Hungry Hill (37 page)

He got up, and looked for the last time about the room. He touched the piano that was hers, the keys where her fingers had rested. He went over to her desk and saw the neatness of it, the stack of smooth white paper, the little scarlet pen. He wanted something of hers to take with him, and on a sudden impulse he picked up the small black leather volume that was lying on the top of the desk. It was a copy of the New Testament. He put it in his pocket, and going out into the hall, he lifted his coat and his hat from the chair where Thomas had placed them. The hall was deserted. Thomas had gone back to the kitchen.

The grandfather clock ticked slowly in its corner.

It was five minutes to nine. Two hours before the pilot boat would return to the ship. Johnnie opened the front door and again stood looking up and down the empty street. There were other places in Slane where there would be warmth and comfort, places where he might forget the dark, dreary cabin of the Princess Victoria and the grim finality of the labels on his luggage, “Captain John Brodrick. Destination London.” A little wind blew round the corner of the street, and the door of Henry’s house shut behind him with a slam. Farewell to Slane. Farewell to his country. Johnnie laughed, thinking once more of Aunt Eliza’s letter, and turning his coat collar up against the wind, and pulling his hat over his eyes, he began to walk up the street towards the city.

It was to East Grove that the police came, two days afterwards. They arrived while Henry and Katherine were having breakfast, and the inspector asked to speak privately to Mr. Brodrick. Henry came out into the hall immediately, leaving Katherine in the dining-room.

“You are a relative, I believe, sir, of Captain Brodrick?” said the man.

“I am his brother,” said Henry. “Is anything the matter?”

The inspector explained to him, in brief words, what had happened. Henry went with him at once.

They were narrow and dark and not of great attraction, the back streets of Slane, and the house to which the inspector brought him was grey, with a cheap, garish look about the beaded curtains at the window. A frightened-faced woman was waiting for them in the hall.

“It’s not my fault,” she began, on sight of Henry. “I’ve never had anything happen in my house like this before, and you know it, Mr. Sweeny. You can’t get me into trouble about it.”

Her voice was shrill and nervous. The inspector bade her hold her tongue. He led Henry upstairs to a bedroom on the second floor, and taking a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door. The room was in disorder. Johnnie’s boots were in one corner, his clothes in another. There were some half-dozen empty whisky bottles, balanced with great nicety, one on top of the other, in the middle of the floor, and round the neck of the highest was a woman’s garter, crimson in colour, made of shabby silk. Johnnie himself lay on the bed, half-dressed. He looked in death more peaceful than he had ever done in life. The sullen, angry expression had gone for ever. His eyes were closed, as though he slept, and his black hair was thick and tumbled like a little boy’s.

In one hand he clutched an empty bottle, and in the other the New Testament.

BOOK FOUR

HENRY, 1858-1874

IT WAS WINTER AGAIN at Clonmere, and the cap of Hungry Hill was white with snow. The sun shone brightly, and there was a crisp, fine tang about the air, a sense of lightness, as though the old, wet melancholy of autumn was laid aside forever and forgotten, while this new cold clarity heralded the spring. The fallen leaves in the park were dry, and crinkled with the frost. The naked trees lifted black branches to the blue sky, and the short grass before the castle was dusted with silver. The tide ebbed swiftly from the creek, the surface of the water shipped with a lively ripple, and the thin smoke from the castle chimneys rose straight in the air like a column.

Tim the coachman drove the carriage round to the front door, and climbing from his seat, stamped up and down before the horses, blowing upon his fingers. It was Sunday, and he was to drive Mr. and Mrs. Henry to the little church at Ardmore, as was their custom. It was a pleasant thing, thought Tim, as he waited for his master and mistress, to have the life about the place natural and normal once more, almost as though the old gentleman himself was alive again, and the first Mr.

Henry and Mr. John and poor Miss Barbara and Miss Jane all back again and living, instead of being, some of them, these thirty years in their graves.

The intervening years seemed to have slipped away, and Tim, who would be sixty next birthday, would often find himself casting his mind back to his early days as stable-boy under old Baird. He would find himself confusing the present generation with the one that had gone before, and he would shake his head and sigh, and bid “Mr.

