CHAPTER V
Next morning came with a burst of sunshine and a windy, cloudless sky. Pinckney, dressing with his window open, could see the park with the rooks wheeling and cawing over the trees, whilst the warm wind brought into the room all sorts of winter scents on the very breath of summer.
This rainy land where the snow rarely comes has all sorts of surprises of climate and character. Nothing is truly logical in Ireland, not even winter. That is what makes the place so delightful to some minds and so perplexing to others.
Hennessey was staying for a day or two to go over accounts and explain the working of the estate to Pinckney.
He was in the hall when the latter came down, and gave him good morning.
“Where’s your mistress?” said Hennessey to old Byrne, as they took their seats at the breakfast table.
“Faith, she’s been out since six,” said Byrne. “She came down threatenin’ to skin Rafferty alive for layin’ fox thraps in the woods, then she had a bite of bread and butter and a cup of tea Norah made for her, and off she went with Rafferty to hunt out the thraps and take them up. It’s little she cares for breakfast.”
“I was the same way myself when I was her age,” said Hennessey to Pinckney. “Up at four in the morning and out fishing in Dublin Bay—it’s well to be young.”
“Look here,” said the young man, as Byrne left the room, “she was out till eleven last night in the woods; she knocked me up as I was sitting in the library and I let her in.Idon’t see anything wrong in the business, but all the same, it’s not a particularly safe proceeding and I suppose a mother or father would have jawed her—I couldn’t. I suppose I showed by my manner that I didn’t approve of her being out so late, for she seemed in a huff as she went up to bed. My position is a bit difficult, but I’m hanged if I’m going to do the heavy father or careful mother business. If she was only a boy, I could talk to her like a Dutch uncle, but I don’t know anything about girls. I wish—”
Pinckney’s wish remained forever unexpressed, for at the moment the door opened and in came Phyl.
Her face was glowing with the morning air and she seemed to have forgotten the business of the night before as she greeted Pinckney and the lawyer and took her place at the table.
“Phyl,” said the lawyer, half jocularly, “here’s Mr. Pinckney been complaining that you were wandering about all night in the woods, knocking him up to let you in at two o’clock in the morning.”
Phyl, who was helping herself to bacon, looked up at Pinckney.
“Oh, you cad,” said her eyes. Then she spoke:
“I came in at eleven. If I had known, I would have called up Byrne or one of the servants to let me in.”
Pinckney could have slain Hennessey.
“Good gracious,” he said. “Iwasn’t complaining. I only just mentioned the fact.”
“The fact that I was out till two,” said Phyl, with another upward glance of scorn.
“I never said any such thing. I said eleven.”
“It was my loose way of speaking; but, sure, what’s the good of getting out of temper?” put in Hennessey. “Mr. Pinckney wasn’t meaning anything, but you see, Phyl, it’s just this way, your father has made him your guardian.”
“Mywhat!” cried the girl.
“Oh, Lord!” said Pinckney, in despair at the blundering way of the other. Then finding himself again and the saving vein of humour, without which man is just a leaden figure:
“Yes, that’s it. I’m your guardian. You must on no account go out without my permission, or cough or sneeze without a written permit—Oh, Phyl, don’t be thinking nonsense of that sort. Iamyour guardian, it seems, and by your father’s special request, but you are absolutely free to do as you like.”
“A nice sort of guardian,” put in Hennessey with a grin.
“I am only, really, guardian of your money and your interests,” went on the other, “and your welfare. When you came in last night late, I was a bit taken aback and I thought—as a matter of fact, I thought it might be dangerous being out alone in thiswild part of the country so late at night, but I did not want to interfere; you can understand, can’t you? What I want you to get out of your mind is, that I am that odious thing, a meddling person. I’m not.”
Phyl was very white. She had risen from the table and was at the window.
Here was her dream come true of the bearded American who had suddenly appeared to claim her and Kilgobbin and the servants and everything.
Pinckney had not a beard, but he was an American and he had come to claim everything. The word guardian carried such a force and weight and was so filled with fantastic possibilities to the mind of Phyl, that she scarcely heard his soft words and excuses.
Phyl had the Irish trick of running away with ideas and embroidering the most palpable truths with fancies. It was an inheritance from her father, and she stood by the window now unable to speak, with the word “Guardian” ringing in her ears and the idea pressing on her mind like an incubus.
Hennessey had risen up. He was the first to break silence.
“There’s no use in meeting troubles half way,” said he vaguely. “You and Phyl will get along all right when you know each other better. Come out, the two of you, and we’ll go round the grounds and you will be able to see for yourself the state of the house and what repairs are wanting.”
“One moment,” said Pinckney. “I want to tell Phyl something—I’m going to call you Phyl because I’m your guardian—d’you mind?”
