AN IRISH COUSIN.

BY
GEILLES HERRING AND MARTIN ROSS.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.
1889.
(All rights reserved.)

CONTENTS.

AN IRISH COUSIN.

PART I.
AN EXPERIMENT.

CHAPTER I.
THE “ALASKA.”

“In that new world which was the old.”

There had been several days of thick, murky weather—dull, uncomplaining days that bore their burden of fog and rain in monotonous endurance. Six of such I had lived through; a passive existence, parcelled out to me by the uncomprehended clanging of bells, and the, to me, still more incomprehensible clatter which, recurring at regular intervals, told that a hungry multitude were plying their knives and forks in the saloon.

But a change had come at last; and on Saturday morning, instead of the usual heaving ridges of grey water, I saw through the port-hole the broken green glitter of sunlit waves. The s.s. Alaska’s lurching plunge had subsided into a smooth unimpeded rushing through the water, and for the first time since I had left New York, the desire for food and human companionship awoke in me.

“Stewardess,” I said, “get me a cup of tea. I am going on deck.”

It was early when I came on deck. The sun was still low in the south-east, and was spreading a long road of rays toward us, up which the big steamer was hurrying, dividing the radiancy into shining lines, that writhed backwards from her bows till they were lost in the foaming turmoil astern.

A light north wind was blowing from a low-lying coast on our left, bringing, as I fancied, some faint suggestion of fields and woods. I walked across the snowy deck, to where a sailor was engaged in a sailor’s seemingly invariable occupation of coiling a rope in a neat circle.

“I suppose that is Ireland?” I said, pointing to the land.

“Yes, miss; that’s the county Cork right enough. We’ll be into Queenstown in a matter of three hours now.”

“Three hours more!” I said to myself, while I watched the headlands slowly changing their shapes as we steamed past. It would soon begin now, this new phase of my life, whether I wished it or not. It had once seemed impossible; now it was inevitable. My destiny was no longer in my own control, and its secret was, perhaps, hidden among those blue Irish hills, which looked as if they were waiting for me to come and prove what they had in store for me.

“Well, it has been my own doing,” I thought; “whatever comes of it, I have only myself to thank; and whether they like or dislike me, I shall have to make the best of them, and they of me.”

“First breakfast just ready, miss,” said one of the innumerable ship-stewards, scurrying past me with cups of tea on a tray.

I paid no attention to the suggestion, and made my way to a deck chair just vacated by an elderly gentleman. I could not bring myself to go below. The fresh sweet wind, the seagulls glancing against the blue sky, the sunshine that gleamed broadly from the water and made a dazzling mimic sun of each knob and point of brasswork about the ship,—to exchange these for the fumes of bacon and eggs, and the undesired conversation of some chance fellow-passenger, seemed out of the question.

Moreover, I was too restless and excited to care about breakfast just then. The sight of the land had given new life to expectations and hopes from which most of the glory had departed during the ignominious misery of the last six days. I lay in my deck chair, idly watching the black river of smoke that streamed back from the funnels, and for the first time found a certain dubious enjoyment in the motion of the vessel, as she progressed with that slight roll in her gait which the sea confers upon all its habitués.

Most people appear to think that sea-sickness, if spoken of at all, should be treated as an involuntarily comic episode, to be dealt with in a facetious manner. But for me it has only two aspects—the pathetic and the revolting; the former being the point of view from which I regard my own sufferings, and the latter having reference to those of others. In the dark hours spent in my state-room, I had had abundant opportunity to formulate and verify this theory, and I have never since then seen any reason to depart from it.

CHAPTER II.
AUNT JANE.

“Sing Hey! when I preside.”

It may not be a very dignified admission, but one of the main causes that led to my being at present on board the Alaska, bound for Queenstown, was the incompatibility of my temper with that of my Aunt Jane.

In self-extenuation, I may mention that I had for the last twelve months lived in her house, and had thus had ample opportunity of verifying the opinion expressed by many of her most intimate friends—“That Jane Farquharson was the salt of the earth, but as such was better when taken in very small quantities.”

She was a Scotchwoman of the most inflexible type. Twenty-five years of sojourn in the United States had modified none of her insular prejudices, and my mother, who was her youngest sister, had never, even during her married life, lost belief in the awfulness of her authority.

The Farquharsons were a family whose pedigree was longer than their purse; and when her younger brother, my Uncle James, had been compelled to sell the paternal acres and emigrate to California, my aunt had uprooted herself from her native land and followed his fortunes, in the full conviction that he, excellent young man though he was, would become altogether a castaway if once allowed out of range of her vigilant eye. They were orphans, and Aunt Jane, having imposed upon herself the duties of both parents, took my mother with her to the Far West, where she maintained on my uncle’s ranch the straitest traditions of the elders.

Uncle James never married. Aunt Jane’s vigilance had been so conscientiously unremitting that no daughter of Heth had ever disputed with her the position of mistress of Farquharson’s ranch. But the precautionary measures that had preserved Uncle James from the snares of matrimony were a distinct failure in my mother’s case. With the unexpected revolt of a weak nature, she defied her elder sister, and committed the incredible enormity of getting married.

Men—with the exception of a legendary Scotch minister, who, if tradition spoke truly, had not long survived his betrothal to Aunt Jane—were regarded by her as the natural foes of cleanliness, economy, and piety. And of all men she considered Irishmen to be the epitome of their sex’s atrocities.

It must, then, be admitted that Fate dealt hardly with Aunt Jane, when, one summer afternoon, her sister Helen came to her and told her that she had that morning been married to Owen Sarsfield, the good-looking Irishman who, a few months before, had entered into partnership with their brother. My mother has often described the scene to me—how she had found Aunt Jane grimly darning her brother’s socks; how she had received the news at first in terrible silence; and then how on my mother, white and trembling, had fallen the thunders of her wrath.

“That ne’er-do-weel Irishman! A creature that ’tis well known had to leave his home for Heaven only knows what wickedness! Did you never hear that a bad son makes a bad husband? I was right when I warned James against having anything to do with a vagabond scamp such as he is, and told him no good would come of handling money that had doubtless been won at the gaming-table!”

To all this, and much more, my mother did not attempt a reply; she thought she knew more of Owen Sarsfield than her sister did. She and her husband settled down in another house on the ranch, and, notwithstanding their proximity to Aunt Jane, they were very happy.

My father, in spite of Aunt Jane’s insinuations to the contrary, was an Irish gentleman of good family, and the money which he had put into the farm had been honestly come by. Perhaps my mother never knew the exact reason of his leaving Ireland. She only told me that money troubles had led to a quarrel with his father, Theodore Sarsfield, of Durrus, in the county Cork. He had no sisters, and his younger and only brother, Dominick, had sided with my grandfather against him, so that during the fifteen years he had spent in America he was as much cut off from his home as if he had been on another planet. The little that he knew of it was gathered from a few misspelt letters, written by one Patrick Roche, a special retainer of his in the old days at Durrus.

These reached him at long intervals, and usually announced some event connected with the Sarsfield family. In this way he heard of his brother’s marriage, which took place three or four years before his own. Then shortly afterwards, towards the end of the Irish famine, came the news that “The young misthris was ded, and she just after havin’ a fine young son; ’twas what the peepel war all saying that the hard times kilt her.”

My mother used sometimes to take these letters from a little old green velvet bag in which she hoarded many valueless treasures, and give them to me to read. And I well remember the yellow worn papers, with the half-foreign smell of turf-smoke lingering about them. I did not then dream of how, in after-years, when that same smell of turf-smoke became very familiar, it would recall the hours I spent when a child, sitting in the shade of the verandah beside my mother’s rocking-chair, and poring with subdued excitement over these messages from the other side of the world.

