Читать книгу Petticoat Loose - Rita - Страница 4

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The caravan was of pine wood, polished and varnished to the verge of brilliance. It had a door at one end, a window at the other. In the day the interior formed a sitting-room, with table, seats and cooking stove. A cupboard held various utensils, such as plates cups, and saucepans. At night the table folded into a bedstead and another cupboard held mattress, sheets, and pillow.

The photographic apparatus and chemicals were kept in a portable canvas tent that was only erected when the caravan stopped for any length of time. The horse was blind of one eye, but strong and useful, and the two Irish terriers, Moll and Tim, were excellent watchdogs.

Brianna attended to the domestic duties of cleaning, washing, and cooking. Mickey Croom had charge of the horse and the tent, the preparation of glasses, frame cards, and chemicals, and Mrs. Dunne herself conducted the business and advertised it in that peculiarly appropriate and striking manner for which her adopted country is famous.

In her way Sally Dunne was a character, and a remarkable one. She had travelled much, and kept her eyes open to the ways of mankind in general. She had a knack of turning most things to account and knew the value of a red cent sufficiently well to get it, when nothing else could be got. She had a quick method of speech, many strange sayings, and delighted in what Mrs. Malaprop terms a curious "derangement of epitaphs."

A wordy war between herself and the hunchback was a battle ground on which much Queen's English would be slain, and strewn, and otherwise ill-treated. He had for years been attached to a theatrical travelling company, when he had played the melodramatic villain to nightly applause and appreciative hisses. Once, on a never-to-be-forgotten occasion, he had played Richard III. at a few hours' notice owing to the sudden illness of the "star." On the strength of this performance he had allowed ambition to get the better of discretion, fought with melodrama and subordinate parts, and finally torn himself from his beloved boards to follow Fortune under a new aspect.

Chance and Sally Dunne had been his tempters. Later on Brianna came upon the scene, and in the interest she awakened, and her admiration of his genius, he found that "balm in Gilead" for which his sick and lonely soul had yearned.

He taught her Shakespeare, and so educated her strange, untamed soul to appreciation of the grandest and loftiest ideals. She was quick to learn and retentive of memory. Her nature was volcanic, alternately smouldering and flaming. Life held all the wealth of possibility for her. In sixteen years she had had no youth, and had breathed but an atmosphere of menace and oppression. Then Hope's face showed itself round the corner of the stationed caravan, and life woke to pulsing glories in the smile and eyes of Pat Rooney. She loved him as Juliet loved, "at first sight," and he returned it with the temporary ardour of an Irish Romeo.

On the morning that he had waved his hand in an eternal farewell he had intended an unexplained departure. Fate stepped in with a different heart-break for the girl he left behind him. She sat desolate and alone on the steps of the deserted caravan, making a first acquaintance with grief, unenlightened by deception. Grief had hitherto been a stranger, for love had played no part as yet in her life. Its vicissitudes and hardships had been purely physical, and as such combated or succumbed to when occasion demanded.

She shut herself now into a heart loneliness that made her deaf to all the noise and turmoil so close at hand. Her hands were on her ears, her head was bowed. Her loosened hair fell like a cloud about her face and shut out the September sunlight.

She tried to think of Pat as dead, but it seemed impossible! He had been such a living image of vitality, mirth and motion that to picture him inanimate, gone from this world of sense and love and laughter, was a task beyond her own immediate sorrow. The blow had stunned her by its suddenness. Pain only beat in a feeble, numbed, pulseless fashion at the door of her heart.

Imagination had so recently awakened that its glories could not realise extinction. The cup of joy seemed still close to her thirsting lips. Not yet could the agony of parched and unslaked tongue herald the coming torture.

Life was still going on around her. The merry-go-rounds, the stalls, the shooting galleries, and hoarse cries of itinerant vendors, the far-off murmur of the Ring, the "k'rect card of the races," the bets and prophecies of waiting jarvies. All these fell on the air, in a curious and endless discordance, what time a girl's heart made first acquaintance with Despair.

The strangeness and "aloneness" of grief seemed to press on her and entomb her from all that living world beyond. In her ears was the sound of rushing waters; before her eyes a darkness as of endless night. Of Time she had no sense, and of Life no present consciousness.

The red of the sunset was burning low before she moved or stirred. A wind, chill with the breath of autumn, swept up from the river and crossed the meadows, and rustled among the treetops, and ruffled her fallen hair. She shivered and lifted her head from her knees, and gazed with dim, musing eyes at the scene before her.

