CHAPTER VII.
‘Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil.’
It is three o’clock as Susan, with Jacky in tow, leaves the Rectory gate and goes up the village towards the broad road beyond that mounts steepwards to Crosby Park. Curraghcloyne possesses but one street, and a very small one, too; but as a set-off to that it teems with interest.
This morning a pig-fair was held in the ‘fair-field,’ a square mass of beaten earth, anything but ‘fair,’ and as unlike a field as possible; and now that the ‘payers of the rint’ have been mercifully removed, bought, or sold, the unsightly patch is covered by young colts, that are being ridden up anddown by their owners, with a view to showing them off; whilst in the far part of the field, over there, cows, sheep, and donkeys are changing owners.
Here, in the main street, much lively conversation is going on. On the right, Salter, the hardware man—a virulent Methodist, who calls himself a Protestant—is retailing to a hushed and delighted group the very latest ritualistic news of the curate just lately imported, and who, if a most estimable man, is undoubtedly abominably ugly. Short and stout and ill-made, poor Mr. Haldane has not proved a success amongst the Protestants of the parish. His views are extreme, and so are his looks, and, as Betty most unkindly put it, he should, on his ordination, have been at once despatched by the Bishop of the diocese as a missionary to the Cannibal Islands, with a view to getting rid of him as quickly as possible. He is a sore trial to Mr. Barry, the Rector of the parish, and Susan’s father. But he had to replace the last curate in a hurry, that young manhaving resigned his charge at a moment’s notice, because the Rector would not give his sanction to having matins at six a.m., he said; but in reality because Susan had, the evening before, rejected him with a haste that deprived him of all hope.
Just now the excitement amongst the groups at Salter’s is growing intense. The curate had been knocked down. No! But he had fallen—and so on, and so on. A few shops lower down comes Mr. Murphy, the undertaker’s. He, too, as indeed do all the shopkeepers in Curraghcloyne, stands in the front of his shop-door, chatting to all who come and go. A little, fat, jolly man, rather useless you would think in a solemn business like his, and yet the best undertaker, for all that, in the seven parishes round. Perhaps it is well to have a cheerful person of that sort to dispel the dreadful gloom of death. However it is, he is a universal favourite, and no wonder, when I tell you he is the man in all Curraghcloyne who can tell you most about the babies!—the ones come, theones to come immediately, and those in the middle distance! The gayest, happiest little man in the town, with a wife as rosy as himself, and quite a crowd of embryo little undertakers swarming round his knees. But these, and many more of the Curraghcloyne celebrities, sink into insignificance before Ricketty, the proprietor of the Crosby Arms Hotel. This name is painted on a swinging signboard, with a huge boar beneath, the crest of the Crosbys from all time.
Ricketty—his name was once Richards, but time and many devoted friendships has brought it down to Ricketty—is a huge benign Irishman, with the biggest jaw in Europe and the smallest eyes. To his bones flesh has grown, until now he might have exhibited himself in the most fastidious show in New York as the ‘Last of the race of Anak,’ or some such attractive title.
And as most big men are, so is he—the mildest-mannered man on earth; who would have run away if he had been asked to scuttle a ship, and who would have fainted if theidea of cutting the throat even of a mouse had been suggested to him. One side of his hotel has the usual bar blind up in it, behind which is a parlour, where on special occasions the politicians congregate to air their eloquence. The other side is given up to a fancy shop, kept by his sister, Miss Ricketty.
Miss Ricketty is the wit, and therefore the scourge, of the village (very little wit suffices for a village such as Curraghcloyne), and though nearly stone-deaf, knows more of the ‘goings on’ of her neighbours than anyone else in the small town.
Of course there is a bank and a post-office in Curraghcloyne. And a town-hall, where the future tenors and sopranos of the world sometimes ‘kindly consent’ to sing to the poor people round them. And there is the draper’s shop called ‘The Emporium,’ very justly, of course; and there is a market-place too, where everyone says the beef and mutton are both bad and dear. But even the interest of all these fails before the caustic tongue of Miss Ricketty.
Just as Susan reaches the window of the hotel that holds Miss Ricketty’s show of notepaper, ballads, bull’s-eyes, woollen mufflers, the latest thing in veils ten years old, and the flotsam and jetsam of various seasons past, she finds herself face to face with Wyndham.
