Hungry Hill (24 page)

Bank-notes and coins flew about the market-square, and the Clerk, alarmed at the turn of events, reached for his blunderbuss, with which he had been armed by Copper John for fear of robbers, and discharged it into the air, with the idea of subduing the people, who were by this time grubbing on hands and knees in search of the scattered notes. Unfortunately the shot struck James Kelly in the eye, wounding him mortally, and in a few moments the whole of Doonhaven was in an uproar. The Clerk, terrified for his life, took refuge in the Post Office, where the postmaster, with con siderable wisdom, had the sense to bar his doors and windows and send a lad, by a back entrance, for the police, and also for the Director of the mines, Copper John himself. Before very long order was restored, the body of the luckless James Kelly was removed to the house of his brother-in-law, Sam Donovan, where his widow had already preceded him in a state of hysteria, and Thomas Dowding, the Clerk to the Company, was taken in a closed carriage to the county jail in Mundy.

He came up for trial at the next Assizes, where he was acquitted, after a great deal of contradictory evidence had been heard, and dispatched from court with no more than a severe reprimand to the effect that he must in future be more careful in his use of firearms. The Clerk, considerably shaken by the whole event, was glad enough to relinquish his post to the Company and take himself to another part of the country, where it was hoped that time, and the change of scenery, would banish all memory of the affair from his troubled mind.

That was not the case, however, in Doonhaven. The old hatred of the mines, which had sunk into abeyance now for ten years, flared up again, and the Brodricks were looked upon askance in the village of Doonhaven or as they rode about the countryside. Once again the Clonmere tenants had their fences broken, their crops burned, and their cattle maimed. It could not be forgotten that the blunderbuss carried by the Clerk had come from the walls of Clonmere Castle itself, which fact, according to the supporters of the Donovans, made Copper John no more nor less than a murderer.

James Kelly, who in his lifetime had been a slow-witted fellow, with a partiality to strong ale, became in his death a martyour, the very paragon among men. He was, or so his widow declared, made in the likeness of the Saints, and never an angry word had she received from him in the fifteen years of their married life.

“He was too good for the world and for me, God help him,” she said; “and as for those same Brodricks who set themselves to destroy his sweet life, the good God will see fit to punish them in His own time.”

It so happened that John, who with Fanny-Rose and the children was spending the summer at Clonmere, became involved in the affair through chance, since it was he who had given the blunderbuss to the Clerk a few weeks previous to the accident. John found himself summoned as a witness, and was obliged to attend the Assizes with his father. The whole proceeding seemed to him fantastic and absurd, and it was only when he discovered two of his favourite greyhounds, which he had left in great health and spirits the night before, dead by poison that he realised he now had incurred the hatred of the Donovans in place of his father. It appeared to him the basest sort of revenge, to strike at a man through the torture of dumb animals, which were guiltless of any crime whatever.

“What the devil am I to do?” asked John of Fanny-Rosa, when they had buried poor Lightfoot and his brother under the old walnut tree in the walled garden. “I can’t go down to Sam Donovan’s shop and ask him if he poisoned my dogs. The fellow would smile in that sickening sly way of his, and tell me he did not know I owned a dog.”

“But Tim saw that son of his climb through the fence last night, coming from the direction of the kennels,” said Fanny-Rosa. “It is obvious that he did it.

Why don’t you take a stick and thrash the lout within an inch of his life?”

“Yes, and be summoned by Sam for assault,” said John wearily. “Oh, confound it, what’s the use? Poor Lightfoot will never run again, or Dauntless either. They gave me the happiest moments of my life, after you, Fanny-Rosa. Maybe it’s foolish of me, but this business has saddened me more than anything that has happened for years.”

He went away by himself, and sat in the little summer-house up in the woods, where Henry used to lie ten years previously, and he thought about Lightfoot and Dauntless, how he had trained them both from puppyhood to be the champions of their year, and now they lay stiff and motionless, having died in agony, without their master near them. He wondered if they had cried for him in the night, and felt themselves lost and deserted when he had not answered them. The fun of those old coursing days, that first season in Norfolk, when Lightfoot had won all the points and all the cups, and then later, in this country, travelling over to Mundy with Fanny-Rosa beside him, the shouts of the crowds, the smile of the judge, Lightfoot slim and eager, waiting upon his master’s word, his master’s hand. There had been beauty in that dog, and a soul too, he could swear. They had understood one another as human beings rarely did. He had neglected the dogs these last years, allowed them to grow idle and fat like himself.