The last letter which my father received was as urgent as it was brief.

“Honored Masther Owen” (it began, without any of the usual preamble of good wishes),

“The owld masther is very sick. You’d do well to cum home. Ther is them that sayes he’s askin’ for you, and God knows maybe ’tis the change for deth that’s on him. The family is very poor this while back. The big house do be mostly shut up; only owld Peggy Hourihane within in the house and her daughter mindin’ the child. Me father and mother is ded. I will gos ’list for a sojer. God help us; these are bad times.

“Your faithful servant,
“Patrick Roche.”

On getting this letter, my father started at once for Ireland. I was at this time about a year old, a very ugly and stubborn little baby, so Aunt Jane has often told me; and when my mother held me high above the sunflowers at the gate, to kiss my hand to my father as he drove away, I only beat her upon the head and screamed for the pussy.

That was the last chance I ever had of seeing my father. He wrote to my mother from New York, and again from Queenstown—short dispirited letters; the latter saying that he had caught a bad cold, and felt the change from a Californian to an Irish winter very severely. A week afterwards came another letter in a strange handwriting. It was from my Uncle Dominick, and it told my mother, not unkindly, the news that she never quite recovered from. The cold which my father had spoken of had turned to pleurisy, and he had died in a hotel in Queenstown the day after he landed. The writer said that, owing to the unfortunate relations that existed between him and his brother, he had not been aware of his marriage till letters that he had found in his possession informed him of the fact. He now forwarded them to her, with his brother’s few personal effects, and remained, hers faithfully, D. Sarsfield.

The next mail brought a second letter from my Uncle Dominick. Since he last wrote, my grandfather had died; and by the terms of his will, in consequence of my father having predeceased him, the property and house of Durrus passed to the second son, the writer himself. “Had my father known that my brother had married,” wrote my uncle, he might possibly have made an alteration in the terms of the will; but as Owen had never seen fit to make any communication on the subject, no such provision was made. “The property has suffered much during the recent famine, but, as I feel sure that it would have been in accordance with my father’s wishes, I have ventured to place a small sum to your credit at the Bank of Ireland, with directions to forward it to your order.”

My mother never allowed the correspondence thus begun with my Uncle Dominick to drop altogether, and once or twice a year she would devote a couple of mornings to the toilful compilation of a letter to the brother-in-law whom she had never seen. Looking back now, I think there was something very touching in the confident way in which she relied on his interest in those annals of my childhood which filled her letters. I came upon them long afterwards, and read them with a strange mingling of feeling, very different from the wonder and longing with which I, in those childish days, saw them despatched on the first stage of their long journey, and wished that I could accompany them into the post-bag’s grimy recesses, and go to Durrus too.

I had a very happy childhood. Either my mother or Uncle James could single-handed have spoiled the best of children, and their joint efforts being devoted to giving me everything I wished for, I should, had it not been for Aunt Jane, have lived a life of lawless enjoyment. The result of their long years of subjugation was a secret exultation in the undaunted front which I bore towards my aunt, and at a very early age I had learnt to recognize the fact that we three were confederates against a common despot. Uncle James was my most daring ally, and at his instigation I committed some of my most signal and spirited misdemeanours. By the time I was sixteen, I had become, under his supervision, a young lady of varied, if unusual, attainments. I could catch and saddle my own horse; I could guide a steam-plough; I could make some attempt at Latin verse; I knew a little about the rotation of crops, and a good deal of Shakespeare and Walter Scott. Aunt Jane herself took charge of my music, and I spent a daily hour of suffering at a piano as upright and unsympathetic as she was, learning from the frayed, discoloured pages of her music-books, the old-fashioned marches, and “Scotch airs with variations,” that had formed the taste of two generations of Farquharsons.

I think my mother would have been satisfied to let me grow up as I was then doing, knowing nothing of the usual more elegant accomplishments of young ladies; and it was owing to Aunt Jane’s abhorrence of my “tom-boy tricks” that the first great change in my life was made. The climax came one early summer morning, when, possessing myself of Uncle James’s gun, I crept out to try and slay one of the big “jack-rabbits” that abounded on the ranch.

My aunt from her bedroom window saw the whole performance—the stalking; the unseemly grovellings and crawlings through the long grass; the deliberate aim; and, finally, the stealthy but triumphant return with the spoil.

That very day it was decided that my mother and I were to go forthwith to Boston, there to abide with a cousin of my mother’s, until such time as some of the high literary polish of that city should be imparted to me.

“Perhaps Rachel Campbell will be given patience to bear with her wild heathen-like ways,” Aunt Jane had said; and my poor mother had answered with a sigh—

“Theo is always good to me, dear Jane; but I dare say you are right, and it will be best for us to go away.”

So my mother and I set out on our long journey, little thinking that we should never see Farquharson’s Ranch again.

Towards the end of our second year in Boston Uncle James died. His horse fell with him, throwing him on his head, and he only lived for a few hours afterwards, never recovering consciousness. He left all his property to my mother and my aunt; and the latter, having sold the ranch, came to live with us in Boston.

My uncle’s death was the first trouble that I had ever known; but in the near future a still greater one awaited me. I was barely twenty-two when my mother’s unexpected death seemed to bring the whole world to a standstill. I do not like to look back to the desolate days which followed. She was all I had in the world to love, and Aunt Jane’s stern, undemonstrative nature would admit me to no fellowship of sorrow.

I dare say it may have been my own fault, but after a time I found the change from my mother’s unexacting governance to Aunt Jane’s rule becoming intolerable.

“Theodora has been quite ruined by poor Helen,” she used, I believe, to say to her friends. “She will do nothing now but what is right in her own eyes. I shudder to think what will become of her.”

Either my aunt’s temper or mine had disimproved with advancing years, and each day I found it harder to avoid a breach of the peace. At length a diatribe upon “the fearful irreverence to my elders which I had learnt in this godless town,” ending with reflections upon my mother’s indulgence, aroused me to angry rejoinder.

I was trying to simmer down in my own room after the encounter, and in my stormy trampings to and fro in that limited apartment, I had twice upset a photograph of a plump and smiling little boy that stood on my table.

“That horrid little Willy Sarsfield!” I said, delighted to find something on which to expend my wrath; “he is always tumbling down!”

The picture had been my mother’s, one which, at her request, had been sent to her by my Uncle Dominick many years before; and as for the second time I picked it up and put it in its place, an idea came to me.

“Why should I not go to Durrus?” I said.

I did not wait for a calmer moment, but, seating myself at the table, I immediately began a letter to my Uncle Dominick. My hand shook from the excitement of my suddenly taken resolution and from a sense of its temerity, but I was at least able to make my meaning clear. I had, I said, since I was a child, longed to visit Durrus, and see my father’s relations; but hitherto this had been impossible to me. Now, however, I was comparatively alone in the world, and if my uncle would allow me to pay him a visit, nothing remained to prevent my doing so.

That evening I told my aunt of the step I had taken. The heat of her altercation with me had not yet died out in her, and, though she was, as she said, beyond measure astounded, her pride did not permit her to remonstrate.

“You can do as you please, Theodora. As your mother did not see fit to leave me the control of your fortune, I do not presume to give an opinion as to your movements. I trust, however, that you may not have cause to regret the headstrong self-will which has made you unable to content yourself in a quiet and God-fearing household.”

