Dublin at the present day is a splendid city for old ghosts to wander in without having their corns trodden on or their susceptibilities injured.
Phyl had come to Dublin to live with the Hennesseys in Merrion Square.
"Never shall my door be shut on you except behind your back," Hennessey had said, and he meant it.
The girl was worth several thousand a year; had she been penniless it would have been just the same.
You may meet many geniuses in your journey through life, many brilliant people, many beautiful people, many fascinating people, but you will not meet many friends. Hennessey belonged to the society of Friends, his wife was a member of the same community, and he would have been ruined only for his partner Niven, who was an ordinary lowdown human creature who believed in no one and kept the business together.
On the day of her arrival at Merrion Square and during her first interview with Mrs. Hennessey in the large, cheerless drawing-room where decalcomanied flower pots lingered like relics of the Palaeolithic age of Art, Phyl kept herself above tears, just as a swimmer keeps his head above water in a choppy sea.
It was all so gloomy, yet so friendly, that the mind could not openly revolt at the gloom; it was all so different from the wind and trees and freedom of Kilgobbin, and Mrs. Hennessey, whom she had only seen once before, was so different, on closer acquaintance, from any of the people she had hitherto met in her little world.
Mrs. Hennessey, with a soul above dust and housekeeping, a faded woman, not very tidy, with an exalted air, pouring out tea from a Britannia metal ware teapot and talking all the time about w.i.l.l.y Yeates, the Irish Players and Lady Gregory"s last play, fascinated the girl, who did not know who w.i.l.l.y Yeates was and who had never seen the Irish Players.
Nor could she learn from Mrs. Hennessey. It was impossible to get a word in edgeways with that lady. Sometimes, indeed, during a lull in her mind disturbance, she would remain quiet whilst you answered some question, only to find that she had totally forgotten the question and was not listening to your reply.
Phyl got so used to Mrs. Hennessey after a few days that she did not listen to her questions, and so the two being matched, they got on well together. Young people soon accommodate themselves to their surroundings, and in a month the girl had grown to the colour of her new life, at least, on the outside of her mind. It seemed to her that she had lived years in Merrion Square. Kilgobbin--Hennessey had managed to let the place--seemed a dream of her childhood. She saw no future, and rebellion was impossible; there was nothing to rebel against--except the dulness and greyness of life. No people could have been kinder than the Hennesseys; unfortunately they had numerous friends, and the friends of the Hennesseys did not appeal to Phyl.
A boy in her position would have adapted himself quickly enough, and been hail fellow well met with Mr. Mattram, the dentist of Westland Row, or the young Farrels, whose father owned one of the biggest wine merchants"
businesses in the city; but the feminine instinct told Phyl that these were not the sort of people from whose cla.s.s she had sprung, that their circle was not her circle and that she had stepped down in life in some mysterious way. This fact was brought sharply home to her by a young Farrel, a male of the Farrel brood, a hobbledehoy, good-looking enough but with a Dublin accent and a cheeky manner.
This immature wine merchant at a party given by Mrs. Hennessey had made love to Phyl and had tried to kiss her behind the dining-room door.
The recollection of the smack in the face she had given him soothed her that night as she lay tossing in her bed, and it was on this night and for the first time since she left Kilgobbin that the recollection of Pinckney came before her otherwise than as a shadow. He stood with the Hennessey circle as his background, a bright, good-looking figure and a gentleman to his finger-tips.
Why had she cast aside her own people--even though they were distant relations? What stupidity had caused her to insult Pinckney by telling him she hated him? She found herself asking that question without being able to answer it.
After all that fuss at Kilgobbin and Pinckney"s departure, Mr. Hennessey had proved to her that Rafferty was a rogue who deserved no quarter; the man had been dismissed, the whole business was done with and over, and now, looking back in cool blood, she was utterly unable to reconstruct and put together the reasons for the outburst of anger that had severed her from the one kinsman who had put out his hand to help her.
She could no longer conjure up the feeling that Pinckney was an interloper come to break up Kilgobbin and spoil the home she had known from childhood.
Fate had done that. Kilgobbin was gone--let to strangers; Hennessey had taken over her guardianship _pro tem_, and it was entirely owing to herself that she was in her present position. She had no right to criticise the friends of the Hennesseys; she had deliberately walked into that circle from which she felt she never could escape now.
Just as Pinckney had discovered that guardianship was showing him traits in his character hitherto unknown to him, Phyl was discovering her woman"s instinct as regards social matters.
She recognised that once having taken her place amongst the Hennessey set, her position for life was fixed, as far as Ireland was concerned. She was branded.
