Hungry Hill (54 page)

Somehow the idea must have come to nothing, for after six months of silence he wrote again, saying that he had been lucky enough to get a position in a bank in Winnipeg, which was a pleasant change after the rough life of the past few years.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that you have to be born to ranching to make a real success of it,” he told Jinny, “and the climate is pretty hard for someone like myself who doesn’t belong to the country. I lost about a stone in weight last winter. The early mornings were the worst, getting up in the dark and going out into the snow, and no proper food either. How I longed for one of Aunt Harriet’s cakes! Now I’m in the town it’s much easier, and I have quite comfortable lodgings.”

But the bank did not last two months, for the next letter came from Toronto, and was only a few lines.

“I’ve started painting again,” said Hal. “After all, it is the thing I like best, and what I’ve always wanted to do. No one to give orders, and my time is my own. One or two people here say I’ve been a damn fool to try anything else. I don’t suppose I shall make a fortune at it, but I feel free again, which I haven’t done for some time.”

There was silence then for a year. The next letter, written in the autumn of ‘86, was one of quiet despair. The handwriting was changed, shaky, and in places almost impossible to read.

“I’ve been very ill,” he said, “my health has all gone to pieces. Adeline was right about me after all, and you were wrong. I’m useless, a failure, and I would end it all if only I had the courage.

I sold one or two pictures, but I haven’t done any work now for months. Think about me sometimes, Jinny, and when you do, remember me as I was that Christmas at Clonmere, when I was twenty, and you were sixteen. You wouldn’t think much of me now.”

This was the last letter he had written to her, three years ago. She had answered the letter, and many months later it had been returned to her, with the words “Gone away” written across the envelope. She remembered going down to the study and telling the whole story to her father, the tears running down her cheeks. He had been so kind and understanding, and had read Hal’s last letter sitting beside her, with his arm about her shoulders.

“If only I were a man,” Jinny said, between her tears, “I’d go out to Canada and bring him home.

I know I should find him.”

Tom Callaghan looked at the eager, hopeful eyes, the small, determined chin.

“I believe you would, Jinny,” he said, “but God made you a woman, and perhaps one day you will find your Hal, and give him greater comfort.”

Three years ago… . Jinny put the letters carefully back in the box and the paintings on top, and closed the lid. She would never throw them away, she would read them again and again, until she was an old woman of eighty. Maybe Hal was dead and suffered no longer, but it made no difference. She would always remember the boy who had held her hand in the dark, ghostly wing of Clonmere that Christmas Day, and was haunted and alone. He would be nearly thirty now, if he was still alive; a boy no longer. Hal, who had sat on the table in the dairy drinking buttermilk and dipping his finger into the cream when her mother’s back was turned. Hal, teasing her, laughing, his hands in his pockets. Hal sailing his boat in the creek… . Jinny had many pictures in her mind, all of them dear and sweet. And they would have to last her all her life, for there would never be any more.

She put the box of letters away in the cupboard, and went downstairs to her birthday lunch. Patsy the gardener had killed a chicken in honour of the occasion and her mother had baked a special pudding.

She feigned the surprise proper to the occasion, though the same ceremony was repeated every year, and her parents watched her unwrap her presents and give the usual cry of pleasure and astonishment. It was a year by year routine, delightful to all three.

“Father dear, a watch! How good of you and how naughty! It’s the very one we admired in the shop window in Slane, and now you have slyly bought it.”

“No slyness at all,” smiled Tom.

“Kitty Flower drove into Slane from Andriff and got it for me.”

“And a writing-case from you, mother. Why am I so spoilt?” Jinny got up from the table, and kissed both her parents. “Of course, I know what it is,” she said. “Father wants to borrow the watch so that he can remember to be in time for church, and mother will write down all the recipes on my new paper.

The plot was hatched between you both.”

“You see too much,” said Tom, “and anyway, what are you going to do with your birthday afternoon? Drive over and see Kitty?”

“No, I think I shall go for a walk, if neither you nor mother need me.”

“I intend making jam,” said Harriet, “but I’ll spare you for once.”

