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Title: Mrs. Martin's company
and other stories
Author: Jane Barlow
Illustrator: Bertha Newcombe
Release date: September 28, 2026 [eBook #79670]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Macmillan and Co., 1896
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79670
Credits: Chuck Greif and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. MARTIN'S COMPANY ***
MRS MARTIN’S COMPANY.
[Illustration: IRIS·SERIES· “RAIN, RAIN, & SVN! A RAINBOW ON THE LEA!
AND TRUTH IS THIS TO ME, & THAT TO THEE; AND TRUTH OR CLOTHED OR NAKED
LET IT BE.”]
_All Rights Reserved._
MRS. MARTIN’S COMPANY
AND OTHER STORIES
BY JANE BARLOW
AUTHOR OF “IRISH
IDYLLS”
[Illustration: MRS. MARTIN’S COMPANY
AND OTHER STORIES
BY JANE BARLOW
AUTHOR OF “IRISH
IDYLLS”}
[Illustration: IRIS SERIES
THAT
GRACIOUS THING MADE UP
OF
TEARS & LIGHT
COLERIDGE]
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY BERTHA NEWCOMBE
New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1896
“_Ein Kleiner Ring_
_Begrenzt unser Leben._”
GOETHE.
NOTE
“Mrs Martin’s Company” and “A Very Light Railway” appeared in _The
National Review_, “A Lost Recruit” and “A Case of Conscience,” in _The
Pall Mall Magazine_. I am indebted to the Editors of these periodicals
for permission to reprint the stories here.
CONTENTS
MRS MARTIN’S COMPANY (_Illustrated_--p. 21) PAGE 1
A LOST RECRUIT (_Illustrated_) “ 27
AFTER SEVEN YEARS (_Illustrated_--_Frontispiece_) “ 59
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (_Illustrated_) “ 103
A PROVIDENT PERSON (_Illustrated_) “ 132
A VERY LIGHT RAILWAY (_Illustrated_) “ 171
ROSANNE “ 195
MRS MARTIN’S COMPANY
Mrs Martin lived down a high-banked lane, which, as it led no whither in
particular, was subject to little traffic, and which she occupied all by
herself, though her cabin stood the middle one in a row of three. You
could see at a glance that the left-hand dwelling was vacant, for the
browned thatch had fallen in helplessly, and the rafters stuck up
through it like the ribs of a stranded wreck. The other was less
obviously deserted; still its plight could be easily perceived in weedy
threshold and cobweb-curtained window. It testified strongly to the
lonesomeness of the neighbourhood that no child had yet enjoyed the
bliss of sending a stone crash through the flawed greenish pane. Both of
them had, in fact, been empty for many months. From the ruined one the
Egan family had gone piecemeal, following each other westward in
detachments, until even the wrinkled parents were settled in California,
where they blinked by day at the strange fierce sunshine, and dreamed
by night back again under the soft-shadowed skies of the ould counthry.
Soon after that, the O’Keefes had made a more abrupt flitting from next
door, departing on the same day, all together, except little Kate and
Joe, whose death of the fever was what had “given their poor mother, the
crathur, a turn like agin the place.” Since then no new tenants had
succeeded them in the row, which was, to be sure, out of the way, and
out of repair, and not in any respect a desirable residence.
The loss of her neighbours was a very serious misfortune to Mrs Martin,
as she had long depended upon them for a variety of things, which she
would have herself summed up in the term “company.” She had been early
widowed and left quite alone in the world, so that through most of the
inexorable years which turned an eager-eyed girl into a
regretful-looking little old woman, she had found herself obliged to
seek much of her interest in life outside her own small domestic
circle--all forlorn centre. This was practicable enough while she lived
under one thatch with two large families, who were friendlily content
that their solitary neighbour should take cognisance of their goings out
and comings in. Upon occasion, indeed, she had unforebodingly grumbled
that the young Egans and O’Keefes “had her moidhered wid the
whillaballoo they would be risin’ continyal.” But when they were gone a
terrible blank and silence filled up their place, as well might be,
since her kind had thus suddenly receded far beyond her daily ken. A
weary Irish mile intervened between her and the nearest cottages of
Clonmacreevagh, and it was only “of a very odd while” her rheumatics had
allowed her to hobble that far, even to Mass. Seldom or never now did
she make her way at all down the windings of the lane, where the grass
from its tall banks encroached monthly more and more upon the ancient
ruts; and other passengers were hardly less infrequent. The lands about
lay waste, or in sheep-walks, so that there was nothing to bring
farm-carts and horses and men lumbering and plodding along it, and to
attract anybody else what was there but a mournful little old woman in a
dark cavernous kitchen, where the only bright objects were the
fire-blink and the few bits of shining crockery on the dresser, which
she had not often the heart these times to polish up? So week out and
week in, never a foot went past her door, as a rule with just one
exception.
Michael O’Toole, a farmer on the townland, did her the kindness of
letting his cart drive out of its way every Saturday and leave at her
house the “loaves and male and grains of tay,” which her lameness would
have otherwise made it difficult for her to come by. This was, of
course, a great convenience, and ensured her one weekly caller. But,
unluckily for her, Tim Doran the carter was a man quite singularly
devoid of conversational gifts, and so grimly unsociable besides, that
her provisions might almost as well have been washed up by the sea, or
conveyed to her by inarticulate ravens. If he possibly could, he would
always dump down the parcels on the road before her door, and jog along
hurriedly unaccosted; and though Mrs Martin could generally prevent that
by keeping a lookout for him, she never succeeded in attaining to the
leisurely gossip after which she hungered. Beyond monosyllables Tim
would not go, and the poor little wiles by which she sought to inveigle
him into discourse failed of detaining him as signally as if they had
been gossamer threads stretched across his road. She had so often tried,
for instance, to lengthen his halt by telling him she thought “the
horse was after pickin’ up a stone,” that at last he ceased even to
glance at the beast’s feet for verification, but merely grunted and
said: “Oh, git along out of that, mare.” Then the mud-splashed blue
cart, and sorrel horse, and whity-brown jacket, would pass out of sight
round the turn of the lane, and the chances were that she would not
again set eyes on a human face, until they reappeared jogging from the
opposite direction that day week.
In the long afternoons, which sometimes began for her before twelve
o’clock if she got expeditiously through her “readyin’ up,” the lag-foot
hours seemed dismally empty, and during them she was especially prone to
crown her sorrow with memories of her happier things: of the time when
she need only slip out at her own door, and in at Mrs Egan’s or Mrs
O’Keefe’s, if she wanted plenty of company, and when “themselves or the
childer would be runnin’ in to her every minute of the day. If there was
nothin’ else,” she mused, “the crathurs of hins and chuckens foostherin’
about the place looked a thrifle gay like.” Mrs Martin herself kept no
fowl, for “how would she get hobblin’ after them, if they tuk to
strayin’ on her?” And she had attempted vainly to adopt the O’Keefe’s
cat, which became unsettled in its mind upon the departure of its late
owners, and at length roamed desperately away into unknown regions.
Thus, nowadays, when the little old woman gazed listlessly over her
half-door, all she could see was the quiet green bank across the road,
with perhaps a dingy white sheep inanely nibbling atop. Then she would
sometimes feel at first as if it were only a dreary Sunday or holiday,
when the silence and solitude being caused by her neighbours’ absence at
Mass would end on their return; but presently she would be stricken with
the recollection that they were irrevocably gone, and that, watch as
long as she might, she would never more hear their voices grow louder
and clearer coming up the lane, preluding their appearance anon, a
cheerful company, round the turn fast by.
One afternoon, however, her hopeless lookout did result in something
pleasant. It was a Christmas Eve, and dull, chilly weather, overclouded
with fleecy grey, thinned here and there into silvery dimness, a sheath
from which a fiery rose might flush at sun-setting. She was just turning
away with a shiver from the draughty door when she caught a glimpse of
Father Gilmore’s long coat flapping between the banks. It was a welcome
sight, which she had missed through six tedious months and more, for his
Reverence, after a severe illness in the spring, had been somehow
provided with funds to go seek lost health abroad, and had fared
southward upon that quest. His travels, indeed, seemed to have been
inconceivably extended. When to Mrs Martin’s question: “And was your
Riverence, now, anythin’ as far as Paris?” he replied, with a touch of
triumph, “A long step _further_,” her imagination recoiled from so wild
a track, and she could only stare at him as if astonished to see no
visible traces of such wanderings, except maybe a slight tawny tinge
like the rust-wraith of many hot sunbeams, superimposed on the normal
greenish hue of his well-worn cloth.
Father Gilmore spared her half-an-hour of delightful discourse, to which
his own foreign adventures and the home news from Clonmacreevagh gave an
animated flow. But when Mrs Martin’s turn came to give an account of
herself the conversation fell into a minor key. And the theme that ran
through all her despondence was the plaint that she did be terrible
short of company. “She had middlin’ good health, barrin’ the rheumatiz,
thanks be to God, but sure she did be cruel lonesome. It’s lost she was
there, wid niver sight nor sound of man or mortal from mornin’ till
night; she might as well be an ould wether left fallen in a gripe for
all she seen or heard of anythin’. ’Deed now ’twas just the one way wid
her as wid the waft of smoke there up her ould chimney that went
fluttherin’ out on the width of the air, and sorra another breath
anywheres nigh it, since ever the crathurs quit. Many a mornin’ she’d
scarce the heart to be puttin’ a light to her fire at all, she was that
fretted, ay bedad, she was so.”
To these laments Father Gilmore listened with a patience made more
difficult by his consciousness that he could suggest no remedy of the
practically appropriate sort which is to general consolatory
propositions as a close and cordial hearth-glow to the remote and
mocking sunshine of a wintry sky. If you want to warm your cold hands
those league-long flames some millions of miles away are so much less
immediately to the purpose than your neighbouring screed of ruddy coals.
This drifted mistily through his mind, as for lack of a more
satisfactory remark he said: “You wouldn’t think of moving into the
town?” But he was well aware that he had spoken foolishly, even before
Mrs Martin answered: “Ah, your Riverence, how would I, so to spake, be
runnin’ me head out from under me penny of rint?” For her husband, a
gamekeeper up at the Big House of the parish, had lost his life by
accident at a shooting party, and the family had pensioned off his widow
with five weekly shillings and her cabin rent free.
“True for you, Mrs Martin,” said Father Gilmore, standing up. “But sure,
lonely or no, we’re all under the protection of God Almighty, and I’ve
brought you a little ornament for your room.” Mrs Martin’s eyes sparkled
at the last clause of his sentence, while he took out of his pocket a
small parcel, and began to strip off its wrappages, which were many
folds of bluish tissue-paper, with layers of grey-green dried grass
between. “The man I got it from at Marseilles,” he said, “told me a lot
of them came from Smyrna, and I never stirred these papers that were on
it, thinkin’ I mightn’t be able to do it up so well again. I only hope
it’s not broke on us.” As the thin sheets and light grass-wisps fell
off, the blast whistling under the door-sill whisked them about the
uneven floor, and Mrs Martin drew in her breath expectantly. At last the
treasure was discovered in perfect preservation, an alabaster statuette
of the Virgin, some two fingers high.
I do not know that it was a very fine work of art, but at worst you
cannot easily make anything ugly out of alabaster. The Child lay
placidly asleep, and the Mother looked young and happy and benignant.
For a few moments Mrs Martin’s admiration was quite incoherent, and when
she found words Father Gilmore sought to stem the tide of ecstatic
gratitude by saying, “And where will you put it? Why, here’s a niche
looks as if it might have been made for it.” The place he pointed to was
a little recess beneath a tiny window-slit, formed partly by design, but
enlarged by the chance falling out of a fragment from the stone-and-mud
wall. A long ray, slanted from the clearing west, reached through the
half-door, quivered across the dark room, and just touched the white
figure as he set it down. Against the background of grimy wall it shone
as if wrought of rosed snow.
“Bedad, then, it’s there I’ll keep her, and nowhere else,” said the
little old woman, and he left her in rapt contemplation. As he trudged
home he felt sure that his few francs had been well bestowed, and his
conviction strengthened with each tedious twist of the deserted ways
which lay between Mrs Martin and her company. By the time he had gained
his own house his uppermost thought was a regret that such a trifle had
been all he could do for the poor ould dacint body--the Lord might pity
her.
It was, however, by no means a trifle to the poor old body herself. For
the first few days after her acquisition of the image it took up a
wonderful deal of her time and thoughts. Even when she was not standing
at gaze in front of it she but seldom lost it from her sight. Her eyes
were continually turning towards the niche, whence it seemed strangely
to dominate the room. Its clear whiteness made a mark for the feeblest
gleam of ebbing daylight or fading embers; it was the last object to be
muffled under bat’s-wing gloom, and the first to creep back when morning
glimmered in again. She dusted it superfluously many times a day, with a
proud pleasure always somewhat dashed by the remembrance that she could
exhibit it to no neighbours, who would say, with variations, “Ah! glory
be among us, Mrs Martin, ma’am, but that’s rael iligant entirely. Och
woman, dear, did you ever see the like of that now at all, at all?”
Still, the most marvellous piece of sculpture ever chiselled would
probably betray deficiencies if adopted as one’s sole companion in life;
and Mrs Martin’s little statuette had obvious shortcomings when so
regarded. As the winter wore on the weight of her solitude pressed more
and more heavily. The bad weather increased her isolation. Some days
there were of bitter frost and snow, and some of streaming rain, and
many of wild wind. Once or twice Tim Doran brought her a double supply
of provisions, and did not return for a fortnight, and then she felt
indeed cut adrift. By-and-bye her vague disconsolateness began to take
shape in more definite terrors. She was beset with surmises of
ill-disposed vagrants tramping that way to practise unforbidden on her
wretched life, and she crept trembling to and from the pool where she
filled her water-can. Or ghostly fears overcame her, and she thought at
night that she heard the little dead children keening in the deserted
room next door, and that mysterious shadows went past the windows, and
unseen hands rattled the latch. But through all her shifting mist of
trouble the alabaster Virgin shone on her steadily with just a ray of
consolation. Every night she said her Rosary before the niche, and
almost always her devotions ended in a prayer of her own especial
wishing and wording.
“Ah, Lady dear,” she would say, “wouldn’t you think now to be sendin’ me
a bit of company? me that’s left as disolit as the ould top of Slieve
Moyneran this great while back. Ah, wouldn’t you then, me Lady? Sure if
that’s a thrue likeness of you at all, there’s the look on you that it’s
plased you’d be to do a poor body e’er a good turn, ay, is there, bedad.
And I couldn’t tell you the comfort ’twould be to me, not if I was all
night tellin’. Just a neighbour droppin’ in now and agin’, acushla, I
wouldn’t make bold to ax you for them to be livin’ convenient alongside
of me the way they was. Sure I know the roof’s quare and bad, and ’twas
small blame to them they quit; but to see an odd sight of one, Lady
jewel, if it wouldn’t go agin you to conthrive that much. Ah, darlint,
supposin’ it was only a little ould poor ould wisp of a lone woman the
same as meself, it’s proud I’d be to behould her; or if it was Crazy
Christy, that does be talkin’ foolish, the crathur, troth, all’s one,
the sound of the voice spakin’ ’ud be plisant to hear, no matter what
ould blathers he tuk the notion to be gabbin’. For it’s unnathural still
and quiet here these times, Lady dear, wid sorra a livin’ sowl comin’
next or nigh me ever. But sure ’tis the lonesome house you kep’
yourself, Lady dear, one while, and belike you’ll remimber it yet, for
all you’ve got back your company agin, ay have you, glory be to God. And
wid the help of the Lord it’s slippin’ over I’ll be meself one of these
days to them that’s gone from me, and no fear but I’ll have the grand
company then. Only it’s the time between whiles does be woeful long and
dhrary-like. So if you wouldn’t think too bad, Lady honey, to send me
the sight of a crathur----.” Thus she rambled on piteously, but in
answer seemed to come nothing more companionable than the wide-winged
gusts of the night wind roving the great grass lands at the back of her
cabin where the tiny window-slit peered out. And day followed day with
not a step or voice.
It was on a mild-aired morning midway in February that Mrs Martin, when
dusting her precious image, noticed a vivid green speck dotted on the
grey wall near its foot. Looking closer, she saw two atoms of leaves
pricked up through the cracked mud, belonging no doubt to some seedling
weed, she thought, and she would have brushed them away had not some
other trifle just then diverted her attention. A few days afterwards,
when she happened again to take heed of them, they were crowning a
slender shoot, fledged with other delicate leaflets, film-frail, and
semi-transparent. She thought the little spray looked pretty and “off
the common,” and next morning she was pleased to see that it had crept a
bit further on the dark wall. Thenceforward she watched its growth with
a deep interest. It throve apace. Every day showed a fresh unfolding of
leaf-buds and lengthening of stalks, which seemed to climb with a
purpose, as if moved by a living will. Their goal was indeed the narrow
chink which let a wedge of light slant in just above the Virgin’s
glistering head, and in making for it they caught boldly at anything
that offered tendril-hold. One morning the little old woman untwisted a
coil of fairy cordage that was enringing the Virgin’s feet, and often
after this she had to disengage the figure from the first beginnings of
wreathings and windings amongst which it would speedily have
disappeared. As it was, they soon filled up the niche with a tangled
greenery, and overflowed in long trails and festoons drooping to the
floor. Never was there a carven shrine wrought with such intricate
traceries. When the early-rising sun struck in through them, the floor
was flecked with the wavering shadows of the small fine leaves, whilst
they themselves took a translucent vividness of hue that might have been
drawn from wells of liquid chrysoprase and beryl; and amid the bower of
golden-green steadily glimmered the white-stoled Virgin.
All this was the work of but a few weeks, scarcely stepping over the
threshold of Spring. The little old woman watched its progress with
pleasure and astonishment. She had never, she said, seen the like of any
such a thing before. As the wonder grew, she felt more and more keenly
the lack of someone to whom she might impart it. She did try to tell Tim
Doran, but the opposite turf-bank would not have received the
intelligence much more blankly, and could not have grunted with such
discouraging indifference in reply. The man, she thought bitterly, was
“as stupid as an ould blind cow. If you tould him you had the Queen of
Agypt and the Lord Lieutenant sittin’ in there colloguin’ be the fire,
he wouldn’t throuble himself to take a look in at the door.” However, no
less stolid listeners were forthcoming. Father Gilmore was paying the
penalty for his ill-timed return to northern climes in a series of bad
colds, and the other neighbours never set foot up the lane.
At last she bethought her of communicating with Father Gilmore by a
letter, which Tim Doran might carry, and she laboriously composed one in
time for his next weekly call. Whether he would deliver it or not was a
point which his manner left doubtful; but he actually did so. Mrs
Martin’s letter was “scrawmed” on a bit of coarse brown paper, which,
when I saw it some time ago, still smelt so pungently of tea, that I
think it must have wrapped one of her parcels. The writing on it ran as
follows:--
“YOUR REVERENCE,--Hopin’ this finds you in good health, thanks be
to God. Plase your Reverence, the Quarest that ever you witnessed
has got clamberin’ inside on the wall. I dunno what at all to say
to it; never the like of it I seen. But the creelin’ of it and the
crawlin’ of it would terrify you. Makin’ offers now and agin it
does be to smoother the Houly Virgin, but sure I’d be long sorry to
let it do that bad thrick, after all the goodness of your
Reverence. And I was thinkin’ this long while your Reverence might
be maybe steppin’ our way yourself some day, for creepin’ over all
before it it is every minute of time. Such a terrible quare thing I
never heard tell of, and the sorra another sowl except meself have
I about the place.
“Your obedient,
“MARY MARTIN.”
This letter caused Father Gilmore considerable uneasiness, for it filled
him with misgivings about the mental condition of the writer. Her
account of “the Quarest that ever you witnessed,” sounded, he feared,
painfully like the hallucinations of a mind distempered by over long
solitude. “Indeed it’s no way for the poor ould body to be left, if one
could help it,” he mused. Even in his meditations I am sure that Father
Gilmore must have used his soft southern brogue--“I’ve thought many a
time it was enough to drive her demented--and now there’s some quare
sort of delusion she’s taken into her head, that’s plain, goodness pity
her. I’d have done right to go see after her before this, as I was
intendin’, only somethin’ always happened to hinder me.”
He was determined now against any further delay, and he set out that
very afternoon to visit his afflicted parishioner. The expedition was
rather formidable to him, as he had a natural shrinking from stormy
scenes, and he fully expected that he would find poor little Mrs Martin
if not downright “raving in no small madness,” at least labouring under
some frightful delusion, in the shape, apparently, of a hideous monster
infesting her abode. This prospect made him so nervously apprehensive
that he was glad to fall in with a small youth, one Paddy Greer, who
seemed inclined to accompany him upon his walk. All the way along,
between the greening hedges of the lane, he remonstrated with himself
for letting the gossoon share unwittingly in such an errand, yet he
could not make up his mind to dismiss Paddy, or to feel otherwise than
relieved by the continued bare-foot patter at his side.
But his relief was far greater when on reaching the cabin he saw its
mistress in her little green plaid shawl and black skirt and white cap,
standing at her door among the long westering sunbeams, without any
signs of excitement or aberration in her demeanour; and his mind grew
quite easy when he ascertained that the creeping thing indoors was no
horrible phantasmal reptile, but only a twining tapestry of bright
leaves and sprays, which trailed a fold of Spring’s garment into the
dark-cornered room. Still, satisfactorily as the matter had been cleared
up from his former point of view, he could suggest nothing to lessen Mrs
Martin’s wonder at the mysterious appearance of the creeper on her wall.
His acquaintance with such things was slight, and he merely had an
impression that the fashion of the delicately luxuriant foliage seemed
unfamiliar to him. So he promised to return on the morrow with the
national school-teacher, who was reputed a knowledgeable man about
plants. Before that came to pass, however, Mrs Martin had another
visitor. For little Paddy ran home to his mother with the news that “the
Widdy Martin was after showin’ his Reverence a green affair she had
stuck up on her wall, and that he said it was rale super-exthrornary
altogether, and he’d get Mr Colclough to it.” At that hearing the
curiosity of Paddy’s mother incited her to call without losing a moment
at Mrs Martin’s house, where she inspected the marvellous growth as well
as the falling twilight permitted, and admired the gracious-looking
little image quite to its owner’s content. Thus Mrs Martin enjoyed a
sociable cup of tea, and an enthralling
[Illustration]
gossip, which sent her to bed that evening in much better spirits than
usual.
Next morning arrived Father Gilmore with the schoolmaster, who was
unable to identify the strange creeper, but called its appearance a
phenomenon, which seemed somehow to take the edge off the admission of
ignorance. His failure only served to heighten a sense of awe and
wonderment among several of the neighbours, who also looked in on her
during the day. For the village rapidly filled with reports of “the big
wrathe of green laves that was windin’ itself round the Widdy Martin’s
grand image of the Blessed Virgin, and it inside on her wall, mind you,
where ’twould be a surprisin’ thing to see e’er a plant settlin’ to grow
at all.” And about the same time they discovered that the Widdy’s house
was “no such great way to spake of onst you turned down the lane; you
could tramp it aisy in a little betther than ten minutes or so from the
corner, if you had a mind.” In the days which followed numbers of them
were so minded, vastly to the comfort of the little old woman, who
welcomed them with unbounded joy, and as many cups of tea as she could
by any means compass. She harboured no resentment on the score of their
long and dreary defection. That was all ended at last. For as the spring
weather mellowed into April, and the imprisoned creeper daily flung out
profuser sprays and tendril-spirals, the fame of it spread far and wide
over the townlands, until its habitation became quite a place of resort.
So many people now turned down the lane that they soon wore a track,
which you could see distinctly if you looked along a stretch of its
grass-grown surface. The Doctor came, and the District-Inspector, and
the Protestant clergyman. Even “higher-up Quality” arrived, and
satin-coated steeds have been seen tossing their silver-crested blinkers
at the little old woman’s door under the supervision of grooms
resplendently polished. Seldom or never in these times had she to weary
through a long, lonely afternoon; more often she held a crowded
reception, when the clack of tongues and clatter of thick-rimmed delft
cups sounded cheerily in her kitchen. They scared away all her fears of
tramps and ghosts; and she no longer ended her Rosary with mournful
petitions for company. Her company had duly assembled.
Towards the beginning of June a fresh development of the marvel
occurred, for then the creeper blossomed. Thickly clustered bunches of
pale green buds broke swiftly into fantastic curven-throated bugles of a
clear-glowing apricot colour, which made gleams as of beaded light in
the dark places where they unsheathed themselves. Mrs Martin said it
looked “like as if somebody was after tyin’ knots in a ray of the
sunshine.” Just at this crisis a Professor from one of the Queen’s
Colleges, chancing to be in the neighbourhood, was brought to pronounce
upon the case. As behoved a learned man, he gave it an ugly name, which
we may ignorantly forget, and he said that it belonged to a species of
plants, rare even in its far off oriental habitat, but totally
unexampled beneath these northern skies.
However, soon after he had gone, leaving no luminous wake behind him,
the little old woman made a brilliant discovery. It was on that same
evening, while she was drinking tea with a few of her good gossips, for
whom she entertained as strong a regard as did Madam Noah in the ancient
Morality. Naturally enough, the “quareness” and general inscrutability
of the strange creeper had been under discussion, when Mrs Martin
suddenly said: “Ah! women, dear, what talk have we then at all, at all?
Sure now it’s come clear in me own mind this instaint minute that
whatever it may be, ’twas the Virgin herself, Heaven bless her, set it
growin’ there wid itself, just of a purpose to be fetchin’ me in me
company. For, signs on it, ne’er a day there is since folk heard tell of
it, that there doesn’t be some comin’ and goin’ about the place, and
makin’ it plisant and gay-like. And sorra a thing else is it brought
them, except to be seein’ the quare new plant; aye, bedad, ’twas them
twistin’ boughs on it streeled the whole lot along in here to me, same
as if they were a manner of landin’-net. And sure wasn’t I moidherin’
her every night of me life to be sendin’ me some company? ’Deed was I
so, and be the same token ne’er a word of thanks have I thought of
sayin’ to her, after her takin’ the throuble to conthrive it that-away,
more shame for me, but I was that tuk up wid it all.”
“Thrue for you, Mrs Martin, ma’am,” said Mrs Brennan; “aiten bread’s
soon forgotten, as the sayin’ is. Howane’er there’s nothin’ liker than
that that was the way of it as you say. What else ’ud be apt to make it
go clamber all round the image of her, as if ’twas her belongin’? And
didn’t the gintleman tell you ’twas nothin’ that grows be rights next
or nigh this counthry? Ah, for sure ’tis from far enough it’s come, if
’twas the likes of Them sent it. And a kind thought it was too, glory be
to God.”
Mrs Martin’s theory gained almost unanimous approval, and was generally
accepted by her neighbours, Father Gilmore sanctioning it with a half
wistful assent. It had the effect of enhancing the interest taken in the
flourishing creeper and the little withered dame, the pledge and
recipient of so signal a favour from those who are still the recognised
powers that be in such places as Clonmacreevagh. The idea gave a tinge
of religious sentiment to the soon established custom of visiting Mrs
Martin, and on the weekly market days you often might have supposed some
kind of miniature _pattern_ in progress at her cabin, so great was the
resort thither of shawled and cloaked and big-basketed country-wives.
These guests seldom came empty handed--a couple of fresh eggs, or a roll
of butter, or a cake of griddle-bread would be reserved for her at the
bottom of the roomy creel. Other visitors were fain to carry off slips
of the many trailing sprays, and would leave payment for them in silver
coin, which sometimes had the comfortable portliness of half-crowns.
