The invalid does not exist who can resist a discussion of symptoms, and Miss Duffy’s hauteur slowly thawed before Charlotte’s intelligent and intimate questions. In a very short time Miss Mullen had felt her pulse, inspected her tongue, promised to send her a bottle of unfailing efficacy, and delivered an exordium on the nature and treatment of her complaint.
“But in deed and in truth,” she wound up, “if you want my opinion, I’ll tell you frankly that what ails you is you’re just rotting away with the damp and loneliness of this place. I declare that sometimes when I’m lying awake in my bed at nights, I’ve thought of you out here by yourself, without an earthly creature near you if you got sick, and wondered at you. Why, my heavenly powers! ye might die a hundred deaths before anyone would know it!”
Miss Duffy picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped the gruel from her thin lips.
“If it comes to that, Miss Mullen,” she said with some resumption of her earlier manner, “if I’m for dying I’d as soon die by myself as in company; and as for damp, I thank God this house was built by them that didn’t spare money on it, and it’s as dry this minyute as what it was forty years ago.”
“What! Do you tell me the roof’s sound?” exclaimed Charlotte with genuine interest.
“I have never examined it, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia coldly, “but it keeps the rain out, and I consider that suffeecient.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s not a word to be said against the house,” Charlotte made hasty reparation; “but, indeed, Miss Duffy, I say—and I’ve heard more than myself say the same thing—that a delicate woman like you has no business to live alone so far from help. The poor Archdeacon frets about it, I can tell ye. I believe he thinks Father Heffernan’ll be raking ye into his fold! And I can tell ye,” concluded Charlotte, with what she felt to be a certain rough pathos, “there’s plenty in Lismoyle would be sorry to see your father’s daughter die with the wafer in her mouth!”
“I had no idea the people in Lismoyle were so anxious about me and my affairs,” said Miss Duffy. “They’re very kind, but I’m able to look afther my soul without their help.”
“Well, of course, everyone’s soul is their own affair; but, ye know, when no one ever sees ye in your own parish church—well, right or wrong, there are plenty of fools to gab about it.”
The dark bags of skin under Julia Duffy’s eyes became slowly red, a signal that this thrust had gone home. She did not answer, and her visitor rose, and moving towards the hermetically sealed window, looked out across the lawn over Julia’s domain. Her roundest and weightiest stone was still in her sling, while her eye ran over the grazing cattle in the fields.