Part 14 (2/2)
”Are ye sure of that?”
”As sure as I have two feet,” replied Norry, ”and I'll tell ye what she's afther it for. It's to go live in it, and to let on she's as grand as the other ladies in the counthry.”
Julia clenched the bony, discoloured hand that lay on the table.
”Before I saw her in it I'd burn it over my head!”
”Not a word out o' ye about what I tell ye,” went on Norry in the same ominous whisper. ”Shure she have it all mapped this minnit, the same as a pairson'd be makin' a watch. She's sthriving to make a match with young Misther Dysart and Miss Francie, and b'leeve you me, 'twill be a quare thing if she'll let him go from her. Sure he's the gentlest crayture ever came into a house, and he's that innocent he wouldn't think how cute she was. If ye'd see her, ere yestherday, follying him down to the gate, and she smilin' up at him as sweet as honey! The way it'll be, she'll sell Tally Ho house for a fortune for Miss Francie, though, indeed, it's little fortune himself'll ax!”
The words drove heavily through the pain of Julia's head, and their meaning followed at an interval.
”Why would she give a fortune to the likes of her?” she asked; ”isn't it what the people say, it's only for a charity she has her here?”
Norry gave her own peculiar laugh of derision, a laugh with a snort in it.
”Sharity! It's little sharity ye'll get from that one! Didn't I hear the old misthress tellin' her, and she sthretched for death-and Miss Charlotte knows well I heard her say it-'Charlotte,' says she, and her knees dhrawn up in the bed, 'Francie must have her share.' And that was the lasht word she spoke.” Norry's large wild eyes roved skywards out of the window as the scene rose before her. ”G.o.d rest her soul, 'tis she got the death aisy!”
”That Charlotte Mullen may get it hard!” said Julia savagely. She got up, feeling new strength in her tired limbs, though her head was reeling strangely, and she had to grasp at the kitchen table to keep herself steady. ”I'll go on now. If I die for it I'll go to Bruff this day.”
Norry dropped the onion she was peeling, and placed herself between Julia and the door.
”The divil a toe will ye put out of this kitchen,” she said, flouris.h.i.+ng her knife; ”is it you walk to Bruff?”
”I must go to Bruff,” said Julia again, almost mechanically; ”but if you could give me a taste of sperrits, I think I'd be better able for the road.”
Norry pulled open a drawer, and took from the back of it a bottle containing a colourless liquid.
”Drink this to your health!” she said in Irish, giving some in a mug to Julia; ”it's potheen I got from friends of me own, back in Curraghduff.” She put her hand into the drawer again, and after a little search produced from the centre of a bundle of amorphous rags a cardboard box covered with sh.e.l.ls. Julia heard, without heeding it, the clink of money, and then three s.h.i.+llings were slapped down on the table beside her. ”Ye'll go to Conolly's now, and get a car to dhrive ye,” said Norry defiantly; ”or howld on till I send Bid Sal to get it for ye. Not a word out o' ye now! Sure, don't I know well a pairson wouldn't think to put his money in his pocket whin he'd be hasting that way lavin' his house.”
She did not wait for an answer, but shuffled to the scullery door, and began to scream for Bid Sal in her usual tones of acrid ill-temper. As she returned to the kitchen, Julia met her at the door. Her yellow face, that Norry had likened by courtesy to the driven snow, was now very red, and her eyes had a hot stare in them.
”I'm obliged to you, Norry Kelly,” she said, ”but when I'm in need of charity I'll ask for it. Let me out, if you please.”
The blast of fury with which Norry was preparing to reply was checked by a rattle of wheels in the yard, and Bid Sal appeared with the intelligence that Jimmy Daly was come over with the Bruff cart, and Norry was to go out to speak to him. When she came back she had a basket of grapes in one hand and a brace of grouse in the other, and as she put them down on the table, she informed her cousin, with distant politeness, that Jimmy Daly would drive her to Bruff.
CHAPTER x.x.xI.
The drive in the spring-cart was the first moment of comparative ease from suffering that Julia had known that day. Her tormented brain was cooled by the soft steady rush of air in her face, and the mouthful of ”potheen” that she had drunk had at first the effect of dulling all her perceptions. The cart drove up the back avenue, and at the yard gate Julia asked the man to put her down. She clambered out of the cart with great difficulty, and going round to the hall door, went toilfully up the steps and rang the bell. Sir Benjamin was out, Lady Dysart was out, Mr. Dysart was out; so Gorman told her, with a doubtful look at the black Sunday gown that seemed to him indicative of the bearer of a begging pet.i.tion, and he did not know when they would be in. He shut the door, and Julia went slowly down the steps again.