But I do not believe that the little old woman valued these very highly,
and I think most of them went in providing the strong black tea with
which she loved to refresh her friends. And there was never an evening
that she did not add to her Rosary: “And the Lord bless the kind heart
of you then, Lady jewel, for sendin’ me the bit of company.”
[Illustration]
A LOST RECRUIT
When Mick Doherty heard that there was to be route-marching next day in
the neighbourhood of Kilmacrone, he determined upon going off for a long
“stravade” coastwards over the bog, where there were no roads worth
mentioning, and no risks of an encounter with the military. In this he
acted differently from all his neighbours, most of whom, upon learning
the news, began to speculate and plan how they might see and hear as
much as possible of their unwonted visitors. Opinions were chiefly
divided as to whether the Murghadeen cross-roads would be the best
station to take up, or the fork of the lane at Berrisbawn House. People
who, for one reason or another, could not go so far afield, consoled
themselves by reflecting that the band, at any rate, would be likely to
come through the village, and would no doubt strike up a tune while
passing, as it had done a couple of years ago, the last time the
red-coats had appeared in Kilmacrone. And, och, but that was the grand
playin’ intirely! It done your heart good just to be hearin’ the sound
of it, bedad it did so. Old Mrs Geoghegan said it was liker the sort of
thunderstorms they might be apt to have in Heaven above, than aught else
she could think of, might goodness forgive her for sayin’ such a thing;
and Molly Joyce said she’d as lief as not have sat down and cried when
was passed beyond her listenin’, it went that delightful,
thumpety-thump, wid the tune flyin’ up over it.
The military authorities at Fortbrack were not ignorant of this popular
sentiment, and had considered it in the order of that day. For
experience had shown that a progress of troops through the surrounding
country districts generally conduced to the appearance before the
recruiting officer of sundry long-limbed, loose-jointed Pats, Micks, and
Joes; and a recent scarcity of this raw material made it seem expedient
to bring such an influence to bear upon the new ground of remote
Kilmacrone. Certain brigades and squadrons were accordingly directed to
move thitherward, under the general idea that an invading force from the
south-east had occupied Ballybeg Allan, while in pursuance of another
general idea, really more to the purpose, though not officially
announced, the accompanying band received instructions to be liberal and
lively in its performances by the way.
All along their route through the wide brown land the soldiers might be
sure of drawing as much sympathetic attention as that lonesome west
country could concentrate on any given line. Probably there would be no
one disposed like Mick Doherty to get out of the way, unless some very
small child roared and ran, if of a size to have acquired the latter
accomplishment, at the sound of the booming drums. To the great majority
of these on-lookers the spectacle would be a rare and gorgeous pageant,
a memory resplendent across twilight-hued time-tracts as a vision of
scarlet and golden gleams, and proudly-pacing horses, and music that
made you feel you had never known how much life there was in you all the
while. Some toll, it is true, had to be paid for this enjoyment. When it
had passed by things suddenly grew very flat and colourless, and there
was a tendency to feel more or less vaguely aggrieved because you could
not go asoldiering yourself. In cases, however, where circumstances
rendered that obviously impossible, as when people were too old or
infirm, or were women or girls, this thrill of discontent, seldom very
acute, soon subsided, by virtue of the self-preserving instinct which
forbids us to persist in knocking our heads hard against our stone
walls. But it was different where the beholder was so situated that he
could imagine himself riding or striding after the rapturous march-music
to fields of peril and valour and glory, without diminishing the
vividness of the picture by simultaneously supposing himself some quite
other person. The gleam in young Felix M’Guinness’s eyes, as he watched
the red files dwindle and twinkle out of sight, was to the brightening
up beneath his grandfather’s shaggy brows as the forked flash is to the
shimmering sheet lightnings, that are but a harmless reflection from
far-off storms. And there indeed pleasure paid a ruinous duty. If those
who were liable to it did not imitate Mick Doherty’s prudence and hold
aloof, the reason may have been that they had not fortitude enough to
turn away from excitement offered on any terms, or that their position
was less desperately tantalising than his; and the latter explanation is
the more probable one, since few lads in and about Kilmacrone can have
had their martial aspirations baulked by an impediment so flimsy and yet
so effectual.
There was nothing in the world to hinder Mick from enlisting except just
the unreasonableness of his mother, and that was an unreasonableness so
unreasonable as to verge upon what her neighbours would have called
“quare ould conthrariness.” For though a widow woman, and therefore
entitled to occupy a pathetic position, its privileges were defined by
the opinion that “she was not so badly off intirely as she might ha’
been.” Mick’s departure need not have left her desolate, since she had
another son and daughter at home, besides Essie married in the village,
and Brian settled down at Murghadeen, where he was doing well, and times
and again asking her to come and live with him. Then Mick would have
been able to help her out of his pay much more efficaciously than he
could do by his earnings at Kilmacrone, where work was slack and its
wage low, so that the result of a lad’s daily labour sometimes seemed
mainly the putting of a fine edge on a superfluous appetite. All these
points were most clearly seen by Mick in the light of a fiercely-burning
desire; but that availed him nothing unless he could set them as plainly
before some one else who was not thus illuminated. And not far from two
years back he had resolved that he would attempt to do so no more.
The soldiers had been about in the district on the day before, scattered
like poppy beds over the bog, and signalling and firing till the misty
October air tingled with excitement. When you have lived your life among
wide-bounded solitudes, where the silence is oftenest broken by the
plover’s pipe, or the croak of some heavily flapping bird, you will know
the meaning of a bugle call. Mick and his contemporaries had acted as
camp-followers from early till late with ever intensifying ardour; one
outcome whereof was that he heard his especial crony, Paddy Joyce,
definitely decide to go and enlist at Fortbrack next Monday, which gave
a turn more to the pinching screw of his own banned wish. It was with a
concerted scheme for ascertaining whether there were any chance of
bringing his mother round to a rational view of the matter that he and
his friend dropped into her cabin next morning, on the way to carry up a
load of turf. Mrs Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked aprons
in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick thought he had introduced the
subject rather happily when he told her “she had a right to be takin’
her hands out of the suds, and dippin’ the finest curtsey she could
conthrive, and she wid the Commander-in-Gineral of the Army Forces
steppin’ in to pay her a visit.” Of course this statement required, as
it was intended to require, elucidation, so Mick proceeded to announce:
“It’s himself’s off to Fortbrack a Monday, ’listin’ he’ll be in the
Edenderry Light Infantry; so the next time we set eyes on him it’s
blazin’ along the street we’ll see him, like the boys we had here
yisterday.”
“Ah! sure now, that’ll be grand,” said Mrs Doherty, unwarily
complaisant; “we’ll all be proud to behold him that way. ’Tis a fine
thing for any young man who’s got a fancy to take up wid it.”
“Och, then, bedad it is so!” said Mick with emphasis, promptly making
for the opening given to him.
“Bedad it is,” said Paddy.
“There’s nothin’ like it,” said Mick.
“Ah, nothin’ at all,” said Paddy.
Mrs Doherty made no remark as she twisted a dripping apron into a
sausage-shaped roll to wring the water out.
“How much was it you were sayin’ you’d have in the week, Paddy, just to
put in your pocket for your divarsion like?” inquired Mick, with a
convenient lapse of memory.
“Och, seven or eight shillin’s anyway,” said Paddy, in the tone of one
to whom shillings had already become trivial coins, “and that, mind you,
after you’ve ped for the best of aitin’ and dhrinkin’, and your kit
free, and no call to be spendin’ another penny unless you plase. Sure,
Long Murphy was tellin’ me he was up in the town a while ago, on a day
when they were just after gettin’ their pay, and he said the Post Office
was that thick wid the soldier-lads sendin’ home the money to their
friends, he couldn’t get speech of a clerk to buy his stamp be no manner
of manes, not if he’d wrecked the place. ’Twas the Sidmouth Fusiliers
was in it that time; they’re off to Limerick now.”
“But that’s a grand regulation they have,” said Mick, “wid the short
service nowadays. Where’s the hardship in it when a man can quit at the
ind of three year, if he’s so plased? Three year’s no time to speak of.”
“Sure, not at all; you’d scarce notice it passin’ by. Like Barney
Bralligan’s song that finished before it begun--isn’t that the way of
it, ma’am?”
“It’s a goodish len’th of a while,” said Mrs Doherty.
“But thin there’s the lave: don’t be forgettin’ the lave, Paddy man.
Supposin’ we----”
“Tub-be sure, there’s the lave. Why, it’s skytin’ home on lave they do
be most continial. And the Edenderrys is movin’ no further than just to
Athlone; that’s as handy a place as you could get.”
“You’d not thravel from this to Athlone in the inside of a week, if it
was iver so handy,” said Mrs Doherty.
“Is it a week? Och! blathershins, Mrs Doherty ma’am, you’re mistook
intirely. Sure, onst you’ve stepped into the town yonder, the train’ll
take you there in a flash. And the trains do be oncommon convenient.”
“Free passes!” prompted Mick.
“Ay, bedad, and free passes they’ll give to any souldier takin’ his
furlough; so sorra the expense ’twould be supposin’ Mick here had a
notion to slip home of an odd day and see you.”
“_Mick!_” said Mrs Doherty.
“Och well, I was just supposin’. But I’m tould”--the many remarkable
facts which Paddy had been tould lost nothing in repetition--“that
they’ll sometimes have out a special train for a man in the army, if he
wants to go anywhere partic’lar in a hurry--there’s iligance for you.
And as for promotion, it’s that plinty you’ll scarce git time to
remimber your rank from one day to the next, whether it’s a full private
you are, or a lance-corporal, or maybe somethin’ greater. Troth, there’s
nothin’ a man mayn’t rise to. And then, Mrs Doherty, it’s the proud
woman you’d be--_anybody’d_ be--that they hadn’t stood in the way of it.
And pensions--he might be pensioned off wid as much as a couple of
shillin’s a day.”
“Not this long while yet, plase the pigs,” broke out Mick, squaring his
shoulders, as if Time were a visible antagonist, and momentarily
forgetting the matter immediately in hand. “But there’s chances in
it--splendid--och, it’s somethin’ you may call livin’.”
“And,” said his friend, “the rations I’m tould is surprisin’ these
times. The top of everythin’ that’s to be got, uncooked, widout bone.”
Paddy and Mick discoursed for a good while in this strain about the
dignities and amenities of a military life, and Mrs Doherty had not
much to say on the subject. During the conversation, however, she
continued to rinse one of her aprons, and wring it dry very carefully,
and drop it back into the water, like a machine slightly out of gear,
which goes on repeating some process ineffectually. The two friends read
in her silence an omen of acquiescent conviction, and congratulated one
another upon it with furtive nods and winks. Mick went off to the bog in
high feather, believing that the interview had been a great success, and
that his mother was, as Paddy put it, “comin’ round to the notion
gradual, like an ould goat grazin’ round its tetherin’ stump.” His
hopes, indeed, were so completely in the ascendant that he summed up his
most serious uneasiness when he said to himself: “She’ll do right
enough, no fear, or I’d niver think of it, if Thady was just somethin’
steadier. But sure he might happen to git a thrifle more wit yet; he’s
no great age to spake of.”
But when he came home about sunsetting, his mother was feeding her few
hens outside their cabin, the end one of a mossy-roofed row, with its
door turned at right angles to the others, looking out across the
purple-brown of the bogland to the far-off hills, faint, like a blue
mist with a waved pattern in it, against the horizon. Mick, brought up
short by the group, woke out of his walking dream, in which he had been
performing acts of valour to the tune of the “Soldier’s Chorus” in
Gounod’s _Faust_, the last thing the band had played yesterday; and he
noticed a diminution in the select circle of fowls, who crooned and
crawked and pecked round the broken dish of scraps.
“I see the specklety pullet’s after strayin’ on you agin,” he said:
“herself’s the conthrary little bein’; I must take a look about for her
prisintly.”
“Ah, sure she’s sold,” said his mother; “it’s too many I had altogether.
I was torminted thryin’ to get feedin’ for them. So I sold her this
mornin’ to Mrs Dunne at Loughmore, that gave me a fine price for her.
’Deed she’d have took her off of me this while back, on’y I’d just a
sort of notion agin partin’ from the crathur. But be comin’ in to your
supper, child alive; it’s ready waitin’ this good while. Molly’s below
at her sister’s, and I dunno where Thady’s off to, so there’s on’y you
and me in it to-night.”
In the room the more familiar odour of turf-smoke was overborne by a
crisp smell of baking, and Mrs Doherty picked up a steaming plate which
had been keeping warm on the hearth. “Isn’t that somethin’ like now?”
she said, setting it on the table triumphantly. “Rale grand they turned
out this time, niver a scorch on the whole of them. I was afeard me hand
might maybe ha’ got out o’ mixin’ them, ’tis so long since I had e’er a
one for you, but sure I bought a half-stone of seconds wid the price of
the little hin, and that’ll make a good few, so it will, jewel avic, and
then we must see after some more. Take one of the thick bits, honey.”
Probably most of us have had experience of the unceremonious methods
which Fate often chooses when communicating to us important
arrangements. We have seen by what a little-seeming triviality of an
incident she may intimate that our cherished hope has been struck dead,
or that the execution of some other decree has turned the current of our
life away. It is sometimes as if she contemptuously sent us a grotesque
and dwarfish messenger, who makes grimaces at us while telling us the
bad news, which is ungenerous and scarcely dignified. So we need not
wonder if Mick Doherty had to read the death-warrant of his darling
ambition in a pile of three-cornered griddle-cakes. At any rate, he did
read it there swiftly as clearly. Most likely he knew it all before the
plate was set on the table, and his heart had already gone down with a
run when he replied to his mother’s commendations that they looked
first-rate. As he endorsed this praise with what appetite he could,
being, indeed, mechanically hungry, the uppermost thought in his mind
was how he should at once let his mother understand that she had got the
price she hoped for her pet hen; and after considering for a while, he
said: “Did you ever notice the quare sort of lane-over the turf-stack
out there’s takin’ on it? I question hadn’t we done righter to have took
a leveler bit of ground for under it. But I was thinkin’ this
mornin’”--of what a different subject he had been thinking--“that next
year I’d thry buildin’ it agin the back o’ th’ ould shed, where there
does be ne’er a slant at all.”
“Ay, sure that ’ud be grand,” said Mrs Doherty, much more elated than if
she had heard of a large fortune; “you couldn’t find an iliganter place
for it in the width of this world.” She felt quite satisfied that her
craftily-timed treat had dispelled the dreaded danger, which actually
was the case in a way. But if Mick would stay at home with her, she was
perfectly content to suppose that she came after a griddle-cake in his
estimation. Her relief made her unusually talkative; but Mick was
reflecting between his answers how he must now tell Paddy Joyce that
they were never to be comrades after all.
He went out on this mission immediately after supper. The sun had gone
down and the cold clearness left showed things plainly, yet was not
light. In front of the cabin-rows the small children of the place were
screeching over their final romp and quarrel, as they did every evening;
fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the
squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on
the brown-hollowed grass-bank between Colgan’s and O’Reilly’s, old
Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly scraping and twangling, according
to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even
the wisps of straw and scraps of paper blowing down the middle of the
wide roadway seemed to have whirled over and over and caught in the
rough patches of stone, just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to
the Joyces’, Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A
broad and burly man, who says “shoo-shoo” to a high-piping cluster of
tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from
straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather
an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have
seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick
experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come
out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter’s cheerful “Fine
evenin’.” What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be
fine or foul?
Altogether, it had been a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in taking
precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles which
had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling
than ever. For the intervening months had not brought the desirable
“thrifle more wit” to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the contrary,
was developing into one of those people whose good-for-nothingness is
taken as a matter of course even by themselves; and a bolt was thus, so
to speak, drawn across Mick’s locked door.
He set off betimes on his long ramble. It was a cloudless July
morning--the noon of summer by air and light as well as by the calendar.
Even the barest tracts of the bogland, which vary their aspect as
little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with
golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton,
and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot. Mick rather hurried over
this stage of his “stravade,” partly because he foresaw a blazing hot
day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are
sheltered hollows scooped in the “knockawns,” and cool patches under
their bushes and boulders. He entered the region of these things before
his shadow had shrunk to its briefest; for not so very far beyond
Kilmacrone the smooth floor of the big bog crumples itself into crests
and ridges, as if it had caught the trick from its bounding ocean; and
the nearer it comes to the shore the higher it heaves itself, until at
last it is cut short by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles
and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of
exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is
fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing
oceanwards, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain-fiords, straits, and
bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver
in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull’s dipping wing, or add to
the terror of the tempest, as they start out black and unmoved behind
rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land
and water, but wrought in less high relief. A tract of lonely strands,
where shells and daisies whiten the grass, and pink-belled creepers
trail entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are apt
thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam, when
you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on
sturdy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently
supposed the unstable furrows of the sea. And the intricate ground-plan
of the district must be long studied before you can always feel sure
whether the low-shelving swarded edges by which you are walking frame
salt or fresh water.
Mick was bound eventually for one of those ravines which cleave the
cliff’s precipitous wall and give access to the shore, generally by a
deep-sunken sandy boreen. Here, under a tall bank, there are a couple of
cabins, besides another which, having lost its roof, may be reckoned as
a half; so that Tullykillagin is not a large place, even as places go in
its neighbourhood. He knew, however, that he could count upon getting
something to eat at either of the two cabins first mentioned, and,
indeed, at the bare-raftered one also if, as often chanced, it was
occupied by Tim Fottrel, the gatheremup; and this prospect served for an
incentive, feeble enough, though it strengthened a little as the hours
wore on. So languid, in fact, was his resolution that at one moment he
thought he would just sthreel home again without going any further; if
he went aisy everybody would have cleared out of Kilmacrone before he
got back. But at this time he was sitting among some broom bushes, under
which last year’s withered black pods were strewn, and he determined
that if there were an odd number of seeds in the first one he opened he
would go on to Tullykillagin. There were nine in it, and he logically
continued to loiter seawards.
He dawdled so much that when he came to the cliff the sun already hung
low over the water, and as he walked along the edge, his shadow
stretched away far inland across the dappled pale and dark green of the
furze-fretted sward. The sea unrolled a ceaseless scroll of faint
wild-hyacinth colour, on which invisible breeze-wafts inscribed and
erased mysterious curves and strokes like hieroglyphics. Here and there
it showed deep purple stains; for a flight of little snowflake clouds
were fluttering in from the Atlantic, followed at leisure by
deep-folded, glistering drifts, now massed on the horizon-rim to muffle
the descending sun. Yet that tide, with all its smoothness, showed a
broad band of foam wherever it touched the pebbles, which lay dry before
its sliding--for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff’s
foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked
down on a small field of very green grass, set as an oasis between the
waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders
to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the
highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of
occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes,
and a clump of scarlet-tasselled fuchsia. To heighten the incongruity of
its aspect, this pasture was inhabited by a large strawberry cow, who
seemed to be enjoying the alternate mouthfuls of seaweed and woodbine,
which she munched off a thickly-wreathed boulder, untroubled by the fact
that the meal bade fair to be her last, since the rising spring tide had
already all but cut off access on either hand, and would still flow for
some hours.
“Musha, now I’ll be skivered,” said Mick, standing still, “if that’s not
Joe McEvoy’s ould cow. You’ll be apt to experience a dampin,’ ould
woman, if you don’t quit out of there. Whethen, it’s a quare man he is
to lave the baste sthrayin’ about permiscuous in the welther of the
tide.”
He peered over the edge of the cliff, evidently mistrusting its smooth
face; and then he threw several stones and clods at the cow, with shouts
of “Hi! out of that,” and “Shoo along!” but his missiles fell short of
their mark, and if his voice reached her, she treated it with the placid
disregard of which her kind are mistress on such occasions, and never
raised her crumple-horned head.
“Have it your own way, then,” said Mick cynically; “it’s nothin’ to me
if you’ve a mind to thry a taste of swimmin’ under wather.”
He had not, however, strolled much farther, when he met with somebody
who was vastly more concerned about the animal’s impending fate. This
was old Joe McEvoy himself, who, out of the mouth of a steep sandy
boreen, sprang up suddenly, like a Jack-in-the-box,--one of the
shock-wigged, saturnine-complexioned pattern. But no Jack-in-the-box
could have looked so flurriedly distracted, or have muttered to itself
such queer execrations as he did, hobbling along.
“A year’s loadin’ of bad luck to the whoule of thim!” he was saying with
gasps when Mick approached; “there’s not a one of thim but ’ud do
desthruction on herself sooner than lose a chanst to be annoyin’
anybody, if she could conthrive it no other way.”
“If it’s th’ ould cow you’re cursin’,” said Mick, “she’s down below
yonder.”
“Och, tell me somethin’ I dunno, you gomeral, not but what I’m nigh as
big a one meself as can be, to go thrust her wid that little imp of
mischief. Bad scran to it; I must give me stiff leg a rest, and she’ll
be up here blatherin’ after me before you can look round, you may bet
your brogues she will.”
“Gomeral yourself and save your penny,” said Mick, whose temper was not
at its best after his long day of hungry discontent. “And the divil a
call you have to be onaisy about the crathur follyin’ you anywheres.
Stayin’ where she is she’s apt to be, until she gets the chanst of goin’
out to say wid the turn of the tide, and that’s like enough to happen
her.”
“And who at all was talkin’ of the cow follyin’? It’s ould Biddy Duggan
down below that niver has her tongue off of me, nagglin’ at me for
lettin’ the poor crathur pick her bit along the beach, and it a strip of
the finest grass in the townland, when it’s above wather, just goin’ to
loss. A couple of pints differ extry it does be makin’ in the milkin’ of
a day she’s grazed there. But it’s threatenin’ dhrownin’ and
disthruction over it th’ ould banshee is this great while; and plased
she’ll be, rael plased and sot up. Sure that’s what goes agin me, to be
so far gratifyin’ her, and herself as mischevious, harm-hopin’ an ould
toad as iver I hated the sight of--Och bejabers, didn’t I tell you so?
It’s herself comin’ gabble-gobblin’ up.”
As he spoke, a very small meagre ragged old woman emerged swiftly from
the lane, accompanied by one younger and stouter and less nimble of
foot, her temporary neighbour, Mrs Gatheremup. Mrs Duggan seemed to bear
out Joe’s character of her; for now, like Spenser’s hag Occasion, “ever
as she went her tongue did walk,” and the path it took was not one of
peace. Maybe, after this happenin’, some she could name might have the
wit to believe what other people tould them, who knew better than to be
thinkin’ to feed a misfortnit crathur of an ould cow on sand and sayweed
as if she was a sayl or a saygull, and it a scandal to the place to
behould her foostherin’ along down there wid the waves’ edges slitherin’
up to her nose, and she sthrivin’ to graze, and the slippery stones fit
to break her neck. Such was the purport of Mrs Duggan’s remarks, which
were punctuated by Joe McEvoy’s peremptory requests that she would lave
gabbin’ and givin’ impidence, and his appeals to the others to inform
him whether they weren’t all to be pitied for havin’ to put up wid the
ould screech-owl’s foolish talk.
“Sure, that’s the way they do be keepin’ it up continial, Micky lad,”
Mrs Fottrel called to him, shrilly, as if athwart gusts of high wind.
“I’ll pass you me word the two of them ’ill stand at their doors of an
evenin’ an give bad langwidge to aich other across the breadth of the
road till they have us all fairly moidhered wid the bawls of them, and I
on’y wonder the thatch doesn’t take and slip down on their ould heads.”
“Belike it’s lave of the likes of _you_ I ought to be axin’ where I’m to
git grazin’ for me own cattle?” a growl of sarcastic thunder was just
then observing, to which flashed a scathing response: “And bedad, then,
it’s lave you had a right to be axin’ afore you sent off me poor son
Hughey’s bit of a Pat, to be wastin’ his time mindin’ your ould
scarecrow and gettin’ himself dhrownded in the tide. It’s no thanks to
you if the innicent child isn’t as like as not lyin’ this minute under
six fut of could wather, instead of fetchin’ me in the full of me kettle
that I’m roarin’ to him for this half-hour, and ne’er a livin’ sinner
widin sight or----”
“Saints above! is little Pat strayin’ along wid the cow?” said Mrs
Fottrel, much aghast. “I was noticin’ I didn’t see him anywheres this
evenin’. What’s to become of him down there, and it risin’ beyond the
heighth of iverythin’ as fast as it can flow? Sure this mornin’ ’twas
wallopin’ itself agin the wall, back of our place, fit to swally all
before it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the child was below?” said Mick. “I’d lep down
there and fetch him up aisy enough; on’y there was no mortial use goin’
after the cow, for ne’er a crathur that took its stand on four hoofs ’ud
git its own len’th up the cliff, unless it might be some little divil of
a goat. And the wather’s dhrowndin’-deep alongside it afore now.”
“Musha, good gracious, sure all I done was to bid the spalpeen be
keepin’ an eye on her now and agin while he would be playin’ about
there,” said Joe; “and it’s twinty chances if iver he did at all.
Trapesed off wid himself somewheres; he’ll be right enough be this time.
’Tisn’t the likes of him go to loss, it’s the quare five-poun’ note he’d
fetch at Athenry fair.”
“He might ha’ broke his legs climbin’ disp’rit on the rocks,” said Mrs
Fottrel, unconvinced by the argument from unsaleability, “and be lyin’
there now waitin’ for the say-waves to wash the life out of him. Heaven
pity the crathur!”
“Sure I’ll step down and see what’s gone wid him,” said Mick.
The descent of the cliff, though not riskless, was no great feat for an
active youth, and Mick accomplished it safely, but to little purpose, he
thought at first, since the irreclaimable cow appeared to be the sole
denizen of the shrinking beach. However, when he had shouted and
scrambled for some time without result, he came abruptly upon a nook
among the piled-up rocks, where a very small black-headed boy in
tattered petticoats was digging the sandy floor with a razor-shell.
“Och, it’s there you are,” said Mick, stepping down from a weedy ledge;
“and what have you in it at all that you didn’t hear me bawlin’ to you?”
“Throops,” said Pat gloatingly, almost too absorbed to glance off his
work; “it’s Bally-clavvy, the way it did be in the school readin’-book
at Duffclane. There’s the Roossian guns,”--he pointed to a row of
black-mouthed mussel-shells, mounted on periwinkle carriages--“and
here’s the sides of the valley I’m makin’; long and narrer it was. Just
step round and look at it from where I am, Micky, but don’t be clumpin’
your fut on the French cavalary.”
“The divil’s in it all,” said Mick, with a sudden bitter vehemence,
which he accounted for to himself by adding, as he pointed towards the
seething white line: “D’you see where that’s come to, you little
bosthoon? And you sittin’ grubbin’ away here as if you were
pitaty-diggin’ a dozen mile inland.”
Pat looked in the desired direction, but misapprehended the object to be
the western sky, where an overblown fiery rose seemed to have scattered
all its petals broadcast. “Sure that’s on’y the sun settin’ red like,”
he explained indifferently, and would have resumed his excavations if he
had not been seized and hustled half-way up the cliff before he could
disengage his mind from his brigades and batteries. Both heads soon
bobbed up over the edge without accident; for Pat climbed like a monkey
when once he had grasped the situation. His grandmother’s attitude
towards Joe McEvoy constrained her to receive him effusively as prey
snatched from the foaming jaws of death; but it was out of Mrs Fottrel’s
pocket that a peppermint drop came to sweetly seal his new lease of
life.
