The Ghost Girl Part 9

With a far, fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the battles of Ireland.

Phyl gathered the impression that, if she went to America Mrs. Hennessey would grieve less over the fact that she (Phyl) was leaving Merrion Square, than over the fact that she was leaving Dublin. She escaped, carrying this impression with her, went upstairs, dressed, and then started off for Mr. Hennessey's office.

It was a cold, bright day and Dublin looked almost cheerful in the sunlight.

The lawyer looked surprised when she was shown into his private room; then, when she had told him her business, he fumbled amongst the papers on his desk and produced a letter.

"This is from Pinckney," said he. "It came by the same post as yours, only it was directed to the office. It's the same story, too. He wants you to go over."

"I've been thinking over the whole business," said Phyl, "and I feel I ought to go."

"Aren't you happy in Dublin?" asked he.

"M'yes," answered the other. "But, you see--at least, I'm as happy as I suppose I'll be anywhere, only they are my people and I feel I ought to go to them. It's very lonely to have no people of one's own. You and Mrs.

Hennessey have been very kind to me, and I shall always be grateful, but--"

"But we aren't your own flesh and blood. You're right. Well, there it is.

We'll be sorry to lose you, but, maybe, though you haven't much experience of the world, you've hit the nail on the head. We aren't your flesh and blood, and though the Pinckneys aren't much more to you, still, one drop of blood makes all the difference in the world. Then again, you're a cut above us; we're quite simple people, but the Berknowles were always in the Castle set and a long chalk above the Hennesseys. I was saying that to Norah only last night when I was reading the account of the big party at the Viceregal Lodge and the names of all the people that were there, and I said to her, 'Phyl ought to be going to parties like that by and by when she grows older, and we can't do much for her in that way,' and off she goes in a temper. 'Who's the Aberdeens?' says she. 'A lot of English without an Irish feather in their tails, and he opening the doors to visitors in his dressing gown--Castle,' she says, 'it's little Castle there'll be when we have a Parliament sitting in Dublin.'"

"I don't want to go to parties at the Viceregal Lodge," said Phyl, flushing to think of what a sn.o.b she had been when only a few days back she had criticised the Hennesseys and their set in her own mind. These honest, straightforward good people were not sn.o.bs, whatever else they might be, and if her desire for America had been prompted solely by the desire to escape from the social conditions that environed her friends, she would now have smothered it and stamped on it. But the call from Charleston that had come across the water to her was an influence far more potent than that. That call from the country where her mother had been born and where her mother's people had always lived had more in it than the voices that carried the message.

"Well," said Hennessey, "you mayn't want to go to parties now, but you will when you are a bit older. However, you can please yourself--Do you want to go to America?"

"I do," said Phyl. "It's not that I want to leave you, but there is something that tells me I have got to go. When I read the letter first this morning, I was delighted to think that Mr. Pinckney was not still angry with me, and I liked the idea of the change, for Dublin is a bit dreary after Kilgobbin and--and well, I _will_ say it--I don't care for some of the people I have met in Dublin. But since then a new feeling has come over me. I think it came as I was walking down here to the office.

It's a feeling as if something were pulling me ever so slightly, yet still pulling me from over there. My father said that there was more of mother in me than him. I remember he said that once--well, perhaps it's that. She came from over there."

"Maybe it is," said Hennessey.

CHAPTER IX

The thing was settled definitely that night, Mrs. Hennessey resisting the idea at first, more, one might have fancied from her talk, because the idea was anti-national than from love of Phyl, though, as a matter of fact, she was fond enough of the girl.

"It's what's left Ireland what it is," went on the good lady. "Cripples and lunatics, that's all that's left of us with your emigration; all the good blood of Ireland flowing away from her and not a drop, scarcely, coming back."

"I'll come back," said Phyl, "you need not fear about that--some day."

"Ay, some day," said Mrs. Hennessey, and stared into the fire. Then the spirit moving her, she began to discant on things past and people vanished.

Synge, and Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde, who was the real genius of the family, only his genius "stuck in him somehow and wouldn't come out." She pa.s.sed from people who had vanished to places that had changed, and only stopped when the servant came in with the announcement that supper was ready.

Then at supper, lo and behold! she discussed the going away of Phyl, as though it were a matter arranged and done with and carrying her full consent and approval.

During the weeks following, Phyl's impending journey kept Mrs. Hennessey busy in a spasmodic way. One might have fancied from the preparations and lists of things necessary that the girl was off to the wilds of New Guinea or some region equally dest.i.tute of shops.

Hennessey remonstrated, and then let her have her way--it kept her quiet, and Phyl, nothing loath, spent most of her time now in shops, Tod and Burns, and Cannock and White's, examining patterns and being fitted, varying these amus.e.m.e.nts by farewell visits. She was invited out by all the Hennesseys' friends, the Farrels and the Rourkes, and the Longs and the Newlands, and the Pryces and the Oldhams, all prepared tea-parties in her honour, made her welcome, and made much of her, just as we make much of people who have not long to live.

She was the girl that was going to America. She did not appreciate the real kindness underlying this terrible round of festivities till she was standing on the deck of the _Hybernia_ at Kingstown saying good-bye to Hennessey.

Then, as the boat drew away from the Carlisle pier, as it pa.s.sed the guardship anchorage and the batteries at the ends of the east and west piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her the most desirable people on earth.

Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child.

Oh, the loneliness! the desolation!

As she stood watching the Wicklow mountains fading in the grey distance, she knew for the first time the meaning of those words, "Gone West"; and she knew what the thousands suffered who, driven from their cabins on the hillside or the moor, went West in the old days when the emigrant ship showed her tall masts in Queenstown Harbour and her bellying canvas to the sunset of the Atlantic.

At Liverpool, she found Mrs. Van Dusen, a tall, rather good-looking, rather hard-looking but exceedingly fashionable individual, at the hotel where it was arranged they should meet.

Phyl, looking like a lost dog, confused by travel and dumb from dejection, had little in common with this lady, nor did a rough pa.s.sage across the Atlantic extend their knowledge of one another, for Mrs. Van Dusen scarcely appeared from her state-room till the evening when, the great ship coming to her moorings, New York sketched itself and its blazing skysc.r.a.pers against the gloom before the astonished eyes of Phyl.

PART II

CHAPTER I

Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home, making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a very good imitation of dying.

But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people may be expected to feel _after_ they are dead.

America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Settlers in Canada"

and "Round the World in Eighty Days," had given her pictures, and from these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains, Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives.

New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound express tumbled it all to pieces.

Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection quite different things from these.

New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could not picture.

What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people--that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of j.a.pan or a dream of the past.

The people in the train were talking English--were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead.

It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it pa.s.sed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows--it was too big.

Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.

Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless pa.s.senger, nerve soothing and mind lulling--the first breath of the South.

Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast s.p.a.ces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond.