Part 4

“And they’re the last ones you’ll be takin’ off her, Miss Eileen, she bid me tell you,” said Widow Barry. “For she’s after killin’ her ould hin this mornin’, because it’s torminted she was to be seein’ it mopin’ around starvin’ the same as a raisonable body, sorra a bit had she to be throwin’ it this great while back whativer. ’Deed now, you might as well be walkin’ along the shore of the say these times as along be the dures down the street, for e’er a scrap of pitaty-parin’ or anythin’ else you’d find lyin’ about. The crathur had to be contintin’ itself wid whativer it could pick out of the ground, and bedad I won’er it had the heart to think of layin’ e’er an odd egg at all. So she took and wrung its neck this mornin’, and she said the sup of broth ’ud keep the life in herself and poor Katty for a day or so anyway. But och, Miss Eileen dear, it’ll be the weeny sup entirely. For ’twas meself caught the crathur for her, and I declare to goodness it wasn’t the weight in me hand of a little wisp of hay. Sez I to her, the feathers on it ’ud be heavier be thimselves. But sure she could do no betther; and if it boiled into the name of broth even, it’d give them the notion they was aitin’ somethin’.” In prospect of this repast, the sixpence that Pierce sent seemed to him hardly more than an emphasising of a “strong distemper and a weak relief”; but the Widow Barry, who went her way filled with a gratitude to God and man, may have understood the situation better.

And then the two young people set out on their rambles. They took their old favourite route up Slieve Ardgreine, for the first time since Pierce’s visit, on Eileen’s part, as the milder weather had been “soft” too, turning the mossy nap of the turf into a treacherous sponge, that squelched coldly over-shoes at the lightest footfall. To-day, however, it might be traversed dry-shod, given a discreet avoidance of extra vivid patches in the golden green; and a busy thirsty breeze had left scarcely a dewdrop in the glazed cups of the celandines and the pink-rimmed saucers of half-blown daisy-buds. Up this daintily carpeted path Eileen picked her steps rather silently. Her companion thought that she had been saddened by the incident of the ill-faring fowl, but that was not the reason. What pre-occupied her was the great venture which she appeared to be approaching more or less in spite of herself. The very direction which their walk was taking, at no choice of her own, was like a hand beckoning imperiously. On the way up she hovered towards the verge of it, and recoiled from it, and came stealing back to it again, oftener than the flitting clouds furled and unfurled their shadow-mats at her feet; and the big boulder, the stone plate-chest, hove in sight while she was still wavering. Failure would be so very terrible to her. She knew that if Pierce were shocked or indignant, or even amused, she would be miserable indeed; and she could not by any means convince herself that he would not be all these things. Yet, when they were standing beside the tall, blackish shape together, just as in old times—only it used to be the taller then—she felt desperately that, chance what might, she must not go away without speaking the sentence she had been mentally rehearsing all the week. It rang in her ears like a clamorous bell, and made her deaf to any other speech, so evidently that Pierce stopped in the middle of what he was beginning to remark, as if she had interrupted him. Just at that moment the sun swam out clear of a high-tossed drift, and sent a golden wave sweeping widely up and down the hill-slopes. It broke against the big stone, shining into Eileen’s face with all the dazzlement of an April forenoon, and she accepted the omen as if it had been the cordial clasp of some encouraging hand. Before the radiant rim had slidden on many paces farther, she took heart of grace, and the irrevocable word was spoken.

* * * * *

“There was one thing I wanted to ask you about, Pierce,” she said. She had moved round to the opposite side of the chest, and was looking at him across the lid, with eyes very bright and wistful beneath her broad-brimmed straw hat, which had brown ribbons tied in a bow under her chin. “I shouldn’t wonder if you thought it very dreadful of me,” she continued; “but I really don’t think it is myself. After all, I only want to use my own things, and that can be no great harm; and if these don’t belong to me now, they don’t belong to anybody, which is absurd. At any rate, it couldn’t possibly make any difference worth speaking of to those people up at the office in Dublin, and it would make all the difference in the world to the poor people here; so ‘the right of it over-leps the wrong of it,’ as old Murtagh Reilly used to say.” She was gradually arguing herself into courage; still a mere shadow falling anywhere would have routed it.