It was difficult to believe, thought Jinny, as she walked that afternoon in Clonmere, down by the creek, and looked away across the harbour to Hungry Hill, that beneath that rugged granite face, so white and still under the summer sun, men toiled and sweated and broke themselves and died, and all for the sake of someone who lived far away, in another country, who cared nothing for them or for their families. His house here, beside the water, was like a sepulchre, the windows shuttered and barred.

Sometimes it came to life, when Molly and her husband and children spent a fortnight or so beneath its roof, but mostly it would stay closed, as it was today, Henry Brodrick and his wife lived at Brighton now, so Molly said they had sold the house in Lancaster Gate. And here was Clonmere,. waiting for the owner who never came. Jinny stared up at the little balcony in the new wing. It was strange to think that perhaps no one had ever stood there and looked down upon the grass bank and the drive. Once people had done so in their dreams, and the dreams had come to nothing.

Jinny walked away from the castle, and followed the path by the creek to the lodge gates. She could see the paddle-steamer from Mundy thrashing its way across the harbour to Doonhaven. Now it had passed Doon Island, and come to anchor outside the harbour wall.

Visitors came these days, since they had built the hotel at Andriff. And there would be some of the miners’ wives, back from market-day in Mundy.

Soldiers too, bound for the garrison on Doon Island. Now and again the garrison would be strengthened, according to the whims and fears of those in authority. But nobody had much interest in politics in Doonhaven.

Jinny paid a few calls at the cottages in Oakmount, and it was past five o’clock by the time she arrived home at the Rectory. She went in through the garden. Patsy was chopping wood outside the dairy.

“You have a visitor, Miss Jinny,” he said, jerking his head towards the house. “Came ashore in the steamer, he did, and I tell you straight I knew him at once, for all he’s run to nothing.”

“Who is it, Patsy?” asked Jinny.

“No, you go in to the Rector, Miss Jinny.

I’ll not be telling you.”

And Patsy went on with his chopping, shaking his head, and muttering to himself.

Jinny found her mother standing in the hall. She looked anxious, a little sad.

“I thought you were never coming,” she said. “Would you go to your father? He’s in the study. And, Jinny dear, prepare for a surprise. At least, something between a surprise and a shock. It’s so strange that this should have happened on your birthday.”

She hesitated, half smiling. Yet there was a tear in the corner of her eye.

Jinny went into the study. Her father was standing by the mantelpiece talking to someone who sat in the long chair by the window, with his back towards her. There was something about the square shoulders, the angle of the head.

She took a step forward, unbelieving, yet strangely certain.

“It’s Hal, isn’t it?” she said.

He rose from the chair, tall, gaunt, a shadow of himself, oddly different from the dream she had made of him all these years. There were lines of suffering and disillusionment on his face, and deep furrows under his eyes. He looked older than his thirty years, older and yet strangely immature. It was Hal with his youth stripped from him, and hope still in his heart. He came towards her and took her hands, and the smile was Hal’s smile, the thing that she loved and that she remembered best.

“You see,” he said, “I’ve come back. I’m a failure, I’ve achieved nothing. But Uncle Tom says I can stay. You won’t turn me away, will you, Jinny? You do believe in me still?”

After Hal and Jinny were married they settled down in what had been Doctor Armstrong’s old house in Doonhaven, which had stood empty now since his death some years before. It was only five minutes’ walk from the Rectory. The Rector and his wife started them off with furniture and linen, and Jinny was a splendid little manager, she had the doctor’s house snug and habitable within a fortnight.

They spent their brief honeymoon by the lakes, bringing back with diem a photograph taken of them both the last day in Slane before returning to Doonhaven. They stood side by side, rather stiff, rather self-conscious, Hal with his hat in his hand and a suspicious, proud look on his face, as though he faced an accuser instead of a photographer. Jinny eager, hopeful, her sailor hat on the back of her brown, curly head, her hands clasping a small muff. The photograph was placed with great pride on the mantelpiece of their new home.

