Chapter II: Part 2

For a like reason she shunned in those days what used to be a favourite walk beyond the front gates along the quiet lane, with its broad green banks softly on one side mounting up into amply spreading grass-slopes, now haunted at its every turn by sorrowful spectres that she had no charm to lay. Occasionally one of them would say to her: “Ah, melady, the blessin’s of God on the sweet face of you, and may you never know what it is to want the bit,” and this made her feel herself all the more to be a sort of ravening locust. Her own meals, indeed, those times, were partaken of grudgingly and of necessity, after which, carrying everything she could lay hands on, she hurried off to the end of the elm-grove, where a herd of small children would be looking out for them with large eyes. But day by day she thought her supplies seemed to dwindle, and the pinched faces to multiply, and she was as powerless against that as if it were the oncoming of night. One day in a week of black frost she desperately sold her godmother’s cameo bracelet to a passing higgler for a shilling, wherewith she bought out of a baker’s cart three portly loaves; and the satisfaction which these caused to prevail for a while, a short while, almost compelled her to think that she would dispose in the same method of her silver key-brooch, her only other ornament, the next time he came by. But always, having looked at it for some minutes, she replaced it in its box without achieving any resolve. The pencilled line, still legible on the lid, seemed to protest against the transaction in the name of the dead summer that lived with her brightest memories.

* * * * *

All this while the big boulder stone was lying out under the stars and mists and shadow-shifting winds on the grassy ridge of Slieve Ardgreine; and thither constantly travelled Eileen’s thoughts, although her bodily pilgrimages to it had grown less frequent than heretofore, since dripping tussocks and long, bedraggled skirts had become a graver consideration. She had never lost her faith in it and its contents. Nothing whatever had occurred to alter her opinion about it, and the silence on the subject which various reasons obliged her to maintain helped to ward off chances of disillusioning enlightenment. Eileen’s sixteen years in lonely Glendoula had taught her so very little either at first or second hand about other Quality’s domestic arrangements, that for anything she could tell, it might not be unusual to keep the family plate locked up in a large stone chest out-of-doors. Therefore no antecedent improbability cropped up to struggle with the existence of a long-cherished, deep-rooted dream and desire.

The one change that had here been wrought by those slow-footed, empty-handed years was in the use she designed for her riches. This change grew more radical under stress of the famishing winter. She no longer could care to admire the beauty of the bright gleaming silver things, nor to sort out from among them fastidiously appropriate gifts for each—that indeed had become only too simple a process, since everybody’s need was the same. Her sole wish now was to sell all that she had straightway—she would have waited to make no pious bargains about treasure in heaven—that she might satisfy the poor with bread. But the more intensely her wishes concentrated themselves upon that object, the more keenly she felt how far it was out of reach. Four years and some months, jealously reckoned, still were lacking to her of the age that would legally entitle her to enter upon the possession of her property; and although she now knew from other sources than old Timothy that some inheritance did then await her, what could such a distant prospect avail in the face of to-day’s direful necessity? Chafing sorely against the law’s delay that set bars between the owner and her rights, Eileen wondered sometimes whether the Lord Chancellor, whom she understood to rule her destinies, might not under the circumstances be persuaded to trust her with her fortune, now that she was sixteen and a half, just to keep poor Denis Madden’s half-dozen orphans, and old Widow Flynn and her blind daughter, and all the rest of the people from starving completely. Once she actually ventured upon a remote hint at some such possibility to her Aunt Geraldine, but lacking courage did not approach the subject closely enough to make herself intelligible; a failure for which her conscience often pricked her in the following days.

* * * * *

More than ever on the morning when this incident befell: It was mocking March weather, bright and calm and pitilessly cold, and Eileen thought she would warm herself by running up to her big stone, which she had not visited since the autumn. But before she reached the first bend in the avenue young Larry M‘Farlane hastily met her, and turned her aside into a shrubbery with a moving story about a crippled blackbird which was fluttering there among the bushes. “Unless some ould miscreant of a cat might be slinkin’ away under the low branches this minyit, Miss Eileen, wid the crathur grabbed in her mouth.” Larry had invented this little fiction on the spur of the moment, the fact being that just round the turn, a few yards from where he stopped Eileen, a heap of rags seemed to have fallen, as if flung or blown down across the road. Its halt there had indeed been so unpremeditated that only a remnant of the crust someone had begged hard for up at the House a minute before was still gripped in a gaunt hand. Coming upon this obstruction, young Larry, whose fare nowadays did not conduce to athletic feats, found its removal quite beyond his powers, and therefore ran on to seek help, when his meeting with Miss Eileen converted his most urgent duty into the task of hindering her from “gettin’ a quare fright along of the misfort’nit poor body.” He accomplished it only in part. For he could not contrive but that she should notice the gathering of a crowd in the avenue, and the shrilling of shocked ejaculations, and then the bearing away with slow solemnity, which apprised her of how near the cloaked shadow had passed.

