was called, was at some distance from the house—at least ten minutes’ walk down a stony lane, worn into deep ruts by the passing of the carts of hay; and now that the ruts had been turned into pools by heavy showers, it was anything but a pleasant walk. The boreen passed through the fields in which Willy had schooled Alaska; it came out into the road near the lodge, and thence led directly to the house, whose gleaming slate roof and tall chimneys I could see from where I was sitting, above the trees of the plantation. The short December day was already beginning to close in; the setting sun was level with my eyes, and was sending broad rays up the long slope that lay between the farm and the sea. Everything for the moment was transfigured; all the wet stones and straw lying about the yard shone and glistened. The pigs were splashing through pools of liquid gold; and the geese, who were gabbling in an undertone near the hayrick, looked blue on the shadow side, and silver-yellow on the side next the sun—one could believe them capable of laying nothing but golden eggs. The wind was going down with the sun, and it seemed as if we should have no more rain; but there was a dangerous-looking black cloud over Croaghkeenen. I wondered if Nugent had come. That cloud certainly meant rain; perhaps it would serve as an excuse to get home.
Willy was as good as his word about coming back quickly, and brought with him not one, but two small sons of the house of Sweeny, with shock heads of hair, as fluffy as dandelion seed, and almost as white, and big grey eyes that looked doubtfully at me from under the blackest lashes and out of the dirtiest faces I had ever seen in my life.
“Come, Timsy,” said Willy to the smaller of the two, “in you go; and if you get a grip of him at all, hold on to him, no matter if he eats the nose off your face.”
In no wise discouraged by this injunction, Timsy crawled into the hole, until nothing but the muddy soles of his bare feet were visible. But the ferret was evidently beyond human reach. I sat impatiently enough, looking on, and trying to summon up courage to say that I would go home, when I felt a drop or two of rain on my hand, and saw that the heavy cloud now shut Croaghkeenen altogether out of view, and that a thick shower was coming across the sea and along the slopes of Durrus. In another instant we were enveloped in a gusty whirl of rain.
“Run to the Sweenys’, Theo!” cried Willy, jumping up from his knees, and abandoning his attempt to push little Sweeny deeper into the hole; “we must shelter there.”
“Couldn’t we get home?” I said, standing undecidedly in the downpour, and thinking with despair that my deserted visitor was possibly arriving at Durrus now.
“No; you’d be drowned getting there. Come on.”
We ran up the lane as fast as was possible from the nature of it, with the mud splashing up at every step, the rain trickling down the backs of our necks, and the dogs racing along with us, getting very much in the way by ridiculous jumps at the bag in which Willy carried the ferret, and evidently believing that this unusual rushing through the mud was only a prelude to something far more thrilling. I picked my way after Willy through the Sweenys’ yard, along a path which ran precariously between a manure heap and a pool of dirty water, and saw Mrs. Sweeny flinging open her door to receive us.
“Oh, ye craytures! ye’re dhrowned! Come in asthore. Get out, ye divil!”—slapping the bony flanks of a calf which was trying to thrust itself into the house. “Turn them hins out, Batty! Indeed, ’tis a disgrace to ask ye into that dirty little house, and me afther plucking a goose.”
We entered the low, narrow doorway; and the hens, seeing that they were hemmed in, and disdaining even at this extreme moment to yield to Batty’s practised pursuit, took to their wings, and flew past our heads through the doorway with varying notes of consternation.
“Did anny wan iver see the like of thim hins?” demanded Mrs. Sweeny, dramatically, while she dragged forward a greasy-looking kitchen chair. “I’m fairly heart-scalded with them—the monkeys of the world! Sit down, ochudth, sit down why!” she went on, addressing me, her broad red face beaming with pride and hospitality. “Indeed, me little place isn’t fit for the likes of ye! Sure, wouldn’t ye sit down, Masther Willy, till I get ye a dhrink of milk? Run away, Bridgie”—this in an undertone to a grimy little girl—“and dhrive in the cows.”
She produced another chair for Willy, the discrepancy in the length of whose legs was corrected by a convenient dip in the mud floor of the cottage, and Willy sat down, and at once began a diffuse and cheerful conversation with her.
The fates certainly seemed to be against me. This shower would probably last for some time, and it would be impossible to say that I wanted to go home until it was over. I looked at my watch; it was already nearly four. Nugent would very likely come early—he had said that he would be over some time before tea—and would hear that I had gone out, and had left no message or explanation of any kind for him. It was very exasperating, but, as long as this deluge of rain lasted, all I could do was to sit still and possess my soul in as much patience as possible.
