The Real Charlotte - Ross Martin

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making their dark and perilous ascent in safety, she stood still in a low passage into which two or three other doors opened. She knocked at the first of these, and, receiving no answer, turned the handle quietly and looked in. There was no furniture in it except a broken wooden bedstead; innumerable flies buzzed on the closed window, and in the slant of sunlight that fell through the dim panes was a box from which a turkey reared its red throat, and regarded her with a suspicion born, like her chickens, of long hatching. Charlotte closed the door and noiselessly opened the next. There was nothing in the room, which was of the ordinary low-ceiled cottage type, and after a calculating look at the broken flooring and the tattered wall-paper, she went quietly out into the passage again. “Good servants’ room,” she said to herself, “but if she’s here much longer it’ll be past praying for.”

      If she had been in any doubt as to Miss Duffy’s whereabouts, a voice from the room at the end of the little passage now settled the matter. “Is that Peggy?” it called.

      Charlotte pushed boldly into the room with the bowl of gruel.

      “No, Miss Duffy, me poor old friend, it’s me, Charlotte Mullen,” she said in her most cordial voice; “they told me below you were ill, but I thought you’d see me, and I brought your gruel up in my hand. I hope you’ll like it none the less for that!”

      The invalid turned her night-capped head round from the wall and looked at her visitor with astonished, bloodshot eyes. Her hatchety face was very yellow, her long nose was rather red, and her black hair thrust itself out round the soiled frill of her night-cap in dingy wisps.

      “You’re welcome, Miss Mullen,” she said with a pitiable attempt at dignity; “won’t you take a cheer?”

      “Not till I’ve seen you take this,” replied Charlotte, handing her the bowl of gruel with even broader bonhomie than before.

      Julia Duffy reluctantly sat up among her blankets, conscious almost to agony of the squalor of all her surroundings, conscious even that the blankets were of the homespun, madder-dyed flannel such as the poor people use, and taking the gruel, she began to eat it in silence. She tried to prop herself in this emergency with the recollection that Charlotte Mullen’s grandfather drank her grandfather’s port wine under this very roof, and that it was by no fault of hers that she had sunk while Charlotte had risen; but the wornout boots that lay on the floor where she had thrown them off, and the rags stuffed into the broken panes in the window, were facts that crowded out all consolation from bygone glories.

      “Well, Miss Duffy,” said Charlotte, drawing up a chair to the bedside, and looking at her hostess with a critical eye, “I’m sorry to see you so sick; when Billy Grainy left the milk last night he told Norry you were laid up in bed, and I thought I’d come over and see if there was anything I could do for you.”

      “Thank ye, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia stiffly, sipping the nauseous gruel with ladylike decorum, “I have all I require here.”

      “Well, ye know, Miss Duffy, I wanted to see how you are,” said Charlotte, slightly varying her attack; “I’m a bit of a doctor, like yourself. Peggy Roche below told me you had what she called ‘an impression on the heart,’ but it looks to me more like a touch of liver.”

      The invalid does not exist who can resist a discussion of symptoms, and Miss Duffy’s hauteur slowly thawed before Charlotte’s intelligent and intimate questions. In a very short time Miss Mullen had felt her pulse, inspected her tongue, promised to send her a bottle of unfailing efficacy, and delivered an exordium on the nature and treatment of her complaint.

      “But in deed and in truth,” she wound up, “if you want my opinion, I’ll tell you frankly that what ails you is you’re just rotting away with the damp and loneliness of this place. I declare that sometimes when I’m lying awake in my bed at nights, I’ve thought of you out here by yourself, without an earthly creature near you if you got sick, and wondered at you. Why, my heavenly powers! ye might die a hundred deaths before anyone would know it!”

      Miss Duffy picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped the gruel from her thin lips.

      “If it comes to that, Miss Mullen,” she said with some resumption of her earlier manner, “if I’m for dying I’d as soon die by myself as in company; and as for damp, I thank God this house was built by them that didn’t spare money on it, and it’s as dry this minyute as what it was forty years ago.”

      “What! Do you tell me the roof’s sound?” exclaimed Charlotte with genuine interest.

      “I have never examined it, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia coldly, “but it keeps the rain out, and I consider that suffeecient.”

      “Oh, I’m sure there’s not a word to be said against the house,” Charlotte made hasty reparation; “but, indeed, Miss Duffy, I say—and I’ve heard more than myself say the same thing—that a delicate woman like you has no business to live alone so far from help. The poor Archdeacon frets about it, I can tell ye. I believe he thinks Father Heffernan’ll be raking ye into his fold! And I can tell ye,” concluded Charlotte, with what she felt to be a certain rough pathos, “there’s plenty in Lismoyle would be sorry to see your father’s daughter die with the wafer in her mouth!”

      “I had no idea the people in Lismoyle were so anxious about me and my affairs,” said Miss Duffy. “They’re very kind, but I’m able to look afther my soul without their help.”

      “Well, of course, everyone’s soul is their own affair; but, ye know, when no one ever sees ye in your own parish church—well, right or wrong, there are plenty of fools to gab about it.”

      The dark bags of skin under Julia Duffy’s eyes became slowly red, a signal that this thrust had gone home. She did not answer, and her visitor rose, and moving towards the hermetically sealed window, looked out across the lawn over Julia’s domain. Her roundest and weightiest stone was still in her sling, while her eye ran over the grazing cattle in the fields.

      “Is it true what I hear, that Peter Joyce has your grazing this year?” she said casually.

      “It is quite true,” answered Miss Duffy, a little defiantly. A liver attack does not pre-dispose its victims to answer in a Christian spirit questions that are felt to be impertinent.

      “Well,” returned Charlotte, still looking out of the window, with her hands deep in the pockets of her black alpaca coat, “I’m sorry for it.”

      “Why so?”

      Julia’s voice had a sharpness that was pleasant to Miss Mullen’s ear.

      “I can’t well explain the matter to ye now,” Charlotte said, turning round and looking portentously upon the sick woman, “but I have it from a sure hand that Peter Joyce is bankrupt, and will be in the courts before the year is out.”

      When, a short time afterwards, Julia Duffy lay back among her madder blankets and heard the last sound of Miss Mullen’s phaeton wheels die away along the lake road, she felt that the visit had at least provided her with subject for meditation.

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      Mr. Roderick Lambert’s study window gave upon the flower garden, and consequently the high road also came within the sphere of his observations. He had been sitting at his writing-table, since luncheon-time, dealing with a variety of business, and seldom lifting his glossy black head except when some sound in the road attracted his attention. It was not his custom to work after a solid luncheon on a close afternoon, nor was it by any means becoming to his complexion when he did so; but the second post had brought letters of an unpleasant character that required immediate attention, and the flush on his face was not wholly due to hot beef-steak pie and sherry. It was not only that several of Sir Benjamin’s tenants had attended a Land League meeting the Sunday before, and that their religious director had written to inform him that they had there pledged

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