The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [37]
Miss Duffy picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped the gruel from her thin lips.
“If it comes to that, Miss Mullen,” she said with some resumption of her earlier manner, “if I’m for dying I’d as soon die by myself as in company; and as for damp, I thank God this house was built by them that didn’t spare money on it, and it’s as dry this minyute as what it was forty years ago.”
“What! Do you tell me the roof’s sound?” exclaimed Charlotte with genuine interest.
“I have never examined it, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia coldly, “but it keeps the rain out, and I consider that suffeecient.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s not a word to be said against the house,” Charlotte made hasty reparation; “but, indeed, Miss Duffy, I say—and I’ve heard more than myself say the same thing—that a delicate woman like you has no business to live alone so far from help. The poor Archdeacon frets about it, I can tell ye. I believe he thinks Father Heffernan’ll be raking ye into his fold! And I can tell ye,” concluded Charlotte, with what she felt to be a certain rough pathos, “there’s plenty in Lismoyle would be sorry to see your father’s daughter die with the wafer in her mouth!”
“I had no idea the people in Lismoyle were so anxious about me and my affairs,” said Miss Duffy. “They’re very kind, but I’m able to look afther my soul without their help.”
“Well, of course, everyone’s soul is their own affair; but, ye know, when no one ever sees ye in your own parish church—well, right or wrong, there are plenty of fools to gab about it.”
The dark bags of skin under Julia Duffy’s eyes became slowly red, a signal that this thrust had home. She did not answer, and her visitor rose, and moving towards the hermetically sealed window, looked out across the lawn over Julia’s domain. Her roundest and weightiest stone was still in her sling, while her eye ran over the grazing cattle in the fields.
“Is it true what I hear, that Peter Joyce has your grazing this year?” she said casually.
“It is quite true,” answered Miss Duffy, a little defiantly. A liver attack does not pre-dispose its victims to answer in a Christian spirit questions that are felt to be impertinent.
“Well,” returned Charlotte, still looking out of the window, with her hands deep in the pockets of her black alpaca coat, “I’m sorry for it.”
“Why so?”
Julia’s voice had a sharpness that was pleasant to Miss Mullen’s car.
“I can’t well explain the matter to ye now,” Charlotte said, turning round and looking portentously upon the sick woman, “but I have it from a sure hand that Peter Joyce is bankrupt, and will be in the courts before the year is out.”
When, a short time afterwards, Julia Duffy lay back among her madder blankets and heard the last sound of Miss Mullen’s phaeton wheels die away along the lake road, she felt that the visit had at least provided her with subject for meditation.
* * *
CHAPTER XI.
Mr. Roderick Lambert’s study window gave upon the flower garden, and consequently the high road also came within the sphere of his observations. He had been sitting at his writing-table, since luncheon-time, dealing with a variety of business, and seldom lifting his glossy black head except when some sound in the road attracted his attention. It was not his custom to work after a solid luncheon on a close afternoon, nor was it by any means becoming to his complexion when he did so; but the second post had brought letters of an unpleasant character that required immediate attention, and the flush on his face was not wholly due to hot beef-steak pie and sherry. It was not only that several of Sir Benjamin’s tenants had attended a Land League meeting the Sunday before, and that their religious director had written to inform him that they had there pledged themselves to the Plan of Campaign. That was annoying, but as the May rents were in he had no objection to their amusing themselves as they pleased during the summer; in fact, from a point of view on which Mr. Lambert dwelt as little as possible even in his own mind, a certain amount of nominal disturbance