by Sara Seale
“Well, to give him his due he did, as I’ve discovered too late to make any difference,” he told her calmly. “He apparently wrote out a telegram and gave it to one of the farm hands to send from the village, who, meeting Willie-the-post on the way, not unnaturally passed it on to him to save himself the extra miles, and Willie stuffed it in his pocket and forgot all about it. That’s the Irish brand of wool-gathering for you. Still, my dear Miss Jones, it’s an ill wind, isn’t it?”
She refused to rise to that one, however, and sat fidgeting in her chair, wishing that the orphanage tendency to bolt down food before all the second helpings had gone had not caused her to finish long before her host.
Perhaps he misunderstood her uneasiness, for he remarked suddenly:
“He wouldn’t marry you, you know, if you’re still cherishing hopes of a more romantic bridegroom. Rory’s nonexistent heiress who was to pull his chestnuts out of the fire has been a family joke for a long time. You’d much better make do with me.”
But Harriet had had enough of Irish humour for one day. “If, Mr. Lonnegan,” she said firmly, “all you want is someone to look after your little girl in the holidays, there’s not the slightest need to marry. Why, when I asked you earlier if you could find me work of that kind, didn’t you offer me this?”
“Because, you stubborn, persistent creature, Ireland is still a country where in isolated districts such as this such an arrangement wouldn’t be considered suitable.”
“I see. Well, there must be other houses, other families.”
“None of any help to you. Castle Slyne the other side of the lough is a guest-house now and the O’Rafferty son and heir a bare two months; the Fitzgeralds and the Lynches have grown-up families, and that leaves the two Miss Ryans with no encumbrances except dogs, Alice Docherty who might need a groom but never a nursemaid and old General Sullivan who’s long past either.” He had risen from the table as he spoke and was occupying himself collecting all the used plates to put on the floor for the dogs to lick.
“Saves the washing up,” he observed, catching her disapproving eye, “we’re short-handed in the kitchen. Well, Miss Harriet Jones, what’s your alternative, since your handsome legacy is already dissipated and the fare to England can’t be obtained on credit even in Ireland?”
She, too, got to her feet for one last effort at reason.
“You could, Mr. Lonnegan, if you chose to be generous, lend me the fare back,” she said a little stiffly, but immediately felt herself blushing at the enormity of the suggestion. To borrow money from a perfect stranger was bad enough by Matron’s standards, but to expect charity when you were already supported by it was like asking for more.
However he interpreted that heightened colour, he was not, evidently, prepared to make things easy for her.
“But perhaps I don’t choose,” he retorted coolly. “I thought I’d already made it clear that Nonie wasn’t the sole reason for my proposal, strange as it apparently still seems to you.”
“Well, of course it’s strange! Whoever heard of such a—such a crazy sort of proposal!”
“Well, we’ve done enough sparring for the day, and I must remember my duties as host. We will go and sit on the terrace and admire the view, and you shall entertain me with unlikely tales of this orphanage which seems to have ill-prepared you for the hard facts and disappointments of adult life. Come along.”
The afternoon passed pleasantly, and Harriet found her disconcerting host had, when he chose, as apt a gift for putting you at ease as he had for putting you in your place. He was also a good listener and, never loth to chatter if she was encouraged, she soon forgot she had known him for barely forty-eight hours.
“Did you know who your parents were?” he inquired idly at one point, and looked surprised and puzzled when she replied that she had never asked.
“It’s better not to know than be disappointed, or just make them up for yourself. I might be one of the cases who have no records, you see,” she explained simply, and his eyes grew gentle.
“Yes, I see. And did you make up parents for yourself, Harriet?”
“No, not parents. Sometimes I used to invent a benevolent trustee who would adopt me, or perhaps marry me, like in that old book, Daddy-long-legs.”
“Well, here’s your chance—grab it with both hands!” he said, unable to resist such an opening, but found her eyeing him doubtfully.
“I don’t think benevolent is exactly the right word for you, Mr. Lonnegan, and I don’t suppose you’d consider adopting me,” she said seriously, and he got to his feet.
“You would suppose right. One daughter’s quite enough to be going on with, thank you. You’d best be going indoors, it’s getting chilly,” he said.
Left to her own devices, Harriet felt free to explore at her leisure those rooms they had visited in the morning. Old pieces of china, many of them cracked or broken lay at the backs of display cabinets, faded miniatures, odd scraps of embroidery, ivories and silver trinkets were heaped carelessly together under the glass tops of little spindly tables. She longed to take them out and hold them in her eager hands, but although the cases were unlocked, Ogilvy’s rigid ruling never to touch what did not belong to you forbade a closer inspection. She even found herself jumping guiltily when Jimsy caught her lifting the edge of a piece of cloth which hung over an easel to discover what it might hide.
“I was bringing a lamp to the snug where himself toult me you would be restin’,” he said with obvious disapproval. “Why would you be puttin’ a strain on your ailin’ leg pokin’ about with this trash? These rooms are niver used.”
“Is it only trash?” she asked, aware that the light falling on all these mute objects revealed dust and the long neglect of years, and wondered whether the old man thought she had been criticising his household duties.
