“Poor old lad!” he thought, compassionately; yet, blended with the compassion, was the half-unconscious triumph of strong middle-age at sight of the failure of a senior.  “That’s the first knock.  He’ll want to mind himself from this out—­the next one might hit him harder.”

CHAPTER XXIII

The back stairs at Mount Music were old and precipitous.  To descend them at high noon demanded circumspection at night, when the armies of the cockroaches were abroad; and marauding rats came flopping up and down them, upon their unlawful occasions, only that man of iron, Robert Evans, was proof to their terrors.  Christian, even though inured from childhood to the backstairs, held her habit skirt high, and thanked, heaven for her riding-boots, as she made her way down the worn stone steps, at some half-past four of a September morning.

Mount Music was one of the many houses of its period that, with, to quote Mrs. Dixon, “the globe of Ireland to build over,” had elected to bestow its menials in dark and complex basements.  Christian and her candle traversed the long maze of underground passages.  The smell of past cooking was in the air, the black and evil glitter of cockroaches twinkled on the walls on either hand.  This was the horrible part of subbing, thought Christian, and told herself that nothing but the thought of seeing the debut of Dido, the puppy that she had walked, would compensate her for facing the cockroaches.

As she opened the kitchen door she was surprised to find a lighted lamp on the table.  In the same glance she caught a glimpse of a figure, retreating hastily, with slippered shuffle, followed by the trailing tappings of braces off duty.  On one end of the long kitchen table was seated a cat, in motionless meditation, like a profile in an Egyptian hieroglyphic; at the other end was a steaming cup of cocoa and plateful of bread and butter.

“Long life to Evans!” thought Christian, seating herself, like the cat, on the edge of the table, and entering upon the cocoa.

“Miss Christian!” a raven-croak came through a slit of the pantry-door; “keep off the Carmodys’ land!  Mind now what I’m tellin’ you!” The slit ceased.

“Thank you for the cocoa, Evans, but why must I?” called Christian, in a breath.

A lower croak, that seemed to end with the words “black papishes,” came through the closed door.

“Old lunatic!” thought Christian; she drank the cocoa, and putting out the lamp, groped her way to the back-door.  It opened on a shrieking hinge, and she was out into a pale grey dawn, pure and cold, with the shiver and freshness of new life in it.

The Mount Music stable yard was an immense square, with buildings round its four sides, and a high, ivy-covered battlemented wall surrounding and overlooking all.  In the middle of the yard was an island of grass, on which grew three wide-armed and sombre Irish yews, dating, like the walls, from the days of Queen Elizabeth.  Weeds were growing in the gravel of the wide expanse; more than one stable-door dropped on broken hinges under its old cut-stone pediments; the dejection of a faded and remembered prosperity lay heavy on all things in the thin, cold air of that September dawn.