Chapter II

It was only comparatively speaking a big house at all, though it made some architectural pretensions with its pillared front and porch and balustraded roof. Its lower windows looked out of a spacious hall, and a few ill-proportioned sitting-rooms; upstairs rambling passages and wide-floored lobbies cramped the uncomfortable bedchambers. Disrepair prevailed within and without, ranging from the rough work of wind and weather to the minuter operations of mouse and moth. Even at its best, all had been ugly and inconvenient enough. Nevertheless to become mistress thereof Lady Winifred had not merely left a far statelier and more luxurious establishment, but had quitted it under a cloud of disapproval, with an assurance that she was taking a long step down in the world. For her Captain was a person so impecunious and impossible, with such an unsuccessful past career, and such unsatisfactory future prospects, that nobody could imagine what she saw in him, and everybody thought the worse of her for seeing it, whatever it might be. The marriage was just not discountenanced and forbidden outright, but most austere visages were turned upon it, and the wedding, Lady Astermount’s maid declared, “couldn’t have been quieter if an affliction had occurred in the family only the previous week.”

Notwithstanding that inauspicious send-off, however, Captain and Lady Winifred O’Reilly passed a surprisingly pleasant year at this shabby old house of his among the bog-lands. Lonesome and monotonous are the bog-lands, and creep up very close to the Big House; but it stands set in a miniature glen of its own, with a wreath of shrubberies around it, and during the months after they arrived the O’Reillys busied themselves much about additional trees and evergreens, wherewith to screen their domain more effectually from the dreary outlook and roughly sweeping winds in the years that were to come. Many improvements, too, had to be made in neglected plots of garden ground, where the Captain looked at geraniums and pansies and carnations through another person’s eyes, until at last he saw something in them himself, and learned with extreme pride to call them by their proper names. This lore gave him more pleasure on the whole than he had ever derived from his familiarity with the colours worn by jockeys or stamped on playing cards, studies which had hitherto engrossed a larger share of his attention. His wife and he diversified their gardening with long rides together on steeds not expensively high bred. Clonmalroan opinion waxed somewhat critical when the pair came trotting by. Her ladyship, they said, didn’t look the size of a wren perched on that big, rawny baste of a chestnut, with an ugly, coarse gob of a head on him too, and the brown mare was something slight for his Honour, who must ride well up to fourteen stone. But the riders themselves were satisfied with their mounts.

Their contentment had showed no signs of waning in that mild November weather, with its pearl-white mists and wafted odour of burning weeds, when the likelihood of his going out loomed up suddenly on their horizon. The certain news came one morning, while they were working away near the back gate, where their small bog stream flows under steep banks, on which they had designed a plantation of rhododendrons. In the black peat soil these thrive amain, and by next June would have lit a many-hued glow in the shadowy little glen. Lady Winifred tried hard not to see that this interruption of their labours was to the Captain scarcely such an unmitigated calamity as to herself. Her recognition of the fact made her feel doubly desolate; not that there was more difference in their sentiments than had to be in the nature of things, or than left him otherwise than miserable at their parting. She tried further to go on with the plantation, as he would no doubt return in time to see it in blossom; but she was relieved when a spell of bad weather presently set in and let her stay indoors. Yet indoors it seemed as if the whole solitude of the great bog had pressed into the empty house. All day it said, wherever she went, upstairs or downstairs, one word to vex her: _Gone_. But at night she had various fortunes in dreams good and evil.

And every morning at breakfast, in the low, broad-windowed bookroom, she sat opposite to the Captain’s place, just as usual, except that the place was empty. She chose that seat because from it she could watch for old Christy Denny coming by from Salinbeg post-office with the mail-bag. That window looked out on a small lawn, bounded by a shrubbery through which a path ran leading round a corner of the house to the front door. The laurel bushes straggled into frequent gaps, so that between them the approach of a passer-by could be fitfully descried. And any morning might bring the letter for her, the foreign letter. To think of how it was perhaps in those very moments journeying towards her in the battered old brown bag made her so hungry and thirsty that she sometimes forgot to pour out her tea, or cut the over-large loaf. Nor was she always disappointed. Every now and then a letter did come, and in its re-reading she would find a refuge through the terrors of the day, as in a flattering dream by night. All the while, indeed, she knew that she was in a fool’s paradise: that, being so many weeks old, it could give her no assurance of its writer’s safety. The hands that had folded its sheets might ere now have grown cold beside some far-off stream, where geysers of deadly hail broke out rattling on the hills, and the wide air was as full of murderous stings as a swamp of sweltering venom. She might more rationally rely upon the newspapers with their flashed tidings. But these she never dared open herself, and she could not forbear to hang her hopes upon that delusive correspondence.

