CHAPTER IX

A quarter of an hour later, as I walked up to Derryaghy, Willie Breen, the grocer’s son, a little boy of ten or eleven, ran out from the shop, and, after gazing carefully up and down the road, slipped a small piece of paper into my hand. One side of this paper was painted black; on the other a single word, “Friday,” was printed in red ink. I put it in my pocket and walked on without making any sign or uttering a word, which was the proper etiquette to observe under these peculiar circumstances; and in equal silence Willie returned to the shop.

When I reached the house, though I had been intending all along to ask for Katherine, I suddenly asked for Gerald instead.

“Gerald isn’t down yet,” Mrs. Carroll informed me, coming into the hall from the dining-room. “Probably he’s not even out of bed. Go up and tell him to hurry. He’s in the room next yours. Katherine is seeing about your lunch.”

Rather reluctantly I went up to Gerald’s room and tapped at his door. “Come in,” he said, sleepily.

He was indeed still in bed, and, in spite of the fact of our appointment, did not seem in any hurry to get out of it.

“Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed. “Good-morning.”

I felt uncomfortable, for I was sure he would think it queer my coming into his room when I hardly knew him. “Good-morning,” I answered, trying to imitate the tone he had used. “I was told to tell you to hurry.”

He sat up and yawned. “It’s late, I suppose,” he murmured. “They hadn’t sense enough to send me up my breakfast.”

“Do you always have breakfast in your room?” I asked.

He looked out of the window as if I did not interest him. “No,” he answered, after a perceptible pause, “but I have it when I want to.”

I felt snubbed. I didn’t know whether to stay or go, but he decided the matter by telling me to wait till he had had his bath, that he shouldn’t be long. He put on a dressing-gown, and left me. When he came back I didn’t know why he had asked me to stay, for he began to dress without taking the slightest notice of me. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him. It seemed to me stupid that I should feel slightly in awe of him, but there was no use pretending that I didn’t. I had already made up my mind that I disliked him, yet somehow I could not be indifferent to him――I wanted him to think me important, to admire me. He was only a year older than I was, but he was infinitely more a man of the world, and it was this, really, that impressed me. He dressed very quickly, yet I noticed that the result was just as harmonious as it had been last night. His clothes were of a light brown colour, that was exactly the same shade as his hair, and a little darker than his skin. A pale violet tie was loosely knotted over a cambric shirt. His forehead was broad; his yellow-brown eyes were set widely apart, and were neither large nor small; his nose was straight and his mouth extraordinarily delicate. His ears seemed to me, too, to have their own peculiar beauty. His skin was of a golden-brown colour, but clear almost to transparency, and a tiny blue vein was faintly visible on his left temple, running from the delicate eyebrow to the cheekbone. When he listened his brows slightly wrinkled. I would have given a good deal to have looked like him.

Suddenly I caught his eyes in the mirror watching me ironically. “Do you know you were extremely rude to me yesterday?” he said, without turning round.

I blushed and had nothing to reply.

“Well, I forgive you.” He patted me on the shoulder. “I’m ready now. Come along.”

“Why wouldn’t you play properly when you were asked?” I blurted out, as we went downstairs.

“I would have played if there had been anybody to play to. Neither Katherine nor Aunt Clara knows _God save the Queen_ from the _Moonlight Sonata_, and that Dick person is too absurd for words. I’ll play for you some time when they aren’t there. And now I must have breakfast; I won’t keep you very long.... What do you want all that for?” he asked, as Katherine suddenly appeared with a large basket.

“For lunch; we’re not going to starve ourselves.”

“Poor Katherine; evidently you’re not. We can each take our own lunch; a basket like that is only a nuisance.”

“You needn’t carry it,” said Katherine. “You and I will carry it by turns,” she said to me.

“What’s the use of talking like that,” answered Gerald. “It doesn’t mean anything. If that huge thing has to be dragged all the way I shan’t go at all.”

