"I will, Rose Ann."
But worst of all were the quarrels between the coachman and the groom. The coachman was a fine, florid man, and the groom was a wizened little troll who had once been a jockey. The coachman was always in decent black, the groom in corduroys. They were forever arguing on everything, from politics to horses. Once Lady Margery had come into the yard to see the groom stepping around like a bantam boxer, his hands up, his feet tapping the ground like a dancer's.
"Put up your hands!" he was shouting. "Put up your hands!"
"Go 'way t' the divil out o' that!"
"Come on if you 're fit! Come on if you 're man enough! I 'll give you a beating you 've been spoiling for for the last thirty years."
"Go 'way t' the divil out o' that!"
"I will not go 'way out o' that. It's fight I want. I 'm boiling mad for one clout at your ugly gob."
"Will you whisht!" The coachman had seen Lady Margery.
"I will not whisht. Put up your hands! I 'll not stop till I 'm dug out of ye!"
"Kelleher, Brady, what's this?"
The groom dropped his fighting attitude and pulled off his cap.
"'T is just a foolish wee argument we were having, m'lady. I was telling this bloody old cod--begging your pardon, m'lady, for giving him his right name--that Lynchehaun the murderer was by rights a cousin to my mother's people, and he said that it was n't in either side of my family to produce a fine murdering man like the same Lynchehaun. So I up and gives him a tip about himself and his drunken old mother...."
"Kelleher!"
"Not that I know anything about her, m'lady, but I just thought that if he had any pride, it would cut him to the quick!"
IV
Nobody in the world but herself, she thought often, could have kept them. But if she sent them away, where would they go? The old gardener--could he last away from the soil he had tended with the care of parents?
And the maids would be lost in a modern world. And for all that the two men in the stable fought, they loved each other in a strange way. She couldn't pension them off; and, also, they got their work done in a surprisingly efficient manner.
And, besides, she could not see new servants in the old house. The maids were as much part of the place as the portraits of dead Kytelers on the walls. They had blended into a mellow composition. They all loved her in their queer selfish way, depended on her for vitality. She could hardly go on visits any more, so much did they grumble. "Sure, it is n't to England you 'd be going, my lady, and the grand house you have of your own!" And not only the servants but the old drowsing dog, Sheila, the little Scottie bitch, who was drawing on fourteen years old and nearly blind, and the foxhound puppies, who waited for her when she was n't there, and ancient Fenian, the old steeplechaser, who was near ending his days. All these laid imploring hands on her.
Her mother she had not known, the countess dying when Margery was not yet two; and the earl had never married again. But the house had been a mother to her. The deep drawing-room, the heavy formal dining-room, the little sitting-room so bright. There was no place in the world so comfortable as the drawing-room of Mount Kyteler in the winter evenings, with the portraits blinking in the light of candles in their silver sticks and the glimmer of the sea-coal in the grate. And her own room at night, on moonlight nights, whence she could see Dublin Bay shine silver and the dark trees bending in the breeze from Three Rock Mountain.
Every tree she knew; every tree had for her a personality. The copper beech was friendly and kindly, the rowan-trees aloof but kindly, the oaks majestic but clumsily kindly; the apple-trees were smiling. All the flowers she knew, all the shrubs. They had seen her stumble as a child of two, they had seen her rollick as a child of seven, they had seen her dream at ten, and grow ugly at twelve, and grow pretty in her late teens, and at twenty beautiful, and now beautiful and assured.
In no other country than Ireland, in no other city than Dublin could such beauty and grace exist alone in an old house. They would have fêted her, made merry with her, married her. A young beauty in an ancient house with grizzled servants. But in Ireland a great beauty has so many competitors for the songs of the poets, the passion of the young men. There is the biting excitement of treason, politics charged with lightning. There are the far places of the world calling to Irish adventurers. There are careers calling for vitality and ambition. And what young woman dare presume to bother poets when there are great purple mountains to enthrall them, and wooded glens and the crashing sea? And winds like wine. The crooning of great romantic ghosts. And an Irish poet is not a pale man to be comforted by women, but a lithe, muscular man with a sword.
Also, in Ireland is little marriage or giving in marriage, if we except the peasantry and the very poor. The young men spread their wings to go abroad, and when they return it is usually with a foreign bride, so that there are convents innumerable in that country, also many mad women at large, as in politics. Unless a girl is very rich she has little chance of a happy marriage. A title may help her, curates and captains in the army having a belief that the daughters of earls will help them to preferment; also, it sounds well, they think--the Reverend Septimus and Lady Jones, Captain and Lady Plantagenet Murphy. There are sadder things in Ireland than the weeping skies.
But though the right of marriage may be often denied them, young Irish girls have always their inalienable right of dreams. Soft winds and nodding flowers and sun going down on the western hills, and with the twilight comes always a love. Out of the blue twilight and soft wind they weave a magical life of love that will be always young, of a world that will be ever kind, of little dark children and loyal friends, of the pageantry of foreign cities, of triumphs for their own beauty and the lover's ability. The skies are always blue in their dreams, and tragedies there are none, nor any sordidness. And they grow old so peacefully in their dreams, so gracefully, and death comes so gently, so kindly--the lover always by, always young, always loving.... Out of the blue twilight and soft wind they dream their dreams, and they never notice that the blue of the twilight has become a threatening black, and the soft wind has withdrawn in itself with the set sun, as a flower does, and all of a sudden it has grown cold, damp, and lonely and cold.
The dream of Margery was around Mount Kyteler. It seemed to her that the house, and the garden and the trees, and the old servants, and the drowsing dogs, and the ancient steeplechaser out to grass were all part of the French nursery, "_La Belle au Bois Dormant_," "The Beauty in the Sleeping Wood." And one day the princely lover would come, breaking through the hedge of Irish stillness, and Mount Kyteler would bloom again. The backs of the gardeners would straighten and the maids become young again. And by some strange magical process the steeplechaser would again win races, and the old dog win ribbons, and children would stumble under the tall trees, as she had stumbled twenty years before. All this would happen with the coming of the prince, all this she could see, but his features she could not plainly see. Only she knew this, that his face would be shining with love and smiles.
V
So that when she met him she did not recognize him at first, nor for many days afterward. On his face were puzzlement and a frown. A clean-cut, red-headed man, he was standing in the road on a frosty November morning, when she was out walking a brace of foxhound puppies. The puppies seemed delighted at the sight of him, all but tearing the leash from her hand.
"Could you tell me," he asked, "where Tallaght is?" He pulled the ears of the foxhound puppies.
"You 're in Tallaght," she said.
He looked incredulously at the scattered houses.
"Is this--"
"Yes. Is there any place in particular you 're looking for?"
"No," he said, "just Tallaght."
"Well, you have Tallaght." She laughed a little at his rueful expression. "You seem surprised."
"I am," he laughed. "For many years, when I was a child, I have been hearing about Tallaght, until it had assumed tremendous proportions for me, and now--"
"Abroad?"
"Yes."
"Australia?"
"No. America."
"What are you looking for? The old homestead?"
"No," he said; "I don't think there ever was an old homestead. There might have been a little cabin somewhere, but it was n't here." He laughed. "I 'll tell you. My father was an old Fenian, and he was at Tallaght when they gathered to descend on Dublin, but for some reason or other the battle was not fought, nor the enemy driven into the sea, nor anything. And my father, with a lot of others, fled to America. But I had an impression of a mountain pass and camp fires and great guns."
"It rained all night, did n't it? Did your father say?"