“And what are you after now, Mick?” she said, observing that, instead of
drawing himself up to level ground, he stood poised on an uncomfortable
perch, and looked back the steep way he had come.
“I’m thinkin’ to slip down agin,” he said, “and see if be any manner of
manes I could huroosha th’ ould baste round the rocks yonder. The wather
mightn’t be altogether too deep there yit; at all evints she’s between
the divil and the deep say where she is now; it’s just a chanst.”
“Sorra a much,” said Joe disconsolately, “scarce worth breakin’ your
bones after, any way.”
“Bones, how are you? Sure, there’s no call to be breakin’ bones in the
matter,” said Mick, beginning to descend. This was true enough, if he
had minded what he was about; but then he did not. So far from it, he
was saying to himself: “One ’ud ha’ thought now she might ha’ took a
sort of pride in it,” when the bottom of the world seemed to drop away
from under his feet, and his irrelevant meditations ended in a
shattering thud down on the rocky pavement a long way below. He never
heard the shouts and shrieks which the incident occasioned above his
head. Once only he became dimly conscious of a quivering network of
prismatic flashes, which he could not see through, and a booming throb
in his ears, which made him murmur dazedly: “Wirra, I thought I’d got
beyond hearin’ of them drums.” In another moment: “What’s took me?” he
said, with a start. But the depths he sank among remain always dark and
silent.
Next day messengers from Tullykillagin told Mrs Doherty that the Lord
had took her son Mick, and that “he had gone out to say wid the tide,
before they could get anybody to him, and there was no tellin’ where he
might be swep’ up, if ever he came to shore at all.”
“And the quarest part of it was that Joe McEvoy’s ould cow that he went
after had legged herself up, somehow, on the rocks out of reach, and
niver a harm on her when they found her in the mornin’. But she’d been
all of a could quiver ever since, and himself doubted if she’d rightly
git over it,--might the divil mend her, and she after bein’ the death of
a fine young man. Sure, every sowl up at Tullykillagin was rael annoyed
about it. Even ould Biddy Duggan, that was as cross-tempered as a
weasel, did be frettin’ for the lad; and Joe McEvoy was sittin’ crooched
like an ould wet hen, over his fire black out, that he hadn’t the heart
to be lightin’.”
Mrs Doherty said she didn’t know what talk they had of the Lord and the
say and the ould cow; but she’d known well enough the way it was when
Mick niver come home last night. He’d just took off after the souldiers,
as he’d a great notion one time.
She was, as may have been observed, rather a dull-witted woman, and
proportionately hard to convince against her will.
“A great notion intirely,” she said; “on’y I’d scarce have thought he’d
go do such a thing on me in arnest. And I runnin’ away indoors yisterday
out of the heighth of the divarsion, when the band-music was a thrate to
be hearin’, just to see his bit of supper wouldn’t be late on him. And
the grand little pitaty-cake I had for him; I may be throwin’ it to the
hins now, unless Molly might fancy a bit; for we’ll not be apt to set
eyes on him this three year. Och wirra! and he that contint at home, and
ne’er a word out of him about the souldierin’ this long while. If it had
been poor Thady itself, ’twould ha’ been diff’rint; but Mick--I’d scarce
ha’ thought it of him; for he’d a dale of good-nature, Mrs Geoghegan,
ma’am.”
“He had so, tub-be sure, woman dear,” said Mrs Geoghegan, “or he might
be sittin’ warm in here this minnit.”
“The back of me hand to thim blamed ould throopers,” said Mrs Doherty,
“that sets the lads wild wid their thrampin’ around.”
“Poor Mick would be better wid them than where he is now--God have mercy
on his soul,” said a neighbour solemnly.
But Mick’s mother continued to bewail herself: “And I missin’ the best
of all the tunes they played, so Molly was tellin’ me, for ’fraid he’d
be kep’ waitin’ for his supper, and he comin’ home to me hungry; and
now---- There’s a terrible len’th of time in three year. I wouldn’t ha’
believed he’d ha’ done it on me.”
AFTER SEVEN YEARS
Looking southward from the strand at Clonalty, you can see Wade’s house
still making an opaque white gleam at the sharp-pointed end of the sandy
spit, which, a wedge of silver and green on sunny days, thrusts itself
out from the opposite shore into the shallow-rippling estuary. Viewed
from such a distance, its aspect is just that of the other whitewashed
cabins, which are dotted about on the Clonalty side; but at closer
quarters, signs of its many years’ desertion peer out of its small blank
windows, and perch on its too-ruffled thatch, and rustle in its deep
border of weeds. These latter are not so luxuriant a growth as they
would be in most places, because the soil of the little peninsula is so
nearly pure sand that vegetation has a hard struggle on it for a stunted
existence. Old Billy Wade used to have the work of the world over his
potato-patch, which, however, in most years did much credit to his
admixture of “careful dirt.” All about it the sand spreads
unadulterated, heaving and sinking in hillocks and hollows, where little
grows except dry grey-green bent grasses, which look as if they had been
withered in some earlier state of life, and, close to the water’s edge,
tufts of faint-coloured sea-pinks, whose very scent is faded. In wild
weather the flying sand tinkled against the panes like fine-ground hail,
and made sloping drifts in the sills of window and door. From the
landward side the cottage is approached (very seldom) by a rude track
sunken between high banks, which come slipping down in spreading slides
if anybody scrambles up them, in hopes of finding firmer ground a-top,
so that he gets there with many additional grains in his gritty shoes. A
few perches from the door this track dips down to the shore at a place
which is a miniature bay at full tide. At other times it is a quicksand,
and since, long ago, one Larry Keogh’s stray horse blundered into it and
was swallowed up, it became locally known as Larry’s horse-pond.
Nowadays the shadow of a more tragical event broods over it, but it
keeps the old name.
Inhabitants of Clonalty have been heard to express their belief that the
tide comes in there only once a week or so; and undoubtedly its visits
to this extreme end of the long sea-arm are of but brief duration,
scarcely more protracted than an orthodox morning call. During the
greater part of the four and twenty hours a brown flat lies between
shore and shore, looking as if nothing could be simpler than to tramp
across it. Moderately prudent people, however, do not attempt the
passage, for it is full of “quick” and “soft” places, death-traps which
have from time to time taken a victim, who has left nothing behind him
except his name to commemorate the disaster. Murphy’s and Dowling’s and
Cassidy’s respective “holes” are a salutary warning to unwary walkers.
The Wades, therefore, and their few visitors had to go a long step round
on the way to and from Clonalty, and as the mainland at their back was
for several miles mostly sand-hills, where the residents were chiefly
rabbits, the cottage was a lonesome place to live in, and as
inconvenient, Mrs Wade used to complain on market-days, “as the desert
of the wilderness, with every hap’orth you wanted to be carried from the
world’s end.” In fact, the residence offered scanty attractions to
anybody save old Billy Wade, whose heart was usually in his
lobsterpots, or at the end of his fishing-lines, and who, paddling off
complacently, whenever the tide served, in his broad-bottomed black boat
to see after them, spent at least half his time afloat. Often he took
his only child Hannah along with him, a proceeding to which his wife
objected more and more as the girl grew old enough to be serviceable and
companionable indoors. But her objections were always over-ruled by
Hannah, who had no taste for domestic affairs, and who was so thoroughly
spoilt that she knew she need only dance desperately on the water’s edge
to make her father pull back for her, no matter how nearly he had got
out of sight. This had happened on occasions when he had tried to slip
away unbeknownst, thinking the weather doubtful. Her mother said she was
as stubborn as a young buffalo-bull--an animal of whose dispositions she
can have had no personal experience--when she took a notion into her
head; but Hannah was not a whit abashed by the comparison, nor moved to
relinquish her voyages, and Mrs Wade’s discontent with her dwelling had
many a long solitary day in which to strike deeper roots.
So when old Billy Wade died, just about Hannah’s fifteenth birthday,
everybody thought that his widow would surely quit the sandy peninsula,
and seek some less isolated home. But everybody was mistaken, for, on
the contrary, Mrs Wade stayed on at the cottage, and in six months
married Mr Miles Roche, whom she had met at Crutwell the lawyer’s
office, where she had gone on business. This marriage was probably the
first step of any importance that she had ever ventured on spontaneously
in all her life; as the match with Billy Wade, thirty years her senior,
had been made up for her quite independently, and ever since she had
taken her orders dutifully from husband and child. Unfortunately, it
could not be called a prudent measure. Miles Roche was a middle-aged
man, whose journey through the world had all been downhill. He had
started in life as a sort of squireen, his family being just on the
borderland of quality, not over well reputed, and with steadily
dwindling resources. Towards maintaining himself in even this position
young Miles had never done anything more to the purpose than drink
rather too much whisky, and lose what money he could at horse-races, and
other events chronicled in the sporting intelligence. These pursuits he
carried on industriously enough, though on a small scale, during a long
series of years, and the process of deterioration, physical, moral, and
social, which they involved was leisurely and gradual. But at last bad
times and other adverse circumstances began to co-operate with them, and
his decline then became more rapid, so that by the time when Mrs Wade,
in her new black clothes, passed him lounging on Crutwell’s steps, he
had, as his neighbours expressed it, “lost himself entirely.” By this
they meant that he had sunk out of the class in which birth had placed
him. Time was when he had walked with something of a swagger over his
own fields, among his own not very thriving flocks and herds, and had
ridden, on rather sorry nags, to the meets of the Harveystown Hunt,
where he could, without undue presumption, join the party at the
breakfast, spread for all acquaintances by old Colonel Meade of Meade
Court. Nowadays, though he still kept his swagger, except when his gait
was controlled by influences more potent than self-conceit, not a rood
of land remained in his possession, not a four-footed beast owned him
for master, not a hat was touched to him in the country-side, and Peter
Molloy, of the general shop, dropped the “mister” as often as not when
asking him gruffly if he was thinking of settling that account. In fact,
Miles Roche had degenerated into a needy loafer, who felt in no way
above his company of a Saturday night at Donnelly’s bar, whither
resident labourers brought their dole of wages, and passing tramps their
more variable gains. And his pride had so far fallen with his fortunes,
that he did not disdain the expedient of mending them by a marriage with
old Billy Wade’s widow, who was reported to have been richly left in a
small way. The old man had, so rumour ran, both inherited and amassed
savings of indefinite amount--some said “pounds,” and some said
“hundreds.” Everybody said, “There was never a one of the Wades yet but
was as close and naygurly as could be consaived.” “Sure, the money stuck
to them,” Peter Molloy averred, “like the flies on a dhrop of treckle.”
These considerations were undoubtedly the mainspring of Miles’ design,
though Mrs Wade’s faded sea-pink-like prettiness may have helped to
bring about his eventual perseverance in it. For her part she felt that
she had drawn a prize. Miles was big and burly, and by any friendly
observer might still have been described as a fine figure of a man,
especially when he had on the respectable hat and coat, which he had
borrowed, and the new scarf, which he had bought on credit, to do his
“coortin’” in. His manners, too, could be, upon occasion, softly
insinuating, and had not wholly lost the stamp of his better days.
Perhaps this is nearly all that could be said in his favour; but it
sufficed to make Mrs Wade a proud woman the first time she walked
through Clonalty with Miles Roche as her accepted suitor, and this
albeit she was well aware how many of the neighbours were of the same
opinion which old Mrs Cleary, who, having attained to “a won’erful great
age entirely,” could say anything she liked, expressed with much candour
in lieu of congratulations. It ran as follows: “Ay, woman dear, but it’s
the quare gaby you’re about makin’ of yourself, takin’ up wid that big
slouchin’ son of ould Charley Roche, that was good for little enough
himself. Sure, he’ll be dhrinkin’ you out of house and home as fast as
the say flows, and sorra a bit ’ill you pacify him wid it all--not if
you had the full of it to be givin’ him.”
Nevertheless, willing as she was to be wooed, the negotiations all but
fell through when, upon more exact enquiry, Miles ascertained that the
widow’s fortune had been grossly exaggerated, as she really possessed an
income of dimensions which prescribe the plainest of plain living, and
only a life interest in the little bit of property that produced it. The
discovery, as I have said, nearly terminated the courtship, and quite
put an end to all its pleasantness. For the mixture of motives which
determined Miles to fulfil his promise was only just strong enough to
effect this, without leaving any margin for a good grace. His
disappointment, indeed, sometimes expressed itself with such brutal
frankness that Mrs Wade now and then wished, before the wedding day
arrived, for strength of mind to pluck up a spirit, and send him about
his business. But Mrs Roche reiterated the wish much more fervently when
it was too late; and in course of time the sentiment became as habitual
as her husband’s alternations of uproarious frenzy and ferocious gloom.
For Miles’s unsteadiness increased from year to year, until she grew to
regard the remote situation of their cottage as an advantage, because it
withdrew them beyond the neighbours’ close observation of their
miserable life. It could not, however, remain a secret, and at length
wore into so open a one that she could bewail herself with little
reserve to sympathising matrons on market-days.
Now it is tolerably certain that none of these things would have come to
pass if Hannah Wade had been living with her mother. Her will, though
only fifteen years old, would effectually have asserted itself against
that of her elders, and Miles Roche’s suit would have been short and
unsuccessful. But Hannah had moped and fretted so after her father’s
death, that she had been sent to stay for a change with his sister away
at Lettercrum. There she received the news of the match with an intense
wrath, which her mother trembled at, even in remote imagination. For a
few days following, she was haunted with apprehensions of her daughter’s
immediate return to upbraid and prohibit; but it presently appeared that
the girl’s indignation had taken the shape of a resolve to stay away
permanently; and during more than five years she never set foot next or
nigh Clonalty. At the end of that time, her step-father’s habits took a
turn for the worse, leading him to behave in a manner which the Clonalty
folk described as “beyond the beyonds altogether;” while her mother,
who, according to the same authorities, was “to be pitied wid the
drunken baste, the crathur,” fell ill, and wrote miserably, begging
Hannah to come home.
Whereupon, one thundery summer evening, Hannah Wade arrived with the
mail-bags and two or three packages, on Patsy Flood’s car. She had grown
into a tall, stalwart lass of twenty or so, with black hair and black
eyebrows ruled very straight over her dark grey eyes, which looked clear
and resolute. Neighbours who saw her pass along the street, remarked
among themselves that “yon looked to be a fine, clever, sturdy girl, and
Miles Roche was maybe apt to find he’d met wid somebody who’d make him
behave himself a thrifle more dacint; he was aisy enough frightened, for
all his crackin’ and braggin’, whenever he’d raison to know he wouldn’t
be put up wid.” And they added that it would be “a rael charity if he
was purvinted of bargin’ and bullyraggin’ the misfort’nit little ould
wisp of a woman, who’d been the great fool to have anythin’ to say to
the likes of him.”
However, as it turned out, Hannah had very little opportunity for
testing her powers of coercion, as the day but one after her return,
Miles Roche suddenly disappeared, and Clonalty saw him no more. Where he
had taken himself off to nobody wasted much time in conjecturing. The
neighbours were unanimously of the opinion that he was apt to be after
no good, and that the best thing could have happened his wife and
step-daughter was to be rid of him. Sometimes they congratulated Hannah
jocularly upon the promptitude which she had shown in “puttin’ him out
of it,” but the pleasantry was not apparently to her taste. This was
when Mrs Roche and her daughter had quitted their old home, and settled
in Dunphy’s Row at Clonalty, which they did only a week after the event.
Mrs Roche was down-hearted and complaining, a state probably due to her
bad health, rather than to regret at her desertion, since it was obvious
that she would be far better off as a widow bewitched, if she were
allowed to remain so. Mrs Tuohy and Mrs Maguire, now her next-door
neighbours, used to drop in occasionally and tell her re-assuringly of
their conviction that she would never be troubled with setting eyes on
him again: “For as like as anythin’ he’d run off to the States, and at
all events, he wouldn’t be very long drinkin’ himself out of this world,
the way he was goin’ on when he quit.” But Mrs Roche did not respond
with much cordiality to their well-meant consolations. In fact, both she
and her daughter showed a disposition to keep themselves to themselves,
which is a very sure way of laying one’s conduct and character open to
hostile criticism.
During her stay with her aunt, Hannah had forsaken her out-of-door life,
and learned to sit for long hours over embroidery and other needlework.
But now she resumed her earlier more active habits, and saw little
daylight indoors. Her boating, however, had come to an end, and she
never cared to go near the shore, where her father’s old _Mary Anne_
might still be seen afloat, owned now by Micky Devlin, to whom Miles
Roche had sold her at a price which did not keep him in whisky for the
inside of a week. Hannah’s occupation lay inland among the
hedge-screened fields and lanes, where the sea betrays its neighbourhood
only by sending flocks of snowy gulls to gleam through the black cloud
of crows that hover in the wake of the sliding ploughshare. At first she
weeded and picked stones, and did other such field work in a flapping
sunbonnet, but after a while the Cochranes up at Donamoate Farm
employed her about their dairy: and it was there that she made the
acquaintance of their nephew Francis Conroy.
Yet nearly seven years had gone by since her return to Clonalty, when
her great day dawned upon her. That is to say, Francis Conroy proposed
and was accepted. Some of the neighbours, indeed, maintained the opinion
that it was no fault of hers he’d been so long over his courting. It
wasn’t, they said, for want of getting every encouragement. Ay, bedad,
she’d done some of it for him; trouble enough she’d took, and maybe
she’d got no such great things after all. Commentaries of this kind,
however, were only to be expected under the circumstances, and they
neither had nor merited any weight with the community at large. On the
same principle these critics averred that it was downright ridiculous of
a young chap like Francey Conroy to be thinking of a girl like Hannah
Wade, who was growing old as fast as a dog could trot. They wondered he
didn’t ask old Batt Hearn’s sister Judy while he was about it. The
innuendo contained in this sarcasm had only a very slender foundation in
facts, for the disparity of age between the sweethearts did not exceed a
couple of years, and Hannah’s dark comeliness was of a sort that wore
well and had lost nothing with the passing of her first youth. As for
the young man himself, he was a straight-featured, curly-haired lad, of
a rather slight make than otherwise, both physically and mentally, whose
worst enemies, just then the people who would have liked to call him
son-in-law, found nothing seriously bad that they could call him instead
with any plausibility. He worked with his uncle Arthur Cochrane, who,
being childless, would, it was confidently expected, do something for
him--stock a little farm, maybe. Altogether, no dispassionate onlookers
could deny that Hannah was in luck, and they generally said so with the
addition that she was “a dacint hard-workin’ girl, and apt enough to
make the lad a good wife.”
It was on a warm long-lighted summer evening that Francis spoke out:
just when they were bundling up the last row of lap-cocks in the shady
corner of Little Fortyfurzes. At first she felt as if she must be
dreaming; and then as if she had never had anything but dreams until
that very moment. Glad she was to waken from some of them. When she went
home a while later through the hushed meadows, her heart was as full of
rest and calm as the soft air was full of the scent of dewy hay. A more
rapturous and jubilant mood might have been expected in her by anybody
acquainted with her somewhat strenuous and stirring ways. Hannah did not
take life easily. Only that morning a fellow-worker had said to her
remonstrantly: “It’s yourself’s the quare onaisy crathur, Hannah Wade.
If you’re not doin’ one thing, you’re doin’ another. I declare to
goodness, one might think the Old Fellow himself was drivin’ you; but if
I was you I’d give him the go by now and agin anyway.” Thus a spell of
quietude may have been her most needed and enjoyable refreshment. But as
the days went by, her spirits did begin to rise above the level of
serenity. She felt not simply at peace with all the world, but also
entrenched in a position where she need fear no challenge nor assault
from any quarter, not even from Fortune, whom she had long accounted her
foe. Therefore she only laughed good-humouredly, and said, sure people
would be talking when some officious clashbag repeated to her the sundry
strictures upon her engagement. And she accepted the congratulations of
her acquaintances with cordiality, as if they pleased her and she had
no wish to shun them. She actually asked Mrs Coleman to step in and see
her mother on the way back from Mass, a thing she had never been known
to do before in all the years they had lived in Dunphy’s Row. “You might
ha’ thought,” somebody once had said, affronted, “that every fut in at
their ould door was a penny out of their pockets, they were that
delicate about lettin’ a person inside it.” To which somebody else
naturally had rejoined: “That there was no such great things to be seen
when you got there, as Thady Bourke said when the train he was
travellin’ on stopped in the middle of the dark tunnel.”
Mrs Roche, too, in her little old woman’s degree, was cheered and
pleased by the event. She had long been an ailing, complaining person,
whose grey days had often taken a bleak east-windy atmosphere from a
certain austere constraint in Hannah’s demeanour towards her. But now
happiness substituted for this an unwonted softness and geniality, and
Francis Conroy, dropping in of an evening, was found by his
mother-in-law elect to be “very friendly and agreeable.” So that she
took heart of grace, and ventured upon several small sayings and doings
from which she had been refraining for fear of a rebuff. For instance,
she re-arranged all the crockery on the dresser, and she remarked that
if Hannah had had any sense, she’d ha’ reared a brood of turkey-poults;
there was nothing so profitable of a dry saison, and they might ha’ got
a grand run in Saunder’s bit of stubble. To which Hannah responded
hopefully: “Ah, sure, you may ha’ turkeys and all manner yit.” Then the
Cochranes, whose liking of the match was an important and somewhat
doubtful point, proved to be well affected, and did talk of giving a
hand with stocking a little farm. Altogether, the hot haymaking
fortnight which followed was made up of halcyon days for both daughter
and mother, with many hopes hatching unmolested. But at the end of that
time a shadow and a ripple came by, nothing of much consequence indeed,
yet it broke up the season of calm weather.
One evening Francis Conroy, who had been working for the day away at
Portallen, found himself towards sunset on the shore, where a
high-brimmed tide quivering its clearness under the green cliff-shadow
tempted him and three or four comrades to take a dip. It was one half of
the mishap that he left his much-prized watch in the pocket of his
vest, and the completion of it that Bob Flynn, when they were dressing,
picked up the garment, unaware of its valuable freight, and tossed it
across a deep pool to the rock-ledge whereon Francis stood aghast. For
during the transit there was a silvery flash, fleeting as the jump of a
trout, a dismayed howl from Francis, and the watch had vanished
irretrievably, sunk among oozy rock-crannies in many fathoms of water.
The loss was a serious one in those times when a watch cost a couple of
months’ wages; and Francis bemoaned himself over it next morning to
Hannah and all his friends coming and going to Mass. He seemed much
depressed all the afternoon, and when she asked him if he was going to
play hurley, he replied mournfully: “’Deed no, and me wid me poor
grandfather’s good watch sittin’ there at the bottom of the say, beyond
raich of man or mortal, unless them little ugly crabs skytin’ over it.”
Hannah was disposed to think it a harsh and inscrutable decree of Fate
that Francey Conroy should lack anything he desired, and she would
blithely have despoiled a whole constellation to provide him with what
he wanted. But this measure being out of her power, she began to frame
a resolve, one which, a few weeks before, would have seemed dreadfully
impossible to her, and which even now needed all her newly-acquired
sense of security and belief in good luck to make it look practicable.
Monday morning was as warm and bright as ever, and when the Egans’
cochin china cock roused Mrs Roche at an early hour, she woke up to it
with no presentiment of trouble. The hot weather always made her feeble
and lazy, a state which she herself described as not being worth
tuppence, and she thought she would lie where she was, in the recess
beside the hearth, until she had had her cup of tay, to the arrival of
which she looked forward with drowsy patience as a pleasant conclusion
to a series of many naps. But it came to her along with a terrible
announcement, which set the cup and saucer clattering in her hand more
violently than a moderate shock of earthquake would have done. “I was
thinkin’,” Hannah said, carelessly, as she stood by the little square
window, and twitched a yellow leaf or so off the geranium plants which
filled it, “I might maybe take a run over to the ould place there this
mornin’, and fetch back me father’s watch out of it.”
There was a dead silence for a few moments, and then Mrs Roche said in a
slow, dull way, as if she were still half-stunned: “Ah no--to be sure
you wouldn’t ever go for to do such a thing.”
“And what for wouldn’t I then?” said Hannah, “it’s the greatest pity to
have a grand watch lyin’ there all these years stuck in an ould crevice,
like a dead beetle--supposin’ it isn’t stole out of the place before now
wid some tramp passin’ by.”
“And so it is, long ago, you may depind--stole away it would be,” said
Mrs Roche, with a clutch at the idea. “Sorra a bit of it you’d git wid
goin’. Och be aisy, for God’s sake, and let it alone.”
“It’s aisy talkin’ that way,” said Hannah, “but all the while it’s maybe
lyin’ there just to me hand, you may say; and--other people at a loss
for it.... And I’m thinkin’ it’s a quare way to be servin’ a thing me
poor father was after givin’ me in a prisint.”
“Oh ay, and it’s fine talk _you_ have about your poor father and
prisints,” said Mrs Roche, bitterly, “and I knowin’ as well as if I was
inside of you this minute, that you’re on’y wantin’ to get it to give to
Francey Conroy. Och, but there’s plenty of fools in this world.”
“And meself was one of them, then,” said Hannah, “that I didn’t take
care to bring me watch over meself, instead of trustin’ it to you. But
sure who’d ever ha’ thought you could conthrive to forget it--and it the
raison of the whole thing happenin’--unless you left it behind on
purpose maybe.”
“I wish it was lyin’ at the bottom of the say,” said Mrs Roche, “and
meself along wid it, the way I wouldn’t be hearin’ you talkin’ of
destroyin’ us this black day.”
“Whist, whisht, mother, and don’t be sayin’ such things,” said Hannah.
“’Deed now, ne’er a word would I ha’ tould you about the matter, on’y I
amn’t clear in me mind which side of the fireplace you had it kep’ in,
so I thought I’d ax you first. But a fut I won’t go after it, if you
think that bad of it--there now. I’ll let it stop where it is, goin’ to
loss, and gettin’ stolen, if that ’ill satisfy you. I dunno what notion
you have about bein’ destroyed. Howane’er, I’ll let it alone.”
But Mrs Roche said: “Goin’ you’ll be for sure and for sartin, goodness
may pity the two of us. What notion have I? Och, I couldn’t be tellin’
you--I dunno. But goin’ you’ll be and destroyin’ us, that I know right
well.”
This, and the like, she continued to reiterate, and Hannah found
counter-protestations on her part as ineffectual as they would have been
against some low-moaning wind that had come keening about the house. At
last, in hopes that deeds might prove more convincing than words, she
took out a long neglected strip of white embroidery, and sat down to
stitch at her over-casting. She had given up her dairy-work in favour of
her wedding-clothes, and was meditating an expedition to the shops of
Glasmena; however, she said to herself that she had better stay at home
this morning and keep her mother pacified. “I won’t torment her, if
she’s that set against it,” she thought, with an impatient regret at the
weakness which had been, no doubt, the cause of her mother’s whim, and
was a reason for humouring it. Yet she was not perhaps without a sense
of relief and escape in deciding thus.
But when they had finished their early dinner, to which Mrs Roche got up
disconsolate, Hannah grew so thoroughly tired of her long morning
indoors, that she felt as if she must run out for a bit into the strong
sunshine that was making veined green transparencies of the geranium
leaves in the window, and dulling the embers on the hearth into a wreath
of pink and white blossom. She had really for the time being forgotten
all about the watch; but when her mother saw her get up and put her grey
shawl over her head, she groaned despairingly and said: “She’s
goin’--Holy Virgin, she’s goin’, for all I could do or say--cruel
headstrong, she always was, goodness forgive her, and now the Lord knows
what she’ll bring on us wid it.” This reminded Hannah again of the plan
which she had given up, and at the same time proved that her
renunciation had failed in its object; and she flung angrily out of the
house without replying. Just at the door she heard her mother calling
her, but she ran down the street and did not look back.
