“That Charlotte Mullen may get it hard!” said Julia savagely. She got up, feeling new strength in her tired limbs, though her head was reeling strangely, and she had to grasp at the kitchen table to keep herself steady. “I’ll go on now. If I die for it I’ll go to Bruff this day.”
Norry dropped the onion she was peeling, and placed herself between Julia and the door.
“The divil a toe will ye put out of this kitchen,” she said, flourishing her knife; “is it you walk to Bruff?”
“I must go to Bruff,” said Julia again, almost mechanically; “but if you could give me a taste of sperrits, I think I’d be better able for the road.”
Norry pulled open a drawer, and took from the back of it a bottle containing a colourless liquid.
“Drink this to your health!” she said in Irish, giving some in a mug to Julia; “it’s potheen I got from friends of me own, back in Curraghduff.” She put her hand into the drawer again, and after a little search produced from the centre of a bundle of amorphous rags a cardboard box covered with shells. Julia heard, without heeding it, the clink of money, and then three shillings were slapped down on the table beside her. “Ye’ll go to Conolly’s now, and get a car to dhrive ye,” said Norry defiantly; “or howld on till I send Bid Sal to get it for ye. Not a word out o’ ye now! Sure, don’t I know well a pairson wouldn’t think to put his money in his pocket whin he’d be hasting that way lavin’ his house.”
She did not wait for an answer, but shuffled to the scullery door, and began to scream for Bid Sal in her usual tones of acrid ill-temper. As she returned to the kitchen, Julia met her at the door. Her yellow face, that Norry had likened by courtesy to the driven snow, was now very red, and her eyes had a hot stare in them.
“I’m obliged to you, Norry Kelly,” she said, “but when I’m in need of charity I’ll ask for it. Let me out, if you please.”
The blast of fury with which Norry was preparing to reply was checked by a rattle of wheels in the yard, and Bid Sal appeared with the intelligence that Jimmy Daly was come over with the Bruff cart, and Norry was to go out to speak to him. When she came back she had a basket of grapes in one hand and a brace of grouse in the other, and as she put them down on the table, she informed her cousin, with distant politeness, that Jimmy Daly would drive her to Bruff.