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Title: A creel of Irish stories

Author: Jane Barlow

Release date: March 11, 2025 [eBook #75587]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Methuen & Co, 1897

Credits: John Campbell 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 A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES ***





  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.




                       A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES


       “Ὅσσ’ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθ’· ὅσα δ’ οὐχ ἕλομεν, φερόμεσθα.”




                           A CREEL OF IRISH
                               STORIES


                                  BY
                             JANE BARLOW
                       AUTHOR OF “IRISH IDYLLS”


                            METHUEN & CO.
                        36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
                                LONDON
                                 1897




                              PRINTED BY
                       W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD
                           RIVERSIDE PRESS
                              EDINBURGH




                                  TO

                               J. W. B.




CONTENTS


                             PAGE

  THE KEYS OF THE CHEST         1

  A DESERTED CHILD             97

  AN ACCOUNT SETTLED          125

  M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP       155

  THE SNAKES AND NORAH        185

  THREE PINT MEASURES         211

  THE SURREE AT MAHON’S       231

  THE SHORTEST WAY            253

  THE STAY-AT-HOMES           271

  A PROUD WOMAN               299




THE KEYS OF THE CHEST




THE KEYS OF THE CHEST


The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome
place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people
who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that
its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden.
It runs westward—that is, towards the ocean—but never reaches the
shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the
end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to
north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple
construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their
smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the
sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at
one point—about midway on the right hand looking westward—it is
suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like
an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybody _the Nick
of Time_. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me
over the opposite hills, but he replied: “Sure, what else would they
be callin’ it?” Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory
explanation.

The effect of Letterglas’s solitude and verdure somehow seems to be
heightened if one notices its single visible sign of human handiwork.
This is a road-track, now all but quite grassed over, leading into
the valley from its open end, where the Clonmoragh highway passes,
and stopping aimlessly at the slope immediately below the Nick,
having first flung two or three zig-zag loops up the hillside.
A rust-eaten, handleless shovel, and the wreck of an overturned
wheelbarrow, still mark the point where the work was abandoned on a
misty morning in April, more than fifty springs ago; but the track
itself is now merely a most faint difference of shade in the sward,
which has crept back again indefatigably, even where the austere
road-metal had been thrown clattering down.

A day before that misty morning, if anybody had climbed up and
had passed through the Nick of Time, in at which the new road was
to go, he would have found himself on a long level of fine-bladed
turf, stretching like a lofty causeway laid down atop of the
hill-embankment Everything else up there looked so softly smooth and
flecklessly green that the eye was at once caught by a big block of
stone, which stood just opposite the gap, at a few yards’ distance.
It was an oblong mass of blackish limestone, perhaps seven feet by
four, with a shape curiously symmetrical for a piece of Nature’s
rough-hewing; plumb-and-rule guided chisel could scarcely have made
its lines truer. That, and its solitariness, uncompanioned as far
as could be seen by so much as a single pebble, gave its aspect an
incongruity which prompted the question how it had come there; for
whose answer we must revert through unimaginable wastes of years to
the time when our last huge ice-sheet was scoring and grinding all
the country’s face on its slithering way to the western ocean. Then
it was that this big boulder dropped fortuitously through a small
rent in the isle-wide coverlid, and so being left behind did not
share in the final weltering plunge a few miles farther on, where
the stark folds slipped over the sea-cliffs like the counterpane
off a restless sleeper’s bed. Ever since that catastrophe it had
sat there looking rather like a rude unwieldy coffer or chest,
a portion—as in fact it had been—of the impedimenta carried and
lost by some Titanic traveller. The resemblance was increased by a
clean-cut horizontal crack, no doubt sustained when the mass came
_sogging_ heavily to earth, which ran all round it, a few inches
from the top, counterfeiting a lid. All the old ages that had passed
over it afterwards had wrought only slight changes in its aspect. As
the years went on, the dark peaty mould deepened a little about its
base, and dull golden and silvery lichen-circlets crept out here and
there like wraiths of the sun and moon beams that had touched it.
Otherwise it was unaltered, and for many a long century so were its
surroundings.

But at last a new feature appeared among them; a very inobtrusive
one. Fifty years ago, anybody approaching the big stone from the Nick
of Time might have observed that a little footpath led up to it from
the contrary direction, and went no farther. A more inartificial path
could not well be: a simple product of steps going to and fro. You
might have supposed a sheep-walk, only that there were no fleeces
nibbling over Letterglas. Indeed, its most frequent passers-by being
such promiscuous wayfarers as the shadows of wings and clouds, it
was not easy to conjecture any plausible _raison d’être_ for this
track, which ran distinctly defined, though faintly, merely a crease
in the flowing sward mantle, not a seam worn threadbare, so to speak,
through to the brown earth. Certainly the rather gloomy-looking block
had no apparent attractions wherewith to invite resort, not even a
view, as it stood at the bottom of a very shallow dent in the green.
Yet there the path ended; and if you took a dozen steps to the brow
of the hill, you could trace the course of that pale thin line far
down the slopes; through the fenceless “mountainy land” first, and
then into two or three steep, dyke-girdled fields, before it was lost
among the round-topped trees which gathered about a rambling old
mansion-house. Whoever visited the big stone evidently thought it
worth while to come a long way.

Such an humble and artless path has always a certain element
of romance about it, lacking in more pretentious thoroughfares
contracted for at so much a mile. They differ as does a brook from a
canal. Like the brook, which has wrought itself as it went along,
with and by its own purpose, the little footpath has some special
meaning and object, albeit perhaps a less obvious one. It is the
visible trail of a want or wish, though of what kind we may be
unaware, and with want or wish it will cease to exist, or soon after.
For the living green things will creep back and efface it speedily.
But meanwhile it seems half to keep and half to betray a secret: you
can only guess what has brought feet thither day by day to tread it
out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fifty years ago or more, you would have been likely enough any fine
morning to catch the chief maker of this particular path in the
act. If the years were, say, ten more, it would have proved to be
a very little little-girl, whose brown hair held both sunshine and
shadow, and whose hazel-green eyes were softly lit, and who in those
early days of hers always wore an ugly reddish checked pelisse, and
a broad-brimmed straw hat with velvet rosettes to match. This was
little Eileen Fitzmaurice, six or seven years old, who, ever since
she could recollect anything, and maybe some twelve months longer,
had lived with her mother and aunt at the Big House in Glendoula. As
you would, no doubt, never guess her errand up the side of Slieve
Ardgreine, I will at once explain that she was seeing after the
safety of her family plate.

Although Eileen had herself no recollection of anywhere else than
this Glendoula, a valley much resembling its neighbour Letterglas,
but with its green dotted and chequered by a few cabins and fields,
she knew by hearsay that there was another place in the world, a most
wonderful place called Drumlough Castle or At Home, where “there
wouldn’t be as much as a wing of a cold chicken served in the parlour
without its silver dish under it, and as for the ould black sideboard
of an evenin’ there would be company in it, that now was somethin’
worth lookin’ at; the full moon on a dark night was a joke to the big
salvers.” To be sure there were there other fine things innumerable,
which would have appealed quite as strongly to her imagination, if
they had had equal justice done to them; however, it was upon these
that Eileen’s informant always laid most stress, for she looked
back to her ancient home through the eyes of old Timothy Gabbett,
the lame butler, whose pride and affection had dwelt in his pantry
and plate-chest, enjoying their supreme moments before a gala-night
spectacle of snowy and crystal and lustrous argent gleams.