The little old woman, left comfortless, sat a while crouched in the
shadowiest corner of the dimly-lit room, beyond the reach of the longest
sunbeam. One might have fancied that she was hiding from some dreadful
thing; but whatever it was had got at too close quarters with her to be
thus eluded. Then, as the glowing afternoon wore on, she grew drowsy
and chilly, and thought she would cheer herself with a cup of tea, only
the big black kettle seemed so heavy that it was not worth the trouble
of lifting, and she lay down instead under her scarlet-diamonded
patchwork quilt, where sleep presently accepted her invitation, and with
it dreams that came unbidden.
Dunphy’s Row lies at the foot of a gentle slope that shuts out the
shore, but a few perches up the road the sea comes into sight. Hannah
went first in the opposite direction--to the Cochranes’ to see if there
was anything she could do in the dairy, her successor having turned out
an inefficient person, and being spoken of by her superiors as “that
great gawk.” But Mrs Cochrane said: “Ah, no thank you, kindly, Hannah,
there’ll be nothin’ wantin’ to-night. The pans is just sittin’ and
gatherin’ paiceable, and that great gawk can’t hinder them of doin’ that
anyways, so long as she lets them alone--and I’ve got the kay of the
door safe in me pocket. The hay’s all up, and Francey’s went off
somewheres wid his gun, after the rabbits I’m thinkin’.” So Hannah said:
“It’s the worth of him;” and soon turned back seawards.
On a sun-bright day when there are many little foam-crests curling
between the swarded shores, and glistering cloudlets flit by, Clonalty
looks very blue and white and green. It was doing so when Hannah came to
the beach, for a high tide had flowed in further than usual, and ripples
were sparkling and bickering among swathes of tangled wrack that had
long lain dry and stirless. As she looked across the water she saw, just
opposite, her old home gleaming with its white back-wall, for it faces
away from the sea; and to left and right lay the silvery hollows of the
sand-hills. Ever since she had run away from her mother’s call she had
been wishing more and more eagerly to make the venture, to visit the
deserted house, and reclaim from it the long forgone bit of property,
the gold watch and chain which her father had given to her on his
deathbed, and which she believed to be still hidden in the wall-niche
where her mother had by a strange oversight left it behind at the time
of their flitting. They had come away hurriedly one still, wet July
evening, when the grey water was fretted with large drops, and the mist
trailed thick and low. Seven years were past since then, and they had
never made the same journey, nor talked nor thought of doing so, not
even in the first dismay of the discovery that the watch was missing.
But now Hannah, for more than one reason, was of a different mind.
Francis Conroy was coming to see her that evening, and she imagined a
delightful moment if she could surprise him with the gift of a watch in
place of his lost one--a gold watch and a real silver chain, whereas he
had hitherto had nothing better than a makeshift contrived out of an old
curb bit. The possibility had flashed into her mind when, on bidding him
good-night the evening before, he had remarked dejectedly that it might
be any hour at all for anything he could tell, unless he could go look
under the waves of the sea. Whereupon she had allowed herself to drop a
mysterious hint that he might be owning a better one than ever he had
yet before long. Francey, she thought, had not minded her; but the
remembrance made her all the more anxious to carry out her design. “Me
mother’s safe to be thinkin’ all the while I’m gone over, whether or
no,” she said to herself, “and if I could get hould of a boat, I’d be
there and back in no time at all.”
So thinking, she became aware that her father’s old boat was moored
close by, its black shape the one blot on the glittering blue, white and
green, with its present owner, old Micky Devlin, and his wife sunning
themselves on the little boatslip at the water’s edge. Hannah reflected
for another minute, and then ran down to them. “I wonder, ma’am,” she
said to Mrs Devlin, “would himself think bad of loanin’ me the boat for
half an hour maybe? I was wantin’ to slip over yonder.” This request was
conveyed to Micky by his wife, her familiar cracked voice alone being
easily accessible to his bothered ears. But in answer he only said, with
a many-wrinkled grin: “Ah, dear, and is it himself she’s expeckin’ to
meet over there?” Hannah gave a great start, and turned from scarlet to
white so quickly that Mrs Devlin said remonstrantly to her husband:
“Arrah, man, don’t be talkin’ ridic’lous. It’s glad enough we are to get
shut of the likes of yous now and agin, let me tell you, widout any
notion of runnin’ after yous over land and say--cock you up! Sure never
mind him, Hannah.”
“Well, for the matter of that, I’d pull her over meself, if she’s
wishful; the tide ’ill take us backwards and forrards handy,” said
Micky, waiving the point. He had two motives in making the offer. For
he was glad to grasp an excuse for getting afloat on a day when no
fishing could be pleaded, and holding decidedly antiquated views about
the capabilities of womenkind, he regarded the suggestion that a lass
should handle his boat herself with a disfavour which would have made
him loth to grant her request in its original form. “Come along wid you,
then,” he said, putting his pipe into his pocket, and scrambling away
over the clattering stones. Hannah looked after him doubtfully for a
moment, and then followed.
Old Mrs Devlin remained where she was, knitting away at her coarse grey
sock, her quick needles glancing in and out of it like lightning at play
about a sullen cloud. As the boat pushed off she called after it: “Don’t
be delayin’ too long, or you might stick fast comin’ home.” And her
husband replied: “Ay, bedad, the tide runs out wid itself that
treacherous, before you know where you are, you might as well be
offerin’ to row through a bit of wet bog.” But Hannah, looking back
wistfully to where the old woman sat placidly turning her heel, felt
herself little disposed to linger over that errand.
On this same afternoon, Francis Conroy, as we have heard, had gone out
shooting. The sand-hills were his hunting-grounds, and their abounding
rabbits his quarry, in the pursuit of which he had no luck. In every
case the scurry and whisk occurred so punctually that the pellets
plopped fruitlessly into the sand like over-impetuous hail. By the time
that his ammunition was running out he had come along, doubling round
the head of the estuary, till he was near the Wades’ deserted cottage.
Then it struck him that he was thirsty, and that there must have been
water somewhere about the premises. Accordingly, he sought out a badly
choked-up well in the precincts of the obliterated garden, and having
taken a brackish draught sparingly, he perched himself with dangling
legs on a ledged bank which commanded a reach of the little lane running
between the cottage door and Larry’s Horsepond.
As he sat looking idly round him in the lengthening rays, a faint cloud
of discontent was on his countenance. He was considering some
unredressed grievances, amongst which his submerged watch just then lay
uppermost, because he was at the same time considering what o’clock it
might be. Presently a sand-muffled tread sounded close by, and a shadow
came wavering round the turn of the sunken boreen. Following it came a
figure, which at once impressed Francis as somehow familiar, and which
he speedily identified only too surely. It was no other than Miles
Roche, reeling along just as he probably had reeled home on that very
road many an evening before his abrupt departure. Though Francis had not
set eyes on him for the last seven years, their acquaintance was too old
a one for any mistakes to be possible now, especially as his absence had
seemingly left him unchanged. Thick-set frame and threadbare suit,
battered hat and red, coarsened face, all had just the same aspect as
when they were last seen lounging in front of Donnelly’s. Equally
characteristic was the unsteadiness of his steps as he lurched along
between the shelving banks, till, with a stumble at the threshold, and a
resentful roar, he vanished into the dark doorway of the cottage.
Francis watched his progress with an expression of deepening disgust,
for this unexpected reappearance of his future step-father-in-law opened
a long vista of mortifying annoyance. “It’s the fine times we’ll be
havin’ wid him--he didn’t lead them the life of a dog, be all accounts.
Och, bad luck to you, you drunken baste,” he said to himself, as the
sound of a thick voice bawling came from the cottage, where Miles Roche
was apparently soliloquising in a bad temper. Being minded to postpone
the renewal of their acquaintance, Francis thought he would take himself
off before the other emerged, and he was getting up to go when another
surprising appearance stopped him. He saw Hannah Wade come through the
cottage door, which was perhaps fifty yards from him, and stand outside
it, where in a minute she was joined by her mother. And this was
astonishing indeed, since, to his certain knowledge, Mrs Roche had not
left her house once in the past twelvemonth, not even to creep as far as
Mass; and she had of late been more than usually complaining. How, then,
had she got here, and what was she doing? Taken in connection with the
return of her husband, her presence was all the stranger. Had she and
Hannah known of it beforehand? In that case, Francis thought, Hannah
“had a right to ha’ tould him, instead of to be lettin’ on they were
quit of the ould rapscallion for good and all--’twould ha’ been only
fairity. It was no sort of thing for Hannah to have done. But as for the
ould woman bein’ over there, that wasn’t better able to travel than a
jelly-fish off the shore, he didn’t know what to say to it at all.”
In the midst of his conjectures, puzzled and indignant, Hannah and her
mother withdrew into the cottage, and then he began to ask himself
whether he should not join them there. They might have come over to
fetch something, and want a helping hand; or their tipsy relation might
become troublesome and violent, though for the time being he seemed to
have fallen quiet. He was still hesitating between the promptings of
chivalry, edged with curiosity, and his reluctance to hurry on his
introduction to this undesired family connection, when Hannah and her
mother reappeared in the doorway.
It seemed to him that he had surmised their errand rightly, for they
were hauling along between them a large, unwieldy looking bundle,
wrapped in folds of some weather-beaten stuff, which might have been an
old sail. It was evidently a heavy, cumbrous burden, beyond their powers
to lift--they could only tug and pull it. But Francis observed that Mrs
Roche appeared to exert far more strength in dragging it over the
threshold than anybody would have supposed her to possess. “Faith, then,
herself’s the great little ould schemer, lyin’ there at home lettin’ on
she’s scarce able to breathe, and as limbersome as a sandhopper when she
takes the fancy. Bedad you’re well mended, ma’am,” he said to himself,
watching her activity with a certain dissatisfaction. A few paces
outside both women paused to rest, and Hannah standing up straight and
tall, twisted together her thick black locks, which had shaken loose,
and wound them round her head, just as he had seen her do the other day
in the hayfield. But she looked, he fancied, slimmer and more girlish
than usual, perhaps only by reason of the rough task she had set
herself. He was jumping up to go and help, when she said a word to her
mother, and ran back into the cottage. She came out again immediately
with something in her hand; something that flickered a fierce cold gleam
in the warm sunlight; it was a long, broad-bladed knife, such as is used
for cutting up meat. This she thrust out of sight swiftly in among the
folds of the wrapping cloth, and he heard her say: “Now come on--make
haste.”
Francis could not have accounted rationally for the feeling of helpless
horror which at this moment came over him; but it did seize him with
such paralysing effect that, if a quicksand had been making mouths all
round him, he could have stirred hand nor foot to escape from his peril.
Like one in a dream he sat watching mother and daughter toil along with
their load, whatever it might be. For a few yards the track ran straight
towards the place where he sat, and as they came nearer he could hear
the older woman panting and groaning over her efforts--“We’ll never do
it, Hannah,” she repeated again and again, “the Saints have mercy on
us--we’ll never do it.” Hannah made no answer, and was stooping so low
that he could not see her face; but she tugged desperately. The
ponderous weight furrowed the loose sand as it passed trailing on, and a
brisk breeze, which seemed to be blowing after them, sent a thin cloud
scudding by, but where Francis sat not a breath was stirring except his
own. They were in full view of him as they approached, but they did not
notice him, and when they came where the sunken boreen turned rather
sharply to the left, the high banks began to interpose, so that only
glimpses could be caught of anybody moving between them.
Then feeling a sudden impulse of rebellion against the spell which kept
him staring blankly after the figures as they receded, he turned to look
in the opposite direction, and thereupon began to utter an exclamation,
which broke off strangled as if a hand had clutched him by the throat.
For close by Hannah Wade was standing--Hannah herself--so near to him
that he could have touched her--and yet at that very moment there was
that same--that other--dark head appearing ever and anon above the
silvery banks of the boreen. His world spun round for a minute, and then
stood still again with a jerk.
Hannah and Francis looked at one another without a word. How long she
had been there, and whence she had come, he did not know, but her eyes,
dark with fear, told him that she knew what he had seen. The silence
seemed to have lasted a long while before it was broken--by neither of
them. A voice came from seaward, shouting in the sustained roar which
mariners learn to oppose to the howling-down of winds and waves. “Hi
then, Hannah, girl,” it said, “Is it stoppin’ there you’d be till every
sup of the say’s dhrained out on us to beyant the King Pharaoh’s
Islands? Come along wid you out of that, before we have th’ ould boat
crawlin’ in the black mud like a man-keeper in a ditch-bottom.”
“That’s ould Micky Devlin rowed me over,” said Hannah, with a hoarse
endeavour to speak naturally. “I mustn’t be keepin’ him any longer.” She
waited a moment, as if hoping for something, and then turned away alone;
but Francis did follow her a few steps behind. To do so seemed to him
more possible than to make his solitary way home through the sand-hills
amongst which those two forms had disappeared.
Old Micky smoking in his boat was a homely and reassuring sight. He
greeted their joint appearance with laughter loud and long, and much
jocular comment. What they responded to it they never knew, and neither
did he; but his deafness was complaisant in its conjectures, and he
subsided into chuckles of unabated satisfaction. On embarking Francis
asked eagerly to be allowed to row, but the old man thrust him back
sportively with the butt-end of an oar, and said: “Och no, boyo; sure I
wouldn’t be separatin’ yous be any manner of manes. Sit you down beside
her, and lave th’ ould paddles to meself that’s got nothin’ better to
mind.” Francis, however, took a seat as far aloof from his
fellow-passenger as the limits of the stern-benches would allow.
As they slid out into the soft mother-o-pearly water, Hannah felt
unspeakably forlorn. It seemed to her that all her hopes were slipping
away from her along with the strand she was leaving, and that her
landing on the other side would be to find a world grown desolate for
evermore. The feeling strengthened with the dwindling distance, while
old Micky pulled and poked his unappreciated fun, and Francis sat silent
and did not look at her. The good luck but now so safely in her keeping,
had turned into a thing wild and winged, that hovered on the point of
taking flight. Within a few fleeting minutes, if ever, she must grasp
and re-capture it; and yet the attempt failing would scare it from her
irretrievably. Thus it came to pass that, although her better judgment
admonished her that she was acting over-hastily and at an ill time, she
could not forbear any longer, but moving down the bench till she sat
opposite to her sweetheart, she held out to him what she had all this
while been hiding under her shawl--something that glistened in the
sun--much as the knife-blade had glittered.
“It was me poor father’s watch,” she said, “I went over of a purpose to
fetch it back for you. It’s as good and better than the one you’re after
losin’, Francey, and you’re kindly welcome to it. There it is--you’d a
right to be puttin’ it on before we’re landin’. The chain’s rael
silver--look, Francey.”
But, alas! he shrank away from her proffered gift as if it had been a
scaly serpent, and said hurriedly, with hardly veiled repugnance: “Ah
no, Hannah, I wouldn’t be takin’ it off you--I’ve no use for e’er such a
thing--keep it yourself.”
She withdrew her hand with a sinking heart, but she only half obeyed
him. For she suddenly turned from him and dropped watch and chain with
their golden gleams and silver overboard into the sea. Neither she nor
Francis felt that there was anything reckless or strange in the action.
The old man did not observe it.
But albeit sadly cast down by this repulse, Hannah would not yet face
despair. She still clung passionately to the hope that her sweetheart
was not going to fail her at this sore pinch, and leave her wandering
forsaken in a world haunted with mysterious horrors, new and old. So
presently she leaned forward to pluck him by the sleeve, and began
speaking again in an eager undertone: “Francey--Francey--I never touched
him--before God I never did--nor she either. He run agin it himself.
I’ll tell you the way it was. You see, that evenin’ after I come back
from me aunt, I was gettin’ a look at me poor father’s watch that me
mother kep’ for me, and so be chance she had it in her hand when that
awful man--Miles Roche--he come bawlin’ home wid dhrink taken, and when
he seen a sight of the watch he let a roar, and was for grabbin’ a hould
of it and wranchin’ it away from her. So to scare him off of her, I
caught up the big knife was lyin’ on the table, where we had it slicin’
the bacon for the supper--and wid that he come runnin’ at me, and reeled
up agin it--I never touched him. But down he dropped, and ne’er a word
out of him after that. It was no doin’ of ours, God knows this
minute--but we couldn’t tell what the people ’ud be sayin’ to it--we got
that afeard, and we thought maybe--But sure you seen--you seen what we
done wid it--there in Larry’s Horsepond--Francey, man, it’s the truth
I’m tellin’ you.”
“Ah, to be sure it is, Hannah, jewel,” said Francis, soothingly. Her
heart leaped up at the kind word, but when she looked into his face for
ratification of it, she saw that he was merely _frightened_--which was a
very great disappointment.
Just then old Micky, who had been looking over his shoulder as he rowed,
said: “There’s a quare clanjamfry of people waiting on the shore,
beckonin’ to us as if we was a ferry-boat, and they after bein’ left
behind. What would they be wantin’ wid us at all.”
A knot of the neighbours were, as he said, gathered on the shore,
evidently to meet the boat, and as they came within earshot, Hannah
heard her name called with rueful ejaculations. She had scarcely set
foot on the shingle when Mrs Maguire seized hold of her. “Och, Hannah,
girl dear, what took you out of it this mislucky day? And we sendin’
after you, high ways and low ways, and thinkin’ you was up at
Cochranes, but not a bit of you could we find--and now your poor
mother’s died on you, the crathur--may the Lord have mercy on her sowl.”
“Why--what ailed her?” Hannah said dully.
“Sure the sorra a one of us knows till the doctor comes. But not so long
ago I called in at your house to borry a pint-mug, and there she was
lyin’ asleep on the bed, and lookin’ none too well, I thought, nor wake
her I couldn’t. So I bid Mrs Tuohy come in and see her, and she was of
the opinion the crathur was as bad as could be, and we ought to be
gettin’ his Reverence to her and Dr Hamilton. And the two of us stopped
wid her while the lads was runnin’ wid the messages; but there was never
a sign of her wakin’. Dhramin’ somethin’ she was, that’s sure, for
whiles she’d be moanin’ and sayin’: ‘She’s goin’ to desthroy
us--desthroyin’ us she’ll be’--and other whiles she’d keep on sayin’:
‘We’ll never do it, Hannah, we’ll never do it.’ But after a bit she got
aisy and quite, and then, before we rightly knew anythin’, she was
gone--och, the crathur, God be good to her. Sure it was the Lord’s will,
Hannah, and nobody could ha’ tould it ’ud happen.”
The neighbours thought it natural enough that Hannah should run off
home “in a great distraction entirely.” But they were surprised to see
that Francis Conroy did not accompany her, and made no offers of
consolation or assistance. However, greater marvels awaited them. For
Hannah’s conduct that night was extraordinary indeed. Not a soul would
she have to sit up with her, or let inside the door. And on the morrow
she was no longer there. She must have slipped away during the brief
darkness of the summer night, and nobody at Clonalty ever heard of her
again. Of course the affair became warp and woof for a web of strange
stories, some of them so uncanny that when, after much delay, the Wades’
household effects were auctioned off for the benefit of Hannah’s old
aunt, who eventually claimed them, many of the neighbours averred that
they would be long sorry to have anything coming out of that house
inside theirs.
All this happened many years back, and Francis Conroy, who probably knew
more than anybody else, and yet not a great deal, about the matter, went
off soon afterwards to the States, without having given any full account
of his experiences on that sunny summer afternoon among the sand-hills
at the Wades’ old home. But he may have let a word fall here and there,
and rumours, all the more portentous for their vagueness, got about. To
this day they hover darkly round the lonely sand-pit; and in all
Clonalty--which numbers, perhaps, not much less than three score of
souls--you would not, I believe, find a man or woman, hardly even a
child, who would venture to linger towards dusk anywhere within sight of
Larry’s Horsepond.
[Illustration]
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE
To Dick O’Neill, sauntering about his neglected gardens, came a message
that “the sergint from the polis was above at the house, and would be
obligated if he might throuble his Honour for a minute,” a summons which
he reluctantly obeyed, apprehensive of hated magisterial business.
During his short residence at Portrosna Castle, two or three experiences
of it had befallen him, and on these occasions he had shown a strong
tendency to pay everybody’s fines himself, and to apologise impartially
all round, which could not but speedily establish his reputation as the
most popular J.P. on the commission. In fact, the local constabulary had
already agreed among themselves that young Mr O’Neill was too easy-going
altogether, and they’d do better in future to bring cases before Captain
Marsh, or Mr Digby-Johnstone at Crossmaclone, who’d a righter notion how
to deal with them lads. Sergeant McEvoy at the same time expressed some
wonder that “a gentleman who, it was understood, had travelled as much
abroad as any regiment on foreign service, shouldn’t have got more
world-learning like than to be took aback by every slieveen might come
blathering at him.” This morning, however, they had departed from their
rule, under stress of an urgent case and the absence or illness of the
more competent authorities; so that when Mr O’Neill entered the library,
he saw his forebodings fully justified. For the room seemed to be
crammed with people from the village, though in reality the throng was
thickened by the fact that all the domestic staff were lighting the fire
ostentatiously, in their anxiety to witness the official investigation
of a crime which had scandalised Portrosna.
It was nothing less enormous than that one Mattie M’Niffe, an elderly
woman of doubtful character, had been caught almost in the act of
purloining an article from the wash which Mrs Duffy had put out to
bleach in “the little grass slip alongside of the road forenint the
Widdy Quinn’s.” Almost, but unluckily not quite. For though Mattie had
been seen to scramble through a gap in the dyke at the one end of the
field, and to “lep like an ould froghopper on wires” down the bank at
the other, just before Mrs Duffy came out and noticed the theft, no
testimony was producible with respect to Mattie’s proceedings exactly in
the corner where the clothes were sunning themselves. And the stolen
shirt, which was picked up immediately afterwards on the roadside, had
been artfully dropped close to Mad Bell, as she sat under the lee of the
bank, “sortin’ through the bits of things she had in her ould basket,
the crathur.” This attempt to shift suspicion was in Portrosna’s eyes
the blackest feature of the affair.
“I wouldn’t have thought so bad of it, your Honour,” said Mrs Brennan,
“if she hadn’t done her best to be puttin’ the discredit on Mad Bell,
the poor little ould respectable diminted body, that niver laid a finger
on a pin’s point didn’t belong to her in all the years she’s comin’ and
goin’ among us.”
“And who’s offerin’ to pass a remark agin Mad Bell at all, at all? It’s
great ould talk the woman has,” said Mrs Autolycus, with half-abashed
defiance. She was a small shrivelled person, wearing the expression of a
magpie; and she now looked on wistfully, as that bird might have eyed a
rescued fork, while Mrs Duffy, the washer-woman, spread out the
recovered shirt over an Atlas and a Greek lexicon, upon the library
table, bewailing with an artist’s chagrin the destruction of her
handiwork.
“Och to goodness--sure I wouldn’t ha’ minded on’y nothin’ ’ud suit her
but one out of the finest set of all your Honour owns. And the ilegant
colour ’twas blachin’; the foam of the say was yalla to it--and to go
wisp it up like an ould dish-clout and sling it in the puddles--och,
look at it, all crases and mud. The loveliest bowl of could-water starch
I was after mixin’ for the front of it, wid a lump o’ sugar in it to
smoothen it, and left it to thicken on the windy ledge, while I’d step
out to fetch me things in--and there if this one wasn’t gone off of the
grass before me eyes! But, bedad, I well knew where it had travelled, as
soon as iver I beheld yon little-good-for leggin’ away down the road;
and I let a yell to me son Tim there, that was spreadin’ top-dressin’ in
the meadow, to be stoppin’ her. Troth, when she heard that she took off
wid herself for her life, till be luck she run full tilt into constable
Molloy comin’ round the corner. So here we’d have her grabbed as nate as
an ould mackerel in a creel, if she’s as slithery itself as a one of
them, except ’twas for the contrariness of Widdy Quinn, that’s set her
mind agin spakin’ a word--she that seen it took and nobody else. For
Katty Mahon noticed Mattie slinkin’ through the gap--and more betoken if
the girl had a grain of wit, she’d ha’ tould me, and I’d ha’ kep’ me eye
on the things--and Tim can swear he seen her tumblin’ down the bank,
wouldn’t you avic?”
“Ay would I,” averred Tim, “agin forty.”
“Musha then it’s yourself’s the great man whativer, Tim Duffy; fit to
swear the hind leg off of a dog any day,” remarked Mattie, with
sarcastic effrontery.
“And if he would, there’s plenty besides him would be ready enough to
swear agin any M’Niffe that iver walked,” retorted Mrs Duffy, “for sorra
a one of the lot of them you could trust the len’th of your little
finger. Och, bejabers, niver a mother’s son of them yet but was as full
of villainy as he could stick together. Wasn’t there her brother up at
Cloughdrum went be the name of Look-out M’Niffe, because the people
would be biddin’ one another look out they weren’t robbed, wheniver they
seen the ould miscreant slingein’ their way? Ah, sure, and didn’t
O’Farrell below say he’d liefer see his haggard black wid rats than
have one of them thievin’ permiscuous about his place?”
“He said right, ma’am. And the trick herself played me the time I was
stookawn enough to loan her me----”
Here the sound of a shrill voice came in a waft, as if through a door
opened at some distance. It seemed to be alternately using strong
language, and breaking into skirls of song.
“That’s poor Mad Bell herself,” said some one explanatorily. “Constable
Long’s keepin’ her pacified at the hall-door, the crathur. She’s waitin’
to take Mrs M’Niffe’s life when she comes out; she said she’d knock
saucepans out of her for thryin’ to do her that bad turn; ay did she,
and small blame to her. Begorrah, if Mad Bell was as big as she’s
little, it’s long sorry I’d be to get contendin’ wid her; for she’s a
terrible wicked woman sometimes, when she’s set a-goin’; and bad cess to
them that sets her, the misfortnit bein’.”
“I call it rael outrageous and scandeelious of Widdy Quinn to be that
unmannerly about comin’ up along wid us,” protested Mrs Duffy, “and
lettin’ on be this and be that she niver seen a sight, as if Mattie
there was aught to her. And me that’s obliged her many a time, so I
have. And she knowin’ right well ’tis on’y the shed-wall and the end of
the stack hindered me of seein’ the ould rogue at her thievin’ wid me
own eyes, so as I might be swearin’ informations meself, and no thanks
to anybody. But sure maybe his Honour might conthrive to make her spake
out conformable, and tell the truth what she seen. And it his Honour’s
own grand shirt that was widin an ames ace of goin’ to loss.”
His Honour, even thus incited, recoiled from the task of reducing the
Widdy Quinn to conformity, and suggested that she possibly had seen
nothing after all.
“Och, musha, divil a fear of that! Sure how would she help seein’, if
she’d her eyes shut, wid her open door star-gazin’ right into the bit of
green? And, faix, there’s divil a much goin’ the road that the Widdy
Quinn doesn’t see if she so plases. Saints above, if a little ould
weevil went aisy be her door on its stockin’ feet, it’s lookin’ out
she’d be to spy what was passin’. Ay, she seen right enough; but the
fact of the matter is, it’s quare and setup she’s been iver since the
notice the Quality took of her what little while they were here; them
that your honour put out of it, or I’d a right to say your Honour’s
father--Heaven be his bed--a couple o’ year back, and a good job too,
for th’ ould Gineral was an ugly-tempered man. Often we would be sayin’
Miss Una was to be pitied wid him, for nobody had a word agin her, the
quite, soft-spoken young lady. Howsome’er, she’d a great opinion
entirely of the Widdy Quinn; times and agin she’d be down to her wid
sugar and tay. And now since they’re quit, what wid lavin’ her the
mindin’ of her baste, and writin’ her letters continyal----”
“Miss Ellis writes?”