Well, there was an end of it all now. Nothing remained of his coursing days but the silver cups on the sideboard in the dining-room. ‘

Such a useless finish. Poisoned by the Donovans. He had never in his whole life harmed one of that family, but he remembered old Morty Donovan cursing him that night in the rain on Hungry Hill. So perhaps the curse was taking effect now. He wished that it could have spared the greyhounds. As John sat alone in the summer-house he began to think about the Donovans, and tried to put himself in their place. Clonmere had been theirs, he reminded himself, before a Brodrick had set foot in the place. And then, of course, like so many other families, the land had been taken away from them after the rebellion in ‘bleda and given to some peer or other, and so to the first Henry Brodrick.

It was natural enough that they should show resentment, and natural enough that they should detest the duty-loving, law-abiding John Brodrick, who stopped them smuggling, and took away the only chance they had of making a bit of money on the sly. Small wonder that one of them took a shot at him when he was riding to church, and small blame if he was glad when the shot succeeded. They said the blood still welled up in the creek beside the drive on the anniversary of the day he died. John and Henry used to go and look for it as boys, but never a drop of blood did they see, unless it was chickens’ blood thrown in the water by the woman at the gate-house hard by. Anyway, the Donovan who fired the fatal shot was killed for his work by Brodrick’s friends and his house destroyed.

Little wonder there was enmity between the two families.

“If I had the energy,” thought John, “I would go down to Doon-haven and have it out with Sam, and tell him to make an end to the business. Otherwise the ridiculous feud will never finish. Johnnie and that son of his will start scrapping about something, though I dare say Johnnie would hold his own without help from me or anyone.”

He left the summer-house in better spirits than he had gone into it Poor Lightfoot and Dauntless were dead, but their lives had been happy, and maybe it was better that they should go suddenly, in their prime, even if their end had been painful, than live to an old age of rheumatism and bad teeth, unable to chase a hare when they saw one.

He came down from the woods to the bank above the house. The hydrangeas were in flower, and Barbara, in her shady hat, was moving amongst them with her scissors. She did not look well these days, sometimes he feared that cough of hers sounded too much like Henry’s. No use saying anything, though. The children came running towards him, Johnnie turning somersaults, laying small Edward flat on his face as he cart-wheeled in the air. Fanny-Rosa came out of the house with the baby Herbert in her arms. Five children in eight years; they had not done badly… .

She handed the little fellow to his aunt, and came up the bank to meet her husband. Something touched his heart as she did so. Would she always have the power to move him thus, with her smile, with her eyes, with the feel of her hand on his arm?

“It’s our wedding day on the twenty-ninth,” he told her. “We shall have been together nine years. Did you know that?”

“I’m not likely to forget it, am I?” she said, pointing to the children. “Maybe it’s time I wore a cap in the house, and gave up running about the grounds the way I do. They say that the tenth year of married life is the most difficult.”

“Do they now? And in what way would it be difficult?”

“Why, the husband becomes weary of seeing the same face every night on his pillow, and he looks around him to see if he might do better.”

“How do you know I have not done so already, and cannot find one?”

“Because you are too lazy, dearest one, andwiththe side-whiskers on your face there’s not a woman would look at you.”

“I am not so lazy as you suppose. In fact, I propose taking a step one day this week that will astonish you when you hear of it.”

“And what would that be?”

“I’ll not tell you. You shall plague me as you will, but I shall keep my secret.”

The truth was that John was determined after all to go down to the village to see Sam Donovan, and make an attempt to bury the hatchet of nearly two hundred years. It mattered little for himself, but for his children’s sake he felt that it must be done. Why should Johnnie, and Henry, and Edward, and Herbert, and Fanny, be landed with ridiculous squabbles in the years to come? So a week after the poisoning of the greyhounds John set off one afternoon on foot for Doonhaven, having reluctantly refused to accompany Fanny-Rosa and the children on a picnic.

