The small town of Cluhir, ever avid,
as are all small towns, of sensation, was, did it
only know it, about to enjoy a week that would long
be remembered in its history. Miss Mangan’s
marriage, which alone would have made an epoch, was
fixed for Thursday, December 12th; but this, it need
scarcely be said, was a matter that, though soul-stirring,
was devoid of the element of surprise. Not so,
however, was the sudden evacuation of Mount Music.
Father Hogan’s indefinite information was as
much as was generally known, but much that was not
generally known was confided to the discreet ears of
Father Greer, and he, almost alone of the inhabitants
of Cluhir, was not surprised when the news went abroad
that the Mount Music carriage had conveyed Major Dick
and Lady Isabel to the station, and that so vast a
mass of luggage had accompanied them as to betoken
a prolonged absence.
That the news should, in the first
instance, have been communicated to Father Greer by
Dr. Mangan, was not remarkable, since Dr. Mangan’s
professional advice had usefully reinforced his unofficial
advocacy of the move, and Father Greer was rarely
ignorant for long of matters that were found interesting
by the Big Doctor.
Not merely for the sake of Major Talbot-Lowry’s
health had this upheaval taken place; an even more
imperious factor had been the state of the family
finances. The cloud of debt that had so long brooded
over Mount Music was lower and darker than ever it
had been before. Dick had at length been coerced
into opening negotiations for the sale of his property
to his tenants, but although, in the fullness of time,
these might be expected to bear fruit, they were of
no more immediate assistance to this over-weighted
survivor of a prehistoric species, than is the suggestion
to a horse to live in order that he may get oats.
There was pressure in the air over
Mount Music. Tradesmen, whose suffering had been
as long as their bills, began to turn, in what had
seemed like the sleep of exhaustion, and to talk about
solicitors’ letters. Even Dr. Mangan had
surprised and pained his friend, the Major, by forgetting
his wonted delicate reticence, and hinting, with what
struck Dick as singularly doubtful taste, at a repayment
of those loans that he had volunteered, offering as
an excuse for doing so the expenses consequent on
his daughter’s marriage. In addition to
these irritations, Major Talbot-Lowry had received
what he justly considered to be very annoying letters
from a firm of Dublin solicitors, in connection with
various charges and mortgages on the Mount Music property,
which so they, informed him, had been “acquired”
by them for “a client,” and were now to
be called in. Alternatively, it was suggested,
an arrangement might be proposed, whereby the house
and demesne of Mount Music might be accepted in settlement
of the sums in question. The firm had been in
communication with another creditor, Dr. Mangan of
Cluhir, and it was hoped that all Major Talbot-Lowry’s
liabilities might be arranged for by the method they
suggested.
Dick Talbot-Lowry received this announcement with the mixture
of indignation and contempt that might have been anticipated from an
old-established Pterodactyl, who has been warned that his hereditary wallow in
the Primeval Ooze is about to be wrested from him. Having expressed these
sentiments in suitable language, he said, lightly, that Fairfax must raise as
much on the property as would keep these Dublin sharks quiet, and in the
meantime he would shut up the house at once and go to London. Temporary
retrenchment was all that was required. He would let the place. Some
rich Englishman would jump at the chance
Major Dick had that optimism about
his own affairs that is often combined with a tranquil
pessimism about the affairs of others. He said
that all he wanted was to get clear of the blood-sucking
swarm of hangers-on that infested the place.
He wondered at his own folly in having endured them
for so long. And it would do Christian good to
get away. She had been looking rather pulled
down she missed the hunting, of course.
London would do her good would be a change.
This, approximately, was what Dick
said. What Lady Isabel said, being an attenuated
echo of Dick’s observations, is negligible.
What Christian said was known only to Rinka, the eldest
of the fox terriers, who had a habit of sitting in
the chair at which Christian, knelt to say her prayers,
and would then, with her bland and balmy smile, extort
confidences denied to any other living creature.
On Christian fell the brunt of the
arrangements, the decisions, worst of all, the dismissals.
The house (pending the materialisation of the Rich
Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external
departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian
had known from her childhood; it was her hand that
had to cut the knot of these old friendships.
Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was
left, alone in the big, old house, with old Evans,
and his down-trodden old wife, to be her ministers,
with Rinka to be her companion, and with the obliteration
of her past life to be her task.
