Part 3
After that the trouble throve and waxed like the most unmolested weed. A man perhaps seldom tastes despair much cruder and sheerer than when at the impatiently desired potato-digging he turns up spadeful after spadeful, spadeful after spadeful, nothing but dangling lumps of malodorous slime, nothing but that whatever, on to the very end of the drill, where the wife stands watching him and saying: “Ah, the Lord be good to us—have we ne’er a sound one in it at all?” with the childer beside her looking on, piteously concerned or piteously indifferent. Before Slieverossan had drawn down his winter snow-hood, the dearth wrought by the ruined harvest was finding its victims far and wide. Serious distress existed in the big houses, where people were at their wit’s end to devise some agreeable substitute for that empty dish on the dinner table. Savoury rice, they tried, and stewed toast, and Yorkshire pudding, and many other such things, but none of them satisfactorily filled the place of the missing potato. There still remained a gap all-thing unbecoming at their feast. It was a dreadful loss. But in the small houses people were spared all worry of that sort at least, because when they had no pitaties, they had nothing else to eat, bad or good, which made their bill of fare a perfectly simple matter, thus illustrating, no doubt, the providential law of compensation.
Eileen’s mind, however, was not philosophic enough to show her this aspect of the case, and what she did actually see and hear smote her with sorrow and dismay. It seemed as if the way of her world, hitherto a tranquil, sometimes rather tedious, one, had changed into the path of a surging flood, whence cries of despair and beseeching hands appealed to her vainly where she stood, secure herself and helpless and remorseful. So little for anybody could she do, who would fain have rescued them all. Even if she had commanded the whole resources of the household, they would have been miserably inadequate; but as it was, Aunt Geraldine said drearily that she supposed it was no use giving to vagrants, and old Timothy, whose inborn tendency towards “naygurliness,” had developed into a vice-like clamp, which acted automatically at the pressure of a petition, kept one watchful eye perpetually upon the hall-door, and another on the little store-room across the passage. Only by rare conjunctions of good luck with agility could Eileen elude his vigilance so far as to fetch and carry between them unbeknownst. More often than not, she arrived too late to do anything; and at best, her stealthiest operations among the bread-crocks and biscuits were pretty sure to bring the old man shuffling thither in defence of the menaced commissariat.
“Arrah now, Miss Eily, what work have you there, cuttin’ up the fresh loaf? and the laws bless us all, but that’s the hunch! If there was a slab of a brick wantin’ for repeerin’ the house-wall, you could make a shift wid that.”
“There’s a very decent poor man at the door,” Eileen might say, “who looks as if he had been starving for a month of Sundays; and he has a scrap of a baby with him; its mother died yesterday at Kilfintragh. I must get it a piece of soft bread, and a drink of milk, if there’s any left.”
“And what for need you be destroyin’ a whole loaf for a crathur o’ that size? Sure, I seen it comin’ past me window, sittin’ cocked up like a kitten bewitched. I’ve some stale bits in the other crock ’ud do it grand.”
“Oh, those are nothing but little crumbs, only fit for the chickens.”
“Musha, long life to it! And is it settin’ itself up to want betther feedin’ than the chuckens? Well, now, I should suppose that what’s good enough for them’s plenty good enough for it, when the most differ between them is that sorra the use _it’s_ ever apt to be, starved or no, except makin’ throuble for itself and other people.”
“Well, if some babies had been fed like chickens, perhaps they wouldn’t have grown up so fond of gabbling like old geese,” Eileen might rejoin, inaudibly, so that the repartee should relieve her own at no cost to Timothy’s feelings, as she escaped with her booty.
But her raids were not by any means invariably so successful. Sometimes she found that Timothy had forestalled her, and had swept everything into an inaccessible locker; and sometimes there was really nothing left to sweep. So then she had no resource save to ensconce herself in the remotest backward-looking room, that she might not hear the interchange of entreaty and denial, nor witness the lingering withdrawal of the rejected suppliants, wandering away disappointed out of sight, but not out of mind so soon, behind the glossy-walled belt of laurels.
