“You’re Miss Duffy from Gurthnamuckla, are you not?” interrupted Christopher, eyeing her with natural disfavour, as he got up and came down the slope towards her.
“I am, Mr. Dysart, I am,” she said defiantly, “and you and your family have a right to know me, and I ask you to do me justice, that I shall not be turned out into the ditch for the sake of a lying double-faced schemer—” Her voice failed, as it had failed before when she spoke to Sir Benjamin, and the action of her hand that carried on her meaning had a rage in it that hid its despair.
“I think if you have anything to say you had better write it,” said Christopher, beginning to think that Lambert had some excuse for his opinion of Miss Duffy, but beginning also to pity what he thought was a spectacle of miserable middle-aged drunkenness; “you may be sure that no injustice will be done to you—”
“Is it injustice?” broke in Julia, while the fever cloud seemed to roll its weight back for a moment from her brain; “maybe you’d say there was injustice if you knew all I know. Where’s Charlotte Mullen, till I tell her to her face that I know her plots and her thricks? ’Tis to say that to her I came here, and to tell her ’twas she lent money to Peter Joyce that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him secondly, the way he’d go bankrupt on me, and she’s to have my farm and my house that my grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of the gentry—”
Her voice had become wilder and louder, and Christopher, uncomfortably aware that Francie could hear this indictment of Miss Mullen as distinctly as he did, intervened again.
“Look here, Miss Duffy,” he said in a lower voice, “it’s no use talking like this. If I can help you I will, but it would be a good deal better if you went home now. You—you seem ill, and it’s a great mistake to stay here exciting yourself and making a noise. Write to me, and I’ll see that you get fair play.”
Julia threw back her head and laughed, with a venom that seemed too concentrated for drunkenness.
“Ye’d better see ye get fair play yerself before you talk so grand about it!” She pointed up at Francie. “Mrs. Dysart indeed!”—she bowed with a sarcastic exaggeration, that in saner moments she would not have been capable of—“Lady Dysart of Bruff, one of these days I suppose!”—she bowed again. “That’s what Miss Charlotte Mullen has laid out for ye,” addressing herself to Christopher, “and ye’ll not get away from that one till ye’re under her foot!”
She laughed again; her face became vacant and yet full of pain, and she staggered away down the avenue, talking violently and gesticulating with her hands.