Then memory came back. With quick, sharp stabs of pain it woke her numbed heart to feel. It told her of a face for ever gone, of a voice for ever silent—of something that had parted her from joy; of somewhere where tears and kisses and love and longing could force no entrance. And then she rose and faced grim reality in the shape of a strangely-clad figure advancing with swaying steps, and speaking in loud, incoherent tones, demanding whether tea was ready, and what she meant by sitting there, heaped up like a broody hen that was counting unhatched chickens?

Sally Dunne had been doing honour to the races in true Irish fashion, treating and being treated. She was slightly exhilarated, and more than usually loquacious. She had not backed the favourite, and owing to its disqualification had been a considerable winner. Brianna listened in silence. She set out the cups and saucers and made tea in that peculiarly mechanical fashion born of habit, which makes the body independent of the mind. Sally Dunne babbled on with loosened bonnet strings and an occasional hiccough. She was describing the attire of a well-known "horsey" lady who ran her own stables, and was proverbially unlucky.

"Such a gown—my stars! that never saw a Dublin workroom or a London either. French as France. I'd bet my bottom dollar, and a new-fashioned sort of water-back." (She probably meant watteau.) "Well, there warn't one woman in the place could keep her eyes off that gown—and never hitchin it up, but just sweeping along as if it weren't in the least consequential. I'd like to have took a picture of her. Guess she'd posay herself, and what an advertisement!"

She poured some tea into a saucer and drank it slowly, her elbows on the table. Then her eyes fell on the girl's face.

"My! What makes you look so queer?" she demanded. "And not a sup of tea have you touched. And where's that vagabond Mickey? I ain't seen him the whole living day. In mischief, I'll be bound. If he comes home drunk to-night I'll broomstick him as sure as I'm an Irishwoman—which, by the way, I'm not, for seems birth don't count in a Free Country when you domerciliate yourself there. But you haven't told me what's the matter?"

"Nothing," said the girl, brusquely, and she hastily swallowed some tea.

"'Spect you've been gallervanting," observed her astute relative. "There's the varmintest lot of men about this racecourse as I've ever seen. Not one honest face among 'em. If I thought one on 'em had been spyin' round here I'd let him know who was in command in the outside of five seconds. No sweetheartin' tricks for me. Keep that in your mind, my girl. I'll convey my caravan respectable, I promise you. And that remembers me, did you hear that Pat Rooney was thrown, just at the last jump? Broke his neck, or his spine, or something."

"Yes, I heard," said the girl mechanically.

"Dead as a door nail," continued Sally, turning her teacup round to examine the leaves. "Such a good-looking lad, too. But a bad lot all the same. It's a fact I've deduced from literal experience, Brianna, that them as has to do with horses is all vagabones more or less; chiefly more. Seems as how stables and sinfulness are born affinities. Cheating, thieving, lying and jockeying are the same thing without no manner of difference, 'cept the sayin' of them. Never you take up with an equin—equin—what in thunder, do they call it?—equinoxial person of any status whatever. Depend on it he'll turn out a blackleg in the long run. Yet it can't be the force of example, eh?—for the steed is nobler than the man, as Shakespeare says somewhere. And now if you're not going to have any more tea, just wash up and settle things, for I'm dead beat, and must have a snooze afore I recommence my peregrinations to-night."

"Did you! hear," asked Brianna, hesitatingly, "where they took Pat Rooney?"

"To the hospital, of course. At least, I don't know, now I come to think of it. Infirmary, or police court, or somewhere."

"But his mother lives in Mary-street," said the girl.

"Ah, so she does. Maybe 'twas there he was conveyanced. I'll step round and inquire after I've had my nap. 'Twill be neighbourly, though the widow Rooney is very much my inferior in the socialistic sphere. But one mustn't be proud when trouble flies like the sparks upwards. Now stop talking, girl, and let me go to sleep. The arms of Morphibious are waving me to slumber in the—Never mind the rest, pull out the bed, and if Mickey wants any tea he's not to have it, mind that. Bless Pat Rooney's broken neck, it's put twenty pounds in my pocket. Twenty pounds! Think of that, Brianna, and don't say Providence ain't good to us sometimes, and that other folks' misfortunes aren't a blessing in disguise?"

After which expression of Christian sentiment she turned in and went off to sleep without any difficulty.

The girl closed the door of the caravan and stood for a moment looking at the sky. The caravan was stationed in a corner of the meadows that lie beyond the Cork racecourse. The sloping hills, autumn-tinted, and crowned with villas and mansions, looked down in a twinkling radiance of light; the full tide of the river swept dark and dim between its banks. The evening star had risen, set in sapphire that still held some of the glow of sunset; a film of tawny gold lingered over the distant treetops, the air breathed a faint odour of peat smoke and damp mist and autumn flowers. Sounds of life—voices, laughter, gay bursts of music—filled the twilight pause.

