Hungry Hill (63 page)

It was strange, thought John-Henry, that his family had striven now for generations to bring progress to the country, and the country did not want it, and his family would not learn. Nearly two hundred years ago Morty Donovan had shot John Brodrick in the back because he tried to interfere with the ways of the people. Duty, law, discipline, obedience, John Brodrick tried to enforce these rules upon the smugglers of Doonhaven, and they would have none of them. All that remained of John Brodrick today was a stone in a forgotten churchyard, and his life’s blood that welled up in the creek year by year, so the legend ran. But the people smuggled still, and took their landlord’s cattle, and fished forbidden waters, and the first John Brodrick might have lived longer and died in blessed old age had he the sense to understand the people could not be driven, and the land was theirs. Copper John made the mines, and the mines lay blackened on the hills, covered with gorse and heather and lichen, the ruins of an industry that no one had desired. John-Henry had seen the chimney-stacks like tombstones amidst the granite as he had come down from Mundy to Doonhaven, and he knew too how, when the civil war was over, tourists would stare at the ruins of Clonmere as they had done upon the wasted mines in his own boyhood. Relics that had failed, and would return, as the years passed, to the soil which gave them birth.

“And you,” said John-Henry to the cowman, “have you no ambition to follow your brother Michael and fight battles for your country?”

Eugene Donovan smiled, chewing the grass stem between his teeth, and he pointed with his stick to the cattle, which had left the creek and were grazing now beneath the windows of Clonmere.

“You see those cows now,” he said. “Always, since I was a lad, I had a wish to graze them here.

No more than a fancy, you see, but it was there, at the back of my mind. And when the fire came the other night and destroyed the castle, I said to myself, “Now at last I can graze the cattle there.”

But I tell you God’s truth, I had no hand in it.”

“Is that all you want?” asked John-Henry.

Eugene Donovan thought awhile, and looked back over his shoulder at the casde.

“There are stables in behind there,” he said. “The fire did not touch them, andwitha pound or two I could make a cow-house out of them. It’s poor grazing up on the hill to what you have here.”

John-Henry felt in his wallet, and he found there the three pounds that remained to him. The others had been won off him at whist by the freckled Tim.

“You can have the stables, if they are any use to you,” he said, “and the ground for grazing, and these few pounds to put the stables the way they should be.”

Eugene Donovan took the notes and counted them. “You’re free with your money,” he said.

“It’s all that’s left to me,” said John-Henry. “That’s where my family went astray, I’m thinking. I have the silver, you have the land. I would prefer it should be the other way round, but they’ve left me no choice.”

“You’re a gentleman,” said Eugene Donovan; “you can travel and see the world. Sure, you can build yourself a finer house across the water than the one that lies here.”

John-Henry did not answer. The rain was falling gently now from a grey wisp of cloud that had come across the sun. He turned up the collar of his coat, and thrust his hands into his pockets. Eugene Donovan pulled his cap over his eyes, and whistled to the mongrel dog that followed him. Through a rift in the clouds there came, for a brief instant, a white shaft of sunlight on the face of Hungry Hill.

The End