The Ghost Girl

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

  CHAPTER III

  Phyl led the way and they crossed the hall to the dining-room, a roomoak-panelled like the library and warm with the light of fire andcandles.

  Once upon a time there had been high doings in this sombre room, huntbreakfasts and dinners, rousing songs, laughter, and the toasting ofpretty women--now dust and ashes.

  Here highly coloured gentlemen had slept the sleep of the just, under thetable, whilst the ladies waited in vain for them in the drawing-room, hereColonel Berknowles had drunk a glass of mulled wine on that black morningover a hundred-and-thirty years ago when he went out with CouncillorKinsella and shot him through the lungs by the Round House on theArranakilty Road. The diminutive Tom Moore had sung his songs here "putstanding on the table" by the other guests, and the great Dan had heldforth and the wind had dashed the ivy against the windows just as it didto-night with fist-fulls of rain from the Slieve Bloom Mountains. Byrnehad put the big silver candlesticks on the table in honour of the guest,and he now appeared bearing in front of him a huge dish with a cover asize too small for it.

  He placed the dish before Mr. Hennessey and removed the cover, disclosinga cod's "head and shoulders" whilst a female servant appeared with a dishof potatoes boiled in their jackets and a tureen of oyster sauce.

  Now a cod's head and shoulders served up like this in the good old Irishway is, honestly, a ghastly sight. The thing has a countenance and anexpression most forbidding and all its own.

  The appearance of the old dish cover, clapped on by the cook in a hurry indefault of the proper one, had given Phyl a turn and now she was wonderingwhat Mr. Pinckney was thinking of the fish and the manner of its serving.

  All at once and as if stimulated into life by the presence of the newguest, all sorts of qualms awoke in her mind. The dining arrangements ofthe better class Irish are, and always have been, rather primitive,haphazard, and lacking in small refinements. Phyl was conscious of thefact that Byrne had placed several terrible old knives on the table,knives that properly belonged to the kitchen, and when the second course,consisting of a boiled chicken, faced by a piece of bacon reposing on amat of boiled cabbage, appeared, the fact that one of the dishes wascracked confronted her with the equally obvious fact that the cook in herlarge-hearted way had sent up the chicken with the black legs unremoved.

  It seemed to Phyl's vision--now thoroughly distorted--that the eyes of thestranger were everywhere, cool, critical, and amused; so obsessed was hermind with this idea that it could take no hold upon the conversation.Pinckney was talking of the States; he might just as well have beentalking about Timbuctoo for all the impression he made on her with herunfortunate head filled with cracked dishes, chickens' black legs, Byrne'sawkwardness and the suddenly remembered crumb-brush.

  It was twenty years old and it had lost half of its bristles in theservice of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacitypurely Irish.

  "Sure, that old brush is a disgrace to the table," was the comment Phyl'sfather had made on it once, just as though he were casually referring tosome form of the Inevitable such as the state of the weather.

  The disgrace had not been removed and it was coming to the table, now, inthe hand of Byrne. Phyl watched the crumbs being swept up, she watched thecloth being taken off and the wine and dessert placed in the good oldfashion, on the polished mahogany, then leaving the gentlemen to theirwine, she retired upstairs and to her bedroom.

  She felt angry with Byrne, with the cook, with Mr. Hennessey and withherself. Plenty of people had been to dinner at Kilgobbin, yet she hadnever felt ashamed of the _menage_ till now. This stranger from over thewater, notwithstanding her dislike for him, had the power to disturb hermind as few other people had disturbed it in the course of her short life.Other people had put her into worse tempers, other people had made herdislike them, but no one else had ever roused her into this feeling ofunrest, this criticism of her belongings, this irritation againsteverything including herself.

  Her bedroom was a big room with two windows looking upon the park; it wasalmost in black darkness, but the windows shewed in dim, grey oblongs andshe made her way to one of them, took her place in the window-seat andpressed her forehead against the glass. The rain had ceased and the cloudshad risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl couldjust make out the black masses of the distant woods and the movement ofthe near fir-trees shaking their tops like hearse plumes to the wind.

  The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted outby night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire intheir power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them wasthinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father.

  Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him inCharleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the willand he had come into the dead man's house as unconcernedly as though itwere an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of thingswith never a word of Him.

  If Phyl had thought over the matter, she might have seen that, perhaps,this silence of Pinckney's was the silence of delicacy, not ofindifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the lightof reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenescame to a decision of this sort they were hard to be shaken from it.

  She had decided to dislike him long before she saw him.

  What Phyl really wanted now was perhaps a commonsense female relative tostiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of theworld, but she had none. Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, thefew distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and wereseparated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into twoopposing camps--Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the othersPapists.

  Phyl, as she sat watching saw, now, the line of the woods strengthenagainst the sky; the moon was breaking through the clouds and its lightincreasing minute by minute shewed the parkland clearly defined, theleafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoonstood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west thegreat dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glenmysterious and secretive, holding in its heart the Druids' altar.

  The Druids' altar was the pride of Kilgobbin Park; it consisted of a vastslab of stone supported on four other stones, no man knew its origin, butpopular imagination had hung it about with all sorts of gruesome fancies.Victims had been slaughtered there in the old days, a vein of ironstone inthe great slab had become the bloodstain of men sacrificed by the Druids;the glen was avoided by day and there were very few of the country peopleround about who would have entered it by night. Phyl, who had no fear ofanything, loved the place; she had known it from childhood and had beenaccustomed to take her worries and bothers there and bury them.

  It was a friend, places can become friends and, sometimes, most terrificenemies.

  The girl listening, now, heard voices below stairs. Hennessey and hiscompanion were evidently leaving the dining-room and crossing the hall tothe library. Going out on the landing she caught a glimpse of them as theystood for a moment looking at the trophies in the hall, then they wentinto the library, the door was closed, and Phyl came downstairs.

  In the hall she slipped on a pair of goloshes over her thin shoes, put ona cloak and hat and came out of the front door, closing it carefullybehind her.

  To put it in her own words, she couldn't stand the house any longer. Nottill this very evening did she feel the great change that her father'sdeath had brought in her life, not till now did she fully know that herpast was dead as well as her father, and not till she had left the housedid the feeling come to her that Pinckney was to prove its undertaker.

  There was something alike cold and fateful in the impression that this manhad made upon her, an extraordinary impression, for it would be impossibleto imagine anything further removed from the ideas of Coldness and Fatethan the idea of the cheerful and practical Pinckney. However, there itwas,
her heart was chilled with the thought of him and the instinctiveknowledge that he was going to make a great alteration in her life.

  She crossed the gravelled drive to the grass sward beyond. The night hadaltered marvellously; nearly every vestige of cloud had vanished, blownaway by the wind. The wind and the moon had the night between them and theair was balmy as the air of summer.

  Phyl turned and looked back at the house with all its windows glitteringin the moonlight, then she struck across the grass now almost dried by thewind.

  Phyl had something of the night bird in her composition. She had oftenbeen out long before dawn to pick up night lines in the river and she knewthe woods by dark as well as by day. She was out now for nothing but abreath of fresh air, she did not intend to stay more than ten minutes, andshe was on the point of returning to the house when a cry from the woodsmade her pause.

  One might have fancied that some human being was crying out in agony, butPhyl knew that it was a fox, a fox caught in a trap. She was confirmed inher knowledge by the barking of its mates; they would be gathered roundthe trapped one lending all the help they could--with their voices.

  The girl did not pause to think; forgetting that she had no weapon withwhich to put the poor beast out of its misery, and no means of freeing itwithout being bitten, she started off at a run in the direction of thesound, entering the woods by a path that led through a grove of hazel;leaving this path she struck westward swift as an Indian along the road ofthe call.

  Her mother's people had been used to the wilds, and Phyl had more than afew drops of tracker blood in her veins; better than that, she had a traceof the wood instinct that leads a man about the forest and makes him ableto strike a true line to the west or east or north or south without acompass.

  The trees were set rather sparsely here and the moonlight shewed vistas ofwithered fern. The wind had fallen, and in the vast silence of the nightthis place seemed unreal as a dream. The fox had evidently succeeded inliberating itself from the trap, for its cries had ceased, cut off all ofa sudden as though by a closing door.

