CHAPTER II.SAYING GOOD-BYE.
The summer was gone and early autumn had come before Grace Moffat walked beyond the precincts of Bayview. Sorrow not sickness had kept her solitary. With the bitterness of her grief she could not endure friends or strangers to meddle, and so all alone she bore the first brunt of her trouble, all alone she formed her plans, rooted up the old projects and fanciful aims of her past life, and, spite of her former convictions on the subject of absenteeism, determined to leave Ireland, if not for ever, at all events for a considerable period.
In truth, without sacrificing her liberty she could not well have remained there.
Although in the eyes of Kingslough she was fast verging towards the sere and yellow leaf period of life, she was not old enough to set Mrs. Grundy at defiance and reside at Bayview without a duenna, and that was an encumbrance Grace had no desire to burden herself with. Further, she knew that every eligible man within reach would rush to offer her consolation in the first instance, and his hand in the second; and that mothers would outvie each other in offering to supply a father’s place to so eligible a daughter-in-law as herself.
She was of course a much more desirable investment in the matrimonial market than had been the case during her father’s lifetime. All he once possessed was hers now unreservedly; and amongst men in search of rich wives, the increased value of Miss Moffat’s hand might readily have been computed by a rule-of-three sum.
All this Grace felt bitterly. Now when she wanted a friend as she had never wanted one before, she found herself surrounded by those who all, she suspected, held a second purpose concealed behind their kindly advances.
Perhaps she wronged the impulses of many a warm heart by this idea, but money was an article truly needed at that time amongst the Irish gentry. Heiresses were scarce, encumbered estates numerous. So to speak, the bulk of the old families were in a state of insolvency, and driven to their wits’ ends to avert the final catastrophe which the famine only precipitated, which it alone certainly never could have induced amongst an aristocracy already tottering to the verge of ruin.
How were the heirs of impoverished estates covered with debt as with a garment to mend their position except by marriage?
Every profession was overstocked; they could not go into trade. Even had they possessed the requisite ability necessary to carry on a business successfully, the prejudices of the country must have deterred them from attempting to mend matters by a move in that direction.
A few went to India, where some succeeded and others died. Australia and the West Indies absorbed most of the adventurous orspeculative youth of the period. In Australia they led a not disagreeable life, spite of hardships they certainly never could have endured at home. In the West Indies success resolved itself into a game at hazard with death. If death won, why they died, and there was an end of it; if they won, they won wealth as well.
For the male gentry who remained at home on the ancestral acres, there were but two courses open. One to marry a girl without money, and so hasten the advent of ruin; the other to marry a girl with money, and so defer to another generation that bankruptcy which it was impossible could be averted for ever.
In such a state of society the woman herself counted for very little. Love matches were made, it is true, every day, and resulted in a good deal of domestic unhappiness, pinching, saving, meanness, and an infinite number of children; but in those cases where love and prudence might have been supposed able to travel together, prudence turned love out of court, and no heiress, let her be as good and beautiful as she pleased, could make quite surewhether it were she who was being wooed, or the comfortable thousands the care and affection of some exceptionally fortunate ancestor had saved for her benefit.
Had she been deaf, humpbacked, lame, afflicted with a squint, eighty years of age, an heiress need not have despaired of attracting suitors.
When sons were shy or indifferent, when they seemed inclined to balk, as a hunting gentleman described their reluctance to go wooing, mothers courted sometimes not unsuccessfully in their stead; and had Grace been one of the blood royal, she could scarcely have had greater attention showered upon her than was the case once the funeral was over and the terms of her father’s will known.
But to visitors Grace sedulously denied herself; invitations she steadily refused to accept, with the exception of one which she took time to consider.
It came from Mrs. Hartley, and was couched in these words:—
“I have been thinking much about you andyour position, and putting my own selfish wishes on one side, really and truly believe the best thing you can do is to come to me for a time. If you stay where you are you will be driven to marry some one. The day must come when in utter weariness of saying ‘No,’ you will say ‘Yes;’ not because you care much for the suitor, or he is especially eligible, but because you feel one husband is preferable to a host of lovers.
“We shall not bore each other; you shall go your way, and I shall continue on mine.
“We will travel if you like; I shall not herald your arrival amongst my friends in the character of an heiress, be sure of that. I have no pet young man free of the house to whom I wish to see you married. Come and try the experiment, at all events. If you still preserve your Utopian ideas on the subject of Ireland’s regeneration, it may be as well for you, before you begin the work, to see that the inhabitants of another country really manage to keep their doorsteps white—and their children’s hair combed without theintervention of philanthropists like yourself, or demagogues like Mr. Hanlon. By the way, I hope you are not getting entangled in that quarter.