He departed to the dining-room, while Katherine and I were left standing in the hall, the basket between us.

“We needn’t take any drinkables,” I began, “there’ll be plenty of water.”

“I haven’t put in any,” said Katherine.

We sat down in the porch to wait for Gerald. When he rejoined us, which he did very leisurely, I glanced at his shoes, and suggested that he should change them for something more substantial.

“Why? We’re not going through ploughed fields, are we? I haven’t any hob-nails even if we were.” A panama hat shaded his face and he swung a light cane in his hand. I knew at once we should have difficulty in getting him any distance, and was very nearly proposing he should stay at home.

“Why aren’t we driving?” he asked.

“Such nonsense!” exclaimed Katherine. “If Aunt Clara had wanted us to drive she would have said so.”

“I don’t mind making inquiries,” Gerald intimated. “I somehow feel it’s the proper thing to drive.”

“You’re not to say anything about it; Aunt Clara won’t like it, I know.”

“I’ll drive with our young friend Peter, here,” he said airily, tapping me on the shoulder with his cane.

I could see Katherine was becoming impatient; Gerald was the only one who was perfectly cool. “About carrying Katherine’s lunch,” he began. “Hadn’t we better get a stick and put it through the handle of this thing?” He kicked the basket lightly. “Then two of us could struggle with it together.”

The idea was a good one, and we put it into practice.

Our road kept all the way by the coast: on the right, the mountains; on the left, a strip of waste land, varying in width, and covered with dry, sapless grass upon which, nevertheless, there were goats feeding; below this, the steep drop down to the sea. Shadowless in the strong sun, the road wound on ahead, white with dust, like a pale ribbon on the green and russet landscape. We had gone about a mile when Gerald suddenly announced, “I’m not going any further; it’s too hot.”

This brought us again to a standstill. “It’s so like you to spoil everything,” said Katherine.

“What am I spoiling? I suppose I can please myself. Only, since I’m not coming, I’d advise you to chuck some of that grub away.” He took his cigarette-case from his pocket and offered me a cigarette, which I refused. He lit one himself.

“You know very well that if you go home Aunt Clara will think I ought to have come with you, or at any rate be back for lunch,” said Katherine quietly.

“How should I know such absurd things? And I can’t help what she thinks, can I?”

“We could have stayed out all day.”

Gerald had begun to whistle an air very softly, and I recognized it as something he had played last night. His eyes were fixed on the distant horizon, and he seemed slightly bored.

“Perhaps if we were to bathe it might make a difference――who knows? Suppose young Peter and I bathe while you watch the basket here in this pleasant sunny spot; or you could walk on slowly with it, and we might in the end even overtake you?”

I turned to Katherine. “Come along,” I said brusquely. “What’s the use of bothering about him?”

He looked at me and coloured faintly. “Then I’m to say you won’t be home till dinner-time?” he asked, speaking directly to his sister.

Katherine hesitated. “Shall he say that?”

“Let him say what he likes,” I returned, shortly.

We moved on together, and I did not look back, though Katherine did, more than once. “I’ll make no more arrangements with your brother,” I remarked.

Katherine was silent. “Perhaps we should come another day instead?” she began presently, and in a hesitating way.

“You mean you are going to give in to him?” I said, making up my mind that there should be no other day, so far as I was concerned.

She was again silent, and meanwhile we continued to walk on. I could see she was uncertain as to what she ought to do, that she did not want to disappoint me, and that, on the other hand, she was not sure about Gerald. “He’s offended at something,” she began. “He takes offence very easily.... He thinks you didn’t want him.”

“Why should he think that?”

“I don’t know.... But it is something of that sort, I’m sure.”

I was going to say that I did not care a straw what he thought, but checked myself. “He didn’t appear to me to be offended,” I replied. “It was simply that he thought it too much fag.”

“You don’t know him,” said Katherine.

