"If that's the case, I don't know why you should look like a dying ghost!"

Judith had never entirely comprehended her younger sister, and she found her, as she said with indignation to the concurring Bill, absolutely dark and inscrutable over the whole affair.

"I know it's. .h.i.t her hard, but nothing will make her admit it. I detest Spartan Boys!" said Judith.

The Spartan Boy in question, though aware of her sister's ardent desire to investigate her wounds, had no intention of removing the cloak that covered them. She wrapped it close about her, so close that Lady Isabel, while unable to stifle a motherly regret for the wedding that might have been, thanked heaven that Christian had not "really cared"; so close that even Judith said that, since Christian had not been hit too hard, though she regretted the _coup manque_ she personally found some consolation in the fact that she would not be called upon to make apologies for the political aberrations of her brother-in-law.

The polling day came, and pa.s.sed with but little excitement.

"You wouldn't har'ly know it," said a voter, who had returned to his normal avocations after a morning wasted, as he considered, in the task of recording his vote. "There was a few men drunk in the town.

Which won is it? Bedad, they dunno yet. Father Sweeny it was marched in the Pribawn boys. Faith, he had them well regulated. Very nate they marched, very nate entirely. They never were in such rotation!"

The voter bent melancholy and slightly bloodshot eyes upon Christian, and awaited her reply.

Christian, with her usual miscellaneous company of dogs, was on her way to visit a woman whose husband had died not long before. Her way took her along the banks of the Broadwater, and during one of the frequent pauses, necessitated by the investigations into the private affairs of water-rats and others, made by her companions, she and Peter Callaghan had exchanged greetings. He and Christian had fallen into talk, with the absence of formality that is, perhaps, peculiar to intercourse between his cla.s.s and hers. He leant upon his scythe, and discoursed seriously and courteously. He wore a soft, slouched black hat, that did not wholly conceal his thick and curly hair, in which there was scarcely a grey strand, though he was, as he told Christian, the one age with her father. His white flannel jacket was wrapped round him, its skirts pushed under the band of his brown frieze trousers. A red wisp of rag was knotted round his middle, and held all together. His pale grey and wistful eyes looked at Christian from above a tangled thicket of grizzled moustache and beard. He suggested almost equally, a conventional Saint Joseph and a stage-brigand--a brigand, as it might be, who had joined the Salvation Army. "As old as I am," he returned, dreamily, to the affair of the morning, "I stepped it away with them!"

He turned his eyes from Christian's face to the large and sliding brightness of the river.

There followed a moment of silence that was filled by the yelps of the little dogs who had marked a water-rat to ground, and the hobble-de-hoy shouts of the hound puppies, uttered with no definite idea of the cause of their enthusiasm, but none the less enthusiastic for that reason.

"Are you the youngest young lady, I beg your pardon?" Peter Callaghan asked presently. "It's long since I seen you. Your father knows me well. I remember of one time when the hounds was crossing my land, and I seen yourself and your sisther taking the hur'ls. I cries out to ye 'me heart'd rise at ye, my darlins!' and the Major, he laughs!"

"I remember jumping the hurdles," said Christian; "I'll tell my father I met you."

"He gave me permission to cut the 'looha' in these fields," resumed Peter Callaghan. "I'm thankful to him. I have a good sop of it cut."

He waved a hand; Christian saw, at a little distance, a heap of rushes, and, seated on it, a girl, of whose presence she had been unaware. She was very pale, and there was a fixity of sadness about her. Christian spoke to her, but she did not appear to notice.

"She's my daughter," said Peter Callaghan in his quiet voice. "She wouldn't know it was to her you spoke. She's dark, the creature.

Blinded she is. She's not long that way."

"How did it happen?" said Christian, in a low voice.

"You could not say," said Peter Callaghan; his dreamy eyes roved again over the broad river; "G.o.d left a hand on her," he said.

