Miss Mullen had one or two sources of income which few people knew of, and about which, with all her loud candour, she did not enlighten even her most intimate friends. Even Mr. Lambert might have been surprised to know that two or three householders in Ferry Row paid rent to her, and that others of them had money dealings with her of a complicated kind, not easy to describe, but simple enough to the strong financial intellect of his predecessor's daughter. No account books were taken with her on these occasions. She and her clients were equally equipped with the absolutely accurate business memory of the Irish peasant, a memory that in few cases survives education, but, where it exists, may be relied upon more than all the generations of ledgers and account books.

Charlotte's visits to Ferry Row were usually made on foot, and were of long duration, but her business on this afternoon was of a trivial character, consisting merely in leaving a parcel at the house of Dinny Crimeen, the tailor, and of convincing her washerwoman of iniquity in a manner that brought every other washerwoman to her door, and made each offer up thanks to her most favoured saint that she was not employed by Miss Mullen.

The long phaeton was at last turned, with draggings at the horse's mouth and grindings of the fore-carriage; the children took their last stare, and one or two ladies whose payments were in arrear emerged from their back gardens and returned to their washing-tubs. If they flattered themselves that they had been forgotten, they were mistaken; Charlotte had given a glance of grim amus.e.m.e.nt at the deserted washing-tubs, and as her old phaeton rumbled slowly out of Ferry Row, she was computing the number of customers, and the consequent approximate income of each defaulter.

To the deep and plainly expressed chagrin of the black horse, he was not allowed to turn in at the gate of Tally Ho, but was urged along the road which led to Rosemount. There again he made a protest, but, yielding to the weighty arguments of Charlotte's whip, he fell into his usual melancholy jog, and took the turn to Gurthnamuckla with dull resignation. Once steered into that lonely road, Charlotte let him go at his own pace, and sat pa.s.sive, her mouth tightly closed, and her eyes blinking quickly as she looked straight ahead of her with a slight furrow of concentration on her low forehead. She had the unusual gift of thinking out in advance her line of conversation in an interview, and, which is even less usual, she had the power of keeping to it. By sheer strength of will she could force her plan of action upon other people, as a conjuror forces a card, till they came to believe it was of their own choosing; she had done it so often that she was now confident of her skill, and she quite understood the inevitable advantage that a fixed scheme of any sort has over indefinite opposition. When the clump of trees round Gurthnamuckla rose into view, Charlotte had determined her order of battle, and was free to give her attention to outward circ.u.mstances. It was a long time since she had been out to Miss Duffy's farm, and as the stony country began to open its arms to the rich, sweet pastures, an often repressed desire a.s.serted itself, and Charlotte heaved a sigh that was as romantic in its way as if she had been sweet and twenty, instead of tough and forty.

Julia Duffy did not come out to meet her visitor, and when Charlotte walked into the kitchen, she found that the mistress of the house was absent, and that three old women were squatted on the floor in front of the fire, smoking short clay pipes, and holding converse in Irish that was punctuated with loud sniffs and coughs. At sight of the visitor the pipes vanished in the twinkling of an eye, and one of the women scrambled to her feet.

"Why, Mary Holloran, what brings you here?" said Charlotte, recognising the woman who lived in the Rosemount gate lodge.

"It was a sore leg I have, yer honour, miss," whined Mary Holloran; "it's running with me now these three weeks, and I come to thry would Miss Duffy give me a bit o' a plashther."

"Take care it wouldn't run away with you altogether," replied Charlotte facetiously; "and where's Miss Duffy herself?"

"She's sick, the craythure," said one of the other women, who, having found and dusted a chair, now offered it to Miss Mullen; "she have a wakeness like in her head, and an impression on her heart, and Billy Grainy came afther Peggy Roche here, the way she'd mind her."

Peggy Roche groaned slightly, and stirred a pot of s.m.u.tty gruel with an air of authority.

"Could I see her d'ye think?" asked Charlotte, sitting down and looking about her with sharp appreciation of the substantial excellence of the smoke-blackened walls and grimy woodwork. "There wouldn't be a better kitchen in the country," she thought, "if it was properly done up."

"Ye can, asth.o.r.e, ye can go up," replied Peggy Roche, "but wait a while till I have the sup o' grool hated, and maybe yerself 'll take it up to herself."

