Hungry Hill

EPILOGUE The Inheritance, 1920

AS JOHN-HENRY turned into Queen Street a sentry came out of the doorway of a house.

"I wouldn't go any further," he said. "They're shooting down the other end and you might get a bullet in your back from one of our fellows."

As he spoke they heard the rattle of a machine-gun and the squealing brakes of a car. The sentry grinned.

"Trouble for someone," he said.

At the far end of the street a car skidded into the pavement, and from the lowered window they could see the nose of the gun pointing across the square. Three men on the pavement flung themselves on their faces. Someone ran from one of the houses to the car and jumped on the running-board. He had a rifle in his hand. A small party of soldiers appeared at the end of the street by the square, and the car gathered speed and turned sideways, up a back street by the farthest house.

The soldiers fired at the retreating car, and then they began to run across the square towards the big post office at the corner. The men who had flung themselves down on the pavement picked themselves up again, and dusted their clothes, as though nothing had happened. A woman called shrilly from one of the upper windows of a house. The church clock struck five o'clock. John-Henry lit a cigarette and smiled at the soldier.

"You'd think," he said, "that after four-and-a-half years of war men would be sick of shooting one another."

The soldier took a fag from behind his ear, and borrowed a match.

"Not in this country," he said; "there's not a man amongst 'em who wouldn't knife his best friend if he had the mind, and then take flowers to his funeral."

John-Henry laughed, and threw away the match.

"That's not fair," he said. "I'm one of them, and I've never wanted to knife anyone."

He went on walking down the street towards the square, where the shooting had been. Many of the windows were broken, not from the incident of five minutes ago, but dating back over the weeks. The square was clear now of troops, but for the guard standing round the police-station. A young man was talking to a woman on the edge of the pavement. His face was lean and bitter. He had his hands deep in his pockets.

"They got Micky Farran," he said to the woman, and then, as John-Henry passed, he stopped talking, and looked down at his feet.

They moved off together, and it seemed to John-Henry that the streets were empty now, and strangely quiet. Across the square, at the far end, were the remains of the barricade. The barbed wire lay in loose strands. A sudden shower of rain came from the bright sky, and was gone again. In the far distance a steamer hooted, deep and low, and was echoed by the high, thin answer of a tug. John-Henry was thinking of the sentry's words, "Not a man amongst them who wouldn't knife his best friend, and then take flowers to his funeral." It was true, he supposed, and yet.

Faces of his childhood came into his mind.

Dear Granpie, with his great, deep-set eyes, his bent shoulders, his white hair, walking through the market-square at Doonhaven, and one of the old women at the stalls lifting a streaming face to his and calling upon the Saints to bless him. He had found employment for the woman's son, and she had never forgotten it. Gran, small, bright and bustling, skimming the cream off the milk with a scallop shell, boxing his ears because he tickled the kitchen-maid's legs with a feather duster, and she half-way up a ladder at the time. Patsy, gardener on week-days and groom on Sundays, who told him the legends of the fairies who walked on Hungry Hill, and the little pixies who burrowed underground and bewitched the miners in the old days. He would not have known how to handle a knife except to whittle sticks or to cut a pig's throat. Perhaps killing a pig made it easy to kill a man…

The streets looked normal on this side of the city; and as he turned into the terrace where Aunt Lizette had her small flat, and saw a child bowling a hoop in the gardens opposite, it seemed ridiculous to remember the skidding car in Queen Street, the machine-gun fire, and the bitter flat voice of that man on the pavement, "They got Micky Farran. '?

He rang the bell at No.5, and climbed the stairs to the little sitting-room, overfull of furniture, where Aunt Lizette sat day after day, crocheting lace samplers to be sold for blind babies. Queer passionate hobby, that must have its origin, surely, in subconscious pity of her own childhood, when, lame and neglected, she lived in fear of a resentful stepmother. She rose smiling now, as he came into the room, her sallow complexion a little yellower than usual, her eyes blinking behind the spectacles.

"You dear boy," she said, and he noticed once more, with pleasure, that her voice had the soft, warm lilt belonging to Slane and the south, possessed also by his mother, which brought back to him always, rich and loved, the memories of boyhood.

"Your mother told me you would come, and I didn't believe her," said Aunt Lizette, "for surely, I said to myself, a young man has better things to do than to visit an aunt when he comes home."

"Not this young man," said John-Henry. "He can't forget the pep-permints you used to keep in your cupboard."