During the days of waiting for an answer from my uncle, Aunt Jane preserved the same demeanour of distant disapproval, and I began to feel that to leave her house with the weight of her displeasure still hanging over me, would be a strong measure. The morning at length came on which I tore open an envelope with the Irish post-mark, and read to her the ceremonious letter in which Uncle Dominick intimated his and his son’s great pleasure at the prospect of a visit from me.

“Very good; then I suppose you will start without delay.” Her cold voice quavered unexpectedly at the end of the sentence, and, looking up in astonishment, I saw in her hard grey eyes an unmistakable moisture. “I had no wish to drive you out, Theodora.”

“I know, Aunt Jane,” I broke in, in hasty penitence; “I never thought that for an instant.”

But she hurried away before I could get any further, saying inarticulately, as she left the room, “God bless you, child, wherever you go.”

After this Aunt Jane made no further comment on what had taken place, but we found ourselves on a more friendly footing than we had ever been before; and when I said good-bye to her, I did so with the knowledge that I could always rely on her undemonstrative, but steadfast affection.

This is the history of how, on the 18th of October, 188-, I came to be reclining in a deck chair on board the s.s. Alaska, two hours from Queenstown.

CHAPTER III.
MY COUSIN WILLY.

“Willy’s fair and Willy’s rare,
And Willy’s wondrous bonny.”

“To Miss Sarsfield, s.s. ‘Alaska,’ Queenstown. From W. Sarsfield.

“Awfully sorry I will not be able to meet you. Drive to Foley’s Hotel. Will be waiting you there.”

This despatch was put into my hand before I left the steamer at Queenstown. Its genial tone and eccentric grammar were quite in keeping with my ideas of an Irishman. These were at once simple and definite. All Irishmen were genial; most of them were eccentric. In fact, had my uncle and cousin met me on the pier, clad in knee-breeches and tail-coats, and hailed me with what I believed to be the national salutation “Begorra!” I should scarcely have been taken aback.

The outside car on which I drove from the Cork station to the hotel was also a realization of preconceived ideas. In response to the bewildering proffers of “Inside or outside?” I had selected an “outside,” and was quite satisfied with the genuineness of the difficulty I found in remaining on it, as we rattled through the muddy streets. The carman himself was perhaps a little disappointing. His replies to my questions were not only devoid of that repartee which I had understood to be the attribute of all Irish carmen, but were lacking in common intelligence; and on his replying for the third time, “Faith, I dunno, miss,” I concluded I must have hit on an unlucky exception.

The day had lost none of the brilliancy of the early morning. It seemed to me that the sun shone with a deliberate intention of welcome, and the unfamiliar softness of Irish air was almost intoxicating. Everything was conspiring to put me into the highest spirits, and I only laughed when my new dressing-bag was flung on to the pavement by the dislocating jerk with which the car pulled up in front of Foley’s Hotel.

As I walked into the hotel, the porter who had taken in my boxes, went over to a tall young man who was leaning over the bar at the end of the narrow hall, and whispered something to him. He immediately started from his lounging position, and, furtively glancing at the mirror behind the bar, he came up to me.

“How do you do? I’m very glad to see you over here,” he said, with an evident effort to assume an easy cousinly manner. “I hope you didn’t mind not meeting me. I was awfully sorry I couldn’t get down to Queenstown, but I had important business in town.” It was perhaps a consciousness of the interested scrutiny of the young lady behind the bar that caused him to blush an ingenuous red as he spoke. “You’d better come on and have some luncheon,” he continued, without giving me time to answer him. “We’ve only got an hour before the train starts.”

I followed him into the coffee-room, thinking as I did so how different this well-dressed, rather awkward young man was from the picturesque and vivacious creature I had somehow pictured my Irish cousin to be. His accent, however, was unmistakably that of his native country; or, rather, as I afterwards found, that of his particular part of it. His quick, low way of speaking was at first a little unintelligible to me, and almost gave me the idea that what he said was intended to be of a confidential nature; but on the whole I thought his voice a singularly pleasant one, and listened with interest to its friendly modulations.

By the time our luncheon was put on the table he was more at his ease, and had even, with a sheepish, half-deprecating glance from his light grey eyes, addressed me as “Theo.” The almost fraternal familiarity of the head waiter was, on Willy’s explanation that I was his cousin from America, extended in the fullest degree to me.

“Indeed, when I seen her coming in the door, I remarked to Miss Foley how greatly the young lady favoured the Sarsfield family,” he observed blandly; “and Miss Foley said she considered she had a great likeness to yourself, captain.”

This was a little embarrassing. I did not quite know what I was expected to say, and devoted myself to my mutton-chop.

“I did not know that you were a soldier,” I said, as soon as the waiter had gone.

“Oh, well,” replied my cousin, giving a conscious twist to his yellow moustache, “I’m only a sort of one—what they call ‘a malicious man.’ I’m a captain in the West Cork Artillery Militia,” he explained; “but nobody calls me that but the buckeens hereabouts.”

I wondered silently what a buckeen was, and why it should be so anxious to maintain the prestige of the militia, but did not like to betray too much ignorance of what might be one of the interesting old courtesy titles peculiar to Ireland.

Looking at my cousin as he rapidly devoured his luncheon, I noticed that, in spite of his disclaimer of military rank, he took some pains to cultivate a martial appearance. His straw-coloured hair was clipped with merciless precision, and on his sunburnt forehead, what was evidently a cherished triangle of white marked the limit of protection afforded by an artillery forage cap.

“I think I’d better be looking after your luggage now,” he said, bolting what remained of his second chop, and getting up from the table with his mouth full. “I was quite frightened when I saw those two big mountains of trunks coming along on the car after you. And then when I saw you walk in”—he laughed a pleasant, foolish laugh—“I didn’t think you’d be such a swell!” he ended, with confiding friendliness.

The terminus of the Cork and Moycullen railway, the line by which we were to travel to Durrus, was crowded on that Saturday afternoon. We had ten minutes to spare, during which I sat at the window and watched with the utmost interest the concourse on the platform. It had all the appearance of a large social gathering or conversazione. Stragglers wandered from group to group, showing an equal acquaintance with all, and with apparently entire nonchalance as to the functions of the train, while the guard himself bustled about among them with an interest that was evidently quite unofficial. My carriage soon became thronged with people, between whom and their friends on the platform a constant traffic in brown-paper parcels was carried on; and I was beginning to think there would be no room for Willy, who had disappeared in the crowd. But the ringing of the final bell set my mind at rest.

Contrary to the usual usage, this sound had the effect of almost emptying the train, and, the party in my carriage being reduced to two, I realized that the travellers were left in a minority by those who had come to bid them good-bye.

Willy returned at the last moment, emerging from the centre of a group of young ladies, with the well-pleased air of one whose conversation has been appreciated.

“Did you see those girls I was talking to?” he said, as we moved out of the station. “They are cousins of the O’Neills, people in our part of the world. They came down to see me off. There was a great mob there to-day, but there always is on Saturday.”

“Who are the O’Neills?” I asked, feeling that some response was expected of me.

“They’re neighbours of ours. They live at Clashmore—that’s four miles from us—and they’re very nice people. Nugent, the brother, used to be a great pal of mine—at least, he was till he went to Cambridge, and came back thinking no one fit to speak to but himself.”

Not feeling particularly interested in the O’Neills, I did not pursue the subject; but Willy was full of conversation.

