The Story of Lucy Gault

In each upstairs room he entered the Captain went first to a window to look out. He saw his daughter in the pasture fields and in a moment of confusion thought she was his wife.

When she was in the hall and he looked down from the turn in the stairs, he could not prevent himself from imagining so again. In her walk she had a way of hesitating almost imperceptibly and he realized that she limped. She had her mother’s features.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice her mother’s also.

Unsteady on the stairs, Everard Gault reached out a hand to the banister and slowly descended. What he had learnt in the kitchen – and, so soon afterwards, this encounter with his daughter – had weakened him.

‘Don’t you know me?’

‘No.’

‘Look at me, Lucy,’ the Captain said, reaching the bottom of the stairs.

‘What do you want? Why should I know you?’

They gazed at one another. Her cheeks had gone as white as the dress she wore and he knew that she recognized him then. She did not say anything and he stood still, not going closer to her.

*

When first she had heard the Captain walking about the house Bridget had crossed herself, seeking protection from the unknown. She had done so again in the dining-room when she saw a stranger standing by the sideboard. She had done so again in the kitchen, seeking guidance.

‘I doubted it was him at first,’ she said. ‘He’s gone to skin and bone, but it wasn’t that.’

‘Oh, it’s him all right.’

‘The poor man was shocked out of his wits when I told him.’

‘She’ll be, herself

‘What’ll happen, Henry?’

Henry shook his head. He listened while it was explained why it was that the Captain was alone.

*

He wanted to embrace his daughter, yet did not do so, sensing something in her that prevented him.

‘Why now?’ It was a whisper he heard, the words not meant for him. And then, as though regretting them, Lucy called him papa.

3

In the village of Kilauran and the town of Enniseala people were on the look-out for Captain Gault. A glimpse of him was anticipated as keenly as that moment in a play when an offstage character of significance first appears. He had thought – so it was said in speculation – to walk through the darkened rooms of his house and then to go away. Instead, there was his living daughter.

In Lahardane itself the events since the night he had aimed his rifle from an upstairs window had not become a chronicle as they had elsewhere. They had not ever been tidily put together for the sake of their retailing, but in memory remained haphazard, as they had happened. Nor was the upheaval occasioned by the Captain’s return, and the news he brought of his widowing, taken to be the completion of a pattern of events, as they were assumed to be elsewhere. At Lahardane there was the rawness of a shock and, more ordinarily, the smell of the small cigars the Captain smoked and of the whiskey in the bottles he opened. It was remarked upon between Bridget and Henry that his voice had grown deeper with the years. His footsteps on the stairs were not quite a stranger’s, but almost so; his shirts seemed alien, hanging out to dry in the orchard.

The Captain himself was still affected by confusion, occasionally by disbelief. Was this some perpetuating dream – that his daughter should be alive, that there should seem to be in all he had imagined for this place a greater veracity than in what was now around him? His instinct when in his daughter’s company was to reach out for her hand, seeking the child she’d been, as if in touching her he would somehow find what had been lost to him. But the instinct was each time stifled.

‘Lahardane is yours,’ he clumsily insisted instead, any statement seeming better than none at all. ‘I am a visitor.’

Her response came full of protest, but was no more than words. Forgiveness for a child’s silliness was at least what he could offer, not only his own but her mother’s too. His daughter would have been absolved of her small transgression within an hour of its perpetration: reassurance as to that tumbled sincerely from his lips. That a child’s anxieties had been impatiently ignored was the cruelty that remained.

But in spite of all he said in terms of contrition and regret, the Captain was aware that he could not say enough. His daughter’s brooding years had created something of their own that long ago had possessed her, wrapping her like fog that chilled. So at least it seemed.

The two sat at either end of the long table in the dining-room, which was where their conversations mostly occurred, although as often as not nothing at all was said. During meal after meal, the Captain watched his daughter’s slender forefinger drawing on the polished surface of the mahogany patterns he could not identify from the finger’s movement. When politeness demanded it, she sometimes said what she had done that day, or would do if it was still early. There was honey to gather, there were the flowers she grew.

*

In time, Ralph heard.