In some dim way, to which her untutored soul could give no expression, the poetry of the scene affected the girl, and set her nerves thrilling as to strange music. Speech could not help her, and thought was chaos, yet she felt less unhappy and less alone than she had done since her first sense of loss.

The beauty of the world, the fullness and unrest of life, a longing to know and thrill and live it to its utmost, swept like a full resistless wave over her heart. She seemed to stand on the threshold of unknown mysteries. Love had chained, but Death had loosed the chain. Sorrow, and passion, and despair had held her life in check while memory opened its doors. Now every faculty of her nature was at its keenest. Sounds and whispers of mystery filled the air and haunted the faint chill mists beyond the winding river. She felt she could not live as she had lived. Her soul leaped strange barriers to the arms of that lover who had left her desolate. Then came a sense of peace to human agony. Terror and grief alike grew passive. All form or visible emotion passed and left her still and tense, and thrilling with sympathy for the vague, beautiful world at which she gazed.

Natures are disciplined by such moments as these. A spirit moves on the face of the waters, and the waters tremble and break, and their depths are stirred, and never more for them is the darkness of the unknown. Such a moment had come to this untutored Irish girl. She looked at the closed door of the caravan, the fluttering folds of the flag of which her aunt was so proud. Then yielding to some invisible influence, she descended the steps and moved swiftly away in the direction of the Marina.

Soon all was quiet about her. Most of the crowd who had come to the races had sped homewards by car, train or carriage. It was too early for the night's amusements. A silent bar emphasised the restless symphony of the day. The girl's swift, light feet bore her onwards to where the old castle stood out in bold relief, its beacon-light streaming over the river. It had always been a favourite resort of hers from the days of her starved and wretched childhood, and her steps turned there instinctively to-night.

The moon had risen. Its brilliance touched the white road and silvered the flowing water, making the shadowy background of tree-clad hills look mystical and remote. The Castle itself looked lonely and grim as some feudal fortress, its high tower guarding the river and the lough beyond. She slipped down the rugged pathway and reached a low stone wall, against which the tide lapped in broken waves. The place was quite deserted, but from the road above sounded the echoes of passing feet, the full-toned voices of men, the light ripple of girlish laughter. Brianna lost all count of time. It seemed as if long, long hours had passed, and still she stood there, leaning her elbows on the low stone wall, gazing with fixed, unwavering eyes at the beautiful scene.

The steps and the voices had grown quiet. The tide was ebbing seawards. The full bright moon still beamed in sweet tranquility. Suddenly, she grew conscious of a step approaching her resting-place. The fragrance of a cigar mingled with the autumn scents of dead moist leaves and drifted seaweed. The girl lifted her head, impatient of coming interruption. There were lurking tears in her eyes of which she was unaware. Her shawl had fallen back, and the damp mists had left light curls and tendrils of glittering hair about her forehead. Her face looked strangely white and spiritual in the clear moonlight. To the man approaching her it held all the beauty and beguilement of a vision. He was young and impressionable, and keenly alive to woman's loveliness and charm. His step quickened. There was a strange ring of gladness in his voice as he uttered her name:

"Why, Brianna! What on earth are you doing here? Who'd have thought of seeing you so far away from the show? And I hear there's no end of fun going on to-night. I've been dining up there," he nodded in the direction of the curving road. "Friends of friends of mine in England. Duty and all that. But do you know what the time is, child?"

"No," she said, somewhat listlessly. "Nine o'clock, perhaps."

"Nine! You'll never see ten again this side of to-morrow," he answered. "But tell me, do you often do this soft of thing?"

He tossed aside his cigar and pointed riverwards. Instinct made him respectful to her loneliness and youth as to his equal in station. She was feminine, and she was beautiful, and only "a daughter of the people," but Nature had created him chivalrous, and the world and society had not been able to break the mould yet.

"Not often," she said, slowly. "I have not the time. But to-night, 'twas no use. I had to come. I thought maybe it might comfort me."

"Comfort—are you unhappy? Ah, yes, I remember. That poor fellow was your sweetheart, wasn't he, Brianna?"

"He was," she said, simply, and without a flush or tremor. "'Twasn't much happiness my life had ever known, and cruel poverty sometimes, and aunt has a bitter tongue of her own, and she's not one to spare it. And then Pat came, and everything was changed. 'Tis just as if my heart was broken, now."

She had spoken slowly and carefully, but her voice broke over those last words, and the tears gathered and dropped one by one on her clasped hands.

Involuntarily his own touched them, closed on them.

"Poor girl—poor child!" he said, tenderly.

The sympathy in his voice touched her deeply. Her heart-beats quickened. She could find no words to answer him, and they stood side by side in a comprehensive silence, while the silver track of the moon broadened on the quivering surface of the river.