And we continued to trudge along, our feet white with dust. It really _was_ very hot, and I was glad I had so little clothing on――merely a light cotton tennis-shirt under my jacket. When we reached a low grey bridge that spanned a shallow mountain stream we branched inland. This was the Bloody Bridge, I told Katherine, and a religious massacre had once taken place here. I pointed out the remains of an old church, with its fallen tombs, and after resting for a few minutes we began to climb the valley, which was the walk I had proposed to take them. This valley was wonderfully beautiful, widening out gradually, and gradually ascending; on each side of it steep dark mountains, covered with heather, and grass, and gorse, and hidden streams which flowed into the broader, deeper stream we followed. The colouring was rich and splendid――dull gold, bronze, dark green and even black, with the brighter purple of the heather woven through it, and the long, narrow, pale, silver streak of water, glittering and gleaming, far, far up, till in the end it was lost over the edge of a higher valley which crossed ours at right angles.

“These are the Mourne Mountains?” Katherine asked gazing up at them. “I’ve seen them from the Isle of Man. On a clear day you can make them out quite distinctly.”

She began to talk to me about mountains, about Switzerland, where she had been last spring, and I felt ashamed never to have been anywhere. Yet, while she was describing it, I had an instinct that I should not like Switzerland. By some chance I indeed pictured it very much as, later on, I was actually to find it. Katherine’s enthusiasm could not remove this conviction: in fact, what she said, secretly strengthened my idea that it must be an odious country, and, years later, amid all the showy banality of its picturesqueness, I remembered this particular walk, and my own beautiful dark country rose up before me, with its sombre hills, its dreamy, changing sky.

But at the time I had nothing to say, I had no comparisons to make, I had seen nothing. “I should like to go to a big city like London or Paris,” I told her, “not to live there, but to see it.”

“I don’t believe you’d like it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.... You’re so much a part of all this.” She glanced up at the hills.

“Do _you_ like cities?”

“Oh, I simply love them; but then I’m quite different.”

“I’d like the picture galleries any way,” I declared.

“Are you fond of pictures?”

“I’ve not seen many――only reproductions.”

“I’m fond of them too. There was a splendid picture in the Academy this year of a girl skating. She was holding a muff up to her face so that it covered her mouth and chin, but she was awfully pretty, and when you came into the room you would just think she was a real person. And the snow was so nice, with a sort of pink light on it. If you come over to London I’ll take you to see everything.”

But again, just as in the case of Switzerland, my instinct told me I should detest this picture. For a moment I had a feeling of depression; it seemed to me of infinite importance that Katherine should like the things that I liked.

“I don’t care for pretty pictures,” I said. “I hate everything pretty,” I went on almost angrily.

“Would you rather have ugly ones?” asked Katherine, laughing, as if she had caught me in an absurdity. I had no answer to give, though I knew myself exactly what I meant. I felt lonely and melancholy. Then I looked at Katherine. She was very beautiful, and in a quite different way from her brother. And suddenly I knew where I had seen her before――her eyes, at least――they were the eyes of Prudence Carroll.... I gazed at her, seeking some further resemblance, but could discover none. Her skin was very white, save where in her cheeks it flushed to a soft radiant glow. Her brown, crisp hair was pulled back straight from her forehead, though one or two little tufts had got loose and waved in the faint wind. Her nose and mouth had the same delicate beauty as Gerald’s, but her expression was quite different, and it was there that her greatest beauty lay.... Yes, there again was a resemblance to Prudence Carroll――her expression was the same as Prudence Carroll’s. She had the same eyes, the same expression ... perhaps, then, the same spirit.... A sort of daydream had begun to weave itself into my thoughts.

“How far can we go this way?” Katherine interrupted me.

“As far as you can see. There is another valley beyond. We could go along it and home over Slieve Donard, but it is a long distance.”

We climbed slowly, not talking very much. It was past noon now, and hotter than ever, and when we reached a deep green pool under a waterfall we stopped to bathe our hands and faces in it. Its cool sweetness was alluring, as if a water-sprite sang up through it into the hot sunlight, and the white spray sparkled in the sun. “It would be splendid for a bathe,” I murmured.

