Larry needed no more leading; he was on the hill above Mount Music, Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe, and the "pat" that was to meet him was the narrow track that led by the Druid Stone and the Well of the Fairies.

The December afternoon was darkening to its close; the sun had made its farewell appearance, coming forth for a moment, a half-circle of clear flame, above the long grey cloud that barred the head of the valley. Larry rode past the great grey stone, and hardly turned his eyes toward it. The hounds, trooping meekly round his horse, went aside to the well, and drank long and thirstily. He did not wait for them. He put from his mind the memory of the last time he had seen from that hill-side the sun go down. Rather he set his thoughts, resolutely, on that other last time, in the library of Mount Music.

And he called up Tishy's brilliant face, framed in the furs that he had given her, that it might help him to drive away other memories. He was very fond of Tishy, he told himself; anyway, he was booked to marry her next week.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

The small town of Cluhir, ever avid, as are all small towns, of sensation, was, did it only know it, about to enjoy a week that would long be remembered in its history. Miss Mangan's marriage, which alone would have made an epoch, was fixed for Thursday, December 12th; but this, it need scarcely be said, was a matter that, though soul-stirring, was devoid of the element of surprise. Not so, however, was the sudden evacuation of Mount Music. Father Hogan's indefinite information was as much as was generally known, but much that was not generally known was confided to the discreet ears of Father Greer, and he, almost alone of the inhabitants of Cluhir, was not surprised when the news went abroad that the Mount Music carriage had conveyed Major d.i.c.k and Lady Isabel to the station, and that so vast a ma.s.s of luggage had accompanied them as to betoken a prolonged absence.

That the news should, in the first instance, have been communicated to Father Greer by Dr. Mangan, was not remarkable, since Dr. Mangan's professional advice had usefully reinforced his unofficial advocacy of the move, and Father Greer was rarely ignorant for long of matters that were found interesting by the Big Doctor.

Not merely for the sake of Major Talbot-Lowry's health had this upheaval taken place; an even more imperious factor had been the state of the family finances. The cloud of debt that had so long brooded over Mount Music was lower and darker than ever it had been before.

d.i.c.k had at length been coerced into opening negotiations for the sale of his property to his tenants, but although, in the fullness of time, these might be expected to bear fruit, they were of no more immediate a.s.sistance to this over-weighted survivor of a prehistoric species, than is the suggestion to a horse to live in order that he may get oats.

There was pressure in the air over Mount Music. Tradesmen, whose suffering had been as long as their bills, began to turn, in what had seemed like the sleep of exhaustion, and to talk about solicitors'

letters. Even Dr. Mangan had surprised and pained his friend, the Major, by forgetting his wonted delicate reticence, and hinting, with what struck d.i.c.k as singularly doubtful taste, at a repayment of those loans that he had volunteered, offering as an excuse for doing so the expenses consequent on his daughter's marriage. In addition to these irritations, Major Talbot-Lowry had received what he justly considered to be very annoying letters from a firm of Dublin solicitors, in connection with various charges and mortgages on the Mount Music property, which so they, informed him, had been "acquired" by them for "a client," and were now to be called in. Alternatively, it was suggested, an arrangement might be proposed, whereby the house and demesne of Mount Music might be accepted in settlement of the sums in question. The firm had been in communication with another creditor, Dr. Mangan of Cluhir, and it was hoped that all Major Talbot-Lowry's liabilities might be arranged for by the method they suggested.

d.i.c.k Talbot-Lowry received this announcement with the mixture of indignation and contempt that might have been antic.i.p.ated from an old-established Pterodactyl, who has been warned that his hereditary wallow in the Primeval Ooze is about to be wrested from him. Having expressed these sentiments in suitable language, he said, lightly, that Fairfax must raise as much on the property as would keep these Dublin sharks quiet, and in the meantime he would shut up the house at once and go to London. Temporary retrenchment was all that was required. He would let the place. Some rich Englishman would jump at the chance--

Major d.i.c.k had that optimism about his own affairs that is often combined with a tranquil pessimism about the affairs of others. He said that all he wanted was to get clear of the blood-sucking swarm of hangers-on that infested the place. He wondered at his own folly in having endured them for so long. And it would do Christian good to get away. She had been looking rather pulled down--she missed the hunting, of course. London would do her good--would be a change.

