Jacky’s recovery is swift; his sobs cease, and he graciously allows himself to be kissed. To go to Crosby Park is always a joy—the big, huge, handsome place, with its long gardens and glass houses, and, best of all, its absentee landlord.
It is, indeed, quite ten years since George Crosby has been at the Park, and in all probability ten more years are likely to elapse before he comes again. The last accounts of him were from Africa, where he had had a most unpleasantly near interview with a lion, but had got off with a whole skin and another not quite so whole: the lion had come to grief.
CHAPTER VII.
‘Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil.’
It is three o’clock as Susan, with Jacky in tow, leaves the Rectory gate and goes up the village towards the broad road beyond that mounts steepwards to Crosby Park. Curraghcloyne possesses but one street, and a very small one, too; but as a set-off to that it teems with interest.
This morning a pig-fair was held in the ‘fair-field,’ a square mass of beaten earth, anything but ‘fair,’ and as unlike a field as possible; and now that the ‘payers of the rint’ have been mercifully removed, bought, or sold, the unsightly patch is covered by young colts, that are being ridden up and down by their owners, with a view to showing them off; whilst in the far part of the field, over there, cows, sheep, and donkeys are changing owners.
Here, in the main street, much lively conversation is going on. On the right, Salter, the hardware man—a virulent Methodist, who calls himself a Protestant—is retailing to a hushed and delighted group the very latest ritualistic news of the curate just lately imported, and who, if a most estimable man, is undoubtedly abominably ugly. Short and stout and ill-made, poor Mr. Haldane has not proved a success amongst the Protestants of the parish. His views are extreme, and so are his looks, and, as Betty most unkindly put it, he should, on his ordination, have been at once despatched by the Bishop of the diocese as a missionary to the Cannibal Islands, with a view to getting rid of him as quickly as possible. He is a sore trial to Mr. Barry, the Rector of the parish, and Susan’s father. But he had to replace the last curate in a hurry, that young man having resigned his charge at a moment’s notice, because the Rector would not give his sanction to having matins at six a.m., he said; but in reality because Susan had, the evening before, rejected him with a haste that deprived him of all hope.
Just now the excitement amongst the groups at Salter’s is growing intense. The curate had been knocked down. No! But he had fallen—and so on, and so on. A few shops lower down comes Mr. Murphy, the undertaker’s. He, too, as indeed do all the shopkeepers in Curraghcloyne, stands in the front of his shop-door, chatting to all who come and go. A little, fat, jolly man, rather useless you would think in a solemn business like his, and yet the best undertaker, for all that, in the seven parishes round. Perhaps it is well to have a cheerful person of that sort to dispel the dreadful gloom of death. However it is, he is a universal favourite, and no wonder, when I tell you he is the man in all Curraghcloyne who can tell you most about the babies!—the ones come, the ones to come immediately, and those in the middle distance! The gayest, happiest little man in the town, with a wife as rosy as himself, and quite a crowd of embryo little undertakers swarming round his knees. But these, and many more of the Curraghcloyne celebrities, sink into insignificance before Ricketty, the proprietor of the Crosby Arms Hotel. This name is painted on a swinging signboard, with a huge boar beneath, the crest of the Crosbys from all time.
Ricketty—his name was once Richards, but time and many devoted friendships has brought it down to Ricketty—is a huge benign Irishman, with the biggest jaw in Europe and the smallest eyes. To his bones flesh has grown, until now he might have exhibited himself in the most fastidious show in New York as the ‘Last of the race of Anak,’ or some such attractive title.
And as most big men are, so is he—the mildest-mannered man on earth; who would have run away if he had been asked to scuttle a ship, and who would have fainted if the idea of cutting the throat even of a mouse had been suggested to him. One side of his hotel has the usual bar blind up in it, behind which is a parlour, where on special occasions the politicians congregate to air their eloquence. The other side is given up to a fancy shop, kept by his sister, Miss Ricketty.