“Good God!” said Pinckney under his breath. The expression was shaken out of him, so to speak, and out of a pocket of his character which had never been fully explored, of whose existence, indeed, he was not particularly aware. This Irish expedition was to show him a good many things in life and in himself of which up to this he had been in ignorance. He had never been brought face to face with waste, bald waste without a hat on or covering of any sort, before.
“Haven’t you any poor people about here?” he asked.
“Hapes, sor.”
Pinckney was on the point of saying something more, but he checked himself, remembering that in the eyes of the servants he was here in the position of a guest.
He followed Hennessey across to the stable yard, where Larry, the groom, was washing the carriage that had fetched him from the station the night before.
“The servants won’t eat chicken,” said Phyl, in an apologetic way. She had noted everything and she guessed his thoughts. “They won’t eat game either—and they throw things away if they don’t like them—of course, it’s wasteful, but they do give things to the poor. Lots of poor people come here, every day nearly, but they don’t care for scraps—you see, it is insulting to give a poor person scraps, just as though they were animals. I remember the cook we had before Norah did it when she came first, and all the poor people stopped coming to the house. Said she ought to know better than to offer them the leavings.”
“Cheek!”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Phyl. “We’ve done it for hundreds of years.”
She closed her mouth in a way she had when she did not wish to pursue a subject further. Despite the fact that she had made friends with Pinckney, she was galled by his attitude of criticism. Guardian or no guardian, he was a stranger; relation or no relation, he was a stranger, and what right had a stranger to dare to come and turn up his nose at the poor people or make remarks—he hadn’t said a word—about the wastefulness of the servants?
The redoubtable Rafferty was standing in the yard chewing a straw and watching Larry at work.