Aunt Lizette smiled, and took off her spectacles, and now he saw that her eyes were fine and handsome, like Aunt Kitty's, and he thought of the happily assorted household they had been out at Castle Andriff, Aunt Kitty, Aunt Lizette, and Uncle Simon, all living together in harmony, with very few servants and too many dogs, until the children grew up and scattered, and Aunt Kitty died, and Aunt Lizette went on living alone with Uncle Simon. These things happened only in this country.

"And your mother, how is she?" asked Aunt Lizette.

"Very well, and very happy, and I was to thank you for the lace you sent her, which I believe made a table-centre for her dining-room. I'm to give you the money here and now. She wouldn't trust the post at the present time."

He felt for his wallet and took out a note.

"Ah, she shouldn't have worried," said Aunt Lizette. "Time enough when all this shooting is over, and everyone behaves like decent human beings. were they fighting today, tell me, in the streets?"

"They peppered a few shop windows as I came down to see you, but I don't think much damage was done. What's it all about, Aunt Lizette? You must be an unprejudiced person."

Aunt Lizette waited until the serving-maid had brought the tea and closed the door behind her.

"You have to be careful," she said softly. "I've had Meggie with me three years, but she has a brother fighting for the rebels. "I haven't set eyes on him, miss, not for six months," she told me yesterday. She was lying, of course. The cigarettes I keep for visitors have been disappearing lately, and where would they be but down the front of Meggie's dress, so that she can slip out after dark and give them to him at the street corner?"

"You'd better be careful," smiled John-Henry. "You'll have the soldiers coming to search your house."

"And they'd find nothing," said Aunt Lizette.

"I'm a loyal subject of the King, and always have been, like the rest of the family. No Brodrick meddles with politics, although my father tried to stand for Parliament in his hey-days, just before your father was born."

John-Henry munched his buttered toast, and looked round the little room, so filled with furniture from Andriff and Dunmore-where Aunt Molly had lived-and bits and pieces from Clonmere also, treasures that Aunt Lizette had gathered around her with the years and would never part with now.

"As far as I can discover," he said, "no Brodrick has ever done anything but die young or drink himself to death."

Aunt Lizette frowned, and poured him out another cup of tea.

"The war and the Navy between them have made you a cynic," she said, "and anyway it's not true. The Brodricks were always greatly respected in the country."

"Who respected them, and what were they respected for?" asked her nephew.

His aunt sat back in her chair, and folded her hands. They were long and slender, the hands of a young woman, for all her fifty years.

"They were just landlords, for one thing," she answered, "right from the start. They did their duty to God and the King. They were firm to their tenants, but kindly too.

And Clonmere always stood for law and order. The people looked upon it as a symbol of authority, of wise authority."

"Perhaps they did," said John-Henry, smiling over the rim of his cup, "but perhaps also they didn't want authority, or God, or the King-and you see the outcome of it all today. You know their motto, "Ourselves Alone"?"

Aunt Lizette clucked her tongue impatiently.

"That's all nonsense," she said. "They can't exist that way. And don't tell me you sympathise with them, or I won't have you in my house. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, and you wearing the King's uniform a few months ago."

"I never said I sympathised with them," pleaded John-Henry. "I don't care a damn for one side or the other. It just happens that I have the misfortune to see both sides of a question."

"Don't go and live in Doonhaven, then," said Aunt Lizette, "or you'll get rapidly worse. If it's raining there, and you should say how fine a day it is to anybody, they will agree with you, just to please your face, and save themselves trouble."

"But surely," said John-Henry, "that is the ideal way of living? If everybody did that there would be no arguments, no wars, no senseless fighting of one another."

Aunt Lizette considered this a moment, then shook her head again.

"It wouldn't be moral," she said solemnly.

John-Henry laughed.

"Anyway," he said, "wet or fine, moral or immoral, I propose to go down to Doonhaven within the next day or so, and visit Clonmere. I haven't been down there, you know, since before the war, just before Granpie died. It's probably falling to bits, although the people at the gate-house are supposed to look after it."

"And what will you do?" said Aunt Lizette, "when you get there?"

John-Henry smiled, and stretched out his legs under the tea-table.

"I shall live there," he said. "I may telegraph mother to come down and join me. Do you know, all the time I was in the Navy, and the war was going on, it was the only thing that was real to me? The Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, none of it seemed to sink in. I kept thinking, "This overgrown sub who sweats his guts out in an engine-room and then goes ashore at Malta and overstays his leave, isn't John-Henry at all. The real John-Henry is standing in front of Clonmere, looking across the creek to Hungry Hill. And that's where I belong. That's where my roots are, that's where I was born and bred."

Aunt Lizette put on her spectacles and, moving to the window, took up her crochet.