“Bedad, yis, your Honour, as reg’lar as the month comes round. And
unless it’s that has cocked the Widdy up wid the idea she’s a great one,
I dunno what else the rason is. But, anyway, I’d have her to know she’s
no call to be disobligin’ dacint neighbours, and colloguin’ wid thieves
and vagabones.”
Mrs M’Niffe ducked an ironical curtsey, and said: “Thank ’ee kindly,
ma’am.”
“And wid them that has the imperence of a throop of horse-dragoons,”
went on Mrs Duffy, modulating abruptly into a key of shriller
exasperation, “and that knows better than any one could be tellin’ them
what went wid the patchwork quilt me sisther-in-law was at the loss of
last Easter; and that this day owns a top-knotty hen belongs to them be
rights as much as the crows in the sky.”
When evidence of this very discursive nature is gone into thoroughly,
proceedings take their time. A long time it seemed to Mr O’Neill before
he was able to arrive, by devious ways, at the regretful conclusion
that, considering the vexatious flaw in the evidence caused by the Widdy
Quinn’s contrariness, and the complications which might arise from Mad
Bell’s entanglement in the affair, the charge against Mattie M’Niffe
must be dismissed. Whereupon the party dispersed, Mattie, perkily
triumphant, being smuggled out by back ways, to frustrate Mad Bell’s
purpose of “doin’ murther on” her wily defamer, a sequel which duty
rather than inclination urged their neighbours to forbid.
Dick was thus at liberty again, but he reverted to his sauntering with a
shadow on his mood. His visitor’s references to “the Quality who had
been put out of it” had jarred a memory aching-ripe ever since, on his
return from a long tour two or three years ago, he had found his family
enmeshed in a lawsuit with their kinsman, General Ellis, then
provisionally in possession of Portrosna Castle, but presently to be
ousted by judicial decree. For sundry reasons Dick had much deplored
this augmentation of his patrimony, but his disregarded protests could
not turn the law from its course, which ran remorselessly as the share
of a steam-plough through growths of ancient amity and intimacy, leaving
the furrow behind it of a family feud, that any regrets of his seemed
powerless to efface. His father’s death, a year back, had not
appreciably altered the situation, which Dick now found so
unsatisfactory a theme for reflections that he determined to shake off
his depressing thoughts by taking a walk through the village.
The February afternoon was flighty and tricky, prone to lay booby-traps
with sudden down-pelting showers for any wayfarer who walked without
regard to the disposition of the swiftly shifting cloud-masses over his
head. Dick did so, and had just passed along the main street, when all
the lights twinkling in the rippled puddles went out abruptly beneath a
sliding black shadow, which straightway hissed and hummed with drops
blown aslant. Now, Dick O’Neill was so constituted that from no ordinary
convulsion of nature would he seek refuge voluntarily in a stranger
dwelling, be it high or low. But on this occasion the matter was taken
out of his hands; for the same gust that brought the rain whisked his
hat off his head, and wheeled it in at the door of the nearest cabin,
whither he was fain to pursue.
“Ah, then! step inside, your Honour--step in out of the teems of rain,”
said the mistress of the house, Widdy Quinn, whose white apron gleamed
in the dusky little entry where she stood, a dark-eyed woman, with an
anxious expression and a comeliness wearing somewhat smoke-dried.
Dick would most likely have declined the invitation had he been in
possession of his headgear; but that was in the hands of the Widdy, who
continued to wipe it vigorously with her apron’s end, and to ask for it
seemed rather more difficult than to step in. Therefore, following the
line of least resistance, he stooped into the turf-scented room, where
the corners were vaguely rounded off with blue haze, and the crockery on
the dresser caught shimmering flushes from the crumbling red
hearth-glow, and a lank geranium stalk was dying in a jampot against the
meagre pane.
“Arrah now, bad manners to you, wouldn’t you be stirrin’ to lave the
gentleman a sate?” said Widdy Quinn, apparently to somebody sitting in
the high-backed chair beside the fire; but she had to add joggles and
pokes to her remonstrance before its occupant emerged.
To Dick’s relief it was only an unusually large grey cat, which,
descending with a sullen flop, stretched itself inordinately, and then
went and ostentatiously sharpened its claws on the leg of the table.
“Sure, it’s thinkin’ to terrify us you are, bedad,” said Widdy Quinn.
“Sit you down, sir, and don’t let on to notice. That’s the thrick it has
if iver I do aught to disoblige it: off it takes, and puts a polish on
its ould croobeens, as much as to say it’s gettin’ itself ready to reive
all before it. Not that ’twould raise hand or foot agin anybody, the
crathur, all the while. Sure you wouldn’t, then, would you, ould
Triptolemus?”
“Triptolemus?” repeated Dick, pricking up his ears. “Is that what you
call him? Rather a queer name for a cat; but I happen to know of
another called so.”
“Well, your Honour, ’twas the name Miss Una had for hers,” said the
Widdy, with obvious embarrassment.
“And is that her--Miss Ellis’s--cat?”
“Well, your Honour, she left me the mindin’ of him when she quit: she
did so; that’s the truth I’m tellin’ you--and a quare name it was till
you got used to it--Triptolemus--och, yis, that’s what I said sure
enough--unless ’twas somethin’ diff’rint be mistake.” The Widdy was
growing more and more flurried and guilty in manner; to judge by it you
might have taken poor Dick for a bullying counsel on the other side. So
great, in fact, was her discomposure that, having finished wiping the
mud off his hat, she went and hung it up on the corner of the dresser,
instead of restoring it to him. But she turned round after this aimless
action with a purpose suddenly full grown.
“Troth, sir, I’ll tell you the whole of the matter,” she said, “faix
will I, for on me conscience I’ll keep it blackenin’ no longer. And be
the same token it’s maybe the nearest I can go to tellin’ Miss Una
herself, for Quality’s in a manner all the one thing; and many’s the
time she’s sat in that same chair, when she’d be bringing me the sugar
and tay. The more ould reprobate I to go chatin’ her, and the crathur
lyin’ underground this two year---- Och to goodness, no, sir, not Miss
Una at all at all; she’s well and hearty, glory be to God--but the
mislucky ould cat. Be sittin’ down agin, your Honour, for the rain’s
outrageous, and I’ll tell you the way of it all.
“Sure she had the baste wid her when first she came to the Castle, and a
hape she considhered of him. They say some one had brought him home to
her from the inds of the earth: an Angory they called him I believe, but
for aught I could see he was just the very moral of me own Minnie that’s
sittin’ over there, may goodness forgive me, lookin’ as bitter as sut
for bein’ put out of the chair. A thrifle longer-haired he might be, and
had a sort of fulness on him round the neck, but nothin’ much to notice,
and a quare notion he had that he wouldn’t dhrink his milk could, except
’twas warmed up wid a sup of hot wather through it; and he might have a
few more fantigues I disremember. Howsome’er I’m tould th’ ould Gineral
niver could abide the thoughts of the baste, whativer the rason might
be” (Dick believed he could surmise), “and if he met wid it comin’ along
the passages, he’d jump and clap his hands, and let yells at it, till he
had it skytin’ about distracted like a rabbit that’s lost its houle. And
Mick Denny, that helped the footman, says that a couple of days afore
they quit, the Master says at dinner: ‘And, mind you, _that brute’s_ not
comin’ along wid us,’ sez he. ‘And what will I do wid him then at all?’
sez Miss Una. ‘Och, sling it in the pond, or wheriver else you plase,’
sez he, ‘but wid a blessin’ we’ll be shut of it anyway.’
“So the next day Miss Una come here, wid the two eyes of her cried out
of her head, the crathur, to ax me would I take and keep the bastie for
her, and a couple of shillins a week I’d be ped for it. And I tould her
I would and welcome, and nary the shillins I’d look after, for proud I’d
be to have him for company to me and Minnie; and sorra a lie was in it,
for I would so. But she said ’twould be a sort of pleasure to her to pay
for his board and lodgin’, and she’d send it every month, and then I’d a
right to scrawm her a line to say what way he was. So she let the baste
out of the covered basket, and down she knelt on the floor to unbuckle
a grand red leather collar he had on him wid little silver conthrivances
shinin’ all over it ilegant. ‘Sure you’re doin’ right, Miss Una jewel,’
sez I to her, ‘to not be lavin’ that fine little affair on him here,
where the smoke and dirt ’ud on’y ruinate it. ’Tis too good entirely for
us,’ sez I.
“‘’Deed then, Mrs Quinn,’ sez she, ‘niver a bit too good it is at all,
but ’twas an ould friend gave it to me,’ sez she, and she turnin’ as
pink as me spark of geranium-blossom there, the crathur, thinkin’ she’d
done somethin’ uncivil like, ‘a _very_ ould friend,’ sez she, ‘and
that’s why I’d liefer keep it. But I’ll send you down some bright
ribbons for collars,’ sez she, ‘to-morra.’ And sure enough she
remembered to send down some len’ths of the beautifullest-coloured
ribbons I ever witnessed, unless it might be in a rainbow. Bedad, sir,
there’s the butt end of a one archin’ itself agin the door, so the
shower’s apt to be clearin’. But it’s little she thought, or I either,
that they’d be in a manner the death of the poor thing the way it
happint.
“For it might be a week after they’d quit, a letter come for me from
Miss Una wid an order to pay for Triptolemus a month beforehand; ten
shillins it was, that came as near as anythin’ to fluttherin’ up the
chimney on me, and I openin’ the cover in me flurry at the fire. And
somehow the notion took me that the least I could do was to put a new
collar on him, so I cut him a piece of the green ribbon, and tied it on
him in the grandest big bow. Saints alive, but the baste was sot up and
consaited over it! He wouldn’t look the way one of us was, but out of
the house he trapesed, to show himself off belike. You’d mind the figure
of him yit, if you’d seen him stompin’ slow across the street there,
wid his tail like a church steeple, and liftin’ up his ould feet as
if he was steppin’ over hot pitaties. But presently I heard
_wurra-wurra-wurra-woof-oof_ settin’ up outside, that would be Barney
Keogh’s rough terrier dog, the greatest little divil after huntin’ cats;
howane’er I niver thought to mind, because I well knew that any cat wid
four legs to it had nothin’ to do but skyte handy up th’ ould
thorn-bush, and defy the nation. But when the _wurra-wurrain’_ seemed
goin’ on onnatural, out I run--and och, murdher alive, if the poor
unlucky baste hadn’t slipped a crooky thorn-twig under his collar, that
was a thrifle loose on him, and there he stuck caught fast, till the
little rogue of a dog had got a woeful grip of him be the scruff of the
neck, and was after givin’ him a shake that shook the life clane out of
him. Kilt dead he was afore iver I could part them. Och now, your
Honour, that was a rael unchancy thing to go happen a body; and the
whole botheration of it came sloppin’ through me mind, like spilt wather
when it’s widenin’ itself over the floor. For directly I got
considherin’ how I’d have to be writin’ to tell Miss Una desthruction
was done on her baste, and how she’d be frettin’ after him, and belike
thinkin’ I’d took no heed to him; and how I’d a right to be sendin’ back
the ten-shillin’ order, and ne’er another one comin’, and I countin’ on
it towards Ray’s bill, and the pitaties middlin’, and pigs goin’ low----
“And then somehow the divilmint come all of a suddint into me head, and
the first thing I knew I’d whipped the green ribbon off of poor ould
Triptolemus, and clapped it on to Minnie there, and I’d got the
fire-shovel to scrape out a buryin’-hole under the hedge, and all the
while I was sayin’ to meself, same as if I was at me beads, ‘It’s
Minnie’s kilt--it’s Minnie’s kilt--it’s Minnie’s kilt,’ and ivery sowl
that come along the road I’d let a bawl to that Keogh’s dog was after
murdherin’ me ould Minnie on me. Begorrah, if I bawled the same big lie
once that day, I bawled it twinty times; but if I’d known rightly the
tormint ’twould be to me, I’d niver ha’ let it off me tongue. For
ochone, your Honour, the way one thing grows out of another does be
terrific. Sure the very next day I had to be gettin’ Foxy Doran’s lad to
do a letter for me to poor Miss Una, tellin’ her Triptolemus was keepin’
finely, and I wondherin’ to meself that the ink didn’t dhry into sut in
his pen wid the inventions I was biddin’ him write--and thankin’ her
kindly for the order I was as good as stealin’ off of her. So now your
Honour can persaive the rason why I couldn’t be spakin’ agin poor Mattie
M’Niffe this mornin’, no matter what I may ha’ seen her doin’. How’d I
have the face, and I thievin’ away reg’lar this two year, and she on’y
pickin’ up an odd thrifle now and agin? Mrs Duffy did be castin’ it up
to me that I was colloguin’ wid the likes of such a notorious ould
good-for-nought; and thinks I to meself, ‘Sure if I do so, sorra the
hap’orth better I am, or worse, if there’s any differ between us.’ It’s
heart-scalded I am,” quoth Widdy Quinn, so piteously that Dick plunged
hurriedly into an attempt to set matters in a pleasanter light.
“Oh, of course you were reluctant to vex Miss Una with the bad news;
nobody could blame you for that.”
“Nary the use there’s in that,” said the Widdy, disconsolately. “Thried
it I have often, but the more I’d let on ’twas Miss Una’s frettin’ I did
be mindin’, the more sartin-sure I’d get that niver a thraneen I cared
about her frettin’, or anythin’ else except the shillins. And the same
way I kep’ on thinkin’ to persuade meself ’twas Minnie got kilt after
all--niver a bit of me could. D’ye see the white forepaw she has on her,
your Honour? That’s the most of the differ there was between her and
Triptolemus; and it seemed to me wheniver I’d get anywhere’s near mixin’
the two of them up in me mind, out she’d cock her ould fut, same as if
she was callin’ me a liar to me face. I got to hate the sight of it. Or
she’d come and rub her head agin’ me, and I talkin’ to any of the
neighbours, till they’d be passin’ the remark that the baste was grown
as friendly wid me as if I’d had it as long as me own poor Minnie; and
then, goodness forgive me, I’d wish she was choked. Ay, often enough I
do be wishin’ she’d just die away wid herself, and lave me a chanst to
quit the sin off of me conscience, for all she’s been the greatest
company to me these ten year. Sure of an evenin’ when she’ll be rowled
up forenint me in the chair, blinkin’ her two eyes at me, and carryin’
on like an ould cushion wid a creak in it, I do whiles git past me
patience, and ‘Bad luck to you then,’ I’ll say, ‘sittin’ cocked up there
in contintment, purrin’ and purrin’, and damnin’ me sowl.’ ’Twas on’y
th’ other night the notion came into me head I’d ax Constable Long for
the loan of a bit of the quare poison stuff they got at the barracks for
slaughtherin’ the rats. Stiffened them up it did, I heard tell, like so
many ould shoes. For if once I’d Minnie stiffened, there’d be an end of
writin’ lies and thievin’ ten-shillinses for good and all. But, och, I
hadn’t the heart to go do such a thing, and that’s a fac’. More-betoken,
wheniver I take any account considherate of the crool idees I’m gettin’
to have in me mind, it’s terrified in a way I do be, for sez I to
meself: ‘What sort of ould divil am I comin’ to at all? It’s apt I am to
be doin’ murdher on some unlucky bosthoon of a human crathur, let alone
an innicent brute-baste, afore I rightly know what I’m at.
“Many’s the time I’ve had it on the furthest end of me tongue to be
tellin’ the whole consarn to his Riverence at confession. But then I
know right well the first thing he’d bid me would be to lave off the
lyin’ and desaivin’, and stop them orders a-comin’; and whatever he’d
say I couldn’t go agin for me life; so tellin’ him would be all the same
thing as openin’ a door you couldn’t shut to: and niver a word I’ve let
on. And himself not long since offerin’ to give me a character to the
new agint for an honest respectable tinant! Troth, if it’s meself’s not
the deceptionable ould haythen, get me one. And dozens of times I’d me
mind made up strong that anyhow niver a penny more comin’ that road
would I touch to be spendin’ it. Keepin’ it safe in me ould glass-lidded
box I’d be, and perhaps sendin’ it back cliver and clane, as I’d on’y a
right, to Miss Una one of these days. But musha goodness help us, what
wid this thing and the other, when the starvation does be in it--and the
poor crathurs borryin’ loans--and meself took bad now and agin--the end
of it was the order’d slip out of the box agin afore I’d fairly clapped
down the lid on top of it. And changed at the post office ’twould be,
your Honour; and onst it was broke, sure you might as well thry to hould
a crumbled clod of clay a horse is after settin’ his fut on, in your
hand, as think to be keepin’ it. And the same way ’twill be wid the one
come yisterday. A bit late it come, because of Miss Una bein’ laid up
this long while, she sez, wid a could--wondherin’ she was, the crathur,
whether Triptolemus remimbered her yit--and the ould Gineral took rael
mortal bad on her now--and I to be chatin’ her in the middle of her
misfortins----”
“By Jove!” said Dick, diving suddenly out of his chair, which was so
constructed that it could be quitted only by a vigorous header, “can you
tell me where she is at present?--where she writes from?”
The mere aspect of the note which Widdy Quinn produced from her
glass-lidded box made Dick feel vaguely as if he had received a bit of
disquieting information. It was dated from a street in the town of
Galway, and its few hurried lines were written palely upon a sheet of
thin limp paper, such as might be used by some struggling retailer, fain
to minimise his trade expenses. “Look here, Mrs Quinn,” he said, when
he had read it through several times, “if you’ll leave the matter to me,
I think I could explain it to Miss Una,--she’s my cousin, and I used to
know her very well. It might, perhaps, be a mistake to tell her just
now, when she’s so uneasy about her father, since she seems to have
thought a great deal of the beast--by Jove she does. I daresay I could
get her another from the same fellow. But anyhow, I’ll see what’s best
to be done.”
“The blessin’ of God be on your Honour, then,” said the Widdy with
fervour, “for the load ’twould take off of me ould conscience couldn’t
be tould in speech.”
As she watched him splash down the glistering roadway with the note in
his pocket, the anxious pucker into which an obliquely dazzling ray
gathered her countenance, really belied a sense of relief such as
follows the transference of some hopelessly bungled-over business to a
person who you feel indefinitely confident will somehow make a good job
of it for you. That sense would no doubt have strengthened in her, had
she known how promptly and energetically Dick acted under his new
responsibility. As a matter-of-fact, he that evening posted a long
letter to Galway, and followed to the same address at an early hour on
the next morning.
About a fortnight afterwards, Mrs Duffy called on Mrs Quinn. The Widdy
was glad of it, for the neighbours had all been more or less stiff with
her since the affair of the stolen shirt. Hence the effusiveness of her
welcome was such that Mrs Duffy’s manners broke down so far as to ignore
more than one “And what way’s the childer?” and “What news do you be
gettin’ from Moyglish this long while back?” in her impatience to arrive
at her own “Did you hear tell who’s comin’ home to the Castle?”
“Niver a tell I heard of comin’ or goin’, forby I know Mr O’Neill’s took
off wid him to Galway the week afore last.”
“Sure Brian M’Clusky, that went wid him, come home this mornin’, and
brought word there’s a match made between his Honour himself and Miss
Una, and the weddin’-day fixed and all. Quite as quite ’tis to be,
because th’ ould Gineral’s had a stroke, and is broke entirely to what
he was. Brian would scarce ha’ known him, he’s that failed, on’y some
one let the door slam, and then ’twas all the ‘blamed blunderin’
brutes,’ and ‘confounded mischievous ijjits’ wid him, just the same as
iver. But two it takes to help him across the room.”
“Well, now, that’s a pity,” said Widdy Quinn sympathetically; “and
himself that was always a fine--” she cast about for an appropriate
adjective--“a fine free-spoken gentleman.”
“It’s quare altogether he’s got, Brian sez. Took up wid the idee, he
has, that it’s he owns the Castle and all, and the others do be
humourin’ him, and lettin’ on ’tis the way he thinks. And he’s comin’
here to live when Miss Una’s married, that’s to be in next to no time.
None too well, Brian sez, she looked. Sure, she’ll ha’ fretted about the
Gineral. But Mr O’Neill was in great spirits whatever. Some message
there was he called after Brian to be givin’ you--that you were to be
mindin’ the cat till Miss Una’d come for it--sure, he’ll tell you
himself. Belike she’ll be takin’ it back.”
“Belike will she,” said Mrs Quinn evasively.
But when she was alone, she stood for a while at her door in rueful
contemplation of the pseudo-Triptolemus, who sat enjoying the March
sunshine under the writhen black boughs and crimped green buds of the
thorn-bush.
“’Twill be a sort of judgment on me,” she mused, “if Miss Una takes her
away in the misbelief ’tis raelly himself; for ’tis lonesome I’d be
widout the little ould crathur. But I scarce know whether I’d liefer she
done that, or heard tell of the villainy I’m after conthrivin’ on her.
Sure, anyway, she’ll be apt now to set less store be cats. To think of
her takin’ up wid his Honour here; but, bedad, I might ha’ made a guess
after seein’ the caper he cut when he misconsthrued me to say somethin’
had happint Miss Una. Troth, be the lep he gave in his chair, I thought
a could dhrip off the roof must ha’ caught him in the back of his neck.
Och, but I’m the schemin’ ould sinner! Howsome’er, sorra a penny of the
last money of hers have I touched; and don’t intind. But all the while I
wouldn’t wondher if that’s on’y just because I’m after hearin’ she’s
comin’ back, and she so charitable to a body, I’m apt to not be so hard
set. Bedad, now, there’s no gittin’ to the end of the divilment does be
in one’s mind; and it’s maybe no use thryin’. ’Tis the same way as when
there’s a sidiment of turf-mould at the bottom of your bucket of wather.
If you keep stirrin’ it up, ’twill bide ugly and black on you; but if
you let it stand aisy and settle itself for a while, you’ll be able to
prisently pour it off as clane as you plase.”
This piece of natural philosophy may have been suggested to the Widdy by
a tin pan of water, which was flashing in the sun a few paces from her
door. Just then a water-wagtail lit daintily on the rim, a most
unsubstantial-looking “smal fowle,” hardly worth the attention, one
would have supposed, of any pot-hunter. Minnie, however, was of a
different opinion, and uncoiled herself from her compact fur roll for a
trailing crawl and a darting pounce, by which she gained nothing but two
wet paws, as the wagtail took unscathed flight in airy undulations, with
a derisive chirrup at every dip.
“Bad manners to you, Minnie,” said the Widdy: “can’t you let grabbin’
after the little birds alone? Musha, good gracious! I’m thinkin’ the two
of us is scarce anythin’ better than a pair of ould rapscallions. And,
bedad, we put our fut in it now and agin. But sure, if we niver done
worse, we might be right enough yit.”
A sentiment which, under the circumstances, leads us to infer that the
fable rather than its moral was the Widdy Quinn’s forte.
A PROVIDENT PERSON
Mac Barry said that he wished he had a steam-yacht, a hunter, a rifle,
and a pound; if he had those, he wouldn’t want anything else. A pound
was the largest sum that the financial experiences of nearly six years
enabled him to imagine himself as owning, and he considered that it
would be quite adequate to the maintenance of the rifle, the hunter, and
the steam-yacht. His cousin Ethel, who was two years older, and inclined
to be consequential, said that some people had _more_ than a pound; she
believed her papa had a hundred a year, and she hoped she would too,
when she was grown up. Whereupon her sister Frances, Mac’s contemporary,
solemnly said: “But when we’re growed up, perhaps we’ll all be old
beggar-men and beggar-women.” A tramp, lately seen passing the window,
had no doubt suggested the mention of this possibility, which was to Mac
a new and startling idea.
[Illustration]
Ethel said confidently: “What nonsense; it’s only poor people who are
beggars, not people like us.” But Frances replied, “Maybe they were like
us when they were little; and then they growed and growed and growed
into old beggars. I wonder if we will. It won’t be very nice.” Frances’s
grey eyes were so large and cloudily dark that they would have looked
melancholy, even if she had been taking a cheerful view of things, which
she seldom did. “I hope I won’t be the sort that is lame, and has big
bags,” she said; “they’re the nastiest of all.”
These speculations were taking place towards the end of luncheon at
Rathbawn Castle, where Mac Barry and his cousins, and their respective
parents, were spending part of the summer on a visit to his grandfather,
Lord Ballyduff. The subject was changed at this point by Frances’s
mother asking Mac whether he would like to drive with her that
afternoon, when she went to see Mrs Fletcher at Manor Vaughan. He said,
“The knees of me knickerbockers is too dirty to go anywhere in the
carriage, thank God!”
“My dear Mac,” said his Aunt Marjory, “you really should not use such
expressions.”
“_Well_,” said Mac, “I’m sure I’m a great deal thankfuller for being too
dirty to go visiting people, than for having me dinner--luncheon, I
mean. I went with Lil sometimes, and they squawked like hens, and gave
one bad little biscuits with caraway seeds in them, at tea. I didn’t
want anything, but they can’t ever let a person alone, and I’d rather
stay at home, thanks.”
So Mac, having successfully resisted this distasteful entertainment, it
was settled that the little girls should go, and he resumed his
meditations upon the future and its possibilities. The particular one
spoken of by Frances had taken rather a hold on his mind, being both
novel and unpleasant. He had never formed any theory about the origin of
old beggar men, and he now could think of no facts that struck him as
satisfactorily inconsistent with their evolution out of a person like
himself. Ethel’s argument did not reassure him in the least, because he
thought very poorly of her sense. Just at that moment she was teasing
her mother to let her put on a new frock, which seemed to him
exceedingly despicable folly. But he was not disposed to agree with
Frances in accepting the possibility as an inevitable fate; he would
rather look upon it as a peril to be guarded against. And for this
reason he thought he would, in the first place, consult any people upon
whose judgment he at all relied, as to whether they believed it to be
really impending. The number of these persons was small, the more so
because his father and mother had both gone away for a few days;
however, he presently found his Uncle Herbert writing in the library,
and jogged his elbow as a preliminary to a conversation. This caused a
blot on Colonel Barry’s letter, and perhaps on the record of his
language for the day, but Mac said with a sort of bland surprise, “By
Jove, that’s a big black one. But you must have had a great deal too
much ink in your pen, you know. You needn’t prod it down to the bottom
of the bottle every time, as if you were fishing with it.”
“Well, what do you want?” inquired the ungrateful recipient of this good
advice.
“Look here,” said Mac, “would you think that a person like me would be
an old beggar-man when he growed quite up?”
Colonel Barry had just been looking over a highly unsatisfactory
account, and what with that and the blot, felt pessimistic about things
in general. “Upon my word,” he said, “as far as I can see, it’s
beginning to look as if we were all uncommonly likely to come to that
one of these fine days. But run off, young man, for I’m busy.”
“I should have thought,” said Mac, moving towards the door, elaborately
at his leisure, “that _you_ were too old to grow into anything else
ever. And I _am_ going out, as it happens, to speak to young
O’Sullivan.”