“Well now ... as to that I can’t tell you, for the stuff’s laid about here gatherin’ dust ever since I first come as pantry boy, but in thim days there was servants and to spare for polishin’ up gew-gaws, and the mistress, as she was then, buyin’ annything that took her fancy from the tinkers at the door. She had a magpie’s taste for gew-gaws, that wan.”
“Mr. Lonnegan’s wife? Is that her portrait?” asked Harriet, warming instantly to a woman who found fascination in a collection of colourful miscellany without regard to its worth.
“His mammy, not his wife, young miss, an’ the pixture’s not of her,” Jimsy replied with a suggestion of reproof. “The late young mistress cared nothing for the castle, poor soul, an’ she with her heart left in Dublin where she should have stayed.”
Harriet felt a chill of foreboding as she stared at the old servant.
“What was she like? How did she die?”
“Miss Kitty, as she was? She was like a child that’s taken too soon from its mammy, an’ she pined for the lights an’ the gaiety they took from her. She died when the babby came, God rest her soul!”
Jimsy stood there holding the lamp and seemed to have forgotten her, remembering too vividly, perhaps, the melancholy little story, and Harriet said softly:
“Oh, how terribly sad ... sad enough not to be happy in such a place as this, but sadder still to die when a child would have changed everything.”
“She niver wanted the child. Mr. Duff, too, thought a babby would divert her from her miscontent, and the paintin’ she was always at, shuttin’ herself up in this very room, for it was the wan she tuk for herself, but the waitin’ an’ the slow change in her body soured her on him an’ she turned agin him.”
“Oh, poor man ... he would have blamed himself, I suppose.”
“He did so, though ‘twas not his fault he niver onder-stood Miss Kitty, for dancin’ an’ dressin’ up was nary a Lonnegan’s notion of the gaiety, but he took it hard, blamin’ himself for wishin’ the child on her and mislidn’ the poor toad on account of it.”
“That’s sadder still,” she said. “I should have thought the little girl would be a comfort.”
“Ah, well ... himself wished for a son, which was only natural, with Clooney in mind, an’ how would a man find comfort in a pukin’ wean, an’ he with no patience with wailin’ females annyways?” Jimsy said with a sudden return to his more usual manner.
“Where’s the little girl now?” Harriet asked curiously, for there seemed to be no signs of a child about the house.
“Away to her convent skule in Knockferry. There’s not much companionship here for a child, so that way was best.”
“The holidays must be lonely here for her.”
“She’s used to it, the craythur, havin’ known nothin’ else. Himself was mistaken shutting up the castle, I’m thinkin’, but he couldn’t abide the place at first, and went trapesin’ round furrin’ parts, drinkin’ hard an’ gamblin’ high, an’ wenchin’ hard too, if he’s annything like his grandda.”
A rather leery look accompanied the old man’s final remark, and she felt herself colouring as she began to suspect Jimsy was exercising his histrionic talents with rather too much exaggeration of the national characteristics.
“Ah well ... I’ll leave you the lamp an’ fetch another to the snug in case you want to gawp here a while longer,” he said a little huffily, and placing the lamp on a table, shuffled out.
She wandered curiously about the room, seeking for indications of its late owner’s personal tastes, but there were few traces of a young girl’s occupation, except for a shelf of dusty books and a small chest of drawers containing the discarded mementoes of parties, and a trivial assortment of unused, or unwanted presents, some still with their Christmas labels attached, and many bearing the signature Sam. Books, too, were inscribed with the same name; expensive editions of reproductions in art, lives of painters and sometimes books of verse. Some had From Sam, with love, scrawled across the fly-leaf, one or two bore more intimate effusions, and one proclaimed itself to be in memory of that unforgettable night in Dublin.
Who was this Sam, so attentive and so pervasive? wondered Harriet, shutting up the last book with an unreasoning feeling of distaste, and the veiled portrait on the easel suddenly proved an irresistible temptation.
She twitched the drapery off with a quick, guilty jerk and stood gazing with curious eyes at the face looking back at her, the face of a young girl brimming over with life and a strange, teasing beauty, a face which proclaimed only too heartbreakingly the truth of Jimsy’s kindly memories of a girl who loved dancing and dressing up and the innocent pleasures of admiration; but there was something there which contradicted that suggestion of pining. The work was unfinished, and not very good, Harriet thought, and remembering that the young Mrs. Lonnegan had painted for a hobby and a distraction, wondered whether this had been a self-portrait left unfinished because death had intervened.
She shivered involuntarily and was replacing the drape when the door opened suddenly and she saw her host standing there watching her with a slightly intimidating expression on his dark face.
“What on earth are you doing in this cold room? You should be resting that ankle by the fire,” he said, and she moved hastily away from the easel.
“I didn’t realise it was so late,” she apologised. “I wanted to explore these rooms again and discover more treasures. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Why should I mind? But there’s little here to rank as treasure. Most of the stuff’s worthless and has amply accumulated through the years.”
“So Jimsy said.”
“H’m ... and what else did Jimsy say? The old scoundrel can be like the Ancient Mariner when the fancy moves him.”
