The English Tutor Read online

  “That’s not my fault, Kilmallin,” she protested hotly. “You never take me anywhere.”

  “There’s gratitude for you! Didn’t I send you for a fortnight to your Aunt Kate only this year, and she going out of her way to make trouble for me, and didn’t you come tearing home before a week was out, vowing you’d not leave Kilmallin again!”

  “I will not work—” she began again, but he waved her away, suddenly tired of the whole thing.

  “You’ll work for your new tutor, whatever his nationality,” he said coldly, “and you’ll take orders from him, and you’ll give him civility, or I’ll put a stop to you hanging round Conn Driscoll and learning all this rebel rubbish. Now, I don’t want to hear any more of this talk, understand? Brian, you understand?”

  “Yes, Kilmallin,” said Brian, wanting only to get away. “Then get along with the pair of you, and leave me in peace.”

  Clancy said nothing at all, but turned and ran out of the room.

  In the hall she picked up the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a brass tray for visiting-cards, and sent it hurtling across the flags. Brian covered his ears against the clatter it made.

  “Don’t—don’t, Clancy,” he implored. “It’s no good, you know, when Kilmallin makes up his mind.”

  “I’ve made up mine, too,” she retorted. “An Englishman! I’ll not stand for it.”

  “You’ll have to,” he said prosaically. “Anyhow, he’ll be better than the governesses—silly cows.”

  Clancy snatched up an old mackintosh and slung it round her shoulders.

  “I’m going to tell Conn,” she said. “Coming?”

  He looked dubious.

  “It’s still raining. Agnes would make a scene.”

  “All right, stay, then. But I’m going. I must get out of this house.”

  “The loch will be rough.”

  “I’ve taken the boat over in worse than this. Tell Aunt Bea I won’t be back for tea.”

  She banged the front door behind her, and ran across the wet lawn to the little wooden jetty and untied the dinghy.

  As the boat pulled away she could see Brian at the schoolroom window watching her. She waved, but he did not respond and she pulled angrily on her oars. Now Brian would sulk because he was left behind.

  The rain beat in her face, cooling her hot cheeks, and, almost ousting her anger, was the fear that her father might carry out his threat. Not to see Conn! To be denied that refuge all on account of a Sassenach! It must not be, whatever she had to endure from the hands of the enemy.

  It was only a short distance across the loch, and soon she was making fast the dinghy at the Driscoll jetty and climbing the steep path to the little farmstead where Conn lived alone since the death of his father a year ago. She ran through the house shouting his name, but there was only old Bridie in the kitchen making potato cakes.

  “Something awful’s happened to us. Where’s Conn?” Clancy cried.

  Bridie turned a dispassionate face from the heat of the fire and smiled.

  “Sure, he’s in the cow byre. He’ll be in directly,” she answered. “Let you sit down, Miss Clancy, and steam. You’re wet through to your skin.”

  “No, I must tell him at once, it’s awful,” Clancy said, “Conn! Conn!” she called, as she reached the cow byre which was now part of Conn’s makeshift stables. “Something terrible has happened! Kilmallin is getting a tutor for us, and what do you think—he’s English!”

  He was squatting in one of the stalls bandaging the near foreleg of a grey mare.

  “Lend a hand, Clancy,” he said. “Hold her head and stop her nipping me. I’ve nearly done.”

  She took the mare’s muzzle between her hands and gently caressed her.

  “Did you hear what I said, Conn? We’re to have a tutor—an English tutor,” she said, her eyes looking enormous in the dim light of the stable.

  “Well, what’s terrible about that?” he asked absently, collecting his first-aid box and stowing it on a shelf. “I always said Brian was getting too old for governesses.”

  “But he’s English—a Sassenach—a foreigner!”

  He looked at her outraged face and his eyes twinkled. “Oh!” he said. “Yes, I see. Well, you know, Clancy, there’s a lot of wild talk about the English, but they’re not so bad.”

