"I wouldn't be surprised at all," Barty replied. "Hardly I could force the car into the storm."
Christian was sitting on the floor by the fireplace in the hall, in the last of the daylight, examining and burning the contents of a drawer full of miscellaneous papers, as the visitor made his unexpected entrance from the back, and Barty, recognising his own improbability and unsuitability on such a day and at such a time, fell to confused apologies that were as incoherent, and seemed as unlikely ever to end, as the buzzing of an imprisoned bee on the window-pane. The fact at length, however, emerged, that there was a map of the Mount Music estate hanging in the library, and that the Major having promised to lend it to Dr. Mangan, had forgotten to do so.
"Some question of boundaries—a little grazing form m' fawther has——" Barty said, nervously.
The map was found, was rolled, and wrapped up, and yet Barty sat on. He talked incessantly, feverishly. He talked so fast, in his low voice, that, in the clamour of the storm, Christian could only distinguish an occasional word. She had a nightmare feeling as if a train were roaring through an endless tunnel, and that she and Barty were the sole passengers, and would never see daylight or know quiet again. His long, lean body was hooped into a very low and deep armchair, his thin hands clasped his knees; his immense dark eyes, fixed on Christian's face, gave her the impression that what he was saying was without relation to what he was thinking. In the direful gloom of the hall, with the rain and wind threshing on the half-shuttered windows, and the inconstant light of the burning logs the sole illuminant, his pale face, with the wing of black hair on his forehead, looked like the face of a strayed occupant of another sphere who had resumed such an aspect as he had worn in his coffin.
"Ireland's a queer old place just now, Miss Christian," Barty hurried on. "Everything's changing hands, and everyone's changing sides. You don't know what'll happen next!"
"I wish I were not changing sides too," said Christian, catching at a sentence, in a momentary lull of the roaring in the chimney. "Sides of the Channel, I mean—I prefer this side!"
"Do you? Do you?" said Barty, intensely. "I'm glad you do! I feel often as if no one cared for this miserable country except for what they could get out of it! At the election it would have sickened you, the bargaining, and the humbugging, and the lies. Larry was the only man that ran straight, and they jockeyed him——"
"I'm sure you ran straight," said Christian, with sympathy in her voice. Piercing her weariness and preoccupation was the feeling that he had something to say that lay under this babble of conversation. He was wrapping himself in a cloak of verbiage, but above the cloak his tormented eyes met hers, and the pain in them hurt her.
"Me? Oh, I only ran after Larry. I thought it was a shabby thing of the Unionists not to have supported him——" he stopped abruptly, remembering Major Talbot-Lowry's abstention, remembering also the feud, of which he knew only that he had never wholly divined its origin, between Coppinger's Court and Mount Music. He cursed himself for a fool. He had not meant to talk politics, but what he had come through the storm to say was so difficult. He looked at Christian with agony. Had she minded what he said about the Unionists? He began to talk again, very fast and incoherently.
"Miss Christian, I said awhile ago everything was changing in Ireland. There's big changes coming, even hereabouts, things I couldn't believe would ever happen. I've recently learned a—a fact—a statement that I'm not at liberty to repeat. I was—I may say that I was shocked—but Miss Christian——" the agony in his eyes was in his voice. "Oh! Miss Christian, for God's sake, believe that I knew nothing of it till this day!"