“No doubt the young man is clever, and behaved well at the time of your poor father’s attack; but still, these are no reasons why he should marry your father’s daughter.
“It would not do, Grace. If by your marriage to such a man you were able to ensure a meat dinner every day to all the tenant farmers in Ireland, you would find even that desirable result dearly purchased at the cost of so unsuitable an alliance. I do you the justice to feel certain your heart is unaffected, but the circumstances have been propitious for touching your fancy; and I know of old what a snare that lively imagination you possess is capable of proving.
“Talking of imagination, what has become of the handsome hero of your teens? What has he done? What is he doing? I see the young earl is dead; and I understand that where the sapling fell it is to lie, as the meansof the family do not permit of a second grand funeral within so short a time. Opinions here are divided as to the chances of Mr. Robert Somerford succeeding to the title.
“Some persons say the new earl is privately married and has a family, others that he will marry, others that he is and has always been single, that he has one foot in the grave and will shortly have another in likewise. It is a case in which I should decline to advise if you asked my opinion.
“If you marry Robert Somerford he may be Earl of Glendare. If you wait till he is Earl of Glendare, you may never be Countess of Glendare. And indeed I shall not desire to see you raised to the peerage. I do not think greatness would sit easily upon your shoulders. I believe you would be far happier married to some honest, honourable man in our own rank of life than you could be amongst the nobility. But there is no honest, honourable young man in our own rank of life residing near here whose cause I wish to plead, so you will be quite safe in coming to me. Will youthinkthe matter over and come?”
Which letter Grace, after having thought the matter over, answered in these words:—
“I will go to you. Amongst all the people I know, there is no one I trust so fully, I believe in so implicitly as I do in you. I will let Bayview furnished. I will set my affairs in order, and leave the dear old place which has grown hateful to me—temporarily only, I hope—for I should like, when I have advanced sufficiently in age, to wear caps, and set the world’s opinions at defiance, to return to Ireland, and spend my declining years and my income amongst mine ‘ain folk.’”
“Were I a stronger-minded woman, I suppose I should be able to conquer my grief and defy public criticism by starting on what you would call a career of philanthropy; but sorrow and the world, this little world of Kingslough, are, I confess, too much for me. As you say, I believe I should marry out of mere weariness of spirit.”
“My pensioners I shall leave to Mrs. Larkin, who will rejoice in seeing the poor crowd round her door like robins in the winter.
“If anything were capable of making me laugh now, I should laugh at your idea of there being the slightest tender feeling between me and Mr. Hanlon. It is because by some nameless instinct I comprehend he never could by any chance care for me that I have seen more of him since my irreparable loss than has been perhaps, situated as I am, quite wise. I do not mean that he has called here often, or that I have chanced to meet him more than two or three times in my solitary walks by the seashore; but still you know what all small places are, what this small place is especially.
“Kingslough has talked, is talking—Kingslough says my head is turned, and that I am bent on flinging myself and my money away on a man who, some say—you remember Kingslough was always remarkable for its vehemence of expression, ‘should be drummed out of the town’—and others think worthy of being—do not faint at the phrase, it is not mine—‘strung up.’
“I have told you that I am positive Mr. Hanlon has no intention, even for the weal ofthe nation, of ever asking me to marry him; and yet I have an uneasy conviction he has some purpose to serve in cultivating better relations between us, which purpose I cannot at present divine. Moreover, I fear he has not given so direct a denial to those rumours which have bracketed his name and mine in such an undesirable connection as I think, were I a man, I should have done under similar circumstances. Kingslough says positively I have lost my heart and my senses—of the state of both you will be able to judge when we meet.
“Mr. Robert Somerford has at length given me the opportunity of refusing the honour of allying myself to the house of Glendare. I am glad of this, for I should scarcely have liked to leave Bayview whilst a chance remained of his doing so. He is handsomer than ever—years only improve his appearance; but were he beautiful as Adonis he could never be my hero more.
“He was first sentimental and sympathetic, next pressing in his entreaties, and sceptical as to the genuineness of my ‘No.’ Lastly hewas insolent and made as much of himself and his position as though he had been nursed in the lap of royalty, and lived all his life on terms of equality with kings and queens. Familiarity may in my case have bred contempt, but I certainly never in the days when I admired him most considered he was so much my superior as appears is the case.