  Phyl paused to listen and look around her. Through all the night fromhere, from there, came thin traces of sound, threads fretting the silence.The trotting of a horse a mile away on the Arranakilty road, the bark of adog from near the Round House, the shaky bleat of a sheep from the fold atRoss' farm came distinct yet diminished almost to vanishing point. It waslike listening to the country sounds of Lilliput. With these came thevaguest whisper of flowing water, broken now and again by a little shudderof wind in the leafless branches of the trees.

  "He's out," said Phyl to herself. She was thinking of the fox. She knewthat the trap must be somewhere about and she guessed who had set it.Rafferty, without a doubt, for only the other day he had been complainingof the foxes having raided the chickens, but there was no use in huntingfor the thing by this light and without any indication of its exactwhereabouts, so she struck on, determined to return to the house by themore open ground leading through the Druids' glen.

  She had been here before in the very early morning before sunrise on herway to the river, Rafferty following her with the fish creel, but she hadnever seen the place like this with the moonlight on it and she paused fora moment to rest and think, taking her seat on a piece of rock by thecromlech.

  Phyl, despite her American strain, was very Irish in one particular:though cheerful and healthy and without a trace of morbidness in hercomposition, she, still, was given to fits of melancholy--not depression,melancholy. It is in the air of Ireland, the moist warm air that feeds theshamrock and fills the glens with soft-throated echoes and it is in thesoul of the people.

  Phyl, seated in this favourite spot of hers, where she had played as achild on many a warm summer's afternoon, gave herself over to themoonlight and the spirit of Recollection.

  She had forgotten Pinckney, and the strange disturbance that he hadoccasioned in her mind had sunk to rest; she was thinking of her father,of all the pleasant days that were no more--she remembered her dolls, thewax ones with staring eyes, dummies and effigies compared with thatmysterious, soulful, sinful, frightful, old rag doll with the inked face,true friend in affliction and companion in joy, and even more, a Ju-ju tobe propitiated. That thing had stirred in her a sort of religioussentiment, had caused in her a thrill of worship real, though faint, farmore real than the worship of God that had been cultivated in her mind byher teachers. The old Druid stone had affected her child's mind insomewhat the same way, but with a difference. The Ju-ju was a familiar,she had even beaten and punched it when in a temper; the stone had alwaysfilled her with respect.

  There are some people the doors of whose minds are absolutely closed onthe past; we call them material and practical people; there are others inwhich the doors of division are a wee crack open, or even ajar, so thattheir lives are more or less haunted by whisperings from that strange landwe call yesterday.

  In some of the Burmese and Japanese children the doors stand wide open sothat they can see themselves as they were before they passed through thechange called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl's mind asa child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollectionsof forgotten gods once worshipped had stolen, and that the power of theJu-ju and the Druids' stone lay in their power of focussing those vagueand wandering threads of remembrance.

  To-night this power seemed regained, for she passed from the contemplationof concrete images into a vague and pleasant state, an absolute idlenessof the intellect akin to that which people call daydreaming.

  With her cloak wrapped round her she sat, elbows on knees and her chin inthe palms of her hands giving herself up to Nothing before starting toresume her way to the house.

  Sitting like this she suddenly started and turned. Some one had calledher:

  "Phylice!"

  For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew thatit was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we arehalf asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as theringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who hasnever spoken.

  She rose up and resumed her way, striking along the glen to the open park,yet still the memory of that call pursued her.

  "Phylice!"

  It seemed Mr. Pinckney's voice, it _was_ his voice, she was sure of thatnow, and she amused herself by wondering why his voice had suddenly poppedup in her head. She had been thinking about him more than about any oneelse that evening and that easily accounted for the matter. Fancy hadmimicked him--yet why did Fancy use her name and clothe it in Pinckney'svoice?--and it was distinctly a call, the call of a person who wishes todraw another person's attention.

  Pinckney had never called her by her name and she felt almost irritated atthe impertinence of the phantom voice in doing so.

  This same irritation made her laugh when she realised it. Then the ideathat Byrne might lock the hall door before she could get back drove everyother thought away and she began to run, her shadow running before herover the moonlit grass.

  Half way across the sward, which was divided from the grass land proper bya Ha-ha, she heard the stable clock striking eleven.