“I hope it is something truly appalling, or else I’ll be horribly disappointed now,” Pierce replied, a little puzzled by this prologue, but rather pleasantly so, because he liked her to consult him. “You’ve raised my expectations cruelly.... But if you wish, I’ll undertake not to think it very dreadful, nor dreadful in the least degree,” he added, as after a short pause she seemed still to be hesitating. He would have said that he had never made a safer promise.

“Well, then,” said Eileen; “do you remember how you said one time that you could easily get a key for this old chest of ours? Here’s the keyhole, you see, all right. I’ve always kept it clear of moss. And, I wonder, would you mind—if it didn’t give you a great deal of trouble—getting one for me now? Without telling anybody else, I mean, for of course they wouldn’t let me. I know I can have no legal right to take anything out of it until I come of age; but that’s only the _law_, and really when people are starving, one can’t be expected to wait for years and years just on account of such nonsense. At the best of times it seems a great pity to keep it lying here useless for so long, but now it’s like locking up other people’s lives. If I can’t get at it in time to do anything for them, I might as well never have it at all—there’ll not be a soul left in Glendoula. You’ve no idea how hateful it makes one feel. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m nearly as bad as the wretches who go on carting off their wheat and oats to sell in England. Only it isn’t my fault in reality, for until you came I never had a chance of speaking to any possible person about it. And then, Pierce, I was thinking that when we have got this opened, you’d maybe help me to manage about selling the silver. It must be worth a great deal of money: enough, at any rate, to last while they are waiting for the potatoes; for we really had very fine plate, I believe, though it mayn’t be quite so splendid as old Timothy used to declare—he _is_ a little given to romancing. And, of course, these times I don’t expect to find the yards of pearl and ruby ropes that were in the _Glittering Hoard_! You do remember that I told you, and that you promised about the key, don’t you, Pierce?” she said anxiously, perplexed by his expression, for he was looking hard at her with a sort of bewildered blank dismay, almost as if something had frightened him—an effect which she had not included among her many apprehensions.

He was taken wholly unprepared, because during her irresolution Eileen naturally had shunned the perilous subject, and he had himself for the time being entirely forgotten the existence of that old childish myth. But now he did indeed remember it, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, instead of all those long years ago. There had stood the little girl eagerly telling him her absurd story, to which he listened with amused forbearance, thinking to himself that he must not vex her by incredulity, and carelessly noticing how swiftly her small face flushed, and how brightly her large eyes shone in the excitement of her narrative. And to-day the same thing seemed coming to pass again—but with differences. For here unchanged in the sunshine was the dark stone block with its yellow dappling of lichen, and that same clear voice came to him across it, speaking so much in earnest that the transparent flower-flush rose and the glance brightened just as of old. But the small child had grown into a tall maiden, and her voice was the one that gave meaning to all the other sounds in his world, and her absurd story no longer amused him in the least, seemed liker breaking his heart, seemed the pronouncing of an evil spell, that blurred the light of his eyes, and conjured up a web of black forebodings over the fair horizon of his future. If the soft-aired spring morning had suddenly began to scowl and keen around him, and sting him with frozen pellets, it would have faintly shadowed forth the transition. A man’s mood, however, may fall from one level to another in much less time than it takes to tell, and Eileen thought his answer came quickly.

“Don’t you know that you’re talking nonsense, Eileen?” he said.

She had never heard him speak so sharply, almost roughly—not even when he had seen his case of mathematical instruments dropped by Hughey Brian into the bottomless bog-hole, nor when he had come upon the Donnellys’ little goat tethered with the remnant of an urgently-needed and long-sought measuring-line. And she was immediately aware that the very worst had befallen. Her plan was impracticable, and she had disgusted Pierce by proposing it. The poor Glendoula people must starve, and her cousin, who had been so good-natured, could never like her any more. Probably he considered her request worthy of a dishonestly-minded idiot, and was deeply, perhaps justly, offended at her suggestion that he should take part in such a transaction. Certainly, he would not hear of the scheme, so all her hopes were scattered like mist before a hurrying wind, and there again loomed the grim trouble ahead, with its inexorable face turned unveiled upon her. Just at that moment, however, it was partially screened by the interposition of a still uglier one, which would thrust itself between, asking and answering a question with the same tormenting result: What must Pierce be thinking of her? He had surely meant worse than “nonsense.”