“No,” said Phyl, “you can call me anything you like, I suppose.”
“I’m not going to call you anything I like—just Phyl— Well, then, I want to tell you what we have to do. It’s not my wishes I have to carry out but your father’s. He wanted to let this house.”
“Let Kilgobbin!”
“Yes, that is what he said. He wanted to let it to a good tenant who would look after it till you are of age. I think he was right. You see, you could not live here all alone, and if the place was shut up it would deteriorate.”
“It would go to wrack and ruin,” said Hennessey.
“And the servants?” said Phyl.
“We will look after them,” said Pinckney, “the new tenant might take them on; if not, we’ll give them time to get new places.”
“Byrne’s been here before I was born,” said the girl, with dry lips, “so has Mrs. Driscoll. They are part of the place; it would ruin their lives to send them away.”
“Well,” said Pinckney, “I don’t want to be the ogre to ruin their lives; you can do anything you like about them. If the new tenant didn’t take them, you might pension them. I want you to be perfectly happy in your mind and I want you to feel that though I am, so to speak, the guardian of your money, still, that money is yours.”
She was beginning to understand now that not only was he striving to soothe her feelings and propitiate her, but that he was very much in earnest in thisbusiness, and crowding through her mind came a great wave of revulsion against herself.
Phyl’s nature was such that whilst always ready to fly into wrath and easily moved to bitter resentment, one touch of kindness, one soft word, had the power to disarm her.
One soft word from an antagonist had the power to wound her far more than a dozen words of bitterness.
Filled now with absolutely superfluous self-reproach, she stood for a moment unable to speak. Then she said, raising her eyes to his:
“I am sure you mean to do what is for the best.—It was stupid of me—”
“Not a bit,” said the other, cheerfully. “I want to do the things that will make you happy—that’s all. I’m a business man and I know the value of money. Money is just worth the amount of happiness it brings.”
“Faith, that’s true,” said Hennessey, who had taken his seat again and was in the act of lighting a cigar.
“When I was a boy,” went on the other. “I was always kept hard up by my father. It was like pulling gum teeth to get the price of a fishing rod out of him. When I think of all the fun I might have bought with a few dollars, it makes me wild. You can’t buy fun when you get old; you may buy an opera house or a yacht, but you can’t buy the real stuff that makes life worth living.”
Phyl glanced out of the window at the park, thenas though she had found some inspiration there, she turned to Pinckney.
“If you don’t mind about the money, then why don’t you let me live here instead of letting the place? I can live here by myself and I would be happy here. I won’t be happy if I leave it.”
“Well,” said Pinckney, “there’s your father’s wish, first of all.”
“I’m sure if he knew how I felt, he wouldn’t mind,” said Phyl mournfully, turning her gaze again to the park.
“On top of that,” went on Pinckney, “there’s—your age. Phyl, it wouldn’t ever do; it’s not I that am saying it, it’s custom, the world, society.”
Phyl, like the hooked salmon that has taken the gaudy fly, felt a check and recognised that a Power had her in hand, recognised in the light-going and fair-speaking Pinckney something of adamant, a will not to be broken or bent.
She felt for a moment a revolt against herself for having fallen to the lure and allowed herself to come to friendly terms with him. Then this feeling faded a bit. The very young are very weak in the face of constituted authority—besides, there was always at the back of Pinckney her father’s wish.
“And then again, on top of that,” he went on, “there’s the question of your coming to live with us; your father wished it.”
“In America!” cried Phyl. “Do you mean I am to live in America?”
“Well, we live there; why not? It’s not a bad place to live in—and what else are you to do?”
She could not answer him. This time she saw that the bogey man had got her and no mistake. America to her seemed as far as the moon and far less familiar. If Pinckney had declared that it was necessary for her to die, she would have been a great deal more frightened, but the prospect would not have seemed much more desolate and forbidding and final.
He saw at once the trouble in her mind and guessed the cause. He had a rare intuition for reading minds, and it seemed to him he could read Phyl’s as easily as though the outside of her head were clear glass—he had cause to modify this cocksure opinion later on.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “If you don’t like America when you see it, you can come back to Ireland. I daresay we can arrange something; anyhow, don’t let us meet troubles half way.”
“When am I to go?” said Phyl.
“Sure, Phyl, you can stay as long as you like with us,” said Mr. Hennessey. “The doors of 10, Merrion Square, are always open to you, and never will they be shut on you except behind your back.”
Pinckney laughed; and a servant coming in to clear the breakfast things, Hennessey led the way from the room to show Pinckney the premises.
CHAPTER VI
They crossed the hall, and passing through a green-baize covered door went down a passage that led to the kitchen.
