Hungry Hill (60 page)

“I have not shown this to anyone else,” said Henry, “and I never shall. Hal did it for me, when he was a lad… . He gave it me the night I brought Adeline back to London with me, and I rather think I never thanked him for it. You see, we were both a little shy of one another.”

Jinny held the miniature, and then gave it back to Henry. He replaced it carefully in the leather case, and put it in his pocket.

“I’ve carried it now for twenty-one years,” he said, “and Adeline has never discovered it.”

A ghost of a smile appeared on his lips, and in a flash Jinny saw the gay, laughing Henry that once had been, the young man who stood beside her father in the university group.

“You won’t give me away to anyone, will you?” he said.

Jinny shook her head.

He turned once more, and looked out of the window at the grass bank sloping to the creek. The sun shone upon a strip of carpet at his feet, and the myriad dust particles danced in a beam of light.

“You are fortunate in having Tom and Harriet for parents,” said Henry. “They will take care of you and this boy, and you won’t be alone. Hal’s allowance will automatically come to you now, of course, you realise that. And when I die, as I told you before, the child has everything.”

He glanced down dubiously at the small, solemn figure in the bottle-green velvet suit. “An empty house, and a load of doubts and dreams-not much of a legacy,” he said.

John-Henry leant against his mother, and tugged at her hand, his signal that he wished to go. He did not care greatly for the strange man who looked down at him with pity, and he wanted to be back at the Rectory, with Granpie, amongst familiar things that he knew and understood.

“He’s had enough of me,” said Henry, with a smile.

“All right, young man, I won’t keep you any longer. I am going too.”

He walked with them to the hall. The luggage had been put in the carriage, the valet was standing in his hat and coat by the open door.

“It’s a mistake,” said Henry, “to walk back into the past. Look forward always, if you can.”

He gazed up at the house, the barred windows of the new wing, the iron balcony above the door. Then he shook hands with Jinny, and touched the boy lightly on the head. He climbed into the carriage, and the servant slammed the door, taking his seat on the box beside the driver.

“I want you to say goodbye to Tom and your mother for me,” said Henry. “I won’t see them again. Ask Tom whether he remembers saying to me over thirty years ago, “I would rather be good like the Eyres than clever like you Brodricks’? The trouble is that goodness dies, and lies buried in the earth. Cleverness passes on and becomes degenerate.”

He looked for the last time at the stone walls of the castle, and down across the sloping grass to the creek, and Doon Island, and the grey mass of Hungry Hill. Then he smiled once more at Jinny.

“You never knew my mother, did you?” he said.

“She died many years ago in Nice. The last words she ever said to me were, “Don’t look serious, Henry boy. Thinking never did anybody any good.” I don’t know if she was right or wrong, but thinking always brought me pain. You can tell that story to your son, when he comes into his legacy.”

He gave an order to the driver, and lifted his hat, and the carriage bowled away down the drive, and disappeared amongst the belt of trees. As it passed into the woods the herons rose from their nests in the tall branches, and went crying down the creek towards Doon Island.

EPILOGUE

THE INHERITANCE, 1920

AS JOHN-HENRY turned into Queen Street a sentry came out of the doorway of a house.

“I wouldn’t go any further,” he said. “They’re shooting down the other end and you might get a bullet in your back from one of our fellows.”

As he spoke they heard the rattle of a machine-gun and the squealing brakes of a car. The sentry grinned.

“Trouble for someone,” he said.

At the far end of the street a car skidded into the pavement, and from the lowered window they could see the nose of the gun pointing across the square. Three men on the pavement flung themselves on their faces. Someone ran from one of the houses to the car and jumped on the running-board. He had a rifle in his hand. A small party of soldiers appeared at the end of the street by the square, and the car gathered speed and turned sideways, up a back street by the farthest house.

The soldiers fired at the retreating car, and then they began to run across the square towards the big post office at the corner. The men who had flung themselves down on the pavement picked themselves up again, and dusted their clothes, as though nothing had happened. A woman called shrilly from one of the upper windows of a house. The church clock struck five o’clock. John-Henry lit a cigarette and smiled at the soldier.

