Daphne du Maurier - Hungry Hill

"Have you ever written to him, boy, and asked his forgiveness?"

"Yes-when I first got out to Winnipeg. I had no answer. That was enough for me. I shall never write to him again as long as I live."

Tom Callaghan said no more. God alone could heal the breach between father and son, and if he tried to meddle it would only make matters worse. He wrote and told his old friend that Hal had returned to Doonhaven, of his ill-health and failure out in Canada, and the engagement to his daughter. Henry made little comment in his reply.

"I never expected anything else," he said, "but that Hal would make a mess of his life. I am afraid your daughter is throwing herself away on him."

So Clonmere remained shuttered and Hal Brodrick lived in Doonhaven instead, with Jinny doing his cooking and a girl coming in every morning to scrub floors, with himself cleaning the boots and shoes and bringing in the coal.

"I did it all in Canada," he said, "and I can do it here too," and then he would look across the way and see Mike Doolan staring at him with a grin on his face as though he despised him, and if he spoke to him the fellow would be off-hand and indifferent.

"It's funny," said Hal to Jinny, "they don't like it. When we lived at Clonmere and were "the gentry," and rode past in the carriage, they hated us, no doubt, but they respected us, or at least they respected my father. And now I've come to live amongst them there's resentment, we make an intrusion. Oh, not you: they're used to you. You're the Rector's daughter. But I'm different. I'm a Brodrick, and they expect me to kick them in the pants, even if they hate me while I do it."

"You're too sensitive," said Jinny, "too much on the defensive, and wondering what they are going to say to you. Just be natural, just be yourself. They'll be friendly in time; they are like children."

"Which is myself?" said Hal. "I'm damned if I know. I thought I was a rancher, and I was not. I believed myself a painter, and I could not sell a picture. I can't even call myself Hal Brodrick of Clonmere. I'm a useless rotter with a wife who's too good for me, living on the good-will of my father-in-law. And the people know it, that's the trouble.

They've every right to despise me."

"They don't despise you, and you are none of those horrid things. You are my own Hal," said Jinny.

She was just a little worried, all the same.

Hal's first rapture at being back and seeing her again had worn rather thin. He was often silent and depressed, and then would be in despair for fear he had wounded her and was making her miserable.

"I'm a burden to you," he said; "you'll be sick of me before you've been married six months. I'd no right to Come home and ask you."

Jinny told some of this to her father, and he nodded his head in understanding.

"The trouble is," he said, "that Hal feels he is dependent on us, and yet he hasn't the strength of mind to try to stand on his own. I'll have a talk with him and see what I can do."

And then, sitting round the fire in the Rectory study, it would be difficult to imagine that Hal was ever anything but charming, light" hearted and gay. He would chaff Aunt Harriet on skimming the cream with a scallop shell, and tease Uncle Tom on the length of the Sunday sermon, and standing on the hearth with his arm round Jinny's waist it might have been Henry himself, some thirty years before, thought the Rector, with the same amusing chatter about people and places, telling them of wild-cat schemes and pranks he had played in Canada with his partner, the dissolute Frank."

"Are you too proud, Hal," he said, when Jinny and her mother had left the room, "to try to earn your living?"

"Not too proud," said Hal, smiling, "but too lazy. That's why I failed in Canada."

"No," said Tom, "you failed in Canada because you were friendless and alone, and spent all your money in the Winnipeg saloons. That won't happen here."

"What do you suggest, then, Uncle Tom? No one will buy my pictures. I hawked three canvases round Slane last week, and didn't sell one of them. It made me ashamed before Jinny, who still believes I'm a good painter. But after I'd had a couple of drinks I felt better about it."

"Yes, lad, and if you go on like that you'll be ill again, as you were in Canada. No, keep your painting as a hobby, and a very good hobby it is. I want to know if you have the courage to do something else."

"What should I do?"

The Rector looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. "You know old Griffiths, the manager up at the mine?" he said.

"Yes."

"His head clerk has gone to America. He wants someone to do the books and keep accounts, and the hundred and one odd jobs that he can't see to himself.

Office hours, of course, nine till six.

Small salary, but not to be despised. What about it?"

Hal thrust his hands in his pockets and made a face at his father-in-law.

"A Brodrick go and earn a few pounds a week in the mine that will one day bring him thousands?" he said. "It's a funny sort of suggestion."

"Never mind about that," answered the Rector.

"It's the present you have to think about, not the future.

And there would be no question of taking money from your father. The salary is paid to the head clerk, whoever takes the place. The question is, can you pull yourself together and do it?

I know someone who would be very proud of you if you did, and that's Jinny."

Hal did not answer for a moment. He stood staring at the fire.

"I want to please Jinny more than anything else on earth," he said, "and yet I know in my heart I shall always let her down. I'm no good, you see, Uncle Tom. I shall make a mess of this job as I've done of everything else."

"No, Hal boy, you will not."

"All right then, I'll have a shot at it."

And so on the 25th of February, 1890, Hal Brodrick walked up to his father's mines on Hungry Hill, shoulder to shoulder with the men of Doonhaven, and hanging his hat on the peg in the counting-house, sat down on a high stool before a desk, with young Murphy the grocer's son on the other side of him. Old Griffiths sat in state in an inner room. Hal remembered him standing with his hat in his hands before his father in the old days, and now Hal was his clerk, and said "Thank you, sir," for his weekly wage, just like young Murphy and the others.

It was strange to be just another employee in the mine, when twenty years ago he had driven here in state with his father, the men doffing their hats at his approach, and he remembered being taken below to watch the miners working the lodes, and visiting the engine-houses to see the great pumps at work. Now for the first time he became acquainted with the vast inner life of the mine, which seemed to have no connection with the world outside.

At six in the morning, in his house at Doonhaven, Hal would wake to hear clanging from Hungry Hill the great bell that called the miners to work, and allowed the night-shift to come wan and tired-eyed to the surface. The bell had gone day after day for nearly seventy years, calling the men and women and little children to the mines, but the Brodricks lying in their beds at Clonmere had never heard it. There was a line that ran from Doonhaven out to the mines on Hungry Hill, and those miners who lived in the village would ride out in the trucks to their work.

Hal would hear the whistle of steam and the clanging of wheels on the rollers, and sometimes the sound of running feet under his window as the men hastened to catch the trucks. It would still be dark outside, with the stars shining.

"Poor devils," whispered Hal to Jinny, feeling in some queer, obscure fashion that he was to blame for their early rising in the bleak raw morning, and then his conscience would prick him as he arrived himself at the counting-house shortly before nine, having ridden out in all probability in the Rector's trap.