“I’m just after buying a grand little mare in Cork. It was that kept me from going to meet you,” he observed confidentially. “I suppose you learnt to ride at your ranch, Theo? I tell you what! I bought her for the governor, but she’d carry you flying, and you shall hunt her this winter if you like.”

My cousinly feeling for Willy increased perceptibly at this suggestion.

“But,” I said, “if your father buys her, he will want to ride her himself, won’t he?”

“Is it the governor?”—with an intonation of contempt. “You never see him on a horse’s back. He’s always humbugging in the house over papers and books. I believe he used to be a great sportsman and fond of society, but he never goes anywhere now.”

The two ladies who had started from Cork with us had got out a station or two afterwards, and we had the carriage to ourselves. But the extraordinary jolting and rattling of the train were not conducive to conversation, and, seeing that I was not inclined to talk, Willy relapsed into the collar of his ulster and the Cork newspaper, and ended by going unaffectedly to sleep.

It grew slowly darker. I sat watching the endless procession of small fields slipping past the window, until the grey monotony of colour made me dizzy. I leaned back, and, closing my eyes, tried to imagine the life I was going to, and to contrast its probabilities with my past experience. But a strange feeling of remoteness and unreality came upon me. I suppose that the mental exhaustion caused by so many new sights and impressions had dazed me, and I began to doubt that such a person as Theo Sarsfield had ever really existed. Willy, my Uncle Dominick, and my father flitted confusedly through my mind as inconsequently as people in a dream. I myself seemed to have lost touch with the world; my past life had slid away from me, and the future I had not yet grasped. I was a solitary and aimless unit in the dark whirl that surrounded me, and the sleeping figure at the opposite end of the carriage was a trick of imagination, and as unreal as I. I became more and more remote from things actual, and finally fell from all consciousness into a sleep as sound as Willy’s.

My slumbers were at length penetrated by a shriek from the engine. I sat up, and saw that Willy was taking down his parcels from the rack; and in another minute we were in the little station of Moycullen.

A hat with a cockade appeared at the window.

“Hullo, Mick. Is it the dog-cart they’ve sent?”

“’Tis the shut carriage, Masther Willy,” said Mick; “and ’tis waiting without in the street.”

With some difficulty I followed Mick through the crowd of carts in the station yard, to where a landau and pair were standing in the road. The moonlight was bright enough for me to see the fine shapes of the big brown horses, who were evincing so lively an interest in the movements of the engine that the coachman had plenty to do to keep them quiet.

“You’re welcome, miss,” said that functionary, touching his hat; and I got into the carriage, followed by Willy, with the usual number of impedimenta that appear necessary to male travelling youth.

“It’s a good long drive,” he said, arranging rugs over our knees—“twelve Irish miles. But we won’t be very long getting there. You won’t have time to be tired of me—I hope not, anyhow.”

This was more like my idea of the typical Irishman, but was, nevertheless, rather discomposing from a comparative stranger. It was said, moreover, with a certain conquering air, which plainly showed that Willy was not accustomed to being found a bore. I could think of no very effective reply, so I laughed vaguely, and said I hoped I should not.

We had been driving at a good pace for about an hour, when we left the high-road and began the ascent of a long steep hill. At the top the carriage turned a sharp corner, and I saw below me, on my right, a great sheet of water all alight with the misty splendour of a full moon. Black points of land cut their way into the expanse of mellow silver, and the small islands were scattered like blots upon it.

“That’s Roaring Water Bay,” said Willy; “and that mountain over there’s called Croagh Keenan”—pointing to a shadowy mass that formed the western limit of the bay. “You haven’t anything to beat that in America, I’ll bet!” An assertion which I refrained from combatting.

Our road now lay for a mile or two along the top of a hill overlooking the bay, and though Willy had done his best to make himself agreeable, I was tired enough to be extremely glad when the carriage swung sharply between high gate-posts, and we entered the avenue of Durrus.

As we passed the lodge, I caught, in the moonlight, a glimpse of the pretty face of a girl who opened the gates, and asked who she was.

“She’s the lodgekeeper’s daughter,” said my cousin.

“She looked very pretty.”

“Yes, she’s not bad looking,” he said indifferently. “There are plenty of good-looking girls in these parts.”

The drive sloped down through a park to the level of a turf bog, which it skirted for some distance, and then entered a thick clump of trees, through which the moonlight only penetrated sufficiently to let me see that they were growing in a species of reedy swamp, from which, on this cold night, a low frosty mist was rising. We were soon out again into the moonlight, the horses quickening up as they came near their journey’s end. I saw a sudden gleam of sea in front, and on the left a long, low house, looking wan and ghostly in the moonlight.

CHAPTER IV.
THE MASTER OF DURRUS.

“My father’s brother; but no more like my father than I to Hercules.”

As the carriage drew up at the hall door it was opened by a stout elderly man, who came forward with such empressement that for a moment I thought it was my uncle. Before, however, I had time to speak, he said with much excitement—

“Your honour’s welcome, Miss Sarsfield!”

Willy checked further remark on his part by shovelling our many parcels into his arms; but as soon as we had got into the hall, he let them all go, and caught hold of my hand and kissed it.

“Glory be to God that I should have lived to see this day! I never thought I’d be bringing Masther Owen’s child into this house. Thank God! thank God!”

“Come, Roche, that will do for a start,” said Willy, laughing. “Keep the rest for another day. Here’s the master.”

Roche hastily let go my hand, as a tall bowed figure came across the hall to meet me.

“Well, my dear Theodora, so you have found your way at last to these western wilds,” said my uncle, and kissed me on the forehead, taking both my hands in his as he did so.

His manner was an extreme contrast to Willy’s affable familiarity, and I was struck by the absence of Irish accent in his voice, which had a mellifluous propriety of intonation.

He led me into the room he had just left, a small library, and placed a chair for me in front of the fireplace.

“You must be cold after your long journey. Sit down and warm yourself,” he said politely, adding another log to the furnace that was blazing in the old brass-mounted grate.

He rubbed his long white hands together and drew back, so as to let the light of the lamp fall on my face.

“And your—a—relatives in America—you left them quite well, I hope? I dare say they resent your desertion of them very bitterly?” He laughed a little.

I made some perfunctory reply, and sat warming one frozen foot after the other, while my uncle stood with his back to the lamp, and surveyed me with guarded intentness.

I had expected him to be perhaps formal, in an old-world, courteous way; but this strained and glacial geniality was a very different thing, and disconcerted me considerably.

“How unlike he is to Willy! I wish he would not stare at me like that. I don’t think he is a bit glad to see me,” I thought, with hasty inconsequence. “Why does he not speak? Well, I will,” and I made an ordinary remark about my journey. My voice seemed to startle him from a reverie. He put his hand to his eyes, and made some alteration in the lamp before replying.

It was a distinct relief when, at this juncture, Willy came in, and offered to show me the way to my room. We passed through the dark entrance-hall, whose depths were inadequately lighted by a cheap lamp, its orange light forming a dingy halo that contended hopelessly with the surrounding gloom. At the end of the hall was a broad flight of stairs, that at the first landing branched into two narrower flights leading to a corridor running round the hall. Passing along one side of this corridor, Willy opened a door at the end of it.

“Here you are,” he said; “and I told them to bring you up a cup of tea; I thought you looked as if you wanted it”—with which he took his departure.

I was grateful for Willy’s unexpected thoughtfulness in the matter of the tea. My uncle’s reception had chilled me. I was tired by my long journey, and the darkness and silence of the house had a depressing effect upon my spirits. For weeks this arrival at Durrus had been constantly in my mind, and now that it was over, the only definite emotions it seemed to have produced were disappointment and dejection.

