Green Girl Read Free Page A

had only a vague impression of the size of the house, wreathed as it was in mist, but the hall they entered seemed vast, its soaring roof lost in shadows, firelight and lamplight mingling to catch flickering reflections in polished wood and brass. It was not a hall at all, she thought, as she was deposited on some large couch or settle, but a cavernous chamber, for living-room seemed too homely a definition for such space and grandeur. She lay there while her unwilling host called peremptorily for whiskey to some unseen person in what was presumably the kitchen quarters, and was surprised when an old man appeared from the shadows, looking so exactly like the traditional venerable ancient retainer of a castle that she had to pinch herself to be sure she was awake.
    The illusion was lost, however, as the old man observed sourly:
    “ You ’ ll not be askin ’ for the craythur now, Mr. Duff, if you know what ’ s good for you, and Agnes ’ temper spoiled entoirely with the vittles kept waiting this past hour. I ’ ll tell her she can rest aisy and dish up. ”
    “ Ah, get away with your sulks, Jimsy, and bring the decanter. We have a refugee from the fog who needs attention before I can sit down to my meal, ” his master replied with none of the sharpness Harriet would have expected at such familiarity, and with the first faint hint of an Irish inflection, and when the old servant shuffled across the hail to peer at her, she could see her first impressions were misleading. Jimsy, seen at close quarters, was neither venerable or clad in the tradition of old retainers. His grizzled hair, which had once been red, was sparse and unkempt, his s hirt sleeves rolled up, and a green baize apron only seemed to accentuate the unorthodox clothing of his nether limbs.
    “ W-ell, now ... ” he remarked, observing her with the porter ’ s same suspicious eye, “ and is this what the dogs has brought in? There ’ s no tellin ’ what thim two will be finding next on the Plain of Clooney. Would she be one of thim gurrls from Casey ’ s new joint by the lough? ”
    “ Not at all. She claims to be Miss Harriet Jones over from England on a visit to Castle Clooney with expectations of marriage, it seems. ”
    “ Does she, so? Well now, that ’ s very interesting. ”
    They seemed, thought Harriet, to be sharing a private joke at her expense, or Jimsy, like his master, placed no great credence on her explanation.
    “ I think you are both rather rude, ” she said, trying to be politely censorious, but only succeeding in sounding as wretched and confused as she felt, and the master of the house replied quickly and gravely:
    “ So we are, and you in no fit state to be teased. Jimsy—the whiskey at once, and tell someone to prepare a room and see the bath water ’ s hot. We don ’ t want pneumonia setting in to add to a damaged ankle. ”
    He had been standing back in the shadows, but as the old man hurried away, offering no further argument, he moved into the light and Harriet looked up curiously to see what manner of man he might be. Her first impression was one of disappointment, for she thought him the ugliest man she had ever seen; her second that his face matched his voice heard only in the darkness; a harsh, uncompromising face, dark-skinned and broad-featured, with a nose which looked as if it had once been broken, and forbidding eyebrows as black as his close-cropped hair; a tall, loosely-made man whose clothes hung carelessly upon him, he could, she thought, have been any age, for the flesh covering the bones of his face appeared taut and lined, whether prematurely or not it was difficult to say in the uncertain light.
    She must have been staring with a regrettable lack of manners, for his mouth tightened and he observed with a return of the old irony:
    “ Well, do I qualify as one of these strange apparitions you were dreaming up in the fog? I ’ m no oil-painting, I know, but my face doesn ’ t as a rule frighten