"I was born there too," she said, "but my childhood was spent in London. And then, when I was ten, and your aunt Molly married, we all went home for Christmas. I shall never forget my first sight of the hills, and the colour of the water in Mundy Bay, and the old paddle-steamer coming in to Doonhaven." She was silent for a moment, bending over her work. "But it's a great big house for a young man to live in all alone," she said.

"There'll be heaps to do," said John-Henry, "to get it right again. The woods will need clearing, and the gardens put in order. No half-measures for me, Aunt Lizette. I'm not a sub in an engine-room any longer. I'm going to be John-Henry Brodrick of Clonmere, and damn all comers! No, not damn all comers, because I like the people, and I want them to like me. And you shall have the best spare-room, Aunt Lizette, and when you come to stay we'll have a big turf fire lit in the great hall to welcome you."

"You don't propose living in the new wing, do you?" she said.

"Why not? My grandfather built it to be lived in, didn't he?"

"Yes, fifty years ago, when there were servants by the score, and carriages, and horses, and the mines working night and day on Hungry Hill.

Doonhaven is only a sleepy village now, with no one to work for you, and the people shooting one another, as likely as not. Ah, now… Do you hear that?"

As she spoke there was a sound of tramping feet at the end of the terrace, where it opened on to the road.

John-Henry leant out of the window beside his aunt.

Soldiers were going past in the main street, and in the midst of them two men in civilian clothes, with their hands behind them, their caps pulled down low over their eyes. A little crowd had collected on the pavement to watch them pass. A woman shouted out abuse at the soldiers, and one of them, mounted, rode towards the crowd, pressing them back. The tramp of marching feet passed on…

"Ourselves Alone," whispered John-Henry, "and if you found one of them, your Meggie's brother, let's say, hiding in the kitchen, would you call in the soldiers and give him up?"

"He might have murdered innocent people. It would be my duty to give him up," said Aunt Lizette firmly.

"You haven't answered my question," persisted John-Henry. "Would you give him up to the soldiers?"

She looked sideways at him, the dark eyes blinking behind her spectacles.

"I might then," she said softly, "but I'd sign my name to a petition to save him afterwards, all the same."

A shower of rain spattered the windows, and the sky darkened.

"Where are you staying?" she asked him.

"At the Metropole Hotel," he told her.

"Then, dear boy, you'd best be getting back.

You don't want to be out in the streets at dusk.

How will you get down to Doonhaven when you go? I don't know that the trains are running, or if the steamer goes from Mundy."

"I've got my car, Aunt Lizette."

"You be careful, or they'll take it from you, and you trussed up like a fowl in the bottom of it-if you're not lying in a ditch with a bullet in your back."

"Maybe I'll join the rebels," he said, mischief in his eyes.

He kissed her goodbye, and went back through the silent streets to his hotel. There were sentries everywhere now, and he was challenged three times. The people were off the streets. The blinds were drawn across the windows of the houses. John-Henry went into the bar of the hotel. It was empty, except for the bartender and one young fellow of about his own age, or a little older, sitting in the corner, reading a newspaper. He glanced up when John-Henry entered, and then looked hard at him, with that questing stare of recognition which a man wears upon his face when he sees someone after a spate of years and has difficulty in finding a name. John-Henry turned his back, and ordered a whisky-and-soda.

"There's been a bit of trouble this afternoon, hasn't there?" he said to the bartender.

The fellow wiped a glass with a napkin, and glanced imperceptibly at the man in the corner, who had resumed his reading of the newspaper.

"Three people killed in the square," he said quietly, "or so I am told. I don't know anything about it. I've been in the hotel all day."

He went to the other end of the bar, and pretended to be busy with some glasses.

"Scared," thought John-Henry. "If he says a word more the chap reading a newspaper may inform against him. Where the devil have I seen that man before?"

But the newspaper was up in front of his face.

John-Henry sipped his whisky-and-soda, and thought about his aunt Lizette living all alone in her flat in the terrace, the youngest and most frail of all her family, and the last survivor-both Aunt Kitty and Aunt Molly had died during the war, in early middle-age. We're a funny family, he thought, we either go quickly, or live to a rude old age. Grandfather Henry Brodrick was getting on for eighty when he died in Brighton. And his wife wouldn't let him be brought across the water and buried at Ardmore, she wanted him in the big white cemetery at Brighton. John-Henry remembered the letter coming from his mother when he was at Dartmouth, telling him that his grandfather had died, and in the holidays they had gone and picnicked at Clonmere and dreamt dreams about the future. The war came so swiftly, spilling the dreams…

The door of the bar swung open, and three officers came in. They were laughing and joking.