Henry” guard against the cold air for fear it should bring back his cough, confusing him with the uncle who had been dead for thirty years.

Here he came now, Mr. Henry, his master, dressed for church, with his tall hat in his hand, and his gloves and his stick, looking for all the world as his uncle Henry had looked, all those years ago. And hadn’t he the same way with him too, the same winning smile, the laugh, the friendly touch on the shoulder? And he would walk around the place on a Sunday afternoon, with his hands behind his back, in consultation with the agent, just as the old gentleman had done, when he was alive. He rode every morning to the mines too, and drove into Slane once a week, and indeed there was a fixed routine of living that pleased the coachman after so long a spate of muddle and disorder.

How different Mrs. Henry was in every way from the other Mrs. Brodrick, Mr. Henry’s mother.

No pride here, no wild temper, no driving of her servants to distraction with the changing orders and the demands she put upon them, but a quiet, sweet reasonableness with every request she made, and a firmness of purpose that made the silly chatterers in the kitchen know their place.

There was peace “at the back” at Clonmere, where there had been nothing but strife and grumbles and discontent for years. She put her touch upon every room in the castle, did Mrs. Henry, and the room was lighter for it.

“You’d say,” said the cook, “that she had a healing hand.”

Gone was the accumulation of dust and disorder, of litter and rubbish, that Fanny-Rosa had allowed; vanished was the chill discomfort, the grey misery that Wild Johnnie had accepted. The rooms were swept, the fires were lit, the windows flung open to the air. Once more flowers and fruit were brought in to the house, once more the grass was cut, the paths were weeded, the shrubs were pruned, as they had been when Barbara, as eldest daughter of the house, kept Clonmere for her father. The house “belonged” once more.

The mistress stood now on the doorstep beside the master, bidding Tim good-morning, and they looked, thought the coachman, the handsomest couple in the country.

She was nearly as tall as himself, andwiththe warm cape wrapped round her, and her smooth, dark hair showing from her bonnet, she might have been a queen.

“How are we for time, Tim?” asked Mr.

Henry.

“It’s just turned the quarter, sir,” replied the coachman, holding open the door of the carriage.

The master was a great stickler for time, like the old gentleman. It would never do to be late for church.

But he had a graciousness about him and a courtesy, quite different from his grandfather.

And now the mistress was seated in her corner of the carriage and the master was tucking the rug round her, putting her feet in the foot-warmer, the whole done with such a loving care and so much gentleness that Tim remembered the talk at “the back” of how there was another baby expected before many months. The nurse was standing in the open doorway, holding little Miss Molly in her arms, the child Waving a plump hand to her father and mother. And then Tim climbed up to his seat and gathered the reins in his hands, and the carriage bowled away down the drive, under the archway past the rhododendrons, and swept round beside the creek and through the woods to the park.

Henry held Katherine’s hand under the rug and wondered, for the five hundredth time, perhaps, what she was thinking about; so detached, so remote, her calm, quiet manner different in every way from his own eager impetuosity.

“Are you warm enough?” he said anxiously, peering into her face. “Are you sure you feel equal to the drive?”

“Yes, of course,” she answered, warming his heart with her smile. “I feel very well indeed.

And I could not bear to miss the weekly drive to Ardmore, you know that.”

He leant back again in the carriage, reassured.

Uncle Willie Armstrong had impressed upon him to be careful with her.

“Your mother,” Uncle Willie had told him, “gave birth to all you boys without turning a hair in the process. She had all the toughness of old Simon Flower. But if you’re going to follow your father’s example and rear a large family, I advise you to do it rather more slowly than he did. Your Katherine is a much more delicate plant than Fanny-Rosa Flower.”

And here they were, with young Molly barely a year old and another one already on the way. But perhaps Uncle Willie Armstrong was inclined to fuss…

Henry gazed out of the carriage window. The trees at the far end of the park, close to the road, were looking a bit shorn after their lopping in the autumn. Still, they would be all the better for it, and would be well enough in two or three years’ time.

