The Ghost Girl Part 6

They left the kitchen and came into the yard. A big tin can of refuse was standing by the kitchen door, and on top of all sorts of rubbish, potato peelings, cabbage stalks and so forth, lay the carca.s.s of a boiled fowl.

It was the fowl they had dined off the night before and it lay there just as it had gone from the table, that is to say, minus both wings and the greater part of the breast, but with the legs intact.

Pinckney stared at this sinful sight. Then he pointed to it.

"What's that doing there?" he asked.

"Waitin' to be took away be the stable boy, sor," replied the cook, who had followed them to the door. "All the rubbish is took away in that ould can every mornin'."

"Good G.o.d!" 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 sc.r.a.ps--you see, it _is_ insulting to give a poor person sc.r.a.ps, 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 att.i.tude 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.

Rafferty was a man of genius, who had started as a helper and odd job person, and had risen to the position of factotum. He had ousted the Scotch gardener and insinuated a relation of his own in his place. There was scarcely a servant about the estate that was not a relation of Rafferty's. Philip Berknowles had put up with a lot from Rafferty simply because Rafferty was an invaluable person in his way when not crossed.

Everything went smoothly when the factotum was not interfered with. Cross him and there were immediate results ranging from ill-groomed horses to general unrest. He was a dark individual, half groom, half game-keeper in dress, a "wicked-looking divil," according to the description of his enemies, and an exceedingly foxy-looking individual in the eyes of Pinckney.

"Rafferty," said Mr. Hennessey, "I want to show this gentleman round.

Let's see the stables."

Rafferty touched his cap and led the way, showing first the stalls and boxes where four or five horses were stabled, and then leading the way through the coach-house to the path from which opened the kitchen gardens.

They were immense and walled in with red brick, capable, one might fancy, of supplying the wants of three or four houses the size of Kilgobbin.

Pinckney noted this fact, also that the home farm to which the kitchen gardens led was apparently a prosperous and going little concern, with its fowls and chickens penned or loose, styes filled with grunting pigs, and turkeys gobbling and spreading their tails in the sun.

"Who looks after all this?" asked Pinckney.

"I do, sor," replied Rafferty.

"What are the takings?"

"I beg your pardon, sor?"

"The profits, I mean. You sell these things, don't you?"

"Kilgobbin isn't a farm, sor, it's a gintleman's estate."

Pinckney, not at all set back by this snub, turned and looked the factotum in the face.

"Just so," said he, "but I've never heard of gentlemen growing pigs to look at; peac.o.c.ks, maybe, but not pigs. However, we'll have another look at the business later."

He turned and they went on, Rafferty disturbed in his mind and much put about by the manner of the other in whom he began to divine something more than a casual guest, Phyl almost as much put out as Rafferty.

The idea that the factotum might have been robbing her father right and left never occurred to her; even if it had, it would not have softened the fact that a strange hand was at work in her old home turning over things, inspecting them, holding them up for comment.

She managed to drop behind as they left the farm yard for the paddocks, then turning down the yew lane that led back to the house, she ran as though hounds were after her, reached the house, locked herself in her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed in a tempest of weeping, dragging a pillow over her head as if to shield herself from the blows that the world was aiming at her.

Phyl, without mother, brothers or sisters, had centred all her affection on her father and Kilgobbin; the servants, the place itself and all the things and people about it were part and parcel with her life, and the death of her father had intensified her love of the place and the people.

If Pinckney had only known, he might have put the business of the inspection of the property and the dealing with the servants into other hands, but Pinckney was young and full of energy and business ability; he was full of conscientiousness and the determination to protect his ward's interests; he had scented a rogue in Rafferty, and at this very minute returning to the house with Hennessey, he was declaring his intention to make an overhaul of the working of the estate.

Rafferty was to appear before him and produce his accounts and make explanations. Mrs. Driscoll was to be examined as to the expenditure, etc.

He little knew the hornet's nest into which he was about to poke his finger.

CHAPTER VII

The grand inquisition began that evening after dinner--Phyl did not appear at dinner, alleging a headache--and Rafferty, summoned to the library, had to stand whilst Pinckney, seated at the table with a pen in his hand and a sheet of paper before him, went into the business of accounts.

Mark how the unexpected occurs in life. Rafferty, who had been pilfering for years, selling garden produce and keeping the profits, robbing corn from the corn bin in the stable, poaching and selling birds and ground game to a dealer in Arranakilty, receiving illicit commissions and so forth, had on the death of his master shaken off all restraint and prepared for a campaign of open plunder. The very last thing he could have imagined was the sudden appearance of an American business man on the scene, armed with absolute power and possessing the eye of a hawk.

"Your master asked me just before he died to look after this estate,"

began Pinckney; "in fact, he has appointed me to act as guardian to Miss Berknowles, so I just want to see how things stand. Now, to begin with the horses. I want to know everything about the stables during the last--shall we say--six months. Who supplies the corn and the hay and the straw?"

"I've been gettin' some from Faulkner of Arranakilty, sor, and some from Doyle of Bally-brack."

"Don't you grow any horse food on the estate?"

"We don't grow no corn, sor."

"Well, hay and straw?"

"You can't get straw, sor, widout you grow corn."

"I know that--but how about hay--surely you grow lots of gra.s.s?"

"We graze the gra.s.s, sor."

"Do you let the grazing?"