“ ‘He holds him with his glittering eyes—the Wedding Guest stood still,’ ” Harriet quoted glibly to avoid a truthful answer, and he smiled.
“Did the authorities insist you learn the whole of that terrible poem by heart?” he asked, and she replied quite seriously;
“Oh, yes. We were very well grounded in the English poets. I could recite lots to you.”
“Well, we’ll reserve that pleasure for days when conversation fails us, I think. Come with me to the warmth. I want to talk to you.”
She followed him into another room which must, she supposed, be the oddly named snug which both he and Jimsy had mentioned, and this, she thought, was clearly the room that was used from choice. It must once have presented the formal graciousness of a small drawing-room, for it was panelled with the fine-grained wood of another decade, and still retained something of the elegance of a past generation. But now the more masculine appointments of a smoking-room rubbed shoulders with brocaded chairs and spindly cabinets; sporting papers and magazines littered tables in untidy heaps, and the high stone mantel was crammed with an assortment of pipes, tobacco jars and official notifications.
“Oh, this is nice! I can see, now, why you call it the snug,” Harriet said, warming her frozen hands at the fire and looking up, saw a coat of arms circled with lettering carved in the stone of the chimneypiece. “What does that say?”
“Wake not a sleeping wolf. Perhaps you should take it as a warning,” he replied with a certain asperity, and, in the same tone, ordered her on to the sofa with instructions to put up her feet
“Is this your family motto?” she asked, unperturbed by what merely sounded like a nursery threat, and he laughed.
“In a sense, I suppose, though it was a Spanish De Wolfe who married into the family back in the middle ages who fancied it, I believe. Pinched it off Will Shakespeare, I shouldn’t wonder, if you know your Henry IV. So you like this room?”
“It’s homey and sort of mixed up,” she said, aware now that she was glad to rest her ankle after so much standing about. “Not that the other rooms weren’t lovely, of course,” she added hastily.
“The other rooms are damn cold and very few of them are lovely from an aesthetic point of view. Clooney is a rather disastrous hotch-potch of style, thanks to the architectural whims of its various tenants,” he observed with some dryness.
“I’ve had a wire from’ this worthy lady of yours at Ogilvy Manor,” he stated casually, and the observation was so unexpected that she stared at him open-mouthed.
“Matron?” But how could she know I was here?” she said at last. “She thinks I’m in Clapham.”
“Well, I regret to say I informed her.”
“You informed her! Well, of all the—”
“How delightfully young you are, Harriet Jones—you nearly called me a dirty sneak, didn’t you?”
The warmth and pleasure this room had given her faded, together with that new-found sense of belonging, a sense she had not been aware of until now. She would have to go back, she thought dully. Whatever harsh view the authorities were likely to take of her future, they could hardly leave her foisted on a complete stranger for want of the fare home.
“Why did you?” she asked in a small, deflated voice.
“Well, there might have been complications if you decided to stay on my terms. I wouldn’t want to be extradited to England on a charge of enticement!”
“Could they do that!”
“Possibly. You’re under age, and I imagine such institutions have certain precautionary powers over their charges.”
“They’ll make me go back.”
“Yes, they will, unless you give them a valid reason for staying.”
“They won’t think lack of money a valid reason. They’ll send the fare. They might even send someone to fetch me.”
He rubbed a thoughtful hand over his chin, regarding her with an odd expression.
“But my dear young lady, only this morning you begged me to lend you the fare. Have you changed your mind since then?” he said with rather unkind irony, and she looked across at him with startled eyes.
“Couldn’t I stop just for a time as companion to your little girl?” she asked, seeking for a compromise, and he gave her a sudden grin as though her attempt to bargain had given him the first round.
“No, you could not,” he replied. “For one thing, Nonie’s only here in the holid
ays, so how would I explain your presence the rest of the time? For another, I happen to need a wife, not just a nursery governess.” His eyes suddenly twinkled with unsuspected humour. “Come now, foolish Harriet, what have you got to lose? You seem to be sold on my crumbling castle, and I can’t believe you want to return to whatever lies in wait for you at this dreary-sounding place. Is it my unromantic face that puts you off, or are you afraid I’ll beat you if you don’t behave yourself?”
She sighed, wondering why he felt he had to humour her like a child.
“Well?”
The bitch, Delsa, got up and pushed her muzzle under his hand, jealous for his attention, and Harriet found herself wondering with slightly shocking irrelevance what he would be like as a lover. Her thoughts travelled back instinctively to the face in the portrait, and she said on impulse:
“Your wife was very lovely, wasn’t she?”
“Lovely?” he repeated, frowning no doubt at the apparent inconsequence of the question. “Well, very pretty, certainly, but loveliness is a little more than that, I think. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, just a natural curiosity, I suppose,” she replied hastily, remembering that he had caught her prying, and might well resent uninvited intrusion in his private affairs, but his answer puzzled her. Nobody, she thought, could have failed to find beauty in that dark, provocative face.
“You haven’t answered my first question,” he said, “I asked you if it was my ugly face that made you hesitate, but perhaps you were only thinking that I might make sad comparisons with the past, and were sorry for me.”