She had begun to walk mechanically away from the house, when she saw Sir Benjamin in his chair coming up a side walk. His face, with its white hair, gold spectacles, and tall hat, looked so sane and dignified, that, in spite of what Norry had said, she determined to carry out her first intention of speaking to him. She s.h.i.+vered, though the sun blazed hotly down upon her, as she walked towards the chair, not from nervousness, but from the creeping sense of illness, and the ground rose up in front of her as if she were going up-hill. She made a low bow to her landlord, and James Canavan, who knew her by sight, stopped the onward course of the chair.
”I wish to speak to you on an important matter, Sir Benjamin,” began Julia in her best voice; ”I was unable to see your agent, so I determined to come to yourself.”
The gold spectacles were turned upon her fixedly, and the expression of the eyes behind them was more intelligent than usual.
”Begad that's one of the tenants, James,” said Sir Benjamin, looking up at his attendant.
”Certainly, Sir Benjamin, certainly; this lady is Miss Duffy, from Gurthnamuckla,” replied the courtly James Canavan. ”An old tenant, I might almost say an old friend of your honour's.”
”And what the devil brings her here?” inquired Sir Benjamin, glowering at her under the wide brim of his hat.
”Sir Benjamin,” began Julia again, ”I know your memory's failing you, but you might remember that after the death of my father, Hubert Duffy-” Julia felt all the Protestant and aristocratic a.s.sociations of the name as she said it-”you made a promise to me in your office that I should never be disturbed in my holding of the land.”
”Devil so ugly a man as Hubert Duffy ever I saw,” said Sir Benjamin, with a startling flight of memory; ”and you're his daughter, are you? Begad, the dairymaid didn't distinguish herself!”
”Yes, I am his daughter, Sir Benjamin,” replied Julia, catching at this flattering recognition. ”I and my family have always lived on your estate, and my grandfather has often had the honour of entertaining you and the rest of the gentry, when they came fox-hunting through Gurthnamuckla. I am certain that it is by no wish of yours, or of your kind and honourable son, Mr. Christopher, that your agent is pairsecuting me to make me leave the farm-” Her voice failed her, partly from the suffocating anger that rose in her at her own words, and partly from a dizziness that made the bath-chair, Sir Benjamin, and James Canavan, float up and down in the air before her.
Sir Benjamin suddenly began to brandish his stick. ”What the devil is she saying about Christopher? What has Christopher to say to my tenants. D-n his insolence! He ought to be at school!”
The remarkable grimaces which James Canavan made at Julia from the back of the bath-chair informed her that she had lighted upon the worst possible method of ingratiating herself with her landlord, but the information came too late.
”Send that woman away, James Canavan!” he screamed, making sweeps at her with his oak stick. ”She shall never put her d-d splay foot upon my avenue again. I'll thrash her and Christopher out of the place! Turn her out, I tell you, James Canavan!”
Julia stood motionless and aghast beyond the reach of the stick, until James Canavan motioned to her to move aside; she staggered back among the long arms of a lignum vitae, and the bath-chair, with its still cursing, gesticulating occupant, went by her at a round pace. Then she came slowly and uncertainly out on to the path again, and looked after the chariot wheels of the Caesar to whom she had appealed.
James Canavan's coat-tails were standing out behind him as he drove the bath-chair round the corner of the path, and Sir Benjamin's imprecations came faintly back to her as she stood waiting till the throbbing giddiness should cease sufficiently for her to begin the homeward journey that stretched, horrible and impossible, before her. Her head ached wildly, and as she walked down the avenue she found herself stumbling against the edge of the gra.s.s, now on one side and now on the other. She said to herself that the people would say she was drunk, but she didn't care now what they said. It would be shortly till they saw her a disgraced woman, with the sheriff coming to put her out of her father's house on to the road. She gave a hard, short sob as this occurred to her, and she wondered if she would have the good luck to die, supposing she let herself fall down on the gra.s.s, and lay there in the burning sun and took no more trouble about anything. Her thoughts came to her slowly and with great difficulty, but, once come, they whirled and hammered in her brain with the reiteration of chiming bells. She walked on, out of the gate, and along the road to Lismoyle, mechanically going in the shade where there was any, and avoiding the patches of broken stones, as possibly a man might who was walking out to be shot, but apathetically unconscious of what was happening.