“I was equal, however, to the emergency; my desolate position, and my heavy mourning, the sorrow I have passed through, all combine to give me a courage I lacked in former times.
“Whilst he was still exalting himself and depreciating me—reciting the glories of the Glendares and contrasting the rank to which he could have raised me with the level of obscurity in which my refusal doomed me to remain for life, maundering on as one might have thought only an angry ill-bred woman or a spoiled child could have maundered—I rose and rang the bell.
“‘Perhaps you will go now, Mr. Somerford,’ I said, ruthlessly cutting across a sentence in which he was drawing a picture of my futurelife when married to a poor apothecary who had not even the recommendation of being possessed of all his senses. ‘Perhaps you will go now, and spare yourself the vexation of being asked to leave before a servant.’
“I never saw a man so taken by surprise. He got up, made me a low, mocking bow, and quitted the room without uttering another word.
“Next time he asks any one to marry him, he says, he will take care the lady is in his own rank of life.
“He had been gradually provoking me, so at that point I broke silence and suggested the advisability of his ascertaining at the same time whether her worldly means were as excellent as his own.
“You will blame me for this, of course; but if I had bitten back the words they would have choked me.
“There was a time when I could have married him, and probably repented doing so every hour of my after life. I told him this, and he pressed me much to say when my feelings underwent so great a change.
“‘On that day,’ I answered, ‘when you forced me to remark,—We had made you welcome at Bayview, and we now make you welcome to stay away.’
“It is only women with money, I fancy, who have to endure impertinence at the hands of their suitors. I suppose the fact is a feeling of tenderness for the beloved one mingles even with the bitterness of losing her; but the wildest fancy cannot suppose any feeling of tenderness towards a fortune that a man sees plainly can never be possessed by him.
“Every obstacle to my accepting your invitation is now removed.
“Our servants seem determined to celebrate the event of their master’s death with a series of weddings. He left them each a sum of money which, though it would appear little to English people of the same rank, is wealth to them, and a number of alliances have been arranged on the strength of these legacies which would have amused you had you seen the match-making in progress.
“On the whole, I am inclined to think thateven in Ireland the possession of a nest egg produces the same effect upon human beings as it does upon a hen. A desire to lay another beside it becomes at once irresistible. After that remark you will not be surprised to hear the marriages in this establishment are chiefly remarkable for prudence. Jane, the dairymaid, is going to invest her money in cows, and a husband who owns a small cottage, the right of grazing over a large tract of common land, and a cabbage-garden, in which he proposes to erect byres. The cook, whom you may perhaps remember for the excellence of her omelets and the warmth of her temper, clubs her legacy with that of the coachman, and they intend to take a public-house five miles down the coast, and add posting to the business. I will not weary you with further matrimonial details.
“The youngest and prettiest of the establishment, my own little maid, takes her money, supplemented by a gift from me, back to her sickly mother.
“‘I shall be able to stay with her alwaysnow, Miss Grace,’ she said, crying and laughing in the same breath. ‘I know enough, thanks be to you, to teach a little school, and we’ll be happy as the day is long.’
“I have spoken to no one concerning my own plans; though of course every one knows I am going to leave Bayview, no person suspects that I intend to visit England.
“It has indeed been stated that I mean to spend the winter abroad with Lady Glendare. Her ladyship sent me a very civil note, favoured by Mrs. Dillwyn, saying how grieved she was to hear of my bereavement, speaking of her own loss, and adding that, if I thought a thorough change would prove beneficial to my health and spirits, she would be delighted if I would visit her.
“Which was very kind, particularly from a member of a family famous for the shortness of their memories of favours received.
“This, I conclude, gave rise to the first report, which has now, however, been superseded by another. I am going to stay with Mr. Hanlon’s mother, who is to come so far as Dublin to meet me!
“I mean to-day to bid good-bye to the Scotts; to-morrow, the next day, and the next, I shall employ in paying farewell visits and in gratifying the curiosity of my friends. Can you not fancy the entreaties with which I shall be assailed to stay in my own country and amongst my own people? My father’s solicitor is delighted with the proposal that he and his family shall occupy Bayview for the autumn. He will endeavour to let it from November next.
“I shall break my journey at Dublin, from which place I will write to you again; but under any circumstances I hope to be talking to you face to face within a fortnight from the present time.”