Eileen gave up her expedition to the stone chest; its baffling impenetrability seemed just then a cruel gibe of Fate, wiselier ignored. Larry, for his part, temporarily lost sight of the errand which had been bringing him up to the Big House: a commission he had undertaken to execute for the postman. Thus it was not until the evening, when the cold March twilight had faded, too tardily for many people impatient to huddle away into oblivious sleep, that a letter reached the thriftily-lit drawing-room, where Eileen and her aunt were also getting through the interval before bed-time as best they could, which was but dully. A letter was something of an event in itself, and this one, unlike most of its predecessors, did not collapse inanely into a listless “Oh, it’s only”—for it contained a real piece of news.

Glendoula was to have another visit from Pierce Wilmot. Pierce, who had grown up a civil engineer, was now in charge of certain road-making relief-works, which were about to come creeping down Letterglas valley and up through the Nick of Time into the neighbouring glen. The superintendence of these would bring him to stay for a while near the place, and he hoped to renew his acquaintance with his kinsfolk at the Big House. All the establishment was more or less thrilled by the intelligence. It seemed, of course, only natural that he should take up his quarters there, and the prospect pleased on the whole. Lady Fitzmaurice, even, and her sister-in-law were slightly cheered and roused; even old Timothy, despite his prejudice, set about his polishing with a revived zest, in anticipation of a visitor who might be expected to appreciate “the differ between spoons that had a proper shine kep’ on them, and ones that was as dingy as if you’d loaned them for stirrin’ the Ould Fellow’s tay.” All the others, who remembered Master Pierce as a fine friendly-spoken young gentleman, thought that it would be a pleasant variety to set eyes on him again, and the rest were quite ready to welcome him on that recommendation. Eileen alone looked forward to his return somewhat doubtfully. She knew right well that things could not be the same as they were in those very olden days; and the differences might not be improvements. Suppose that she did not like the grown-up Pierce, nor he her? Then her reminiscences, she thought, would be superseded and spoiled. Still, she believed herself, after all, to be glad that he was coming.

* * * * *

It was late on a wild bleak evening that Pierce arrived, after a long open-air day of surveying and supervising. An additional pair of candles illuminated the drawing-room in his honour, and were burning clearly enough to show what manner of man he was at four-and-twenty. He had not changed at all irrecognisably, being still black and straight-browed, alert and rather resolute-looking, as beseemed a person whose business consisted largely in the clearing away of obstacles, by summarily forcible methods if need were. He had done this figuratively upon occasion as well as literally since his last visit to Glendoula. But the little girl who then used to patter up and down that primitive path beside him was now much harder to identify, having shot up so slender and tall. Also in Pierce’s honour, Eileen had put on her best gown that evening, a fine white muslin, sprinkled with a pattern of little lilac rose-bunches, outlined in a cloud of black dots. It was not more than half a decade lag of the latest Dublin fashions, but the six months’ growth since its last wearing had certainly made its skirt a rather skimpy length, as she noted with chagrin when putting it on. Some consolation was found in fastening her deep embroidered collar with the silver key. She had plaited her brown hair, darker now, yet keeping its richness of latent gold, in an unusually elaborate Grecian-plait to coil in a careful spiral knot at the back of her head. But first it framed her face in satin-sleek bands, smoothed down low on the delicate curve of the cheek, and then gathered up, leaving on either side a loop discovering a shell-like ear. As pink as a geranium-blossom one of them was that evening, the nipping cold and her thin dress had tempted her to sit so near the fire; and her eyes were as softly bright as ever, with such light as a sunbeam, questing beneath leaf-lattices, may waken in a moss-brimmed nook of clearest well-water.

Pierce noticed all these things, and none of them, while he was greeting his Aunt Geraldine; and he fell in love so simultaneously that it would have been impossible to say whether his observations came before or after. His habit was to be prompt and decided, and with promptitude and decision did he grasp this new experience—of which, nevertheless, an access of very unwonted diffidence and irresolution seemed part and parcel. These set in immediately, as if he had passed a vote of want of confidence against himself upon the spot, and its effect was retrospective, throwing a slur alike upon his present and his past. He wondered whether his cousin had not thought him a peculiarly odious schoolboy. His old pet name for her suddenly occurred to him as persistently appropriate, but the mere remembrance of it made him feel so over-presumptuous that he almost wished her to have forgotten it. In like manner he recollected, and could not dare to remind her of, their climb up Slieve Ardgreine, or their adventure with the strayed goats, and other episodes. He had retained only just enough common-sense to understand that Eileen’s silence all the evening upon this, and indeed every other topic, was not intended for a rebuff; and the flow of his conversation with his Aunt Geraldine was not a little impeded by a perpetual apprehension, altogether superfluous, of her niece as a critic.

Of course, he was not very long in recovering his presence of mind. In a day or two he began to dispense with such hampering precautions, but the sentiment that had suggested them continued in full force, and did not cease to influence his behaviour. Less, perhaps, in his dealings with Eileen than with the world at large, it made him transpose himself, so to speak, into a softer key. He unlearned in a single week some tricks of peremptoriness and self-assertion, which the vicissitudes of one early set in authority had been teaching him through several past years. For it was with him as if he had suddenly discovered the existence of something precious and perishable, that a touch might shatter or a breath destroy, and thereupon he grew wonderfully sensitive to the wide-spreading intricacies of cause and effect. How could he tell but that a rough word spoken anywhere might set a-stirring peril-fraught vibrations to reach and threaten the head that he loved? For her sake, he would have liked everything to be on velvet, and he was always instinctively aiming at that end. The most unskilled and incapable of the labourers whose efforts he superintended found their miscellaneous inefficiency treated with singular forbearance, even if it attained an egregiousness characterised by their comrades as “a quare botch intirely,” and driving their foreman to demand of various powers, celestial and otherwise: What to glory the great gaby was at? During leisure moments their lank and hollow-eyed gang were prone to pass the remark that “the captain” was “a rael gintleman”; while up at the Big House all the inmates accorded him all sorts of golden opinions.