Christian went on her way, and the words stayed with her. "G.o.d left a hand on her." There had been no resentment in the father's voice, only a profound and n.o.ble gravity.

"And here am I," thought Christian, "angry and whimpering--"

Mrs. James Barry lived a mile or so farther down the river. Christian gathered up her pack of terriers, hound puppies, and red setters, with the farm collie to complete its absurdity, and walked fast. October was just ending; the willows along the river-bank were yellow, the reeds in the ditches that ran beneath each fence were greying and withering. The successive profiles of wood and hill, down the valley of the river went from orange and brown to a reddish purple, until, in the large serenity of the autumn evening, they softened to the universal blue of distance.

Mrs. Barry's farm-house stood a little back from the river. A stream that widened to a pond, and narrowed again to a stream, divided the house from the fields that ran between it and the river; the decent thatched roofs and whitewashed walls of the farm, and the elm trees that grew beside it, were mirrored in the pond. A flotilla of geese and ducks paraded, in stately fatuity, to and fro across the mirror. A battered little wooden bridge, painted green, enabled the people of the farm to reach the banks of the river. Christian crossed it, and went up to the open door of the house.

In the kitchen a red-haired woman was seated, rocking a wooden cradle with her foot while she st.i.tched at a child's frock. Hens, with their alert and affected reserve of manner, stepped in and out of the doorway, sometimes slowly, with poised claw, sometimes headlong, with greedy speed. Christian watched them and the hound puppies (in whose power of resistance to temptation she had no confidence), while she talked to the woman of the house, and heard the story of her trouble.

Her husband had been "above in the hospital at Riverstown. He was in it with a fortnight," said the red-haired woman in the idiom of her district, the noise of the rocker of the cradle on the earthen floor beating through her words; "he had a bunch, like, undher his chin, and they were to cut it." She paused, and the wooden b.u.mp of the cradle filled the pause.

"When they had it cut, he rose up on the table, and all his blood went from him; only one little tint, I suppose, stopped in him. Afther a while, the nurse seen the life creeping back in him. 'We have him yet!' says she to the Docthor. 'I thought he was gone from us!' says the Docthor." The voice ceased again. The speaker slashed the frock in her hand at an over-bold hen, who had skipped on to the table beside her and was pecking hard and sharp at some food on a plate.

"They sent him home then. We thought he was cured entirely. He pulled out the summer, but he had that langersome way with him through all."

She was silent a moment, then she looked at Christian, with grief, crowned and omnipotent, on her tragic brow.

"As long as he was alive, I had courage in spite of all, but when I thinks now of them days, and the courage I had, it goes through me!"

Her red-brown eyes stared through the open door at the path twisting across the field to the high road.

"Ye'll never see him on that road again, and when I looks up it me heart gets dark. Sure, now when he's gone, I thinks often, if he'd be lyin' par'lysed above in the bed, I'd be runnin' about happy!"

When Christian went home Mrs. Barry walked with her to the little green bridge, and stood there until her visitor reached the bend of the river where the path pa.s.sed from her sight.

At the turning Christian looked back and saw the lonely figure standing at the bridge-head, and again she said to herself: "Here am I, angry and whimpering!"

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

Doctor Mangan told himself that he had never laid out a ten-pound note to better advantage than the one he had pushed into the heel of Tishy's fist. It had, as he thought it would, clinched the matter. He had never been unaware of the menace of Cloherty, R.A.M.C., but he was confident in the three forces that he had at his command--authority, bribery, and propinquity.

"If I know my young lady," he said cheerfully to himself, "she'll think more of Larry at her elbow, than of that foxy devil back at Riverstown" (which was the present scene of Captain Cloherty's professional labours). "And what's more, if Tishy will only give her mind to it, it'll take a stiffer lad than Master Larry to be man enough for her! She downed him once, and she'll do it again, in spite of Christian Lowry!"

