Chapter V

But that evening she left the house once more. She had intended to wait until dusk, but its slow oncoming wore out her patience, and there were still rich gleams and glows receding among the furthest tree trunks when she stole forth into the open air. It breathed freshly fragrant on her, after her many weeks in the mouldering mustiness of the bookroom, and the blackbirds were singing with notes clear as the gathering dews and mellow as the westering light. The season was now the late autumn of spring, when most blossoms are falling, though the young leaves are yet in their first luminous green. On the lawn the laburnums and thorn bushes stood with their outlines enamelled on the grass in gold and pearl and pink coral. Along the shaded avenue and shrubbery paths lay softly drifts of dimmer blossoms and blossom dust, in faint ambers and russets and crimsons. But the white plumes of the Guelder roses were still glimmering ghostly above her head as she went by, and some of the firs were studded all over with little pale-yellow tapers like wild Christmas trees.

Lady Winifred was going towards the back gate, and presently came where the Winding Walk, under a dense canopy of evergreens, runs parallel with the avenue, on the right hand, and on the left within hearing of the fretted, rocky stream in the bit of a glen below. Once between the screening laurels and junipers, you could see, however, only up and down short curves of the waving path. About midway in it was a rustic wooden seat, niched in a recess of the shrubs, and Lady Winifred intended to sit down there and wait and watch. But when she reached it, she found it already occupied by someone who had also been watching, as was clearly seen in the look that leaped forward to meet the newcomer, and at sight recoiled again. In this tall woman, with a black shawl over frosted dark hair, Lady Winifred recognised the Widow Connor concerning whom, ages ago, before the days of the _Annual Registers_, she half remembered to have heard about the loss of a soldier son. The older widow was rising up with many apologies for the boldness of slipping in there, never thinking any of the family would be coming out; and she would have gone away, but the other hastened to sit down beside her, and kept a hand on her shawl. “I won’t stay myself unless you do,” said Lady Winifred. “I only came out because it was so warm,” she explained, as she had been explaining to herself, “and such a fine evening.”

“Tellin’ you the truth, me lady,” said the Widdy Connor, “me poor Terry himself would sometimes be smokin’ a pipe in here of an evenin’ when there was nobody about. I was tellin’ him he’d a right to not be makin’ so free--but sure, after all, he done no harm. There’s great shelter under the shrubberies when the weather does be soft--and be the same token, we do be gettin’ a little shower this minyit, me lady; that’s what’s rustlin’ in the laves. So ’twould be nathural enough if Terry was mindin’ the place. But trespassin’ or annoyin’ the family now, he’d never be intendin’. Just comin’ of an odd evenin’ he might be, the way he used. Anyhow Paudeen Nolan and Jim M‘Kenna was positive ’twas him they seen, and they all goin’ home from the hurley match. The other lads said diff’rint; but that Anthony Martin’s a big stookawn, and his brother’s as blind as the owls. Nor I wouldn’t go be what Rose Ahern says--”

“Rose has very good sight,” said Lady Winifred.

“Ah, then you’re after hearin’ the talk, me lady?” said the widow. “Faix now, they’d no call to be tellin’ you wrong, and bringin’ you out under the wet for nothin’, to get your death of cold. Because Terry it was, whatever they may say. But there’s wonderful foolishness in people. For some of them says they wouldn’t believe any such a thing; so what _woula_ they believe at all? And more of them says it’s a bad sign for anybody to be walkin’ that way. And what badness is there in it, if a lad would be takin’ a look at a place he had a likin’ for, and where he might get a chance of seein’ his frinds? And it’s the quare sort of unluckiness ’twould be for one of _them_ to git a sight of him, if ’twas only goin’ by, and ne’er a word out of him. That’s what I was sayin’ this mornin’ to ould Theresa Joyce. For says she to me: ‘It’s unlucky,’ says she. ‘And you’d do betther to be wishin’ he’d bide paiceable wherever he is, till yourself comes along to him,’ says she. But it’s aisy for Theresa Joyce to be talkin’, and she as ould as a crow. She can’t be livin’ any great while longer, so I was sayin’ to her; and it’s somethin’ else she’d be wishin’ if she’d no more age on her than meself. Sure I was reckonin’ up, me lady, accordin’ to things that happint, and at the most I can make it I’m short of fifty years. That’s lavin’ a terrible long time to be contintin’ oneself in.”

“And I’m twenty,” said Lady Winifred.

“Well, now the Lord may pity you, and may goodness forgive me,” the widow said compunctiously as if she had somehow been an accomplice of this cruel fate, and were all at once smitten with remorse. She seemed to ponder for a while deeply, and at last said: “If be any odd chance it isn’t Terry after all, and only the Captain--I won’t be grudgin’ it to her; no, the crathur, I will not.”

