by Sara Seale
Aunt Bea spoke suddenly without raising her eyes from her knitting.
“It was Kitty, you know,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?” She was given to making vague statements of this kind and expecting her listener to understand.
“Kitty, my sister-in-law—the children’s mother.”
“Oh, yes?”
“She used to do her hair like that. I noticed the resemblance at once. That’s what upset Kevin.”
“I see.” Mark looked out across the rough lawn, already wet with dew. “The children are like their mother?”
“Oh, very like, especially Clancy, now that she is older. The eyes, you know, and the shape of the face.”
“Your brother must have been very fond of his wife,” Mark said, wondering whether Kitty’s death accounted for Kevin’s impatient intolerance for other women.
Aunt Bea put down her knitting and pulled the grey woollen shawl more closely about her shoulders.
“In his own way he was,” she said, “though he’s always had contempt for women. Some men are like that, I think. It was a good thing Kitty died—she was killed in a hunting accident, you know—he would have made her very unhappy.”
“It was sad for the children,” Mark said gently. “I think to Clancy especially, her mother would have made a great difference.”
She looked at him, and her vague expression had quite gone.
“No,” she said quietly, “you’re quite wrong. Clancy admires her father. If Kitty had lived and been unhappy there would have been a constant pull between loyalties. The child might have come to hate her father, and all men because of him.”
Mark sat silent. How little one knew people, he thought. Here was this unattractive, elderly woman, so vague and nondescript that, for years, she had been a cypher in her brother’s house, with a clearer grasp on human relations than any of them.
He said impulsively:
“You must have suffered a good deal all these years.”
The vague look came back into her pale eyes, and she took up her knitting again.
“Oh no,” she said. “You mustn’t think that. At first, perhaps, it was a little difficult, but then—I was the unwanted spinster sister, you see, and it was good of Kevin to give me a home. I used to wish sometimes that I could fill their mother’s place with the children, but that, of course, was impossible. I love Brian very much, you know.”
“Have you no fondness for Clancy, then?”
“Oh yes, of course, but the boy was especially my own. I came here when he was a baby, and then he was delicate and seemed to need me, though, of course, Agnes always took first place. Agnes is a very possessive woman and she was Kitty’s nurse before the children’s, and devoted to her.”
“I should have thought,” said Mark a little dryly, “that might have given her more affection for Clancy.”
“Well, you see, Kitty was foolish. Clancy was her first child and she insisted on doing everything for her herself, and Agnes was jealous. When Brian came, she had the handling of him from the start, and then of course, poor Kitty died so soon after.”
Mark knocked out his pipe and put it in his pocket. “What’s going to happen to Clancy, Miss Bea?” he asked.
“Clancy?” She sounded vague. “Oh, she’ll marry in a year or so. Irish girls marry young, you know.”
“If you’ll forgive my saying so,” said Mark gently, “she doesn’t get many opportunities of meeting people.”
She rolled up her knitting and put it away in an untidy canvas hold-all.
“We haven’t many neighbours,” she said placidly. “I expect she will marry Conn Driscoll. There isn’t much money, but Clancy will have a little when Kevin goes. It would be very suitable. I think I shall go now. It’s getting chilly.”
But Mark remained on the terrace long after she had gone, watching the light fade and the pale stars come out one by one. Then, feeling unaccountably depressed, he went in and up the tower stairs to bed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE summer slipped away almost imperceptibly. There were more picnics at Kinross Sands, there were days at the races and days at the fair, and the unpredictable Irish weather alternated between rain and shine. Kevin seemed to have forgotten his promise of a few days in Dublin for Mark and the children, and was, instead, away a good deal himself, leaving Mark in charge. Clodagh came on several flying visits and Conn had an offer for his farm.
They had all walked down to the south pasture to look at his yearlings when he told them, and Mark saw Clancy go a little white.
“But you won’t sell, will you, Conn?” she asked. “You wouldn’t sell your father’s farm?”
“It’s my farm now,” he said carelessly. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Clodagh sat on the grass making a buttercup chain. “Only the other day you were talking of selling,” she said.
“Well, can’t a man change his mind? I tell you I’ve not decided.”
“You won’t get another offer like that in a hurry.”
“That’s true. What would you do, Mark?”
“That, I think, is a decision that only you can make,” replied Mark carefully. “If it’s a question of buying another farm and shifting your stock to more profitable ground, then it might be the best thing to do. But if you sell up and start something quite different, that’s another matter.”
“You think it’s a mistake to change one’s trade?”
“I don’t know. Really, I’m faced with much the same problem myself, only in my case it’s more chancy as I’m a good deal older.”
“Change is a good thing,” said Clodagh.
“Yes, up to a point it is, but there are other things that enter into it.”
“Such as?”
“Well, whether it’s a good thing ultimately to deny one’s calling. Conn is a horse-breeder—by inclination as well as a living to get. I’m a schoolmaster and I suppose teaching is really in my blood. Changing one’s whole bent, so to speak, is a very personal decision, and I don’t think anyone can make it for one.”
“Yes, that’s right, Conn,” said Clancy gravely. “I hadn’t seen it that way. None of us should influence you.”
