Chapter Seven.
A Book of Fate.
The coming of Mistress Kit, as I said before, made life at Knockowen tolerable for me. It mattered little if his honour neglected me, and my lady never looked at me; it mattered little if my fellow-servants ill-used me and put upon me; it mattered little that I had not a friend but Con and the horses to talk to, and not a holiday to call my own.
Miss Kit made all the difference. Not that she concerned herself specially about me, or went out of her way to be kind; but it did one good to see her about the place, with a smile for every one and a friendly word for man and beast. She even beat down the gloom that, in her absence, had weighed both on her father and mother. The former, indeed, was as indifferent as ever to his wife and the latter to her husband. But this daughter of theirs was one interest in common for both—perhaps the one object in the world about which both agreed.
It fell to my lot, as my young lady was an ardent horsewoman, to attend her on many a long ride, riding discreetly twenty yards in the rear, and never forgetting my duty so far as to speak when not spoken to.
One day, some weeks after she had come home, as we were riding on the cliffs near Dunaff, she turned in her saddle and beckoned me to approach.
“What road is that?” she said, pointing with her whip to a grass-grown track which led off the shore.
“That’s the Kilgorman road,” said I, guessing what was to follow.
“Kilgorman!” repeated she. “I should like to see the house.”
“By your leave,” said I, “his honour forbids any one to go there without his permission.”
She tossed her head.
“I am not any one,” she said. “I shall go where I please. Fall behind, sir; and if you are afraid to follow, stay where you are till I return.”
And without more words, she flicked her horse and cantered over the turf to the road.
Of course I followed. If I feared the place, it was all the less possible to allow her to go there alone.
It was one comfort to me that it was still broad daylight, so that the mystery, whatever it might be, would lose its chief terror.
She looked round once to see if I was following or not, and then, changing her canter to a trot, turned into the road.
Now his honour’s order to me about Kilgorman had been a very strict one, so much so that I suspected he had a shrewd idea who it was, eighteen months ago, had broken the window and knocked over the stand of arms in the kitchen.
“Mind, Barry,” said he, “I allow no one on the road that leads up to Kilgorman. No one is to go to the house on any excuse. If my orders are disobeyed, he who trespasses will be sorry for it.”
This had prevented my going near the place since. But now I followed the little mistress I felt myself in another case, and, any way, Gorman or no Gorman, I was not going to let her go alone.
The year and a half had made little change about the place. Only I noticed some wheel-ruts on the road that were not old, and saw, as we came nearer, that the window over the porch had been mended.
As we entered the avenue, Miss Kit reined up for me to approach.
“It’s a finer house than Knockowen,” said she. “I never saw it so near before. Why does my father hate it so?”
“’Deed I cannot say, but it’s certain he does hate it.”
“Help me down, Barry, and fasten the horses. Where do we go in?”
“Faith, that’s the puzzle. When I came before I got in by yon window.”
She laughed as she looked up.
“You’ll have to go the same way again,” said she, “and I’ll wait here till you open the door for me.”
I was in for the venture now! When I looked for the ladder, though, it was not to be seen. But the thick creeper beside the door served the purpose, and by dint of clambering I reached the porch-top in safety.
To my relief, I found that, though the window was mended, it was not bolted, and that I could lift it without breaking a new pane of glass.
I confess, in spite of the bright daylight, it gave me a turn to find myself once more in that fatal room, and recall the terrors of the night when I saw it last. As quickly as possible I left it, and descended the stairs to the hall.
Here a strange perplexity arose. For though I was certain where the door should be, there was never a sign of it inside—nothing but a row of iron-barred windows along the wall, like the corridor of a jail. When I came to look a little closer, I found that the doorway had been bricked up and plastered, so that by the ground-floor there was positively no entrance to the house.
With some misgivings, I wandered on to the great kitchen where Tim and I had had such a fright. But it was empty now, and the sun, as it glanced through the guarded window, fell brightly on the white hearthstone. Nor, though all was still as death, could my ears catch a single sound, except the stamping of the horses without and the idle tapping of my lady’s whip against the pilaster of the door.
I traversed the corridor to the other end. It opened into a large room of the same size as the kitchen, evidently a dining-room, for a long table stood in the middle, and a solitary, moth-eaten stag’s head, with antlers broken, hung over the chimney-piece.
Other doors opened off the corridor, and beyond them, along the back of the house and overlooking the boggy lake, ran another corridor, out of which no door opened to the outer world.
There was no sign of life anywhere, and the few pieces of furniture, rotten and withered with time, were more deathlike than if the house had been stark empty.
I returned upstairs, and on my way peeped into this room and that out of curiosity. But all was the same. Only in the last of all, at the end of the landing, did I see anything. There, on the window-ledge, covered with dust, which made it seem part of the woodwork it rested on, lay a little shabby book. How it caught my eye I hardly know, except that, believing in Providence as I do, I suppose it had lain there all those years, like the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale, waiting for me to discover it.
I remember, as I lifted it, the under cover stuck fast to the window-ledge and parted company with the rest of the book.
It was a common little volume of English ballads, with nothing much to commend it to the book lover. But the sight of it moved me strangely, for not only was it the same work, only another volume, as that I had brought away from the old home at Fanad, but on the front page, in my mother’s hand, was written in faded ink, “Mary Gallagher, her book. A gift from her dear mistress.” I thrust the precious relic hurriedly into my pocket, and casting a last look round the room, which I now guessed to be that in which I first saw the light, I hurried back to the chamber over the porch.
My little mistress was very vexed and put about when she found that there was no way into the house except the one. Had she been alone, I suspect she would have been up in a trice, and let dignity go; but my presence hindered her, and she chose, I think rather harshly, to blame me as the cause of her disappointment.
“If I were you,” said she, with a frown, “and you I, I warrant I could have found some way to let you in.”
“Faith, you wouldn’t be sorrier to keep me standing out here than I was,” said I humbly. “And indeed there’s little enough to pay you for the trouble when you’re once in. It’s a dull, dismal house.”
“And how was the ghost?” asked she.
“Whisht, Miss Kit! It wasn’t likely any evil spirit could walk abroad while you’re about.”
“All very fine,” said she. “I’ll see Kilgorman before I’m much older, cost what it may. And I’ll be my own groom, what’s more. Fall behind, Barry.”
And she set off, looking very mortified and angry.
I don’t know if I was more sorry or glad that things had turned out as they had. I dreaded for her to come across sorrow in any form. And this house of mourning, with its mysterious air of terror, with its prison-like bars and bolts, and its time-devoured relics of a life that had gone out all in one day like the wick of a candle, was no place, then, for the bright sunflower of Knockowen.
His honour, happily, was away in Derry, and no one was there to question us as to our expedition. So I put up the horses, and trusted to God there was an end of Kilgorman.
But that very night, as I curled up in my narrow bed above the stable, I recalled my prayer.
By the light of a candle I took the book I had found from my pocket to look at it again. My mother’s hand on the cover called back all the old memories of my childhood—how she sang to Tim and me these very ballads, and taught us to say them after her; how she always seemed as much a stranger in Fanad as this little English book seemed on the ledge at Kilgorman. There, too, between the leaves, were a few pressed flowers, and—what was this?
A little piece of thin paper fluttered down to my feet, written over in my mother’s hand, but, oh, so feebly and painfully. With beating heart I held it to the light, and made out these words,—
“If you love God, whoever you are, seek below the great hearth; and what you find there, see to it, as you hope for grace. God send this into the hands of one who loves truth and charity. Amen.”