It was strange, thought Hal, to be living down in Doonhaven instead of at Clonmere. It gave him a funny sense of inferiority, which he could not quite get over. He hoped Jinny did not realise it. She was so dear to him, so loving and so kind, and took such a pride in their home, which was nothing but a rather bare, ugly house in the middle of the village. Hal would not for the world have her suspect that it worried him to look out of the sitting-room window at the Post Office, and have Doolan the shoemaker as his next-door neighbour. It was not snobbery that made him resent it, but an unspoken longing for the space and solitude of Clonmere. It was there that he belonged, not in the village of Doonhaven.

When these thoughts passed through his mind he would hate himself for his ingratitude., taking special care to compliment Jinny on her new curtains, or her arrangement of the flowers, or a cake she had baked for Sunday.

“Sometimes I’m a bear and a brute, sweetheart,” he told her, drawing her on his knee, “and I beg of you to be patient with me at those times, and take no notice. I’ve brought black moods home with me from Canada, as well as rotten health.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Hal,” she answered, running her hand through his hair, “to chase away the black moods and hold your hand.”

“You’re a darling,” he said, “and I am the luckiest man in the world… . Now give me the hammer and some nails, and I’ll see if I can fit up that shelf you want in the pantry. Canada has done one thing for me if nothing else, it’s made me a handy man about the house.”

Before they decided to live in the house in the village, the Rector had asked Hal what he felt about returning to Clonmere. Hal had shaken his head at once, an obstinate expression on his face.

“The place is not mine,” he said, “it’s my father’s. He has not written to me since I left London nine years ago. How could I possibly go and live at Clonmere after that?”

“Have you ever written to him, boy, and asked his forgiveness?”

“Yes-when I first got out to Winnipeg. I had no answer. That was enough for me. I shall never write to him again as long as I live.”

Tom Callaghan said no more. God alone could heal the breach between father and son, and if he tried to meddle it would only make matters worse. He wrote and told his old friend that Hal had returned to Doonhaven, of his ill-health and failure out in Canada, and the engagement to his daughter. Henry made little comment in his reply.

“I never expected anything else,” he said, “but that Hal would make a mess of his life. I am afraid your daughter is throwing herself away on him.”

So Clonmere remained shuttered and Hal Brodrick lived in Doonhaven instead, with Jinny doing his cooking and a girl coming in every morning to scrub floors, with himself cleaning the boots and shoes and bringing in the coal.

“I did it all in Canada,” he said, “and I can do it here too,” and then he would look across the way and see Mike Doolan staring at him with a grin on his face as though he despised him, and if he spoke to him the fellow would be off-hand and indifferent.

“It’s funny,” said Hal to Jinny, “they don’t like it. When we lived at Clonmere and were “the gentry,” and rode past in the carriage, they hated us, no doubt, but they respected us, or at least they respected my father. And now I’ve come to live amongst them there’s resentment, we make an intrusion. Oh, not you: they’re used to you. You’re the Rector’s daughter. But I’m different. I’m a Brodrick, and they expect me to kick them in the pants, even if they hate me while I do it.”

“You’re too sensitive,” said Jinny, “too much on the defensive, and wondering what they are going to say to you. Just be natural, just be yourself. They’ll be friendly in time; they are like children.”

“Which is myself?” said Hal. “I’m damned if I know. I thought I was a rancher, and I was not. I believed myself a painter, and I could not sell a picture. I can’t even call myself Hal Brodrick of Clonmere. I’m a useless rotter with a wife who’s too good for me, living on the good-will of my father-in-law. And the people know it, that’s the trouble.

They’ve every right to despise me.”

“They don’t despise you, and you are none of those horrid things. You are my own Hal,” said Jinny.

She was just a little worried, all the same.

Hal’s first rapture at being back and seeing her again had worn rather thin. He was often silent and depressed, and then would be in despair for fear he had wounded her and was making her miserable.

“I’m a burden to you,” he said; “you’ll be sick of me before you’ve been married six months. I’d no right to Come home and ask you.”

Jinny told some of this to her father, and he nodded his head in understanding.

“The trouble is,” he said, “that Hal feels he is dependent on us, and yet he hasn’t the strength of mind to try to stand on his own. I’ll have a talk with him and see what I can do.”