I looked round me as I sipped my tea, and did not feel enlivened by what I saw. The room was large and bare. The paper and the curtains of the two windows were alike detestable in colour and pattern. The enormous bed had once been a four-poster, but the posts had been cut down, and four meaningless stumps bore witness to the mutilation it had undergone. A colossal wardrobe loomed in a far-off corner; a round table of preposterous size occupied the centre of the room. Six persons could comfortably have dined at the dressing-table. In fact, the whole room appeared to have been fitted up for the reception of a giantess, and was quite out of proportion to my moderate stature of five feet seven.

I have always disliked more than one door in a bedroom, as it seems to me to afford to ghosts and burglars unnecessary facilities; and my dislike of my gaunt apartment reached its climax when I saw a door in the corner on the farther side of the fireplace from the door into the corridor. It had been papered over along with the walls, and its consequent unobtrusiveness had almost the effect of intentional concealment. I opened it, and found that it led into a moderate-sized bedroom. The moonlight which came through the uncurtained window lay in greenish-white patches on the uncarpeted floor, and showed a few pieces of furniture, shrouded in sheets and huddled in one corner. In spite of its chill bareness, an effect of recent occupancy was given to it by a chair that stood sideways in the window with an air of definiteness, and underneath and beside it I noticed a few tattered books.

I went back to my own room with an unexplainable shudder, slamming the door behind me, and proceeded to dress for dinner with all speed.

With the unfailing punctuality of a newcomer, I left my room as the gong sounded, and, hurrying down, found my uncle and Willy waiting for me in the library.

The dining-room was a large and imposing room. A moderate number of portraits of the most orthodox ancestral type hung, interspersed with mezzotints of impassioned Irish clergymen, on its panelled walls. A high old sideboard of what seemed to me an unusual shape stretched up to the ceiling on one side of the room, and the plate upon it twinkled in the blaze of the fire.

We sat down at the long table; and while Willy and his father were absorbed in overcoming the usual embarrassments offered by soup to the wearers of moustaches, I amused myself with speculations as to who was responsible for the subtle combination of yellow and magenta dahlias that adorned the table. I concluded that the artist must have been the old butler, Roche; and as, at the thought, I involuntarily looked towards him, I found his eyes fixed upon me with the abstracted gaze of one who is trying to trace a likeness. Our eyes met, and he shuffled away, but I felt sure that he had been searching for a resemblance to the refined, well-cut, humorous face which, from a miniature of thirty years ago, I knew must be what he remembered of my father.

“It is quite an unusual pleasure to Willy and me to see a charming young lady at our bachelor-table—eh, Willy?” said Uncle Dominick, lifting his face from his now empty soup-plate, and smiling at me.

Willy, whose flow of language seemed checked by his father’s presence, gave an assenting grunt.

“It is a long time since there has been a Miss Sarsfield at Durrus, and it is thirty years since she died. You will find Willy and I are sad barbarians, and we shall have to trust to you to civilize us.”

I am singularly unfitted to deal with the compliments of elderly gentlemen. On this occasion I failed as signally as usual to attain the requisite quality of playful confusion, and diverted the conversation by a question about a claret-coloured ancestor, who had been staring at me from his frame over the fireplace ever since we had sat down to dinner.

“That is my grandfather,” said my uncle. “Dick the Drinker, they called him. He neither is nor was an ornament to the family; but his wife, the beautiful Kate Coppinger, is worth looking at. In fact, my dear”—with another smile and a little bow—“directly I saw you I was reminded of a miniature which we have of her.”

“I hope she looks Irish,” I responded. “I have always tried to live up to my idea of an Irish girl; but though my hair is dark, I haven’t got violet eyes.”

“No, nor any one else either. I never heard of them out of a book,” said Willy, abruptly.

It was almost his first contribution to the conversation; but his father took no more notice of him than if he had not spoken, and went on eating his dinner, taking longer over each mouthful than any one I had ever seen.

“Then, am I not like the Sarsfields?” I asked.

My uncle paused and looked hard at me for a second or two, letting his heavy eyebrows drop over his eyes, with a peculiar change of expression.

“In some ways, perhaps,” he said shortly. Then, turning to Willy, “Nugent O’Neill was here this afternoon to see you about the stopping of some earths. I told him to come over and dine here some day next week. Not”—turning to me—“that he is much of a ladies’ man, but he is a gentlemanlike young fellow enough; very unlike his father,” he added, in a bitter tone.

“Why, is Mr. O’Neill very objectionable?” I said.

I felt an unmistakable kick under the table, and Willy, with an admonitory wink, slurred over my question by saying—

“I can tell you, O’Neill would be pretty mad if he heard you calling him Mr. He’s The O’Neill, and his wife’s Madam O’Neill, and they wouldn’t call the queen their cousin.”

My uncle silently continued his dinner, but I noticed how unpleasant his expression had become since The O’Neill was mentioned.

I finally made up my mind that his face was one I should never care for. He was decidedly a handsome man, though unusually old-looking for his age, which could not have been more than sixty.

His thick dark eyebrows lay like a bar across his high forehead. A long hooked nose drooped over an iron-grey moustache, which, when he smiled, lifted in a peculiar way, and showed long and slightly prominent yellow teeth. His unwholesomely pallid skin was deeply lined, and hung in folds under the dark sunken eyes, giving a look of age which was further contributed to by the stoop in his square shoulders. As I glanced from him to Willy, I concluded that the latter’s blonde commonplace good looks must have been inherited from his mother.

Rousing himself from the morose silence into which he had fallen, my uncle proceeded to apply himself to the task of entertaining me by a dissertation on the trade and agriculture of California. I soon found that he had all the desire to impart information which characterizes those whose knowledge of a subject is taken from pamphlets; but I listened with all politeness to his description of the country in which I had lived most of my life. Willy maintained a discreet silence, but from time to time bestowed on me glances of sympathy and approbation. Evidently Willy did not know how to talk to his father.

As dinner progressed, I observed that, if Roche allowed his master’s glass to remain empty, he was at once given a sign to refill it, and my uncle became more and more diffusely instructive.

During dessert a pause at length gave me an opportunity of changing the conversation.

“I saw such a pretty girl at your gate lodge as we drove in,” I said. “She looked delightful in the moonlight, with a shawl thrown over her head.”

If Uncle Dominick had looked black at the mention of The O’Neill, he became doubly so at this apparently inoffensive remark. Glancing for explanation to Willy, I was amazed to see that he had become crimson, and was elaborately trying to show his want of interest in the subject by balancing a fork on the edge of his wine-glass.

“Yes,” said my uncle; “she is a good-looking girl enough, and no one knows it better than she does. When people in that class of life are taken out of their proper place”—with great severity—“they at once begin to presume.”

Willy upset his wine-glass with a sudden jerk. For my part, I was so taken aback by this tirade, that I thought my safest plan lay in immediate flight. Willy got up with alacrity, and, following me from the room, opened the drawing-room door. He looked confused and annoyed.

“Can you take care of yourself in there for a while?” he said. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

CHAPTER V.
IMPRESSIONS

“Groping in the windy stair,
Darkness and the breath of space
Like loud waters everywhere.”

The room was cold, and I at once made for the fire, and, to my surprise, found the hearthrug occupied by an untidy little girl, who was engaged in dropping grease from a candle over the coals to make them burn. On seeing me she sprang to her feet, and, with semi-articulate apologetic murmurs, she gathered up a coal-box and retired in confusion.