“This is the housekeeper’s room,” said Hennessey, pointing to a half open door, “and the servants’ hall is that door beyond. This is the kitchen.”
They paused for a moment in the great old-fashioned kitchen, with an open range capable of roasting a small ox, one might have fancied. Norah, the cook, was busy in the scullery with her sleeves tucked up, and under the table was seated Susie Gallagher, a small and grubby hanger-on engaged in the task of washing potatoes. The potatoes were beside her on the floor and she was washing them in a tin basin of water with the help of an old nail-brush.
There was a horse-shoe hung up, for luck, on the wall over the range, and a pile of dinner plates, from last night’s dinner and still unwashed, stood on the dresser, where also stood a half-bottle of Guinness’ stout and a tumbler; an old setter bitch lay before the fire and a jackdaw in a wicker cage set up a yell at the sight of the visitors, that brought Norah out of the scullery to receive them, a broad smile on her face and her arms tucked up in her apron.
“He always yells like that at the sight of tramps or stray people about,” apologised the cook. “He’sbetter than a watch-dog. Hold your tongue, you baste; don’t you know your misthress when you see her?”
“Rafferty caught him in the park,” said Phyl, “and cut his tongue with a sixpence so as to make him able to speak.”
They left the kitchen and came into the yard. A big tin can of refuse was standing by the kitchen door, and on top of all sorts of rubbish, potato peelings, cabbage stalks and so forth, lay the carcass of a boiled fowl. It was the fowl they had dined off the night before and it lay there just as it had gone from the table, that is to say, minus both wings and the greater part of the breast, but with the legs intact.
Pinckney stared at this sinful sight. Then he pointed to it.
“What’s that doing there?” he asked.
“Waitin’ to be took away be the stable boy, sor,” replied the cook, who had followed them to the door. “All the rubbish is took away in that ould can every mornin’.”
“Good God!” said Pinckney under his breath. The expression was shaken out of him, so to speak, and out of a pocket of his character which had never been fully explored, of whose existence, indeed, he was not particularly aware. This Irish expedition was to show him a good many things in life and in himself of which up to this he had been in ignorance. He had never been brought face to face with waste, bald waste without a hat on or covering of any sort, before.
“Haven’t you any poor people about here?” he asked.
“Hapes, sor.”
Pinckney was on the point of saying something more, but he checked himself, remembering that in the eyes of the servants he was here in the position of a guest.
He followed Hennessey across to the stable yard, where Larry, the groom, was washing the carriage that had fetched him from the station the night before.
“The servants won’t eat chicken,” said Phyl, in an apologetic way. She had noted everything and she guessed his thoughts. “They won’t eat game either—and they throw things away if they don’t like them—of course, it’s wasteful, but theydogive things to the poor. Lots of poor people come here, every day nearly, but they don’t care for scraps—you see, itisinsulting to give a poor person scraps, just as though they were animals. I remember the cook we had before Norah did it when she came first, and all the poor people stopped coming to the house. Said she ought to know better than to offer them the leavings.”
“Cheek!”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Phyl. “We’ve done it for hundreds of years.”
She closed her mouth in a way she had when she did not wish to pursue a subject further. Despite the fact that she had made friends with Pinckney, she was galled by his attitude of criticism. Guardian or no guardian, he was a stranger; relation orno relation, he was a stranger, and what right had a stranger to dare to come and turn up his nose at the poor people or make remarks—he hadn’t said a word—about the wastefulness of the servants?
The redoubtable Rafferty was standing in the yard chewing a straw and watching Larry at work.
Rafferty was a man of genius, who had started as a helper and odd job person, and had risen to the position of factotum. He had ousted the Scotch gardener and insinuated a relation of his own in his place. There was scarcely a servant about the estate that was not a relation of Rafferty’s. Philip Berknowles had put up with a lot from Rafferty simply because Rafferty was an invaluable person in his way when not crossed. Everything went smoothly when the factotum was not interfered with. Cross him and there were immediate results ranging from ill-groomed horses to general unrest. He was a dark individual, half groom, half game-keeper in dress, a “wicked-looking divil,” according to the description of his enemies, and an exceedingly foxy-looking individual in the eyes of Pinckney.
“Rafferty,” said Mr. Hennessey, “I want to show this gentleman round. Let’s see the stables.”
Rafferty touched his cap and led the way, showing first the stalls and boxes where four or five horses were stabled, and then leading the way through the coach-house to the path from which opened the kitchen gardens.
They were immense and walled in with red brick, capable, one might fancy, of supplying the wants of three or four houses the size of Kilgobbin.
Pinckney noted this fact, also that the home farm to which the kitchen gardens led was apparently a prosperous and going little concern, with its fowls and chickens penned or loose, styes filled with grunting pigs, and turkeys gobbling and spreading their tails in the sun.