Eileen herself meanwhile was not in the least aware of what had befallen him, but she had left off dreading any detriment to her cherished memories, and his visit had undoubtedly brought an influx of pleasure and interest to cheer her present day. She was so unaccustomed to being made much of by relations that this kinsman’s good nature impressed her as quite extraordinary, and so little used to making much of herself that she never thought of attributing it to anything except a special quality in Pierce, rather more likely, no doubt, to be exercised in another person’s behalf than in her own. It repeatedly surprised her to see that he remembered and acted upon her opinions and wishes, as if they were really important—a new view of them which she would have been slow to adopt. One morning he rode off all the long way to Denismore and back to get her Alfred Tennyson’s latest volume, and her delight in it was alloyed only by the intrusive consideration of how much coarse meal the price of it would have purchased. For her mind was still engrossingly pre-occupied with the neighbours’ trouble.

* * * * *

The cloud of it had lifted a little since Pierce’s coming. Possible wages loosened the famine-grip on such households as could send forth a man to ply pick and shovel, instead of hopelessly lying abed “agin the hunger”; and then a spell of more genial weather interposing released everybody from the clutches of that other icy-fingered foe, whose co-operation is so deadly. “For sure,” as old Christy Shanahan had been known to remark in this connection, “to be starvin’ inside and outside at the one time is more than any raisonable man can stand at all, unless be good luck he was a graven image.” This dim lightening of the prospect, however, rousing a stir of hope where numb despair had begun to prevail, made the need of plans for a timely rescue seem all the more urgent. One evening at dinner, Eileen heard Pierce say that if the people could get food enough to ward off the fever just until the potatoes—supposing there should be any—were dug, they might do well enough; otherwise, it was a bad lookout. And he added that it was hard to see how it could be managed, as the road-making grant had nearly run short, and where else should the money come from? At that Eileen had almost spoken her haunting thought aloud, and it was: “the great chest full of silver.” And though the unpropitious moment enjoined silence, therefrom dated the designing of an enterprise so venturesome that the possibility of carrying it out was a point upon which she hopefully and fearfully changed her mind a dozen times daily for as many days.

At last there came a brilliant, capriciously-lighted morning, with its shine and shadow under the control of a shifting snow-drift, which sailed at the wind’s will. It was a holiday, and Pierce succeeded in setting out almost as soon as he wished on the early walk he had planned with his cousin. What slight delay did intervene was caused by the arrival, just as they were starting, of the Widow Barry with a couple of eggs to sell on commission for her next door neighbour—the Widow Shanahan, who “could get that far be no manner of manes herself, the crathur.”

“And they’re the last ones you’ll be takin’ off her, Miss Eileen, she bid me tell you,” said Widow Barry. “For she’s after killin’ her ould hin this mornin’, because it’s torminted she was to be seein’ it mopin’ around starvin’ the same as a raisonable body, sorra a bit had she to be throwin’ it this great while back whativer. ’Deed now, you might as well be walkin’ along the shore of the say these times as along be the dures down the street, for e’er a scrap of pitaty-parin’ or anythin’ else you’d find lyin’ about. The crathur had to be contintin’ itself wid whativer it could pick out of the ground, and bedad I won’er it had the heart to think of layin’ e’er an odd egg at all. So she took and wrung its neck this mornin’, and she said the sup of broth ’ud keep the life in herself and poor Katty for a day or so anyway. But och, Miss Eileen dear, it’ll be the weeny sup entirely. For ’twas meself caught the crathur for her, and I declare to goodness it wasn’t the weight in me hand of a little wisp of hay. Sez I to her, the feathers on it ’ud be heavier be thimselves. But sure she could do no betther; and if it boiled into the name of broth even, it’d give them the notion they was aitin’ somethin’.” In prospect of this repast, the sixpence that Pierce sent seemed to him hardly more than an emphasising of a “strong distemper and a weak relief”; but the Widow Barry, who went her way filled with a gratitude to God and man, may have understood the situation better.