Yet this paradise, of which old Timothy used to say mournfully,
“Ah, Miss Eileen, them was the rael times,” was haunted by lurking
shadows. Eileen never learned the true reason of their exile: how
wild Sir Gerald, her father, had been found one summer morning
entangled among the serpentine coils of the water-weeds at the end of
the lake, with his only son and heir dead in his arms, three-year-old
Jack, who, when told by the garden-boy Mick that the master was
looking for him high ways and low ways, had stumped off greatly
elated, with no foreboding of the method in which Sir Gerald had
resolved to settle his grievously involved affairs. She had been
too small a baby then to be conscious of her mother’s flight from
the memories of Drumlough, and the circumstances of their coming
to Glendoula remained for her in their original obscurity. But
she very quickly perceived that it was worse than useless to ask
questions on such subjects of anybody except old Timothy, and that
any allusion to his stories in the presence of her elders was a grave
misdemeanour, which made her invalid mother cry, and her melancholy
aunt scold; and Eileen would have desisted at a subtler hint. She
did not often wonder why this should be, because her world was so
full of mysteries that she generally accepted their existence as a
matter of course. There was just one of them, however, that exercised
her mind not a little, and that she sometimes vainly tried to get
cleared up. She wanted to know what had become of all those most
beautiful silver things that Timothy talked about—the great shining
salvers, the claret-jugs, the tankards and flagons, the piles “as
high as your head, Miss Eileen,” of plates with a polish on them “the
stars in the sky might be the betther of gettin’,” and the grand
potato-rings, and the frosted cake-baskets, and the tall _up-urny_,
which seemed to be a marvellous composition of lights and flowers.
Of all these resplendent objects, the only one, a few uninteresting
spoons and forks excepted, that apparently had moved with the family
to Glendoula, was an antique teapot of fantastic shape. It could
no longer be used for its proper purpose, owing to the infirmity of
its dragon-tail handle, but old Timothy turned it to account in his
own way. You would always have been warned that it was Quality—and
Quality was almost invariably either Dr M‘Clintock or Canon Roche—who
had called at Glendoula House had you seen Timothy hobbling to
answer the bell. For, having reconnoitred through the half-glass
back hall-door, it was his practice in such cases to equip himself
with the old teapot and a bit of “shammy,” that he might appear
rubbing up ostentatiously, and muttering a stereotyped apology: “Beg
your pardon, sir, but there does be such a terrible sight of silver
clanin’ in this house that I scarce git time to lay a bit out of me
hand.” All the while he felt more than half-conscious that it was a
poor and rather unseemly pretence; but he had not much invention, and
could devise no better expedient for the magnifying of his diminished
office and the upholding of the family’s fallen fortune. Nor was
he ready with any very satisfactory answers when Eileen questioned
him about the present bestowal of his treasures. Full well he
knew that they had long since gone to the Jews and other hopeless
destinations, and were by this time irrecognisably melted down, or,
more intolerable still, adorning alien boards, and subject to alien
powder and brushes. This knowledge gave him acute pangs, which made
his replies curt and vague. “Where are they now, Miss Eily? Ah, sure,
just put away somewheres safe; they’re not wanted these times, when
the poor misthress is seein’ no company; but it won’t be so one of
these days.... Ah no, Miss Eily darlint, I couldn’t be showin’ them
to you—sure, they’re not in this house at all.” And once he added:
“They’re just stored up handy, Miss Eily, waitin’ till you’re grown a
big enough lady to be ownin’ of them.”

“Me?” said Eileen, startled.

“Why, in coorse, Miss Eileen. Who else has anythin’ else to say to
thim after poor little Master Jack, that had a right to ha’ been Sir
John, gettin’ dhrown—bein’ took suddint, I mane, that way? Hiven be
good to the both of them. Ay, to be sure, honey, it’s all in a very
safe place waitin’ for you. And thank ’ee kindly for bringin’ me in
the grand little bunch of daisies—they smell iligant.”

After learning this fact about her far-off proprietorship in the
hoarded plate, Eileen thought about it oftener than ever, though from
motives of delicacy she spoke about it seldomer, lest she should
appear unduly prying and eager on her own behalf. And for a long time
the more she pondered the matter, the less possible she found it to
excogitate any possible hiding-place. But at last she made a fateful
discovery.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was one fine May morning when she went for an unusually long
ramble with Norah Kinsella, the housemaid. Norah—a tall, strong,
cheerful lass, far more active than rheumatic old nurse—thought
nothing of carrying her pet, little Miss Eileen, who at six years
old was still only “a light fairy of a crathur,” up and down steep
places, so that they could go all the farther. On this occasion they
climbed right up to the top of the hill behind the house, higher
than Eileen had ever been before; and one of the first things she
noticed was the great boulder-block. She never had seen a stone of
nearly so large a size, nor imagined one; and she did not now class
it with the small unshapely fragments and insignificant pebbles with
which she was familiar. Rather, it reminded her of the turf-stacks
that she had watched people building up carefully in the yard. Yet a
turf-stack it certainly was not.

“Doesn’t it look like a great big box, Norah?” she said.

“Ay, indeed does it, Miss Eily,” Norah said; “and a fine power of
things it ’ud hould inside of itself, too. Sure now, you could be
puttin’ away a one of them little houses down below there in it, or
very nearly.”

“It must be extrornarly heavy, Norah,” Eileen said, patting the
sun-warmed side of the stone with her hand. “If that’s its lid, I
couldn’t lift it.”

“Sorra a bit of you, honey, nor ten like you. Troth, ’twould take
ten strong men to give that a heft,” said Norah, making as if she
would prise it up with the flat of her hand. “Whativer was inside it
’ud have to stay there for you or for me, if it was silver or gould
itself—we’d ha’ ne’er a chance.”

