Daphne du Maurier: Hungry Hill

"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