"Is she eating nothing but that?" asked Charlotte, viewing the pasty compound with disgust.

"Faith, 'tis hardly she'll ate that itself." Peggy Roche rose as she spoke, and, going to the dresser, returned with a black bottle. "As for a bit o' bread, or a pratie, or the like o' that, she couldn't use it, nor let it past her shest; with respects to ye, as soon as she'd have it shwallied it'd come up as simple and pleashant as it wint down." She lifted the little three-legged pot off its heap of hot embers, and then took the cork out of the black bottle with nimble, dirty fingers.

"What in the name of goodness is that ye have there?" demanded Charlotte hastily.

Mrs. Roche looked somewhat confused and murmured something about "a weeshy suppeen o' shperits to wet the grool."

Charlotte s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle from her, and smelled it.

"Faugh!" she said, with a guttural at the end of the word that no Saxon gullet could hope to produce; "it's potheen! that's what it is, and mighty bad potheen too. D'ye want to poison the woman?"

A loud chorus of repudiation arose from the sick-nurse and her friends.

"As for you, Peggy Roche, you're not fit to tend a pig, let alone a Christian. You'd murder this poor woman with your filthy fresh potheen, and when your own son was dying, you begrudged him the drop of spirits that'd have kept the life in him."

Peggy flung up her hands with a protesting howl.

"May G.o.d forgive ye that word, Miss Charlotte! If 'twas the blood of me arrm, I didn't begridge it to him; the Lord have mercy on him-"

"Amen! amen! You would not, asth.o.r.e," groaned the other women.

"-but does'nt the world know it's mortial sin for a poor craythure to go into th' other world with the smell of dhrink on his breath!"

"It's mortal sin to be a fool," replied Miss Mullen whose medical skill had often been baffled by such winds of doctrine; "here, give me the gruel. I'll go give it to the woman before you have her murdered." She deftly emptied the pot of gruel into a bowl, and, taking the spoon out of the old woman's hand, she started on her errand of mercy.

The stairs were just outside the door, and making their dark and perilous ascent in safety, she stood still in a low pa.s.sage into which two or three other doors opened. She knocked at the first of these, and, receiving no answer, turned the handle quietly and looked in. There was no furniture in it except a broken wooden bedstead; innumerable flies buzzed on the closed window, and in the slant of sunlight that fell through the dim panes was a box from which a turkey reared its red throat, and regarded her with a suspicion born, like her chickens, of long hatching. Charlotte closed the door and noiselessly opened the next. There was nothing in the room, which was of the ordinary low-ceiled cottage type, and after a calculating look at the broken flooring and the tattered wall-paper, she went quietly out into the pa.s.sage again. "Good servants' room," she said to herself, "but if she's here much longer it'll be past praying for."

If she had been in any doubt as to Miss Duffy's whereabouts, a voice from the room at the end of the little pa.s.sage now settled the matter. "Is that Peggy?" it called.

Charlotte pushed boldly into the room with the bowl of gruel.

"No, Miss Duffy, me poor old friend, it's me, Charlotte Mullen," she said in her most cordial voice; "they told me below you were ill, but I thought you'd see me, and I brought your gruel up in my hand. I hope you'll like it none the less for that!"

The invalid turned her night-capped head round from the wall and looked at her visitor with astonished, bloodshot eyes. Her hatchety face was very yellow, her long nose was rather red, and her black hair thrust itself out round the soiled frill of her night-cap in dingy wisps.

"You're welcome, Miss Mullen," she said with a pitiable attempt at dignity; "won't you take a cheer?"

"Not till I've seen you take this," replied Charlotte, handing her the bowl of gruel with even broader bonhommie than before.

Julia Duffy reluctantly sat up among her blankets, conscious almost to agony of the squalor of all her surroundings, conscious even that the blankets were of the homespun, madder-dyed flannel such as the poor people use, and taking the gruel, she began to eat it in silence. She tried to prop herself in this emergency with the recollection that Charlotte Mullen's grandfather drank her grandfather's port wine under this very roof, and that it was by no fault of hers that she had sunk while Charlotte had risen, but the worn-out boots that lay on the floor where she had thrown them off, and the rags stuffed into the broken panes in the window, were facts that crowded out all consolation from bygone glories.