Her random words gave Eileen the shock of a new idea. Perhaps there
really might be silver, quantities of silver, in it. For why
should not this be the handy safe place that old Timothy meant? A
safer there could not well be, since it was so far removed from all
meddlers; and she almost thought that she did espy a bright twinkle
as she stared hard at the lid-like crack, which was just on a level
with her eyes. She discreetly said nothing about it to Norah, and her
pre-occupation with the subject made her so abstractedly silent on
their way home that Norah feared the walk must have been too long.
But, in fact, she was considering whether or no she should mention
her discovery to old Timothy. He might be vexed, she thought, at her
finding out what he had refused to tell her: still, she would have
liked to ask him whether her guess were right. The point needed much
deliberation, and remained undecided for many days.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile she chanced upon something that seemed to be an
independent corroboration of her own theory. By nature Eileen had
not particularly studious tastes, but solitariness had early driven
her to seek for company on the shelves in the long low-windowed
book-room. She did not find there much that was very congenial.
Sixty years ago juvenile literature was, as a rule, a solemn and
dreary thing; and Eileen’s meagre library was not even up to that
date, having for the most part belonged to the preceding generation.
The favourite authors of the day would appear to have been infested
with a mole-like fancy, which commonly led them to linger among
tombs and worms and epitaphs, seldom, indeed, stopping short at
those grisly precincts, or forbearing to light them up with a lurid
flare from the regions beyond, but, nevertheless, dwelling upon them
with a fond elaboration of detail. Accordingly, a few days after her
first ascent of Slieve Ardgreine, Eileen fished down from its shelf
a small, old dusty, half-calf volume, which was composed of several
short stories bound together. One of them, entitled _The Churchyard
Prattler_, related the experiences of a child, aged four, who, as
an appropriate and improving pastime, was sent out provided with a
string of his own length, and instructed to ascertain by measurement
how many of the graves in his cheerfully chosen playground were
shorter than himself. He was pictorially represented as attired in a
long bib and a broad-brimmed chimney-pot hat, and he moralised his
lively researches into the strains of a brief rime-doggerel hymn:

      “_Oft may be found
      A grassy mound
      By the yew-tree,
      Much less than me;
      It seems to cry:
      Prepare to die!_”

Another showed how a frivolous little girl, in a huge coal-scuttle
bonnet, had her sinful hankering after toys and such vanities rebuked
by being conducted past a series of attractive shop-windows, from
each of which she was bidden to select herself a present, until she
arrived at an undertaker’s establishment, where she was likewise
required to place an order.

The last story in the volume, however, was of a very different type,
and upon it Eileen now alighted, instinctively judicious in her
skipping of its ghoulish companions. It was called _The Glittering
Hoard in the Coffer of Stone_; and the passage that most profoundly
impressed her ran as follows: “The flare of the scented torches
fell upon the vast coffer of dark stone, which stood in one corner
of the cavern. Its smooth sides were crusted here and there with
patches of lichen and grey moss, and it looked as if no hand had
touched it for many an age. But at a gesture from the Prince, six
gigantic black slaves raised up the massive slab which formed its
lid. As they did so, the foot of one of them slipped, and before he
could recover himself, the unwieldy weight slid down with a crash,
and was shattered into three fragments on the floor. Nobody heeded,
however, for the light that broke out of the open chest drew all
eyes thither. It was like a cistern filled with crystalline fire.
“Empty it, my son,” said the old Sultaness, and the Prince began to
lift out one by one the treasures it contained. Silver goblets there
were and flagons, great gilt bowls and ewers, filigree caskets set
with diamonds, chains of red gold, and ropes of milk-white pearls,
diadems and necklaces, armlets and girdles, whose pendant gems
dripped a many-coloured brilliance, as of flower-distained dew. At
the bottom of the chest lay a round golden buckler, studded with
knots of jewels, and a mighty sword in an ivory scabbard inlaid with
pale coral and amber: the hilt was carved out of a single lump of
apple-green chrysoprase. All these, strewn over the flagged floor,
shimmered and bickered under the glancing torch-gleams, until it
seemed as if a rippled and moon-lit sea lay there flashing around a
murky rock. The beholder could hardly realise that its uncouth bulk
had indeed been the receptacle of a treasure so richly wrought and
exquisite.”

Eileen read and pored over this account with keen interest and
pleasure. From the first she drew a parallel between the two great
blocks of stone, so that the wealth disclosed by the one strengthened
her most splendid conjectures about the other. As she read, she
easily shifted the scene from the shadowy cavern to the sunny
hill-top, and imagined the grass all scattered over with shining
gear, which by some strange decree of fortune she was to look upon as
her own property. Silver dishes and jewelled diadems, the _up-urny_
and the buckler, both these alike fascinatingly mysterious, sparkled
for her in the clear light of day. The only objects in the picture
that she shrank from reproducing were those six gigantic black men,
whose presence she felt to be an ugly blot upon the brightness. But
then she reflected that the lifters of the lid perhaps need not be
either black or gigantic. Dan Donnelly, and Christy Shanahan, and
Murtagh Reilly, would surely be strong and big enough to do it;
and they were all pleasant familiar faces, who said “Good mornin’
to you kindly, Miss Eily,” or “The Lord love you,” with friendly
smiles, whenever they met her, and were in no wise alarming. So she
substituted them for the formidable figures, and could almost hear
old Murtagh saying, “Hup boyos! or what for was yous aitin’ all them
pitaties?” which was his usual exordium upon such strenuous occasions.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next time that she went for a walk with Norah Kinsella, which
happened soon after this, in the continuance of old nurse’s
rheumatism, Eileen said, half-scared at her own temerity: “Let us
go up again to the big box”; and she felt happy when Norah at once
assented, tacitly accepting the fact that a box it was. Eileen wanted
to see whether she were tall enough to look in, supposing the lid
removed, and she found, to her gratification, that on tiptoe her
stature sufficed.

It was some while longer, however, before she ventured to touch
upon it in conversation with old Timothy; nor did she then make any
point-blank statement. She introduced the subject allusively and
implicitly. “That _is_ an exceedingly safe place where you keep the
plate now, Timothy, isn’t it?” she said to him one day when she was
helping him to lay the table, by following him with a little sheaf of
spoons as he hobbled round it. Her brown frock was hidden beneath a
white cambric pinafore, and her large eyes glinted wistfully through
a soft cloud of hair.

“It is so bedad, missy,” said the old man resignedly, “we’ve took
good care of that.”

“How many people do _you_ think it would take to lift off the lid of
the chest?” said Eileen.

“Is it the led, Miss Eily? Troth, now, they’d be bothered to do that
on us at all, if they was as many as they plased, and the kay of it
put away out of the raich of them—or the likes of them,” old Timothy
said, arbitrarily blackening her colourless term.

“Oh, then, it’s locked?” said Eileen.

“To be sure it is, Miss Eily. Why now, if it wasn’t, you might as
well be gad’rin’ the things together handy for villins to run away
wid thim convanient. But ah, sure, you’re innicent yet, Miss Eily,
and small blame to you, or you’d understand the raison of kays.”

“So I do, Timothy,” said Eileen. “It’s villins. But I think I don’t
quite understand the reason of _them_.”

She went away pondering. This locking of the chest compelled her
to modify somewhat the details of the opening scene. However, she
quickly re-arranged them completely to her satisfaction, and her
fondness for visiting the site of it did not diminish. About this
time she began to be allowed to ramble out unattended, for old nurse
went invalided home, and Eileen had acquired the character of a
quiet, sensible child, not apt to get into mischief. The use she made
of her liberty was a daily pilgrimage up to the big stone, where she
dreamed away many pleasant hours, largely occupied with plans for the
future, when she should have found that key. Sometimes she brought
the _Glittering Hoard_ book up with her, and read it there to whet
the edge of anticipation; but in general she was content to weave a
dazzling fabric out of the material supplied her by old Timothy’s
reminiscences.