"I tell you it's true," said one of them. "A whole party was over in London a year or so ago, and asked to see Casement's grave. They had brought wreaths and flowers and heaven knows what else. And the governor of the place hoodwinked 'em and showed them where Crippen or some chap was buried, and they went down on their knees and crossed themselves, and said "Hail Mary." Funniest thing you ever saw, said the governor."

The officers leant against the bar and ordered drinks.

"They're not human," said another. "We ought to have orders to shoot the lot. They're the scum of the earth, and always have been."

The first officer glanced across at John-Henry.

He had merry eyes, for all his hard mouth.

"What are you drinking?" he said.

"The spirit of the country," said John-Henry, raising his glass.

"You'd better have one with us, then," said the officer, laughing. "It's the thing we are trying to down."

He put his hat on the bar, and John-Henry looked at it closely. The hated emblem of a hated band. Yet the man seemed harmless enough, and was only doing his duty, and obeying orders.

"Do you belong to this God-forsaken country?" asked the officer.

"I do," said John-Henry, "and what's more I intend to live in it."

"You must be crazy," said the other, "unless you're a sportsman. They know how to breed horses, if nothing else."

"Good woodcock shooting, where I belong," said John-Henry, "and snipe in the bogs, and hares on Doon Island and Hungry Hill. That's the only sort of shooting I care about, not this monkey-business you fellows have to do."

"Doon Island?" said one of them. "I had a friend garrisoned there at one time. It's quiet, I believe, down west of Mundy. The people won't play either way."

"Too idle," said John-Henry, "like myself.

They only want to be left alone. And now what about having a drink with me? I don't suppose I'm the first of my countrymen to offer you hospitality."

The bartender came forward, and John-Henry moved up closer to the officers.

"Four whiskies-and-sodas for these gentlemen and myself," he said.

He listened with half an ear to the stories of the fighting, how the Town Hall, in a city farther north, had been seized by the rebels and set ablaze, and then the fellows had spent all their ammunition and taken to their heels and hidden out in the mountains.

"We went out to look for them," said the officer, "and brought them all back, two of them dead from lying out there in the cold. We shot the rest next morning.

Oh, we have lively moments. It's not all sitting on our backsides."

And this, thought John-Henry, has been going on through the ages, and my family took no part in it.

They lived at Clonmere, and built their mines, and raised their copper, and came in here to Slane to the shipping-office without caring a damn who bled on the roadside, as long as they lived in comfort at Clonmere. And all I care about is for this lunacy to be over so that I can do the same. The officers had swallowed their drinks, and were fixing their belts.

"And now what?" said John-Henry.

"Patrol," said the first officer, "and maybe a knife under the ribs. Come and join us."

"Not I," smiled John-Henry.

"We'll come and shoot woodcock with you," said the officer, "when we've killed enough of your countrymen.

Goodnight, and good luck."

"Goodnight," said John-Henry.

The bartender was putting up the shutters and fastening the bolts.

"That's the last of them," he said, "there won't be any more tonight. You'll go up through the hotel entrance, if you please."

John-Henry glanced round the room. It was empty, except for himself and the bartender.

"There was a man in the corner," he said, "when I first came in. I seemed to recognise his face.

Do you know who he was?"

The bartender shook his head.

"We get all sorts these days," he said.

"He must have slipped away very quietly," said John-Henry. "I'm sorry about it, because I had a feeling he came from Doonhaven."

The bartender ran a cloth along the side of the bar.

"If he came from your home," he said slowly, "it's a pity he saw you drinking with the Black and Tans."

John-Henry stared at him.

"What do you mean?" he said. "I don't know those fellows. They're nothing to me."

"No," said the bartender, "but this is a funny country… Goodnight, sir."

He switched off the light over the bar as a signal of dismissal.

John-Henry walked slowly up the stairs to bed. He drew aside the curtains of his room, and looked at the sky. The rain had cleared, and the stars were shining. There was a clean fresh smell in the air of washed streets, and night itself, and early spring. The church bell tolled out the hour. Down in the street, below his window, the patrol marched by with tramping feet.

The rain had all gone by morning, and the sun was shining as John-Henry drove out of Slane along the road to Mundy. His spirits were high, for he was young and in good health, and his car ran well, and he was going home. The dream of boyhood was to come true at last, Gone were the years of war, of stress, and duty, of travelling strange waters, of sweating under tropical skies. He had come back again, to the place where he belonged. And the air had a softness to it, belonging to no other country, the very hills were magic, with the morning mist upon them.