“Bathe if you want to; I can walk on and you can overtake me.”

I remembered Gerald, however, and refused to do this, being full to the brim just now of unselfishness and chivalry. “We might have our lunch here,” I suggested. “Then we could hide the basket somewhere, and not be bothered by it again till we are going home.”

We spread a napkin on a broad flat stone, and our lunch on top of that. I now discovered why the basket had been so heavy, but, though it had been a nuisance carrying it, its contents were extremely welcome. We had almost finished when a peculiar feeling rather than a sound made me look up, and I saw a man standing not more than three or four yards from us. It was as if he had risen out of the earth. When you are under the impression that you are miles away from any human being, such a sudden apparition is a little startling, nor was the appearance of this visitor reassuring. He was large and pale, with short brown hair, and at the back of his head he wore a cap, like a boy’s cap, which was too small for him. His clothes, without being ragged, were stained and worn, and of a nondescript, brownish colour. He was young, probably between twenty-five and thirty, and strongly built. There was something coldly malevolent in the pale, clean-shaved face, something indescribably corrupt and cruel, which seemed to stare out of the hard brown eyes, and to hover about the smiling lips. He stood before us, looking down in obvious enjoyment of our discomfiture, making no movement to pass on. It was curious that features so perfectly regular, features neither bloated nor disfigured, could give so vivid an impression of ugliness. It was the ugliness of something positively evil, and my first feeling was one of instinctive repugnance and disgust, as if I had been touched by an obscene and noxious creature. I felt, I can’t say why, that I was in the presence of something actively dangerous, and not only to my body, but reaching beyond that: I felt as if I were in the presence of some form of spiritual corruption or decay, that I knew nothing about, and that yet I had a horror of, as a young rabbit is afraid of a hawk. That prolonged, impudent stare, passing over me, seemed to leave a trail of filth, of slime, of something that defiled like a loathsome caress. His eyes slid from me to Katherine with the same repulsive scrutiny. What was he doing here? He was no country man. As my first startled feeling passed, my temper began to rise. “What do you want?” I asked. “How much longer are you going to stand there?”

He laughed almost noiselessly, though he still neither moved nor spoke. It was as if the sound of his laugh touched a spring within me, and I lifted a sharp piece of stone lying near my feet. I felt a sudden rage, an extraordinary desire to destroy. I could actually feel my lips draw back ever so little, just like the lips of an angry terrier. I had no longer the faintest sensation of fear: on the contrary, what I wanted was for him to make a movement forward, a gesture that I could take as threatening. And the rough, natural weapon I had picked up must have acquired a sudden appearance of dangerousness, for our visitor drew back and his face altered. Then he laughed more loudly and on a different note as he passed on his way down the valley. I felt elated. Somehow, I was certain my stone would not have missed its mark, and that there would have been no hesitation, no lack of force, on the part of the wielder. Katherine and I watched him as he retreated, now disappearing from our sight, and now again appearing, but always at a point farther down.

“Well, he’s gone,” I said. “He was horrible looking.” I faced her with a proud consciousness of having behaved very well.

“Do you know what _you_ looked like?” asked Katherine. And before I could answer: “You looked just like David when he threw the stone.”

I blushed. Then, “I never cared much for David,” I answered ungraciously, and moreover untruly, for I was, secretly, extremely pleased and flattered.

“Neither did I till a minute ago, but that was because I didn’t know what he was like.”

My blush deepened. “Well, the beast’s gone at any rate,” I said to cover my gratification. “I will tell Michael when we get home. He can’t be prowling about here for any good.”

“Who is Michael?”

“One of our policemen――the decentest.”

* * * * *

We hid the basket under the heather. A quiet had fallen upon us, through which the noise of the splashing water seemed to weave itself in patterns and arabesques of sound.