I concluded that, improbable as it appeared, this was the under-housemaid, and reflected with some astonishment on the incongruities of the Durrus establishment. However, I afterwards found she held no official position, but was a satellite of the under-housemaid’s, privately imported by her as a species of body-servant or slave. In fact, at the risk of digressing, I may here add that in process of time I discovered that the illicit apprenticeship of a young relation was a common custom of the Durrus servants, and in the labyrinthine remoteness of the servants’ quarters they could be concealed without fear of attracting the master’s eye.

In spite of its top dressing of grease, the fire was not a tempting one to sit over, and I roamed round the large ill-lighted room, taking in with leisurely wonderment the style of its decorations. It was, in startling contrast to the rest of the house, painted and papered in semi-aesthetic hues, pale sage-green and pink being the prevailing colours. This innovation of culture had not, however, extended itself to the furniture, which was of the solidly ugly type prevalent fifty years ago.

Heavy mahogany tables, each duly set forth with books and daguerrotypes, stood inconveniently about, causing a congestion among the lesser furniture. The pictures, which had been taken down at the repapering of the room, leaned against the wall with their faces inwards. I turned one of the nearest to me, expecting to come upon a family portrait, but found it represented a Turk of truculent aspect, worked in Berlin wool—a testimony to the amount of spare time at the disposal of the ladies of Durrus. The thick coating of dust on my fingers which was the result of this investigation did not encourage me to make any further researches, and an examination of the old china on the marble cheffonier between the windows had equally disastrous results. In one corner there was an ancient grand piano, which to my astonishment proved to be in good tune. I had not been playing for very long when Willy came in, and, without speaking, placed himself beside me.

“Well, I declare!” he said, as I finished playing one of Schubert’s impromptus, “it’s a long time since I heard that old piano. I got it tuned the other day on purpose for you, and you know how to knock sparks out of it, anyhow! I heard Henrietta O’Neill playing that piece once, and it didn’t sound half so well—though, I can tell you, she thinks no end of herself.”

“By-the-by, Willy, why did you stop me when I began to speak of Mr. O’Neill?”

“O’Neill,” corrected Willy.

“Oh, well, O’Neill,” I said peevishly. “But what was the harm of talking about him?”

“No harm, as far as I am concerned, but the governor hates him like poison. I believe they had some row in my grand-father’s time—I don’t know exactly what-and they never made it up since. But there’s no regular quarrel; I go to all their parties, and I think the governor rather likes Nugent and the girls.”

“What is Madam O’Neill like?”

“Oh, I get along with her first-rate,” said Willy, stretching out one of his long legs, and serenely studying the gold-embroidered clock on his sock. “But other people say she’s rather a bitter old pill; and I can tell you, she has the two girls in great order!”

I began to play as he finished speaking; but his thoughts had travelled on to my other unlucky remark at dinner, for he presently interrupted me by saying in an uncertain way—

“Oh! you know that girl we were talking of at dinner, the one you saw at the gate—Anstice Brian her name is—her mother is a bit queer in her head, and she’d be very apt to give you a start if you didn’t know her ways. She’s a harmless poor creature, but she wanders about these bright nights, and she gets into the house sometimes.”

I probably looked as alarmed as I felt, for he laughed protectingly, and, drawing his chair a little closer to mine, said reassuringly—

“Never fear! She’s not half as silly as they say; and do you think I’d let her be about if there was any chance at all of her frightening you?”

“What is she like? Is she an old woman?”—ignoring the reproachful warmth of this last observation.

“Is it old Moll Hourihane? She’s as old as two men—or she looks it, anyhow. She used to be my nurse till she went off her head.”

“I thought you said her name was Brian,” I said.

“That’s only her husband’s name. The women mostly stick to their own names in this country when they’re married.”

“And you’re quite sure she’s not dangerous?” I said, feeling only half reassured.

“No more than I am myself”—with a glance to see if I were going to contradict this assertion. “She has a sort of dumb madness—like a hound, you know—and she’ll never speak; though I dare say after all that’s no great loss,” he concluded.

I was by this time feeling very sleepy, and hoping I should soon be able to escape to my own room, when the door opened, and my uncle came solemnly in.

“I have come, Theodora, my dear, to suggest an early retirement on your part.”

He avoided looking at Willy, and I felt that the effects of my ill-timed remarks at dinner had not yet died out. He looked haggard and troubled, and a sudden pity and sense of kinship impelled me to raise my cheek towards him as he took my hand to say good night. He stooped his head as if to kiss me, but checked himself, and after an instant of hesitation his moustache touched my forehead.

There was something repelling in his manner, but I felt that he was not unconscious of the sympathy I had intended to express. He turned and left the room, and I heard him go back to the library and shut himself in, the sound of the closing door emphasizing his solitariness.

I went upstairs with the feeling of isolation again strongly upon me. The wind had risen, and on the walls of the draughty corridor each gust made the old pictures shake in their mouldering frames. At intervals, through the panes of the large skylight overhead, the moon’s light dropped in pale wavering squares on the floor of the hall below. I leaned over the balustrades watching the spectral alternations of light and darkness, as the clouds swept across the moon, till the objects beneath me seemed to take intermitting motion from the flitting of the moonbeams.

As I looked, the dim lamp in the hall flickered and went out. A gust from below circled round the corridor, lifting the hair upon my forehead and almost extinguishing my candle as it passed me.

Perhaps I was overtired and nervous, but a causeless fear possessed me—the old unreasoning dread of some vague pursuit out of the darkness, that I had not felt since I was a child. I gave a terrified glance over my shoulder at the swaying pictures, and then, shielding my candle with my hand, I ignominiously ran down the corridor into my own room.

CHAPTER VI.
AN IRISH SUNDAY.

“In Islington there was a man,
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran,
Whene’er he went to pray.”

“Will you have your tay, plase, miss?”

The words at first mingled with the dreams which had all night disturbed my sleep. On being repeated, the unfamiliar accent, accompanied by the clink of a cup and saucer, made me open my eyes. A pleasant-looking, red-haired girl was standing by my bed, tray in hand.

“You’re after having a great sleep, miss. I was twice here before, and there wasn’t a stir out of you.”

“Is it very late?” I asked, with an alarming recollection of my uncle’s punctuality.

“Oh, not at all, miss. The masther’s only just after having his breakfast.”

“What!” I gasped. “You should have called me earlier.”

“Oh, there’s no hurry, miss! Sure he always ates his breakfast by himself, and there’s no sayin’ how late it’ll be before Masther Willy’s down.”

Calmed by this assurance, I did not hurry myself over my dressing, but from time to time stopped to look at the view from my windows.

It was a quiet October day, with a grey yet luminous sky, that lit with a grave radiance the group of yellow elms that divided the avenue from a heathery expanse of turf-bog, with low hills beyond. From the other window, which was almost over the hall door, I could see to the left a dark belt of trees that went round to the back of the house; and in front, at the foot of the lawn, the curve of a little bay. This was separated from the larger waters of Durrusmore Harbour by a low promontory, along whose ridge a meagre line of fir trees was etched against the grey sky. Leaning out of the window, and looking westwards towards the mouth of the harbour, I saw the Atlantic lying broad and white under the light of the soft clear morning.

I went downstairs, and as I passed along the corridor, I felt, even on this still day, the air circulating freely through broken panes in the skylight and the staircase window, making it easy to account for the ghostly eddyings of the wind the night before.