The cabin had more occupants than, in its doubtful light, I had at first noticed. In the smoky shadow of the overhanging chimney-place was huddled, on a three-legged stool, a very small old man in knee-breeches and a tail-coat, who was smoking a short pipe, and still held in his hand the battered tall hat which he had taken off on our entrance. He was our hostess’s father-in-law, one of the oldest tenants on the estate, and he sat, as I had often seen the old country men in the cabins sit, smoking and dozing over the fire, and looking hardly more alive to what was going on than the grey, smouldering lumps of turf on the hearth. In the dusky recess at the foot of a four-poster bed, which blocked up one of the small windows, Batty and two other children were hiding behind each other, and were staring at us as young birds might. Pat and Jinny were vulgarly snuffing among Mrs. Sweeny’s pots and pans, with an affectation of starvation which but ill-assorted with what I knew of their recent luncheon. Now they had come, with stunning unexpectedness, on a cat, crouched on the dresser, and, when called off by Willy on the very eve of battle, remained for the rest of their visit in agonized contemplation of her security. From a hencoop in the corner by the bed came faint cluckings; the goose which Mrs. Sweeny had been plucking lay with its legs tied beside the red earthen pan, in which it might have seen its own breast feathers, and tried to console itself by pecking feebly at the yellow meal which had been spilt on the ground in front of the chickens’ coop.
Mrs. Sweeny was sitting on a kind of rough settle, between the other window and the door of an inner room. She was a stout, comfortable-looking woman of about forty, with red hair and quick blue eyes, that roved round the cabin, and silenced with a glance the occasional whisperings that rose from the children.
“And how’s the one that had the bad cough?” asked Willy, pursuing his conversation with her with his invariable ease and dexterity. “Honor her name is, isn’t it?”
“See, now, how well he remembers!” replied Mrs. Sweeny. “Indeed, she’s there back in the room, lyin’ these three days. Faith, I think ’tis like the decline she have, Masther Willy.”
“Did you get the doctor to her?” said Willy. “I’ll give you a ticket if you haven’t one.”
“Oh, indeed, Docthor Kelly’s afther givin’ her a bottle, but shure I wouldn’t let her put it into her mouth at all. God knows what’d be in it. Wasn’t I afther throwin’ a taste of it on the fire to thry what’d it do, and Phitz! says it, and up with it up the chimbley! Faith, I’d be in dread to give it to the child. Shure, if it done that in the fire, what’d it do in her inside?”
“Well, you’re a greater fool than I thought you were,” said Willy, politely.
“Maybe I am, faith,” replied Mrs. Sweeny, with a loud laugh of enjoyment. “But if she’s for dyin’, the crayture, she’ll die aisier without thim thrash of medicines; and if she’s for livin’, ’tisn’t thrusting to them she’ll be. Shure, God is good—God is good——”
“Divil a betther!” interjected old Sweeny, unexpectedly.
It was the first time he had spoken, and having delivered himself of this trenchant observation, he relapsed into silence and the smackings at his pipe.
“Don’t mind him at all, your honour, miss,” said his daughter-in-law, seeing my ill-concealed amusement. “Shure, he’s only a silly owld man.”
“He’s a good deal more sensible than you are,” said Willy, returning to the subject of Honor.
The rain poured steadily down. I thought of Nugent, and could fancy his surprise at hearing that I was not at home. It was not, I argued to myself, so much that I was sorry to miss him, as that I hated being rude; and it certainly was rude to have gone out on the day he had settled to come, without even leaving a message. What an amazing gift of the gab Willy had! Rain or no rain, it was clear that he and Mrs. Sweeny meant to talk to one another for the rest of the afternoon.
The old man in the chimney-corner had watched me during all this time, and muttered to himself every now and then—what, I could not understand. We must have been sitting there for ten minutes at least, when the two boys whom Willy had left to look for the ferret came dripping in, with the object of their search safely housed in a bag, and silently stationed themselves along with their brothers and sisters in the corner by the bed.
“Is the rain nearly over?” I asked the elder.
“I dunno, miss,” he replied, bashfully rubbing the sole of his foot up and down the shin of the other leg.
“I can tell you that,” said Willy, getting up and going to the door. “I don’t think it looks like clearing for another quarter of an hour.”
“Then I don’t know what I can do,” I said, in unguarded consternation.
“Why,” said Willy, turning round and looking at me with his hands in his pockets, “what’s the hurry?”
“There is no hurry exactly,” I said, feeling very small and cowardly; “but I thought you knew—at least, I think I told you this morning, that Mr. O’Neill said he would come over to-day.”
I wondered if this simple sentence gave any indication of the effort it was to me to say it.