Even as the Big Doctor thought, there were many more that fought for him in this matter than against him. Potent had been his suggestion to his daughter that there wasn't a girl in Cluhir that wouldn't "be gibeing at her" if she lost so golden an opportunity, nor one that would believe she had not half hanged herself to secure it. (And though it has not been possible to include them in this chronicle, it may be accepted that there were many girls in Cluhir of the lively malevolence of whose gibes Tishy was entirely sensible.) Even more potent was the pull of Larry's position, the _prestige_ of his money, of his "place," of his good looks; most potent of all, the fact of his nearness, the mere primary fact that he was a young man, in whose company she was daily thrown, whose unattached status (the Doctor had kept his own counsel as to that interview with Christian, and his deductions therefrom) was a continual challenge to her charms, whose mere presence was an excitement an a stimulus.

As the polling day approached, and effort became more strenuous, Larry fell ever more gratefully into the habit of No. 6, The Mall. Of coming in, in the gloom of the wet afternoon, and finding Tishy mending her gloves, or st.i.tching something all lace and ribbons, something that would obviously blossom into a "Sunday blouse," but that, with flash of her grey eyes, she would tell him was "poor-clothes,' that the Nuns had asked her to make. Of sitting on the big sofa beside her, and teasing her about Captain Cloherty and the adventure in which Tinker took a leading part.

"If you go telling tales to the Doctor, you'll be sorry!"

"How can you make me sorry?"

"Wait awhile and you'll find out! There are plenty ways to teach little boys manners! Oh, look now what you've done! You've made me pull the thread out o' me needle. Thread it now, you!"

Then Larry, with his quick eye and steady hand, would annoy her by threading it as deftly as she herself could have done, would possibly contribute some enormous st.i.tches to the confection, and, by the time its construction was seriously resumed, the collaborators on the big sofa would have advanced a stage further on the road through the jungle, that had, with so much foresight and patience, been prepared for them.

Young Mr. Coppinger's hopes and fears as to his prospects of becoming a Member of Parliament varied no more than was suitable in the possessor of the artistic temperament, but Barty, his agent in chief, maintained an att.i.tude of unbroken pessimism. That whisper of the secret and late-declared antagonism of the Church had reached him, and in the secure seclusion of his own office he inveighed against clerical interference with all the fierceness of a dog chained in his kennel, who knows that his adversaries are as unable to touch him as he is to injure them. Only, in Barry's case, he was quite sure that his barkings were unheard, and he would have been exceedingly alarmed had he thought otherwise.

"I declare to G.o.d I don't care what way it goes!" Larry had said many times, but most often when fatigue and discouragement had together taken control.

Such times had come more often during the last week Before the election, and they reached their climax on the evening of the polling day. The two young men, mentally and physically demoralised by fatigue, had at length, at an hour considerably past midnight, escaped from their colleagues, and, having gained the sanctuary of Barty's office, were drearily reviewing the position by the light of a smoky lamp and over the ashes of a dead fire; counting possible votes, making unconvincing calculations based on supposition, wading hand-in-hand ever deeper into the Slough of Despond.

"I was talking to your father this evening," said Larry, lighting a cigarette and letting himself fall into an ancient rocking-chair. "He wouldn't give me an opinion one way or the other, but it's my belief he thinks it's a bad chance."

"I believe he's done his best for you," said Barty, dubiously; "but the way he's situated, he doesn't like to come out too strong one way or the other."

"Quite right too; I'm a rotten proposition," said Larry, "and this dam' cigarette won't draw!"

"I could stand getting licked," went on Barty, too preoccupied to consider the plaints of his princ.i.p.al, "if I thought the Clergy had played fair. Father Hogan and Father Sweeney stood to us well, and I know Father Greer was for you at the first go-off; but G.o.d knows what way he and the rest o' them went, after. I wouldn't trust them--"

His dark and mournful eyes rested dejectedly upon Larry. "And what's more, they don't trust you!"