CHAPTER XII.
A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY.
“And wouldst thou leave me thus? Say Nay.”
A lowering grey sky succeeded the sunshine of the day of the hunt. I crawled down late to breakfast, feeling very stiff after yesterday’s exertions, and was on the whole relieved to find that Willy had gone out for a long day’s shooting, and that till lunch at least I should have no one to entertain but myself.
The evening before had been, as far as Willy had been concerned, of a rather complicated type. I had done all in my power to efface from his mind the memory of my unfortunate laughter, but until dinner was over he had remained implacable. Uncle Dominick, on the contrary, had been unusually bland and talkative. It appeared that Madam O’Neill and her eldest daughter had called on me while I was out, and my uncle, having met them on the drive, had brought them in, given them tea, and had even gone so far as to ask the two girls to come with their brother to dinner the next night. He had given me to understand that this unusual hospitality was on my account—“Although,” he added, “I have no doubt you two young people are quite well able to amuse each other.” The look which accompanied this was, under the circumstances, so peculiarly embarrassing, that, in order to change the conversation, I made the mistake of beginning to describe the hunt. Too soon I discovered that to slur over Willy’s disaster would be impossible, and my obvious efforts to do so did not improve matters.
“So you went off with young O’Neill,” my uncle had said, with a change of look and voice that frightened me; and nothing more was said on the subject.
My discomfiture was perhaps the cause of the alteration in Willy’s demeanour after dinner. Success far beyond my expectations, or indeed my wishes, was the result of my conciliatory advances. I went to bed feeling that I had more than regained the position I had held in Willy’s esteem, and a little flurried by the difficulties of so ambiguous a relationship as that of first cousins.
From all this, it may be imagined that when I heard from Roche that “the masther was gone to town, and would not be home for lunch,” I regarded the combined absences of Willy and his father as little short of providential.
I observed that the magenta and yellow dahlias which had decorated the table on my arrival still held their ground, albeit in an advanced stage of decay; and, remembering the glories of the autumn leaves, I suggested to Roche that with his permission I might be able to improve upon the present arrangement.
A little elated by the expectation of surprising Willy with the unusual splendour of the dinner-table, and not without an emulative thought of the O’Neills, I determined to ransack the shrubberies for the most glowing leaves wherewith to carry out my purpose. A few minutes later, I left the house with a capacious basket in my hand, feeling a delightful sense of freedom, and full of the selfish, half-savage pleasure of a solitary and irresponsible voyage of discovery.
I wandered down the nearest path to the sea, and, keeping to the shore, came to the little promontory which, with its few ragged trees, I could see from the windows of my room. There was a certain romance about this lonely wind and wave beaten point that had always attracted me to it. When, in the early light, I saw the fir trees’ weird reflection in the quiet cove, I used to wonder if they had ever been a landmark for some western Dick Hatteraick; and now, as I scrambled about, and tugged at the tough bramble-stems that trailed in the coarse grass, I was half persuaded that any one of the rough boulders might close the entrance of a smuggler’s long-forgotten “hide.”