Amid this rude crowding in on her of disappointment jostling with grief and mortification, Eileen clung half-consciously to the sense that it behoved her by all means to retain the footing of her self-possession, and she replied very gently: “Not exactly nonsense, I think; but perhaps—I daresay it would be quite out of the question to take these things now, and not even right. It seemed to me the only way I could do any thing to help the people, but of course I knew it mightn’t be possible at all. I don’t understand much about the law. Don’t you think it’s getting rather cold up here? Perhaps we’d be wiser to come back before the day clouds over.”

This dignified composure seemed to Pierce as it were a seal set upon his fear, the document of which her fantastic story had supplied, and he dejectedly turned down the hill-path with her in silence. The sullen-looking stone which they left behind them, a blot on the sunny sward, might have been a little ancient altar to some unpropitious God, whence they were taking home, sorrowfully, discomfortable oracles. In truth, one of them had there said farewell to an old hope, and the other struck up an acquaintance with a new fear; both experiences apt to arouse pre-occupying meditations. Neither of the cousins gave much heed to their surroundings as they went. The small wild clouds flirted the sunshine about as if flocks of white wings were flickering by; here and there they flung down the shadows which make one marvel how their “little-seeming substance” can be the cause of such deep purple stains. But now nobody marked them, nor the far-off pipe of the plover, nor the fragrance of the basking herbage underfoot.

Thus they presently came to the gapped dyke leading into the first field, and all the way neither of them had spoken a word. Now, at that moment it happened that Eileen was looking very straight before her, with her head held rather high, and her eyes steadily opened, to give the tears a chance of going back the way they had come, and walking warily as one who felt how even the quiver of an eyelash might be fatal. Yet these precautions defeated themselves, for they were the reason why she stumbled at the flat stepping-stones, so that Pierce had to save her from falling just as he had done nearly nine years before. This time, however, he did not let her go again with a laugh. He held her close and said: “Oh, my darling, my sweetheart, don’t be vexed, don’t be vexed. It will be all right, never fear. We’ll pull them through—all of them—safely somehow. Don’t think about that old silver any more; and you won’t mind what I said just now? I’m a stupid brute, you see, sweetheart; but there’s nothing on earth that I wouldn’t do for you.”

While she listened to this statement, Eileen went through, in an intensified form, an experience somewhat resembling that of the bygone summer morning when the unknown Pierce had first spoken to her: a sudden surging up of dread, that wave-like took her off her feet for the instant, but only to lift her unharmed into a new world, most beautifully strange, and shut out from all troubles of the mere earth with the light that never was on land or sea. A reflection of it in her eyes encouraged him to pursue that line of argument, and he said a great deal more, all much to the same purport, as they went down the steep green fields, where the young bracken-fronds were uncoiling their flossy silken whorls beneath last season’s weather-beaten brown plumes, and the golden blossom-flakes were melting off the tall winter furzes; and then on between the fledged boles of the elm-grove, and under the scented shadow of the laurel-walk, until at the hall-door Eileen ran away to make a solitary survey of the unexplored regions in which she had wonderfully arrived. Just for the moment Pierce felt gratefully disposed towards the big stone, which had, at all events, given him his cue.

* * * * *

But later on that afternoon he spoke very bitterly to his Aunt Geraldine, whom he found alone in the book-room. The hearing of candid opinions is a privilege not uncommonly enjoyed by spinster aunts.

“You’ve kept her moping here all these years,” he said, “without companions or amusement or occupation, till it’s no wonder that she has taken up queer fancies. Why, it was enough to drive her—to make anybody unlike other people. Surely you might have managed better for her somehow.”

“It really wouldn’t have been easy,” his aunt said, but meekly on the defensive; “we always have had so little ready money, and then your poor Aunt Gerald’s wretched health is another difficulty. Besides that, I never noticed anything odd about Eileen. She always seems contented and cheerful enough, and I thought she was a sensible sort of child, and very quiet. Just once or twice, now that I think of it, she has said something that rather puzzled me about a plate-chest, but I had no idea she had any delusion of the kind.”

