Part 24 (2/2)

There was a pause of several seconds, and he was framing a fresh remonstrance when she spoke.

”Roddy's in great trouble. I wouldn't leave him,” she said, taking refuge in a prevarication of the exact truth.

Something about her told Hawkins that things were likely to go hard with him, and there was something, too, that melted his anger as it rose; but her pale face drew him to a height of pa.s.sion that he had not known before.

”And don't you think anything about me?” he said with a breaking voice. ”Are you ready to throw me overboard just because he's in trouble, when you know he doesn't care for you a tenth part as much as I do? Do you mean to tell me that you want me to go away, and say good-bye to you for ever? If you do, I'll go, and if you hear I've gone to the devil, you'll know who sent me.”

The naive selfishness of this argument was not perceived by either. Hawkins felt his position to be almost n.o.ble, and did not in the least realise what he was asking Francie to sacrifice for him. He had even forgotten the idea that had occurred to him last night, that to go to New Zealand would be a pleasanter way of escaping from his creditors than marrying Miss Coppard. Certainly Francie had no thought of his selfishness or of her own sacrifice. She was giddy with struggle; right and wrong had lost their meaning and changed places elusively; the only things that she saw clearly were the beautiful future that had been offered to her, and the look in Roddy's face when she had told him that wherever he had to go she would go with him.

The horses had moved staidly on, while these two lives stood still and wrestled with their fate, and the summit was slowly reached of the long hill on which Lambert had once pointed out to her the hoof-prints of Hawkins' pony. The white road and the grey rock country stretched out before them, colourless and discouraging under the colourless sky, and Hawkins still waited for his answer. Coming towards them up the tedious slope was a string of half-a-dozen carts, with a few people walking on either side; an unremarkable procession, that might have meant a wedding, or merely a neighbourly return from market, but for a long, yellow coffin that lay, hemmed in between old women, in the midmost cart. Francie felt a superst.i.tious thrill as she saw it; a country funeral, with its barbarous and yet fitting crudity, always seemed to bring death nearer to her than the plumed conventionalities of the hea.r.s.es and mourning coaches that she was accustomed to. She had once been to the funeral of a fellow Sunday-school child in Dublin, and the first verse of the hymn that they had sung then, came back, and began to weave itself in with the beat of the mare's hoofs.

”Brief life is here our portion, Brief sorrow, short-lived care, The life that knows no ending, The tearless life is there.”

”Francie, are you ever going to answer me? Come away with me this very day. We could catch the six o'clock train before any one knew-dearest, if you love me-” His roughened, unsteady voice seemed to come to her from a distance, and yet was like a whisper in her own heart.

”Wait till we are past the funeral,” she said, catching, in her agony, at the chance of a minute's respite.

At the same moment an old man, who had been standing by the side of the road, leaning on his stick, turned towards the riders, and Francie recognised in him Charlotte's retainer, Billy Grainy. His always bloodshot eyes were redder than ever, his mouth dribbled like a baby's, and the smell of whisky poisoned the air all round him.

”I'm waitin' on thim here this half-hour,” he began, in a loud drunken mumble, hobbling to Francie's side, and moving along beside the mare, ”as long as they were taking her back the road to cry her at her own gate. Owld bones is wake, asth.o.r.e, owld bones is wake!” He caught at the hem of Francie's habit to steady himself; ”be cripes! Miss Duffy was a fine woman, Lord ha' maircy on her. And a great woman! And divil blasht thim that threw her out of her farm to die in the Union-the dom ruffins.”

As on the day, now very long ago, when she had first ridden to Gurthnamuckla, Francie tried to shake his hand off her habit; he released it stupidly and staggering to the side of the road, went on grumbling and cursing. The first cart, creaking and rattling under its load of mourners, was beside them by this time, and Billy, for the benefit of its occupants, broke into a howl of lamentation.

”Thanks be to G.o.d Almighty, and thanks be to His Mother, the crayture had thim belonging to her that would bury her like a Christian.” He shook his fist at Francie. ”Ah-ha! go home to himself and owld Charlotte, though it's little thim regards you-” He burst into drunken laughter, bending and tottering over his stick.

Francie, heedless of the etiquette that required that she and Hawkins should stop their horses till the funeral pa.s.sed, struck the mare, and pa.s.sed by him at a quickened pace. The faces in the carts were all turned upon her, and she felt as if she were enduring, in a dream, the eyes of an implacable tribunal; even the mare seemed to share in her agitation, and sidled and fidgeted on the narrow strip of road, that was all the s.p.a.ce left to her by the carts. The coffin was almost abreast of Francie now, and her eyes rested with a kind of fascination on its bare, yellow surface. She became dimly aware that Norry the Boat was squatted beside it on the straw, when one of the other women began suddenly to groan and thump on the coffin-lid with her fists, in preparation for a burst of the Irish Cry, and at the signal Norry fell upon her knees, and flung out her arms inside her cloak, with a gesture that made her look like a great vulture opening its wings for flight. The cloak flapped right across the mare's face, and she swerved from the cart with a buck that loosened her rider in the saddle, and shook her hat off. There was a screech of alarm from all the women, the frightened mare gave a second and a third buck, and at the third Francie was shot into the air, and fell, head first, on the road.

CHAPTER LI.

The floor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed repairs, a circ.u.mstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June, however, an intimation from Norry that ”there's ne'er a pratie ye have that isn't ate with the rats,” given with the thinly-veiled triumph of servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and moreover ensured its being properly done.

So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a workman's eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless, redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even sending pallid, worm-like roots down into s.p.a.ce through the cracks in the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.

She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard, and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.

”Hullo, Roddy!” she called out at last, ”is that you? What brings you over so early?”

Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to demand.

”Hullo!” he replied, in a voice not like his own, ”is that where you are?”

”Yes, and it's where I'm going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work I'm at,” brandis.h.i.+ng her saw; ”so if you want to talk to me you must come up here.”

”All right,” said Lambert, gloomily, ”I'll come up as soon as I put the colt in the stable.”

It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the ma.s.sive coils at the back of her head.

”Well, and where's the woman that owns you?” she asked, beginning to work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply up against his red and heavy eyes.

”At home,” he replied, almost vacantly. ”I'd have been here half an hour ago or more,” he went on after a moment or two, ”but the colt cast a shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get it put on.”

Charlotte, with a flat pencil in her mouth, grunted responsively, while she measured off a piece of board, and, holding it with her knee on the body of a legless wheelbarrow, began to saw it across. Lambert looked on, provoked and disconcerted by this engrossing industry. With his br.i.m.m.i.n.g sense of collapse and crisis, he felt that even this temporary delay of sympathy was an unkindness.

”That colt must be sold this week, so I couldn't afford to knock his hoof to bits on the hard road.” His manner was so portentous that Charlotte looked up again, and permitted herself to remark on what had been apparent to her the moment she saw him.

”Why, what's the matter with you, Roddy? Now I come to see you, you look as if you'd been at your own funeral.”

”I wish to G.o.d I had! It would be the best thing could happen me.”

He found pleasure in saying something to startle her, and in seeing that her face became a shade hotter than the stifling air and the stooping over her work had made it.

”What makes you talk like that?” she said, a little strangely, as it seemed to him.

He thought she was moved, and he immediately felt his position to be more pathetic than he had believed. It would be much easier to explain the matter to Charlotte than to Francie, he felt at once; Charlotte understood business matters, a formula which conveyed to his mind much comfortable flexibility in money affairs.

”Charlotte,” he said, looking down at her with eyes that self-pity and shaken self-control were moistening again, ”I'm in most terrible trouble. Will you help me?”

”Wait till I hear what it is and I'll tell you that,” replied Charlotte, with the same peculiar, flushed look on her face, and suggestion in her voice of strong and latent feeling. He could not tell how it was, but he felt as if she knew what he was going to say.

”I'm four hundred pounds in debt to the estate, and Dysart has found it out,” he said lowering his voice as if afraid that the spiders and wood-lice might repeat his secret.

”Four hundred,” thought Charlotte, ”that's more than I reckoned;” but she said aloud, ”My G.o.d! Roddy, how did that happen?”

”I declare to you I don't know how it happened. One thing and another came against me, and I had to borrow this money, and before I could pay it he found out.”

Lambert was a pitiable figure as he made his confession, his head, his shoulders, and even his moustache drooping limply, and his hands nervously twisting his ash plant.

”That's a bad business,” said Charlotte reflectively, and was silent for a moment, while Lambert realised the satisfaction of dealing with an intelligence that could take in such a situation instantaneously, without alarm or even surprise.

”Is he going to give you the sack?” she asked.

”I don't know yet. He didn't say anything definite.”

Lambert found the question hard to bear, but he endured it for the sake of the chance it gave him to lead up to the main point of the interview. ”If I could have that four hundred placed to his credit before I see him next, I believe there'd be an end of it. Not that I'd stay with him,” he went on, trying to bl.u.s.ter, ”or with any man that treated me this kind of way, going behind my back to look at the accounts.”

”Is that the way he found you out?” asked Charlotte, taking up the lid of the packing case and twisting a nail out of it with her hammer, ”he must be smarter than you took him for.”

”Someone must have put him up to it,” said Lambert, ”someone who'd got at the books. It beats me to make it out. But what's the good of thinking of that. The thing that's setting me mad is to know how to pay him.” He waited to see if Charlotte would speak, but she was occupied in straightening the nail against the wall with her hammer, and he went on with a dry throat. ”I'm going to sell all my horses, Charlotte, and I daresay I can raise some money on the furniture; but it's no easy job to raise money in such a hurry as this, and if I'm to be saved from being disgraced, I ought to have it at once to stop his mouth. I believe if I could pay him at once he wouldn't have s.p.u.n.k enough to go any further with the thing.” He waited again, but the friend of his youth continued silent. ”Charlotte, no man ever had a better friend, through thick and thin, than I've had in you. There's no other person living that I'd put myself under an obligation to but yourself. Charlotte, for the sake of all that's ever been between us, would you lend me the money?”

Her face was hidden from him as she knelt, and he stooped and placed a clinging, affectionate hand upon her shoulder. Miss Mullen got up abruptly, and Lambert's hand fell.

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