Hungry Hill (34 page)

“I have not,” said Johnnie, lighting his cigar.

“There is nothing to go to the mines for. The only interest to me is to see what gets paid into my account at the bank. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Only that I believe it encourages the fellows employed there if they feel the owner takes a bit of interest, and enquires after their welfare, and the work too, now and again.”

“Any other advice?” asked Johnnie.

Henry pushed the decanter towards him.

“Only to go a bit slow on this, old fellow,” he said, “and see rather less of the Donovan family.”

Johnnie laid down his cigar.

“Who the hell’s been talking to you about the Donovans?” he said.

“You know what this country is like for gossip,” said Henry. “What goes on in Doonhaven is all over Slane in a couple of days. Jack Donovan isn’t much of a chap, you know. He has a bad record for poaching and pilfering generally. And he’s been heard boasting in the public-houses here that his sister has you by the ears, though he didn’t use quite such a polite expression.”

“God damn everyone,” shouted Johnnie. “Why the hell can’t people leave me alone?”

“They would leave you alone,” said Henry, “if you would leave the whisky alone.”

Johnnie leant back in his chair and stared at his brother.

“It’s damned easy for you to talk, isn’t it?” he said. “You are happy I and married to the woman you love. There’s precious little for you to worry about.

You have your Katherine. Let me enjoy my Kate.”

He laughed, and poured himself another glass of port.

“I’m sick and tired of people telling me what to do,” he said. “I suffered from it in the army, and I’m not going to stand it in civil life.”

“I’m not trying to preach at you,” said Henry quietly. “I’m only telling you to beware of Jack Donovan. If you choose to have an affair with his sister I can’t stop you. But do keep your head.”

“The Donovans are my friends,” said Johnnie.

“They’re the only people in this country who have showed any friendliness to me since I came back to it.”

“Very well,” said Henry. “I won’t say any more. Let us go into the drawing-room and ask Katherine to give us some music.”

Yes, it was easy enough for him, thought Johnnie, watching his brother turn the pages for Katherine at the piano, while she looked up at him and smiled.

Tonight they will be together, she with her head on his shoulder, and tomorrow he will wake, and Katherine will be beside him. And the next day and the next. When he is irritable she will soothe him. When he is tired she will rest him. When he is gay she will join in his gaiety, and when he is solemn she will be solemn too. They belong to each other, she is going to have his baby. And I belong to nothing and to no one; I’m nothing but a useless, ill-tempered drunkard, whose only amusement in life is to make love to my lodge-keeper’s sister.

“Johnnie,” said Katherine suddenly, looking up from her music, and smiling across at him, “you are going to stay a little while with us, are you not?”

And Henry, with his hand on her shoulder, glanced at him too.

“Yes, Johnnie, I wish you would. I’m out a great deal, and I should like to think of you here with Katherine. I know you would be happy. I know she would look after you.”

Johnnie watched them, Katherine at the piano with the lamp-light shining on her smooth dark hair, and Henry his brother, playing half-consciously with the lace on Katherine’s collar. The little gesture, familiar, intimate, broke into Johnnie’s dream.

“No,” he said, “no, I shall leave you both in peace and go back to Clonmere.”

When Johnnie returned home one of the first things he did was to dismiss his agent Adams, telling him that in future he would look after the estate himself. This would show Henry, and anyone else who chose to criticise him, that he was not so incompetent as they liked to believe. For a month or so he rose earlier in the morning, answered his letters, walked or rode round Clonmere, and even went up to the mines once or twice a week. Then he had the misfortune to catch a chill and be laid up for several days, and as he lay alone in his dreary bedroom, with only his manservant to minister to him, depression once more came upon him, and his energy of the past few weeks seemed futile and absurd.

What good did he achieve, after all, by riding up to Hungry Hill and sitting in the counting-house?

He merely wasted Griffiths’ time. During the hour he would spend in the place, the manager would be fretting to be gone. And it would be the same about the estate. He was certain his tenants disliked him.

No one gave him a welcome, except the Donovans. And by God, he thought to himself, tossing on his bed, they are my only friends; no one else cares one ha’porth about me. I could lie here and die before anyone came to see me. His godfather, Doctor Armstrong, looked in upon him one morning, and read him a lecture on self-indulgence.