For a like reason she shunned in those days what used to be a favourite walk beyond the front gates along the quiet lane, with its broad green banks softly on one side mounting up into amply spreading grass-slopes, now haunted at its every turn by sorrowful spectres that she had no charm to lay. Occasionally one of them would say to her: “Ah, melady, the blessin’s of God on the sweet face of you, and may you never know what it is to want the bit,” and this made her feel herself all the more to be a sort of ravening locust. Her own meals, indeed, those times, were partaken of grudgingly and of necessity, after which, carrying everything she could lay hands on, she hurried off to the end of the elm-grove, where a herd of small children would be looking out for them with large eyes. But day by day she thought her supplies seemed to dwindle, and the pinched faces to multiply, and she was as powerless against that as if it were the oncoming of night. One day in a week of black frost she desperately sold her godmother’s cameo bracelet to a passing higgler for a shilling, wherewith she bought out of a baker’s cart three portly loaves; and the satisfaction which these caused to prevail for a while, a short while, almost compelled her to think that she would dispose in the same method of her silver key-brooch, her only other ornament, the next time he came by. But always, having looked at it for some minutes, she replaced it in its box without achieving any resolve. The pencilled line, still legible on the lid, seemed to protest against the transaction in the name of the dead summer that lived with her brightest memories.
* * * * *
All this while the big boulder stone was lying out under the stars and mists and shadow-shifting winds on the grassy ridge of Slieve Ardgreine; and thither constantly travelled Eileen’s thoughts, although her bodily pilgrimages to it had grown less frequent than heretofore, since dripping tussocks and long, bedraggled skirts had become a graver consideration. She had never lost her faith in it and its contents. Nothing whatever had occurred to alter her opinion about it, and the silence on the subject which various reasons obliged her to maintain helped to ward off chances of disillusioning enlightenment. Eileen’s sixteen years in lonely Glendoula had taught her so very little either at first or second hand about other Quality’s domestic arrangements, that for anything she could tell, it might not be unusual to keep the family plate locked up in a large stone chest out-of-doors. Therefore no antecedent improbability cropped up to struggle with the existence of a long-cherished, deep-rooted dream and desire.
The one change that had here been wrought by those slow-footed, empty-handed years was in the use she designed for her riches. This change grew more radical under stress of the famishing winter. She no longer could care to admire the beauty of the bright gleaming silver things, nor to sort out from among them fastidiously appropriate gifts for each—that indeed had become only too simple a process, since everybody’s need was the same. Her sole wish now was to sell all that she had straightway—she would have waited to make no pious bargains about treasure in heaven—that she might satisfy the poor with bread. But the more intensely her wishes concentrated themselves upon that object, the more keenly she felt how far it was out of reach. Four years and some months, jealously reckoned, still were lacking to her of the age that would legally entitle her to enter upon the possession of her property; and although she now knew from other sources than old Timothy that some inheritance did then await her, what could such a distant prospect avail in the face of to-day’s direful necessity? Chafing sorely against the law’s delay that set bars between the owner and her rights, Eileen wondered sometimes whether the Lord Chancellor, whom she understood to rule her destinies, might not under the circumstances be persuaded to trust her with her fortune, now that she was sixteen and a half, just to keep poor Denis Madden’s half-dozen orphans, and old Widow Flynn and her blind daughter, and all the rest of the people from starving completely. Once she actually ventured upon a remote hint at some such possibility to her Aunt Geraldine, but lacking courage did not approach the subject closely enough to make herself intelligible; a failure for which her conscience often pricked her in the following days.
* * * * *
More than ever on the morning when this incident befell: It was mocking March weather, bright and calm and pitilessly cold, and Eileen thought she would warm herself by running up to her big stone, which she had not visited since the autumn. But before she reached the first bend in the avenue young Larry M‘Farlane hastily met her, and turned her aside into a shrubbery with a moving story about a crippled blackbird which was fluttering there among the bushes. “Unless some ould miscreant of a cat might be slinkin’ away under the low branches this minyit, Miss Eileen, wid the crathur grabbed in her mouth.” Larry had invented this little fiction on the spur of the moment, the fact being that just round the turn, a few yards from where he stopped Eileen, a heap of rags seemed to have fallen, as if flung or blown down across the road. Its halt there had indeed been so unpremeditated that only a remnant of the crust someone had begged hard for up at the House a minute before was still gripped in a gaunt hand. Coming upon this obstruction, young Larry, whose fare nowadays did not conduce to athletic feats, found its removal quite beyond his powers, and therefore ran on to seek help, when his meeting with Miss Eileen converted his most urgent duty into the task of hindering her from “gettin’ a quare fright along of the misfort’nit poor body.” He accomplished it only in part. For he could not contrive but that she should notice the gathering of a crowd in the avenue, and the shrilling of shocked ejaculations, and then the bearing away with slow solemnity, which apprised her of how near the cloaked shadow had passed.
