At the hall door steps a manure cart was drawn up. In the cart was something covered with a pig-net. Doolan, whip in hand, was standing at the horse's head.
"Let up!" came a voice from the cart. "What are yiz doin' wid me? Where am I, at all, at all? Oh, but I'll pay yiz out for this! I'll have the laa on yiz—and—and—yer sowls!"
"Shut your ears," said Mr. French to the girl; then he took Doolan's whip, and with the butt of it prodded the thing in the cart. What seemed a great tin snout resented this treatment. Then the cart moved off, Doolan at the horse's head, and disappeared down the drive.
"Did you see what was in the cart?" asked Mr. French when Miss Grimshaw uncovered her ears.
"Yes," she replied, "and I saw it in the garden this morning, and I spoke to it, and asked it what it was doing, and—well, I don't wonder at your wanting to leave Ireland."
"Not while there's things like that in it," said the master of Drumgool, following Doolan and his charge with his eyes till they disappeared from sight. "And now, let's get to work."
The sunlight of the early morning had vanished, and almost as the cart and its contents turned from the avenue drive into the road the rain began to come down again in great sheets—thunderous pourings, as if to make up for lost time. But it was a merry rain, at least in the ears of the girl. "You're going, you're going!" The rain beat a tattoo to the words on the zinc roof of outhouse and window-pane. "To-morrow," slobbered the overflowing water-butts, and "Sussex" hissed the schoolroom fire, as the raindrops down the chimney hit the burning coals.
No one but a woman knows the things to be done in a sudden disruption of a household like this. "Everything must be covered up, and everything must be turned over," is a broad axiom that only just covers the situation when a house is to be left uninhabited for a number of months. That is to say, carpets must be taken up, beaten, and folded, pictures and looking-glasses taken down, covered in brown paper, and placed on the floor. A sort of spring cleaning, petrified half-way through and left in a state of suspension, is the ideal aimed at by the careful housewife.