Mac found young O’Sullivan, who was rather a crony of his, raking gravel
not far from the house. It did not accord with his sense of the fitness
of things to consult this friend point-blank about his own future
prospects, and he therefore said, after a while, with a view to leading
up: “Do you think, Dan, that you’ll ever grow into an old beggar? I
s’pose you’d rather not--a raggety old beggar-man, you know.”
But young O’Sullivan replied curtly: “’Deed then, sir, I never heard
tell of any of me name but was very dacint, respectable people. I dunno
what talk you have about beggars.” And collecting his rake, hoe, and
brush into a bunch, he dumped them down across his wheelbarrow, and
trundled it huffily into a shrubbery walk.
This source of information being thus prematurely stopped, Mac had begun
to wonder why young O’Sullivan went off in such a hurry, when he saw
coming along the avenue the same old man who had passed by the window at
luncheon, and who since then had been visiting the regions of the
kitchen. He seemed to be a very typical beggar-man, with a
mysterious-looking leathern wallet, a long beard, and garments that
flapped in large square tatters; and it struck Mac that here was a
favourable opportunity for obtaining knowledge from the fountain-head.
Consequently he said in reply to the new-comer’s salutation: “I can’t
assist anybody, because I’ve left all my money upstairs in a drawer that
locks. What used you to do before you began to walk about?” This
appeared to him the most delicate way of describing the other’s
profession. “Hadn’t you ever any money of your own? Or had you as much
as a florin and a sixpence, and a silver mug belonging to you any time,
only then you growed up different?”
Old Joe Gafney had never been endowed with great conversational gifts,
and was not now capable of much beyond his professional litanies, but
Mac’s question chanced to touch a theme upon which he still always
waxed eloquent, and he said: “Is it money? Och, begor, sir, it’s the
grand little bagful I had saved up, that I kep’ unbeknownst under the
hearthstone at home, till one day me rogue of a wife she ups and robs me
of it, and I away at Dunardmore Fair. On’y for her doin’ that on me, the
divil a fut ’ud I ever ha’ took to thrampin’ the road. Plenty I had
saved. Ah now, sir, wasn’t she the quare thief of the world to go rob me
that way?”
The appeal somewhat embarrassed Mac, to whom it seemed unmannerly either
to controvert or endorse this opinion of Mrs Old-Beggarman. As for the
bag, it had never indeed existed save in Joe’s imagination; but he
believed quite as firmly in it as in the hot sun shining on his
bewildered old head, and he maundered on volubly, until at last he
abruptly broke off, and began to shuffle along with a whining request
that a poor man might be relieved for the love of God.
“Oh, it’s the grand-governor,” said Mac, rather glad to see his
grandfather approaching. Lord Ballyduff relieved all the parties
concerned by means of a penny, and Mac joined him on his stroll. The
prospect of growing into an old beggar-man had somehow become gloomier
in Mac’s eyes during this interview, and now looked so ugly that he did
not like to speak of it to anybody. He was meditating deeply upon plans
of precaution--a hoard of savings might, apparently, be efficacious, if
inaccessible to one’s wife--and when Lord Ballyduff said: “What were you
talking to that old fellow about?” he waved the question away with a
preoccupied, “Oh, business--business, that you couldn’t possibubly
understand.”
His grandfather was accustomed to such rebuffs, and they continued their
walk without any more interruptions. They were going to the haggard,
where a new rick was being built up in fragrant bundles under its shiny
zinc hood. Outside the broad-leaved doors Lord Ballyduff threw away the
end of his cigar, and carefully stamped out the red spark with his heel.
“It wouldn’t do to have a flare-up in there,” he said.
“What would you do if you burnt it all up?” said Mac.
“Well, for one thing,” said Lord Ballyduff, “the Insurance Company would
have to pay me five hundred pounds.”
“For burning up all that hay?” said Mac with interest. “Then why on
earth don’t you? Would they pay all the same if it was me burnt it up?
Yes, did you say? When you speak so indistinctually, you make a person
quite deaf.” It seemed to Mac that here was a very easy and enjoyable
mode of securing a provision against an indigent old age, and the idea
charmed him so much that his blue eyes gleamed in his small sun-browned
face. “How many is five hundred?” he said.
“Oh--more than you’d know what to do with, at anyrate,” said his
grandfather.
“Wouldn’t I just?” said Mac. “Well enough I’d know. I’d keep it in the
same place with me cartridges. I should think one’s wife would be afraid
to go meddling with it then. When ladies and girls see a person looking
at a gun or anything, they all say: ‘_Oh yawpy, yawpy--don’t touch
it--it’s very dangerous_’--great idiots. But I declare there’s Mrs Knox
at the gate. If she’s going to John Loughlin’s, I’m going with her to
see the new calf,” and he ran off with his mind for the time being
diverted from provident cares.
Mrs Knox, housekeeper at the Castle, was a sister of John Loughlin, who
held a goodish little bit of land over towards Alanmore, and had long
been wondered at by neighbouring farmers for his persistence in keeping
it under meadow year after year, till some of the fields, they said,
were got that thick with moss, you might think he was after laying it
down like a carpet at so much a yard. He had a right to plough them all
up, and not have e’er a haycock sitting in a one of them for the next
half dozen years. But John Loughlin continued to disregard their advice,
and with the exception of a field or so of oats--which he was suspected
of growing only for the sake of the thatching straw--had every rood of
his holding waving with the long grass as sure as June came round. His
haggard was a sight to be seen. It contained the accumulations of many a
season, for grudgingly and of necessity did he consume or sell any part
of his garnered crop. In the sheltered corner, against a screen of tall
elms, rose up the long-ridged ricks “with wedge sublime,” flanked by
sharp-peaked pikes like gigantic peg-tops, all in capes of golden straw
surmounting their soft umbers and greys. One small rick of very old
clover hay which had been cut in smooth slices, looked as close and dark
in grain as a brown loaf. To pace up and down at the end of the
paddock, whence he had a good view of their array, was his favourite
recreation, and he indulged in it for some time on that brilliant July
afternoon, while his sister and Mac were making their way towards him
over the sunny fields. The view was even more than usually interesting
to him just then, because the joy of building a new rick would so soon
begin. All his meadows were down, and some of them up again in large
cock, ready to be drawn in: the others were turning themselves into hay
under the hot sunshine, with the least possible demand for labour. There
would be, he calculated, barely room for one more big rick at the
north-west angle of the walls. That would fill the haggard chock-full,
not another ton would it hold. However, when Grace married Ned
Lawlor--and the wedding might take place before next Shrove-tide--two
ricks must go for her dowry, which would, alas, make some room. It said
a very great deal for the sincerity of John’s feelings towards his
granddaughter that he could endure to anticipate such a woeful gap. He
had for a long while past been reconciling himself to the prospect, and
commonly wound up his self-conflict with the reflection: “Ah well, sure
it’s the best thing I can do for the crathur, and that’s one good
comfort anyway. _She’ll_ be as plased and content as anything at all
events.”
Therefore the contrariness of things, and the differences in people’s
points of view, are clearly exemplified by the fact that all the while
Grace was looking askance upon his beloved haggard, and could not bear
the thoughts of Edward Lawlor. This Grace was the eldest child of his
favourite daughter, who had been afflicted by matrimony with a
struggling husband and a long family. To diminish those burdens he had
some years before adopted Grace, and taken her to live at the farm, on
the understanding that in due time her marriage portion should be
provided. She found favour in his eyes, and it became rumoured in the
parish that the portion would be, at least, “a very tidy little bit of
money.” So much so that Robert Lawlor, who was a warm man, when in quest
of a suitable alliance for his son Ned, thought it worth while to
consult John Loughlin on the subject. The result of the negotiations had
been satisfactory, though not decisive. There was no need for hurry, as
the little farm old Robert had in his eye for Ned would not fall vacant
yet a while, and the fortune of another not impossible daughter-in-law
required cautious and deliberate investigation ere a final choice could
be made. Neither was John unwilling, for his part, to indefinitely
postpone the removal of his granddaughter and his two stately ricks. But
that the affair was being talked of everybody knew, Grace herself among
the rest, and she had unhappily taken a strong dislike to Ned Lawlor
from the first moment that she beheld him sitting with the sun shining
through his red whiskers in his pew near the pulpit at ten o’clock Mass.
She now said to herself that she would never marry him, whatever anybody
might do or say. Yet she was so used to seeing matches made up as a
matter of course that she felt almost as if she were resolving vainly
against a sort of fate which would overtake her whatever she might say
or do. The project had not reached a stage at which her grandfather
would mention it to her; and being a shy and silent girl, she had never
expressed any sentiment that could give him a clue to the state of her
mind. He never guessed at the steady growth of her abhorrence for Ned
Lawlor and everything connected with him, even the touch of his hand on
the gate-latch, which she was wont to rub up with an old duster after he
had gone through. But she knew right well that no such proposal would
ever have troubled her had it not been for her bit of fortune, and she
was also quite aware that this lay stored up among the tall ricks, and
nowhere else. Often enough she had heard it said that every penny her
grandfather was worth was in his hay. Consequently it was natural that
she should look upon the haggard as a grievance and a bane. “Bad luck to
them,” she would say, “I wish the whole of them was burnt to dust and
ashes out of that.” (Grace may be excused, since there are few of us who
have not at some time or other been ready to follow the example of the
swineherd Ho-ti and his lubberly son.) And on days when she had happened
to fall in with Ned Lawlor, it must be owned that she frequently added:
“and himself in the middle of them.”
This did occur on the morning of the day in question, when he stepped
over to see about the loan of a hay-shaker, and had rather a long
interview with her, at which he considered himself to have behaved with
an agreeable mingling of gallantry and facetiousness. He would have been
much surprised, poor man, to learn that fright and detestation were the
sentiments which he had inspired; but so it was. In fact, Grace’s
spirits did not soon recover from the dejection caused by his jokes, and
when the shadows were beginning to lengthen she was glad to see the
portly figure of her good-natured great-aunt Lizzie coming along under
the hedge of Killenbeg’s Corner. A little company might help her to
shake off the odious recollection.
Mrs Knox and Mac had had a somewhat perplexing walk. Hitherto, Mac’s
experience of nature had been gathered exclusively at the sea-side. He
had not yet quite unlearned the instinct to seek in the gravel for
shells, and he still felt disappointed at its unproductiveness of any
desirable varieties. Lanes and yards and fields abounded for him in
extraordinary objects, concerning which his curiosity was only
restrained by his constant wish to pose as one of those who know. But
to-day his ignorance was complicated by a theory which he had based upon
his grandfather’s remark about the fire insurance. He had understood
the grand-governor--a mode of address adapted from his father’s--to
announce a reward of great magnitude offered for the destruction of hay
in large quantities; whence he inferred that hay was esteemed a
worthless substance, to be got rid of summarily like weeds and other
rubbish. Now therefore, as they took their way through the scented
meadows among the silvery-green swathes and encampments of peaked cocks,
he puzzled Mrs Knox by suggestions which seemed to argue rash and
destructive propensities in Master Mac, whom she had heretofore regarded
as an unusually reasonable and peaceable child. “Why, it ’ud be a sinful
pity to go do such a thing, Master Mac,” she replied to a plan which he
had propounded for clearing a newly-mown field by sweeping it all into
the big horsepond at one end, “It ’ud be no good for man or baste, after
soakin’ that way in the water. But maybe the child’s thinkin’ of flax,
that has to be steeped, sure enough. Is that it, honey? Ah, dear now,
it’s the quare botch you’d make of your hay crop if you gave it the same
thratement as flax. ’Deed and I remember the stink of it, when they
would be steepin’ it in the bog-holes up at me poor father’s place. But
hay’s another pair of shoes. I must tell John the notion you had. But
sure it’s the fine little farmer you’ll be one of these days.”
“It’s very vulgar to _daffaw_ at everything a person says,” Mac observed
with dignity, for Mrs Knox’s remarks had been threaded on a creaking
laugh. Among farming people, even a small lay blunder supplies matter
for infinite jest. “I daresay it _is_ better to burn it up,” he said.
They were just then passing a gap in the hedge, on the other side of
which lay a newly-weeded turnip-field, and close by, a withered heap was
crackling and sending up a blue-writhing column, through which the
flames could hardly make a wraith-like glimmer against the strong
sunshine. The white flakes of the ashes came fluttering across and
sprinkled him, as two blissful small boys stirred up the fire with
sticks. Mac would have liked to stand and look on, but Mrs Knox said:
“Ah, come along out of the blindin’ smoke, Master Mac dear, or we won’t
have time to get Gracie to wet us a cup of tay.”
When they reached the farm, Mrs Knox was glad to sit down and wait for
that refreshment in the cooler parlour, while Mac preferred to
accompany Nellie Reilly, the ploughman’s daughter, on her mission
styeward with the pig’s bucket. He did not, however, consider himself
under her surveillance, and she being intent upon collecting eggs, and
gossiping over the yard-wall with some friends returned from the
hay-fields, made no attempt to exercise any. So he presently strayed
down to the far end of the farm-yard, where he made a most important
discovery. Sitting on the top of the broken door-post belonging to a
ruined shed, he found a little green and yellow match-box. It had a
portrait of Parnell on one side, and a political cartoon on the other,
and it contained a single slender pink-headed match. Mac had so often
been warned against meddling with matches, that to strike one seemed an
exquisite pleasure. But just now his mind was occupied with more serious
matters than mere present enjoyment. Close by was the open door of the
haggard, and it immediately occurred to him that this gave him a grand
opportunity for securing the splendid sum which his imperfect knowledge
of the insurance system led him to look upon as the meed of the
incendiary. Here was quite as much hay as up at the Castle, and here
were the means of setting it all in a magnificent blaze; and with five
hundred pounds warily stowed away, safe from a Mrs Mac of predatory
habits, he felt that the fear of the old beggar-man’s fate need no
longer trouble him. “For,” he reasoned, “if a person had even as much as
one pound, one wouldn’t go about after people saying: ‘Och, your
Honour’s glory, give a poor man a copper, and the blessin’ of God be wid
you.’” And thereupon, with his precious box in hand, he proceeded to the
haggard.
Some loose bundles of hay scattered near where one of the largest ricks
stood on its low platform of stones and logs, seemed to him a suitable
starting-point for the conflagration. The striking of the match took
place successfully, and the delightful fizz and splutter and sulphureous
odour left nothing to be desired. But to the eye the result was
decidedly disappointing. Even under the shadow of the big rick, the air
was so full of light that the little artificial flame could make only a
faint bluish quivering in it, hardly visible, and Mac at first thought
with dismay, “It’s gone and went out.” When it touched the hay, however,
matters improved. Small golden stars began to kindle, and run twinkling
along the fibres, and now and then a tiny red tongue flickered
perceptibly through a puff of white smoke like a tuft of thistle-down.
John Loughlin, sauntering in the paddock not many hundred yards distant,
might well have been smitten with a foreboding of ill, but he continued
to gaze complacently upon his treasury, recking naught of the destroyer,
who at that moment was squatting in the midst of it, clad in a brown
holland suit and a broad-brimmed straw hat several sizes too large.
And after all, Mac’s triumph was but brief. For a while the fiery golden
stars increased and multiplied, and hurried hither and thither like a
raid of luminous ants. But soon they began to dwindle and diminish,
vanishing with a blink as bubbles do, until at length their bright array
had been reduced to a solitary spark, the progress of which he watched
with the deepest concern. It ducked and dived in and out of sight among
the soft grey-green tangle, alarming him by prolonged disappearances,
and then gleaming forth again, after he had almost given it up for lost.
But finally it sped and hid itself in the heart of a more intricate
wisp, and thence he was never to see it re-emerge, though he watched
for it long and earnestly, as a cat watches the hole’s mouth in at which
an expeditious mouse has slid. At last he had sorrowfully to abandon the
hope that it would ever come gliding and glimmering back. His grand
design had failed, and for the moment he perhaps regretted the glorious
blaze that had been frustrated more than the accession of wealth which
should have therefrom accrued. As he trotted back into the yard he
resolved to say nothing about the matches. Mac’s experience of life had
not been very great, yet it sufficed to teach him that success justifies
the means, and throws a handsome cloak over sins which would have worn a
far less reputable habit if things had turned out otherwise. If he had
burned John Loughlin’s ricks down to the ground, he would have proudly
owned the deed, and would have expected to receive not only his five
hundred pounds, but also many praises unqualified by any moral
reflections upon the impropriety of meddling with matches. Whence it
appears that, although his premises were not altogether founded upon
fact, he reasoned from them correctly enough. As it was, he could only
rejoin Nellie rather crestfallen, and soon afterwards he set out for
home. His little cousins had returned before him; Ethel out of humour
at her relapse into private life and an old frock, and Frances
preoccupied with her own affairs, so the evening closed dully.
Yet all the while, had he but been aware, the fire-seed he had sown was
thriving to his heart’s desire. At first, indeed, a dampness in the lock
of hay had most gravely menaced it with extinction, but it survived this
peril and kept its hold on existence with gradually strengthening grip,
until about sunset a waft of breeze came ruffling lightly over the
littered floor of the haggard, and at a critical moment fanned the spark
into a delicate flame. As the dusk fell this grew from the dimness of a
wild violet’s petal to the vividness of a scarlet poppy--of a great
glowing cactus-cup--and then flared into a many-leaved brilliance such
as never yet endowed any blossom sprung from the black earth.
John Loughlin had slept only a short while when he awoke to the
consciousness of a fierce red light streaming into his little bedroom,
and fluttering against its white wall like the reflection of a flaming
wing. His window looked over the yard to the haggard, but he hardly
needed the sight to assure him, he knew so well what must have happened.
The nightmare of many a sleep had come true. Those awful pinions were
indeed flapping and soaring around his ricks, with pale smoke rolling
and rushing between, against the massed shadow of the trees and the
smooth-vaulted dark of the moonless sky. From the first moment when the
glare met his dazed eyes he felt that his fate was sealed, and the knot
of onlookers who gathered about the doomed stacks were unanimously of
the opinion that “wid the hould the fire had took on them, and the quare
dryness of everythin’, you’d as much chance of puttin’ them out as of
puttin’ out the stars in the sky.” There was some running about with
bucketfuls from the failing pump, and some futile splashing of water,
but everybody recognised the bootlessness of the attempt, and soon
desisted from it.
The spacious night all around him was very dark and still as John
Loughlin stood watching his ricks burn away. A belated corncrake far off
across the fields creaked faintly, as if the wheels of time needed
oiling, and a star looked down a long way, here and there; else the fire
alone made sound and light. It roared and crackled as it leaped and
soared, scaling the carefully heaped-up hay mounds; sometimes it dragged
down from their sides, as if with a giant hand, great masses that came
slipping and flaring to the ground, and sometimes it plucked off flaming
plumes and bore them up into the air. Some of these were caught on the
overhanging boughs of the elms, where they hung like strange fruit,
which shrivelled and blackened the fresh green leaves. The scattered
litter of hay and straw underfoot burst every now and then into a blaze,
so that the whole haggard seemed to be paved with a fiery sheet,
presently smothered beneath a heavy rug of woolly smoke beaten back by
some caprice of the breeze. All spectators had to keep on the dark side
of the low surrounding wall; not even a dog ventured in, though rats
could be heard flopping desperately off the rick-stands, and rustling as
they fled. But shrill yelps at a prudent distance showed that the
fugitives were not escaping unmolested, and green, blinking eyes peered
out of ambushes whence many a productive pounce was made.
So hungrily swift was this fire, and found fare so much to its mind in
the drought-parched stacks, that it had well-nigh made an end of
consuming them before the prompt midsummer dawn came back, cold and grey
as a lingering remnant of the sunset. It showed sundry shapeless black
heaps, which lay with white smoke straining up through them, and shook
into spangles of crumbling gold if they were stirred. John Loughlin’s
ricks, in short, had resolved themselves into materials over which he
could no longer exercise any owner’s rights, and he was a ruined man.
Not a penny of them was insured. He had obstinately refused to take this
precaution, not because he grudged the expense, but from a superstitious
prejudice against acting on the hypothesis of so intolerable a calamity.
If his death had seemed as odious to him, he would never have made the
will which was locked up in a drawer with his lease, and a few things
that had belonged to his wife. But now that the dreadful event was an
actually accomplished fact, he seemed to contemplate it with rather
surprising equanimity. He made no comment when Tim Mahony, close beside
him, said to Andy Farrell: “Bejabers, it’s plenty of room we’ll have
there, and we drawin’ in to-morra,” and Andy replied: “To-morra? Faix
then we’d be the fine fools to go about that job to-morra, or next day,
and the place as thick wid red sparks lyin’ as a hayloft wid
seeds--wouldn’t we, sir?” Only as he turned back through the cold
dimness to his house--a meagre little white-washed box, originally a
barn, and hardly so big as his most sizeable rick had been--a cock hard
by uttered a drowsy crow, whereupon he looked round at the men who were
following him and said: “Some of yous wring th’ ould screech-owl’s
neck.” And they muttered among themselves: “Och, the poor man--to be
sure he would be greatly knocked about.”
It seemed, indeed, as if his granddaughter Grace were more crushed by
the misfortune than he. After they had finished their dreary breakfast,
she retreated into a dark corner of the kitchen, where she sat such a
picture of despondency, that the old man, watching her, began vaguely to
wish he could offer her any consolation. He recalled her long visit
yesterday from Ned Lawlor, and it suggested to him how probably she was
fretting over the lost prospect of that alliance. This notion somehow
touched his pride, and set a spring of energy stirring through the dull
lethargy in his mind. To himself he said: “Sure I might be conthrivin’
as good a match for her one of these days yet;” and to Grace he observed
encouragingly: “Well, it’s a grand warm mornin’ anyway.” Grace only
murmured something dolorously; and in a while he got up and went out of
doors. As he did so the first object he noticed was Daddy Yellowman set
on a window-ledge in the sun. Daddy Yellowman was a very large
canary-coloured delft jug, which had lived for a long time on the
Loughlin’s dresser, and had become quite an institution at hay making,
when carried afield with the froth of porter at its lips. John Loughlin
now took it up, and filled it, for conveyance to Long Leg, where he knew
there were people working. By the act he seemed to turn and face the
possibility of going on.
Not long afterwards, Grace, who for her part had recognised the
necessity of putting on the potatoes for dinner, was startled as she
made up the languishing summer fire by the entrance of Nellie Reilly,
wearing an expression of very contagious alarm. She had run at full
speed through two or three fields, and was much out of breath as she
clutched Grace’s arm and said, between frequent pants: “I’m just after
meetin’ himself--the poor master--up in Killenbeg Corner--widin a
stone’s throw of the pond. It’s there he was goin’ as sure as
anythin’--och saints--and about dhrowndin’ himself he might be as like
as not, that’s what I’m thinkin’--for the lads was sayin’ he’s clane
ruinated entirely--and indeed he was lookin’ as black and as bitter as
sut, and I passin’ him by, the poor man, he was so. But mercy on us all,
there’s ten fut of wather standin’ in the deep pool up under th’ ould
thorn-bushes--and the botthom all a mask of thick mud--if a body got in
there you’d never see sight nor light of him agin.”
The two girls stared dumbly at one another for a few moments, with a
sort of horror reflecting itself to and fro between their faces, and
growing on its way. Then Grace rushed out of the house, retaining the
fire-shovel unawares, and Nellie followed at her heels. They raced on
over the pale-green of the lately shorn meadows, catching their feet in
scattered wisps of hay, and stooping their heads against the dazzle of
the sunbeams. And as, cresting the slope in Killenbeg Corner, they came
close upon the pond, the first thing they beheld was Daddy Yellowman
shining very brightly set beside the edge. At sight of it Nellie gave a
scream. “The Lord be good to us all,” she said, “carryin’ it he was;
he’s after throwin’ himself in.” But Grace flung herself down on the
bank under the hedge, with her apron over her face and her fingers in
her ears, and rocked herself as if she would lull her remaining senses
to sleep. Whereupon Nellie broke into a wailful lament. She had an
unsuspected listener, whose emergence from behind a curve of the hedge
struck her overawedly mute; and Grace heard a voice enquiring: “What’s
the matter with her?” It was no less than Lord Ballyduff, who had come
across the fields upon the report of the disaster befallen his old
acquaintance and tenant John Loughlin. Grace recognised the voice, but
through too stormy a cloud of trouble to leave her any constraining
respect for persons, not even for Quality in the shape of a lordship and
a landlord. So she continued to rock and bemoan herself. “What’ll I do
at all at all? Och me heart’s broke. Sure it’s meself’s the wickedest
crathur this day in the width of Ireland that’s as good as took and
burnt up me poor grandfather’s haggard on him, forby dhrownin’ of him in
the black pool. But sure if I’d ha’ thought he’d go for to do that, I
wouldn’t ever ha’ let the big rick get on fire, ’deed and I wouldn’t,
not if there was forty Ned Lawlors botherin’ one in it. Dhrownded dead
he is be this time, and it all along of me burnin’ his ricks, that
dhruv him distracted.”
But the voice that replied: “Musha good gracious, what talk have you,
girl alive, about burnin’ and dhrowndin’?” made her uncover her face, to
confront a refutation of her despair. For her grandfather, safe and
sound, stood beside Lord Ballyduff, with whom, indeed, he had merely
been conversing just round the corner. He was eyeing Grace with some
disapproval. It seemed to him all of a piece--a small piece of
course--with his other misfortune that his granddaughter should be
discovered by his lordship sitting keening under a hedge, bare-headed,
holding an irrelevant sooty shovel in her lap, and accusing herself
vehemently of disastrous crime. “What ails you, then, to be sittin’
there makin’ a show of yourself wid our ould shovel?” he said to her in
a mortified undertone, “Faix, one might ha’ thought you’d had enough of
fires at home to contint you.” An appeal to regard for appearances was,
however, thrown away upon Grace, whom more tragical thoughts were
engrossing wholly. “Glory be to goodness if you’re not dhrownded,” she
said, “but sure it’s no thanks to me, after lettin’ the whole place
burn to black cinders. For there it was, when I run down to the haggard
late last night after the supper, to see had e’er a one of the hins been
layin’ in it--somethin’ I noticed shinin’ alongside the big rick, and
sure enough, the bit of ground was creepin’ all over wid sparks and wee
flames of fire, like as if somebody’d dropped a lightin’ match among the
hay. And first of all I was goin’ to let a yell for the lads to come and
put it out; but then I thought to meself ’twas a good chance to be
gettin’ shut of him, if I just let it alone. So I slunk in wid me, and
never a word I said about it.”
“And what the mischief at all made you go do that?” said her
grandfather, feeling himself threatened with the disclosure of fresh
afflictions.
“It was--it was Ned Lawlor,” said Grace, beginning to stammer a little
over her explanation. “You see I knew his father and you had talk of him
and me. And in course it was on’y the bit of money they was after, you
would be givin’ wid me--and every penny of that in the ricks--and I
can’t abide the thoughts of Ned Lawlor--I hate the name of him.”
“Then the divil’s in it that you couldn’t ha’ said so,” her grandfather
said bitterly. “Sure if you’d tould me, never a word more talk would
there ha’ been about the matter. Sorra the match ’ill I make up for a
girl agin her will, not if the other folk was offerin’ to stock the
counthry-side for her--troth no wouldn’t I. There was me poor sister
Maggie, her they gave to an ould feller up at Annalone, whether she
would or no, and if they did, it’s follyin’ at her buryin’ we were widin
a twelvemonth of the weddin’. Sez I to meself that same day, it was
neither art nor part I’d have in any such a thing in the len’th of me
life, and I hadn’t, nor I wouldn’t. Your mother plased herself. But
bedad now a lass is more conthráry to ha’ doins or dalins wid than a
dumb baste of the field, for sooner than spake a sensible word to you,
she’ll take and set house and home flarin’ in a blaze about your ears.”