"Well, Miss Duffy," said Charlotte, drawing up a chair to the bedside, and looking at her hostess with a critical eye, "I'm sorry to see you so sick; when Billy Grainey left the milk last night he told Norry you were laid up in bed, and I thought I'd come over and see if there was anything I could do for you."

"Thank ye, Miss Mullen," replied Julia stiffly, sipping the nauseous gruel with ladylike decorum, "I have all I require here."

"Well, ye know, Miss Duffy, I wanted to see how you are," said Charlotte, slightly varying her attack; "I'm a bit of a doctor, like yourself. Peggy Roche below told me you had what she called 'an impression on the heart,' but it looks to me more like a touch of liver."

The invalid does not exist who can resist a discussion of symptoms, and Miss Duffy's hauteur slowly thawed before Charlotte's intelligent and intimate questions. In a very short time Miss Mullen had felt her pulse, inspected her tongue, promised to send her a bottle of unfailing efficacy, and delivered an exordium on the nature and treatment of her complaint.

"But in deed and in truth," she wound up, "if you want my opinion, I'll tell you frankly that what ails you is you're just rotting away with the damp and loneliness of this place. I declare that sometimes when I'm lying awake in my bed at nights, I've thought of you out here by yourself, without an earthly creature near you if you got sick, and wondered at you. Why, my heavenly powers! ye might die a hundred deaths before anyone would know it!"

Miss Duffy picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped the gruel from her thin lips.

"If it comes to that, Miss Mullen," she said with some resumption of her earlier manner, "if I'm for dying I'd as soon die by myself as in company; and as for damp, I thank G.o.d this house was built by them that didn't spare money on it, and it's as dry this minyute as what it was forty years ago."

"What! Do you tell me the roof's sound?" exclaimed Charlotte with genuine interest.

"I have never examined it, Miss Mullen," replied Julia coldly, "but it keeps the rain out, and I consider that suffeecient."

"Oh, I'm sure there's not a word to be said against the house," Charlotte made hasty reparation; "but, indeed, Miss Duffy, I say-and I've heard more than myself say the same thing-that a delicate woman like you has no business to live alone so far from help. The poor Archdeacon frets about it, I can tell ye. I believe he thinks Father Heffernan'll be raking ye into his fold! And I can tell ye," concluded Charlotte, with what she felt to be a certain rough pathos, "there's plenty in Lismoyle would be sorry to see your father's daughter die with the wafer in her mouth!"

"I had no idea the people in Lismoyle were so anxious about me and my affairs," said Miss Duffy. "They're very kind, but I'm able to look afther my soul without their help."

"Well, of course, everyone's soul is their own affair; but, ye know, when no one ever sees ye in your own parish church-well, right or wrong, there are plenty of fools to gab about it."

The dark bags of skin under Julia Duffy's eyes became slowly red, a signal that this thrust had home. She did not answer, and her visitor rose, and moving towards the hermetically sealed window, looked out across the lawn over Julia's domain. Her roundest and weightiest stone was still in her sling, while her eye ran over the grazing cattle in the fields.

"Is it true what I hear, that Peter Joyce has your grazing this year?" she said casually.

"It is quite true," answered Miss Duffy, a little defiantly. A liver attack does not pre-dispose its victims to answer in a Christian spirit questions that are felt to be impertinent.

"Well," returned Charlotte, still looking out of the window, with her hands deep in the pockets of her black alpaca coat, "I'm sorry for it."

"Why so?"

Julia's voice had a sharpness that was pleasant to Miss Mullen's car.

"I can't well explain the matter to ye now," Charlotte said, turning round and looking portentously upon the sick woman, "but I have it from a sure hand that Peter Joyce is bankrupt, and will be in the courts before the year is out."

When, a short time afterwards, Julia Duffy lay back among her madder blankets and heard the last sound of Miss Mullen's phaeton wheels die away along the lake road, she felt that the visit had at least provided her with subject for meditation.

CHAPTER XI.