And having sealed and despatched this letter, Grace, as has been stated, for the first time since her father’s death left behind her the grounds of Bayview, and wended her way towards the Castle Farm.
With a feeling of sick surprise she paused when she reached the top of the divisional road and looked at the fields to right and left. The meadows were still uncut; acres of long richgrass had been laid by the rain, trampled by the cattle. The potato blossoms had flowered and faded; the potato apples were beginning to turn brown on the stems, but not a spade had been put in to dig the roots out of the ground.
In the other lands lying around she saw hayricks; she beheld men busy at work; she heard the voices of the women and children who were almost playing at their labour, so rejoiced were all hearts to find the heavy crop the upturned earth disclosed; but at the Castle Farm there was no sign of toil or of gladness.
There was a dead stillness about the place which told Grace the beginning of the end had begun. Spite of the rich grass thick with clover, spite of the wealth lying buried in the broad ridges of the potato fields, spite of the luxuriance of the ripening corn, she knew ruin was sitting by the once hospitable hearth, stealthily biding its time till it should turn husband and wife and children out of house and home upon the world.
No active signs of grief—no outbreak ofsorrow could have affected Grace like the dumb testimony which gave evidence of the crisis that had come.
When before, in hay-time, had Amos and his boys and his men not been up at the first streak of light, in order to get well on with their labour before the sun gaining power—and the dews drying off the grass—made mowing weary work?
When had the potatoes ever lain in the ground as they were lying now? when had not all needful tasks been expedited and got well out of hand before the time came for the ingathering of the corn?
Miss Moffat’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at the deserted fields that had borne their increase only to point more forcibly the ruin which was come to the Castle Farm.
If she had seen a sale going on in the place; had she beheld a crowd of strangers in the yard, and heard a babel of tongues in the air; had the horses and the cows and the busy fussing hens, and the fat well-to-do pigs been taken away while she looked, the scene couldscarcely have struck her with the numb dread that for a time paralysed her steps.
Then it all came upon her. They had sown, but they might not reap; they had planted, but they might not gather; on the land they had held so long they were trespassers, and if they still remained in the old homestead it was only because there is nothing more difficult than to get rid of people who have determined to remain.
Amos Scott had so determined; but the law was closing him in slowly, surely.
It was eating his substance first; while he had a pound in the traditional stocking, or the ability to borrow a pound—while he had a shoe to his foot and a shirt to his back, it refrained from cutting short his torture, but once let the cruise fail, and the law would scourge him with scorpions out of that once happy garden which never again might seem like paradise to Amos or one of his family.
Out of the sunlight Grace passed into the house, where, by reason of the glare from which she had come, she could at first scarcelydistinguish any object; but after a second or two she beheld Mrs. Scott, aged and haggard, who, in her hands holding a coat of her husband’s she had been engaged in patching, rose and bade her visitor welcome.
She was quite alone; a rare thing in that populous house. Inside as out the same stillness prevailed, a stillness like unto the Egyptian darkness, inasmuch as it could be felt.
The first words uttered were by Mrs. Scott, in sympathy for Miss Moffat’s affliction; but Grace, though her burden seemed heavy, knew the dead had no need of help or remembrance, and here face to face with her was at least one human being who had.
“Tell me about yourselves,” she said, passing her handkerchief across the large soft eyes that would encourage tears to shelter themselves under the white lids and long lashes. “We cannot do anything more forhim. It was a great shock. I sometimes seem as if I were unable to realize it even yet; but it is true, and I must learn to bear the greatest trouble God sends one of his creatures.”
“The greatest, Miss?” said Mrs. Scott inquiringly; she was sympathetic and respectful, but she could not quite fall in with this opinion.
She had her trouble, and if she heard that the trouble of another might be greater, who shall blame her for being slow of belief.
There cannot be much doubt that the man who has broken his leg feels sceptical when told that his next neighbour who has broken his ankle is in worse case than he. As a matter of theory, people may sympathize with the griefs of their fellow-creatures, but as a matter of fact the only sorrows which are ever thoroughly understood are those a man has himself to bear; and this is reasonable enough, remembering that after the lapse of even a short time, a man finds it difficult to recall vividly the anguish and the shame and the agony he may once have been obliged to pass through.