Aunt Lizette had doubted that he could live alone at Clonmere, twenty miles from any railway station. He would not know, she had said, what to do with himself; assuming that because he was war Weary he must be restless too, seeking company, and sport, and entertainment. John-Henry smiled, for restlessness belonged to the days at Salonika, where nothing was certain and nothing was true and fear was present in great measure; a man who trod his own soil and smelt his own land could never be restless, not if he loved it well. As for company, why, he had his own thoughts and dreams to spin at leisure, and the fascinating exploration of the past to make him understand the present.

What was John-Henry but the outcome of the years?

And looking back into the past he would learn about the future. Maybe a hundred years ago old Copper John had travelled this same road from Slane to Mundy, in confidence and strength, bequeathing to his great-great-grandson no ruggedness of character, no hardness of heart or monetary ambition, nothing but a strange facility for figures; so that lightning sums in the head and absurd mathematical calculations were the easiest thing in the world! Irony of time, that this was the only legacy handed down from the founder of the family fortunes, whose life's work, the copper mines, lay rusted and lichen-covered in the folds of Hungry Hill. Why, thought John-Henry, do I have a sentimentality for very small puppies, and birds that are maimed, and even wounded, blundering bumble bees? Is it because the son of Copper John loved greyhounds better than men, and could not destroy as much as a wasp upon a window-pane, for the good God made all things to live under the sun?

As he drove, bits and pieces of family history came back to him that his mother had gleaned for him from time to time, because she knew he loved the past.

The turbulent Fanny-Rosa, who ran stocking-less in the dew and broke the hearts of men, and her own as well perhaps, though she told it to no one; and the soft-eyed Jane of the picture, with her hand upon her heart, looking towards Doon Island.

"It was Fanny-Rosa Flower," his mother had said, nodding wisely, "who brought the bad blood into the Brodricks."

Alas, poor Johnnie… His ceremonial swords still hung in the library at Clonmere, crossed, above the mantelpiece.

John-Henry would get them down when he reached home, and clean them, and make them bright again, so that Johnnie in his grave would not feel himself forgotten.

"It will take time, son," said his mother, "getting the place to rights again. And you will have to buy furniture, you know, for the new wing."

"Even if it's the work of a life-time, no matter," said John-Henry.

If the floors were unscrubbed and cobwebs clung from the corners, at least it would be his plot of earth, his kingdom. Sport and entertainment; Aunt Lizette had wondered about these.

There were woodcock and hares on the island, and snipe in the bogs by Kileen; killigs in the creek, and little brown trout in the lake on Hungry Hill. The people of Doonhaven were all the neighbours he wanted; and if the parson and the priest would sink their differences and take cold pig with him on Sunday, why, he would have done all that was necessary for the future of his country.

The dull miles lay behind him, and in front rose the pass, wild and rocky, with the heather and the gorse amidst the granite, tumbling to the road's edge. This, thought John-Henry, was where Copper John rode in his post-chaise the day he signed the lease for the copper mines with Robert Lumley, and Robert Lumley himself would have travelled down in gloomy state to Castle Andriff, from his solitary mansion at Duncroom, which lies naked to the skies now, razed to the earth by the rebels. The bitter feud-for what fine purpose and to what good end? Once again, John-Henry wondered why men must kill one another and spill blood under God's sky, when the gorse is scented, and the heather blows, and the snipe whistle and tumble in the bogs?

He slowed down the car, for the pass was narrow here, and as he turned the bend he saw, right in front of him, a barricade of torn heather and loose wire lying across the road, and beside it a man standing with a rifle in his hand. John-Henry drove slowly to the barricade and switched off his engine. The man did not move, except to cover him with the rifle, and then, putting two fingers in his mouth, he whistled loud and shrill. Some half-dozen figures crept down from the boulders above the pass. All of them were armed.

John-Henry knew none of them. One, he supposed their leader, came to the door of the car and leant upon it.

"What's your name?" he said curtly.

"John-Henry Brodrick."

"Where are you going?"

"To my home, Clonmere, at Doonhaven."

"You served in the Royal Navy in the war, didn't you?"

"I did."

"What are your politics?"

"I have none."

"Were you staying last night in the Hotel Metropole in Slane?"

"I was."

"All right." He jerked his head to a couple of his companions.

"I shall have to ask you to get out of your car."

"What for?"

"That's our business. You'll not be harmed if you go quietly. Try to be funny with us, and we'll put a bullet between your shoulder-blades."

"What are you going to do to my car?"

"You won't see it again. Cars are too precious to us."

The man grinned for the first time. John-Henry shrugged his shoulders.

"I was warned not to take my car on the road.

I've only myself to blame. Go ahead then. What do you want me to do?"