“You’d think,” he said, “that after four-and-a-half years of war men would be sick of shooting one another.”

The soldier took a fag from behind his ear, and borrowed a match.

“Not in this country,” he said; “there’s not a man amongst ‘em who wouldn’t knife his best friend if he had the mind, and then take flowers to his funeral.”

John-Henry laughed, and threw away the match.

“That’s not fair,” he said. “I’m one of them, and I’ve never wanted to knife anyone.”

He went on walking down the street towards the square, where the shooting had been. Many of the windows were broken, not from the incident of five minutes ago, but dating back over the weeks. The square was clear now of troops, but for the guard standing round the police-station. A young man was talking to a woman on the edge of the pavement. His face was lean and bitter. He had his hands deep in his pockets.

“They got Micky Farran,” he said to the woman, and then, as John-Henry passed, he stopped talking, and looked down at his feet.

They moved off together, and it seemed to John-Henry that the streets were empty now, and strangely quiet. Across the square, at the far end, were the remains of the barricade. The barbed wire lay in loose strands. A sudden shower of rain came from the bright sky, and was gone again. In the far distance a steamer hooted, deep and low, and was echoed by the high, thin answer of a tug. John-Henry was thinking of the sentry’s words, “Not a man amongst them who wouldn’t knife his best friend, and then take flowers to his funeral.” It was true, he supposed, and yet .

Faces of his childhood came into his mind.

Dear Granpie, with his great, deep-set eyes, his bent shoulders, his white hair, walking through the market-square at Doonhaven, and one of the old women at the stalls lifting a streaming face to his and calling upon the Saints to bless him. He had found employment for the woman’s son, and she had never forgotten it. Gran, small, bright and bustling, skimming the cream off the milk with a scallop shell, boxing his ears because he tickled the kitchen-maid’s legs with a feather duster, and she half-way up a ladder at the time. Patsy, gardener on week-days and groom on Sundays, who told him the legends of the fairies who walked on Hungry Hill, and the little pixies who burrowed underground and bewitched the miners in the old days. He would not have known how to handle a knife except to whittle sticks or to cut a pig’s throat. Perhaps killing a pig made it easy to kill a man… .

The streets looked normal on this side of the city; and as he turned into the terrace where Aunt Lizette had her small flat, and saw a child bowling a hoop in the gardens opposite, it seemed ridiculous to remember the skidding car in Queen Street, the machine-gun fire, and the bitter flat voice of that man on the pavement, “They got Micky Farran. ‘?

He rang the bell at No .5, and climbed the stairs to the little sitting-room, overfull of furniture, where Aunt Lizette sat day after day, crocheting lace samplers to be sold for blind babies. Queer passionate hobby, that must have its origin, surely, in subconscious pity of her own childhood, when, lame and neglected, she lived in fear of a resentful stepmother. She rose smiling now, as he came into the room, her sallow complexion a little yellower than usual, her eyes blinking behind the spectacles.

“You dear boy,” she said, and he noticed once more, with pleasure, that her voice had the soft, warm lilt belonging to Slane and the south, possessed also by his mother, which brought back to him always, rich and loved, the memories of boyhood.

“Your mother told me you would come, and I didn’t believe her,” said Aunt Lizette, “for surely, I said to myself, a young man has better things to do than to visit an aunt when he comes home.”

“Not this young man,” said John-Henry. “He can’t forget the pep-permints you used to keep in your cupboard.”

Aunt Lizette smiled, and took off her spectacles, and now he saw that her eyes were fine and handsome, like Aunt Kitty’s, and he thought of the happily assorted household they had been out at Castle Andriff, Aunt Kitty, Aunt Lizette, and Uncle Simon, all living together in harmony, with very few servants and too many dogs, until the children grew up and scattered, and Aunt Kitty died, and Aunt Lizette went on living alone with Uncle Simon. These things happened only in this country.

“And your mother, how is she?” asked Aunt Lizette.

“Very well, and very happy, and I was to thank you for the lace you sent her, which I believe made a table-centre for her dining-room. I’m to give you the money here and now. She wouldn’t trust the post at the present time.”

He felt for his wallet and took out a note.