“Who looks after all this?” asked Pinckney.
“I do, sor,” replied Rafferty.
“What are the takings?”
“I beg your pardon, sor?”
“The profits, I mean. You sell these things, don’t you?”
“Kilgobbin isn’t a farm, sor, it’s a gintleman’s estate.”
Pinckney, not at all set back by this snub, turned and looked the factotum in the face.
“Just so,” said he, “but I’ve never heard of gentlemen growing pigs to look at; peacocks, maybe, but not pigs. However, we’ll have another look at the business later.”
He turned and they went on, Rafferty disturbed in his mind and much put about by the manner of the other in whom he began to divine something more than a casual guest, Phyl almost as much put out as Rafferty.
The idea that the factotum might have been robbing her father right and left never occurred to her; even if it had, it would not have softened the fact that a strange hand was at work in her old home turning over things, inspecting them, holding them up for comment.
She managed to drop behind as they left the farmyard for the paddocks, then turning down the yew lane that led back to the house, she ran as though hounds were after her, reached the house, locked herself in her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed in a tempest of weeping, dragging a pillow over her head as if to shield herself from the blows that the world was aiming at her.
Phyl, without mother, brothers or sisters, had centred all her affection on her father and Kilgobbin; the servants, the place itself and all the things and people about it were part and parcel with her life, and the death of her father had intensified her love of the place and the people.
If Pinckney had only known, he might have put the business of the inspection of the property and the dealing with the servants into other hands, but Pinckney was young and full of energy and business ability; he was full of conscientiousness and the determination to protect his ward’s interests; he had scented a rogue in Rafferty, and at this very minute returning to the house with Hennessey, he was declaring his intention to make an overhaul of the working of the estate.
Rafferty was to appear before him and produce his accounts and make explanations. Mrs. Driscoll was to be examined as to the expenditure, etc.
He little knew the hornet’s nest into which he was about to poke his finger.
CHAPTER VII
The grand inquisition began that evening after dinner—Phyl did not appear at dinner, alleging a headache—and Rafferty, summoned to the library, had to stand whilst Pinckney, seated at the table with a pen in his hand and a sheet of paper before him, went into the business of accounts.
Mark how the unexpected occurs in life. Rafferty, who had been pilfering for years, selling garden produce and keeping the profits, robbing corn from the corn bin in the stable, poaching and selling birds and ground game to a dealer in Arranakilty, receiving illicit commissions and so forth, had on the death of his master shaken off all restraint and prepared for a campaign of open plunder. The very last thing he could have imagined was the sudden appearance of an American business man on the scene, armed with absolute power and possessing the eye of a hawk.
“Your master asked me just before he died to look after this estate,” began Pinckney; “in fact, he has appointed me to act as guardian to Miss Berknowles, so I just want to see how things stand. Now, to begin with the horses. I want to know everything about the stables during the last—shall we say—six months. Who supplies the corn and the hay and the straw?”
“I’ve been gettin’ some from Faulkner of Arranakilty, sor, and some from Doyle of Bally-brack.”
“Don’t you grow any horse food on the estate?”
“We don’t grow no corn, sor.”
“Well, hay and straw?”
“You can’t get straw, sor, widout you grow corn.”
“I know that—but how about hay—surely you grow lots of grass?”
“We graze the grass, sor.”
“Do you let the grazing?”
“Well, sor, it’s this way; the masther was never very shtrict about the grazin’; we puts some of the horses out to grass, ourselves, and we lets poor folk have a bit of grazin’ now and then for their cattle, though master was never after makin’ money from the estate—”
“Just so. Have you the receipted bills for the fodder during the last six months?”
“Yes, sor. The master always sent me wid the money to pay the bills.”
“You have got the receipts?”
“The which, sor?”
“The bills receipted.”
“Bills, sure, what’s the good of keepin’ bills, sor, when the money’s paid. I b’lave they’re somewhere in an ould crock in the stable, at laste that’s where I saw thim last.”
“Well,” said Pinckney, “you can fetch them for me to-morrow morning, and now let’s talk about the garden.”
Rafferty, not knowing what Pinckney might discoverand so being unable to lie with confidence, had a very bad quarter of an hour over the garden.
Pinckney was not a man to press another unduly, nor was he a man to haggle about halfpence or worry servants over small peccadillos. He knew quite well that grooms are grooms, and will be so as long as men are men. He would never have bothered about little details had Rafferty been an ordinary servant. He recognised in Rafferty, not a servant to be dismissed or corrected, but an antagonist to be fought. It was the case of the dog and badger. Rafferty was Graft and all it implies, Pinckney was Straight Dealing. And Straight Dealing knew quite well that the only way to get Graft by the throat is to ferret out details, no matter how small.