"Stand still while we bandage your eyes. I tell you again, we're not going to hurt you. Now put your wrists behind your back. Take his arm, Tim-you know what to do if he plays tricks."

What a damned fool he had been to fall into this trap! They had told him in Slane it was an act of lunacy to take a car out upon the road. And now he would probably be shot in the back and left to die on the hills. It was the loss of his car that angered him most. The old car, the faithful friend, being driven to hell and damaged by these madmen. No hope of ever getting it back again, of course. He cursed and swore uselessly to himself, as he stumbled over the heather and the stones, a man guiding him on either side.

They must have walked three miles or more, in heaven knew what direction, before they came to a standstill, and there was a sound of a door being unlocked, and someone saying something in a low voice, and then the bandage was removed from his eyes and the bands from his wrists, and he was standing on the mud floor of an abandoned cabin.

There was some loose straw in the corner. The small window was blocked with rags, and the hearth was black with long-burnt sticks and ashes.

"You'll have to stay here awhile," said the man who had unbound him. "I shall be outside on the hill, and my orders are to put lead into you should you run. I'll be bringing you something to eat and to drink."

"How long," said John-Henry, "is this foolery to go on? And what am I supposed to have done?"

"I don't know anything about it," said the man.

"I have my orders, that's good enough for me."

And he went out, bolting the door behind him.

Oh, God damn them all, thought John-Henry; what in hell's name do they want with me, and why must I be mixed up in a revolution which means less than nothing to me, and with which I have no concern? He went and sat down upon the straw, for there was no chair or bench, and presently the man was as good as his word and brought him some bread, and some very sour cheese, and a pitcher of water.

"You haven't any ale, I suppose?" asked John-Henry.

"I have not," said the man, "but I have a flask on me with a drop of whisky in it, and you can have a spot of it if you're that way inclined."

John-Henry swallowed the whisky, and the man smiled.

"Oh, that's all right," he said. "I can get more when I want it, and you'll be here till the morning, or maybe the day after, I don't mind telling you."

"Look here," said John-Henry, "you can take my wallet-there's twenty pounds in it-if you'll let me out of this place."

"I don't want your money," said the man.

"We'd have taken it from you if we'd had the need.

Is it robbers you think we are?"

"You stole my car, didn't you?"

"We borrowed it for the cause. When the country is free you can have it back again."

"That's nonsense, and you know it. Why am I kept here?"

"I tell you I don't know, and that's the plain truth, before God. Do you play two-handed whist?"

"I did once. I haven't played it for a long time."

"I have a pack of cards here in my pocket.

If you're agreeable we could have a game, and it would help to pass the time. I can't do a thing outside your door but kick my heels and look at the heather. We might as well be company one for one another as not."

"All right," said John-Henry, "bring out your cards." They sat down together in the small, close cabin, with a patch of light coming in at the stuffed-up window, and they played two-handed whist, and finished the whisky in the flask.

And this, thought John-Henry, is surely the madness of all time, that my captor and I pledge one another in illicit spirit, and he takes money off me in whist that he is too proud to steal, and we discuss the best method of snaring rabbits. Tomorrow he shoots me in the back, and maybe, as the sentry said in Slane, he will weep with pity and bring flowers to my funeral.

Two days passed, with the fellow Tim leaving him from time to time and coming back with bread, and sometimes cold bacon, or a fowl's leg, and more whisky in the flask to keep body and soul together, and each time John-Henry would ask him, "Well, Tim, when is the execution to be?", and each time Tim shook his head and said, "I've told you before, there's to be no execution."

"Then what am I doing in this confounded cabin?"

"You're having a rest, for the good of your soul," answered Tim, and out would come the greasy pack of cards, and the tipple of whisky, and was it fifteen pounds that Tim had won now or seventeen?

John-Henry did not remember, but it was fair exchange for the whisky, and maybe if he was warm enough in mind and body he would have no fear when they shot him in the hills.

The third night Tim brought rather more whisky than usual in his flask, and the guttering candle made a sickly light, and the cards stuck, and the few pieces of turf that they had kindled filled the room with smoke, so that John-Henry yawned and stretched and finally flung himself upon the straw and slept soundly, with his head pillowed in his hands. He woke to find a red dawn staring at him through the open door of the cabin, and his captor gone, and the white mist clearing away from the hills. He rose to his feet and rubbed his eyes and stared out upon the day, a lank, untidy figure, with straw in his hair and a three days' growth of beard, and he stood by the open door and felt the sun upon his face, and saw a curlew fly low over the hills and vanish. Then he looked upon the ground, and close to his feet, lying beneath a stone, was a newspaper, with the dew upon it, dated the day before. There was a cross on the front page, and a scrawling writing above it, saying "Turn to page 3." He opened the paper, and there on the centre page was a picture of Clonmere. The caption above the picture, in heavy black type, said "Historic Mansion Destroyed."