At about this time the person whose name Julia Duffy had so unfortunately selected to conjure with was sitting under a tree on the slope opposite the hall door at Tally Ho reading aloud a poem of Rossetti's. ”Her eyes were like the wave within, Like water reeds the poise Of her soft body, dainty thin; And like the water's noise Her plaintive voice. ”For him the stream had never welled In desert tract malign So sweet; nor had he ever felt So faint in the suns.h.i.+ne Of Palestine.” Francie's attention, which had revived at the description of the Queen, began to wander again. The sound in Christopher's voice told that the words were touching something deeper than his literary perception, and her sympathy answered to the tone, though the drift of the poem was dark to her. The music of the lines had just power enough upon her ear to predispose her to sentiment, and at present, sentiment with Francie meant the tender repose of her soul upon the thought of Mr. Gerald Hawkins.
A pause at turning over a leaf recalled her again to the fact of Christopher, with a transition not altogether unpleasant; she looked down at him as he lay on the gra.s.s, and began to wonder, as she had several times wondered before, if he really were in love with her. Nothing seemed more unlikely. Francie admitted it to herself as she watched his eyes following the lines in complete absorption, and knew that she had neither part nor lot in the things that touched him most nearly.
But the facts were surprising, there was no denying that. Even without Charlotte to tell her so she was aware that Christopher detested the practice of paying visits even more sincerely than most men, and was certainly not in the habit of visiting in Lismoyle. Except to see her, there was no reason that could bring him to Tally Ho. Surer than all fact, however, and rising superior to mere logic, was her instinctive comprehension of men and their ways, and sometimes she was almost sure that he came, not from kindness, or from that desire to improve her mind which she had discerned and compa.s.sionated, but because he could not help himself. She had arrived at one of these thrilling moments of certainty when Christopher's voice ceased upon the words, ”Thy jealous G.o.d,” and she knew that the time had come for her to say something appropriate.
”Oh thank you, Mr. Dysart-that's-that's awfully pretty. It's a sort of religious thing, isn't it?
”Yes, I suppose so,” answered Christopher, looking at her with a wavering smile, and feeling as if he had stepped suddenly to the ground out of a dream of flying; ”the hero's a pilgrim, and that's always something.”
”I know a lovely song called 'The Pilgrim of Love,'” said Francie timidly; ”of course it wasn't the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully nice too.”
Christopher looked up at her, and was almost convinced that she must have absorbed something of the sentiment if not the sense of what he had read, her face was so sympathetic and responsive. With that expression in her limpid eyes it gave him a peculiar sensation to hear her say the name of Love; it was even a delight, and fired his imagination with the picturing of what it would be like to hear her say it with all her awakened soul. He might have said something that would have suggested his feeling, in the fragmentary, inferential manner that Francie never knew what to make of, but that her eyes strayed away at a click of the latch of the avenue gate, and lost their unworldliness in the sharp and easy glance that is the unvalued privilege of the keen-sighted.
”Who in the name of goodness is this?” she said, sitting up and gazing at a black figure in the avenue; ”it's some woman or other, but she looks very queer.”
”I can't see that it matters much who it is,” said Christopher irritably, ”so long as she doesn't come up here, and she probably will if you let her see you.”
”Mercy on us! she looks awful!” exclaimed Francie incautiously; ”why, it's Miss Duffy, and her face as red as I don't know what-oh, she's seen us!”
The voice had evidently reached Julia Duffy's ears; she came stumbling on, with her eyes fixed on the light blue dress under the beech tree, and when Christopher had turned, and got his eye-gla.s.s up, she was standing at the foot of the slope, looking at him with a blurred recognition.
”Mr. Dysart,” she said in a hoa.r.s.e voice, that, combined with her flushed face and staring eyes, made Christopher think she was drunk, ”Sir Benjamin has driven me out of his place like a beggar; me, whose family is as long on his estate as himself; and his agent wants to drive me out of my farm that was promised to me by your father I should never be disturbed in it.”
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