“Shall we go up higher?” I asked, and without answering me Katherine began to climb the hill-side, and I followed her over dry, springy, fragrant heather, and between huge mossy boulders that had lain undisturbed for centuries. We stopped to look at a fly-catching plant, that curious, unpleasant mixture of the animal and the vegetable. Katherine had never seen one before, and she examined the outspread, concave disc, with the skeletons, the grey husks of flies, adhering to its green surface. We found a bee struggling on his back on the purple flower of a thistle, waving his legs in the air, a ridiculous picture of intoxication. But in spite of these interruptions the silence that had crept over us lingered still. When we reached a place where the ground rose steeply for a yard or two I gave Katherine my hand to help her, and when we came to more level ground we still went on hand in hand. And with this light contact there came to me a strange, thrilling pleasure, intense yet dreamy, unlike anything I had ever known before. I did not look at my companion. When I spoke, telling her to avoid a patch of soft ground that had here spread across the path, the sound of my own voice astonished me, so unfamiliar was it, even trembling slightly; and I felt my limbs trembling. But why should it be so? What was there? Why was I nervous? Nothing had happened but this short easy climb hand in hand. I threw my hat from me and flung myself down among the heather, lying with my hands clasped behind my head, and my face turned up to the dark blue sky. Far, far below us, the sea, blue and deep, broad, beautiful and free, lay shimmering in the hot sun. I had a sensation of intense happiness, physical and mental, into which I seemed to be sinking deep and deeper. I felt my eyes grow moist, and I turned away my head that my companion might not see my face.

Presently I looked round. Katherine was sitting beside me, gazing straight out at the distant sea. The broad brim of her black hat shadowed her face. The deep blue of her eyes seemed darker than before; they had the blue now of the eyes Renoir so often painted, and that I have seen nowhere else. I wanted to say something, I hardly knew what. I hovered shyly on the verge of it, like a timid bather on the brink of the sea, but there was no one to push me in, and my plunge was not taken.

“It’s jolly nice here!” Those feeble words were all I could find to express the rapid rush of emotion that had shaken my whole being. The vast and complex forces of nature were stirring within me almost as unconsciously as the new leaf germinates in the growing plant. Yet there was something which, without any words at all, I must have expressed, had there been an observer to see it. I mean the helplessness of youth, its pathetic credulity and good faith, its brightness and briefness in the face of those hoary old hills, and of feelings that were almost as ancient.

I sat up and clasped my hands about my knees. “I wonder what it will be like living in town?” I said.

“Yes, you’re going away next month, aren’t you? Aunt Clara told me.”

“My father wanted me to try for a post in a Government office. There is a boy who lives here who is going to do that: he is working for his exam. now.” Then I added, I don’t know why; “Mrs. Carroll is paying for me, and will be afterwards, when I go to college. I’m to go to one of the English universities――Oxford, I think. Of course my father couldn’t afford to send me, and indeed he’d rather I didn’t go at all. He let me decide, however, though there was really only one thing that made him give in.”

“What?”

“My mother once sent money to be used for my education, and he would not take it.”

Katherine was mystified, and, as I saw this, it dawned on me that I should not have spoken. I had taken it for granted that she knew all about me.

“You know, my mother doesn’t live at home,” I explained; and then, to change the subject, I took the piece of paper Willie Breen had given me that morning from my pocket.

“Can you guess what that is?” I asked.

She turned it over.

“It means that on Friday there will be a meeting of a kind of club we have,” I said. “It is a night club. The whole thing is a secret. We have supper round a fire, and talk, and tell yarns, and all that.”

“Outside?”

“Yes; over on the golf-links usually.”

“But why at night?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Pretty late too――about half-past eleven or twelve. I got it up last year with some of the boys who were staying down here. And then, afterwards, I kept it up with two or three of the chaps at school. This year I got sick of it, and I’ve only been to one meeting.”

“At night! It must be rather queer. I love the sea at night. Are you allowed to bring visitors?”

“There is no rule; there are no rules of any kind. Would you like to come?”

