Later, much later, Johnnie pulled aside the curtains in his room in Pall Mall. The morning was foggy and grey. For a while he could not remember what had happened the night before, and he reached for the flask in the drawer of the dressing-table. He felt better after a moment or two, and his eye fell on the sleepy form of Vera Potts, who was lying on his bed. Strange, he had no recollection of anything after leaving Grosvenor Street. He went into the sitting-room and stared vacantly about him. There was his coat, and the much-trimmed hat of Vera Potts, and the fur she had worn about her neck. He took another sip from his flask. Then he noticed a telegram lying on the desk. He put out a shaky hand and opened it. When Vera Potts came into the room, looking for her things, she found Johnnie sitting before his desk, the telegram open in his hand. He was staring straight in front of him.
'What's up?' she said. 'Not bad news, is it?'
He did not seem to hear her. He was watching the grey December fog break upon the world outside.
'My grandfather's dead,' he said slowly. 'That means Clonmere is mine.'
The funny thing was that he still felt that the library belonged to the old man, and when he opened the drawers of the great roll-top desk, or turned a key in the book-case, he did so with a certain uneasiness, as if Copper John might walk into the room at any moment, and stand there with his hands behind his back, his eyes narrowing under his thick eyebrows, and demand in cold, measured tones what his grandson was about. The place smelt of him. It was grey, austere. And Johnnie knew that he could never sit there, never write letters with any sense of ease because of the shadow of his grandfather, looking over his shoulder.
The thing was ridiculous, of course. His grandfather had not been to Clonmere for more than six years. And Johnnie tried to picture him, that old deaf man of eighty-four, living with his housekeeper-wife at Lletharrog, waiting for death to claim him, seeing no one, writing to no one, except once a month with great regularity to the manager of the mines on Hungry Hill. Surely there was nothing fearful about that distant figure, sitting day after day in the living-room of the farm-house? And yet Johnnie shuddered, for no reason, and he would shut up the roll-top desk, and push away the chair, and leave the library to the cobwebs and the dust, and go out into the sunlight. There was a queer anti-climax in returning home. All his life he had waited for this moment, dreamt about it, planned for it, and now that it had come the savour was lost to him, the excitement was no longer there. 'It's come too late,' he thought, wandering about the grounds, listening abstractedly to what the agent had to say.
'It's come too late. I no longer care. This should have happened ten years ago, then it might have been worth while.' The agent had an irritating manner; he was a fellow called Adams. Johnnie did not know him, and he kept referring to Henry all the time, as though the place had come to him, and not to Johnnie at all. 'Yes, Captain Brodrick, your brother, Mr. Henry, ordered those trees to be planted; he was staying here last summer, with the other young gentlemen, when you were abroad.' And then, 'Mr. Henry suggested that the farm-buildings should be repaired, and he settled the dispute between old Baird and the new man; he decided Baird was really too old for the job, and he engaged the present man, Phillips.' And, 'Mr. Henry used to go up to the mines fairly frequently. I rather think the letters referring to the business have been going to him.'
No doubt, when he was in the regiment, and with his grandfather living in retirement at Lletharrog, Henry had given an eye to the place; but now his grandfather was dead, and Johnnie was the head of the family, Henry could mind his own business.
'In future,' he said curtly, 'all communications in regard to the estate or to the mines are to be brought direct to me.'
The tenants kept asking after Mr. Henry too, looking a little doubtfully at Johnnie, as if he had no business to be there, and was a stranger. Up at the mines it was the same. The former mining captain, old Nicholson, had retired long since, and his place had been taken by a manager, Griffiths, who showed him the accounts willingly enough, and appeared efficient and civil, but who when Johnnie asked some question about machinery, said 'that Mr. Henry considered the plant wanted renewing, and perhaps Captain Brodrick would be seeing his brother, and find out what steps he had taken in the matter.'