Her grandfather’s censure of her silence might not have been
unanswerable, but Grace’s mood was too remorseful to seek for justifying
arguments, and she resumed her lamentations under her apron, saying,
“Sure, I tould you I was the wickedest crathur ever walked. Deed, I
wish I was after dhrowndin’ meself in th’ ould pond there, and a better
job it would ha’ been.” This could not be permitted, and the old man
said soothingly, “Ah, whisht, then, whisht; that’s no sort of talkin’.
And sure now, maybe there’s no such great harm done after all. Maybe
it’s foolin’ meself I was, in a manner, thryin’ to fill up me mind wid
the thought of th’ ould stacks. I’d do righter to be breakin’ up the
meadows, and gettin’ in the crops--If I could conthrive it,” he added,
brought up short by the recollection that his ways and means had largely
become dust and ashes.
“Here’s your sister, Loughlin,” said Lord Ballyduff, somewhat relieved
by the diversion, as Mrs Knox appeared at the neighbouring gate. “And,
by Jove, I believe there’s that young scamp.” For a small figure
scudding along by the hedge developed itself into unmistakably Mac.
Mrs Knox arrived first. The business which had brought her hurrying
through the noontide heat was so important that she did not hesitate to
enter upon it even in the presence of his lordship. “Well, to be sure,
John,” she said to her brother, “you’re the unlucky man. Howsome’er,
it’s unluckier you’d be this minute if everybody else was as headstrong
as yourself--Gracie, child, have you a mind to be ravin’ wid a
sunstroke, that you’ve run out wid ne’er a shadow of a shawl over your
head? But as for your hay, John, that’s clane destroyed and gone to loss
if there was nobody, only you, mindin’ it, that wouldn’t put it under
the insurance for man or mortal, it’s right enough all the while, be
raison of me payin’ it into the Alliance office for you this last five
year as regular as the clock. All the papers I have belongin’ to it up
at the Castle. Four hundred pounds they’ll pay you on it, and if that
doesn’t cover it all, ’twill make a good offer at it any way.”
“Troth and it’s youself’s the quare one,” said John Loughlin.
“I always said that Mrs Knox was one of the most sensible women I knew,
Loughlin,” said Lord Ballyduff, “I believe the best thing I could do
would be to appoint her my man of business. But you should come up to
the Castle at once and look at these papers. Mac, you run up against one
like a spent cannon-ball.”
“Never mind,” said Mac forbearingly, “I suppose you weren’t looking.”
“As far as I can judge, your lordship,” said Mrs Knox, highly
gratified, “all we have to do is, send word of the fire to the Insurance
Company, and they’re bound to pay us the money, though whether to me
brother or meself I can’t precisely say. To him, I should suppose, but
anyhow, it’s all the one thing, for ’twas on his account I done it.”
“It’s a great lie,” said Mac. “Look here, grand-governor, she’s telling
a _most awful_ untruth.” Although manners had indeed kept him from
breaking in upon Mrs Knox’s speech, excitement and impatience now made
the tone of his interruption all the more unconventional. “She didn’t
burn them a bit, don’t believe a word she says,” he asseverated. “It was
me lit them with a match, and I thought it had went out on me, but it
mustn’t have, after all. So it’s _me_ that they’re to pay the four
hundred pounds to, and not to anybody else. Why couldn’t you stop and
wait for a person? I’ve been running after you all the way to tell you
that you’ll have to write for the money to those people, because I don’t
exactually know where they live. But mind you say it wasn’t she burnt
them at all--it was me with a pink-headed match that I found in the
yard. Young O’Sullivan told me they were all destroyed.”
“This is a very shocking story of yours, Mac,” said his grandfather,
looking aghast, “and I hope to goodness that you’re only romancing.”
“Why, to be sure it is, your lordship,” said Mrs Knox with conviction,
“Sure, how at all would the innicent child get to do such a thing, and
he never next or nigh the place till yesterday evening, when he came
over wid me, and wasn’t out of me sight, except only a few minutes that
he ran out into the yard along wid Nellie Reilly there, and she’d take
good care of him, or else I’d not have trusted----”
“’Deed then, we were only just through the yard--never set fut in the
haggard, bad or good; and where’d he get matches, ma’am? Sorra a one was
there,” Nellie protested loudly, recoiling scared by the sudden prospect
of being drawn into the meshes of responsibility. “I never took me eyes
off him the whole time,” she averred.
“Oh didn’t you, _my friend_,” said Mac, with crushing emphasis, “had you
them on me when you were talking to the people with pitchforks in the
lane over the wall, that you said you wouldn’t listen to gabbin’
nonsense out of them? And I _was_ in the hay-place, and I _did_ find
some matches--it was only one match--in a little yellow box with
pictures on it, that was near the calves’ house. But it went off
beautifully against the scrapey stuff on the side. And if you don’t
believe it, you may go and see where it is, for I put the box back there
when I was coming in. Only there’ nuffin in it now, except itself.
Grand-governor, you’ll have to write for my four hundred pounds.”
Lord Ballyduff looked perplexed and uneasy, as Mac drummed impatiently
on him to emphasise his injunction; but everybody else took, or
professed to take, Mrs Knox’s view of the matter, and she said, ah sure,
it couldn’t have been that way at all, for if Master Mac had had
anything to say to it, it would have been in blazes of fire long and
long before. A burning spark wasn’t a sort of thing could go crawling
about any length of time unbeknownst like a hayspider in a haycock.
Their scepticism aggrieved and enraged Mac, as it threatened to filch
from him the fruit of his successful enterprise; but his wrath seemed to
avail nothing, and presently his grandfather said that they must be
getting home, as it was nearly luncheon-time. The group accordingly
separated, John Loughlin with his sister and the girls returning towards
the devastated farmstead, through the meadows, where he imagined,
reluctantly enough, the cold gleam of the ploughshare shredding up their
old green mantle. Mac and his grandfather went back to their somewhat
out-at-elbows looking little ancient Castle, but they proceeded
severally and silently, for Mac’s resentment led him to stalk on ahead
and decline entering into conversation. He was already sitting on the
steps at the end of the terrace when Lord Ballyduff arrived just as the
luncheon bell rang.
“Come along, Mac,” said Lord Ballyduff.
But Mac replied without stirring: “If I do be an old beggar-man, I can
tell you I’ll never say ‘Long life to your Honour,’ and ‘Heaven be your
bed,’ no matter _how_ many pennies you give me.”
The contemplation of this prospective revenge so far soothed his
feelings that they permitted him to follow his grandfather into the
dining-room. Yet, in the middle of his sago-pudding he remarked to his
neighbour, Frances, with little apparent relevance, but much scathing
sarcasm: “Some people are so wonderful fine and clever that they can’t
believe anything a person tells them.”
To which Frances, turning upon him wide and melancholy eyes, made
answer: “Maybe some day you won’t know any better, Mac, yourself.”
And Mac said reflectively, looking towards his grandfather’s end of the
table: “I suppose they get all the sense used up that they had when they
were rather youngish. Do you think your mamma’s a hundred, Frances? A
person must make ’lowances for them. But they may burn up their old
ricks themselves next time. _I_ intend to get my own living in another
way.”
[Illustration]
A VERY LIGHT RAILWAY
The newly-finished railway ran by Mrs Dowdall’s front door with only the
breadth of the narrow lane between. This was towards the middle of May,
the construction having begun early in April, when the air first grew
mild enough to make sitting out on the bank seem pleasant. An unusually
long spell of fair weather had favoured the work in its progress, and
hastened its completion; more than a month of innocent-looking
daisy-and-speedwell skies had surveyed it, and no flaws of wind and rain
had come to damage or delay. I am not sure whether it could be correctly
called a Relief Work, but it undoubtedly did take the burden of many a
leaden hour off Johnny Dowdall’s mind. For, being so lame that the
journey from one end of the lane to the other was quite beyond his
powers, he rather often found himself hampered, when casting about for
employment, by the meagreness of the resources within his range. All the
eight years of his life had been dominated by the fact that one of his
legs was “quare,” and tended constantly to become “quarer” still.
Indeed, upon the last occasion when he and his mother had sought medical
advice, the doctor talked of such desperate remedies that they had
abruptly ceased to consult him, and for many days after, Johnny’s master
dread had been a vision of Dr Lawson’s trap drawing up at their door.
But since their removal out of the village row to the cabin lonesome
among bye-lanes, this terror had faded from his thoughts, and did not
molest him at his railway works. Over these he presided in every
capacity, from chief engineer to delving navvy, and he, therefore,
regarded the design and its execution with the fond delight which the
artist can feel only for the poor thing that is all his own.
When finished, it was extremely complete, as far as it went, which,
however, was not beyond two or three yards. The top of the grassy
roadside bank had been laboriously hollowed out and levelled, and at one
point even tunnelled through by means of a superannuated fire-shovel.
Round willow twigs, deftly fitted together, made rails laid on broader
sticks for sleepers, and other twigs set upright, peeled white,
blackened duly with soot, and connected with cotton threads, were
telegraph posts, so realistic that you could almost hear the wind hum in
the wires. Orderly piles of stones and cinders and timber flanked the
line, where a junction was indicated by a maze of confluent metals
traced in labyrinthine sidings. But his crowning achievement was perhaps
the tall signal-post, whose arms of different coloured woods could be
moved up and down. Johnny had wrestled long with a mechanism of crooked
pins before he attained to this delightful result. If he prided himself
more upon anything else, it was his rolling stock, which consisted of a
truck and a carriage. They were both built of materials derived from the
small paper-covered matchboxes, of which you can buy as many as six for
one penny in the Dublin streets, or even seven--so I am told--if you
craftily “let on” to walk away from the ragged urchin without coming to
terms. In a happy hour Johnny chanced upon an accumulation of these
boxes lying empty on the window-ledge, and he found that their garish
yellow and green gave very effective touches of colour to his handiwork,
especially after he had fashioned one strip into a flag, and had stuck
poster-wise on the face of a smooth stone the full-length portrait of a
popular statesman, which adorned the lids. At a little distance it
looked just like one of the soap or mustard advertisements which were
inseparably associated with his idea of a railway.
This accuracy in details was due to his reminiscences of the time when
he lived in the village--he called it the town--of Ballyhoy, and had
been used to spend much of his leisure on the parapet of the bridge,
whence he looked down into the little station, with its periodical
flurries of arriving and departing and passing trains. A thunderous
locomotive charging the arch at full speed, and enveloping him in a
cloudy swirl of its wild white mane, was a strong sensation, which he
relinquished with regret when they moved out of the village. That
flitting had followed the death of Johnny’s father, late head porter at
Ballyhoy, and memories of the railway were accordingly fraught for Mrs
Dowdall with the melancholy of good days done, so that her son’s
engineering operations rather distressed her when she first noticed
them. Her shrinking from the subject yielded, however, to her conviction
that “’twas a good job the crathur had somethin’ to be divartin’ its
mind wid, and she away in the fields the len’th of the day.” So she had
fluent praises forthcoming upon demand, and added with sincerity: “Sure
now, Johnny avic, it ’ud be a great convanience to us of a Saturday, if
it was a somethin’ more commodious size.” For now that two long miles
intervened between her and Ballyhoy station, her weekly marketing became
a serious item in the recurrent fatigues of her life. It was a terrible
tag, she would remark disconsolately, as having replaced the deep-eaved
lilac sun-bonnet in which she weeded turnips, or gathered stones, or
planted cabbages all the week, by the small very old black straw
reserved for town wear, she trudged away with her large battered basket.
Sometimes when her wants were not of a bulky sort, her nearest neighbour
spared her the tramp by doing her errands along with her own. This
neighbour was a tall thin elderly woman, who occupied the cabin just out
of sight round the turn. She lived quite alone, and as she had never
been married, was spoken of unceremoniously as Maggie Ryan, a title to
which the younger people were now beginning to prefix “ould.”
There were no other dwellers in the lane and very few passers by, facts
which had been consolatory to Johnny ever since he set about laying
down his line. For it was of course accessible to the public, and could
hardly have been proceeded with in the face of much traffic. A few
random footsteps might have devastated it in all its length, and equally
fatal would have been the pecketing of poultry and the nibbling of
goats. But none of those dangerous creatures menaced the construction,
which grew dearer to Johnny with every day’s new device. When not
actually working at it, he kept on it a jealous eye, though the only
practical precaution he could take was to drag a trail of barbed thorny
briar across the low end of the bank, in hopes that this would deter any
wayfarer from ascending. His most anxious moments were of an evening
when Tom and Peter Denny would occasionally return home by that route
from their field-work, not always with the steadiest gait. Johnny’s grey
eyes grew black with trouble in his harassed face as he watched
apprehensively for the lurch or stagger that might lay his permanent way
in ruins. However, this threat of disaster always passed on unfulfilled.
But all through these busy weeks an unrecked-of peril was growing up
against him. It might have been tracked to a secluded corner of Maggie
Ryan’s dark kitchen, where a lily-white hen was sitting on a clutch of
brown eggs. She was a very comely fowl, whose fleckless feathers looked
as if they had been carved out of a faery marble; and in due time she
emerged triumphant, surrounded by a brood of ten downy fluff-balls, who
promised to wear exactly the like snowy plumage in maturer months. For
the first few days the newcomers confined their explorations of the wide
world which had opened upon them to the immediate precincts of Maggie’s
little house; but one fine morning, when the sun was warm on the dewy
grass-banks, and grubs abounded, the whole family were tempted to
prolong their rambles some way further up the lane. Thus it happened
that Johnny, hobbling out of doors with his head full of fresh plans,
was sorely chagrined to find the scene of his labours occupied by a
party, clucking and piping, and more banefully scratching and bobbing
about. The damage they had as yet done extended only to the knocking
down of one telegraph-post; it was the future mischief too surely
augured by their appearance which caused his dismay. He could, of
course, drive them off for the time being, but he knew that he could
not keep perpetually on guard against their incursions. So he scared
them with shouts, and then sat down to revolve plans of defence. After
some meditation an idea occurred to him, and made him start on an
unwontedly long walk--all the way, about a hundred yards, to Maggie
Ryan’s house.
Maggie was hanging up her blue-rimmed breakfast cup on the brass
dresser-hook, when she became aware of a small grey-ragged figure halted
at her threshold. “Och! and is it yourself, Johnny lad?” she said,
rather surprised, for her dwelling lay almost beyond Johnny’s invisible
tether, and he but rarely appeared there; “was your mother wantin’
anythin’?”
“I’m after seein’ a big wild cat,” said Johnny, “up above under the
hedge.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper, which the old woman heard
imperfectly, and she crossed over hurriedly to the door, saying: “What
was that, sonny?”
“A great big yella wild cat it was,” said Johnny, “sittin’ yonder behind
the bank. The size of a calf it was. Watchin’ for chuckens it looked to
be.”
“Bedad, then! that’s like enough, and bad luck to it,” said Maggie Ryan,
peering out anxiously. “I wonder where at all the white hin has
streeled herself off to.”
“If you had her shut up in the little shed, there couldn’t anythin’ be
gettin’ at them,” Johnny observed pointedly.
“Thrue for you,” said Maggie Ryan, “and ’twould be a good plan to keep
them up till they’re a trifle grown anyway, if there’s e’er such a
bastely brute slingein’ about the place. And you were an iligant child
to come tell me. Have a bit of flour-cake, honey,” she continued,
casting about her for some impromptu reward of merit, and finding
nothing more appropriate than a griddle-cake, “I’ll be steppin’ out and
drivin’ in the hin.”
Johnny heard her intention with unqualified approval, and received her
gift with more mingled feelings. The three-cornered cake looked
inviting, but his conscience flavoured it for him with a tincture of
remorse, which is a seasoning to nobody’s taste. He took one bite, still
lingering at the door, and then said indistinctly: “Plase, ma’am--it
wasn’t maybe altogether the size of a calf.” However, he was so uneasy
about the possible effects of even this grudging concession to veracity,
that he hastened to add: “But it’s a terrible great bigness
entirely--and lookin’ out it is to catch _somethin’_.”
“Ah sure, child alive, calf or no, ’twould be to the full big enough to
swally down one of them scraps of chuckens, if it got the chance,” said
Maggie, “and I’ll put them in out of the way of it the next minute....
Ah now, to think of the crathur comin’ creepin’ along all that way to
warn me,” she said to herself, looking ruthfully after the small figure
as it limped and dragged itself out of her ken down the green and
gold-spangled space between the hedgerows, “’tis a good-hearted poor
little imp, the Lord may pity it.” But I fear that the crathur was at
this moment sophistically saying in its good heart: “And sure there
might aisy be an odd wild cat in it all the while, and I not seein’ it.
Very belike there _is_ a one--or maybe a couple.”
For a few days the result of Johnny’s stratagem was all that he could
desire. The white hen reluctantly found her wanderings circumscribed by
the mud walls of the lean-to shed with its thatch of shrivelled
potato-haulms, and Johnny was thus enabled to continue his work secure
from harassing incursions. He gloatingly gave it several new touches,
the most notable being the erection of a heap of old iron, gathered
from the bunches of rusty “keys,” which the willow-boughs had kept, like
a cherished grievance, to dangle among their fresh spring foliage. But
then rose a Saturday morning when Maggie Ryan, rather late and flurried
in setting out to catch the train at Ballyhoy, failed to adequately
fasten the door of the shed where she had been feeding her captive fowl,
and the consequence of this oversight was that five minutes afterwards
the whole brood were gleefully at large in the lane. As ill-luck would
have it, the sedate stalk of the matron tended towards the Dowdall’s
cabin, retarded but not deflected by her incidental scrapings and
pokings, and in her wake the round downy chicks followed dispersedly,
yet steadily as foam-bells bobbing along in the current of a stream. So
that the prospects of the neighbouring light railway became every moment
more seriously imperilled, and had it been vested in a company, its
shares might well have fallen with a run.
Meanwhile, Johnny was unaware of the approaching danger, his attention
being quite engrossed by an unusual spectacle. A great yellow
furniture-van had come lumbering and creaking by, bound for sea-side
Quinton, and threading a short cut thither through the lane-labyrinth
north of Ballyhoy. Just opposite Mrs Dowdall’s residence, which it could
have stowed away with ease, some part of the harness collapsed,
compelling a halt for repairs, and while one of the two men in charge
was splicing and tying, the other opened the van-door to make a change
in the disposition of the load. To Johnny, staring hard close by, there
was something rather awful about the aspect of the dark interior thus
revealed, with the legs and other salient features of its freight dimly
visible against a background of cavernous gloom. He thought those black
recesses must hold something more mysterious than the indications of
tables and chairs which actually met the eye. But he was diverted from
his speculations on this point by a very self-complacent clucking croak,
which sounded near at hand, and betrayed to him Maggie Ryan’s white hen
in the act of knocking down his precious signal-post. Her chickens were
scattered out all along the line. It was a grave disaster.
Johnny could not run fast to the rescue, and his consciousness of this
disability increased the exasperation with which he sent on ahead of his
painful hobble his voice uplifted in shrill railing. “Git along out of
that, you great ugly, dirty, big bastes of brutes!” he yelled at the
little snow-ball chickens. Perhaps also it gave force and precision to
his aim when he flung a stone after them. At any rate, the missile came
skimming in among the scurrying cluster, and knocked down one of the
smallest chickens, which had been running very fast across the road, and
chirping at the top of its voice. Its brethren now continued their
fleeing and piping, but it remained lying still and silent in the dust.
The sight smote Johnny with compunctious dismay, which deepened as he
picked it up, and felt how fluffily soft it was, and saw its absurd beak
finer than a thorn. He had not thrown the stone with murderous intent,
for though he sincerely desired the absence of the family, their
slaughter had never occurred to him as a means to that end. Again, he
remembered having heard Maggie Ryan say to his mother that she hoped to
goodness she might rear the whole clutch, an aspiration which could now
never be fulfilled--“and she after often givin’ him bits of cake, and
bringin’ home sugar-sticks from town.”
These reflections, and not the wreckage of his railway, were uppermost
in his mind as he sat on the grassy bank with the lifeless chicken held
carefully. It seemed to throw a shadow over everything, although the May
morning was still radiant, and the dandelions were glowing and blazing
on the sod, like the suns in old engravings, all translated and
transfigured. Presently he began to consider how he should best conceal
his own rather large share in the tragedy, the revelation of which
would, he thought, by no means mend matters. What seemed the simplest
plan was to hide away the remains before his mother returned from the
fields and Maggie Ryan from town, and let it be supposed that the yellow
wild cat had had a privy paw in the affair. This would be merely a
sequel to his former fiction, demanding no further imaginative efforts,
an advantage, as Johnny did not from choice exercise his ingenuity in
that way. He looked down into the tangle of weeds and briars at the
bottom of the ditch, which did no doubt offer an obviously convenient
sepulchre; but somehow he felt that he would hate to know it was lying
there, and he paused irresolute on the brink of dropping it in. Just
then his eye was caught by the furniture-van, which still stood with
open door, while both its men were round in front working at the
harness. Its black depths of darkness looked capable of keeping any
secret confided to them, and the idea suddenly struck him that here was
a chance of ridding himself effectually of all embarrassments connected
with the presence of the little dead bird. Whereupon he arose hastily,
hobbled his swiftest, and was barely in time to thrust it as far as he
could into the gloomy interior before the vanman came and banged the
door. In another minute the clumsy gaudy vehicle was crawling away
between the hedges, taking with it the most urgent of Johnny’s
anxieties. This being removed, he settled down to the repair of his
line, and soon became so deeply absorbed in it that he nearly forgot the
late catastrophe and the trouble which the straying white hen with her
diminished brood threatened to cause him in the future.
As for the yellow van, its depressed sorrel pair dragged it at length
out of the many winding lanes, and drew up on the crunching gravel in
front of Marine View Villa, which had a pinkish stucco face, and a mock
ruin on the lawn. Pat Magennis, the driver’s subordinate, let down the
board and opened the door preparatory to unloading; but he was amazed,
in a small way, to see a tiny round white object emerge from the darkest
corner, and come running towards the light with an interrogative chirp.
“Musha, good gracious! and what at all might _you_ be offerin’ to call
yourself?” said Pat; “may I land anywhere if one of them white chickens
there was skytin’ about the place we stopped at in the lane isn’t after
leppin’ in and comin’ along wid us.”
“I wish they’d throuble themselves, thin, to keep their ould fowls and
crathurs out of streelin’ into _my_ loads, where they’re not wanted,”
said glumly the driver, who had started that day in a captious temper.
“Just chuck it down out of that, and be gettin’ at them arm-chairs.”
Pat obeyed this behest, with modifications, for he deposited the
stowaway chicken carefully under a rose-bush in a round box-edged
flowerbed. “Sure ’twas the quare notion took you to not be stoppin’
paiceable in your own place,” he said to it with some sternness; but the
white chicken cocked its eye at him unabashed, and its self-confidence
increased when he shook a few bread-crumbs for it out of the red
handkerchief which held his luncheon. He was so much interested in
watching its meal that he did not turn away until bawled at by his chief
to “lave foolin’ there and be mindin’ his business,” when he had to take
up the less congenial occupation of carrying about heavy furniture. The
chicken, he thought, would surely have disappeared before he was free
again; but having got through his tasks, he found it where he had left
it, safe and brisk, and apparently not loth to be recaptured. By this
time Gaffney, the driver’s, bad temper had worsened to such an
intolerable degree that Pat preferred a journey home, sitting
uncomfortably with dangling legs on the board at the van door, to the
alternative share of the front seat. The rather because he was now
conveying the chicken in his breast pocket, whence its alert head
protruded, and where it would, he knew, be made a theme of morose
sarcasms by his grumpy companion. He half intended to bestow it upon his
sister’s small children when he got back; a prospect which might have
caused its friends to bless its stars that it did not possess the
faculty of looking before and after.
While the empty van proceeded with undulatory motion townwards, Mrs
Dowdall and Maggie Ryan on their way from field-work and marketing, fell
in with one another at the end of the lane, and arrived home
simultaneously. Johnny had forgotten all about them in a rapt attempt to
mimic, with bent twigs and the bottom of an old tin mug, the marvellous
revolving turn-table which he had once admired at the big Dublin
terminus; but when he espied their two long-drawn shadows preceding them
down the sun-set litten lane, his thoughts immediately reverted to the
morning’s mishap, and he glanced uneasily around in quest of the white
hen. He was annoyed to see her approaching from the opposite direction,
so that the loss would most likely soon be noticed. “There niver was
such an ould crathur for comin’ where she isn’t wanted,” he said to
himself, regarding her with the gaze of concentrated bitterness so
commonly encountered by objects that manifest this unpopular propensity.
Well for them if they can meet it with the serene indifference of Maggie
Ryan’s hen.
But Maggie’s mind was evidently preoccupied just then to the exclusion
of concern about her poultry. She set down her old, broken-lidded basket
on the bank, and began to grope among its contents with an air of
exultant mystery. “Well, Johnny lad,” she said; “them’s great
conthrivances you’ve got there entirely, but I question now would you
iver ha’ put together the likes of that.” So saying, she produced a toy
tin railway carriage about two inches long, and handed it to Johnny. It
was painted a strong green, picked out with scarlet, and might be
considered a very brilliant and highly-finished pennyworth. If Johnny’s
conscience had been clear, such a gift would have afforded him the
liveliest pleasure, stirring his imagination to fresh delightful
activity; as things were, however, there at once arose before him a
piteous downy spectre, which poignantly upbraided him with the loss
sustained at his hands by the bestower of such benefits. So he only
turned scarlet, and stared dumbly at the carriage. The two women
attributed his embarrassed silence to shyness and surprise. “’Deed now,
ma’am, it was too good of you altogether to be thinkin’ of him,” said
his mother; “sure, he’s fairly took aback wid your kindness. Bad
manners to you, Johnny, haven’t you so much as a thank you at all?”
“Och, the crathur!” said Maggie Ryan, deprecatingly. “Thry will it run
along on the line for you, sonny.”
Johnny set the toy on his twig-rails, and found that the wheels fitted
as exactly as if the gauge had been made to suit them. This discovery
excited him a little; yet in a moment his eyes wandered towards the
neighbouring thorn-clump behind which the hen had temporarily
disappeared, to emerge presently at closer quarters. But before that
happened, a much more imposing object arrived on the scene. Round the
corner came the great mustard-coloured van, in which he had laid his
victim to find a vast and wandering grave. He watched it lumber up, and
speculated as to whether the little white heap were still lying in the
dark angle by the door. Then a more alarming surmise occurred to him.
What if the vanmen, enraged at the liberty taken with their vehicle,
should have traced the deed to him, and would now stop and denounce it?
The danger of this seemed to have passed harmlessly by, but it suddenly
returned with a rush, for the man who had been sitting on the board at
the door, slid hastily off his low seat, and came running back to the
group at the bank. His first words, too, were ominous. “Might you happen
to be missin’ e’er a little white chicken?” he said.
“Not to my knowledge, we didn’t,” Maggie Ryan began, but Pat interrupted
her, as he caught sight of the hen and chickens, which by this time were
close at hand.