Should anybody hence infer that Eileen Fitzmaurice must have been
in her early youth an avaricious sort of person, he cannot be
flatly contradicted; for so she was, in a way. But in a way it
was. Her theories about the privileges of property were peculiar,
and restrictive. For instance, in her definition “my own” meant
merely “promptly transferable”; and the Paradise she supposed was
a place where everybody else would like everything that she had.
Here, the failure of her few possessions to please other people
not infrequently caused her disappointment; and she occasionally
thought scorn of herself for having only trifles to offer so scant
and paltry. Sometimes, indeed, it was nothing better than a bunch or
so of blackberries, perhaps wanting still several shades of their
mature glossy jet, which she had torn hands as well as frock in
extricating from among their barbed briers—the greediest child never
plucked with a more eager recklessness. When she could meet with
no friend who was imprudent or complaisant enough to accept these
spoils, she would, a little crestfallen and regretful, scatter them
on some walk or window-stool, in hopes that at least the small birds
might condescend to benefit thereby. She was all the more dependent
upon opportunities for bestowing such a tangible proof of her regard,
because she seldom had any for others of the less material kind. Her
mother was too drearily isolated by ill-health and despondency to
be within reach of caresses, while her aunt Geraldine was mostly
absent, inhabiting some remote volume, and seemed to be rather bored
by the people whom she encountered in her brief visits to the outer
world. The acquisition of the wonderful chest, however, would release
Eileen from these straitened circumstances, as its contents would
surely comprise what could not but give satisfaction to all. She
could scarcely believe that anybody, not even poor mamma, who only
pretended so badly to care about her presents of wild flowers and the
like, could really be indifferent to the set of six little silver
salt-cellars shaped like water-lilies, which old Timothy described
so fondly. It might be possible also to provide Aunt Geraldine with
something of which she should not say hurriedly, coming reluctantly
out of her book: “Oh, thank you, my dear child, but what use would it
be to _me_?” Then there were Norah Kinsella, and old nurse, and old
Timothy, and after them a small crowd of neighbours, very adequately
representing the population of Glendoula, so catholic being Eileen’s
good will that there was hardly a dresser in the hamlet on which
some brilliant object should fail to shine. And if anything remained
over after the distribution, she thought to herself that she would
leave it for the villins, who would no doubt be much disappointed,
supposing they ever did come to look and found nothing at all. Such
plans as these were commonly in her mind as she toiled up and trotted
down the smooth-swarded steps, where the thread-like track of her
footsteps slowly began to follow them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Generally Eileen went to and fro quite alone beneath the spacious
domed skies, which seemed to make no more account of her than of
the rabbits, who played here and there on the side of the hill.
The rabbits evidently did not think much of her either, and hid
themselves when she came near without any great show of flurry or
fright, rather intimating by their demeanour that they had simply
no wish to make her acquaintance. But Eileen used to watch them
wistfully from their prescribed distance, and think to herself that
they looked enviably sociable and friendly together. Sometimes, too,
she wished that her tame robin would hop along with her farther than
to the end of the holly walk, but it never would; and one day the
black cat ate it, all except a fluff of heart-rending feathers,
no doubt to warn her that her desires were vain. For destiny had
assigned her little intercourse with her fellow-creatures.

Once, however, she had a companion for a while. It was during her
seventh summer, when her cousin Pierce Wilmot spent his holidays at
Glendoula House. Just at first Eileen found this an experience as
alarming as it was novel. Breakfast and luncheon became such serious
ordeals when she had to confront a great-sized stranger—Pierce was
about double her age and much more than twice as big—concerning whom
the furtive glances she ventured upon gave her an impression of a
very black head, and eyebrows as dark and straight as if they had
been ruled with pen and ink. She thought he looked ferocious, and
privately inquired of Norah whether holidays were _many_ days.

But on the second morning, after breakfast, this forbidding person
suddenly said to her: “Come along, little Bright-Eyes, and show
me everything.” At which address her terror culminated, and then,
as terrors sometimes do, toppled over into nothing at all. A few
minutes later they were going about together quite amicably out of
doors. Pierce was so immeasurably Eileen’s superior in age and all
its privileges that he had no need to assert his dignity by keeping
her at a distance—as the rabbits did—and they fraternised apace.
The July morning was still freshly fair, with a twinkling trail
of dew shifting along from blade to leaf up the sun-lit sward, as
the moon’s silver-spun wake shifts over a rippled water, and with
gossamer threads, that might have been ravelled out of a rainbow,
woven between furze and broom bushes, when Eileen and Pierce began
to ascend Slieve Ardgreine. For one of the first things she had to
show him was her stone chest. She took an especial pleasure in doing
so, because she very seldom had an opportunity of even talking about
it to anybody, the matter being, she felt, a family affair, which
she could not with propriety enter upon except to old confidential
Timothy, whose distaste for the subject she was bound to respect.

“Why, _you’ll_ never get up there,” Pierce said with some
incredulity, when, in answer to his inquiry whither he was being
taken, Eileen pointed to the ridge above their heads, “_Were_ you
ever up so high?” he asked, doubtfully.

Eileen would have been very sorry to let him perceive how absurd she
thought this curious misconception, and she only replied: “Every
fine day, if they don’t say the grass is too boggy altogether. And
old Murtagh says I skyte up as fast as his Cruiskeen going after a
rabbit.”

On the way up, Eileen gave her companion, whose life seemed to
have been spent chiefly in towns, a good deal of information about
common natural objects. Some of this she had excogitated for herself
during her solitary rambles, and it appeared to surprise and amuse
him rather unaccountably. Her explanation, for instance, of how the
hedgehogs came and stuck themselves over with the withered spines of
the furze-bushes, that had dropped off mottled and grey. Among other
things she showed him two or three rabbit-holes; but here it was
Pierce who had new facts to impart. “So that’s where they sleep, is
it?” he said, “I always thought they hung themselves up like bats,
head downwards against a wall; at any rate, that’s how they manage in
Dublin.”

“That _is_ funny,” said Eileen; “I don’t think they ever do here. And
I suppose they drop down when they awake?”

“Oh, I rather fancy they never do awake,” said Pierce.

“Never at all? Are you quite sure, now, that they’re not _dormouses_,
Pierce?” said Eileen wisely.

“Am I sure that you’re not an elephant, Miss Eileen?” he said,
mimicking her. “But I can tell you that if I can borrow a gun, I’ll
soon teach your rabbits the same trick. Why, haven’t you ever been in
a poulterer’s shop”—Eileen never had—“and seen them hanging up?”