“You’ve only yourself to blame for the condition you are in,” he said, without an ounce of sympathy, and sat for fully twenty minutes declaiming the evils of alcohol. Then he departed, and Johnnie, feeling rather worse towards evening, bade his man bring up a bottle of port from the cellar, after which he was sufficiently recovered to put on a dressing-gown and eat cold bacon and potatoes by the fire in the dining-room, where Jack Donovan, full of sympathy, sat with him to bear him company.

“Here’s Kate been fretting herself sick for the sight of you these past few days,” he said, “and nothing would content her but that I should come up myself to the castle to see the Captain. How do you feel, then?”

“Like hell,” said Johnnie.

“It’s lying here by yourself that does it, Captain.

As for physic, the man has yet to be born that drew any strength from the stuff. It’s what you have there in the bottle that will do you most good.”

“That’s the way I like to be spoken to, Jack.

By heaven, you’re the only friend I have.”

“True for you, sir. It’s what Kate was saying to me only this morning: the Captain’s fine friends and relatives would let him die before they gave him a thought. I tell you what it is, sir, you have too much spirit for them, that’s the trouble. You like to go your own way, and why shouldn’t you ? Here’s that dirty fellow Adams going round saying you don’t know one end of your property from the other. I’d scalp the brute.”

“Oh, he says that, does he?”

“Sure, ‘tis out of spite because you took the agency out of his hands. I can tell you one thing, Captain, and that is I’ll give you a hand any day with the property, when you haven’t the mind to be bothering with the place.”

“That’s very good of you, Jack.”

“Ah, don’t mention it. No trouble at all.

I dare say I can squeeze more out of the place for you than Adams. What do you say to Kate coming round and straightening things up for you here in the house?”

“I’d be very obliged if she would,” yawned Johnnie. “None of my servants here flicks a duster in the rooms from one day to the next.”

The port was taking effect, it was making him sleepy, and satisfied, which the medicine of his old fool of a godfather would never have done, and it was pleasant, thought Johnnie later, lying in his bed once more, with a fire lit in the grate, to see Kate moving noiselessly about the room, drawing the curtains and shutting out the grey November afternoon, folding his clothes and putting them away, and afterwards, when he was practically asleep, creeping to his side and lying down on the bed beside him. He thought of East Grove, and his brother and Katherine sitting down now to their tea in the drawing-room, and later Katherine playing the piano, and Henry sitting back in his chair, turning it so that he could watch the lamp-light on his wife’s hair.

“He has his Katherine,” thought Johnnie, “I have my Kate. What the hell do I care?”

And pulling Jack Donovan’s sister close to him, he sought oblivion, while the rain began to patter again on the closed window and the darkness fell.

It was easy, as the winter passed, to rely more and more upon the company of the Donovans. Jack had a shrewd, rather cunning business head upon him, and in less than no time, Johnnie noticed, he had the affairs of Clonmere at his finger-tips. He dealt with the tenants, he paid the wages, he took upon his shoulders all that his master could not be bothered to do.

“I don’t know how I’d manage without you now, Jack,” Johnnie would say to him. “You save me all the work that bores me stiff, and I don’t have to worry any more whether the fellows dislike me or not.”

“Dislike you?” said Jack Donovan. “Why, Captain, you’re the best-liked gentleman that’s ever borne the name of Brodrick. Aren’t there men and women down in Doonhaven that speak to you who never spoke to your brother, or your grandfather? Even Father Healey himself said to Kate the other day, “The Captain is a credit to the country.”

It was indeed rather remarkable, thought Johnnie, that the priest of the district, who to the best of his belief had never in his grandfather’s time had as much as a nod from any member of the family, far less entered inside the park, should now smile and bow to the present owner of Clonmere, and even take tea with him in the stuffy kitchen of the gate-house. He was really, Johnnie decided, quite a good sort of fellow, and he found himself fumbling for five pounds to give to the priest for distribution among the poorest families in the district.

“Never before,” said Father Healey, counting the coins carefully, and putting them away in a shabby leather purse, “never before has a Brodrick given a thought to any of the poor stricken members of my flock. And there’s my church, with the roof soon to fall in, and how am I to find the money to repair it?”