Katherine was bowing and smiling at Mrs. Mahoney at the gate-house. Henry purposely turned his head away. The gate-house brought unpleasant thoughts, reminders of something that was best forgotten.

Jack Donovan and his sister had left the country and gone to America, no trace of them remained in the little lodge at the entrance to the drive, and yet whenever Henry passed through the gates he would remember, for all his wishes to forget, the insolent, familiar manner of the fellow when his fare was paid to him, the furtive, crafty expression of his sister, and through them both the helpless, tragic eyes of poor Johnnie the last time he had seen him at Clonmere. No, those things were not the best food for thought on a Sunday morning, and Henry, once more caressing Katherine’s hand under the carriage rug, began to chatter lightly and gaily about nothing at all, of the shooting party the week before, of Petty Sessions the following Tuesday in Mundy, of a letter received from his mother Fanny-Rosa from Nice the day before.

“You noticed,” he said to Katherine, laughingly, “that it was full of the usual extravagances. I believe she is having the time of her life.”

“I wonder,” said Katherine.

“Oh, dearest, you don’t know my mother sufficiently well to judge. I quite thought poor Johnnie’s death would break her completely, but I am inclined to think, after the first shock of it wore off, she dismissed the matter from her mind and poor Johnnie too.”

“Your mother is not so superficial as she would have everyone believe,” said Katherine. “She pretends to other people, and to herself as well.”

“My mother pretends to no one,” said Henry, “you can rest assured about that. No, she has her little villa, and her foreign counts, and her casino, and is very well content. Look, there is that disagreeable Mrs. Kelly actually curtseying to you. What have you done to the people of Doonhaven? I have never known anyone of that family smile at a Brodrick before, unless it was to do something very dirty afterwards.”

“Perhaps,” said Katherine, looking sideways under her bonnet, “the Brodricks never smiled at the people of Doonhaven.”

“I am quite certain they did not,” said Henry, “and that is why the first of them was shot in the back. What do you think of the new road out to the mine? The new surface is a capital affair, quite different from the old gravel that became almost impassable in winter.

Grandfather would have been pleased with it.”

“I think, with you, that it is a great improvement, but I should like it better if the miners’ houses had been taken in hand at the same time. Some of those huts are a disgrace. I cannot bear to think of little children being obliged to live in them.”

“Are they really so bad?” asked Henry. “I’m afraid I have never been through them, and have only concerned myself with the efficiency of the mine. I can easily give orders to have the wood strengthened, and the worst places painted. That should keep out the cold and damp.”

“Why not give orders to have them pulled down altogether, and brick houses built instead?” said Katherine.

“Dear heart, that would cost a lot of money.”

“I thought the mines made such an enormous profit last year.”

“So they did, but if we once start pulling down the miners’ huts and building them small palaces, there will be no profit at all.”

“Now who is exaggerating?” smiled Katherine.

“The miners don’t ask for palaces, Henry love. They only ask for a bit of warmth and comfort, which, considering how hard they work for you, I think they deserve.”

Henry pulled a face.

“Now you make me feel a worm,” he said.

“Very well then, I shall go into the matter, and see what can be done. But I warn you they won’t be grateful.

They will say, in all probability, that they prefer the old wooden cabins.”

“Never mind about gratitude,” said Katherine, “at least those little children will be warm… . Hungry Hill has a smiling face today. Do you see the sun on the ridge? It looks like a crown of gold.”

“Hungry Hill has too many moods for my liking,” said Henry. “The bad weather before Christmas interfered with the work, and a whole shipment of copper was held up.”

“Nature works slowly, in her own time,” said Katherine, “and if you become impatient she gets angry. Why, there is Tom Callaghan walking to church. His horse must be lame. I wonder he did not wait for us to pick him up in Doonhaven.

Tell Tim to stop the horses, dear.”

Laughing, Henry climbed out of the carriage, and called out to the curate, who was walking ahead of them, covering the ground with immense long strides.

“Tom, you madman,” he shouted, “what do you mean by not waiting for us? Come and take a seat beside Katherine. We are seriously affronted.”