“I can’t say I remember anything about it,” Willy answered, in what I am sure he thought a crushingly chilly voice.
“Oh yes, indeed I did tell you,” I said, getting up and following him to the door; “but you sneezed just as I was saying it, and the voice is not yet created that could be heard through one of your sneezes.”
I knew that he was rather proud than otherwise of his noisy sneezes, and I laughed servilely, and looked up, hoping that he would laugh too. But there was nothing approaching to amusement in his face. It was red and forbidding, as he looked out into the rain that was thrashing down in the dirty yard. He had still a good deal of hay and hayseed about his coat and hat, and altogether I thought it was not one of his most becoming moments.
“I don’t know if you’d like to start in that,” he said; “but if you would, I’m quite ready to go with you.”
If I had been alone, I should probably have faced a wetting in order to get back to the house; but now I was both too proud and too shy to accept Willy’s offer.
“I think I shall wait a little longer,” I said, going back to my chair by the fire.
“Himself’s afther sayin’,” said Mrs. Sweeny, as I sat down, “that he’d think ’twas your father he was lookin’ at, an’ you sittin’ there a while ago.”
Old Sweeny removed his pipe from his lips, and cleared his throat.
“Manny’s the time I seen the young masther sit there,” he said, in a sort of harsh whisper, turning his bleared and filmy old eyes towards me—“the way she”—he pointed a crooked forefinger at me—“is now, afther he bein’ out shootin’ or the like o’ that; ‘Be domned to ye, Sweeny, ye blagyard,’ he’d say to me, ‘dickens a shnipe is there left on yer land with your dhraining; I’ll have ye run out of the place,’ he’d say. That’s the very way he’d talk to me, as civil and pleasant as yerself. Begob, ye have the very two eyes of him, an’ the grand long nose of him!”
I acknowledged the compliment as well as I knew how, and old Sweeny went on again, punctuating his sentences with long and noisy pulls at his pipe.
“Faith, there was manny a wan of the Durrus tinants would rather ’twas their own son was goin’ to Ameriky than him when he went; and manny a wan too that’d have walked to Cork to go to his funeral. That was the quare comin’ home that he had—to die an’ be berrid in the town o’ Cork. I’ll niver forget that time. Shure the night he died in Cork—’twas the night before the owld masther dyin’ too—I wasn’t in me bed, but out in the shed with a cow that was sick. There was carridges dhriving the Durrus avenue that night,” he said, his voice getting lower and huskier; “I heard them goin’ the road, an’ it one o’clock in the morning! And the big shnow comminced afther that agin.”
“What carriages were they?” I asked, with a little superstitious shiver.
The old man looked furtively round, and took his pipe out of his mouth.
“God knows!” he said mysteriously; “God knows! But they say there do be them that wait for the Sarsfields agin they’re dyin’. There was wan that seen the black coach and four horses goin’ wesht the road, over the bog, the time the owld man—that’s Theodore’s father—died; and wansht,” he went on impressively, “there was a Sarsfield out, that time the Frinch landed beyond in Banthry Bay, and the English cot him an’ hung him; but those people took him and dhragged him through hell and through det’th, and me mother’s father heard the black coach taking him wesht to Myross Churchyard.”
Old Sweeny had let his pipe go out during the telling of the story, and he left me to make what I could of it, while he poked about for a piece of burning turf wherewith to rekindle his pipe. Willy was still standing by the door.
“I think it’s cleared up enough for you to start now,” he said coldly, “and if you want to get back to the house, you’d better start before it comes on heavy again.”
“Oh, very well, if you like,” I answered, with equal indifference. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Sweeny.”
Mrs. Sweeny was taking a bowl from the dresser, from which haven of refuge she had driven her cat with one swing of her brawny arm. It shot past Willy out of the door, followed by a flying white streak, which inference rather than eyesight told me was composed of the pursuing Pat and Jinny.
“Look at that, now!” remarked the cat’s mistress; “that overbearin’ owld cat’d be sittin’ there, thwarting thim dogs, and she well able to run for thim; an’ I wouldn’t begridge them to ketch her nayther. She’s a little wandhering divil that have no call to the place.” She came forward with the bowl in her hand. “See here, Masther Willy; here’s eight beautiful pullet’s eggs, the first she iver laid, an’ you’ll carry them wesht to the house for Miss Sarsfield to ate for her brekfish—mind that, now!” She gave him a slap on the back. “Och, there’s no fear but he’ll mind!” she said, winking at me. “He’d do more than that for yourself, and small blame to him!”
Willy took the bowl from her without taking any notice either of the innuendo or the slap which accompanied it, and marched out of the house with sulky dignity.
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