The Ghost Girl Part 2

She felt angry with Byrne, with the cook, with Mr. Hennessey and with herself. Plenty of people had been to dinner at Kilgobbin, yet she had never felt ashamed of the _menage_ till now. This stranger from over the water, notwithstanding her dislike for him, had the power to disturb her mind 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 her dislike them, but no one else had ever roused her into this feeling of unrest, this criticism of her belongings, this irritation against everything including herself.

Her bedroom was a big room with two windows looking upon the park; it was almost in black darkness, but the windows shewed in dim, grey oblongs and she made her way to one of them, took her place in the window-seat and pressed her forehead against the gla.s.s. The rain had ceased and the clouds had risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl could just make out the black ma.s.ses of the distant woods and the movement of the near fir-trees shaking their tops like hea.r.s.e plumes to the wind.

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

Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will and he had come into the dead man's house as unconcernedly as though it were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things with 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 of indifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the light of reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenes came 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 to stiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of the world, but she had none. Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, the few distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and were separated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into two opposing camps--Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the others Papists.

Phyl, as she sat watching saw, now, the line of the woods strengthen against the sky; the moon was breaking through the clouds and its light increasing minute by minute shewed the parkland clearly defined, the leafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoon stood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west the great dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glen mysterious and secretive, holding in its heart the Druids' altar.

The Druids' altar was the pride of Kilgobbin Park; it consisted of a vast slab of stone supported on four other stones, no man knew its origin, but popular imagination had hung it about with all sorts of gruesome fancies.

Victims had been slaughtered there in the old days, a vein of ironstone in the 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 people round about who would have entered it by night. Phyl, who had no fear of anything, loved the place; she had known it from childhood and had been accustomed to take her worries and bothers there and bury them.

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

The girl listening, now, heard voices below stairs. Hennessey and his companion were evidently leaving the dining-room and crossing the hall to the library. Going out on the landing she caught a glimpse of them as they stood for a moment looking at the trophies in the hall, then they went into 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 on a cloak and hat and came out of the front door, closing it carefully behind her.

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

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

She crossed the gravelled drive to the gra.s.s sward beyond. The night had altered marvellously; nearly every vestige of cloud had vanished, blown away by the wind. The wind and the moon had the night between them and the air was balmy as the air of summer.

Phyl turned and looked back at the house with all its windows glittering in the moonlight, then she struck across the gra.s.s now almost dried by the wind.

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

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

The girl did not pause to think; forgetting that she had no weapon with which to put the poor beast out of its misery, and no means of freeing it without being bitten, she started off at a run in the direction of the sound, 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 of the call.

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

The trees were set rather spa.r.s.ely here and the moonlight shewed vistas of withered fern. The wind had fallen, and in the vast silence of the night this place seemed unreal as a dream. The fox had evidently succeeded in liberating itself from the trap, for its cries had ceased, cut off all of a sudden as though by a closing door.

Phyl paused to listen and look around her. Through all the night from here, 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 a dog from near the Round House, the shaky bleat of a sheep from the fold at Ross' farm came distinct yet diminished almost to vanis.h.i.+ng point. It was like listening to the country sounds of Lilliput. With these came the vaguest whisper of flowing water, broken now and again by a little shudder of wind in the leafless branches of the trees.

"He's out," said Phyl to herself. She was thinking of the fox. She knew that 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 complaining of the foxes having raided the chickens, but there was no use in hunting for the thing by this light and without any indication of its exact whereabouts, so she struck on, determined to return to the house by the more open ground leading through the Druids' glen.

She had been here before in the very early morning before sunrise on her way to the river, Rafferty following her with the fish creel, but she had never seen the place like this with the moonlight on it and she paused for a moment to rest and think, taking her seat on a piece of rock by the cromlech.

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

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

She had forgotten Pinckney, and the strange disturbance that he had occasioned 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, the wax ones with staring eyes, dummies and effigies compared with that mysterious, soulful, sinful, frightful, old rag doll with the inked face, true friend in affliction and companion in joy, and even more, a Ju-ju to be propitiated. That thing had stirred in her a sort of religious sentiment, had caused in her a thrill of wors.h.i.+p real, though faint, far more real than the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d that had been cultivated in her mind by her teachers. The old Druid stone had affected her child's mind in somewhat 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 always filled her with respect.

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

In some of the Burmese and j.a.panese children the doors stand wide open so that they can see themselves as they were before they pa.s.sed through the change called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl's mind as a child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollections of forgotten G.o.ds once wors.h.i.+pped had stolen, and that the power of the Ju-ju and the Druids' stone lay in their power of focussing those vague and wandering threads of remembrance.

To-night this power seemed regained, for she pa.s.sed from the contemplation of concrete images into a vague and pleasant state, an absolute idleness of the intellect akin to that which people call daydreaming.

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

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

"Phylice!"

For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew that it was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we are half asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as the ringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who has never 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 that now, and she amused herself by wondering why his voice had suddenly popped up in her head. She had been thinking about him more than about any one else that evening and that easily accounted for the matter. Fancy had mimicked him--yet why did Fancy use her name and clothe it in Pinckney's voice?--and it was distinctly a call, the call of a person who wishes to draw another person's attention.

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

This same irritation made her laugh when she realised it. Then the idea that Byrne might lock the hall door before she could get back drove every other thought away and she began to run, her shadow running before her over the moonlit gra.s.s.

Half way across the sward, which was divided from the gra.s.s land proper by a Ha-ha, she heard the stable clock striking eleven.

CHAPTER IV

When Phyl withdrew from the dining-room, Hennessey filled his gla.s.s with port, Pinckney, who took no wine, lit a cigarette and the two men drew miles closer to one another in conversation.

They were both relieved by the withdrawal of the girl, Hennessey because he wanted to talk business, Pinckney because her presence had affected him like a wet blanket.

His first impression of Phyl had been delightful, then, little by little, her stiffness and seeming lifelessness had communicated themselves to him.

It seemed to him that he had never met a duller or more awkward schoolgirl. His mind was of that quick order which requires to be caught in the uptake rapidly in order to s.h.i.+ne. Slowness, coldness, dulness or hesitancy in others depressed him just as dull weather depressed him. He did not at all know with what a burning interest his arrival had been awaited, or the effect that his voice had produced and his first appearance. He did not know how the dull schoolgirl had weighed him in a mysterious balance which she herself did not quite comprehend and had found him slightly wanting. Neither could he tell the extent of the paralyses produced in that same mind of hers by the cracked china, the old dish cover, Byrne's awkwardness, and the deboshed crumb-brush.

He should have kept to his first impression of her, for first impressions are nearly always right; he should have sought for the reason of so much charm proving charmless, so much positive attraction proving so negative in effect. But he did not. He just took her as he found her and was glad she was gone.