“Oh,” said Eileen. She disliked guns and shooting, and moreover
became suddenly aware that she must have displayed a ridiculous
stupidity about Pierce’s joke. This made her turn disconcertedly
pink, so that Pierce was afraid he must have hurt her feelings, which
he had not meant to do. Therefore he was glad to find, when a few
minutes afterwards they reached the big stone, that she had evidently
quite forgotten any little vexation in the excitement of relating
its wonderful romance. He was careful to listen with such interest,
and seemingly so fully share all her sentiments, that she very soon
ventured upon confiding to him a particular anxiety which had of late
grown up in her mind. “Do you see what a small keyhole it has?” she
said, pointing to a little round orifice which occurred high up on
one side of the block, and the discovery of which had been to her
a source both of hopes and fears. “Only a tiny little _pinny_ key
would fit into it. Wouldn’t you think it would take a bigger one to
open a box like this?” As the hole barely admitted the tip of her
forefinger, it could not be considered roomy, but Pierce replied with
decision: “The largest box in the world might be opened with the
smallest key that ever was made”; and one of her haunting fears being
thus dispelled, she produced another, which took this form: “Well,
but supposing the people somehow _lost_ the key, then I suppose the
box couldn’t ever be opened again, even if the person that the things
in it were belonging to did live to be as much as twenty—old enough
to be let have them, you know?” And again Pierce could re-assure her.
“Why, there’d be nothing easier than to get another key made. One
takes an impression of the lock with cobbler’s wax; _I_ could do it
myself. So if they lose it on you, little Bright-Eyes, just send word
to me, and I’ll come and settle it for you.” Eileen looked grateful
and relieved. “It won’t be for a long while, but I’ll not forget,”
she said.

As they returned down the hill she said: “I wonder whether there
is that very fine sort of sword in this chest too. I hope so, and
perhaps there may be, only old Timothy never told me. I must ask him
about it, and if there is one, Pierce, I’ll give it to you.”

“And then I’d maybe kill you with it,” Pierce said, absently joking,
for just at that time he was speculating upon his chances of getting
a shot at the rabbits. But Eileen replied quite solemnly: “I don’t
believe you’d ever like to do that on purpose—at any rate, not unless
I growed up very detestfully nasty; and you’re too big to do anything
by accident.” And she proceeded home, much cheered by the event of
their walk.

       *       *       *       *       *

Less satisfactory was the result of an interview which she had
shortly afterwards with old Timothy. For, in the first place, she
regretted to hear that “he couldn’t be sure, but he thought it
noways likely there would be a sword, or any such description of
an ould skiverin’ conthrivance, put up along with the good plate;
at all events, he never remimbered any talk of e’er a one—not to
his knowledge.” And still more mortifying than this, she quickly
perceived that the old butler had no liking for her cousin. What
Timothy said on the subject was exactly as follows:—“Goin’ out wid
Master Pierce, missy jewel? Och well, to be sure, he’s a fine young
gentleman, considherin’. If the night’s black enough, the baste’s
white enough, as Andy Goligher said, and he misdhrivin’ home the
wrong Kerry bullock.” An aphorism the application of which may seem
rather obscure to the undiscerning, but which Eileen quite clearly
understood as an intimation that of Master Pierce Timothy thought
poorly, and she was sorry for this, as she would have liked her old
and her new acquaintance to be friends.

The grounds of Timothy’s prejudice, however, she did not guess. The
fact was that he had a few days before scowlingly from his pantry
window espied Master Pierce “discoorsin’ as plisant as anythin’”
with young Larry M‘Farlane, “that was sister’s son to ould Pather
Doran, and bad luck to _him_.” Now, maybe as many as a dozen years
ago, Timothy and Pather had differed in a discussion about the proper
season for sowing asparagus, and one of Pather’s arguments had been:
“That it was no great thanks to Timothy if he _had_ sted a goodish
while wid the Family, and he, you might say, tied to thim be the
leg like a strayin’ jackass.” Pather’s allusion was to the effects
of an accident, which, met with by Timothy on the cellar-stairs at
Drumlough Castle in his youth, had left him a hobbler for life; and
since the controversy Pather and he “weren’t spakin’.” Therefore,
now, if Master Pierce chose “to be great wid a one of that pack,
and to go sthreelin’ up the hill wid him after the rabbits,” it was
only natural that old Timothy should entertain no high opinion of so
indiscriminating a person.

But his veiled disparagement did not check the progress of a real
friendship between the cousins, and when the end of Pierce’s holidays
came, Eileen thought they had not been nearly many enough. On the
regretful evening before he went, they paid a farewell visit to the
big boulder, and, standing by it, Eileen said forlornly: “Next time
I’ll only be myself.”

“Perhaps I may be here again next summer,” Pierce said encouragingly.
He had already learned by experience that even twelve months are not
interminable.

“I wish it would be next year always,” said Eileen. “For that’s the
time when people come back. The Widow Shanahan’s son’s coming home
from the States next year, please goodness; but she says she’ll not
be in this world then, so he might as well stop where he’s gettin’
the fine wages. Norah says that she means that she’ll be dead. I
wonder who told her, or how she knows. _You_ don’t know how soon you
are going to die, Pierce, do you?”

“Not I, nor anybody else,” said Pierce.

“I wanted to give her her little silver jug,” said Eileen; “she’s
to have the little fat one that’s gilt inside and has two spouts,
because it’s the nicest, and she’s to be pitied, the dear knows,
Norah says, with one thing and the other. But if she goes and dies
first, I never can. Do you think she’d wait a while, if I told her
about it as a secret?”

“She mightn’t be able,” said Pierce.

“Ah, and then it would only tantinglise her,” said Eileen, “so I’d
better not. But I’m sorry.”

“Don’t forget that you must send me word, if they lose the key, and
you want another,” Pierce said to change the subject.

“I’ll remember,” said Eileen. “But I’ll have to keep on living for
ever so much longer before they’ll let me want it. You see, I’ll not
be twenty-one even next year, I should think.”

“I should think not indeed, Miss Eileen,” said Pierce; “you’re no age
worth speaking of at all.”

They were now descending the hill, and for some way Eileen mused
vainly about possible remedies for this deplorable state of affairs.
“I wish,” she said at length, “that a great many days would happen
all together sometimes—in bunches like the black and white currants,
instead of one by one and one by one: ever so long they last, when
there’s nobody here but me. One might get old pretty quick then.
Wouldn’t you like it better, Pierce?”

“Well, no,” said Pierce. “If the days were used up that way, there’d
be so little time for doing anything. Mostly they’re short enough;
and there’s no hurry about getting old, as you call it—an old woman
of twenty—you’re a queer young person, Eileen.”

“I was only thinking,” said Eileen, “that perhaps I mightn’t be able
to wait a great while, any more than the Widow Shanahan. And it would
be a pity if I wasn’t in this world when the chest is opened”; and
although Pierce replied: “Oh, nonsense; where else should you be?”
she continued to contemplate this contingency in sad silence as they
trotted down after their perch-long shadows over the sunny turf with
its jewelled embroideries of golden trefoil and pearly eyebright, and
dim amethystine thyme. But when they had just come to the gap in the
dyke, where you step across two flat stones into the highest field,
a somewhat consolatory thought struck her. It was: “Perhaps, then,
they’d give all those things to you, Pierce, and I’ve told you what
everybody’s to have, so mind you don’t forget.”