Willy had apparently made an effort on my behalf at early rising, and I found him making tea when I came into the dining-room. He came forward to meet me with a complacency in which I detected a consciousness of the added smartness of his Sunday attire; and, having satisfactorily ascertained the fact that I had slept well, he installed me behind the urn to pour out the superfluously strong tea which he had just brewed.

I experienced undeniable relief in the absence of Uncle Dominick, whom at this moment I saw pacing up and down a walk leading from the house to the sea. Willy saw the direction of my eyes.

“I hope you’re not insulted by only me breakfasting with you,” he said, with ungrammatical gallantry. “You can breakfast with the governor whenever you like, but you will have to be down at eight o’clock to do that!”

I intimated with fitting politeness that I was satisfied with the present arrangement, and we began our tête-à-tête meal in great amity. Willy, indeed, was an excellent host. He plied me with everything on the table, eating his own breakfast and talking all the time with unaffected zest and vigour, and I began to feel as if the time I had known him could be reckoned in months instead of hours.

The necessity of writing to announce my safe arrival to Aunt Jane was one that had already forced itself upon my notice.

“I thought you’d be wanting to write a letter,” Willy said, conducting me into the drawing-room after breakfast, “and I got the place ready for you.”

I sat down at the old-fashioned writing-table, and found that he had anticipated my wants with a lavish hand. Through the window I saw him, a few minutes afterwards, sauntering down the drive towards the lodge, smoking a cigarette, with two little white dogs flashing in circles round him; and as I watched him, I came to the conclusion that at first sight I had underestimated my cousin.

There was something to me half amusing and half touching in the anxiety of his little housewifely attentions to me. He was really unusually thoughtful for others; from various things he had said, it was evident that his father had allowed the whole management of the place to devolve on him, and I fell to idle speculation as to whether he ordered dinner, and if he were particular about the housemaids wearing white muslin caps; and I was only aroused from these, and other equally interesting reflections by hearing the clock strike the hour at which I had been warned I must get ready for church.

My uncle was standing on the steps, with his Prayer-book in his hand, when I came downstairs. He wished me good morning, with a polite apology for not having met me at breakfast, and stood looking about him, with eyelids narrowed by the white glare from the sea, till a minute afterwards the wagonnette in which we were going to church came to the door. My uncle and I got in behind; while Willy, with Mick by his side, sat on the box and drove. Once outside the gate, we took a road running at right angles to that by which I had arrived. It went round the head of Durrusmore Harbour, and, leaving the sea behind, turned inland through large woods, which my uncle told me were part of the demesne of Clashmore, The O’Neill’s place.

The road was level, and soft with the fallen red beech leaves, and the brown horses took us along it at a pace that showed they were none the worse for their journey the night before. The rough stone walls on either side of the road were covered with moss and small ferns. Here and there the wood was pierced by narrow rides—vistas in which the clumps of withering bracken repeated the brown and gold of the trees above.

“We’re going to draw this place on Friday,” said Willy, pausing in the steady flow of his conversation with Mick to give me the information. “Blackthorn will carry Miss Theo right enough, wouldn’t he, Mick? and I’ll ride the new mare.”

The village of Rathbarry, which we had now entered, consisted of a single street of low, dirty-looking cottages, their squalid uniformity varied at frequent intervals by the more prosperous shuttered face of a public-house. At the end of the street, a gateway led into a graveyard, surrounded by ill-thriven elm trees, in the middle of which stood the church. It was an ugly, oblong building, with a square tower at the west end, from which proceeded a clanging as of a cracked basin battered with a spoon.

“We’re in good time,” said Willy, drawing up with a flourish before the porch. “That’s the hurry-bell only begun now, so we’ve five minutes to spare. Look, Theo! there’s the Clashmore carriage. Did you ever see such brutes as those chestnuts?”

Before, however, I had time to reply, Uncle Dominick hurried me into the church, and we took our places in opposite corners of a singularly uncomfortable square pew. As we sat confronting each other in the half-empty church, we heard in the porch Willy’s voice raised in agreeable converse. Apparently his remarks were of a complimentary sort, for a girl’s voice rejoined, “Oh, nonsense, Willy!” with a laugh.

“Disgraceful!” muttered my uncle, under his breath; and the next moment three ladies swept up the aisle, followed by Willy, on whose face still beamed a slightly fatuous smile.

He immediately sat down beside me, and in a rapid whisper instructed me as to the more prominent members of the congregation.

“Those are the O’Neills”—indicating the ladies he had come in with. “Connie’s the little fair one. And look! those are the Jackson Crolys! You’d better sit up and behave, as they’ll be watching you all the time. I know they all want to see what you’re like!”

“Hush! don’t talk!” I whispered back. “Here’s the clergyman.”

The service was very long. The music, which consisted of the clergyman’s daughter accompanying herself on a harmonium, with casual vocal assistance from a couple of school-children, was of an unexhilarating kind. Willy fidgeted, admired his boots, trimmed his nails, and tried to utilize every possible opening for conversation. Uncle Dominick, on the contrary, devoted his whole attention to the service, and answered all the responses with austere punctiliousness, even going so far as to try and track the clergyman’s daughter in her devious course through the hymns.

From the corner which had been allotted to me in my uncle’s pew I could not see the clergyman, and, though his voice resounded through the church, his very pronounced Cork accent made it difficult for me to understand more than a word here and there in his discourse.

The high sides of the pew debarred me from even the solace of inspecting the congregation, and, in the absence of other occupation, I could not altogether conceal the interest that I felt in the remark which Willy was laboriously spelling on his fingers for my edification. Becoming conscious, however, that Uncle Dominick’s eye, while fixed upon the preacher, had included us in its observations, I transferred my attention to the mural tablets, which on either side of the church set forth the perfections of dead-and-gone O’Neills and Sarsfields.

Having studied these for a few minutes with the mild sceptical interest usually excited by the tabulated virtues of the unknown departed, I leaned back in my corner, and, in doing so, noticed a brass upon the wall slightly behind my uncle’s seat. My eye was immediately caught by my father’s name.

IN MEMORIAM.
THEODORE WILLIAM SARSFIELD,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
JANUARY 10, 185-.
AND OF
OWEN SARSFIELD,
SON OF THE ABOVE,
WHO DIED SUDDENLY IN CORK,
ON HIS RETURN FROM AMERICA,
JANUARY 9, 185-.
————
THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY THEIR SORROWING SON
AND BROTHER, DOMINICK SARSFIELD, OF DURRUS.

I glanced by a natural transition to my uncle, whose head all but intervened between me and the brass. His expression of sombre melancholy harmonized well with the words “his sorrowing brother.”

I could guess what must have been his grief at the death of an only brother, from whom he had been perforce alienated. Till then I had scarcely realized how closely linked their lives must once have been, and I resolved that his chilly manner should not deter me from some day inducing him to speak to me of my father.

As I made up my mind to this, the clergyman’s voice ceased, and the congregation rose at the end of the sermon. We walked out of church close behind the O’Neills, and outside the porch Madam O’Neill stopped to shake hands with my uncle. Then, turning to me—

“I need not ask to be introduced to you, my dear. I knew your poor father very well indeed in days gone by.” This was said in a dry attenuated voice, but through the elaborate pattern of her Maltese lace veil, her eyes looked kindly at me. She was small and refined looking, with little artificial airs and graces which told that she had been a beauty in her day; and what remained of a delicate complexion was carefully sheltered from the harmless light of the grey sky by a thick parasol.

Uncle Dominick’s impatience to get away only gave me time to say a word or two in answer to her salutation.