And then the two young people set out on their rambles. They took their old favourite route up Slieve Ardgreine, for the first time since Pierce’s visit, on Eileen’s part, as the milder weather had been “soft” too, turning the mossy nap of the turf into a treacherous sponge, that squelched coldly over-shoes at the lightest footfall. To-day, however, it might be traversed dry-shod, given a discreet avoidance of extra vivid patches in the golden green; and a busy thirsty breeze had left scarcely a dewdrop in the glazed cups of the celandines and the pink-rimmed saucers of half-blown daisy-buds. Up this daintily carpeted path Eileen picked her steps rather silently. Her companion thought that she had been saddened by the incident of the ill-faring fowl, but that was not the reason. What pre-occupied her was the great venture which she appeared to be approaching more or less in spite of herself. The very direction which their walk was taking, at no choice of her own, was like a hand beckoning imperiously. On the way up she hovered towards the verge of it, and recoiled from it, and came stealing back to it again, oftener than the flitting clouds furled and unfurled their shadow-mats at her feet; and the big boulder, the stone plate-chest, hove in sight while she was still wavering. Failure would be so very terrible to her. She knew that if Pierce were shocked or indignant, or even amused, she would be miserable indeed; and she could not by any means convince herself that he would not be all these things. Yet, when they were standing beside the tall, blackish shape together, just as in old times—only it used to be the taller then—she felt desperately that, chance what might, she must not go away without speaking the sentence she had been mentally rehearsing all the week. It rang in her ears like a clamorous bell, and made her deaf to any other speech, so evidently that Pierce stopped in the middle of what he was beginning to remark, as if she had interrupted him. Just at that moment the sun swam out clear of a high-tossed drift, and sent a golden wave sweeping widely up and down the hill-slopes. It broke against the big stone, shining into Eileen’s face with all the dazzlement of an April forenoon, and she accepted the omen as if it had been the cordial clasp of some encouraging hand. Before the radiant rim had slidden on many paces farther, she took heart of grace, and the irrevocable word was spoken.

* * * * *

“There was one thing I wanted to ask you about, Pierce,” she said. She had moved round to the opposite side of the chest, and was looking at him across the lid, with eyes very bright and wistful beneath her broad-brimmed straw hat, which had brown ribbons tied in a bow under her chin. “I shouldn’t wonder if you thought it very dreadful of me,” she continued; “but I really don’t think it is myself. After all, I only want to use my own things, and that can be no great harm; and if these don’t belong to me now, they don’t belong to anybody, which is absurd. At any rate, it couldn’t possibly make any difference worth speaking of to those people up at the office in Dublin, and it would make all the difference in the world to the poor people here; so ‘the right of it over-leps the wrong of it,’ as old Murtagh Reilly used to say.” She was gradually arguing herself into courage; still a mere shadow falling anywhere would have routed it.

“I hope it is something truly appalling, or else I’ll be horribly disappointed now,” Pierce replied, a little puzzled by this prologue, but rather pleasantly so, because he liked her to consult him. “You’ve raised my expectations cruelly.... But if you wish, I’ll undertake not to think it very dreadful, nor dreadful in the least degree,” he added, as after a short pause she seemed still to be hesitating. He would have said that he had never made a safer promise.

“Well, then,” said Eileen; “do you remember how you said one time that you could easily get a key for this old chest of ours? Here’s the keyhole, you see, all right. I’ve always kept it clear of moss. And, I wonder, would you mind—if it didn’t give you a great deal of trouble—getting one for me now? Without telling anybody else, I mean, for of course they wouldn’t let me. I know I can have no legal right to take anything out of it until I come of age; but that’s only the _law_, and really when people are starving, one can’t be expected to wait for years and years just on account of such nonsense. At the best of times it seems a great pity to keep it lying here useless for so long, but now it’s like locking up other people’s lives. If I can’t get at it in time to do anything for them, I might as well never have it at all—there’ll not be a soul left in Glendoula. You’ve no idea how hateful it makes one feel. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m nearly as bad as the wretches who go on carting off their wheat and oats to sell in England. Only it isn’t my fault in reality, for until you came I never had a chance of speaking to any possible person about it. And then, Pierce, I was thinking that when we have got this opened, you’d maybe help me to manage about selling the silver. It must be worth a great deal of money: enough, at any rate, to last while they are waiting for the potatoes; for we really had very fine plate, I believe, though it mayn’t be quite so splendid as old Timothy used to declare—he _is_ a little given to romancing. And, of course, these times I don’t expect to find the yards of pearl and ruby ropes that were in the _Glittering Hoard_! You do remember that I told you, and that you promised about the key, don’t you, Pierce?” she said anxiously, perplexed by his expression, for he was looking hard at her with a sort of bewildered blank dismay, almost as if something had frightened him—an effect which she had not included among her many apprehensions.

He was taken wholly unprepared, because during her irresolution Eileen naturally had shunned the perilous subject, and he had himself for the time being entirely forgotten the existence of that old childish myth. But now he did indeed remember it, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, instead of all those long years ago. There had stood the little girl eagerly telling him her absurd story, to which he listened with amused forbearance, thinking to himself that he must not vex her by incredulity, and carelessly noticing how swiftly her small face flushed, and how brightly her large eyes shone in the excitement of her narrative. And to-day the same thing seemed coming to pass again—but with differences. For here unchanged in the sunshine was the dark stone block with its yellow dappling of lichen, and that same clear voice came to him across it, speaking so much in earnest that the transparent flower-flush rose and the glance brightened just as of old. But the small child had grown into a tall maiden, and her voice was the one that gave meaning to all the other sounds in his world, and her absurd story no longer amused him in the least, seemed liker breaking his heart, seemed the pronouncing of an evil spell, that blurred the light of his eyes, and conjured up a web of black forebodings over the fair horizon of his future. If the soft-aired spring morning had suddenly began to scowl and keen around him, and sting him with frozen pellets, it would have faintly shadowed forth the transition. A man’s mood, however, may fall from one level to another in much less time than it takes to tell, and Eileen thought his answer came quickly.