She was so engrossed by the idea that she nearly tripped over the
unheeded stones, and her heir and executor, preventing her tumble,
said: “Oh, it will be all right, never fear; but meanwhile, little
Bright-Eyes, you’d better not break your neck. We’ll both of us have
grand times when I come with the key.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Eileen had many of her long years, almost nine, in fact, during which
she might have forgotten Pierce and his promises, but she never did.
Only once in all that time did anything happen to remind her of
them, and that was on the Christmas after his visit, when Tom Roe,
the postman, brought the first letter that had ever been addressed
to Miss Eileen Fitzmaurice. Being opened hastily, it was found to
contain a little white cardboard box, within which lay among rosy
cloudlets of marvellous pink cotton-wool a tiny silver key, sent
to Eileen by her cousin Pierce—her affectionate cousin, Pierce’s
mother, who put up the packet for him, had written him down without
consulting him, as a matter of form. The gift filled Eileen with
gratitude and delight. Yet, in the course of the morning, her Aunt
Geraldine came upon her when she sat in the book-room window, eyeing
her new possession with a somewhat doubtful countenance. “I’m almost
afraid,” she said half-aloud, “that it isn’t quite long enough. And I
never did see a key with a pin in it before.”

“Long enough for what?” said her Aunt Geraldine. “It seems to me to
be a very pretty little brooch, and it was exceedingly good-natured
of your cousin to think of sending you one.”

“Oh yes, indeed, and it is very pretty, as pretty as can be,”
Eileen protested. She flushed distressfully at the implication of
ingratitude partly, and partly at this new view of the trinket,
which would involve the vanishing of its peculiar charm. “I was
only thinking,” she said, “that I have poked my finger farther
down the hole than this would reach; but, of course, if it’s a
brooch”—Aunt Geraldine had not stayed to hear her explanation; and
Eileen presently put away the little box in her drawer, feeling that
something had blunted the fine edge of her pleasure.

Those nine long years passed by uneventfully. It seemed, indeed,
as if fewer things and fewer happened at Glendoula. In the Big
House life went on somewhat in the manner of a machine gradually
slowing down. Lady Fitzmaurice grew from season to season a little
more invalided and melancholy, her sister-in-law more abstracted
and apathetic, old Timothy stiffer and lamer in his gait. Even the
ancient grey parrot on his pole in the parlour sank deeplier into his
dotage, and only grimaced silently at Eileen when she tried to start
a conversation with him. Eileen herself was an exception, though
perhaps potentially rather than actually, the fresh spirit of youth
making less resistance than is commonly imagined for it against the
coercion of dreary external circumstances. Still her disposition was
naturally blithe and hopeful, and she would have been ready enough
with her: O brave new world! if any fair wind had borne the good ship
into her ken. But instead of that she was destined to see a woeful
wreck come drifting by.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was gradually, by an aggregation of rumours, faint and vague
at first, that warnings of the black time impending stole into
Glendoula valley, much as the wan mists creep thither from seaward,
a mere smoke-wreath falling away down the purple-rifted shoulders
of Slieverossan, with the murk of a sky-enfolding cloud gathered up
opaquely behind them. Felix O’Riordan, returning from Clonmorragh
fair one July day, first brought authentic news of how “the quare
ugly blackness on the pitaties, the same that done destruction last
year on the crops away down in different parts of the counthry, was
desthroyin’ all before it now no farther off than Kilfintragh, just
at the back of the hills.” And through the rainy harvest weather
ensuing, reports of the like became as frequent as the unkindly
and chilly showers that drip-dripped unseasonably over the little
fields. Then fell a heavy thunderous night, with flickerings of
sheet-lightning fitfully casting an evil eye through the dark, and on
the morrow, when its pall lifted, there was grief and fear among the
neighbours at Glendoula, for the sober green ridges looked as if a
scorching breath had passed over them, and from their drooping haulms
and leaves came wafted the ill-auguring odour.

After that the trouble throve and waxed like the most unmolested
weed. A man perhaps seldom tastes despair much cruder and sheerer
than when at the impatiently desired potato-digging he turns up
spadeful after spadeful, spadeful after spadeful, nothing but
dangling lumps of malodorous slime, nothing but that whatever, on to
the very end of the drill, where the wife stands watching him and
saying: “Ah, the Lord be good to us—have we ne’er a sound one in it
at all?” with the childer beside her looking on, piteously concerned
or piteously indifferent. Before Slieverossan had drawn down his
winter snow-hood, the dearth wrought by the ruined harvest was
finding its victims far and wide. Serious distress existed in the big
houses, where people were at their wit’s end to devise some agreeable
substitute for that empty dish on the dinner table. Savoury rice,
they tried, and stewed toast, and Yorkshire pudding, and many other
such things, but none of them satisfactorily filled the place of the
missing potato. There still remained a gap all-thing unbecoming at
their feast. It was a dreadful loss. But in the small houses people
were spared all worry of that sort at least, because when they had no
pitaties, they had nothing else to eat, bad or good, which made their
bill of fare a perfectly simple matter, thus illustrating, no doubt,
the providential law of compensation.

Eileen’s mind, however, was not philosophic enough to show her this
aspect of the case, and what she did actually see and hear smote
her with sorrow and dismay. It seemed as if the way of her world,
hitherto a tranquil, sometimes rather tedious, one, had changed into
the path of a surging flood, whence cries of despair and beseeching
hands appealed to her vainly where she stood, secure herself and
helpless and remorseful. So little for anybody could she do, who
would fain have rescued them all. Even if she had commanded the
whole resources of the household, they would have been miserably
inadequate; but as it was, Aunt Geraldine said drearily that she
supposed it was no use giving to vagrants, and old Timothy, whose
inborn tendency towards “naygurliness,” had developed into a
vice-like clamp, which acted automatically at the pressure of a
petition, kept one watchful eye perpetually upon the hall-door,
and another on the little store-room across the passage. Only by
rare conjunctions of good luck with agility could Eileen elude his
vigilance so far as to fetch and carry between them unbeknownst. More
often than not, she arrived too late to do anything; and at best,
her stealthiest operations among the bread-crocks and biscuits were
pretty sure to bring the old man shuffling thither in defence of the
menaced commissariat.

“Arrah now, Miss Eily, what work have you there, cuttin’ up the fresh
loaf? and the laws bless us all, but that’s the hunch! If there was a
slab of a brick wantin’ for repeerin’ the house-wall, you could make
a shift wid that.”

“There’s a very decent poor man at the door,” Eileen might say, “who
looks as if he had been starving for a month of Sundays; and he has a
scrap of a baby with him; its mother died yesterday at Kilfintragh.
I must get it a piece of soft bread, and a drink of milk, if there’s
any left.”

“And what for need you be destroyin’ a whole loaf for a crathur o’
that size? Sure, I seen it comin’ past me window, sittin’ cocked up
like a kitten bewitched. I’ve some stale bits in the other crock ’ud
do it grand.”

“Oh, those are nothing but little crumbs, only fit for the chickens.”

“Musha, long life to it! And is it settin’ itself up to want betther
feedin’ than the chuckens? Well, now, I should suppose that what’s
good enough for them’s plenty good enough for it, when the most
differ between them is that sorra the use _it’s_ ever apt to be,
starved or no, except makin’ throuble for itself and other people.”

“Well, if some babies had been fed like chickens, perhaps they
wouldn’t have grown up so fond of gabbling like old geese,” Eileen
might rejoin, inaudibly, so that the repartee should relieve her own
at no cost to Timothy’s feelings, as she escaped with her booty.

