Dick Talbot-Lowry received this announcement with the mixture of indignation and contempt that might have been anticipated from an old-established Pterodactyl, who has been warned that his hereditary wallow in the Primeval Ooze is about to be wrested from him. Having expressed these sentiments in suitable language, he said, lightly, that Fairfax must raise as much on the property as would keep these Dublin sharks quiet, and in the meantime he would shut up the house at once and go to London. Temporary retrenchment was all that was required. He would let the place. Some rich Englishman would jump at the chance——
Major Dick had that optimism about his own affairs that is often combined with a tranquil pessimism about the affairs of others. He said that all he wanted was to get clear of the blood-sucking swarm of hangers-on that infested the place. He wondered at his own folly in having endured them for so long. And it would do Christian good to get away. She had been looking rather pulled down—she missed the hunting, of course. London would do her good—would be a change.
This, approximately, was what Dick said. What Lady Isabel said, being an attenuated echo of Dick's observations, is negligible. What Christian said was known only to Rinka, the eldest of the fox terriers, who had a habit of sitting in the chair at which Christian, knelt to say her prayers, and would then, with her bland and balmy smile, extort confidences denied to any other living creature.
On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst of all, the dismissals. The house (pending the materialisation of the Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old friendships. Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left, alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with the obliteration of her past life to be her task.
An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of her sight for a single instant.
The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one's own little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one insignificant segment of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes, to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost. And on Monday afternoon with the early darkness the storm began. There came first a little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out the land. There followed complete stillness; then a few scattered drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling roar, the wind came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of its surprise attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long passages snatching at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows and the shaking clatter of doors within the house, and the shrieking rage of the wind outside. She sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her room. She had none of the fears that might, for another, have filled the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing passages and knocks on the shaking doors. She had always lived on the borderland, and was naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so often given her help, were, when she most needed help, silent.
"I have nothing left now," she said to herself, "but memories, hungering memories——"
She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world has power to break a heart?
Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then, with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was hurled upon the world. All that night, and all the following day, the rain was like a wall about the house. It was flung in masses against the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck. To look forth was as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters, eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried roof was mastered, and in all its angles and valleys yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the top story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the tempi, from a ponderous adagio to a racing prestissimo. Buckets and jugs and baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the old Evans pair waddling to and fro, elated, almost gratified, by the magnitude of their task. And in the middle of the uproar, late in the afternoon, a new sound joined in the chorus of the storm, the coarse and ugly summons of a motor-horn. Old Evans spied at the car through the hall window, and contrived to signal a command to go round to the back of the house.
"If I let dhraw the bolts," he said to Barty Mangan at the kitchen entrance, "the door would fall flat on me!"