‘You have come back!’ says she involuntarily. She is glad to see him. He is—well, scarcely an old friend, because the distances between his comings and goings to the Cottage make such broad margins on the leaf of time that he has hardly come into quite close contact with the family at the Rectory. But they have known him for a long time, and they have liked him, and there is a good deal of soft, pleasurable welcome in the glance that Susan gives him. He has been away now, she tells herself, quite two months.
‘Yes,’ says Wyndham, smiling. His smile is a little preoccupied, however. ‘And how are you, Jacky? My goodness, how we are grown! You’ll be as big as Ricketty presentlyif you don’t put a weight on your head.’
Jacky sniggles, but, like Wyndham’s smile, his sniggles are a little preoccupied. Having shaken hands with the latter, he retires behind Susan, and wonders if Wyndham is going up to the Cottage, and if he is, will the ghost catch him? He rather hopes it. It would leave him—Jacky—free, any way, and Mr. Wyndham is a big man and would be a better match for her.
Susan, too, is thinking of the ghost. As Wyndham is facing now, the Cottage lies before him. Is he going to see the mysterious ‘prisoner’? Perhaps he is married to her! This seems delightful—like an old romance, so much nicer than the commonplace marriages of to-day. She scans Wyndham’s face swiftly with a view to saying something nice and kind to him, if she sees anything there to help her to believe in this sentimental marriage. But evidently she sees nothing, because she says nothing. After all, she tells herself, it is of course a secret.
‘I hope you will come in and see father,’ she says presently, when she and Wyndham have discussed the town and its inhabitants, and she has told him all the news. He is in the habit of sleeping at the Cottage whenever he does come down, and in the habit, too, of spending his evenings at the Rectory, which is only just over the way from the Cottage.
‘Not to-night, I’m afraid,’ says Wyndham. ‘I must go back to town by the evening train.’
A slight frown gathers on his brow, but he dismisses it as he bids her good-bye.
‘Remember me to him,’ he says quickly, absently. He pinches Jacky’s ear, and is gone.
Susan, who has been inveigled into a promise concerning bull’s-eyes, is now led triumphantly into Miss Ricketty’s shop, where that spinster is discovered in an Old English attitude, her body being screwed out of all shape in her endeavour to catch sight of someone going down the street. Her window is quite blocked up by her shoulders, and her deafness prevents her from knowing of Susan’scoming until Jacky, falling over her left leg, which is sticking out behind in mid air, brings her back to the perpendicular and a view of Susan.
She is a small woman, thin to a fault, and shrewd-visaged, with a quizzical eye and a bonnet. The latter is of the historic coal-scuttle shape, and must have been a most admirable purchase when bought—‘warranted to wear,’ in the truest sense of the word, as it has lasted without a break for at least fifty years. As no one in Curraghcloyne ever saw her ‘outside of it,’ and as she is popularly supposed to sleep in it, it may safely be regarded as a sound article; even her worst enemy had once been heard to say that, ‘no matther how great an ould fool she was wid her tongue,’ she had made no mistake about ‘the bonnet.’
‘An’ is that you, Miss Susan, me dear?’ says she, when Jacky has picked himself up, and she has ceased to rub her ankle. ‘Ye’re as welcome as the flowers in May, though divil a flower we had this year, wid the rainan’ all. Ye’re not in a hurry, miss, are ye, now? Ye can spare a minute to the ould maid? Come in, then.’
She opens the little gate that hinges on to her little counter, and draws Susan inside, to her ‘parlour,’ as she calls the tiny space within—a cosy spot in truth, where in the winter a fire burns briskly, and with a wall lined with bottles that make glad the souls of children. To Susan Barry the old maid has given all the heart that remains from her worship of her giant brother. Perhaps it is the almost childish sweetness of her manner that has won the old maid’s heart, or else the young unconscious beauty of her—beauty being dear to the Irish heart. However it is, she has a warm corner in Miss Ricketty’s.