Johnnie remembered his balance in the bank, swollen by the copper from Hungry Hill, and promised a cheque to Father Healey.

“Didn’t I tell you the Captain was a gentleman, father?” said Jack. Donovan, peering over the priest’s shoulder to see the amount of the cheque. “He’s as simple-hearted as a child with his money, and twice as generous. Kate, pour the reverend father another glass of whisky, and the Captain too.”

“Not for me, child, not for me,” said the priest, holding up his hand. “I must be on my way. It is a joy to see a man of your position,” he added, looking at Johnnie, “happy in such humble surroundings, and with so little thought of the honour he does those he visits.”

“I should be lost without Jack and Kate to look after me,” smiled Johnnie.

“And they would be lost without you,” said Father Healey.

“Here is Kate, a dear child I have known from her birth, with a mind and heart as innocent now as the day I baptised her, and showing you, I am well aware, a devotion that could not be equalled by the highest in the land. It would be a terrible thing if such devotion were ever to be cast aside as worthless, and an innocent heart betrayed.”

“What the devil does he mean?” thought Johnnie, but he shook hands with the priest, and assured him that neither Jack nor his sister should ever want for anything while he was living in Clonmere.

“I believe you,” said Father Healey, opening a vast umbrella to shield his stout person from the rain.

“You have given proof of your honour and generosity to me in person, and this blessed child, with no parents living and only her brother to care for her, trusts herself in your hands.”

And leaving the gate-house, he turned down the hill towards the village.

“Ah, he’s a great saint, the reverend father,” said Jack Donovan, glancing at his sister, “and has a tenderness for Kate. He’d die rather than see her wronged, just as I would myself. I tell you, Captain, if I ever saw my sister shamed I’d strangle her with my two hands. And you know that, don’t you, Kate?”

“Yes, Jack,” said his sister softly, looking meekly at the work on her lap.

“There’s some gentlemen, Captain, believe it or not,” said Jack Donovan fiercely, “who would seize advantage of a young woman’s innocence and make game of her when her brother’s back was turned, and the poor creature herself as ignorant as the babe unborn. Why, it’s disgusting.”

Johnnie shrugged his shoulders, and finished his glass of whisky. Surely Jack was not going to feign ignorance at this late hour of ail-that had taken place under his roof during the past months? As for his sister’s innocence, anyone less innocent than Kate the second day she had put her hair down in the kitchen would be hard to find.

“You had better come down to the castle in the morning, Jack,” he said briefly, rising to his feet. “Phillips has brought me in a bill for meal and cattle feed I can’t make head or tail of.”

“Won’t you stay for a bite of cupper, Captain?”

“No, I don’t think so. Goodnight, Kate.”

He arrived home to find a letter from Katherine, reproaching him for his neglect of East Grove for so many weeks. She had hoped so much, she said, that he would have paid them a visit at the New Year, and he had never done so. His goddaughter Molly was flourishing, and Henry very proud of her, and as Johnnie would not come to see them she proposed that they should visit Johnnie. If Henry brought his gun next Saturday would there be any woodcock left, and any hares on Doon Island? Her brother, Bill Eyre, was with them, and would come too.

The letter put Johnnie in a fever of unrest.

The house was disreputable. No comfort for Katherine; she would be cold and miserable, she could never stand the place for a day. Yet how dear to see her again, to have her sitting in his drawing-room, if only for a couple of hours.

During the few days before Saturday came he threw himself with a fury of energy into the business of getting the house into shape. Servants were cursed, dismissed, and taken into service again, all within the hour. He walked round the grounds with his keeper, arranging the shoot. He even sent out invitations to his godfather, Doctor Armstrong, and one or two other people in the district, to make more sport for Henry.

“I’ll let them know,” he said to himself, “that I can put on as good a show as my grandfather ever did.”

The morning of the great day was crisp and fine, and Johnnie, up earlier than he had been for several weeks, walked down to the creek and looked across at the snow-tipped crest of Hungry Hill. The sun shone into the windows of Clonmere, the doors were opened wide, and the dining-room table, laid for cold luncheon, looked clean and inviting, for the first time in months.