An immense fire of logs and turf blazed
in the hall fireplace, a funeral pyre, on which Christian
cast one basketful after another of letters, papers,
ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room
books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated
rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase,
strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped
in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times
that were over and done with. She spent those
short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and
Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and
out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless,
carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all
portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning
heart, not to let Christian out of her sight for a
single instant.
The darkness and shortness of the
days was intensified by the onslaught of a great storm;
one of those giant overwhelmings when it seems that
the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one’s
own little corner of this earth, and that all the
winds and all the waters of the universe are gathered
beneath it to annihilate one insignificant segment
of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw
her father and mother start, too agitated by their
coming journey to have a spare thought for sentiment;
too much beset by the fear of what they might lose,
their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes,
to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost.
And on Monday afternoon with the early darkness the
storm began. There came first a little run of
wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying
out the land. There followed complete stillness;
then a few scattered drops of rain fell, and ceased;
and then, with a heavy, travelling roar, the wind
came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the
cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped
at the windows, and shook them with a human fury,
as though it were life or death to it to get in, as
though it were maddened by the failure of its surprise
attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran
from room to room, barring shutters, fastening doors,
the draughts down the long passages snatching at the
candle flames, the old man and woman full of forebodings
and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to
Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows
and the shaking clatter of doors within the house,
and the shrieking rage of the wind outside. She
sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her room.
She had none of the fears that might, for another,
have filled the empty house with visitants from another
world, and might have taught her to listen for footsteps
in the echoing passages and knocks on the shaking
doors. She had always lived on the borderland,
and was naturalised in both spheres, but to-night,
the voices that had so often given her help, were,
when she most needed help, silent.
“I have nothing left now,”
she said to herself, “but memories, hungering
memories
She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday,
and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy
Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears
when these things were certainties? What spectre
from the other world has power to break a heart?
Deep in the night there was a lull,
a strange moment of arrest, that endured for scarcely
as long as that one could count ten, and then, with
the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent
behind it, was hurled upon the world. All that
night, and all the following day, the rain was like
a wall about the house. It was flung in masses
against the windows, as buckets of water are flung
on a deck. To look forth was as though one looked
through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters,
eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried
roof was mastered, and in all its angles and valleys
yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the top
story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the
tempi, from a ponderous adagio to a
racing prestissimo. Buckets and jugs and
baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the
old Evans pair waddling to and fro, elated, almost
gratified, by the magnitude of their task. And
in the middle of the uproar, late in the afternoon,
a new sound joined in the chorus of the storm, the
coarse and ugly summons of a motor-horn. Old
Evans spied at the car through the hall window, and
contrived to signal a command to go round to the back
of the house.
“If I let dhraw the bolts,”
he said to Barty Mangan at the kitchen entrance, “the
door would fall flat on me!”
“I wouldn’t be surprised
at all,” Barty replied. “Hardly I
could force the car into the storm.”
Christian was sitting on the floor
by the fireplace in the hall, in the last of the daylight,
examining and burning the contents of a drawer full
of miscellaneous papers, as the visitor made his unexpected
entrance from the back, and Barty, recognising his
own improbability and unsuitability on such a day
and at such a time, fell to confused apologies that
were as incoherent, and seemed as unlikely ever to
end, as the buzzing of an imprisoned bee on the window-pane.
The fact at length, however, emerged, that there was
a map of the Mount Music estate hanging in the library,
and that the Major having promised to lend it to Dr.
Mangan, had forgotten to do so.
“Some question of boundaries a
little grazing form m’ fawther has ”
Barty said, nervously.
The map was found, was rolled, and
wrapped up, and yet Barty sat on. He talked incessantly,
feverishly. He talked so fast, in his low voice,
that, in the clamour of the storm, Christian could
only distinguish an occasional word. She had
a nightmare feeling as if a train were roaring through
an endless tunnel, and that she and Barty were the
sole passengers, and would never see daylight or know
quiet again. His long, lean body was hooped into
a very low and deep armchair, his thin hands clasped
his knees; his immense dark eyes, fixed on Christian’s
face, gave her the impression that what he was saying
was without relation to what he was thinking.
