rest him. When he is gay she will join in his gaiety, and when he is solemn she will be solemn too. They belong to each other, she is going to have his baby. And I belong to nothing and to no one; I'm nothing but a useless, ill- tempered drunkard, whose only amusement in life is to make love to my lodge-keeper's sister.
'Johnnie,' said Katherine suddenly, looking up from her music, and smiling across at him, 'you are going to stay a little while with us, are you not?'
And Henry, with his hand on her shoulder, glanced at him too.
'Yes, Johnnie, I wish you would. I'm out a great deal, and I should like to think of you here with Katherine. I know you would be happy. I know she would look after you.'
Johnnie watched them, Katherine at the piano with the lamp-light shining on her smooth dark hair, and Henry his brother, playing half-consciously with the lace on Katherine's collar. The little gesture, familiar, intimate, broke into Johnnie's dream.
'No,' he said, 'no, I shall leave you both in peace and go back to Clonmere.'
When Johnnie returned home one of the first things he did was to dismiss his agent Adams, telling him that in future he would look after the estate himself. This would show Henry, and anyone else who chose to criticise him, that he was not so incompetent as they liked to believe. For a month or so he rose earlier in the morning, answered his letters, walked or rode round Clonmere, and even went up to the mines once or twice a week. Then he had the misfortune to catch a chill and be laid up for several days, and as he lay alone in his dreary bedroom, with only his manservant to minister to him, depression once more came upon him, and his energy of the past few weeks seemed futile and absurd.
What good did he achieve, after all, by riding up to Hungry Hill and sitting in the counting-house?
He merely wasted Griffiths' time. During the hour he would spend in the place, the manager would be fretting to be gone. And it would be the same about the estate. He was certain his tenants disliked him.
No one gave him a welcome, except the Donovans. And by God, he thought to himself, tossing on his bed, they are my only friends; no one else cares one ha'porth about me. I could lie here and die before anyone came to see me. His godfather, Doctor Armstrong, looked in upon him one morning, and read him a lecture on self- indulgence.
'You've only yourself to blame for the condition you are in,' he said, without an ounce of sympathy, and sat for fully twenty minutes declaiming the evils of alcohol. Then he departed, and Johnnie, feeling rather worse towards evening, bade his man bring up a bottle of port from the cellar, after which he was sufficiently recovered to put on a dressing-gown and eat cold bacon and potatoes by the fire in the dining-room, where Jack Donovan, full of sympathy, sat with him to bear him company.
'Here's Kate been fretting herself sick for the sight of you these past few days,' he said, 'and nothing would content her but that I should come up myself to the castle to see the Captain. How do you feel, then?'
'Like hell,' said Johnnie.
'It's lying here by yourself that does it, Captain.
As for physic, the man has yet to be born that drew any strength from the stuff. It's what you have there in the bottle that will do you most good.'
'That's the way I like to be spoken to, Jack.
By heaven, you're the only friend I have.'
'True for you, sir. It's what Kate was saying to me only this morning: the Captain's fine friends and relatives would let him die before they gave him a thought. I tell you what it is, sir, you have too much spirit for them, that's the trouble. You like to go your own way, and why shouldn't you? Here's that dirty fellow Adams going round saying you don't know one end of your property from the other. I'd scalp the brute.'
'Oh, he says that, does he?'
'Sure, 'tis out of spite because you took the agency out of his hands. I can tell you one thing, Captain, and that is I'll give you a hand any day with the property, when you haven't the mind to be bothering with the place.'
'That's very good of you, Jack.'
'Ah, don't mention it. No trouble at all.
I dare say I can squeeze more out of the place for you than Adams. What do you say to Kate coming round and straightening things up for you here in the house?'
'I'd be very obliged if she would,' yawned Johnnie. 'None of my servants here flicks a duster in the rooms from one day to the next.'
The port was taking effect, it was making him sleepy, and satisfied, which the medicine of his old fool of a godfather would never have done, and it was pleasant, thought Johnnie later, lying in his bed once more, with a fire lit in the grate, to see Kate moving noiselessly about the room, drawing the curtains and shutting out the grey November afternoon, folding his clothes and putting them away, and afterwards, when he was practically asleep, creeping to his side and lying down on the bed beside him. He thought of East Grove, and his brother and Katherine sitting down now to their tea in the drawing-room, and later Katherine playing the piano, and Henry sitting back in his chair, turning it so that he could watch the lamp-light on his wife's hair.
'He has his Katherine,' thought Johnnie, 'I have my Kate. What the hell do I care?'
And pulling Jack Donovan's sister close to him, he sought oblivion, while the rain began to patter again on the closed window and the darkness fell.
It was easy, as the winter passed, to rely more and more upon the company of the Donovans. Jack had a shrewd, rather cunning business head upon him, and in less than no time, Johnnie noticed, he had the affairs of Clonmere at his finger-tips. He dealt with the tenants, he paid the wages, he took upon his shoulders all that his master could not be bothered to do.
'I don't know how I'd manage without you now, Jack,' Johnnie would say to him. 'You save me all the work that bores me stiff, and I don't have to worry any more whether the fellows dislike me or not.'
'Dislike you?' said Jack Donovan. 'Why, Captain, you're the best-liked gentleman that's ever borne the name of Brodrick. Aren't there men and women down in Doonhaven that speak to you who never spoke to your brother, or your grandfather? Even Father Healey himself said to Kate the other day, 'The Captain is a credit to the country.'
It was indeed rather remarkable, thought Johnnie, that the priest of the district, who to the best of his belief had never in his grandfather's time had as much as a nod from any member of the family, far less entered inside the park, should now smile and bow to the present owner of Clonmere, and even take tea with him in the stuffy kitchen of the gate-house. He was really, Johnnie decided, quite a good sort of fellow, and he found himself fumbling for five pounds to give to the priest for distribution among the poorest families in the district.
'Never before,' said Father Healey, counting the coins carefully, and putting them away in a shabby leather purse, 'never before has a Brodrick given a thought to any of the poor stricken members of my flock. And there's my church, with the roof soon to fall in, and how am I to find the money to repair it?'
Johnnie remembered his balance in the bank, swollen by the copper from Hungry Hill, and promised a cheque to Father Healey.
'Didn't I tell you the Captain was a gentleman, father?' said Jack. Donovan, peering over the priest's shoulder to see the amount of the cheque. 'He's as simple-hearted as a child with his money, and twice as generous. Kate, pour the reverend father another glass of whisky, and the Captain too.'
'Not for me, child, not for me,' said the priest, holding up his hand. 'I must be on my way. It is a joy to see a man of your position,' he added, looking at Johnnie, 'happy in such humble surroundings, and with so little thought of the honour he does those he visits.'
'I should be lost without Jack and Kate to look after me,' smiled Johnnie.
'And they would be lost without you,' said Father Healey.
'Here is Kate, a dear child I have known from her birth, with a mind and heart as innocent now as the day I baptised her, and showing you, I am well aware, a devotion that could not be equalled by the highest in the land. It would be a terrible thing if such devotion were ever to be cast aside as worthless, and an innocent heart betrayed.'
'What the devil does he mean?' thought Johnnie, but he shook hands with the priest, and assured him that neither Jack nor his sister should ever want for anything while he was living in Clonmere.
'I believe you,' said Father Healey, opening a vast umbrella to shield his stout person from the rain.
'You have given proof of your honour and generosity to me in person, and this blessed child, with no parents