“Yes, that’s just where it is; nobody has cared to look after her or take any trouble about her,” Pierce said, wrathful and reproachful, a little unreasonably; so fresh was his discovery that concern for Eileen’s welfare ought to be the prime consideration in every rightly ordered mind. He did not surmise, either, that he was upbraiding a friend. Yet such was the case. For, from the very first evening, their Aunt Geraldine had guessed whither things were tending, and ever since had been watching their course, a melancholy sort of Prospero, who was powerless to work any wonders, and whose joy at nothing could be much, but who did feel some pleasure in the growing likelihood that her favourite sister’s son would some day reign in the wreck of the old place, and take charge of the person whom she had always regarded half-pityingly, half-impatiently as “Eileen, poor child.” Therefore the cropping up of this ominous obstacle was a disappointment by which she felt so cast down that she had not the spirit to rebut with any energy the accusation of contributory negligence.

Neither she nor Pierce had spoken of the circumstances that lent the matter its menacing aspect, but they were uppermost in the mind of each. What made Eileen’s futile story sound so warningly in their ears was the remembered existence of that baneful spectre whose mischief might be traced among the annals of the Fitzmaurice family, as well in the notorious eccentricities which had preluded poor Sir Gerald’s last desperate act, as in the more or less pronounced oddities and deficiencies which had wrought the history of this kinsman and the other into a tragedy with a grotesquer plot.

“I can’t think what has put such a notion into her head,” Miss Fitzmaurice said dejectedly. The workings of Eileen’s mind could hardly indeed have been more remote from her observation if they had gone on in a different planet. “But, after all, Pierce, if one considers how young she is—scarcely more than a child.”

“No reasonable child would believe anything so preposterous,” Pierce replied with gloom. “A rough lump of a boulder with moss growing in the cracks!”

“And did you tell her so?” asked his aunt.

“Well, no, not exactly; we began talking about something else, and I thought I’d better see whether you knew anything about it; but apparently you don’t,” said Pierce.

“Oh, you must just laugh her out of it,” his aunt said, laughing nervously herself, and had not any more helpful suggestion to offer. Pierce left the interview dissatisfied and unreassured.

* * * * *

Towards sunsetting, however, he found himself once more on the summit of Slieve Ardgreine. He had promised to go and see after Barney Foyle, who had been “took bad wid the road-sickness” on the day before, and as the Foyles’ cabin stood by the side of the Clonmoragh road, his shortest route was up and down through the Nick of Time. The sight of the solitary boulder, squatting there starkly black amid the flushed western glow, made him realise his trouble with much searching of heart. It seemed a symbol, or something more than a symbol, a visible tangible embodiment of the obstruction which had thrust itself into the clear path of his desires. Now, Pierce Wilmot was alike by nature and training a person who could not, without great and grudging reluctance, admit impediments to his progress along the way wherein he would go; and in this case he felt more loth than ever before. As he crossed the stretch of sward towards the gap, he eyed the dark mass with a hot thrill of resentment, as if against somebody who had wittingly baulked and baffled him. Yet withal it was for him so obviously nothing more than just an ordinary lump of limestone, that in view of it Eileen’s quaint belief took a stronger tinge of unreason. Nor did he possess, to soften it down, any knowledge of how the seed had been sown in her mind, and had grown up, fostered and never disturbed, through the long years of a lonely childhood. So, for a few paces, his heart sank and sank, till it reached depths where a poignant pity was the most endurable element in his mood.

But before he reached the Nick of Time, an idea that flashed across him made him deviate several yards to the right, and walk up to the big stone. He stood still beside it, reflecting for a while, and then gave it a slight kick, as though to mark his arrival at some definite conclusion. At that moment he was saying to himself: “In any case it would be better out of this; and I’ll do it the first thing to-morrow, by Jove I will! Then I’ll bring her up here, and the chances are that when once she’s seen it in fragments she’ll never give the matter another thought. There was that young fellow the Barnards knew, who got rid of a curious hallucination in much the same sort of way. They burned an old paper on which he had taken it into his head that the safety of the whole world depended; and when he found that nothing happened, he grew perfectly rational about it. And so will she. For indeed she’s as sensible as anybody can be, except just on that one point, which won’t signify an atom, if it’s taken in time. It’s a good job the notion occurred to me. Ay, that’s the kind of key I must get you, sweetheart—poor little Bright-Eyes. However, I’ll take good care that she shan’t be vexed about it. So there’ll be a short end of you, you old _stookawn_, and joy go with you,” he said half-aloud, with a defiant flourish of his blackthorn towards the big stone, which, as he turned his back upon it, flung a long, murky shadow after him, like a scowl, over the sheeny grass.

* * * * *