Thereupon silence continued long between the two watchers, and nothing befell them except that their blackness was gradually softened into the shadows as cobweb-coloured dusk enmeshed them.

Then there came a moment when the older woman saw the younger start, and, quivering like a bough after it has bent to a waft of wind, look fixedly in one direction. “In the name of God, do you see anythin’, me lady?” Widdy Connor whispered, and as she spoke she saw too. For a small rent in the straggling laurel on their right made a spy-hole, which brought within view a curve of the Winding Walk near its gate end, many yards away, and there, moving and glimpsing in the twilight, from which it seemed to have absorbed the last lingering brightness, went a gleam of scarlet. It was coming towards the seat, and the faces turned that way looked as if a white moonbeam had fallen across them. Almost immediately branches rustled close by, and out into the path a girl hooded with a fawn-coloured shawl stepped warily on the left hand, and stood poising herself for a swift dart past the recess, unintercepted if not unobserved. Lady Winifred could not have noticed the leap of an ambushed tiger; but her companion sprang up and caught the girl by the wrist. “Norah Grehan,” said the widow. “And who at all are you watching for this night? Me son Terry was spakin’ to ne’er a girl, I well know. He’d have told me, so he would. Who are you lookin’ to see?”

“Och, Mrs Connor, ma’am, lave go of me,” the girl said, twisting her arm and struggling. “And don’t let on to anybody that you seen me, or there’ll be murdher. It’s Jack M‘Donnell that’s waitin’ for me below there. He that listed about Christmas, and now they’re sendin’ him to the war. He and me are spakin’ this good while back, unbeknownst, be raison of me father makin’ up a match for me wid some other man; I dunno who he is, but I won’t have him, not if he owned all the bastes that ever ran on four legs. So I do be slippin’ across the steppin’-stones of an evenin’ for to get a word with Jack, that comes over the bog from the dear knows how far beyant Lisconnel. And if they knew up at the farm I’d be kilt.”

“And maybe the best thing could happen you,” said the widow.

“Ah, don’t say so, woman dear. He’ll be comin’ back one of these days for sure, a corporal maybe, or a sargint, with lave to marry. And he’s plannin’ to conthrive for me to be livin’ wid his mother’s sisther in Sligo till then, the way they won’t get me married on him while he’s gone--no fear. He’ll be tellin’ me about it to-night--and bedad there he is whistlin’ to me. Ah, let me go, Mrs Connor; but whisht, like a good woman,” said the girl, wrenching herself free, and speeding away between the half visible dark foliage.

Then Lady Winifred, who had heard the last part of this colloquy, got up also and said: “I think I’ll go home now. It’s a very pleasant evening, but the air feels rather cold.”

“’Deed now you’d a right to not be out under the rain, wid nothin’ on the head of you, me lady, but the little muslin cap,” said the widow, and added as Lady Winifred went: “And, troth, it’s the cruel pity to see the likes of her wearin’ any such a thing, ay indeed is it. Nora Grehan and Jack M‘Donnell, sure now the two of them’s at the beginnin’, and she’s at the endin’. But there’s an endin’ in every beginnin’, and maybe, plase God, there’s a beginnin’ in every endin’.”

Lady Winifred, meanwhile, was not pitying herself. As she walked slowly back to her empty Big House, along paths odorous with the rain whose drops began to pierce their leafiest roofs, she felt again a stunned disappointment, only vaguer and more chilling than the overdue letter had caused her. And there were no little birds about now to mock her into keener consciousness. After all, things were just as they had been when she set out, no worse surely, and how could they be better, except in a dream? But a dream she might have before to-morrow came, and brought back her long day in the brown bookroom with the companionship of the _Annual Registers_. There were still so many unread of the dusty volumes, clasped with blackish cob-webs, made ghastly now and then by the shrivelled skeleton of the dead spinster. She need not yet consider what she should do when they were all finished.

As the Widdy Connor went towards her little silent house, she was saying to herself: “Jack M‘Donnell bedad! Sure the height of him isn’t widin the breadth of me hand of Terry; everybody knows that. It’s my belief ’twasn’t Jack they seen that time at all. They couldn’t ha’ mistook him for Terry, the tallest lad in this counthryside.... And says I to Theresa Joyce: ‘The heart of me did be leppin’ up wid pride every time I’d see him have to stoop his head, comin’ in to me at our little low door. But it’s lower his head’s lyin’ now,’ says I, ‘low enough it’s lyin’,’ And says she to me: ‘If ’twas ever so low, the heart of you’ll be leppin’ up twice as high wid joy and plisure,’ says she, ‘the next time you behould him.’ But, ah sure, it’s aisy talkin’. I’ll see him come stoopin’ in at it no more.”

[_A dramatised version of this story will be found in the author’s volume_: “Ghost Bereft, with Other Stories and Studies in Verse,” published by Messrs Smith & Elder.]

A MONEY-CROP AT LISCONNEL