But her raids were not by any means invariably so successful.
Sometimes she found that Timothy had forestalled her, and had swept
everything into an inaccessible locker; and sometimes there was
really nothing left to sweep. So then she had no resource save to
ensconce herself in the remotest backward-looking room, that she
might not hear the interchange of entreaty and denial, nor witness
the lingering withdrawal of the rejected suppliants, wandering away
disappointed out of sight, but not out of mind so soon, behind the
glossy-walled belt of laurels.

For a like reason she shunned in those days what used to be a
favourite walk beyond the front gates along the quiet lane, with its
broad green banks softly on one side mounting up into amply spreading
grass-slopes, now haunted at its every turn by sorrowful spectres
that she had no charm to lay. Occasionally one of them would say to
her: “Ah, melady, the blessin’s of God on the sweet face of you,
and may you never know what it is to want the bit,” and this made
her feel herself all the more to be a sort of ravening locust. Her
own meals, indeed, those times, were partaken of grudgingly and of
necessity, after which, carrying everything she could lay hands on,
she hurried off to the end of the elm-grove, where a herd of small
children would be looking out for them with large eyes. But day by
day she thought her supplies seemed to dwindle, and the pinched
faces to multiply, and she was as powerless against that as if it
were the oncoming of night. One day in a week of black frost she
desperately sold her godmother’s cameo bracelet to a passing higgler
for a shilling, wherewith she bought out of a baker’s cart three
portly loaves; and the satisfaction which these caused to prevail
for a while, a short while, almost compelled her to think that she
would dispose in the same method of her silver key-brooch, her only
other ornament, the next time he came by. But always, having looked
at it for some minutes, she replaced it in its box without achieving
any resolve. The pencilled line, still legible on the lid, seemed to
protest against the transaction in the name of the dead summer that
lived with her brightest memories.

       *       *       *       *       *

All this while the big boulder stone was lying out under the stars
and mists and shadow-shifting winds on the grassy ridge of Slieve
Ardgreine; and thither constantly travelled Eileen’s thoughts,
although her bodily pilgrimages to it had grown less frequent than
heretofore, since dripping tussocks and long, bedraggled skirts had
become a graver consideration. She had never lost her faith in it
and its contents. Nothing whatever had occurred to alter her opinion
about it, and the silence on the subject which various reasons
obliged her to maintain helped to ward off chances of disillusioning
enlightenment. Eileen’s sixteen years in lonely Glendoula had taught
her so very little either at first or second hand about other
Quality’s domestic arrangements, that for anything she could tell, it
might not be unusual to keep the family plate locked up in a large
stone chest out-of-doors. Therefore no antecedent improbability
cropped up to struggle with the existence of a long-cherished,
deep-rooted dream and desire.

The one change that had here been wrought by those slow-footed,
empty-handed years was in the use she designed for her riches. This
change grew more radical under stress of the famishing winter. She no
longer could care to admire the beauty of the bright gleaming silver
things, nor to sort out from among them fastidiously appropriate
gifts for each—that indeed had become only too simple a process,
since everybody’s need was the same. Her sole wish now was to sell
all that she had straightway—she would have waited to make no pious
bargains about treasure in heaven—that she might satisfy the poor
with bread. But the more intensely her wishes concentrated themselves
upon that object, the more keenly she felt how far it was out of
reach. Four years and some months, jealously reckoned, still were
lacking to her of the age that would legally entitle her to enter
upon the possession of her property; and although she now knew
from other sources than old Timothy that some inheritance did then
await her, what could such a distant prospect avail in the face of
to-day’s direful necessity? Chafing sorely against the law’s delay
that set bars between the owner and her rights, Eileen wondered
sometimes whether the Lord Chancellor, whom she understood to rule
her destinies, might not under the circumstances be persuaded to
trust her with her fortune, now that she was sixteen and a half, just
to keep poor Denis Madden’s half-dozen orphans, and old Widow Flynn
and her blind daughter, and all the rest of the people from starving
completely. Once she actually ventured upon a remote hint at some
such possibility to her Aunt Geraldine, but lacking courage did not
approach the subject closely enough to make herself intelligible; a
failure for which her conscience often pricked her in the following
days.

       *       *       *       *       *

More than ever on the morning when this incident befell: It was
mocking March weather, bright and calm and pitilessly cold, and
Eileen thought she would warm herself by running up to her big stone,
which she had not visited since the autumn. But before she reached
the first bend in the avenue young Larry M‘Farlane hastily met her,
and turned her aside into a shrubbery with a moving story about a
crippled blackbird which was fluttering there among the bushes.
“Unless some ould miscreant of a cat might be slinkin’ away under
the low branches this minyit, Miss Eileen, wid the crathur grabbed
in her mouth.” Larry had invented this little fiction on the spur of
the moment, the fact being that just round the turn, a few yards from
where he stopped Eileen, a heap of rags seemed to have fallen, as if
flung or blown down across the road. Its halt there had indeed been
so unpremeditated that only a remnant of the crust someone had begged
hard for up at the House a minute before was still gripped in a gaunt
hand. Coming upon this obstruction, young Larry, whose fare nowadays
did not conduce to athletic feats, found its removal quite beyond his
powers, and therefore ran on to seek help, when his meeting with Miss
Eileen converted his most urgent duty into the task of hindering her
from “gettin’ a quare fright along of the misfort’nit poor body.”
He accomplished it only in part. For he could not contrive but that
she should notice the gathering of a crowd in the avenue, and the
shrilling of shocked ejaculations, and then the bearing away with
slow solemnity, which apprised her of how near the cloaked shadow had
passed.

Eileen gave up her expedition to the stone chest; its baffling
impenetrability seemed just then a cruel gibe of Fate, wiselier
ignored. Larry, for his part, temporarily lost sight of the errand
which had been bringing him up to the Big House: a commission he had
undertaken to execute for the postman. Thus it was not until the
evening, when the cold March twilight had faded, too tardily for
many people impatient to huddle away into oblivious sleep, that a
letter reached the thriftily-lit drawing-room, where Eileen and her
aunt were also getting through the interval before bed-time as best
they could, which was but dully. A letter was something of an event
in itself, and this one, unlike most of its predecessors, did not
collapse inanely into a listless “Oh, it’s only”—for it contained a
real piece of news.