So Rafferty was taken over details. He had to admit that he had “given away” some of the stuff from the garden and sold “a bit,” sending it up to Dublin for that purpose; but he was not to be caught.
“And the profits,” said Pinckney. “I suppose you handed them over to Mr. Berknowles?”
“No, sor; the master always tould me to keep any bit of money I might draa from anything I planted extra for me perkisites, that was the understandin’ I had with him.”
“And over the farmyard, I suppose anything you could make by selling any extra animals you planted was your perquisite?”
“Yes, sor.”
“Very well, Rafferty, that will do for to-night; get me those receipted bills to-morrow morning.Come here at ten o’clock and we will have another talk.”
Rafferty went off, feeling more comfortable in his mind.
The word Perquisites might be made to cover a multitude of sins, but he would not have been so easy if he had known that Mrs. Driscoll had been called up immediately after his departure. Mrs. Driscoll was one of those terrible people who say nothing yet see everything; for the last year and a half she had been watching Rafferty; knowing it to be quite useless to report what she knew to her easy-going master, she had, none the less, kept on watching. As a result, she was now able to bring up a hard fact, a small hard fact more valuable than worlds of ductile evidence. Rafferty had “nicked”—it was the lady’s expression—a brand-new lawn mower.
“I declare to God, sir, I don’t know what hehastook, for me eyes can’t be everywhere, but I do know he’s took the mower.”
“Why did you not tell Miss Phyl?”
“I did, sir, and she only said, ‘Oh, there must be a mistake—what would he be doin’ with it,’ says she. ‘Sellin’ it,’ says I. ‘Nonsense,’ says she. You see, sir, Rafferty and she has always been hand in glove, what with the fishin’ and shootin’, and the horses and such like, and she won’t hear a word against him.”
Mrs. Driscoll had called Rafferty a sly devil—he was.
At eleven o’clock next morning, Phyl, crossing thestable yard with some sugar for the horses, met Rafferty. He was crying.
“Why, what on earth’s the matter, Rafferty?” asked the girl.
“I’ve got the shove, miss,” replied Rafferty, “after all me years of service, I’m put out to end me days in a ditch.”
“You mean you’re discharged!” she cried. “Was it Mr. Pinckney?”
“That’s him,” replied Rafferty. “Says he’s the masther of us all. ‘Out you get,’ says he, ‘or it’s I that’ll be callin’ a p’leeceman to put you,’ says he. Flung it in me face that I’d stolen a laan mower. Me that’s ben on the estate man and boy for forty year. A laan mower! Sure, Miss Phyl, what would I be doin’ with a laan mower?”
Phyl turned from him and ran to the house. Pinckney and Hennessey were seated in the library when the door burst open and in came Phyl. Her eyes were bright and her lips were pale.
“You told me you would keep all the servants,” said she. “Rafferty tells me you have dismissed him.”
“I should think I had,” said Pinckney lightly, and not gauging the mad disturbance of the other, “and it’s lucky for him I haven’t put him in prison.”
The word prison was all that was wanted to fire the mine. Pinckney stood for a moment aghast at the change in the girl.
“Ihateyou,” she cried, coming a step closer to him. “I loathe you—master of us all, are you?Dare to touch any one here and I’ll burn the house down with my own hands—you—you—”
She paused for want of breath, her chest heaving and her hands clenched.
Then Pinckney exploded.
The good old fiery Pinckney blood was up. Oh, without any manner of doubt our ancestors are still able to speak, and it was old Roderick Pinckney—“Pepper Pinckney” was his nickname—that blazed out now. It was also the fire of youth answering the fire of youth.
“Damn it!” he cried. “I’ve come here to do my best—I don’t care—keep who you want—be robbed if you like it—I’m off—” He caught up all the sheets of paper he had been covering with figures and tore them across.
“Beast!” cried Phyl.
She rushed from the room and upstairs like a mad creature. The bang of her bedroom door closed the incident.
“Now don’t be taking on so,” said Hennessey. “You’ve both of you lost your temper.”
“Lost my temper—maybe. I’m going all the same. Right back to the States. I’m off to Dublin by the next train and you’d better come and finish the business there. You’d better have her to stay with you in Dublin. I don’t want to see her again. Anyhow, we’ll settle all that later.”
“Maybe that’s the best,” said Hennessey. “My wife will look after her till she’s ready to go to the States—if she wants to.”
“Please God she doesn’t,” replied the other.
Phyl did not see Pinckney again. He went off to Dublin by the two-ten train with Hennessey, the latter promising to be back on the morrow to arrange things.