Eileen gave up her expedition to the stone chest; its baffling impenetrability seemed just then a cruel gibe of Fate, wiselier ignored. Larry, for his part, temporarily lost sight of the errand which had been bringing him up to the Big House: a commission he had undertaken to execute for the postman. Thus it was not until the evening, when the cold March twilight had faded, too tardily for many people impatient to huddle away into oblivious sleep, that a letter reached the thriftily-lit drawing-room, where Eileen and her aunt were also getting through the interval before bed-time as best they could, which was but dully. A letter was something of an event in itself, and this one, unlike most of its predecessors, did not collapse inanely into a listless “Oh, it’s only”—for it contained a real piece of news.
Glendoula was to have another visit from Pierce Wilmot. Pierce, who had grown up a civil engineer, was now in charge of certain road-making relief-works, which were about to come creeping down Letterglas valley and up through the Nick of Time into the neighbouring glen. The superintendence of these would bring him to stay for a while near the place, and he hoped to renew his acquaintance with his kinsfolk at the Big House. All the establishment was more or less thrilled by the intelligence. It seemed, of course, only natural that he should take up his quarters there, and the prospect pleased on the whole. Lady Fitzmaurice, even, and her sister-in-law were slightly cheered and roused; even old Timothy, despite his prejudice, set about his polishing with a revived zest, in anticipation of a visitor who might be expected to appreciate “the differ between spoons that had a proper shine kep’ on them, and ones that was as dingy as if you’d loaned them for stirrin’ the Ould Fellow’s tay.” All the others, who remembered Master Pierce as a fine friendly-spoken young gentleman, thought that it would be a pleasant variety to set eyes on him again, and the rest were quite ready to welcome him on that recommendation. Eileen alone looked forward to his return somewhat doubtfully. She knew right well that things could not be the same as they were in those very olden days; and the differences might not be improvements. Suppose that she did not like the grown-up Pierce, nor he her? Then her reminiscences, she thought, would be superseded and spoiled. Still, she believed herself, after all, to be glad that he was coming.
* * * * *
It was late on a wild bleak evening that Pierce arrived, after a long open-air day of surveying and supervising. An additional pair of candles illuminated the drawing-room in his honour, and were burning clearly enough to show what manner of man he was at four-and-twenty. He had not changed at all irrecognisably, being still black and straight-browed, alert and rather resolute-looking, as beseemed a person whose business consisted largely in the clearing away of obstacles, by summarily forcible methods if need were. He had done this figuratively upon occasion as well as literally since his last visit to Glendoula. But the little girl who then used to patter up and down that primitive path beside him was now much harder to identify, having shot up so slender and tall. Also in Pierce’s honour, Eileen had put on her best gown that evening, a fine white muslin, sprinkled with a pattern of little lilac rose-bunches, outlined in a cloud of black dots. It was not more than half a decade lag of the latest Dublin fashions, but the six months’ growth since its last wearing had certainly made its skirt a rather skimpy length, as she noted with chagrin when putting it on. Some consolation was found in fastening her deep embroidered collar with the silver key. She had plaited her brown hair, darker now, yet keeping its richness of latent gold, in an unusually elaborate Grecian-plait to coil in a careful spiral knot at the back of her head. But first it framed her face in satin-sleek bands, smoothed down low on the delicate curve of the cheek, and then gathered up, leaving on either side a loop discovering a shell-like ear. As pink as a geranium-blossom one of them was that evening, the nipping cold and her thin dress had tempted her to sit so near the fire; and her eyes were as softly bright as ever, with such light as a sunbeam, questing beneath leaf-lattices, may waken in a moss-brimmed nook of clearest well-water.
Pierce noticed all these things, and none of them, while he was greeting his Aunt Geraldine; and he fell in love so simultaneously that it would have been impossible to say whether his observations came before or after. His habit was to be prompt and decided, and with promptitude and decision did he grasp this new experience—of which, nevertheless, an access of very unwonted diffidence and irresolution seemed part and parcel. These set in immediately, as if he had passed a vote of want of confidence against himself upon the spot, and its effect was retrospective, throwing a slur alike upon his present and his past. He wondered whether his cousin had not thought him a peculiarly odious schoolboy. His old pet name for her suddenly occurred to him as persistently appropriate, but the mere remembrance of it made him feel so over-presumptuous that he almost wished her to have forgotten it. In like manner he recollected, and could not dare to remind her of, their climb up Slieve Ardgreine, or their adventure with the strayed goats, and other episodes. He had retained only just enough common-sense to understand that Eileen’s silence all the evening upon this, and indeed every other topic, was not intended for a rebuff; and the flow of his conversation with his Aunt Geraldine was not a little impeded by a perpetual apprehension, altogether superfluous, of her niece as a critic.
