The Real Charlotte, 41 



CHAPTER VII. 



Miss Julia Duffy, the tenant of Gurthnamuckla, was a 

 woman of few friends. The cart track that led to her 

 house was covered with grass, except for two brown ruts and 

 a narrow footpath in the centre, and the boughs of the syca- 

 mores that grew on either side of it drooped low as if ignor- 

 ing the possibihty of a visitor. The house door remained 

 shut from year's end to year's end, contrary to the usual 

 kindly Irish custom ; in fact, its rotten timbers were at once 

 supported and barricaded by a diagonal beam that held 

 them together, and was itself beginning to rot under its 

 shroud of cobwebs. The footpath skirted the duckpond in 

 front of the door, and led round the corner of the house to 

 what had been in the palmy days of Gurthnamuckla the 

 stableyard, and wound through its weedy heaps of dirt to 

 the kitchen door. 



JuHa Duffy, looking back through the squalors of some 

 sixty years, could remember the days when the hall door 

 used to stand open from morning till night, and her father's 

 guests were many and thirsty, almost as thirsty as he, 

 though perhaps less persistently so. He had been a hard- 

 drinking Protestant farmer, who had married his own dairy- 

 woman, a Roman Catholic, dirty, thriftless, and a cousin of 

 Norry the Boat ; and he had so disintegrated himself with 

 whisky that his body and soul fell asunder at what was 

 considered by his friends to be the premature age of seventy- 

 two. Julia had always been wont to go to Lismoyle church 

 with her father, not so much as a matter of religious as of 

 social conviction. All the best bonnets in the town went 

 to the parish church, and to a woman of Julia's stamp, 

 whose poor relations wear hoods and shawls over their 

 heads and go to chapel, there is no salvation out of a 

 bonnet. After old John Duffy's death, however, bonnets 

 and the aristocratic way of salvation seemed together to 

 rise out of his daughter's scope. Chapel she despised with 

 all the fervour of an Irish Protestant, but if the farm was 

 to be kept and the rent paid, there was no money to spare 

 for bonnets. Therefore Julia, in defiance of the entreaties 

 of her mother's priest and her own parson, would have 