  “Conn!” Her eyes accused him. “But it was you who said—”

  He flung an arm about her shoulders and rumpled her wet hair.

  “I said a lot of foolish things when I was a boy,” he told her. “My father bore the grudge on account of his father, but that was all long ago, and Granddad died like many another, and Ireland is free.”

  She pulled away from him.

  “Ireland is free because of men like your grandfather,” she cried. “They were martyrs and you should never forget.”

  “They were soldiers fighting for their country and the war’s long over.”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. “All I know of Ireland’s history I learnt from you. Never forget, you told me the Irish never forgive an injury.”

  His rather ugly face looked rueful.

  “I turned you into a proper little rebel, Miss Clancy O’Shane,” he said. ‘What have the English ever done to you?”

  “In 1598—” began Clancy swiftly, but he pushed her towards the door.

  “Ah, have done, you firebrand!” he laughed. “For what did I ever want to go and fix dates so firmly in your silly head? It’s all you’ve ever learnt from your schooling. Come up to the house and dry off. Bridie will give us tea.”

  She walked beside him in silence, thinking how much he had changed of late. It did not seem so very long ago when she used to sit on the floor, listening while the young Conn, the firelight ruddy on his hair and flashing eyes, had painted the wrongs of Ireland for her in passionate phrases she never forgot. But since his father had died and the farm and the need to make his own living had been his, there had been less and less of the old talk. It seemed to Clancy that he took life altogether less seriously, and the rare trips to England connected with his horses, instead of convincing him of the truth of his old ideas, appeared to do the opposite.

  He shouted to Bridie for tea, and Clancy automatically set the table, just as she had done a hundred times before while Conn in a shabby armchair by the fire leafed through the current copy of Irish Country Life. Presently Bridie came from the kitchen with plates of the newly made potato cakes dripping with farm butter and the honey that Aunt Bea always sent over from Kilmallin, and a vast plain cake which Clancy knew would be nicely damp in the middle.

  “The child should dry,” she remarked disapprovingly. “She looks as if she’s swam the loch, no less.”

  “Oh, Clancy never catches cold,” Conn said carelessly. “She’ll dry out after tea.”

  Clancy lifted the enormous brown teapot and began pouring out the strong black tea. Since she had been almost too little to hold it, she had performed this office for Conn and his father, remembering four lumps of sugar for Conn and no cream, and cream for Denis Driscoll and no sugar. But today the charm had gone from the little ceremony. Her own momentous news had passed unheeded and she felt as though she had lost an ally.

  “You’re very quiet,” Conn said suddenly. “As a rule you talk me nearly dizzy.”

  “Conn”—she pushed back her plate, unable for once to do justice to Bridie’s baking—“I cannot work for an Englishman, whatever Kilmallin may say. Think of having English history crammed down my throat like a lot of lies. It would choke me.”

  “It would surprise you, I don’t doubt,” he said with a grin. “Didn’t your governesses try to teach you English history?”

  “Not very hard. My Aunt Kate says I taught them Irish history they never knew.”

  “I shouldn’t be at all surprised, if it’s what you learnt from me.”

  “But, Conn, it was all true, what you used to tell me.”

  “Sure it was true, but you never heard the other side.�
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  “I don’t want to hear the other side.”

  “Well, that’s very narrow-minded of you.”

  “If,” said Clancy slowly, “I had told you about our English tutor three—even two years ago, you would have raged.”

  “Would I so?” He scratched his red head. “Ah, well, I was a boy then—not much older than you are now. You’ll learn when you’re my age.”

  “When I’m twenty-two,” said Clancy severely, “I’ll be no different from what I am now.”

  “Your English tutor will change all that,” he teased, but she was in no mood for teasing.

  “I’m too old for a tutor at all,” she burst out, “and so I told Kilmallin.”

  “You’re no different now from when you were Brian’s age,” he scoffed. “You haven’t even grown very much. I’m thinking Kilmallin is right. You can still do with a tutor, and a man at that, who won’t let himself be pushed around like those poor women. Oh, yes, me poor child, you’re going to have a hard time of it. The English are very good governors.”