'My brother,' said Johnnie, 'is particularly busy at the moment getting himself married, and anyway the management of the mines has nothing whatsoever to do with him.'
'Of course, now you are home, Captain Brodrick, it is a different matter,' said Griffiths hastily. 'No doubt you will see to things personally.'
And he began talking technicalities, and showing Johnnie figures, none of which meant anything much to Johnnie. But rather than betray his ignorance he nodded his head now and again, and asked questions, and put some sort of bold face on the matter so that the manager would learn his lesson.
'I'm damned if I'm going to be dictated to by Henry or anyone else,' thought Johnnie, and on returning to the castle he had all the servants in and cursed them, just to show them that he was not going to stand any nonsense. He was irritated when old Thomas informed him that if the Captain did not require his services he would go and look after Mr.
Henry and Mrs. Henry, in the house they had taken in Slane.
'Go by all means, if you want to,' he said.
'I don't want to be served by people who dislike me.'
'It's not that, sir,' said the old servant, looking uncomfortable;? 'tis only that I know Mr. Henry's ways, and that with your being out of the country so longea' I might not please you.'
So Thomas departed to Slane, and so did one or two of the other servants, and Johnnie, in exasperation, sent for the batman who had looked after him in the regiment. He took charge of the house immediately, and shortly afterwards Fanny-Rosa arrived, with three more servants and all her luggage, and two or three dogs, announcing that darling Johnnie could not possibly live at Clonmere all by himself, of course she was going to look after him.
'You know, my darling,' said Fanny-Rosa, tucking her arm in her son's, and walking up and down before the houses 'what you ought to do is to marry. Some nice quiet, placid creature, who would give you dozens of children, and be about the place if you wanted her, but with no mind of her own to make an irritation.
She would not get in my way or in yours. There must be someone in the country who would answer the purpose.
Good family, of course. None of your upstarts.'
'I dislike quiet, placid women,'
Johnnie said, 'and so do you; and anyway I'm too much of a ruffian for any woman to marry, so we won't discuss it.'
'Henry and his Katherine are ideally happy,' said his mother. 'It's a pity you can't be the same. A wife would steady you, give you more of a background.
I'm not a fool. I know what I am talking about.'
'I've no desire to be steady,' said Johnnie, 'and if you are going to start lecturing me I shall remind you that this house is mine, and not yours.'
Fanny-Rosa glanced at him sideways.
Queer how mention of Henry and Katherine always made him stick out his jaw and smoulder.
'Don't be absurd, darling,' she said, 'you know I never lecture.'
But she made a silent resolve to question this servant of his discreetly sometime as to how much whisky his master was consuming, and where he kept the key of the cellar, and what he did with himself every evening, and whether he received many letters. The great thing at the moment was to keep Johnnie occupied. Fanny-Rosa wrote invitations to every neighbour within thirty miles inviting them to Clonmere to shoot before the season finished. Her brother. Bob Flower, who had married and settled down in Castle Andriff, her cousin, the Earl of Mundy, her other cousins, the Lumleys- everybody who might be induced to make some sort of companionship for Johnnie was pestered with letters and invitations, all claiming that 'darling Johnnie was longing to see them,' and on accepting the invitations and going to Clonmere the guests would be greeted by their talkative, flamboyant hostess, dressed in every describable colour to clash with her vivid hair. Later, considerably later, in the day, they would be joined by their somewhat flushed and slightly incoherent host, who would be hearty and aggressive in turn, one moment laughing boisterously, the next plunged for no apparent reason in sullen gloom. And the guests would be diffident, embarrassed, uncertain whether they were expected to shoot or to order their carriages and go home. At any rate, when next invited to Clonmere they would find themselves otherwise engaged.
'Extraordinary people are,' Fanny-Rosa would say. 'Last winter, when Henry and Herbert were here, they had friends over to shoot two or three times a week, inviting themselves. And now the same lot are full of excuses about the roads and the distance.'