In the direful gloom of the hall, with the rain and
wind threshing on the half-shuttered windows, and
the inconstant light of the burning logs the sole
illuminant, his pale face, with the wing of black hair
on his forehead, looked like the face of a strayed
occupant of another sphere who had resumed such an
aspect as he had worn in his coffin.
“Ireland’s a queer old
place just now, Miss Christian,” Barty hurried
on. “Everything’s changing hands,
and everyone’s changing sides. You don’t
know what’ll happen next!”
“I wish I were not changing
sides too,” said Christian, catching at a sentence,
in a momentary lull of the roaring in the chimney.
“Sides of the Channel, I mean I prefer
this side!”
“Do you? Do you?”
said Barty, intensely. “I’m glad you
do! I feel often as if no one cared for this
miserable country except for what they could get out
of it! At the election it would have sickened
you, the bargaining, and the humbugging, and the lies.
Larry was the only man that ran straight, and they
jockeyed him
“I’m sure you ran
straight,” said Christian, with sympathy in
her voice. Piercing her weariness and preoccupation
was the feeling that he had something to say that
lay under this babble of conversation. He was
wrapping himself in a cloak of verbiage, but above
the cloak his tormented eyes met hers, and the pain
in them hurt her.
“Me? Oh, I only ran after
Larry. I thought it was a shabby thing of the
Unionists not to have supported him ”
he stopped abruptly, remembering Major Talbot-Lowry’s
abstention, remembering also the feud, of which he
knew only that he had never wholly divined its origin,
between Coppinger’s Court and Mount Music.
He cursed himself for a fool. He had not meant
to talk politics, but what he had come through the
storm to say was so difficult. He looked at Christian
with agony. Had she minded what he said about
the Unionists? He began to talk again, very fast
and incoherently.
“Miss Christian, I said awhile
ago everything was changing in Ireland. There’s
big changes coming, even hereabouts, things I couldn’t
believe would ever happen. I’ve recently
learned a a fact a statement
that I’m not at liberty to repeat. I was I
may say that I was shocked but Miss Christian ”
the agony in his eyes was in his voice. “Oh!
Miss Christian, for God’s sake, believe that
I knew nothing of it till this day!”
He stood up, steadying himself with
a hand on one of the high marble pillars of the mantelpiece.
“Knew nothing of what?”
said Christian, thinking she had mistaken what he
had said.
“I can’t tell you you’ll
know soon enough only I’m just asking
you to believe that I had neither part nor lot in
it!”
Christian had risen, and was standing
up; he came a step nearer.
“I just want you to understand,
Miss Christian, that in this world there is no one
I regard like you no one, nor ever was,
nor ever will be but don’t mind that,
I only want to say that if there is anything in this
earthly world that it’s in my power to do for
you, or that I could help you in anny shape or form,
you will be showing the kindness and mercy of God
if you will let me do it for you.”
He was trembling, and his voice shook,
but his nervousness was gone. “The kindness
and mercy of God!” he said again. “I
would feel it to be that oh, God!
I would!” The tortured spirit in his eyes had
given place to another spirit, whose emotion Christian
could neither mistake nor respond to, yet its kinship
with the immutable fidelity that was in her heart
made an appeal that she could not refuse.
“Be sure I will ask you,”
she said, with the pity that her own heart-loneliness
had taught her in her voice. “I can’t
understand what it is that you think may happen; it
seems to me as if ” She broke off,
held by the thought that disaster could hardly have
another arrow in its quiver for her. “You
may be sure if I think you can help me, I will ask
you. I know I could rely on you,” she said,
pushing back her own trouble, meeting his wild eyes
with hers, steadfast and compassionate.
“I’m more than thankful grateful you’ve
only to speak ” he stumbled and stammered
with words that were all inadequate to his feeling.
“I won’t detain you; I’m taking your
time too long as it is and I’ll have
a job to get home too, the river’s rising every
minute, and so is the storm ” He somehow
talked himself out of the room.
Christian returned to her work of
destruction. The situation in general had not
been made easier for her by Barty’s tragic offer
of assistance in some mysterious and advancing stress,
or by the certainty that she tried to shake, but could
not, of what his eyes had said to her.
But Barty, as he drove home through
the storm, felt himself to be a new man, consecrate
and apart, ennobled by her promise to rely on him,
glorified by her look; and thanked God that, when the
trouble came, she would remember that he had had neither
part nor lot in it.