Mr. Roderick Lambert's study window gave upon the flower garden, and consequently the high road also came within the sphere of his observations. He had been sitting at his writing-table, since luncheon-time, dealing with a variety of business, and seldom lifting his glossy black head except when some sound in the road attracted his attention. It was not his custom to work after a solid luncheon on a close afternoon, nor was it by any means becoming to his complexion when he did so; but the second post had brought letters of an unpleasant character that required immediate attention, and the flush on his face was not wholly due to hot beef-steak pie and sherry. It was not only that several of Sir Benjamin's tenants had attended a Land League meeting the Sunday before, and that their religious director had written to inform him that they had there pledged themselves to the Plan of Campaign. That was annoying, but as the May rents were in he had no objection to their amusing themselves as they pleased during the summer; in fact, from a point of view on which Mr. Lambert dwelt as little as possible even in his own mind, a certain amount of nominal disturbance among the tenants might not come amiss. The thing that was really vexing was the cra.s.s obstinacy of his wife's trustees, who had acquainted him with the fact that they were unable to comply with her wish that some of her capital should be sold out.

It is probably hardly necessary to say that the worthy turkey hen had expressed no such desire. A feeble, "to be sure, Roderick dear; I daresay it'd be the best thing to do; but you know I don't understand such things," had been her share of the transaction, and Mr. Lambert knew that the refusal of her trustees to make the desired concession would not ruffle so much as a feather, but he wished he could be as sure of the equanimity of his coachbuilder, one of whose numerous demands for payment was lying upon the table in front of him; while others, dating back five years to the period of his marriage, lurked in the pigeon-holes of his writing-table.

Mr. Lambert, like other young gentlemen of fashion, but not of fortune, had thought that when he married a well-to-do widow, he ought to prove his power of adjusting himself to circ.u.mstances by expending her ready money in as distinguished a manner as possible. The end of the ready money had come in an absurdly short time, and, paradoxical as it may seem, it had during its brief life raised a flourishing following of bills which had in the past spring given Mr. Lambert far more trouble than he felt them to be worth, and though he had stopped the mouths of some of the more rapacious of his creditors, he had done so with extreme difficulty and at a cost that made him tremble. It was especially provoking that the coachbuilder should have threatened legal proceedings about that bill just now, when, in addition to other complications, he happened to have lost more money at the Galway races than he cared to think about, certainly more than he wished his wife and her relations to know of.

Early in the afternoon he had, with an unregarding eye, seen Charlotte drive by on her way to Gurthnamuckla; but after a couple of hours of gloomy calculation and letter-writing, the realisation that Miss Mullen was not at her house awoke in him, coupled with the idea that a little fresh air would do him good. He went out of the house, some unconfessed purpose quickening his step. He hesitated at the gate while it expanded into determination, and then he hailed his wife, whose poppy-decked garden-hat was painfully visible above the magenta blossoms of a rhododendron bush.

"Lucy! I wouldn't be surprised if I fetched Francie Fitzpatrick over for tea. She's by herself at Tally Ho! I saw Charlotte drive by without her a little while ago."

When he reached Tally Ho he found the gate open, an offence always visited with extremest penalties by Miss Mullen, and as he walked up the drive he noticed that, besides the broad wheel-tracks of the phaeton there were several thin and devious ones, at some places interrupted by footmarks and a general appearance of a scuffle; at another heading into a lilac bush with apparent precipitancy, and at the hall-door circling endlessly and crookedly with several excursions on to the newly-mown plot of gra.s.s.

"I wonder what perambulator has been running amuck in here. Charlotte will make it hot for them, whoever they were," thought Lambert, as he stood waiting for the door to be opened, and watched through the gla.s.s of the porch-door two sleek tortoise-sh.e.l.l cats lapping a saucer of yellow cream in a corner of the hall. "By Jove! how snug she is in this little place. She must have a pot of money put by; more than she'd ever own up to, I'll engage!"

At this juncture the door opened, and he was confronted by Norry the Boat, with sleeves rolled above her brown elbows and stockinged feet untrammelled by boots.

"There's noan of them within," she announced before he had time to speak. "Miss Charlotte's gone dhriving to Gurthnamuckla, and Miss Francie went out a while ago."

"Which way did she go, d'ye know?"

"Musha, faith! I do not know what way did she go," replied Norry, her usual asperity heightened by a recent chase of Susan, who had fled to the roof of the turf-house with a mackerel s.n.a.t.c.hed from the kitchen-table. "I have plinty to do besides running afther her. I heard her spakin' to one outside in the avenue, and with that she clapped the hall-doore afther her and she didn't come in since.