“There’ll be picnics a-plenty in the days to come,” he told them. “For once in my life I am going to do a piece of work.”

“Don’t let it kill you,” laughed Fanny-Rosa.

“It certainly shan’t do that,” said her husband.

It was pleasant walking in the October sunshine.

The path through the woods was crisp with fallen leaves, and the old herons rose from their nests in the trees and flapped away at his approach. The tide was making in the creek. Some of the men were burning leaves up in the park. The good bitter wood smell came floating down to him on the wind. Soon the cock would be in, and he would persuade his father to take a day off from the mines with his gun. They might get a few snipe up in the bog at Kileen, and have another day with the hares on Doon Island. He would suggest to Fanny-Rosa that they stayed on at Clonmere until Christmas. Five small children seemed like ten at Lletharrog. If they went on as they were doing at present he would have to give the farm-house back to his father and take something larger. It was close and sultry down in Doonhaven, more like summer than autumn in the market-square, and the place seemed deserted, as it always did in the afternoon.

He went down to the quay, and along to Sam Donovan’s shop. It was closed, and the shutter was up at the window. He knocked on the door, and presently it was opened by Sam’s wife, a thin, tired-looking woman, who was wiping her hands on a dirty apron. A girl of ten or eleven, with a mop of fair hair and light blue eyes like all the Donovans, peered over her mother’s shoulder.

“Is Sam at home?” asked John, aware that his voice sounded a shade too hearty to be natural.

“He is not,” said the woman, gazing at him suspiciously.

“Oh, I am sorry for that,” said John. “I came down to speak to him most particularly.”

The woman made no reply, and after waiting a moment, John turned away. Perhaps he had bungled the business after all. He heard the child whisper to her mother, and then she ran out on to the quay.

“My father is staying with my uncle Denny, on account of the sickness,” she said. “If you want to speak to him you will find him there. Mother and I have not seen him these two weeks.”

John thanked the child, and went back along the quay. Having come down to Doonhaven for the purpose, it was something of an anti-climax to find Sam was not at home, and his good effort made for nothing. The church clock struck four. It was too late to join the others for their picnic. No, he had set himself to the task, and the task might as well be done. He would walk over to Denny Donovan’s, and see both brothers at the same time. There was nothing like doing the business thoroughly, now he had made up his mind to it. It was an ideal day for a walk too, the air up on the road to Denmare would be grand after the village.

Once again he left Doonhaven behind him, and the gate-house, and the park, and struck up westward on the road across the moors. His father had won his way, and the road had been widened in places, and now ran straight through to the Denmare river, but John did not notice that much good had been done by it, only that more people came down from the country to Doonhaven on market days and Saints’ days. Denny Donovan’s public-house-it was hardly more than a shack-was some three miles along the road, a dirty, tumbled-down place, with a few bedraggled hens scratching in the yard behind. Denny’s cart was put up in the shed beside the house, and his pony was turned loose on the moor beside the road.

“At any rate,” thought John, “he is at home, if Sam is not.”

He saw the figure of a woman looking down at him from behind a blind in the upstairs bedroom, and believed that he recognised Mary Kelly, the widow of the unfortunate man who had been shot. His courage began to fail him. Perhaps it was nothing but quixotic foolishness after all that had led him here.

The door of the public entrance was shut, with a bar across it, and John went round the yard to the back. It was odd of Denny Donovan to close his door against possible customers. More likely than not he had run out of liquor, and had been unable to go into Mundy to replenish his store.

John knocked on the door, and, gaining no response, boldly lifted the latch and walked in. There was nobody below, but he could hear sounds of movement overhead in the bedroom. The public bar had a grey, neglected air about it. There was dust everywhere, and on the bar itself two or three unwashed glasses that looked as if they had stood there for days. He thumped on the bar with his fist, and after a moment or two he heard footsteps coming down the rickety stairs, and Sam Donovan stood before him. He was wearing a night-shirt stuffed into a pair of breeches, and was unshaven. He stood staring at his visitor, and began scratching his ear and half smiling in the old fawning way that was his mannerism.