‘An’ how’s your good aunt?’ says the spinster, adjusting the bonnet with one hand, whilst with the other she pulls out from under the counter a huge ear-trumpet, half a yard long, and big enough at the speaking end to engulf Susan’s small and shapely head. ‘She’s been expectin’ that clutch o’ eggs Ipromised her, no doubt; but them hens o’ mine might as well be cocks for all the eggs we get out of them.’
‘Aunt Jemima knows that eggs are scarce now,’ cries Susan, softly, into the gulf.
‘Scarce! ’Tis nothin’ them ungrateful hens is doin’ for us now, an’ we who coddled ’em up all the winther. The saints forgive thim! Miss Susan’—leaning towards the girl, and speaking with the suppressed emotion of the born gossip—‘was that Misther Wyndham as wint up the street just now?’
‘Yes,’ says Susan. ‘I was talking to him just before I came in here.’
‘No! Blessed Vargin!’ says Miss Ricketty, recoiling; she had, of course, been the first to hear of the mysterious stranger at the Cottage, and had, indeed, told the news to her brother, under promise of secrecy, that she knew he would not keep. Nor did she want him to keep it. How can you gossip unless you have someone to gossip with? That is why people spread scandals.
‘And what was he saying?’ asks she presently,when she has produced a little box of figs and given them to Jacky, with a view to keeping him quiet until she has got the last word of news out of Susan.
‘Nothing, I think,’ says Susan, running over mentally her late conversation with Wyndham. ‘He won’t have time to see father to-night, because he is going back to town by the evening train.’
‘Is that what he says?’ Miss Ricketty gives her bonnet a push. ‘Faith, he’s full of smartness. An’ did he tell ye nothin’ at all?’
‘Oh, it was I who told him everything,’ says Susan. ‘He wanted to know how the new curate was going on, for one thing, and——’
‘If ’twas Misther Haldane he was askin’ afther so kindly, I could a’ tould him somethin’,’ says Miss Ricketty. ‘But never mind him! What else was Misther Wyndham sayin’?’
‘There was not time to say anything,’ says Susan, laughing. ‘He was in a hurry, and so was I—at least, Jacky was; he wants youto give him two pennyworth of bull’s-eyes. Though, really, after those figs——’
‘Miss Susan’—the old maid puts Susan’s last remark aside with an eloquent gesture—‘have ye heard anything sthrange about the Cottage lately?’
Susan starts, and Jacky comes to a dead set, the last fig between his finger and thumb. Jacky must be far gone indeed when, having anything edible between his fingers, he delays about putting it between his lips.
‘Ye have, I see,’ says Miss Ricketty. ‘I’m tould, me dear,’ looking behind her, and beside her, and to the door, and now, for even better security, putting up her opened palm to one side of her mouth, ‘that there’s a young—a’—she hesitates as if to choose a word, then comes to a safe conclusion—‘a faymale there,’ she says.
‘There’s a girl there, I think,’ says Susan nervously. ‘At least’—here Jacky looks at her appealingly, and she changes her sentence—‘someone says there is. A niece, or a friend of Mrs. Denis’s, I suppose.’
‘Arrah! Suppose!’ says Miss Ricketty with considerable eloquence, but without committing herself.
‘Well, if not that,’ says Susan, who is full of her late romantic idea about a secret marriage between the unknown and Wyndham, ‘perhaps—perhaps Mr. Wyndham knows something about her.’
Miss Ricketty turns sharply, and looks at her. But the girl’s lovely, open, tranquil face betrays nothing but a soft enthusiasm. A sense of amusement fills Miss Ricketty’s breast.
‘Fegs, I’m thinkin’ ye’re on the right thrack,’ says she evenly.
‘You won’t say it again, Miss Ricketty, will you?’ says Susan; ‘but I have thought—at least, it has occurred to me—that perhaps she’s Mr. Wyndham’s wife.’
This is a little too much for Miss Ricketty. She gives way suddenly to a fit of coughing, and, turning her back to Susan, dives under the counter, whether to recover from a very proper confusion, or to indulge in very improperlaughter, can now, alas! never be known. When she emerges, however, her face is a fine crimson.