Of course, he was not very long in recovering his presence of mind. In a day or two he began to dispense with such hampering precautions, but the sentiment that had suggested them continued in full force, and did not cease to influence his behaviour. Less, perhaps, in his dealings with Eileen than with the world at large, it made him transpose himself, so to speak, into a softer key. He unlearned in a single week some tricks of peremptoriness and self-assertion, which the vicissitudes of one early set in authority had been teaching him through several past years. For it was with him as if he had suddenly discovered the existence of something precious and perishable, that a touch might shatter or a breath destroy, and thereupon he grew wonderfully sensitive to the wide-spreading intricacies of cause and effect. How could he tell but that a rough word spoken anywhere might set a-stirring peril-fraught vibrations to reach and threaten the head that he loved? For her sake, he would have liked everything to be on velvet, and he was always instinctively aiming at that end. The most unskilled and incapable of the labourers whose efforts he superintended found their miscellaneous inefficiency treated with singular forbearance, even if it attained an egregiousness characterised by their comrades as “a quare botch intirely,” and driving their foreman to demand of various powers, celestial and otherwise: What to glory the great gaby was at? During leisure moments their lank and hollow-eyed gang were prone to pass the remark that “the captain” was “a rael gintleman”; while up at the Big House all the inmates accorded him all sorts of golden opinions.
Eileen herself meanwhile was not in the least aware of what had befallen him, but she had left off dreading any detriment to her cherished memories, and his visit had undoubtedly brought an influx of pleasure and interest to cheer her present day. She was so unaccustomed to being made much of by relations that this kinsman’s good nature impressed her as quite extraordinary, and so little used to making much of herself that she never thought of attributing it to anything except a special quality in Pierce, rather more likely, no doubt, to be exercised in another person’s behalf than in her own. It repeatedly surprised her to see that he remembered and acted upon her opinions and wishes, as if they were really important—a new view of them which she would have been slow to adopt. One morning he rode off all the long way to Denismore and back to get her Alfred Tennyson’s latest volume, and her delight in it was alloyed only by the intrusive consideration of how much coarse meal the price of it would have purchased. For her mind was still engrossingly pre-occupied with the neighbours’ trouble.
* * * * *
The cloud of it had lifted a little since Pierce’s coming. Possible wages loosened the famine-grip on such households as could send forth a man to ply pick and shovel, instead of hopelessly lying abed “agin the hunger”; and then a spell of more genial weather interposing released everybody from the clutches of that other icy-fingered foe, whose co-operation is so deadly. “For sure,” as old Christy Shanahan had been known to remark in this connection, “to be starvin’ inside and outside at the one time is more than any raisonable man can stand at all, unless be good luck he was a graven image.” This dim lightening of the prospect, however, rousing a stir of hope where numb despair had begun to prevail, made the need of plans for a timely rescue seem all the more urgent. One evening at dinner, Eileen heard Pierce say that if the people could get food enough to ward off the fever just until the potatoes—supposing there should be any—were dug, they might do well enough; otherwise, it was a bad lookout. And he added that it was hard to see how it could be managed, as the road-making grant had nearly run short, and where else should the money come from? At that Eileen had almost spoken her haunting thought aloud, and it was: “the great chest full of silver.” And though the unpropitious moment enjoined silence, therefrom dated the designing of an enterprise so venturesome that the possibility of carrying it out was a point upon which she hopefully and fearfully changed her mind a dozen times daily for as many days.
At last there came a brilliant, capriciously-lighted morning, with its shine and shadow under the control of a shifting snow-drift, which sailed at the wind’s will. It was a holiday, and Pierce succeeded in setting out almost as soon as he wished on the early walk he had planned with his cousin. What slight delay did intervene was caused by the arrival, just as they were starting, of the Widow Barry with a couple of eggs to sell on commission for her next door neighbour—the Widow Shanahan, who “could get that far be no manner of manes herself, the crathur.”