“Don’t you know that you’re talking nonsense, Eileen?” he said.

She had never heard him speak so sharply, almost roughly—not even when he had seen his case of mathematical instruments dropped by Hughey Brian into the bottomless bog-hole, nor when he had come upon the Donnellys’ little goat tethered with the remnant of an urgently-needed and long-sought measuring-line. And she was immediately aware that the very worst had befallen. Her plan was impracticable, and she had disgusted Pierce by proposing it. The poor Glendoula people must starve, and her cousin, who had been so good-natured, could never like her any more. Probably he considered her request worthy of a dishonestly-minded idiot, and was deeply, perhaps justly, offended at her suggestion that he should take part in such a transaction. Certainly, he would not hear of the scheme, so all her hopes were scattered like mist before a hurrying wind, and there again loomed the grim trouble ahead, with its inexorable face turned unveiled upon her. Just at that moment, however, it was partially screened by the interposition of a still uglier one, which would thrust itself between, asking and answering a question with the same tormenting result: What must Pierce be thinking of her? He had surely meant worse than “nonsense.”

Amid this rude crowding in on her of disappointment jostling with grief and mortification, Eileen clung half-consciously to the sense that it behoved her by all means to retain the footing of her self-possession, and she replied very gently: “Not exactly nonsense, I think; but perhaps—I daresay it would be quite out of the question to take these things now, and not even right. It seemed to me the only way I could do any thing to help the people, but of course I knew it mightn’t be possible at all. I don’t understand much about the law. Don’t you think it’s getting rather cold up here? Perhaps we’d be wiser to come back before the day clouds over.”

This dignified composure seemed to Pierce as it were a seal set upon his fear, the document of which her fantastic story had supplied, and he dejectedly turned down the hill-path with her in silence. The sullen-looking stone which they left behind them, a blot on the sunny sward, might have been a little ancient altar to some unpropitious God, whence they were taking home, sorrowfully, discomfortable oracles. In truth, one of them had there said farewell to an old hope, and the other struck up an acquaintance with a new fear; both experiences apt to arouse pre-occupying meditations. Neither of the cousins gave much heed to their surroundings as they went. The small wild clouds flirted the sunshine about as if flocks of white wings were flickering by; here and there they flung down the shadows which make one marvel how their “little-seeming substance” can be the cause of such deep purple stains. But now nobody marked them, nor the far-off pipe of the plover, nor the fragrance of the basking herbage underfoot.

Thus they presently came to the gapped dyke leading into the first field, and all the way neither of them had spoken a word. Now, at that moment it happened that Eileen was looking very straight before her, with her head held rather high, and her eyes steadily opened, to give the tears a chance of going back the way they had come, and walking warily as one who felt how even the quiver of an eyelash might be fatal. Yet these precautions defeated themselves, for they were the reason why she stumbled at the flat stepping-stones, so that Pierce had to save her from falling just as he had done nearly nine years before. This time, however, he did not let her go again with a laugh. He held her close and said: “Oh, my darling, my sweetheart, don’t be vexed, don’t be vexed. It will be all right, never fear. We’ll pull them through—all of them—safely somehow. Don’t think about that old silver any more; and you won’t mind what I said just now? I’m a stupid brute, you see, sweetheart; but there’s nothing on earth that I wouldn’t do for you.”

While she listened to this statement, Eileen went through, in an intensified form, an experience somewhat resembling that of the bygone summer morning when the unknown Pierce had first spoken to her: a sudden surging up of dread, that wave-like took her off her feet for the instant, but only to lift her unharmed into a new world, most beautifully strange, and shut out from all troubles of the mere earth with the light that never was on land or sea. A reflection of it in her eyes encouraged him to pursue that line of argument, and he said a great deal more, all much to the same purport, as they went down the steep green fields, where the young bracken-fronds were uncoiling their flossy silken whorls beneath last season’s weather-beaten brown plumes, and the golden blossom-flakes were melting off the tall winter furzes; and then on between the fledged boles of the elm-grove, and under the scented shadow of the laurel-walk, until at the hall-door Eileen ran away to make a solitary survey of the unexplored regions in which she had wonderfully arrived. Just for the moment Pierce felt gratefully disposed towards the big stone, which had, at all events, given him his cue.

* * * * *

But later on that afternoon he spoke very bitterly to his Aunt Geraldine, whom he found alone in the book-room. The hearing of candid opinions is a privilege not uncommonly enjoyed by spinster aunts.

“You’ve kept her moping here all these years,” he said, “without companions or amusement or occupation, till it’s no wonder that she has taken up queer fancies. Why, it was enough to drive her—to make anybody unlike other people. Surely you might have managed better for her somehow.”

“It really wouldn’t have been easy,” his aunt said, but meekly on the defensive; “we always have had so little ready money, and then your poor Aunt Gerald’s wretched health is another difficulty. Besides that, I never noticed anything odd about Eileen. She always seems contented and cheerful enough, and I thought she was a sensible sort of child, and very quiet. Just once or twice, now that I think of it, she has said something that rather puzzled me about a plate-chest, but I had no idea she had any delusion of the kind.”