John-Henry knelt down and spread the paper on the ground, for his hands were trembling. He placed a stone at each corner of the page so that the morning wind should not blow the curling edges. Underneath the picture, in smaller print, were some half-dozen lines, "Clonmere Castle, at Doonhaven, on Mundy Bay, was last night burnt down by persons unknown. Some of the contents were saved by people in the village who woke and saw the house ablaze, but the building was a shell by morning. The owner, Mr.

John-Henry Brodrick, is believed to be in the country at the present time."

He knelt upon the ground, looking at the paper, and the first blind rage that filled his heart died suddenly away, leaving him cold, and stupefied, and numb.

A lark rose from the ground to greet the day, and the mists rolled back, baring the bright sun. In the far distance shimmered the pale sea. And while the ruins of his home and the wreckage of his dreams stared up at him from the printed page, John-Henry saw once again the eyes of the man in the hotel in Slane, and the blue-eyed, freckled Tim grinning at him over the pack of cards, as, pledging John-Henry's future in a flask of whisky, he whispered..

"Ourselves Alone."

The anger was spent, and the sorrow too. It seemed to him that he looked upon something that would stand for ever as a symbol in his heart, and could never be destroyed, whatever the fire might have done to the bricks and stones. The past would always cling to him, the unseen, ghostly hands of the people he never knew, but who had so great a part in him. This was no farewell, standing amongst the rubble. In a sense it was a dedication to the future. One day he would understand in full measure what it was that he had lost, and he would return again, because this was where he belonged. Now, being young, rage and grief that have such sharpness in their coming would quickly pass, and even now he felt something of a schoolboy's excitement bent on treasure-seeking, as he stirred the embers with hi? feet and looked for the lost treasures.

The people had great delicacy. They stayed away, they did not trample the grounds and stare at the blackened walls. He had his heritage to himself. And he knew that they had taken already the things they wanted, for outside one of the cottages in Oakmount was part of a dresser that he recognised, and a little child at the gatehouse was playing with a porcelain vase that had stood once on the drawing-room mantelpiece.

There were other things, no doubt, lying snug and secure in the cottages at Doonhaven, for a fire, like a wreck, is public property until law and authority walk in. John-Henry was neither law nor authority. He was someone who must take his chance in a country that was torn in civil war, and if his possessions were lost to him he must suffer in silence. Little remained, then, that he could bring away, except that lying on the bank, untouched and quite unharmed, was the smiling portrait of Great-great-aunt Jane, and he was glad of this because he had always loved it, and his mother should have it in her house. The curious thing was that from a little distance the walls of his home appeared untouched. The chimneys stood, and all the windows, and it was only on approaching closely that he could see that nothing had been left of the inside, and the ceiling was the sky.

Yet the foundations of every room remained. And he could walk amongst the rubble and recognise each room, although no room remained. The old part of the house had suffered most. The new wing, always untenanted, looked as it must have done those fifty years ago when it was being built and his father had climbed the scaffolding as a little lad. The iron balcony above the great front door was twisted, but unbroken, and it clung precariously from the blackened walls like a fairy thing, the windows bare behind it, and the walls of the boudoir gone for ever. These were what he valued most, for no known reason, the iron balcony and the portrait of Aunt Jane. With a strange impartiality the fire had spared them both.

When John-Henry had finished probing amongst the stones, he stood on the bank below the castle, and he saw coming towards him down the drive a herd of cattle, which grazed by the wayside as they came, driven by a leisurely fellow with a cap on the side of his head, who sucked a grass stem as he walked. The cows took kindly to their new pasture, they nosed the shrubs, and trod the soft gravel and the leader of them, seeing the creek below, led his followers down the bank to the water-garden, amongst the wild plants that once had been the pride of Jane and Barbara, and thence to the creek itself, where they drank deeply, raising their heads now and again to gaze across the water. The cowman watched them, swishing the grass with his stick, but averting his eyes from the ruins of the castle all the while as though from delicacy.

John-Henry walked down the bank to join him, and the man took the grass stem from his mouth and touched his cap.

John-Henry felt at once that the man, who was young, about his own age, had a face that was familiar to him, seen surely within the last week, and in a sudden wave of perception he saw a likeness to the man in the bar of the hotel in Slane. For a moment he said nothing but "Good-day," and the pair of them stood staring at the cattle which grazed below.