‘That would be very romantic, wouldn’t it?’ says Susan, looking at her and speaking softly, yet with a pretty delight. ‘A marriage like that, with nobody knowing anything except they two, you know; and I feel sure she is lovely, and Mr. Wyndham is very nice-looking too, and after awhile perhaps we shall know her. He will introduce us to her, and we shall be friends, and——’
‘’Tis a beautiful story,’ says Miss Ricketty, breaking in with unction. ‘An’ beautiful stories, we all know, come thrue. I wish ye joy o’ the bride at the Cottage, Miss Susan; but I wouldn’t be for intherferin’ wid the young married people too soon if I were you, me dear.’
‘Of course, I shouldn’t do that,’ says Susan hastily, her fair face growing earnest. ‘But I thought that if——’
‘Well, ye’d betther wait, I think,’ saysMiss Ricketty. ‘’Tis bad bein’ in a hurry, as Misther Haldane found out last night.’
‘Mr. Haldane! What has happened to him?’
‘Fegs, miss, it seems that last night, as he was descendin’ the steps from the vesthry, he thripped, God help us! an’ fell on his ugly mug an’ broke his front teeth.’
‘Oh, how dreadful!’ says Susan, real compassion in her tone, though the new curate is rather farther beyond the range of her sympathy than even the old. ‘I wonder father hasn’t heard of it.’
‘It seems the poor gintleman is keeping it dark,’ says Miss Ricketty, ‘wid the thought of gettin’ thim put in agin widout anyone knowin’. But’—wrathfully—‘’twill be no use for him. I see that villain of a Salter down there’—with a glance out of the window—‘tellin’ every wan of it. Why, ye must have seen him yerself, miss, as ye come by.’ And suddenly Susan does remember the crowd round Salter’s shop-door, with Salter himself in its midst. ‘He’s got hould of it, for sure,and if he has ’twill be short shrift for Misther Haldane.’
‘But why?’ asks Susan.
‘Why, this, miss! He hates your clergy because he’s not in wid ye, like. A Methody he is; an’ Mr. Haldane goes agin his grain, wid the candles an’ the flowers an’ that, an’ he says how that Mr. Haldane had a dhrop too much last night when he thripped on the vesthry stairs.’
‘What a shame!’ says Susan indignantly. ‘I know for a fact that Mr. Haldane is——’
‘Yes, of course, miss. But that’s how thim Methodys does. An’ as for that Salter himself, I don’t believe in him. ’Tis a power o’ whisky he can get undher his own belt widout bein’ found out, until his timper is up. I know for a fact that ’twas only a week ago that he bate his poor wife until she let a screech out of her that would have waked Father D’Arcy himself, only that the seven sleepers aren’t a patch on him.’
It appears she cannot even spare her parish priest! Susan, who has risen, and who isnow dragging Jacky from under the counter, where he has been in hot pursuit of a kitten, bids her old friend good-bye for the present.
‘You’ll tell Miss Barry about the clutch,’ says the spinster; and ‘Yes!’ shouts Susan into the terminus, a little louder than usual, perhaps, because Miss Ricketty lifts up her hand and shakes it at her reproachfully.
‘Wan would think I was deaf,’ says she tragically, whereupon both she and Susan laugh together. The girl’s happy mirth—seen if not heard—delights the old maid behind the counter.
‘Good-bye, me dear, an’ God bless you!’ says she, and, disdaining to even see Susan’s pennies, she thrusts a big parcel of sweets into Jacky’s small hands.
‘Keep a few for Masther Bonnie,’ whispers she, as she kisses him and sends him after his sister.
At the door, however, Susan turns back, and once more calls down the trumpet:
‘You will contradict that thing about Mr. Haldane, won’t you?’ says she; ‘surely it isbad enough that he should have lost his front teeth, without having scandalous stories spread about him. Besides, they will make father very unhappy.’
‘I’ll look afther him,’ says Miss Ricketty, ‘if only to oblige ye, me dear; though, I think, I’m not wantin’. Providence seems to have his eye on that young man.’
‘Oh, poor man! I’m afraid not,’ says Susan; ‘he was ugly enough before, and now his front teeth are gone!’
‘That’s it,’ says Miss Ricketty; ‘whin next ye look at him, ye’ll see what a fine openin’ the Lord has made for him.’
The last vision Susan has of Miss Ricketty shows her leaning back in her chair, with her apron over her bonnet, convulsed with joy at her own wit.