Clodagh had finished her buttercup chain, and had placed it on her head.
“It’s a strong man who isn’t influenced by anyone,” she said.
“You talk a lot of nonsense, as you always did. For the love of heaven, take that thing off your head, the colour doesn’t suit your hair.” Conn snatched the buttercup chain off her head and placed it carefully on Clancy’s. “There! That’s the effect you want. Yellow flowers on pitch-black hair. It turns you into a fairy princess, Clancy.”
She sat in the grass looking up at him, and wore her crown with a proud innocence which Mark found very touching.
“You’ll not forget us all, Conn, even if you do leave Slievaun?” she said.
He pulled her to her feet and placed a careless kiss upon her tilted nose.
“Of course not,” he said, “and I’ll not be leaving anyhow, I expect.”
They wandered back to the house. Conn and Clodagh ahead, sparring amicably together.
Clancy slipped a hand through Mark’s arm and he glanced down at her in surprise. It was the first consciously friendly gesture she had ever made towards Mm.
“I don’t think he’ll sell, do you?” she said.
“Perhaps not,” he replied gently, “but even if he does, Clancy, it’s his life, and he will have to lead it. We can’t hold people, you know. It’s one of the hardest lessons we all have to learn.”
Her face beneath its golden crown was soft and aware.
“I would never want to hold Conn,” she said. “It’s only that we’ve been together all our lives, Conn, Clodagh and me. I haven’t had any other friends.”
Clodagh went back to Dublin the next morning, and they did not see Conn for some days. Kevin was back from one of his business trips and seemed a little morose, largely due to his sister, who had su
ddenly turned the house upside down in an orgy of cleaning. Only the tower room was spared since it had been turned out so recently for Mark’s arrival, and Kevin took to wandering up there in the afternoon and smoking a pipe with Mark.
“You know,” he said on one occasion, “if I’d saved my money on all these governesses and had you from the start, things would have been very different.”
“In what way?” asked Mark, amused.
“In every way. You fit in here—someone for me to talk to—and Brian would have been more of a proper boy. I see now that we kept him too much with women. The boy’s improved enormously since you had him.”
“There wasn’t really much wrong with him, except undue coddling,” Mark said.
“Ah, well, that’s Agnes, and my sister, and the boy was delicate for so long that I was always afraid we’d lose him.” Kevin looked at Mark with the eagerness of a child. “You like him, eh? A fine little chap, and, when he’s stronger, a son I can be proud of.”
“Mr. O’Shane—” Mark began, but Kevin interrupted:
“Ah, call me Kilmallin like the rest of them.”
“Well, Kilmallin—I was going to say couldn’t you find an equal counterpart in your daughter? She’s far more akin to you, you know, and she has the greatest admiration for you.”
Kevin looked surprised.
“Ah, Clancy’s all right as far as she goes,” he said carelessly. “She has pluck, mind you, and she doesn’t fill her head with silly notions like most girls. It’s a pity she wasn’t a boy.”
“I think, if I may say so,” said Mark, “it’s a pity you don’t accept her sex and let her become a companion to you.”
Kevin looked at him with unexpected shrewdness.
“For all that you nearly walked out on me when you found you were expected to take charge of a girl, you prefer her of the two, don’t you, Cromwell?” he said.
Mark made a polite gesture of evasion.
“I wouldn’t say that,” he replied. “She’s older, of course, so perhaps I naturally find her more interesting, and frankly, she has the better brain.”
“Och, you schoolmasters! What you’re so politely trying to tell me, my dear fellow, is that you think I’m not fair to Clancy.”
“Well,” said Mark quietly, “since you put it like that, I don’t.”
Kevin got to his feet, and, not for the first time, Mark did not think he looked well. There were pouches under his eyes and drink had started to blur the outlines of his neck and jaw.
“It’s no use, Cromwell,” he said in a tired voice, “when I see her looking at me with her mother’s eyes, and moving her head in the way she did, God forgive me, I resent her. It should have been Kitty here, bearing me the sons I always wanted.”
“You have one son,” Mark said gently.
“One son, when I wanted five or six! And a boy that’s afraid of me into the bargain. I love Brian as I’ve never loved in my life, and now you know why I squirm when my daughter stands up to me with all the guts he should have had.”
It was difficult to counter such frankness as this and Mark did not try. He felt sorry for Kevin, but he could not help him, and his compassion went out to Clancy, that unwanted child, so pitifully aware of her failure in her father’s eyes.
“The rain’s stopped,” said Kevin in his usual voice. “Come and take a stroll round the place.”
Long before they reached the hall they could hear the outcry. Agnes’s shrill voice storming at somebody, and the sound of crying.
“Now, what!” exclaimed Kevin, and hurried forward.
Brian was sobbing in Agnes’s arms, while Michael John, the garden boy, hovered anxiously in the background, and Clancy stood stiff and straight and rather white just inside the door. Both brother and sister were wet and muddy and the sleeve of Clancy’s sweater was ripped up to the shoulder.
“For the love of heaven, what’s happened?” shouted Kevin. “Is the boy hurt?”
Brian had stopped crying at sight of his father, but he whimpered:
“She ran into me on her bicycle. I think she did it on purpose!”