This, approximately, was what d.i.c.k said. What Lady Isabel said, being an attenuated echo of d.i.c.k's observations, is negligible. What Christian said was known only to Rinka, the eldest of the fox terriers, who had a habit of sitting in the chair at which Christian, knelt to say her prayers, and would then, with her bland and balmy smile, extort confidences denied to any other living creature.

On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst of all, the dismissals. The house (pending the materialisation of the Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old friendships. Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left, alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with the obliteration of her past life to be her task.

An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room books, stray numbers of magazines, all the acc.u.mulated rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of her sight for a single instant.

The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one's own little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one insignificant segment of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes, to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost. And on Monday afternoon with the early darkness the storm began. There came first a little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out the land. There followed complete stillness; then a few scattered drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling roar, the wind came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of its surprise attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long pa.s.sages s.n.a.t.c.hing at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to Christian in broken sc.r.a.ps, through the rattle of windows and the shaking clatter of doors within the house, and the shrieking rage of the wind outside. She sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her room. She had none of the fears that might, for another, have filled the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing pa.s.sages and knocks on the shaking doors. She had always lived on the borderland, and was naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so often given her help, were, when she most needed help, silent.

"I have nothing left now," she said to herself, "but memories, hungering memories--"

She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world has power to break a heart?

Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then, with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was hurled upon the world. All that night, and all the following day, the rain was like a wall about the house. It was flung in ma.s.ses against the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck. To look forth was as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters, eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried roof was mastered, and in all its angles and valleys yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the top story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the _tempi_, from a ponderous _adagio_ to a racing _prestissimo_. Buckets and jugs and baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the old Evans pair waddling to and fro, elated, almost gratified, by the magnitude of their task. And in the middle of the uproar, late in the afternoon, a new sound joined in the chorus of the storm, the coa.r.s.e and ugly summons of a motor-horn. Old Evans spied at the car through the hall window, and contrived to signal a command to go round to the back of the house.

"If I let dhraw the bolts," he said to Barty Mangan at the kitchen entrance, "the door would fall flat on me!"

"I wouldn't be surprised at all," Barty replied. "Hardly I could force the car into the storm."

Christian was sitting on the floor by the fireplace in the hall, in the last of the daylight, examining and burning the contents of a drawer full of miscellaneous papers, as the visitor made his unexpected entrance from the back, and Barty, recognising his own improbability and unsuitability on such a day and at such a time, fell to confused apologies that were as incoherent, and seemed as unlikely ever to end, as the buzzing of an imprisoned bee on the window-pane.

The fact at length, however, emerged, that there was a map of the Mount Music estate hanging in the library, and that the Major having promised to lend it to Dr. Mangan, had forgotten to do so.

"Some question of boundaries--a little grazing form m' fawther has--" Barty said, nervously.

The map was found, was rolled, and wrapped up, and yet Barty sat on.

He talked incessantly, feverishly. He talked so fast, in his low voice, that, in the clamour of the storm, Christian could only distinguish an occasional word. She had a nightmare feeling as if a train were roaring through an endless tunnel, and that she and Barty were the sole pa.s.sengers, and would never see daylight or know quiet again. His long, lean body was hooped into a very low and deep armchair, his thin hands clasped his knees; his immense dark eyes, fixed on Christian's face, gave her the impression that what he was saying was without relation to what he was thinking. In the direful gloom of the hall, with the rain and wind threshing on the half-shuttered windows, and the inconstant light of the burning logs the sole illuminant, his pale face, with the wing of black hair on his forehead, looked like the face of a strayed occupant of another sphere who had resumed such an aspect as he had worn in his coffin.

"Ireland's a queer old place just now, Miss Christian," Barty hurried on. "Everything's changing hands, and everyone's changing sides. You don't know what'll happen next!"

"I wish I were not changing sides too," said Christian, catching at a sentence, in a momentary lull of the roaring in the chimney. "Sides of the Channel, I mean--I prefer this side!"

"Do you? Do you?" said Barty, intensely. "I'm glad you do! I feel often as if no one cared for this miserable country except for what they could get out of it! At the election it would have sickened you, the bargaining, and the humbugging, and the lies. Larry was the only man that ran straight, and they jockeyed him--"

"I'm sure _you_ ran straight," said Christian, with sympathy in her voice. Piercing her weariness and preoccupation was the feeling that he had something to say that lay under this babble of conversation. He was wrapping himself in a cloak of verbiage, but above the cloak his tormented eyes met hers, and the pain in them hurt her.