CHAPTER VIII
Dublin can never have been a cheerful city. Even in the days when the butchers joined in street fights and hung their antagonists when caught on steel hooks—like legs of mutton—the gaiety of Dublin one may fancy to have been more a matter of spirits than of spirit.
Echoes from the days when the Parliament sat in Stephen’s Green come down to us through the works of Charles Lever, but the riotous gaiety of the old days when Barrington was a judge of the Admiralty Court, the Hell Fire Club an institution, and Count Considine a figure in society, must be taken with a grain of salt.
Mangan shows you the old Dublin as it was in those glorious times, and in the new Dublin of to-day the shade of Mangan seems still to walk arm in arm with the shade of Mathurin. Gloomy ghosts addicted to melancholy, noting with satisfaction that the streets are as dirty as ever, the old Public Houses still standing, that, despite the tramways—those extraordinary new modern inventions—the tide of life runs pretty much the same as of old. The ghosts of Mangan and Mathurin have never seen a taxi cab.
Dublin at the present day is a splendid city for old ghosts to wander in without having their cornstrodden on or their susceptibilities injured. Phyl had come to Dublin to live with the Hennesseys in Merrion Square.
“Never shall my door be shut on you except behind your back,” Hennessey had said, and he meant it.
The girl was worth several thousand a year; had she been penniless it would have been just the same.
You may meet many geniuses in your journey through life, many brilliant people, many beautiful people, many fascinating people, but you will not meet many friends. Hennessey belonged to the society of Friends, his wife was a member of the same community, and he would have been ruined only for his partner Niven, who was an ordinary lowdown human creature who believed in no one and kept the business together.
On the day of her arrival at Merrion Square and during her first interview with Mrs. Hennessey in the large, cheerless drawing-room where decalcomanied flower pots lingered like relics of the Palæolithic age of Art, Phyl kept herself above tears, just as a swimmer keeps his head above water in a choppy sea.
It was all so gloomy, yet so friendly, that the mind could not openly revolt at the gloom; it was all so different from the wind and trees and freedom of Kilgobbin, and Mrs. Hennessey, whom she had only seen once before, was so different, on closer acquaintance, from any of the people she had hitherto met in her little world.
Mrs. Hennessey, with a soul above dust and housekeeping, a faded woman, not very tidy, withan exalted air, pouring out tea from a Britannia metal ware teapot and talking all the time about Willy Yeates, the Irish Players and Lady Gregory’s last play, fascinated the girl, who did not know who Willy Yeates was and who had never seen the Irish Players.
Nor could she learn from Mrs. Hennessey. It was impossible to get a word in edgeways with that lady. Sometimes, indeed, during a lull in her mind disturbance, she would remain quiet whilst you answered some question, only to find that she had totally forgotten the question and was not listening to your reply.
Phyl got so used to Mrs. Hennessey after a few days that she did not listen to her questions, and so the two being matched, they got on well together. Young people soon accommodate themselves to their surroundings, and in a month the girl had grown to the colour of her new life, at least, on the outside of her mind. It seemed to her that she had lived years in Merrion Square. Kilgobbin—Hennessey had managed to let the place—seemed a dream of her childhood. She saw no future, and rebellion was impossible; there was nothing to rebel against—except the dulness and greyness of life. No people could have been kinder than the Hennesseys; unfortunately they had numerous friends, and the friends of the Hennesseys did not appeal to Phyl.
A boy in her position would have adapted himself quickly enough, and been hail fellow well met with Mr. Mattram, the dentist of Westland Row, or the young Farrels, whose father owned one of the biggestwine merchants’ businesses in the city; but the feminine instinct told Phyl that these were not the sort of people from whose class she had sprung, that their circle was not her circle and that she had stepped down in life in some mysterious way. This fact was brought sharply home to her by a young Farrel, a male of the Farrel brood, a hobbledehoy, good-looking enough but with a Dublin accent and a cheeky manner.
This immature wine merchant at a party given by Mrs. Hennessey had made love to Phyl and had tried to kiss her behind the dining-room door.
The recollection of the smack in the face she had given him soothed her that night as she lay tossing in her bed, and it was on this night and for the first time since she left Kilgobbin that the recollection of Pinckney came before her otherwise than as a shadow. He stood with the Hennessey circle as his background, a bright, good-looking figure and a gentleman to his finger-tips.
Why had she cast aside her own people—even though they were distant relations? What stupidity had caused her to insult Pinckney by telling him she hated him? She found herself asking that question without being able to answer it.
After all that fuss at Kilgobbin and Pinckney’s departure, Mr. Hennessey had proved to her that Rafferty was a rogue who deserved no quarter; the man had been dismissed, the whole business was done with and over, and now, looking back in cool blood, she was utterly unable to reconstruct and put together the reasons for the outburst of anger that hadsevered her from the one kinsman who had put out his hand to help her.