“Bedad, yis; itself’s the livin’ moral of one of them,” he said, “it
must ha’ hopped into us the time we was stoppin’ here this mornin’. I’d
a notion to bring it home wid me to the childher, but like enough
’twould only die on them, or else they might have it tore in pieces
contendin’ over it, and besides that, it has the heart of me broke
conthrollin’ it from fluttherin’ out of me ould pocket every minute of
time.” As he spoke, he extracted the chicken, and set it down on the
ground, where it promptly rejoined its brethren, after which they all
ran “through other” with such bewildering liveliness, that in a moment
or two no one could have confidently singled out the travelled member of
the family.
“Why, thrue for you,” said Maggie Ryan, “one and one is two, and two is
four--sure enough there’d be but nine widout it. Glory be to goodness
now, to think of it settin’ up to take off wid itself that way! I’d ha’
been as sorry as anythin’ to lose it, after me brother, poor man,
disthressin’ himself sendin’ herself there up to me from his bit of a
place in the county Wicklow, along wid the clutch of eggs, to make a
beginnin’ like of a few fowls for me to be keepin’. And only a couple
bad out of the whole dozen, and not a coloured feather but white on a
one of them.”
The end of this statement was lost upon Pat Magennis, who had run off
after the receding van.
“I dunno how they got strayin’ out,” Maggie continued, “but I’ll put
them up safe now at all events, before I wet me cup of tay. So
good-night to you kindly, ma’am, and, Johnny, don’t thravel away too far
from us entirely on that grand line of rails.” She went her way, driving
in front of her the white hen and chickens, and Johnny, who had
witnessed this resurrection with almost incredulous eyes, was left to
gloat over his latest acquisition, no longer now poisoned for him by
remorseful memories. It was not until the last glimmer of clearness had
died out of the dusk that he shunted the new carriage into a siding by
his truck, and withdrew lingeringly indoors.
At this point Johnny’s light railway had reached the highest pitch of
perfection to which it ever attained, and I wish I could append a report
of continued prosperity. But that was not to be. An hour or so later,
anybody who had happened to be abroad in the lane might have noticed a
dimness steal over the stars to the south-eastward, until they turned
from twinkling rosettes of light into the semblance of tarnished silver
nails, and anon were vanished altogether as if they had dropped out of
their holes. The drifts of vapour blowing in from the sea spread and
thickened fast; the hedgerows began to rustle, and large rain-drops made
dark wafers dispersedly in the shimmering white dust on the road.
Presently the night was all filled with the sound and scent of rain,
driving and splashing and dripping. When the May morning broke this
downpour was over, and the clouds were lifting to widen a chink of
glowing amber. But along the bank where Johnny’s railway had run, a
brisk little stream went rippling, and the only trace of craftmanship
remaining there was the tin carriage, overset and lying on its side in
the water.
Perhaps the ruin thus wrought sounds more deplorable than it in reality
was. Of one thing we may feel certain; that an inventive child with
ample puddles at his command, and no authorities present to enforce
decrees against dabbling, would never, in the longest day, find himself
stinted of congenial occupation--our most unalloyed boon. The white hen,
too, and her family had again escaped, and were thoroughly enjoying
themselves on the track of many small black and fawn-coloured slugs,
whom the wet grass had tempted forth. And if these latter were not quite
happy under the turn affairs were taking, it is clearly impossible to
satisfy all parties, and when discontent is confined to things which
slimily creep and crawl, we may at any rate hope that it has been
reduced to its very lowest power.
ROSANNE
Towards seven o’clock on a summer evening in July, Rosanne should have
been helping her mistress in the dairy, instead of which she was sitting
under the shadow of the big water-barrel at the kitchen-door and writing
to her sweetheart. She wrote to tell him how she had been given leave to
go home next Sunday, and she did not stop to consider that she was at
this very moment risking the loss of her holiday, by getting into
disgrace for neglect of duty. But it was not Rosanne’s way to think of
more than one thing at a time, so when it occurred to her that John
Gahan, who had called about the loan of a hay-shaker, might post a
letter for her as he went home, she acted upon the idea without further
reflection. She had her paper spread out on the barrel stand, and craned
her curly head over it at unlikely angles as she enjoined Dan McClean to
meet her at Hunt’s in Kilbracken, where the gig would drop her next
Saturday evening.
Meanwhile the dairy work had been going on well enough without her. Mrs
Conroy had a pleased smile as she saw the ripe yellow cream curl
smoothly up under her skimmer, and added it to the rich contents of her
great wide-mouthed gathering-crock. She thought they would have a grand
churning to-morrow, and at least a dozen pounds of butter for Saturday’s
fair. But when she had finished, she recollected that Rosanne should
have been there to carry the pigs their supper of sour skim milk; and
after calling her in vain several times, she sent little Ned to find
her, and bid her come along out of that this instant. Ned delivered this
message, with the pithy addition: “She’s ragin’”; and so in frightened
haste Rosanne finished addressing her envelope with wild blots, and
overset the ink bottle, and rushed away to fetch the bucket. When she
reached the dairy she was relieved at finding nobody there to scold her,
and, still hurry-driven, she filled her bucket and ran off with it
across the yard. Rosanne rather liked seeing the pigs at their supper,
they wriggled so all over with enjoyment, and she now leaned against the
stye-door to watch them. She began to sing _Norah Creina_, but in the
middle of the first verse she stopped abruptly. A frightful misgiving
had suddenly seized her, come she knew not whence. She leaned forward
and looked into the trough; she snatched up her bucket and examined it
carefully; and then she perceived that she had indeed done a dreadful
thing. In her haste she had emptied the wrong crock, and had thrown a
week’s gathering of cream to the pigs!
_How_ dreadful it was, she could estimate by the pride her mistress took
in the row of rich yellow-topped milk-pans, the precautions with which
she surrounded them, her wrath if any clumsiness imperilled them. What
would that wrath be now? Rosanne made her mind up all in a minute not to
face it. She would run away home. It was no such great distance across
the fields; she might get there, she supposed, before it was quite dark.
She thought her father would be glad to see her, and if so, her
stepmother must perforce acquiesce. But at all events there was Dan
McClean, who would be certainly “as plased as anythin’,” and make much
of her, and take her part whatever happened--Dan’s stalwart frame held
up the whole fabric of Rosanne’s future. Beyond a doubt she had lost her
chance of getting a holiday in any other way, she thought, as she raced
at full speed back to the house. For she had no time to hesitate, as the
discovery might at any moment prevent her flight. Luckily almost
everybody was out in the hayfield, and she got up to her attic
unperceived. There she collected her few most cherished little
possessions--the rest might be fetched afterwards--threw on her shawl,
and once more dared the creaking clattering stairs, and the passage that
led by the awful dairy door. Fortune still favoured her; she escaped all
their perils, and was presently scrambling through the gap in the briery
hedge into the meadows at the back of the haggard. She ran all the way
through the first field, because she had such a vivid picture in her
mind of what might be at that very minute happening within doors. She
could almost see Mrs Conroy’s face as she stared into the empty cream
crock, and hear her terrible call, loud and peremptory, “Rosanne,
Rosanne.” The mere thought of it made her scud along like a rabbit.
But at the end of the field she heard real voices, for the haymakers
were returning to the house, so she slipped out of their way, behind a
smooth-sided haycock. When they passed, she stole back to the foot-path,
and on again. About Rathcrumlyn Farm the land was all down in meadow,
and the fields were bordered by thick bosky hedges. Tall cocks threw
shadows nearly across some of them, and the interspaces were very
goldenly green with fresh-springing after-grass, under westering
sunbeams. On others the newly mown swathes still lay in soft waves, and
the shorn sward underneath was paler hued, not having had time to thrust
up any young blades since the sweep of the scythe went by. Along under
the hedge the remnant of the meadow made a fringe with feathery crests
drooping and creamy plumes, tall stalks that unfurled white sunshades,
and here and there a scarlet poppy. The drops of an earlier shower still
twinkled beneath them, and Rosanne’s crisp pink calico skirt grew limp
and bedraggled as she brushed by. But she did not heed this; for the one
article of dress that she much regarded--her new hat with its wreaths of
curious buff and crimson roses--rested safely on her head, and her head
was full of pre-occupying speculations. She began to think that perhaps,
after all, no such great harm was done. That is to say, it was, of
course, a woful pity about the beautiful cream; but for the matter of
losing her place thereby, she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t as lief as
not quit being in service. And she thought it as like as not that when
she came home this way, Dan McClean would again take up the notion of
their getting married after the harvest. That was what he had wanted to
do in the spring, if her stepmother had not put it into everybody’s head
that it would be better for them to get together a few pounds before
they set up housekeeping. Rosanne now said to herself that she did not
see any occasion for it. She wondered, too, what sort of girl Maggie
Walsh, her stepsister, who had just come to live at home, was apt to be.
She had a presentiment that there would be little love lost between
them. However, that didn’t much signify--by reason of Dan.
Through three or four fields Rosanne passed without meeting anything to
interrupt these cogitations. Now and then the voices of home-going
hay-makers were wafted over a hedge, and a belated corncrake was heard
from a long way off faintly “creak-creaking.” The shadows lengthened
silently all about, and the sun-lit interspaces seemed as they shrank to
grow more jewel-like in their shimmering emerald. From a sheltering
corner a large olive-mottled frog started up out of the tangled grass,
and went flinging himself on before her in a long series of expanding
leaps; but at last she almost trod on him as he stopped and sat suddenly
squatting. At the same moment somebody called her name loudly, close
by--“Rosanne, Rosanne.”
A flappy white sun-bonnet was looking at her over a gate in a hedge, a
little way to the right; and in it she recognised her cousin, Martha
Reilly, who lived near them at home. “And where might you be off to?”
Martha said, as Rosanne came up to the gate, “and wid fine grandeur on
you,” she added, referring to the rose-wreathed hat.
“Sure I’m just streelin’ about a bit,” Rosanne said with rather confused
unconcern. She regretted the encounter, and was not at all disposed to
confide in Martha, who had the name of being “the greatest ould gossip
you’d meet in a long day’s walk.” “It’s a fine warm evenin’,” she
continued, to account for her stroll.
“Warm enough, bedad,” said Martha, “you might say so if it was in the
hay you’d been. I come up yisterday to work above at Hilfirthy’s, and I
was manin’ to run over this evenin’ and see you, on’y somethin’ delayed
me. And what’s the best good news wid you this long while?”
“I dunno is there any news in partic’lar, bad or good,” said Rosanne,
with a guilty “I could an’ I would” in her mind as she thought of the
pigs’ supper.
“Then you _haven’t_ heard tell about Dan McClean?” said Martha, suddenly
craning her neck over the topmost bar.
“What about him at all?” said Rosanne with a great start.
“You haven’t heard?” Martha repeated in a half incredulous tone.
“Can’t you tell me?” said Rosanne.
“I’ll come over to you--just wait?” said Martha. She launched her
pitchfork across the gate, and began to scale its many bars with
remarkable agility. She had scarcely flopped to the ground, on Rosanne’s
side of it, before she said: “He’s took up wid Maggie Walsh, that’s what
it is.”
“Took up wid her?” said Rosanne, staring up stupidly at her cousin.
“Ay, bedad and so he has,” said Martha, “but it come to my knowledge
on’y last Sunday. About gettin’ married they are after the harvest--he
and your stepmother’s daughter. And he be all account as good as
promised to you, Rosanne!”
“Who was telling you so? He never set eyes on her till she came home
after Easter. Dan’s no affair of mine. I don’t believe any such thing,”
said Rosanne, rattling the rusty bolt of the padlocked gate.
“Sure they was all talkin’ about it after Mass,” said Martha, “and that
evenin’ I taxed the young feller’s mother wid it, and she didn’t deny
it. Och, Rosanne, but you was a fine fool to let your stepmother pack
you off to service that-a-way, wid Maggie just comin’ home. Earnin’
money for yourself, bedad! ’Deed now what notion she had in her mind’s
as plain to see as the seeds in a ripe gooseberry. Puttin’ you out of it
she was the way she’d have the chance of gettin’ young Dan for her own
girl--and that’s what she’s after doin’ on you.”
“She’s welcome,” said Rosanne, desperately.
“Och, that’s just talkin’, Rosanne,” said Martha, “I was spakin’ about
it to your father on Tuesday. I’d ha’ thought he’d be none too well
plased, but he said nothin’ agin it. I suppose she had him persuaded,
poor man. And Dan’s mother was axin’ me had I heard tell anythin’ about
a young chap was coortin’ you up here. Mark my words, that’s the story
your stepmother’s been puttin’ into their heads. But I tould Mrs McClean
there wasn’t a _iotum_ of truth in it as far as I knew. And there isn’t,
in coorse?” Martha said, glancing again rather suspiciously at the grand
hat.
“Maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t,” said Rosanne defiantly. “It’s
no affair of anybody’s. Let other people mind their own business, and
I’ll mind mine. And let them plase themselves--the pack of them--and
they’ll plase me. I dunno which of them’s the greatest liar; but it’s
little I trouble meself about them. And it’s time for me to be runnin’
back, or else I’ll be too late. So good-night to you kindly--och don’t
be delayin’ me, you ould tormint!” Rosanne whisked the corner of her
shawl out of Martha’s detaining grasp, and ran away down the field. As
she went she struck up _Norah Creina_, and sang it lustily as long as
she thought herself within hearing; but her mind was not at all occupied
with that gentle bashful heroine. The sun had disappeared behind the
rounded tops of Drumaree Wood while she talked to Martha, and the vivid
lights had gone out among the haycocks and hedges. Everything had grown
dimly green, soft and cool, and when she left off singing, not a sound
was to be heard. But her thoughts were travelling through the scorching,
hissing, whirling chaos into which this thunderbolt of tidings had
shattered the world before her. Dan, and the little house of her own,
and love and trust, and a fine wedding and the Aylesbury ducks Mrs
Conroy had promised her, and her pride in old Tim Donagh’s remark that
she had got the best lad on six townlands--all were swept away from her,
and in their places seethed a flood of jealousy, rage, and despair. As
its first rush subsided, she recollected several things that seemed like
disregarded warnings of Martha’s news. She had wondered now and again
that Dan had never managed to get over and see her between this and
Easter; and then the last time old Biddy Doran from his place was up at
the Farm he hadn’t sent e’er a message by her at all. The reason was
plain enough now. And with that, Rosanne bethought her of the letter
which _she_ had sent by John Gahan, and which might be delivered by this
time. Perhaps Dan was at that minute of time laughing with Maggie Walsh
over the suggestion that he should be wasting his evening streeling off
to meet Rosanne Tierney at Kilbracken. Cock her up. This possibility
was the cruel little barb of mortification by which the crushing bulk of
her misfortune caught hold of her mind, and she raged at herself for
having ignorantly wrought it.
But circumstances seldom allow us to rage long uninterrupted, and while
Rosanne walked on, the fields grew dimmer, and the green greyer, and the
breeze chillier, and the grass wetter, until at last she found that the
thorny briers which twitched her by the shawl as she passed them, were
beginning to ask her where she was going. It was a puzzling question. To
go home among those false, scheming, triumphant creatures, could not for
a moment be thought of. It would be more tolerable to return and face
the storm in the dairy at Rathcrumlyn Farm, and even that was quite
impossible. On such consideration as she could give, only one answer
occurred to her. She would go to her aunt Lizzie Mahony, her mother’s
sister, who had always been good-natured and friendly. The Mahonys, it
was true, lived rather a long step off, somewhere beyond Hewitstown;
still she thought she could certainly contrive to get there in the
course of the next day, and she knew they would be glad to see her.
After that, her future was all drearily vague. She supposed that she
could get field work to do, and sometimes she even thought wildly of
turning ballad-singer. Dan used to say that she had a voice fit to make
her fortune; but of course that might only have been one of his lies,
for it was evident you could not believe a word that came out of his
head. The further her feet and her reflections travelled, the more
attractive grew the picture of the Mahonys’ little white cottage, with
her aunt looking out at the door, and saying: “Glory be to goodness, if
it isn’t little Rosanne.” For the fields around her spread lonelier, and
stranger, and the moonlight began to fill them cruelly with ghostly
gleams and shades. At last in a great fright she crept under a haystack,
and shivered and dozed in unequal alternations till the dawn.
It found her bewilderingly miserable, but delivered from the panic fears
that had beset her, while the world was black and white, and she stole
out of the yellow-mounded haggard on to the high road close by. She
hardly noticed that she was hungry and cold, and damp with dew, as she
resumed her journey, upon which the July sun soon began to glare strong
and fierce. The way was much longer than she thought, and she lengthened
it by missing it several times, finding intricate directions all the
more puzzling because she was dazed for the want of food and sleep. Two
women of whom she had made inquiries, and who told her of terribly many
miles, gave her a drink of milk, but that was all she had the whole day.
With her gaudy hat and her carelessly wisped on shawl, and bedraggled
pink gown, her curly hair tossed and ruffled, and her eyes wild and
woebegone, she had become a forlorn, strange-looking figure, which
passers-by eyed curiously, and on which they sometimes made remarks.
This alarmed her greatly, for solitary wanderings were a new experience
to her. She made up her mind never to be a ballad-singer, and her aunt’s
house grew a more and more desired refuge. At last when the shadows
stretched very long, and the sunbeams had relaxed their scorching grip,
she came to a bit of road that seemed familiar to her. Round the next
turn, if she was not mistaken, stood the little white cottage at the
foot of a steep field, in the angle where two lonings met--she
remembered the place very well.
And sure enough, round the corner, just as she had hoped, the little
white cottage came into view, a sight which for a few moments she beheld
with much comfort of heart. But she had not taken many quick steps
towards it, before she perceived that something was amiss. On the brown
slope of the thatch a thick cloud of smoke was brooding, dull and pale,
and as she looked, thicker black clouds came rolling up through it in
great heavy puffs, pierced here and there by sharp thrusts of flame,
which even under the sunset flush of the sky gleamed strong and red.
Very clearly the house was on fire, which was a dreadful thing; but what
struck Rosanne with still more dismay, was that there seemed to be
nobody about to mind it. Three small stranger boys were sitting on the
triangular grass-plot between the two lanes just in front of the
cottage, but they were busily playing some game with bits of broken
crockery, and taking no interest in the fire. Nobody else was to be
seen. Rosanne ran up to the children in a breathless scare. “Where’s all
the Mahonys?” she said, “sure they can’t be in it, wid the roof blazin’
over their heads?” One of the boys glanced at her indifferently. “Och,
the Mahonys was put out of it yisterday for the rint,” he said, “and the
Colonel’s burnin’ the ould bad houses to hinder the people of comin’
back to them, and squatters, and tramps, and all manner. Give me the
blue-edged bit, Billy.”
“And where’s me uncle gone to?” said Rosanne.
“I dunno,” said the boy, “unless it was to the Union below at
Hewitstown.”
“Sure not at all,” said Billy, “I heard them sayin’ Pat Mahony was gone
to his brother’s place away at Tullylough.”
The first boy, who was freckled, and blue-eyed, and red-haired, put out
his tongue in acknowledgment of this correction, and the third, who was
like him, said: “No, he isn’t. They’ve all took off to the States.”
Rosanne thought they looked quite fiendishly hideous. She was turning
towards the house when Billy said: “There’s nobody in it;” but his
brother said: “Yis, there is, after that agin. I seen Alec Anderson and
another of the bailiff’s men goin’ round wid a pitchfork a while ago.”
Rosanne ran desperately up to the door, and looked in. It was all a
smother of smoke inside, and the flames might be heard gnashing their
teeth among the crackling rafters. Then she ran on round the corner of
the house, and there, sure enough, were two men, one of whom, standing
on the pig-stye wall, was poking a pitchfork into the thatch. The fact
was that Alec Anderson, who had a thrifty turn, had noticed a fresh
golden patch where Pat Mahony had lately darned his roof, and now deemed
it worth while to rescue the good bit of straw from the conflagration
for use on his own premises. Burning cabins is hot and thirsty work on a
radiant July day, and Anderson’s mood had become irritable over it. So
when a dishevelled slip of a vagrant girl, wrapped in an old rag of a
shawl surmounted by an incongruous gay hat, came rushing up to him, and
in horror-stricken accents asked would he plase be tellin’ her where Mrs
Mahony was gone, he felt moved to reply by tossing down a bundle of
thatch on her off his fork, and saying: “Ou spier that at somebody that
kens or cares, me hizzie, and dinna be bletherin’ here awa’.” Unluckily
the bundle had a red-hot smouldering core, and as it dropped on
Rosanne’s head, it knocked off her hat, and set her hair alight, and
fell in scorching flakes before her eyes. She was fleeing away, blinded
and terrified, but she tripped over a stone, and fell with her head
against the wall, which stunned her into unconcern.
By the time that her troublesome world came back to her, she had been
conveyed to the infirmary ward of the Hewitstown workhouse, a doleful
white-washed place, where the last red rays of the sunset were beating
on the grimy windows. Poor Rosanne’s fortunes had sunk so deeply within
the last four and twenty hours that you would hardly have recognised her
as the same girl who had talked to her cousin Martha at the gate among
the hay-fields, while the sun went down behind a screen of rounded
tree-tops. For her clothes were blackened and drenched with fire and
water, and, much worse, her pretty curling hair was all burnt off, and
one side of her face was scorched. Next morning her neighbour in the
ward thoughtfully lent her a bit of broken looking-glass that “she might
see the quare show she was;” but she had scarcely energy to glance at
it, and was faintly shocked by the disfigured image. For two days she
lay in a dull apathetic state, and took little heed of anything. It
seemed to her as if she had been there always in a dreary sort of dream.
But on the Monday, when the creeping shadow on the floor had shrunken
almost to its noontide skimpiness, she suddenly roused up quite awake.
Just outside the door, which was close to her bed, she heard a familiar
voice speaking--the voice of Dan McClean. Rosanne held her breath as the
nurse, a square framed stolid person, was called out to interview “a
young man from about Kilbracken, that was come axin’ after a girl.”
Dan’s voice would have sounded like heavenly music to her, if the echo
of Martha’s had not come harshly through it and jarred it into discord.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” she heard him say diffidently, “might there be
a girl be the name of Rosanne Tierney in it?”
“Is it the name?” said the nurse, “sure I couldn’t be tellin’ you the
names of the half of them that comes and goes. What sort is she?”
“Och, a slip of a girl,” said Dan, whose descriptive powers were not
great, “a slip of a girl--wid black hair--and a smallish size she is.”
“There’s plenty of them like that, if that’s all,” said the nurse,
“we’ve a black-haired one come in the other day, not over big. Some sort
of a tramp she is, and got a crack on the head wid a bit of the roof
slippin’ down on her; but I could be axin’ her her name. Rosanne Tierney
did you say? And what might you be to her supposin’ she is? Her brother
maybe?”
It seemed to Rosanne as if an endless pause followed this question; yet
Dan only hesitated for a moment before he answered. “Och well, ma’am,”
he said, “you might say I’m as good as a brother anyway.”
And with that a stormy darkness fell upon Rosanne. For what could “as
good as a brother” signify, except marriage with the stepsister Maggie
Walsh? She hoped to goodness she might never have the misfortune to set
eyes on either of the two of them to the end of her life’s days--and
she’d as lief that mightn’t be very long--a pair of black-hearted
rogues--the villain might just go back the way he came.
When a minute afterwards the nurse returned to make her enquiry, the
tramp kept her head under the blanket, and would only mutter in a husky
mumbling way: “I dunno any such people at all--Bid him get along out of
that--me name’s Isabella Hill,” facts which were at once reported to Dan
outside in the passage, with the additional details that the crathur
seemed to be a cross-tempered one, and perhaps not quite right in her
senses. But at this moment another visitor arrived, in the shape of a
small freckled and red-haired boy, who was carrying, with an averse
expression of countenance, a large, gaudily-wreathed straw hat. “And
what might _you_ be wantin’, Matthew Flanigan?” said the nurse.
“Me mother bid me be bringin’ th’ ould hat,” said Matthew. “It dropped
off the girl that got hurted up at Pat Mahony’s on Friday, and me
brother brought it home, but she sez it might be a loss to the crathur
that owned it, so she sent me along wid it, and it’s him she’d a right
to ha’ sent----”
“Be the powers of smoke,” Dan exclaimed, seizing hold of the hat,
“that’s belongin’ to Rosanne Tierney; she got it new at Easter, and as
proud of herself in it she was as a little paycock. Sure I remember this
tuft of yeller roses wid red glass beads in them cocked up at the side
of it; I was tellin’ her it looked for all the world like a one of our
ould donkey’s ears; and was axin’ her why wouldn’t she be sticking up
the other to match it.”
“For the matter of that,” said the nurse, “there’s dozens of quare hats
goin’ about the world, and all of them that deminted lookin’ you’d be
hard set to tell the one from the other. The aquil of the outlandish
gazaboes you see on people these times I niver witnessed.”
“Ah, but I couldn’t be mistook in this one be any manes,” said Dan,
continuing to examine the hat, “sure ’twas sittin’ in front of me in the
trap all the way drivin’ over from her place to our place and back agin
of Easter Sunday, an’ here it is the very same. Couldn’t I be seein’ the
girl, ma’am, just for a minyit, for if she isn’t Rosanne----.”
But here a voice called loudly and clearly through the half open door.
“Don’t you offer to be comin’ next or nigh me, Dan McClean. I’m no such
thing. Git away home to Maggie Walsh,” it said, and Dan’s sunburnt face
grew two inches shorter at the sound. “Glory be to goodness, it’s
herself,” he said, “and me heart broke thinkin’ what had become of her
ever since Saturday mornin’. Sure, I’ll not be comin’ in if you’re not
wishful, jewel,” he said, peering warily round the edge of the door,
“but what talk at all was that you had about Maggie Walsh?”
“It was me cousin Martha Reilly was tellin’ me all manner,” said
Rosanne, who felt as if she were wakening up out of a very ill-favoured
nightmare.
“Trust Martha Reilly to be gabbin’ about what doesn’t consarn her,” said
Dan. “Troth I well knew your stepmother was puttin’ that story about
this while back, and divil a word of truth in it. ’Deed Rosanne, that
ould woman isn’t any too good I’m thinkin’. But sure what matter about
the pack of them? Your aunt Lizzie Mahony’s stoppin’ wid her
sister-in-law away at Drumcastle. I discovered that much yisterday--and
they bid me be bringin’ you to stay up there till we would be gittin’
married afore raipin’ begins. Maggie Walsh bedad! Is it idling me time
I’d be trampin’ over the country after her on a Monday mornin’ in the
middle of haymakin’? So hurry up, honey, and git all right agin, the way
I can be comin’ to fetch you. I’ll borry Jimmy Byrne’s side-car.”
“And did you hear tell the quare awful thing I done at the
Farm--throwin’ all Mrs Conroy’s grand crame to the pigs?” said Rosanne,
the recollection of this disaster now beginning to emerge from the chaos
of troubles which had overwhelmed and obliterated it. But Dan replied
unappalled: “Why to be sure. And was that any raison for you to be
throwin’ yourself after it, so to spake? Not if every sup of crame in
Ireland was spilt, and all the pigs in the country swimmin’ in the
middle of it--ay, and your stepmother, and her daughter, and Martha
Reilly, that can’t be aisy unless she’s gabbin’, along wid the lot of
them.”
So a few Sundays later Rosanne Tierney was married in her gay buff and
crimson wreathed hat. It was slightly battered and the worse for its
travels, but it would have been ungrateful of her to discard it, as only
for its timely turning up on a former critical occasion, it might
probably enough at that moment have been worn by a forlorn little
distracted vagrant, instead of adorning the proud and happy head of Mrs
Daniel McClean.
THE END.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
slope in Kilbeggan corner=> slope in Killenbeg Corner {pg 159}
its self-confidenee=> its self-confidence {pg 187}
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