  “No Englishman will govern me,” she said coldly.

  “Ah, stop giving battle!” he said good-naturedly. “He’s probably some little dried-up old professor who can hardly keep body and soul together. Not worth your powder and shot.”

  ‘Yes, I suppose he’s bound to be old—old and crabbity. Most of the governesses were.”

  “He’ll scarcely be anything else coming all the way from England and shutting himself up in an old castle like Kilmallin with a couple of ignorant young hooligans,” he retorted. “Be cripes! I’m sorry for the poor man.”

  It had stopped raining when she rowed back across the loch, and the wind had dropped. Conn stood on the jetty waving to her, and they shouted to one another until he turned and climbed the path to the house in easy, leaping strides. No, she must not lose Conn to Kilmallin’s wrath. I’ll behave, she told herself, but I won’t submit. I’ll never submit.

  On the other side, Brian waited for her. He seemed to have recovered from his pique at being left behind.

  “What did Conn say?” he demanded excitedly. “Wasn’t he amazed?”

  “Not very. I think he thought it was a good thing,” she replied.

  “So do I. But Agnes says a tutor will destroy me entirely.”

  “Agnes talks a lot of nonsense. What does Aunt Bea say?”

  “She never says anything—I don’t expect she cares. Don’t go into the study tonight. Kilmallin’s doing accounts.”

  Clancy sighed. Kilmallin had in his own phraseology been doing accounts a great deal of late. He was drinking far too much.

  Agnes met them in the hall.

  “Come in out of that,” she snapped, bustling Brian up the stairs. “There’s mist rising after the rain and your chest will be bad.”

  Clancy watched them disappear and felt very alone. For no reason, she suddenly remembered those words of her father’s, so many years ago. “If it had to be one of you, Clancy, God help me, it should not have been her. She should have given me another son.”

  She went into the library, and still in her wet clothes began to write a long letter to her cousin Clodagh in Dublin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THERE was a spell of fine weather following the day of Miss Dillon’s departure, and Clancy and Brian, temporarily freed from study, spent much of their time on the loch. Each morning they listened for the postman’s shrill whistle and tore down to the gates to collect the letters, inspecting them closely for one from England, but so far there had been nothing.

  Clancy wished that Clodagh would arrive from Dublin with her usual accompaniment of smart luggage and new clothes, but Clodagh was having too good a time in the city just then to spare a visit to her cousins in the west, though she promised to come and inspect the new tutor when he arrived.

  They were all at breakfast when the letter came. Kevin, always restless until the morning papers arrived, paced about the room eating his porridge which he had never been known to take sitting down, while Brian plagued his aunt to know whether the English always dressed for dinner.

  “I don’t know, dear,” Aunt Bea said vaguely. “I shouldn’t think so, these days. In recent years there have been great changes in England.”

  “I don’t suppose he’ll bring anything dressy here,” remarked Clancy, with her mouth full. “The English have queer ideas about us. They think we keep cows and hens in the house and never wash.”

  “How disappointed he’ll be,” said Brian. “We don’t even have the dogs in the house and Agnes is always making me wash. Where will he sleep?”

  “The tower room,” said Kevin shortly, from behind Clancy’s chair.

  She wriggled round to look at him with disbelief.

  “The tower room!” she exclaimed. “You’d give him the tower room where men have watched and waited for the English for generations—the room Grandfather had as his own?”

  “Why not?” snapped Kevin. “You talk as though the tower room was sacred.”

  “It is,” said Clancy quickly, “I mean, it’s historical. I shouldn’t think an Englishman’s ever set foot in it.”

  “Well, one is going to set foot in it now,” said Kevin. “See to it, will you, Bea?”

  Aunt Bea pursed her lips and looked pained. However, she only said: “Very well, Kevin,” and went on with her breakfast.

