LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

clattering meal in the dining-room. He had always remembered the second of these occasions with just annoyance, because, in manœuvring the long box through the narrow hall, he had been knocked off his perch, and never after that day had the person whom he had been taught to call “Doctor” come to give him his daily lump of sugar.

      But the day that enunciated itself most stridently from the cockatoo’s past life was that on which the doctor’s niece had, after many short visits, finally arrived with several trunks, and a wooden case from which, when opened, sprang four of the noisome creatures whom Miss Charlotte, their owner, had taught him to call “pussies.” A long era of persecution then began for him, of robbery of his food, and even attacks upon his person. He had retaliated by untiring mimicry, by delusive invitations to food in the manner of Miss Charlotte, and lastly, by the strangling of a too-confiding kitten, whom he had lured, with maternal mewings, within reach of his claws. That very day Miss Charlotte’s hand avenged the murder, and afterwards conveyed him, a stiff guilty lump of white feathers, to the top of the kitchen press, from thenceforth never to descend, except when long and patient picking had opened a link of his chain, or when, on fine days, Norry fastened him to a branch of the tall laurel that overhung the pig-stye. Norry was his only friend, a friendship slowly cemented by a common hatred of the cats and Louisa; indeed, it is probable that but for occasional conversation with Norry he would have choked from his own misanthropic fury, helpless, lonely spectator as he was of the secret gluttonies of Louisa, and the maddening domestic felicity of the cats.

      But on this last day of turbulence and rout he had been forgotten. The kitchen was sunny and stuffy, the blue-bottles were buzzing their loudest in the cobwebby window, one colony of evicted kittens was already beginning to make the best of things in the turf heap, and the leaves of the laurel outside were gleaming tropically against the brilliant sky, with no one to appreciate them except the pigs. When it came to half-past twelve o’clock the cockatoo could no longer refrain, and fell to loud and prolonged screamings. The only result at first was a brief stupefaction on the part of the kittens, and an answering outcry from the fowl in the yard; then, after some minutes, the green baize cross-door opened, and a voice bellowed down the passage:

      “Biddy! Bid Sal!” (fortissimo), “can’t ye stop that bird’s infernal screeching?” There was dead silence, and Miss Mullen advanced into the kitchen and called again.

      “Biddy’s claning herself, Miss Mullen,” said a small voice from the pantry door.

      “That’s no reason you shouldn’t answer!” thundered Charlotte; “come out here yourself and put the cockatoo out in the yard.”

      Louisa the orphan, a short, fat, white-faced girl of fourteen, shuffled out of the pantry with her chin buried in her chest, and her round terrified eyes turned upwards to Miss Charlotte’s face.

      “I’d be in dhread to ketch him,” she faltered.

      Those ladies who considered Miss Mullen “eccentric, but so kind-hearted, and so clever and agreeable,” would have been considerably surprised if they had heard the terms in which she informed Louisa that she was wanting in courage and intelligence; but Louisa’s face expressed no surprise, only a vacancy that in some degree justified her mistress’s language. Still denouncing her retainers, Miss Charlotte mounted nimbly upon a chair, and seizing the now speechless cockatoo by the wings, carried him herself out to the yard and fastened him to his accustomed laurel bough.

      She did not go back to the kitchen, but, after a searching glance at the contents of the pigs’ trough, went out of the yard by the gate that led to the front of the house. Rhododendrons and laurels made a dark green tunnel about her, and, though it was June, the beech leaves of last November lay rotting on each side of the walk. Opposite the hall door the ground rose in a slight slope, thickly covered with evergreens, and topped by a lime-tree, on whose lower limbs a flock of black turkeys had ranged themselves in sepulchral meditation. The house itself was half stifled with ivy, monthly roses, and virginian creeper; everywhere was the same unkempt profusion of green things, that sucked the sunshine into themselves, and left the air damp and shadowed. Charlotte had the air of thinking very deeply as she walked slowly along with her hands in the pockets of her black alpaca apron. The wrinkles on her forehead almost touched the hair that grew so low down upon it as to seem like a wig that had been pulled too far over the turn of the brow, and she kept chewing at her heavy underlip as was her habit during the processes of unobserved thought. Then she went into the house, and, sitting down at the davenport in the dining-room, got out a sheet of her best notepaper, and wrote a note to Pamela Dysart in her strong, commercially clear hand.

      Afternoon tea had never flourished as an institution at Tally Ho Lodge. Occasionally, and of necessity, a laboured repast had been served at five o’clock by the trembling Louisa; occasions on which the afternoon caller had not only to suffer the spectacle of a household being shaken to its foundations on her behalf, but had subsequently to eat of the untempting fruit of these struggles. On the afternoon, however, of the day following that of the cleansing of the spare room, timely preparations had been made. Half the round table in the centre of the drawing-room had been covered with a cloth, and on it Louisa, in the plenitude of her zeal, had prepared a miniature breakfast; loaf, butter-cooler, and knives and forks, a truly realistic touch being conferred by two egg-cups standing in the slop-basin. A vase of marigolds and pink sweet-pea stood behind these, a fresh heap of shavings adorned the grate, the piano had been opened and dusted, and a copy of the “Indiana Waltzes” frisked on the desk in the breeze from the open window.

      Charlotte sat in a low armchair and surveyed her drawing-room with a good deal of satisfaction. Her fingers moved gently through the long fur at the back of Mrs. Bruff’s head, administering, almost unconsciously, the most delicately satisfactory scratching about the base of the wide, sensitive ears, while her eyes wandered back to the pages of the novel that lay open on her lap. She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact that she “took in the English Times and the Saturday Review, and read every word of them,” but it was hinted that the bookshelves that her own capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a large proportion of works of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, “and,” it was generally added in tones of mystery, “many of them French.”

      It was half-past five o’clock, and the sharpest of several showers that had fallen that day had caused Miss Mullen to get up and shut the window, when the grinding of the gate upon the gravel at the end of the short drive warned her that the expected guest was arriving. As she got to the hall door one of those black leather band-boxes on wheels, known in the south and west of Ireland as “jingles” or inside cars, came brushing under the arch of wet evergreens, and she ran out on to the steps.

      “Well, my dear child, welcome to Tally Ho!” she began in tones of effusive welcome, as the car turned and backed towards the doorstep in the accustomed way, then seeing through the half-closed curtains that there was nothing inside it except a trunk and a bonnet box, “Where in the name of goodness is the young lady, Jerry? Didn’t you meet her at the train?”

      “I did to be sure,” replied Jerry; “sure she’s afther me on the road now. Mr. Lambert came down on the thrain with her, and he’s dhrivin’ her here in his own thrap.”

      While he was speaking there was the sound of quick trotting on the road, and Miss Mullen saw a white straw hat and a brown billycock moving swiftly along over the tops of the evergreens. A dog-cart with a white-faced chestnut swung in at the gate, and Miss Fitzpatrick’s hat was immediately swept off her head by a bough of laburnum. Its owner gave a shrill cry and made a snatch at the reins, with an idea apparently of stopping the horse.

      “No, you don’t,” said Mr. Lambert, intercepting the snatch with his whip hand; “you’re going to be handed over to your aunt just as you are.”

      Half a dozen steps brought them to the door, and the chestnut pulled up with his pink nose almost between the curtains of the inside car. It was hard to say whether Miss Mullen had heard Lambert’s remark, which had certainly been loud enough to enable her to do so, but her only reply

Скачать книгу