Mrs. Scott’s pain was very present with her, however, on that beautiful morning. She was in the midst of a trouble which might well have exhausted a more patient woman. She had to sit still and see her household godsbroken one by one; she was forced, as she said herself, to “bide quiet” whilst ruin stalked towards their home, drawing nearer every hour. Death to her seemed naturally a less trial than this lengthened torture, and she could not agree with her visitor when Miss Moffat answered,—
“The greatest because it is hopeless.”
“Not making light of your trouble, Miss Grace, don’t you think it may be just as hopeless a grief as death to feel yourself coming to want and your children to beggary?”
“If there were no way to avert such misfortunes, perhaps not,” was the reply; “but it is because we cannot avert death, because we can never hope in this world to see those who are gone, that I say death is so terrible a grief.”
“It is terrible,” Mrs. Scott agreed; “but I don’t feel as if it was as hard a sorrow as to see everything going, and not be able to put out a finger to save us from ruin. There are the potatoes undug in the ground, and I dursn’t take up a root of them to boil for the dinner.We have had to sell the cows, for we were “threatened” if we tried to graze them. The boys have nothing to do, and the meadows are all laid; but they warned Amos off when he went to mow. They poisoned our dog because he flew at one of the bailiffs Brady sent; and they tell me now Brady is going to get the grass in, and the potatoes up, and the corn cut when it ripens, if he has to bring a regiment of soldiers to protect his men.”
At the idea of which imposing array Mrs. Scott dropped her work on her knee, heaved a deep sigh, and remarked,—
“God alone knows what the end will be!”
“I will tell you what the end ought to be,” said Grace kindly. “You ought to begin to pack up your belongings now, and leave the Castle Farm as soon as ever you can get out of it.”
“Amos’ll never leave it alive,” she answered. “He is not a hard man to talk to in a general way, but Brady has tried to head him, and it has made him that dour, there is no reasoning with him.”
“Have you ever really tried to reason with him?” Miss Moffat inquired.
“Not at first. I’ll own it. I was as keen on as himself for fighting to the last; but, oh! Miss Grace, when the trouble comes inside the door, it is the woman feels it. She must hold up and have a bite for the men folks to eat if her heart is just breaking; and I’m fairly tired of it. I feel I’d be that glad to creep into any hole where we could be quiet, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Where is Amos?” asked her visitor, after a pause.
“Gone to Glenwellan to see the lawyer; now we have sold Tom he has to walk there and back every step of the way. He is spending his all in law, Miss Grace. Shure the very money I got for the hens and the ducks and the other cratures he made me give him, and me saving it for the time when we’ll want it sorely.”
“What does Amos hope to do?” inquired Grace. “What does he expect the lawyers can do for him?”
“That’s beyond me to tell. He wants his rights, and he says he’ll have them.”
“What are his rights?”
“Oh, that’s easy telling; this place he paid the renewal of.”
“I am going away,—” began Grace, with apparent irrelevance.
“So I heard tell,” interpolated Mrs. Scott.
“And before I go I want to put this matter before you clearly, as I see it; as others, wiser and more capable than I, see it also.”
“Yes, Miss,” said Mrs. Scott in a tone which implied that Grace might talk and she herself might listen, but that her opinions would remain the same.
And indeed is this not always the case? Is it not always when talking and listening are signally useless that opinions alter?
“Supposing,” said Grace, a little fluttered by reason of her own boldness, “I went to Dublin and said I must have a new piano.”
“Likely you will some day,” agreed Mrs. Scott, as her visitor paused for a moment and hesitated.
“And suppose for the sake of argument,” went on Grace, “I decided to spend a hundred pounds.”
“It would be a heap of money,” commented her auditor.
“Or fifty, or twenty,” said Miss Moffat, seeing her mistake; “say twenty pounds; and that I chose a piano and told the man where to send it, and paid him the money and took no receipt for it. After I leave, another person sees the same piano, likes it, pays the money, and gets a receipt. Shortly I begin to wonder why the instrument is not sent home, and I write to the seller. I receive an answer saying he is dead, and that no one knows anything about the matter except that the piano I mention has been sold and delivered to Mr. So-and-so. Now such a case would be undoubtedly a hard one for me, but I should never think of throwing good money after bad in trying to put spilt milk back into a basin; and yet this is what Amos persists in attempting. Do you understand what I mean?”
“You speak very clever, Miss Grace,” was the reply.
“I am afraid I do not speak at all cleverly,” said her visitor. “I wish any words of mine could persuade Amos and you how utterly useless it is for you to continue the resistance he has begun.”
