The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

glass with port, Pinckney, who took no wine, lit a cigarette a

Hennessey because he wanted to talk business, Pinckney

dly in order to shine. Slowness, coldness, dulness or hesitancy in others depressed him just as dull weather depressed him. He did not at all know with what a burning interest his arrival had been awaited, or the effect that his voice had produced and his first appearance. He did not know how the dull s

should have sought for the reason of so much charm proving charmless, so much positive attraction prov

the South is different now. It use

lly independent. The war broke us. We had to get money, so we grew cotton as cotton was never grown before; the South became a great sheet of cotton. You see, cotton is t

and sat staring before him as t

ade them, don't make love in a wild and extravagant manner and shoot other co

and more's the pity. He's like an old house pulled down. No one can ever build it again as it was. The South's a big industrial region now. Not only cotton-ore and coal and machinery. We supply the North and East with p

t's not the thing to trust to a handbag. It's in correct form, I believe. Temperley, our solicitor, made it

putting on his glasses and pushing his dess

wine, contrasted strangely with the typical lawyer of the States. Flushed and not in his business mood, the man of law cast his eyes over the docu

which he re-read as though puzzled by the meaning o

id he. "He has made yo

ney l

trust the devil than the few relatives he had, that they were Papists-that is to say Roman Catholics-he seemed to fear them like the deuce and their influence on the girl. I couldn't understand him. I've never seen any harm in Roman Catholics; there are loads in

een staring at Pinckney during this. He looke

be a guardian, why, Lord bless my soul, what'll people be doing next? A youn

, "but she's to come and live under my roof at Charleston. I promised Berkno

, went to the sideboard, poured himself out a

need not be worried at the impropriety of the business; there's none, nothing improper could l

in the other.

want that house at all. I want her to keep it forever, but it's such a pleasant old place, I like to live there instead of buying a house of

guardian to the girl?" asked Hennessey. "There'd

kney, "my aunt is not a middle

?" said H

tates that hasn't squeezed her, or a beggar-man in the South that hasn't banked on her. She was sent into the world to grow flowers and look after stray dogs and be robbed by hoboes; she has been nearly seventy years at it and she doesn't know she has ever been robbed. She's not a

nckney was genuine enough, all the same it irritated him to think that Philip Berknowles should have chosen a youth like this to be second father to

e known Phyl since she was born and I've known her father since we were together at Trinit

d to us; then, of course, there were the family reasons. Phyl's mother was a Mascarene; my mother was her mother's first cousin. Vernons belonged to the Mascarenes, my mother brought it to my father as part of her wedding

nt to take her away

ink it would be easy to find a good tenant-then I want to go to London on business and get back as quick as possible. She need not come back with me, it would scarcely give her time to get thing

estate like Kilgobbin taken off to the States-Oh, you needn't tell me, if Phyl goes out there she's done for as far as Ireland is concerned. Sure, they never come back, the people t

pace you feel coming back here as if you were living in a country where people are hobbled. At least that's my experience. Then the air is dif

ising from the table, left the room

d for bed, whilst Pinckney, leaning back in his armchair, fell into

much interest and amusement and the physical health that comes from both, out of money-tending as out of flower and vegetable growing. Knowing all about cotton and nearly everything about wheat, he managed occasionally to do a bit of spe

e and another person's property to be conserved and dealt with. Never, never, did he dream when acceding to Ber

nscience most painfully sensitive with regard to the interests of others, a conscience that would prick him and poison

ey to look after Phyl and her affairs, and he guessed, just by the little bit he had seen of Kilgobbin and t

lstered in leather some five years ago. There is nothing that cries out so much against neglect as leather, and the chairs and couch in the library of Kilgobbin, without exactly crying out, still told their tale. Some of the buttons were gone, and some of them hung actually by the thread in the last stage of departure. There was a tiny triangular rent in the leather of

accountable and unaccountable little sounds that night evolves from an old house set in the stillness of the country. Just as the night jasmine gives up its perfume to the night, so does an old house its past in the form of murmurs and crackings and memories and suggestions. Notwithstanding Dunn's attentions there were rats alive in the cellars and under the boarding-and mice; the passages leading to t

e fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep, feeling for h

d he returned the gaze, trying to imagine what manner of man this might have been and how he had lived and what he

was rising from his chair to retire for the night when a sound from outside the window made him sit down again. It was

ootstep-and yet! He listened. The sound had ceased and now came a faint rubbing as of

to his feet and approaching the

Byrne's bolted the front door. Go to the h

mself. "Good heavens!" Then

the big front door that had been nearly battered in in the time of the Fenians and still possessed the ponderous locks and bars of a past day when the tenan

he contrast between the forbidding and ponderous door and the charming little figure against which it had stood as a barrier might

th have you b

n the woods and I went to let it out and couldn't find it, then that old fool Byrne locked the door; l

ow part of his business in life and that consideration just checked his speech. There was nothing at all wrong in the affair, and never for a moment did he dream of making the slightes

and cloak. She knew nothing of the true facts of the case, she looked on Pinckney as a being almost of her own age, and that he should dare to

Fate, with the help of Irish temper and the Pin

a word, marched into the library and finding the boo

d she as she pass

ght," he

that can be more hurting than speech-yet what could he have said? He rummaged in his mind to find something he might have said and could find nothing more appropriate than a remark about the weath

d himself. This was a small business, but if Phyl in the future was to do things that he did not approve of it would be

at heart a boy just as young as Phyl; even in years he was very little older than sh

ame to a

can attend to that. My business will be to look after her property and keep sharks off it. I'm no

ming solution of the di

nd, when she reached her room, that she had forgotten a matchbox, a

stepped into her life, and who possessed such a strange power to disturb her being and

to feel for the distant magnet, or the f

ther was there and, before the dream converted itself into something equally fatuous she heard Pinckney'