The Berknowles were an old family, but she was the last of them. The relatives living in the south could be no help to her; they were poor, rabid Catholics and had fallen to little account, owing to unwise marriages and that irresponsible fatuous apathy in affairs which is the dry rot of Ireland and the Irish people. They were proud as Lucifer, but no one was proud of them.
If only Philip Berknowles had been a man to make fast friends amongst his own cla.s.s, some of those friends might have come to his daughter"s rescue now. But Berknowles had lived his own life since the death of his wife, an easy-going country gentleman in a county mostly inhabited by squireens and cottage folk, caring little for the _convenances_ and with no taste for women"s society.
Thoughts born of all these facts, some of which were only half understood, filled the mind of the girl as she lay awake with the noise of that raucous party ringing in her ears; and when she fell asleep, it was only to awake with a sense of despondency weighing upon her and the odious Farrel incident waiting to follow her through the day.
About a week later, coming down to breakfast one morning, she found a letter on her plate. A letter with American stamps on it and the address, Miss Phylice Berknowles, Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland, written in a firm, bold hand.
Mrs. Hennessey was not down and Mr. Hennessey had departed for the office, so Phyl had the breakfast table to herself--and the letter.
She knew at once whom it was from, even before she read the postmark, "Charleston."
Pinckney, the man who had been in her thoughts during the past six or seven days, the man who had left Ireland righteously disgusted with her, the man to whom she had said, "I hate you!"
The scene flashed before her as she tore the envelope open, his sudden blaze of anger, the way he had torn the papers up, his departure. What was he going to say to her now? She flushed at the thought that this thing in her hand might prove to be his opinion of her in cold blood, a reproof, a remonstrance--she opened the folded sheet--ah!
"Dear Phyl,
"Aunt Maria was greatly disappointed when I returned here without you, she had quite made up her mind that you were coming back with me. We both lost our temper that day, but I was the worse, for I said a word I shouldn"t have said, and for which I apologise. Aunt Maria says it was the Pinckney temper. However that may be, we shall be delighted to see you. Mrs. Van Dusen leaves on the 6th of next month.
I am sending all particulars to Mr. Hennessey. You could meet Mrs.
Van Dusen at Liverpool and go with her as far as New York. Let me have a cable to know if you are coming. Pinckney, Vernons, Charleston, U. S. A., is the cable address.
"Your affectionate guardian--also cousin-- "R. Pinckney."
Then underneath, in an angular, old-fashioned hand, one of those handwritings we a.s.sociate with crossed letters, rosewood desks, valentines and wafers:
"Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you will like me as much as I am sure to like you.
"Maria Pinckney."
Phyl caught her breath back when she read this and her eyes filled with tears. It was the woman"s voice that touched her, coming after Pinckney"s business-like and jerky sentences.
Then she sat with the letter before her, looking at the new prospect it had opened for her.
Was Pinckney still angry, despite his talk about the Pinckney temper; had he written not of his own free will but at the desire of Maria Pinckney?
She read the thing over again without finding any solution to this question.
But one fact was clear. Maria Pinckney was genuine in her invitation.
"I"ll go," said Phyl.
She rose up from the table as though determined then and there to start off for America, left the room, went upstairs and knocked at Mrs.
Hennessey"s door.
That lady was sitting up in bed with a stocking tied round her throat--she was suffering from a slight attack of tonsilitis--and the Irish _Times_ spread on her knees.
"Mrs. Hennessey," said Phyl, "I have just had a letter from my cousins in America, and they want me to go out to them."
"Want you to go to America!" said Mrs. Hennessey. "On a visit, I suppose?"
"No, to stay there."
"To stay in America; but what on earth do they want you to do that for?
Who on earth would dream of leaving Dublin to live in America! It"s extraordinary the ideas some people get hold of. Then, of course, they don"t know, that"s all that"s to be said for them. It"s like hearing people talking and talking of all the fine views abroad, and you"d think they"d never seen the Dargle or the Glen of the Downs; they don"t know the beauty of their own country or haven"t eyes to see it, and they must go raving of the Bay of Naples with Kiliney Bay a stone"s throw away from them, and talking of Paris with Dublin outside their doors, and praising up foreign actors with never a word of the Irish Players. Dublin giving her best to them, and they with deaf ears to her music and blind eyes to her sons."
"But, you see, Mrs. Hennessey, the Pinckneys are my relations."
"Irish?" cried the good woman, absolutely unconscious of everything but the vision before her. "Those that can"t see their own land aren"t Irish.
Mongrels is the name for them, without pride of heart or light of understanding."
She was off.