Lambert thought it wiser not to venture on the suggestion that Louisa might be better informed, and walked away down the avenue trying hard not to admit to himself his disappointment.

He turned towards home again in an objectless way, thoroughly thwarted, and dismally conscious that the afternoon contained for him only the prospect of having tea with his wife and finishing his letters afterwards. His step became slower and slower as he approached his own entrance gates, and he looked at his watch.

"Confound it! it's only half-past four. I can't go in yet;" then, a new idea striking him, "perhaps she went out to meet Charlotte. I declare I might as well go a bit down the road and see if they're coming back yet."

He walked for at least half a mile under the trees, whose young June leaves had already a dissipated powdering of white limestone dust, without meeting anything except a donkey with a pair of creaking paniers on its back, walking alone and discreetly at its own side of the road, as well aware as Mr. Lambert that its owner was dallying with a quart of porter at a roadside public house a mile away. The turn to Gurthnamuckla was not far off when the distant rumble of wheels became at last audible; Lambert had only time to remember angrily that, as the Tally Ho phaeton had but two seats, he had had his walk for nothing, when the bowed head and long melancholy face of the black horse came in sight, and he became aware that Charlotte was without a companion.

Her face had more colour in it than usual as she pulled up beside him, perhaps from the heat of the afternoon and the no small exertion of flogging her steed, and her manner when she spoke was neither bluff nor hearty, but approximated more nearly to that of ordinary womankind than was its wont. Mr. Lambert noticed none of these things; and, being a person whose breeding was not always equal to annoying emergencies, he did not trouble himself to take off his hat or smile appropriately as Charlotte said- "Well, Roddy, I'd as soon expect to see your two horses sitting in the dog-cart driving you as to see you as far from home as this on your own legs. Where are you off to?"

"I was taking a stroll out to meet you, and ask you to come back and have tea with Lucy," replied Mr. Lambert, recognising the decree of fate with a singularly bad grace. "I went down to Tally Ho to ask you, and Norry told me you had gone to Gurthnamuckla."

"Did you see Francie there?" said Charlotte quickly.

"No; I believe she was out somewhere."

"Well, you were a very good man to take so much trouble about us," she replied, looking at him with an expression that softened the lines of her face in a surprising way. "Are you too proud to have a lift home now?"

"Thank you, I'd sooner walk-and-" casting about for an excuse-"you mightn't like the smell of my cigar under your nose."

"Come, now, Roddy," exclaimed Charlotte, "you ought to know me better than that! Don't you remember how you used to sit smoking beside me in the office when I was helping you to do your work? In fact, I wouldn't say that there hadn't been an occasion when I was guilty of a cigarette in your company myself!"

She turned her eyes towards him, and the provocative look in them came as instinctively and as straight as ever it did from Francie's, or as ever it has been projected from the curbed heart of woman. But, unfair as it may be, it is certain that if Lambert had seen it, he would not have been attracted by it. He, however, did not look up. "Well, if you don't mind going slow, I'll walk beside you," he said, ignoring the reminiscence. "I want to know whether you did better business with Julia Duffy than I did last week."

The soft look was gone in a moment from Charlotte's face.

"I couldn't get much satisfaction out of her," she replied; "but I think I left a thorn in her pillow when I told her Peter Joyce was bankrupt."

"I'll take my oath you did," said Lambert, with a short laugh. "I declare I'd be sorry for the poor old devil if she wasn't such a bad tenant, letting the whole place go to the mischief, house and all."

"I tell you the house isn't in such a bad way as you think; it's dirt ails it more than anything else." Charlotte had recovered her wonted energy of utterance. "Believe me, if I had a few workmen in that house for a month you wouldn't know it."

"Well, I believe you will, sooner or later. All the same, I can't see what the deuce you want with it. Now, if I had the place, I'd make a pot of money out of it, keeping young horses there, as I've often told you. I'd do a bit of coping, and making hunters to sell. There's no work on earth I'd like as well."

He took a long pull at his cigar, and expelled a sigh and a puff of smoke.

"Well, Roddy," said Charlotte, after a moment's pause, speaking with an unusual slowness and almost hesitancy, "you know I wouldn't like to come between you and your fancy. If you want the farm, in G.o.d's name take it yourself!"