“Come, Theodora,” he said, with the smile that lifted his moustache and showed all his teeth. “We must not keep the horses waiting;” and bidding the madam and her two daughters, who had been standing behind her, good-bye, he led the way down to the gate.

Willy was already on the box of the wagonnette, and was talking to a dark, quiet-looking young man who was standing with one foot on the wheel.

“Then you’ll see about having those earths stopped,” Willy said, leaning over, and emphasizing what he was saying with the handle of the whip on his hearer’s shoulder. “Oh, here they are! Theo, let me introduce Mr. O’Neill. I was just telling him he must be sure and have a fox for you at Clashmore this week.”

“I shall do my best,” said Mr. O’Neill, as he took off his hat; but he did not look particularly enthusiastic as he spoke.

We had no sooner driven off, than Willy twisted round on the box to speak to me.

“Well, what do you think of Nugent?” he said rather eagerly.

“He is nice looking,” I replied critically; “but I do not like his expression. I cannot say he is what I should call either cheerful or agreeable looking.”

“Oh, he’s not half a bad chap,” said Willy, with a leniency which was possibly the result of the pleasure with which young men listen to the depreciation of their fellows. “He’s jolly enough sometimes; but he can put on a bit of side when he likes, and I dare say he thinks he is thrown away down here. Henrietta’s like him in that sort of way, but Connie has no nonsense about her.”

I decided that Connie’s was the laugh that I had heard in the porch before service, and thought that of the two I should be more likely to prefer Henrietta.

Ever since we had left church the sky had been darkening, and when we reached Durrusmore Harbour, the distant headlands were almost hidden in a white mist. The south-west wind blew it towards us from the sea, and by the time we got home a thick fine rain was coming steadily down.

Lunch, with Uncle Dominick at the head of the table, was a more serious business than breakfast had been, and old Roche’s shuffling ministrations added to the general solemnity. I was, however, amused by the affectionate solicitude with which he nudged me in the elbow with the dish of potatoes, indicating with his thumb a specially floury one, and concluded that this was the singular method he took of showing that his regard for my father had extended itself to me.

When lunch was over Willy announced his intention of walking to Clashmore, to see about borrowing a side-saddle for me, he said—an act of self-sacrifice which I was not slow to attribute to the fascinations of Miss Connie O’Neill. Uncle Dominick retired to a private den at the end of a dark passage leading from the hall to the back of the house; and a few minutes later, Willy, in a voluminous mackintosh, set forth on his errand, followed by the fox terriers in a state of amiable frenzy, the result of the abhorred Sunday morning incarceration. I became aware that I was thrown upon my own resources, and, with the prospect of a wet afternoon before me, I felt my spirits sinking perceptibly.

To finish my letter to Aunt Jane was at least better than doing nothing. I took up a strong position in front of the library fire, and disconsolately applied myself to filling the big sheet of foreign paper on which I had embarked in the morning.

CHAPTER VII.
MOLL.

“Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!”

Willy did not come home till dinner-time, when he reappeared in exceedingly good humour. I, on the contrary, felt the vague ill-temper of a person who has spent a wet Sunday afternoon in solitude, and I found dinner long and dull. In the drawing-room after dinner, I sought the resource of music to raise my spirits; but I was debarred from even this last consolation, for Willy implored me to “let the piano alone,” as his father disapproved of music on Sunday.

We finally settled down in armchairs by the fire, and I discovered that Willy possessed in a high degree the feminine faculty of sitting over a fire and talking about nothing in particular. He pretended to no superiority to the minor gossip which forms the ripples in the current of country life, and he had quite a special gift of recounting small facts with accuracy and detail, and without any endeavour to exalt his talent as a story-teller. His tales had, in consequence, a certain intrinsic freshness and merit, and till bedtime we maintained a desultory, but on the whole interesting conversation.

When I got up to my room, I found it full of smoke and extremely cold. The window had been opened to let out the smoke, and the chintz curtains rustled and flapped in the draught. Making up my mind after a few minutes that even turf smoke was preferable to the cold disquiet of the wind, I went to the window to close it, and noticed with a good deal of amusement that, the pulley being broken, the housemaid had supported the sash with one of my brushes.

There was something in this misplaced ingenuity which was eminently characteristic of the slipshod manner of life at Durrus, and by force of contrast my thoughts travelled back to my mother’s orderly household. I leaned against the shutter and looked out, beset by poignant recollections of a time when life without my mother seemed an impossibility, and when Durrus was no more to me than a place in a fairy story.

The wind had blown away most of the fog, and the rain had ceased, but a thin haze still blunted the keenness of the moonlight. I gazed at the dark shapes of the trees in the shrubbery till I lost the sense of their reality, and they came and went like dreams in the uncertain light. In my ears was still the throb and tremor which seven days and nights spent in listening to the screw of the Alaska had imprinted on my brain, and my thoughts and surroundings seemed alike hurrying on in time to its pulsations. I was at length roused to realities by a sound which at first seemed part of the light chafing of the laurel leaves, but which in a few moments became detached and distinct from the vague noises of the autumn night.

It came nearer, and gave the impression of some stealthy advance in the wet grass under the trees. At length, at the verge of their shadow, just opposite my window, I heard the gravel crunch under a soft footstep. The next instant a woman’s figure slid into the dim light, and came out across the broad gravel sweep with a rhythmical swaying gait, as though moving to music.

Half-way to the house she stopped, and, raising her arms above her head with a wild gesture, she began to step to and fro with jaunty liftings and bendings of her body, as though she were taking part in a dance. Backwards and forwards she paced with measured precision; then, placing her hands on her hips, she danced with fantastic lightness and vigour some steps of an Irish jig. Suddenly, however, she checked herself; she knelt down, and, turning a pale face to the sky, she crossed her hands on her breast and remained motionless.

Her absolute stillness had in it an intensity almost more dreadful than the strange movements she had previously gone through, and I stood staring in inert terror at the grey kneeling figure, with a face as white as that which was still turned rigidly skywards in what appeared to be the extremity of supplication. Just then the moon shone sharply out, hardening and fixing in a moment the limits of light and darkness, and, as if with a sudden movement, it flung the shadow of the praying woman on the ground before her. She started, and slowly rose to her feet, and, with her hands still crossed on her bosom, turned her face towards me. I saw the moonlight glisten in her wide-open eyes, which were fixed, not on me, but on the window of the room next to mine. Then opening her arms wide, she let them fall to her side with an extravagant obeisance, and sidled back into the impenetrable shadow of the trees.

There was I know not what unearthly suggestion about this weird dance and agonized devotion, that seemed to paralyze my mind, and render it incapable of any thought except fear. I stood bewilderedly looking at the spot where the darkness had swallowed up her figure; but before I had time to collect my ideas, she reappeared at a little distance, and, as well as I could see, turned up a path which led through the shrubbery in the direction of the lodge.

As she passed out of sight, I suddenly remembered what Willy had said to me about Anstey’s half-witted mother. This strange dancer was, then, no ghost nor dream-creature, sent on a special errand to me, as I had first feared, and then, with returning courage, had almost hoped might be the case.

She was only “old Moll Hourihane.” It was a simple explanation, and perhaps a humiliating one; but, in spite of my anxiety to possess a ghost-story of my own, I accepted it with relief. I shut the window and locked my door, and, though still trembling all over with cold and excitement, I went to bed, thankful that “Mad Moll” had introduced herself to me from without, instead of first appearing to me within the walls of Durrus.