"Me? Oh, I only ran after Larry. I thought it was a shabby thing of the Unionists not to have supported him--" he stopped abruptly, remembering Major Talbot-Lowry's abstention, remembering also the feud, of which he knew only that he had never wholly divined its origin, between Coppinger's Court and Mount Music. He cursed himself for a fool. He had not meant to talk politics, but what he had come through the storm to say was so difficult. He looked at Christian with agony. Had she minded what he said about the Unionists? He began to talk again, very fast and incoherently.

"Miss Christian, I said awhile ago everything was changing in Ireland.

There's big changes coming, even hereabouts, things I couldn't believe would ever happen. I've recently learned a--a fact--a statement that I'm not at liberty to repeat. I was--I may say that I was shocked--but Miss Christian--" the agony in his eyes was in his voice. "Oh! Miss Christian, for G.o.d's sake, believe that I knew nothing of it till this day!"

He stood up, steadying himself with a hand on one of the high marble pillars of the mantelpiece.

"Knew nothing of what?" said Christian, thinking she had mistaken what he had said.

"I can't tell you--you'll know soon enough--only I'm just asking you to believe that I had neither part nor lot in it!"

Christian had risen, and was standing up; he came a step nearer.

"I just want you to understand, Miss Christian, that in this world there is no one I regard like you--no one, nor ever was, nor ever will be--but don't mind that, I only want to say that if there is anything in this earthly world that it's in my power to do for you, or that I could help you in anny shape or form, you will be showing the kindness and mercy of G.o.d if you will let me do it for you."

He was trembling, and his voice shook, but his nervousness was gone.

"The kindness and mercy of G.o.d!" he said again. "I would feel it to be that--oh, G.o.d! I would!" The tortured spirit in his eyes had given place to another spirit, whose emotion Christian could neither mistake nor respond to, yet its kinship with the immutable fidelity that was in her heart made an appeal that she could not refuse.

"Be sure I will ask you," she said, with the pity that her own heart-loneliness had taught her in her voice. "I can't understand what it is that you think may happen; it seems to me as if--" She broke off, held by the thought that disaster could hardly have another arrow in its quiver for her. "You may be sure if I think you can help me, I will ask you. I know I could rely on you," she said, pushing back her own trouble, meeting his wild eyes with hers, steadfast and compa.s.sionate.

"I'm more than thankful--grateful--you've only to speak--" he stumbled and stammered with words that were all inadequate to his feeling. "I won't detain you; I'm taking your time too long as it is--and I'll have a job to get home too, the river's rising every minute, and so is the storm--" He somehow talked himself out of the room.

Christian returned to her work of destruction. The situation in general had not been made easier for her by Barty's tragic offer of a.s.sistance in some mysterious and advancing stress, or by the certainty that she tried to shake, but could not, of what his eyes had said to her.

But Barty, as he drove home through the storm, felt himself to be a new man, consecrate and apart, enn.o.bled by her promise to rely on him, glorified by her look; and thanked G.o.d that, when the trouble came, she would remember that he had had neither part nor lot in it.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

The storm, and the preparations for the wedding, raged on with almost equal violence, within and without the walls of No. 6, The Mall. From the moment that daylight began on the fateful Wednesday, the day before the wedding, and until it ceased, Mrs. Mangan's face recurred at the window of the dining room, full of protest, primarily against the arbiter of the weather, who had sent so supreme a hindrance to all her preparations, secondarily, against the shops of Cluhir, whose dilatoriness in matters of the highest importance "had her," so she affirmed frequently, "that much distracted, that it would be a comfort and a consolation to her if she were stretched cold in her grave."

At intervals during the feverish day, beings would come rushing through the torrents, like trout in a swirling brook, and would fling themselves and their parcels in through the door that Mrs. Mangan was generally ready to open for them. Frantic messages from bridesmaids about their costumes, belated wedding presents, all the surf and foam that is flung up by the waves of a wedding, broke upon No. 6. The bride elect, pale and preoccupied, ("pale," that is to say, "for Tishy," as one of her compeers observed, "flushed for any one else!") wrote notes, and exhibited presents, and packed clothes, and rode the tempest with a fort.i.tude that was worthy of the Big Doctor's daughter.

But even Tishy began to fail as darkness drew in.

"I can't stand this house any more," she said to her mother, "rain or no rain, I'm going out! I didn't see Mrs. Whelply about Kathleen's"

wreath that she wrote about--"