Katherine hesitated. Then she laughed. “Yes. Would it matter?”

“There’ll be nobody but boys there.”

“But you’d take me; and of course, Gerald would come.”

“I’ll take you if you’ll come by yourself,” I said.

“Without Gerald? I couldn’t. What harm would he do?”

I did not say; but without Gerald I knew I could carry the thing off, with him it would be difficult. “You’d have to promise not to tell anybody,” I explained.

“Of course. If I told, I shouldn’t be there myself.”

“But I mean even afterwards.”

“I’ll not tell.”

For a minute or two we looked down the hill-side, bathed in the afternoon sun; then I made up my mind. “If you can promise that Gerald won’t talk about it I’ll take you. But won’t you find it difficult to get out?” I added immediately afterwards.

“No; we’ll simply sit up later than the others. They seem to go to bed about ten.”

“But the lodge-gate will be locked.”

“I can easily manage about that.”

I regretted having mentioned the matter at all, yet I hadn’t the courage to draw back. “I’ll tell you on Friday morning exactly when to be ready,” I said.

We sat silent. Katherine had taken off her hat and it lay on the ground beside her; she was fastening a bunch of heather into her blue and white muslin dress.

“Have you looked at the portraits in the long passage yet?” I asked suddenly.

“Yes; not very particularly, but I noticed there were some.”

“Did you see one of a dark lady standing by a spinet, holding a bunch of flowers?”

“I don’t remember. Who is she?”

“Prudence Carroll,” I answered. “Look at her when you go in.”

Katherine had completed her task. “Why?” she inquired, turning to me.

“I think she is very like you――or you are very like her.”

“I shall see; but suppose I don’t care for her?”

“Then you can say I’m a fool. But you will care for her――at any rate, I do. I don’t mean that your features are just the same as hers.”

“And I’m not dark, am I?”

“No; at all events not _so_ dark. However, you will see what I mean――perhaps you will see.”

“You’re not sure? It can’t be so very striking then.”

“That’s just what it is――it _is_ striking. It mayn’t, however, be exactly obvious to everybody. When I first saw you, I kept wondering who you were like. I couldn’t get at it for a long time――then I knew.”

“Well, I never even heard of her, but I’m shockingly ignorant of my ancestors.”

“She wasn’t an ancestor: she was never married; the likeness isn’t physical.”

“Oh, then I shan’t see it. Besides, I never _do_ see likenesses, even when they’re much less mysterious than this.”

“I don’t know,――perhaps, in a way, it is mysterious. I can see it more clearly sometimes than others. I don’t think I should see it at all if you were asleep or dead.”

“What a horrid idea!” She laughed, but not quite easily.

“Do you not feel that these hills are familiar to you?” I asked dreamily. “I can imagine a person coming to some house like Derryaghy for the first time, and then finding that he knew this room and that, where this passage led to, what view he should see when he looked out through that little window at the top of the stairs. Or it might be that two people would come there together, and everything they said would sound like an echo from something that had been spoken before, and each, while they waited for it, would know the answer, before it had left the other’s lips.”

“I’m not sure that I follow you,” said Katherine prosaically, “but I imagine you are trying to make out that I may be what-do-you-call-her Carroll come to life again. You’re the strangest boy I ever met.”

“You told me I was like David. But――but――pretend it for a moment. Say you were Prudence Carroll, then who should I be?”

“I haven’t any idea. Perhaps the apprentice of the artist who painted her picture, if he had an apprentice.”

I considered this. It had never occurred to me before. But I could not get back, I could not discover even a faint gleam. It was not the time; I was too saturated with my actual surroundings.

I did not pursue the subject, for I saw it had no interest for Katherine. Besides, I wanted to be quiet. I thought if we sat in silence, if I held her hand; above all, if we sat in silence close together, her arms about me, my cheek against her cheek, the past might swim up into the present, and we should know. But instead of that we began to talk, to talk of things that did not matter, until, by and by, we got up to return home.