One midwinter morning she came down to breakfast with her heart set more than ever eagerly upon the arrival of old Christy. Partly because she had not had a letter for longer than usual, and partly because it was Saturday, and on Sunday no mail comes in Salinbeg. This last was of course no reason at all for expecting a letter; but it did seem to her almost improbable that Fate could intend such harshness as to make her wait two whole days and nights before she could begin hoping again. So she looked out of the window with shining eyes, and set about crumbling the bread on her plate before she had tasted a bit, and thought Christy was late before he had well started on his two-mile trudge. It was hard weather, and on the corner of lawn she looked into lay a sprinkling of frozen snow; only a sprinkling; she had seen it whiter last June with daisies spread to the sun. But the frost was keen, as she would have felt by the air blowing through the open window if she had been at leisure to consider anything except the possibility of their bringing the sound of footsteps on the hardened path.

Old Christy was late really, and she listened in vain. When at length he did come, she saw him first, a shadow moving along within the still shadow of the laurels. Just opposite to the window a gap in them made a ragged arch, and Lady Winifred knew that if Christy had anything special for her he would come through the opening and straight across the grass to her, instead of following the path round the house to the hall door. For a minute, a half-happy minute of doubt, she watched him nearing the fateful place, fearful, hopeful, blindly impatient, and then--stunned. Old Christy had gone past the gap, hurrying a little it seemed, as if he wished to get out of sight. This in fact he did. “Sure now, the mistress’s face is all eyes these times,” he said to Mrs Keogh in the kitchen, “and lookin’ at me they do be like as if she thought bad of me not bringin’ her aught. But bedad if she could see to the bottom of me heart, she’d know it’s sorry I am I haven’t got somethin’ for her at the bottom of th’ ould bag. Troth would she so;” and Mrs Keogh replied: “Ah, sure it’s frettin’ she is; goodness may pity the crathur, she’s frettin’. And doesn’t ait what would fatten a sparrow. It’s my belief she’ll do no good.”

The mistress did not appear to be fretting as she sat without motion, and still gazed out over the lawn. Though its aspect was quite unchanged, it had become a grave wherein her hope, newly slain, must lie buried until the sun had set and risen, and again set and risen. Even by the uncertain measure of years, the mistress was very young yet, and otherwise younger still, so that the edges of the experiences which make up life had not been worn smooth for her, to expedite their slipping past. A whole day looked nearly as interminable to her as to a small child, who gets out of bed with no clear prospect of ever getting into it again. And now her own bedtime lay beyond more than twelve leaden-footed hours, so early was this desolate, sunny morning. It seemed late, however, to some of her neighbours, who were keeping round eyes on her movements, and considered her as tardy as she had been thinking Christy. Perhaps a chirp or a rustle may have reached and prompted her unawares, or perhaps she merely acted from habit, but by-and-by she got up and scattered her plateful of crumbs upon the rimy window ledge, where they lay like a little drift of discoloured snow. As she strewed them she said to herself bitterly towards Fate, and ruthfully towards fellow-victims: “Why should the birds go hungry because I have no letter?” and she was careful to shut down the window sash, lest the sleek black cat should, according to custom, lurk ambushed within to pounce upon a preoccupied prey. Then she stood aside, half hidden by the faded crimson curtain, and looked out at nothing with a cold ache in her heart.

The small birds arrived in headlong haste. Some of them were almost pecking before the window closed. For the frost’s tyranny had made of not a few among them desperate characters, fluttering with reckless enterprise. Even a scutty wren ventured out of cover, and advanced along the ledge in a dotted line of tiny hops, scarcely less smooth than a mouse’s run. A robin redbreast alighting brought a gleam of colour something brighter than a withered beech leaf and duller than a poppy petal. Two tomtits in comic motley suits disputed with tragic audacity the claims of all their _biggers_--thrushes, blackbirds, finches and sparrows. The whole party twittered and fluttered and wrangled together, blithe and pugnacious, but the spreader of the feast gave no heed to any of its incidents. She smiled neither at the abrupt gobblings of the large golden bill, nor at the absurd defiances of the blue-and-yellow dwarfs. Her act of charity seemed to have gained her nothing. Then all at once, at some caprice of panic, the assembled birds whisked themselves down from the window-stool into the gravel walk below. Each one of them bore off in his beak a breadcrumb which looked like a little white envelope, and gave him the appearance of a letter-carrier. The sudden movement caught Lady Winifred’s attention, and she was struck by the fantastic resemblance. But at the same moment she remembered keenly how she had been reft of her hope for that day and the next; and immediately, as if the frost at her heart were broken up, she saw the mock letters through a rain of tears. She had not foregone her recompense after all.