“Yes, that’s just where it is; nobody has cared to look after her or take any trouble about her,” Pierce said, wrathful and reproachful, a little unreasonably; so fresh was his discovery that concern for Eileen’s welfare ought to be the prime consideration in every rightly ordered mind. He did not surmise, either, that he was upbraiding a friend. Yet such was the case. For, from the very first evening, their Aunt Geraldine had guessed whither things were tending, and ever since had been watching their course, a melancholy sort of Prospero, who was powerless to work any wonders, and whose joy at nothing could be much, but who did feel some pleasure in the growing likelihood that her favourite sister’s son would some day reign in the wreck of the old place, and take charge of the person whom she had always regarded half-pityingly, half-impatiently as “Eileen, poor child.” Therefore the cropping up of this ominous obstacle was a disappointment by which she felt so cast down that she had not the spirit to rebut with any energy the accusation of contributory negligence.

Neither she nor Pierce had spoken of the circumstances that lent the matter its menacing aspect, but they were uppermost in the mind of each. What made Eileen’s futile story sound so warningly in their ears was the remembered existence of that baneful spectre whose mischief might be traced among the annals of the Fitzmaurice family, as well in the notorious eccentricities which had preluded poor Sir Gerald’s last desperate act, as in the more or less pronounced oddities and deficiencies which had wrought the history of this kinsman and the other into a tragedy with a grotesquer plot.

“I can’t think what has put such a notion into her head,” Miss Fitzmaurice said dejectedly. The workings of Eileen’s mind could hardly indeed have been more remote from her observation if they had gone on in a different planet. “But, after all, Pierce, if one considers how young she is—scarcely more than a child.”

“No reasonable child would believe anything so preposterous,” Pierce replied with gloom. “A rough lump of a boulder with moss growing in the cracks!”

“And did you tell her so?” asked his aunt.

“Well, no, not exactly; we began talking about something else, and I thought I’d better see whether you knew anything about it; but apparently you don’t,” said Pierce.

“Oh, you must just laugh her out of it,” his aunt said, laughing nervously herself, and had not any more helpful suggestion to offer. Pierce left the interview dissatisfied and unreassured.

* * * * *

Towards sunsetting, however, he found himself once more on the summit of Slieve Ardgreine. He had promised to go and see after Barney Foyle, who had been “took bad wid the road-sickness” on the day before, and as the Foyles’ cabin stood by the side of the Clonmoragh road, his shortest route was up and down through the Nick of Time. The sight of the solitary boulder, squatting there starkly black amid the flushed western glow, made him realise his trouble with much searching of heart. It seemed a symbol, or something more than a symbol, a visible tangible embodiment of the obstruction which had thrust itself into the clear path of his desires. Now, Pierce Wilmot was alike by nature and training a person who could not, without great and grudging reluctance, admit impediments to his progress along the way wherein he would go; and in this case he felt more loth than ever before. As he crossed the stretch of sward towards the gap, he eyed the dark mass with a hot thrill of resentment, as if against somebody who had wittingly baulked and baffled him. Yet withal it was for him so obviously nothing more than just an ordinary lump of limestone, that in view of it Eileen’s quaint belief took a stronger tinge of unreason. Nor did he possess, to soften it down, any knowledge of how the seed had been sown in her mind, and had grown up, fostered and never disturbed, through the long years of a lonely childhood. So, for a few paces, his heart sank and sank, till it reached depths where a poignant pity was the most endurable element in his mood.

But before he reached the Nick of Time, an idea that flashed across him made him deviate several yards to the right, and walk up to the big stone. He stood still beside it, reflecting for a while, and then gave it a slight kick, as though to mark his arrival at some definite conclusion. At that moment he was saying to himself: “In any case it would be better out of this; and I’ll do it the first thing to-morrow, by Jove I will! Then I’ll bring her up here, and the chances are that when once she’s seen it in fragments she’ll never give the matter another thought. There was that young fellow the Barnards knew, who got rid of a curious hallucination in much the same sort of way. They burned an old paper on which he had taken it into his head that the safety of the whole world depended; and when he found that nothing happened, he grew perfectly rational about it. And so will she. For indeed she’s as sensible as anybody can be, except just on that one point, which won’t signify an atom, if it’s taken in time. It’s a good job the notion occurred to me. Ay, that’s the kind of key I must get you, sweetheart—poor little Bright-Eyes. However, I’ll take good care that she shan’t be vexed about it. So there’ll be a short end of you, you old _stookawn_, and joy go with you,” he said half-aloud, with a defiant flourish of his blackthorn towards the big stone, which, as he turned his back upon it, flung a long, murky shadow after him, like a scowl, over the sheeny grass.