She could no longer conjure up the feeling that Pinckney was an interloper come to break up Kilgobbin and spoil the home she had known from childhood.
Fate had done that. Kilgobbin was gone—let to strangers; Hennessey had taken over her guardianshippro tem, and it was entirely owing to herself that she was in her present position. She had no right to criticise the friends of the Hennesseys; she had deliberately walked into that circle from which she felt she never could escape now.
Just as Pinckney had discovered that guardianship was showing him traits in his character hitherto unknown to him, Phyl was discovering her woman’s instinct as regards social matters.
She recognised that once having taken her place amongst the Hennessey set, her position for life was fixed, as far as Ireland was concerned. She was branded.
The Berknowles were an old family, but she was the last of them. The relatives living in the south could be no help to her; they were poor, rabid Catholics and had fallen to little account, owing to unwise marriages and that irresponsible fatuous apathy in affairs which is the dry rot of Ireland and the Irish people. They were proud as Lucifer, but no one was proud of them.
If only Philip Berknowles had been a man to make fast friends amongst his own class, some of those friends might have come to his daughter’s rescuenow. But Berknowles had lived his own life since the death of his wife, an easy-going country gentleman in a county mostly inhabited by squireens and cottage folk, caring little for theconvenancesand with no taste for women’s society.
Thoughts born of all these facts, some of which were only half understood, filled the mind of the girl as she lay awake with the noise of that raucous party ringing in her ears; and when she fell asleep, it was only to awake with a sense of despondency weighing upon her and the odious Farrel incident waiting to follow her through the day.
About a week later, coming down to breakfast one morning, she found a letter on her plate. A letter with American stamps on it and the address, Miss Phylice Berknowles, Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland, written in a firm, bold hand.
Mrs. Hennessey was not down and Mr. Hennessey had departed for the office, so Phyl had the breakfast table to herself—and the letter.
She knew at once whom it was from, even before she read the postmark, “Charleston.”
Pinckney, the man who had been in her thoughts during the past six or seven days, the man who had left Ireland righteously disgusted with her, the man to whom she had said, “I hate you!”
The scene flashed before her as she tore the envelope open, his sudden blaze of anger, the way he had torn the papers up, his departure. What was he going to say to her now? She flushed at the thought that this thing in her hand might prove to be his opinion of her in cold blood, a reproof,a remonstrance—she opened the folded sheet—ah!
“Dear Phyl,“Aunt Maria was greatly disappointed when I returned here without you, she had quite made up her mind that you were coming back with me. We both lost our temper that day, but I was the worse, for I said a word I shouldn’t have said, and for which I apologise. Aunt Maria says it was the Pinckney temper. However that may be, we shall be delighted to see you. Mrs. Van Dusen leaves on the 6th of next month. I am sending all particulars to Mr. Hennessey. You could meet Mrs. Van Dusen at Liverpool and go with her as far as New York. Let me have a cable to know if you are coming. Pinckney, Vernons, Charleston, U. S. A., is the cable address.“Your affectionate guardian—also cousin—“R. Pinckney.”
“Dear Phyl,
“Aunt Maria was greatly disappointed when I returned here without you, she had quite made up her mind that you were coming back with me. We both lost our temper that day, but I was the worse, for I said a word I shouldn’t have said, and for which I apologise. Aunt Maria says it was the Pinckney temper. However that may be, we shall be delighted to see you. Mrs. Van Dusen leaves on the 6th of next month. I am sending all particulars to Mr. Hennessey. You could meet Mrs. Van Dusen at Liverpool and go with her as far as New York. Let me have a cable to know if you are coming. Pinckney, Vernons, Charleston, U. S. A., is the cable address.
“Your affectionate guardian—also cousin—“R. Pinckney.”
“Your affectionate guardian—also cousin—
“R. Pinckney.”
Then underneath, in an angular, old-fashioned hand, one of those handwritings we associate with crossed letters, rosewood desks, valentines and wafers:
“Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you will like me as much as I am sure to like you.“Maria Pinckney.”
“Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you will like me as much as I am sure to like you.
“Maria Pinckney.”
“Maria Pinckney.”
Phyl caught her breath back when she read this and her eyes filled with tears. It was the woman’svoice that touched her, coming after Pinckney’s business-like and jerky sentences.
Then she sat with the letter before her, looking at the new prospect it had opened for her.
Was Pinckney still angry, despite his talk about the Pinckney temper; had he written not of his own free will but at the desire of Maria Pinckney? She read the thing over again without finding any solution to this question.
But one fact was clear. Maria Pinckney was genuine in her invitation.
“I’ll go,” said Phyl.
She rose up from the table as though determined then and there to start off for America, left the room, went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Hennessey’s door.