“Would you have him give up everything, then, Miss, and see us turned out on the world—we who have always tried to keep decent and respectable as you know, Miss Grace?”
“I do know,” was the answer, “but I see no help for it—if a thing has to be done at last, it may as well and better be done at first.”
“I am thinking Amos will fight it to the end,” said Mrs. Scott calmly.
“But what folly it is!” exclaimed Miss Moffat.
“Like enough; I wouldn’t be so ill bred as to contradict you, Miss, even if I could.”
“But it is impossible you can be happy or comfortable living in this sort of way.”
“Happy, comfortable,” repeated the poor woman, then added with sudden vehemence, “And who is it that has made us unhappy anduncomfortable, but that villain Brady? It’ll come home to him though; sure as sure, Miss Grace, it will. We may not live to see it, but the day will come that others will mind what Brady done to us and say, ‘Serve him right,’ no matter what trouble is laid upon him.”
“But you do not wish any harm to happen to him?” suggested Grace, who, having no personal feud with Mr. Brady, naturally felt shocked at Mrs. Scott’s bitterness of expression.
“Don’t I?” retorted the woman. “It would be blessed news if one came in now and said, ‘Brady is lying stiff and stark out in the field yonder.’”
“Hush, hush, hush!” entreated Grace, laying her hand on the lean unlovely arm which had once been plump and comely. “Oh! I wish I could talk to you as I want to talk. I wish I could say good things as other people are able. I wish I could persuade you to bear your heavy burden patiently, feeling certain God in His own good time will lighten it for you. I cannot think there is any reality in religion if it does not support us intrials like these, and you are a religious woman, dear Mrs. Scott. I remember, as if it was yesterday, the Bible stories you used to tell me when I was a bit of a thing wearing mourning for the first time.”
Mrs. Scott’s face began to work, then her eyes filled with tears, then one slowly trickled down her cheek, which she wiped away with the corner of her checked apron, then with a catching sob, she said,—
“Ay, those were brave days, Miss Grace, brave, heartsome days. It was easy to feel good and Christian-like then, and wish well to everybody; but I can’t do it now, I cannot. When I’m sitting here all alone, texts come into my head; but they are all what I used to call bad ones, about vengeance, and hatred, and punishment. There are no others I can mind now. That thief of the world has destroyed us body and soul, but it will come to him. He will get his deserts yet.”
Grace rose, and walked into an inner room, where, on the top of a chest of drawers, bright as beeswax could keep them, lay the familyBible, with Scott’s spectacles, heirlooms like the book, reposing upon it.
Lifting the Bible she carried it out, placed it upon the dresser, and, turning to the Gospels, read the last six verses of the fifth chapter of St. Matthew softly and slowly. Then she closed the volume and took it back again.
“It’s well for them that can do all that,” said Mrs. Scott, not defiantly, but in simple good faith.
“Some day we shall all be able to feel it, and do it, please God,” answered Grace, and, stooping over the back of Mrs. Scott’s chair, she kissed the face of the humble friend who had once been like a mother to her.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Let Reuben write to me, and get Amos away from here, if you can, before worse comes of it.”
“What is this, Miss Grace?” asked Mrs. Scott, as her visitor laid a small packet in her lap.
“It is what you will need,” said Grace, “when perhaps I am not near at hand to come to for it.”
“Is it money?” inquired the woman.
“Yes; surely you do not mind taking it from me?”
“No, I wouldn’t mind. There aren’t many I could ask to help us, or that I could take help from; but I am not that high in my turn I’d refuse it from you. Take it with you though, Miss Grace. Don’t leave it here. I could not keep it secret from the good man—we have never had anything separate, and he’d either be angry with me for taking it, or else he’d want it to spend on the law.”
“In that case I will not leave it,” said Grace emphatically; “only remember this one thing,—whilst I am alive and have a pound, you need never want. Bid me good-bye now, for I must go.”
“Good-bye,” answered Mrs. Scott, taking Grace’s hand in her own, after carefully wiping the latter on her apron; “God send you safe to England and back again!” and with this customary form of farewell, which, familiar as it is to those resident in Ireland, always strikes solemnly on the ear, Mrs. Scott suffered hervisitor to depart, watching her retreating figure till it was lost to sight, and then returning to her seat and her occupation.
“And back again!” Grace repeated to herself, as she looked over the glory of land and water—hill and wood lying calm and beautiful under a flood of golden sunshine. “And back again! what will have happened, I wonder, by the time I return?”