* * * * *

The next morning did not smile upon anyone’s undertakings; rather, it might be said to survey them unsympathetically through a blank, expressionless mask. For Letterglas and all its neighbouring glens were full of a white fog. It was not merely the soft mist that clings about distant tree-clumps and cabin-clusters when the sun is still low, and uncurls slowly, peeling off from round them, while he climbs, giving one an impression that the landscape is a fragile work of art, not yet quite finished careful unpacking out of delicate cotton-wool wrappings. All the night through a vast white cloud had been adrift thither from the westward, over seas, hanging low always, and sometimes trailing on the very face of the water like a huge disabled pinion. Beneath it the dim blue tide had crept to the limitary foot of the cliffs, furtively, as if from an ambush; but the wavering ribbon of weed and froth set no boundary for the thronging vapour-masses, which passed on wafted inland through rifts and over crests, till at length the escorting breeze dropped and left them halted motionless, a crowd checked by invisible barriers. Round about Glendoula they made all the valleys into one, spanning the ravines with ghostly causeways and bridges, and levelling the peaks, lost among aërial snowfields. The curd-white impenetrable wall looked at a few yards’ distance so dense and solid that the thought of walking through it almost took away one’s breath, and people about to emerge from it loomed along with such dim, unsubstantial shapes that their voices sounded startlingly loud and near.

Yet, notwithstanding these obstructive conditions, work was going on in Letterglas valley, where wheel-barrows trundled to and fro invisibly, tilting out clattering loads, and picks swung unseen till one stood close to the wielder’s elbow. Pierce, the inspector, had made his way thither, gropingly, at an early hour, having a special job in view, which he was anxious to get done as soon as might be. But since a field of vision wider than the present was desirable for his operations, he consulted the weather-wise among his men as to the probability of the fog clearing off. In old Murtagh Reilly’s opinion, which was highly esteemed upon such points, this might be expected to take place before they were much older.

“I wouldn’t wonder if it was very apt to be givin’ itself a heft agin we’re done breakfast, your honour,” he said; “and once it fairly gits a rise on it, it won’t be long streelin’ itself off out of your way. It’s quare somewhiles to see the rate them mists ’ill be skytin’ up the hillside at, and not a breath of win’ stirrin’ that ’ud thrimble the feather of steam whiffin’ out of an ould kettle’s spout, let alone liftin’ a big cloud fit to thatch a townland.”

“Sure it’s the sun shinin’ on the wrong side of them does be drawin’ them up,” said Christy Martin instructively, “like as if they was a wet shirt shrinkin’ in front of the fire. The flannen’s a terror for cocklin’ up into nothin’ if the hate’s too strong for it.”

“I dunno where the great likeness is then,” said old Reilly, who had not a taste for instruction.

“Maybe there’s not, Christy,” said Christy’s brother Willy; “very belike there is not. But all the same, you and me’d be glad enough of a pinny for ivery time we’ve seen the sun comin’ out red on this side, lookin’ the livin’ moral of a hot cinder burnin’ through a blanket.”

“Have it your own way, lads,” said old Reilly, sublimely abandoning the whole expanse of the heavens to them with a comprehensive flourish of his hand. “Howsomiver, your honour, if you was axin’ me, I’d say this day’s apter than not to be takin’ up prisintly, or next door to it, as thick as it is this instiant minyit.”

Old Reilly seemed to have said truly, for by the time that everybody rose from the sodded bank, on which some of them had been eating slices of bread as they sat—others were in the same plight as John O’Mahony, who remarked humorously that it saved a dale of throuble to have your breakfast yisterday or else to-morra—there was a perceptible curtailment in the flowing drapery of the hill-slopes, and a thinning of its texture, paler shimmering brightness running through it here and there, to show that the opaque folds might shake out into diaphanous tissues of pearl and silver.

Accordingly, a small knot of men by-and-by detached themselves from the rest, and began to ascend towards the Nick of Time, whose gap was still hidden by an ample curtain. Pierce was one of the party, which carried up with it a supply of gritty black grains and sundry coercive-looking tools. He invited Murtagh Reilly to accompany them, but the old man cried off the expedition. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll stop where I am,” he said, “for these times when there does be a notorious curse on the counthry, and the hungry-grass growin’ over ivery inch of it, troth it’s as much as a man’s life’s worth—and if that’s no great things, it’s the most he has—to be settin’ his misfortnit fut e’er a step further than he’s bound. But you’ve a plinty of the lads along widout me, your honour.”

* * * * *

Just at the same time, Larry M‘Farlane also set off up the slope, by a different route from the others, however, and with a different goal. He was taking the shortest way to the Big House down at the bottom of Glendoula. The fog there had begun to recede a little earlier than in Letterglas, but still muffled things very closely, making mysteries of the most familiar objects, and Larry, who, to judge by his headlong bounds and plunges all the way, might have been racing for at least his life, collided more than once with a tree-trunk when he came among the plantations. And he reached the house panting, only to run up against more hampering blocks of delay. For in the kitchen was nobody except Mrs Dunlop, the cook, busied with frizzling preparations for the breakfast, and all she could be got to say was, “Aw, ax Mr Gabbett, Larry man; he’ll be apt to know if she’s after goin’ out, and if she isn’t, she might be indures yit.” And when he rushed on to the pantry, old Timothy, who had overheard the voice of an unfavoured visitor, shot the bolt of the door, and was long deaf to all thumps and calls. In fact, Larry, the urgency of whose errand divided every minute infinitely, was turning away in despair, when the old man shouted a surly, “What’s a-wantin?” and he had to waste another tormenting interval before a churlish chink opened.