"Take it myself! I haven't the money to pay the fine, much less to stock it. I tell you what, Charlotte," he went on, turning round and putting his hand on the splash-board of the phaeton as he walked, "you and I are old pals, and I don't mind telling you it's the most I can do to keep going the way I am now. I never was so driven for money in my life," he ended, some vague purpose, added to the habit of an earlier part of his life, pushing him on to be confidential.

"Who's driving you, Roddy?" said Charlotte, in a voice in which a less preoccupied person than her companion might have noticed a curiously gentle inflection.

It is perhaps noteworthy that while Mr. Lambert's lips replied with heartfelt irritation, "Oh, they're all at me, Langford the coachbuilder, and everyone of them," one section of his brain was asking the other how much ready money old Mrs. Mullen had had to leave, and was receiving a satisfactory answer.

There was a pause in the conversation. It was so long now since the black horse had felt the whip, that, acting on the presumption that his mistress had fallen asleep, he fell into an even more slumbrous crawl without any notice being taken.

"Roddy," said Charlotte at last, and Lambert now observed how low and rough her voice was, "do you remember in old times once or twice, when you were put to it for a five-pound note, you made no bones about asking a friend to help you? Well, you know I'm a poor woman"-even at this moment Charlotte's caution a.s.serted itself-"but I daresay I could put my hand on a couple of hundred, and if they'd be any use to you-"

Lambert became very red. The possibility of some such climax as this had floated in a sub-current of thought just below the level of formed ideas, but now that it had come, it startled him. It was an unheard-of thing that Charlotte should make such an offer as this. It gave him suddenly a tingling sense of power, and at the same time a strange instinct of disgust and shame.

"Oh, my dear Charlotte," he began awkwardly, "upon my soul you're a great deal too good. I never thought of such a thing-I-I-" he stammered, wishing he could refuse, but casting about for words in which to accept.

"Ah, nonsense. Now, Roddy, me dear boy," interrupted Charlotte, regaining her usual manner as she saw his embarra.s.sment, "say no more about it. We'll consider it a settled thing, and we'll go through the base business details after tea."

Lambert said to himself that there was really no way out of it. If she was so determined the only thing was to let her do as she liked; no one could say that the affair was of his seeking.

"And, you know," continued Charlotte in her most jocular voice, before he could frame a sentence of the right sort, "who knows, if I get the farm, that we mightn't make a joint-stock business out of it, and have young horses there, and all the rest of it!"

"You're awfully good, Charlotte," said Lambert, with an emotion in his voice that she did not guess to be purely the result of inward relief and exultation; "I'm awfully obliged to you-you always were a-a true friend-some day, perhaps, I'll be able to show you what I think about it," he stammered, unable to think of anything else to say, and, lifting his hand from the splash-board, he put it on hers, that lay in her lap with the reins in it, and pressed it for a moment. Into both their minds shot simultaneously the remembrance of a somewhat similar scene, when, long ago, Charlotte had come to the help of her father's pupil, and he had expressed his grat.i.tude in a more ardent manner -a manner that had seemed cheap enough to him at the time, but that had been more costly to Charlotte than any other thing that had ever befallen her.

"You haven't forgotten old times any more than I have," he went on, knowing very well that he was taking now much the same simple and tempting method of getting rid of his obligation that he had once found so efficacious, and to a certain extent enjoying the thought that he could still make a fool of her. "Ah, well!" he sighed, "there's no use trying to get those times back, any more than there is in trying to forget them." He hesitated. "But, after all, there's many a new tune played on an old fiddle! Isn't that so?" He was almost frightened at his own daring as he saw Charlotte's cheek burn with a furious red, and her lips quiver in the attempt to answer.

Upon their silence there broke from the distance a loud scream, then another, and then a burst of laughter in a duet of soprano and ba.s.s, coming apparently from a lane that led into the road a little further on- a smooth and secluded little lane, bordered thickly with hazel bushes-a private road, in fact, to a model farm that Mr. Lambert had established on his employer's property. From the mouth of this there broke suddenly a whirling vision of whiteness and wheels, and Miss Fitzpatrick, mounted on a tricycle and shrieking loudly, dashed across the high road and collapsed in a heap in the ditch. Lambert started forward, but long before he could reach her the Rev. Joseph Corkran emerged at full speed from the lane, hatless, with long flying coat-tails, and, with a skill born of experience, extricated Francie from her difficulties.