The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted out by night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire in their power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them was thinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father.
Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will and he had come into the dead man’s house as unconcernedly as though it were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things with never a word of Him.
If Phyl had thought over the matter, she might have seen that, perhaps, this silence of Pinckney’s was the silence of delicacy, not of indifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the light of reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenes came to a decision of this sort they were hard to be shaken from it.
She had decided to dislike him long before she saw him.
What Phyl really wanted now was perhaps a commonsense female relative to stiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of the world, but she had none. Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, the few distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and were separated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into two opposing camps—Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the others Papists.
Phyl, as she sat watching saw, now, the line of the woods strengthen against the sky; the moon was breaking through the clouds and its light increasing minute by minute shewed the parkland clearly defined, the leafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoon stood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west the great dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glen mysterious and secretive, holding in its heart the Druids’ altar.
The Druids’ altar was the pride of Kilgobbin Park; it consisted of a vast slab of stone supported on four other stones, no man knew its origin, but popular imagination had hung it about with all sorts of gruesome fancies. Victims had been slaughtered there in the old days, a vein of ironstone in the great slab had become the bloodstain of men sacrificed by the Druids; the glen was avoided by day and there were very few of the country people round about who would have entered it by night. Phyl, who had no fear of anything, loved the place; she had known it from childhood and had been accustomed to take her worries and bothers there and bury them.
It was a friend, places can become friends and, sometimes, most terrific enemies.
The girl listening, now, heard voices below stairs. Hennessey and his companion were evidently leaving the dining-room and crossing the hall to the library. Going out on the landing she caught a glimpse of them as they stood for a moment looking at the trophies in the hall, then they went into the library, the door was closed, and Phyl came downstairs.
In the hall she slipped on a pair of goloshes over her thin shoes, put on a cloak and hat and came out of the front door, closing it carefully behind her.