“Wantin’ to spake to Miss Eileen?” said old Timothy. “Then want’ll be your master, me hayro of war, for I seen her goin’ out a while back. So if that’s what all you had the prancin’ in the passage for, like a cross-tempered carriage-horse kep’ standin’ in a could win’——”

“Murther alive and wirrasthrew and bad luck to it,” Larry said, “what’ll I do at all now? And which way did she go, Mr Gabbett? Was it up Slieve Ardgreine she wint, do you suppose? For it’s biddin’ her keep off goin’ up it I’d be.”

“Well to be sure, and set you up. Yourself’s the great one to be givin’ your orders. And how the mischief could I be tellin’ you where she’s went, except be the sound of the hall-door clappin’? But I dunno what’d take her sthreelin’ very far up the hill, unless she was wishful to lose herself body and bones in the thick of the fog that you might take and cut like the side of a rick. And if you’re from the place where they’re workin’, sure you’d ha’ met her comin’ along, supposin’ she’s gone that way.”

“I might ha’ passed her by twinty times over unbeknownst, up about the top of the fields, where you couldn’t see a goat’s horns and tail together,” said Larry; “nor I wasn’t keepin’ along be the path the most part of the way; I just slapped down the shortest I could. But if I’d had the wit of an ould blind crow, I would ha’ sted on her own path, and then I might ha’ stopped her. But I’ll be hard set now to git a chance of findin’ her at all.”

With that, Larry bolted away too hurriedly for any further questions, thus frustrating the curiosity of old Timothy, left wondering “What for in the nation the bosthoon would be warnin’ Miss Eileen off the hill,” a riddle for which he could invent himself no plausible answer.

* * * * *

Larry’s surmise was partly right, Eileen having in reality been on her leisurely way up Slieve Ardgreine while he sped hot-foot down it. She had slept little in the night, and would have almost grudged that little, had it not been for the pleasantness of waking to the recollection that she was not only dreaming. The last time she did so, the silvery lines framing the shuttered window, though but faint as yet, convinced her that it could not be too early to get up. Rising, she was fascinated by the spectacle of one of the snow-whitest and stillest fogs she had ever seen in the dozen years or so during which she had been capable of meteorological observations; and she stood looking on at it for some time. But when the fabric of the spacious pavilion began to give ground a little and sway to and fro, restoring glimpses of a substantial world and shifting them away again, no longer contented with her watch from the window, she determined to run out and survey more thoroughly this rare aspect of things. On the way downstairs she stopped to tap at her mother’s door, very softly—a velvet-suited bee would have made more noise flying against it—hoping to be let in, and fearing to rouse a sleeper. An answer did set out to her, but the feeble drowsy voice failed to reach her, so she stole on cautiously, a little sorry that she must put off her good morning until she should return. Eileen was wearing a favourite blue and white mousseline-de-laine, and had not forgotten to fasten its collar with her silver key. Over her head she had thrown a grey woollen shawl, because the April morning air was soft rather than warm. It was a somewhat shabby old shawl, and Eileen vainly reflected that if she met anybody she could just slip it off and be carrying it on her arm.

Anybody might be coming down the hill home to his breakfast about this time, and the long aisle of the elm-walk, where the straight trunk columns showed themselves momentarily and vanished as the mist-wreaths floated and melted through them, was weirdly alluring. When Eileen had followed it to its end, she found another vista opening before her out on the green slope, closed ever and anon, and temptingly cleared again by capricious wafts of dimness. For as she went there was setting in a general movement among all that great gathering of vapours; their assembly was lingeringly breaking up; a spectral city going to wrack. Vast cloaked and hooded shapes seemed curtseying ceremoniously to one another from opposite sides of the glens, while here and there some loftily towering pile might be seen to betray the frailness of its structure by a shivering from top to base like that of a sail in a veering wind. But hardly a breath was stirring in Glendoula, so that the dispersion proceeded by very slow degrees, with many fitful pauses.

Eileen’s little footpath led her so closely in the wake of a receding cloud-wave that she could watch the bracken-plumes emerge frond by frond from its filmy borders, and descry the gold of the furze-blossom glimmering through the white, before the sombre branches became visible. On either hand, low trailing fleeces were caught and carded into filaments on tussocks and bents and briers. Farther up it seemed as if a spectral net cast over the hills were being hauled in with torn meshes teased and tangled. And behind all this shadowy shifting drifting there were vague motions of light, hinted at by sudden wan shimmerings of the canopy that screened it.

Eileen was always half intending to turn back, yet she went on and on, sometimes noticing these things, and occasionally stopping to gather a shrivelled dandelion bud, or a russet plantain head for the old moping parrot in the parlour at home, until at last she knew that she must have come near the stone chest. It had no bitter associations for her now. Rather she would have looked upon it as the auspicious starting-point whence she had fared to the highest fortune. Even the failure of her scheme for producing a relief fund did not any longer grieve her, for Pierce had undertaken that help would be forthcoming, and to Pierce’s keeping she had transferred herself, responsibilities and all, which she found a wonderful ease to her mind. So light of heart, indeed, it made her that she now began softly to sing a sorrowful little ditty, which she used long ago to hear crooned by her poor old nurse, who had a turn for sentiment:

“_Oh sunny blooms Slieve Cryan, where the gold boughs creep
together,
With honey on the high cliff in ten thousand bells of heather.
For the morn that fears no morrow is there bliss in flower and
bee,
And in one heart sorrow, sorrow, for the hope that wafts to
sea._”