Mark knelt down and felt the boy’s bones. “Where are you hurt, Brian?” he said.
“I don’t know,” he sniffed. “I couldn’t breathe.”
“He was winded for the instant,” said Michael John. “It gave him a fright.”
“I think that’s all that was wrong,” Mark said, getting to his feet. “There’s not a scratch on him. He’ll be all right in a moment, won’t you, Brian?”
“Yes,” said Brian with surprise, “all right now.”
“Then you are not, my poor child,” snapped Agnes. “ ‘Tis a shock you’ve had, an’ it’s to bed you’ll go this instant minute, an’ if it’s not in a fever you’ll be tonight, and a chill, like as not from the rain, it won’t be your sister we have to thank. Come along now, my doty. Agnes will put you to bed and bring you some hot milk.”
She led him up the stairs, and Kevin, relief turning to anger, rounded on Clancy.
“Have you no sense at all?” he shouted, “—taking the boy out on a day like this, and then knocking him over because you were neither of you fit to be riding bicycles at all?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Clancy said. ‘We just collided and fell off.”
“So you just collided and fell off! And it would have been all the same if you’d fallen off under a car and killed your brother.”
“It’s Miss Clancy was the one who was hurt, I’m thinking,” said Michael John.
“The girl’s got as many lives as a cat! Get back to your work, Michael John, and don’t stand there trying to make excuses for her. If anything had happened to that boy—”
“Were you hurt, Clancy?” asked Mark.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“Well, you’d better go upstairs and change your wet things,” he told her.
She turned and went slowly up the stairs, pulling herself up by the banisters, and Kevin went into the library.
“I’ll not be going out now,” he said. “Just go up and satisfy myself Brian’s all right when Agnes has got him to bed.”
Mark stood for a few minutes in thoughtful contemplation of the rain-drenched lawns beyond the open front door, then he went upstairs and along the passage to Clancy’s room. He had not liked the way she had dragged herself up the stairs.
He found her sitting on her bed still in her wet skirt. She had taken off her sweater and was contemplating her arm with a face as white as paper.
“You’d better let me see it,” Mark said quietly.
He knelt down beside her and took her arm in gentle fingers. A deep ragged cut ran nearly from shoulder to elbow and was bleeding profusely.
“My poor child,” he said, “this must hurt like anything.”
“I fell on one of those sharp stones in the drive,” she said. “I feel rather queer.”
He spread a towel on the bed and told her to lie down.
“I’ll just put a rough dressing on it to stop the bleeding, then I’ll take you down to the doctor,” he said.
When he had dressed her arm, he took off her wet shirt and found her another to put on, then he wrapped her in a coat and told her to stay where she was while he fetched the car.
“You’d better go quickly,” she said in a small distressed voice, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
He met Kevin on the stairs, on his way to see Brian, and asked if he might borrow the car to take Clancy to the doctor.
“Doctor?” said Kevin blankly, “—what would Clancy want with a doctor?”
“Several stitches in a very nasty cut and a strong dose of sal volatile to stop her from fainting,” said Mark curtly.
Kevin stood aside to let him pass, his face wrinkled in almost comical dismay.
“Heavens!” he said, and added: “You look quite angry, my dear fellow!”
“Yes, I am angry,” retorted Mark. “It was a pity you didn’t make sure the child was all right befo
re you treated her to that display downstairs. Sometimes, Kilmallin, your partiality for your son makes me a little tired.”
In the doctor’s surgery, Clancy sat propped against Mark’s shoulder while her arm was stitched. She was very white, but she did not cry out, but held Mark’s hand tightly until it was over.
“A nasty cut,” old Doctor Boyle said when he had finished. “It’ll give you a bit of pain at first, I’m afraid, but you’ve got healthy blood, and you’ll soon heal.” He gave her some tablets in case she was unable to sleep, and told Mark to bring her down again in a couple of days.
There was no one about when they reached Kilmallin, and Mark took Clancy up to her room and told her to get into bed.
She sat down on the bed, very straight and upright.
“Kilnmallin was so angry,” she said. “I didn’t run into Brian on purpose. He was so angry.”
“Of course you didn’t. Your father realizes that now. He was just upset.”
“He looked at me as if he hated me,” she said, and all at once she began to weep.
He went to her and sat on the bed beside her, drawing her gently into his arms, and she put her free arm round his neck and crumpled up against him.
“Cry it all out, you poor child, you’ll feel better then,” he said.
Shock and pain and Kevin’s anger combined with Mark’s kindness caused a storm of weeping which she had seldom experienced. He sat there, stroking her hair, and letting her cry until she was quiet again, then he gently laid her back on the bed and fetched her a glass of water from the wash-stand.
“Feel better now?” he asked, brushing the dark hair back from her forehead.
She smiled up at him a little shakily.
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’ll send your aunt up to you if I can find her, or one of the maids if I can’t. You may have trouble manipulating that arm in and out of garments, and we don’t want to start it throbbing.”
“Thank you,” she said again. “You’ve been terribly kind. I wonder—”
“Yes?”
“I wonder if you’d think it cheek—I wonder if you’d mind—”