"Were you here when they burnt the house?" said John-Henry at last.

The man shook his head, and went on looking at his cattle.

"I was not," he said, "I was in bed up at my house, and I had no knowledge of it until my mother told me." He paused a moment, and then he said, as though in afterthought, "It was nobody in Doonhaven that did it."

John-Henry lit a cigarette, and smoked awhile in silence.

"I'm glad of that," he said. "I've done none of them any harm. I remember your face, but I can't put a name to it."

"Eugene Donovan," said the man, "grandson to Pat Donovan who had the farm up by Hungry Hill when you were a boy. My father was called Jim Donovan. He went to South Africa when they closed the mines here."

"That's right," said John-Henry. "I remember you now. You took over the farm then, when your grandfather died. Didn't you have a brother?"

"I have a brother Michael. He did not care about farming."

"What's happened to him?"

"We've seen nothing of him this long while. He was friendly to Pat O'Connor and some of the boys."

"Ah! I see."

And in the half-veiled admission John-Henry understood that no more would ever be revealed. But he could trace now the story from the beginning, and he could see again the face of Michael Donovan in Slane.

He would have gone from the hotel to his friends outside the city, and told them that John-Henry Brodrick of Clonmere gave drinks to the enemies of his country, and was a traitor to his home and to his land. And so they came by night and burnt his house. Not Michael himself, nor any of the men of Doonhaven, because to do so would have brought ill-luck upon them, and the Saints would not have wished it. John-Henry knew this, and Eugene Donovan the cowman knew it too, but they did not speak of these things. Justice had been done. There was no more to be said.

It was strange, thought John-Henry, that his family had striven now for generations to bring progress to the country, and the country did not want it, and his family would not learn. Nearly two hundred years ago Morty Donovan had shot John Brodrick in the back because he tried to interfere with the ways of the people. Duty, law, discipline, obedience, John Brodrick tried to enforce these rules upon the smugglers of Doonhaven, and they would have none of them. All that remained of John Brodrick today was a stone in a forgotten churchyard, and his life's blood that welled up in the creek year by year, so the legend ran. But the people smuggled still, and took their landlord's cattle, and fished forbidden waters, and the first John Brodrick might have lived longer and died in blessed old age had he the sense to understand the people could not be driven, and the land was theirs. Copper John made the mines, and the mines lay blackened on the hills, covered with gorse and heather and lichen, the ruins of an industry that no one had desired. John-Henry had seen the chimney-stacks like tombstones amidst the granite as he had come down from Mundy to Doonhaven, and he knew too how, when the civil war was over, tourists would stare at the ruins of Clonmere as they had done upon the wasted mines in his own boyhood. Relics that had failed, and would return, as the years passed, to the soil which gave them birth.

"And you," said John-Henry to the cowman, "have you no ambition to follow your brother Michael and fight battles for your country?"

Eugene Donovan smiled, chewing the grass stem between his teeth, and he pointed with his stick to the cattle, which had left the creek and were grazing now beneath the windows of Clonmere.

"You see those cows now," he said. "Always, since I was a lad, I had a wish to graze them here.

No more than a fancy, you see, but it was there, at the back of my mind. And when the fire came the other night and destroyed the castle, I said to myself, "Now at last I can graze the cattle there."

But I tell you God's truth, I had no hand in it."

"Is that all you want?" asked John-Henry.

Eugene Donovan thought awhile, and looked back over his shoulder at the casde.

"There are stables in behind there," he said. "The fire did not touch them, andwitha pound or two I could make a cow-house out of them. It's poor grazing up on the hill to what you have here."

John-Henry felt in his wallet, and he found there the three pounds that remained to him. The others had been won off him at whist by the freckled Tim.

"You can have the stables, if they are any use to you," he said, "and the ground for grazing, and these few pounds to put the stables the way they should be."

Eugene Donovan took the notes and counted them. "You're free with your money," he said.

"It's all that's left to me," said John-Henry. "That's where my family went astray, I'm thinking. I have the silver, you have the land. I would prefer it should be the other way round, but they've left me no choice."

"You're a gentleman," said Eugene Donovan; "you can travel and see the world. Sure, you can build yourself a finer house across the water than the one that lies here."

John-Henry did not answer. The rain was falling gently now from a grey wisp of cloud that had come across the sun. He turned up the collar of his coat, and thrust his hands into his pockets. Eugene Donovan pulled his cap over his eyes, and whistled to the mongrel dog that followed him. Through a rift in the clouds there came, for a brief instant, a white shaft of sunlight on the face of Hungry Hill.

The End