“Ah, she shouldn’t have worried,” said Aunt Lizette. “Time enough when all this shooting is over, and everyone behaves like decent human beings. were they fighting today, tell me, in the streets?”

“They peppered a few shop windows as I came down to see you, but I don’t think much damage was done. What’s it all about, Aunt Lizette? You must be an unprejudiced person.”

Aunt Lizette waited until the serving-maid had brought the tea and closed the door behind her.

“You have to be careful,” she said softly. “I’ve had Meggie with me three years, but she has a brother fighting for the rebels. “I haven’t set eyes on him, miss, not for six months,” she told me yesterday. She was lying, of course. The cigarettes I keep for visitors have been disappearing lately, and where would they be but down the front of Meggie’s dress, so that she can slip out after dark and give them to him at the street corner?”

“You’d better be careful,” smiled John-Henry. “You’ll have the soldiers coming to search your house.”

“And they’d find nothing,” said Aunt Lizette.

“I’m a loyal subject of the King, and always have been, like the rest of the family. No Brodrick meddles with politics, although my father tried to stand for Parliament in his hey-days, just before your father was born.”

John-Henry munched his buttered toast, and looked round the little room, so filled with furniture from Andriff and Dunmore-where Aunt Molly had lived-and bits and pieces from Clonmere also, treasures that Aunt Lizette had gathered around her with the years and would never part with now.

“As far as I can discover,” he said, “no Brodrick has ever done anything but die young or drink himself to death.”

Aunt Lizette frowned, and poured him out another cup of tea.

“The war and the Navy between them have made you a cynic,” she said, “and anyway it’s not true. The Brodricks were always greatly respected in the country.”

“Who respected them, and what were they respected for?” asked her nephew.

His aunt sat back in her chair, and folded her hands. They were long and slender, the hands of a young woman, for all her fifty years.

“They were just landlords, for one thing,” she answered, “right from the start. They did their duty to God and the King. They were firm to their tenants, but kindly too.

And Clonmere always stood for law and order. The people looked upon it as a symbol of authority, of wise authority.”

“Perhaps they did,” said John-Henry, smiling over the rim of his cup, “but perhaps also they didn’t want authority, or God, or the King-and you see the outcome of it all today. You know their motto, “Ourselves Alone”?”

Aunt Lizette clucked her tongue impatiently.

“That’s all nonsense,” she said. “They can’t exist that way. And don’t tell me you sympathise with them, or I won’t have you in my house. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, and you wearing the King’s uniform a few months ago.”

“I never said I sympathised with them,” pleaded John-Henry. “I don’t care a damn for one side or the other. It just happens that I have the misfortune to see both sides of a question.”

“Don’t go and live in Doonhaven, then,” said Aunt Lizette, “or you’ll get rapidly worse. If it’s raining there, and you should say how fine a day it is to anybody, they will agree with you, just to please your face, and save themselves trouble.”

“But surely,” said John-Henry, “that is the ideal way of living? If everybody did that there would be no arguments, no wars, no senseless fighting of one another.”

Aunt Lizette considered this a moment, then shook her head again.

“It wouldn’t be moral,” she said solemnly.

John-Henry laughed.

“Anyway,” he said, “wet or fine, moral or immoral, I propose to go down to Doonhaven within the next day or so, and visit Clonmere. I haven’t been down there, you know, since before the war, just before Granpie died. It’s probably falling to bits, although the people at the gate-house are supposed to look after it.”

“And what will you do?” said Aunt Lizette, “when you get there?”

John-Henry smiled, and stretched out his legs under the tea-table.

“I shall live there,” he said. “I may telegraph mother to come down and join me. Do you know, all the time I was in the Navy, and the war was going on, it was the only thing that was real to me? The Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, none of it seemed to sink in. I kept thinking, “This overgrown sub who sweats his guts out in an engine-room and then goes ashore at Malta and overstays his leave, isn’t John-Henry at all. The real John-Henry is standing in front of Clonmere, looking across the creek to Hungry Hill. And that’s where I belong. That’s where my roots are, that’s where I was born and bred.”

Aunt Lizette put on her spectacles and, moving to the window, took up her crochet.