That lady was sitting up in bed with a stocking tied round her throat—she was suffering from a slight attack of tonsilitis—and the IrishTimesspread on her knees.
“Mrs. Hennessey,” said Phyl, “I have just had a letter from my cousins in America, and they want me to go out to them.”
“Want you to go to America!” said Mrs. Hennessey. “On a visit, I suppose?”
“No, to stay there.”
“To stay in America; but what on earth do they want you to do that for? Who on earth would dream of leaving Dublin to live in America! It’s extraordinary the ideas some people get hold of. Then, of course, they don’t know, that’s all that’s to be said for them. It’s like hearing people talking and talking of all the fine views abroad, and you’dthink they’d never seen the Dargle or the Glen of the Downs; they don’t know the beauty of their own country or haven’t eyes to see it, and they must go raving of the Bay of Naples with Kiliney Bay a stone’s throw away from them, and talking of Paris with Dublin outside their doors, and praising up foreign actors with never a word of the Irish Players. Dublin giving her best to them, and they with deaf ears to her music and blind eyes to her sons.”
“But, you see, Mrs. Hennessey, the Pinckneys are my relations.”
“Irish?” cried the good woman, absolutely unconscious of everything but the vision before her. “Those that can’t see their own land aren’t Irish. Mongrels is the name for them, without pride of heart or light of understanding.”
She was off.
With a far, fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the battles of Ireland.
Phyl gathered the impression that, if she went to America Mrs. Hennessey would grieve less over the fact that she (Phyl) was leaving Merrion Square, than over the fact that she was leaving Dublin. She escaped, carrying this impression with her, went upstairs, dressed, and then started off for Mr. Hennessey’s office.
It was a cold, bright day and Dublin looked almost cheerful in the sunlight.
The lawyer looked surprised when she was shown into his private room; then, when she had told himher business, he fumbled amongst the papers on his desk and produced a letter.
“This is from Pinckney,” said he. “It came by the same post as yours, only it was directed to the office. It’s the same story, too. He wants you to go over.”
“I’ve been thinking over the whole business,” said Phyl, “and I feel I ought to go.”
“Aren’t you happy in Dublin?” asked he.
“M’yes,” answered the other. “But, you see—at least, I’m as happy as I suppose I’ll be anywhere, only they are my people and I feel I ought to go to them. It’s very lonely to have no people of one’s own. You and Mrs. Hennessey have been very kind to me, and I shall always be grateful, but—”
“But we aren’t your own flesh and blood. You’re right. Well, there it is. We’ll be sorry to lose you, but, maybe, though you haven’t much experience of the world, you’ve hit the nail on the head. We aren’t your flesh and blood, and though the Pinckneys aren’t much more to you, still, one drop of blood makes all the difference in the world. Then again, you’re a cut above us; we’re quite simple people, but the Berknowles were always in the Castle set and a long chalk above the Hennesseys. I was saying that to Norah only last night when I was reading the account of the big party at the Viceregal Lodge and the names of all the people that were there, and I said to her, ‘Phyl ought to be going to parties like that by and by when she grows older, and we can’t do much for her in that way,’ and off she goes in a temper. ‘Who’s the Aberdeens?’ saysshe. ‘A lot of English without an Irish feather in their tails, and he opening the doors to visitors in his dressing gown—Castle,’ she says, ‘it’s little Castle there’ll be when we have a Parliament sitting in Dublin.’”
“I don’t want to go to parties at the Viceregal Lodge,” said Phyl, flushing to think of what a snob she had been when only a few days back she had criticised the Hennesseys and their set in her own mind. These honest, straightforward good people were not snobs, whatever else they might be, and if her desire for America had been prompted solely by the desire to escape from the social conditions that environed her friends, she would now have smothered it and stamped on it. But the call from Charleston that had come across the water to her was an influence far more potent than that. That call from the country where her mother had been born and where her mother’s people had always lived had more in it than the voices that carried the message.
“Well,” said Hennessey, “you mayn’t want to go to parties now, but you will when you are a bit older. However, you can please yourself—Do you want to go to America?”
“I do,” said Phyl. “It’s not that I want to leave you, but there is something that tells me I have got to go. When I read the letter first this morning, I was delighted to think that Mr. Pinckney was not still angry with me, and I liked the idea of the change, for Dublin is a bit dreary after Kilgobbin and—and well, Iwillsay it—I don’t care for some of the people I have met in Dublin. But since thena new feeling has come over me. I think it came as I was walking down here to the office. It’s a feeling as if something were pulling me ever so slightly, yet still pulling me from over there. My father said that there was more of mother in me than him. I remember he said that once—well, perhaps it’s that. She came from over there.”
“Maybe it is,” said Hennessey.