  Kevin gave her a look. He was not unattached to his sister and found her useful in many ways, but her vagueness and slight air of martyrdom exasperated him. Kate, now, was quite different. In their young unmarried days, it was always thought that the bouncing, domineering Kate would remain a spinster, but it had been she who had got a husband, and her gentler elder sister left an old maid. Perhaps it was just as well as things had turned out. He could not have borne Kate keeping house for him.

  “It’ll be pleasant to have another man in the house,” he said, frowning at Aunt Bea. “If he’s the right sort we can have a bit of fishing and one thing and another when he’s not knocking knowledge into you two children’s addle-pates.”

  “Conn says he’s bound to be old and dried up, taking a job like this—you won’t want him, Kilmallin,” said Clancy. “There’s Micky-the-post! Come on!”

  At the long blast of the postman’s whistle she and Brian had leapt to their feet and were out of the room, Brian still holding his egg spoon, before their aunt could protest. At the gate Clancy inspected the mail.

  “Two for Aunt Bea, six for Kilmallin—two look like bills. That one for Aunt Bea is from that frightful Miss Foley—did you know, Micky, that she wears her sister’s false teeth—the one that died of the fits?”

  “Is that so?” The postman was much interested. “She always was the mean wan, waiting, no doubt for the poor soul to die so she might get a loan of her teeth. Did you hear, Miss Clancy, that old Mr. Grady turned his only daughter out of the house after giving her a great skelpin’, an’ she with no place to lay her head this night?” Micky-the-post had long been their main source of information as to what went on in the neighbourhood, and many were the highly coloured and probably untrue tales they had taken with delight back to Kilmallin, but today Clancy was not interested. There were two other letters for Kevin, both with English stamps, one typewritten with the name and address of a London firm of solicitors stamped on the back, and the other a square tidy envelope bearing neat, precise handwriting.

  “Sure, I thought I’d brought the right wans this time—two of them,” the postman said, winking at Brian. He knew all about the new tutor, and the fact that he was English pleased him. The English were foolish with their money, and Micky had other sidelines besides being Micky-the-post.

  “This must be from those London lawyers Kilmallin wrote to,” said Clancy, turning the letters over. “And this is from him. Ah, he’s an old man for sure—look at the neatness of it. A professor, no less, as Conn said. Let’s get Kilmallin to open them at once. Hide the papers, Brian, or he’ll want to read the headlines first.”

>   They raced back to the house and Aunt Bea said disapprovingly:

  “You’ll get overheated, Brian, if you race about like that. Sit down now and finish your breakfast.”

  Brian obliged her, sitting on the newspapers at the same time. Clancy flung the letters down in front of her father and requested him to open them immediately.

  “What’s all the fuss?” he said. “Where are the papers?”

  “We have them, but please open these first—just these two,” begged Clancy.

  Kevin was in a good humour. He obediently took up the solicitor’s letter and slit open the envelope.

  “For a girl who made such a scene at the very idea of an English tutor, you seem mighty anxious to hear all about him,” he remarked.

  “We want to know the worst,” Clancy said, and watched in silence while her father read the letter. He read it to the end, then lay back in his chair and shouted with laughter. He then read the second letter which seemed to afford him nearly as much amusement, and, still chuckling to himself, folded both letters up and put them back in their envelopes.

  “What is it, Kilmallin? What’s so funny about it?” asked Clancy in a fever of curiosity.

  “It’s funny all right,” said Kevin, glancing at the rest of his mail, and tossing it aside to be dealt with later. “It tickles my sense of humour, though I doubt if it will yours.”

  “Why, isn’t it all right? Are his references queer?”

  “His references seem to be admirable, and he writes a good letter himself. No, I should say he’s just the man for us.”

  Clancy nearly stamped in her impatience.

  “But aren’t you going to read us what he says? Is he old? What’s his name?”

  “His name?” This seemed to amuse Kevin afresh. “Ah, no, I’ll not spoil the joke by telling you. I’ll send him a wire and he’ll be here by the end of the week. You can wait till then for your information. Now give me the paper and leave me in peace.”