Glendoula was to have another visit from Pierce Wilmot. Pierce,
who had grown up a civil engineer, was now in charge of certain
road-making relief-works, which were about to come creeping
down Letterglas valley and up through the Nick of Time into the
neighbouring glen. The superintendence of these would bring
him to stay for a while near the place, and he hoped to renew
his acquaintance with his kinsfolk at the Big House. All the
establishment was more or less thrilled by the intelligence. It
seemed, of course, only natural that he should take up his quarters
there, and the prospect pleased on the whole. Lady Fitzmaurice,
even, and her sister-in-law were slightly cheered and roused; even
old Timothy, despite his prejudice, set about his polishing with a
revived zest, in anticipation of a visitor who might be expected to
appreciate “the differ between spoons that had a proper shine kep’ on
them, and ones that was as dingy as if you’d loaned them for stirrin’
the Ould Fellow’s tay.” All the others, who remembered Master Pierce
as a fine friendly-spoken young gentleman, thought that it would be
a pleasant variety to set eyes on him again, and the rest were quite
ready to welcome him on that recommendation. Eileen alone looked
forward to his return somewhat doubtfully. She knew right well that
things could not be the same as they were in those very olden days;
and the differences might not be improvements. Suppose that she did
not like the grown-up Pierce, nor he her? Then her reminiscences,
she thought, would be superseded and spoiled. Still, she believed
herself, after all, to be glad that he was coming.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was late on a wild bleak evening that Pierce arrived, after a
long open-air day of surveying and supervising. An additional
pair of candles illuminated the drawing-room in his honour, and
were burning clearly enough to show what manner of man he was at
four-and-twenty. He had not changed at all irrecognisably, being
still black and straight-browed, alert and rather resolute-looking,
as beseemed a person whose business consisted largely in the clearing
away of obstacles, by summarily forcible methods if need were. He
had done this figuratively upon occasion as well as literally since
his last visit to Glendoula. But the little girl who then used to
patter up and down that primitive path beside him was now much harder
to identify, having shot up so slender and tall. Also in Pierce’s
honour, Eileen had put on her best gown that evening, a fine white
muslin, sprinkled with a pattern of little lilac rose-bunches,
outlined in a cloud of black dots. It was not more than half a decade
lag of the latest Dublin fashions, but the six months’ growth since
its last wearing had certainly made its skirt a rather skimpy length,
as she noted with chagrin when putting it on. Some consolation was
found in fastening her deep embroidered collar with the silver
key. She had plaited her brown hair, darker now, yet keeping its
richness of latent gold, in an unusually elaborate Grecian-plait
to coil in a careful spiral knot at the back of her head. But
first it framed her face in satin-sleek bands, smoothed down low
on the delicate curve of the cheek, and then gathered up, leaving
on either side a loop discovering a shell-like ear. As pink as a
geranium-blossom one of them was that evening, the nipping cold and
her thin dress had tempted her to sit so near the fire; and her eyes
were as softly bright as ever, with such light as a sunbeam, questing
beneath leaf-lattices, may waken in a moss-brimmed nook of clearest
well-water.

Pierce noticed all these things, and none of them, while he was
greeting his Aunt Geraldine; and he fell in love so simultaneously
that it would have been impossible to say whether his observations
came before or after. His habit was to be prompt and decided, and
with promptitude and decision did he grasp this new experience—of
which, nevertheless, an access of very unwonted diffidence and
irresolution seemed part and parcel. These set in immediately, as if
he had passed a vote of want of confidence against himself upon the
spot, and its effect was retrospective, throwing a slur alike upon
his present and his past. He wondered whether his cousin had not
thought him a peculiarly odious schoolboy. His old pet name for her
suddenly occurred to him as persistently appropriate, but the mere
remembrance of it made him feel so over-presumptuous that he almost
wished her to have forgotten it. In like manner he recollected, and
could not dare to remind her of, their climb up Slieve Ardgreine, or
their adventure with the strayed goats, and other episodes. He had
retained only just enough common-sense to understand that Eileen’s
silence all the evening upon this, and indeed every other topic, was
not intended for a rebuff; and the flow of his conversation with his
Aunt Geraldine was not a little impeded by a perpetual apprehension,
altogether superfluous, of her niece as a critic.

Of course, he was not very long in recovering his presence of mind.
In a day or two he began to dispense with such hampering precautions,
but the sentiment that had suggested them continued in full force,
and did not cease to influence his behaviour. Less, perhaps, in
his dealings with Eileen than with the world at large, it made him
transpose himself, so to speak, into a softer key. He unlearned in a
single week some tricks of peremptoriness and self-assertion, which
the vicissitudes of one early set in authority had been teaching him
through several past years. For it was with him as if he had suddenly
discovered the existence of something precious and perishable, that
a touch might shatter or a breath destroy, and thereupon he grew
wonderfully sensitive to the wide-spreading intricacies of cause
and effect. How could he tell but that a rough word spoken anywhere
might set a-stirring peril-fraught vibrations to reach and threaten
the head that he loved? For her sake, he would have liked everything
to be on velvet, and he was always instinctively aiming at that end.
The most unskilled and incapable of the labourers whose efforts
he superintended found their miscellaneous inefficiency treated
with singular forbearance, even if it attained an egregiousness
characterised by their comrades as “a quare botch intirely,” and
driving their foreman to demand of various powers, celestial and
otherwise: What to glory the great gaby was at? During leisure
moments their lank and hollow-eyed gang were prone to pass the remark
that “the captain” was “a rael gintleman”; while up at the Big House
all the inmates accorded him all sorts of golden opinions.

Eileen herself meanwhile was not in the least aware of what had
befallen him, but she had left off dreading any detriment to her
cherished memories, and his visit had undoubtedly brought an influx
of pleasure and interest to cheer her present day. She was so
unaccustomed to being made much of by relations that this kinsman’s
good nature impressed her as quite extraordinary, and so little used
to making much of herself that she never thought of attributing it to
anything except a special quality in Pierce, rather more likely, no
doubt, to be exercised in another person’s behalf than in her own. It
repeatedly surprised her to see that he remembered and acted upon her
opinions and wishes, as if they were really important—a new view of
them which she would have been slow to adopt. One morning he rode off
all the long way to Denismore and back to get her Alfred Tennyson’s
latest volume, and her delight in it was alloyed only by the
intrusive consideration of how much coarse meal the price of it would
have purchased. For her mind was still engrossingly pre-occupied with
the neighbours’ trouble.

       *       *       *       *       *

The cloud of it had lifted a little since Pierce’s coming. Possible
wages loosened the famine-grip on such households as could send forth
a man to ply pick and shovel, instead of hopelessly lying abed “agin
the hunger”; and then a spell of more genial weather interposing
released everybody from the clutches of that other icy-fingered foe,
whose co-operation is so deadly. “For sure,” as old Christy Shanahan
had been known to remark in this connection, “to be starvin’ inside
and outside at the one time is more than any raisonable man can
stand at all, unless be good luck he was a graven image.” This dim
lightening of the prospect, however, rousing a stir of hope where
numb despair had begun to prevail, made the need of plans for a
timely rescue seem all the more urgent. One evening at dinner, Eileen
heard Pierce say that if the people could get food enough to ward off
the fever just until the potatoes—supposing there should be any—were
dug, they might do well enough; otherwise, it was a bad lookout.
And he added that it was hard to see how it could be managed, as
the road-making grant had nearly run short, and where else should
the money come from? At that Eileen had almost spoken her haunting
thought aloud, and it was: “the great chest full of silver.” And
though the unpropitious moment enjoined silence, therefrom dated the
designing of an enterprise so venturesome that the possibility of
carrying it out was a point upon which she hopefully and fearfully
changed her mind a dozen times daily for as many days.

At last there came a brilliant, capriciously-lighted morning, with
its shine and shadow under the control of a shifting snow-drift,
which sailed at the wind’s will. It was a holiday, and Pierce
succeeded in setting out almost as soon as he wished on the early
walk he had planned with his cousin. What slight delay did intervene
was caused by the arrival, just as they were starting, of the Widow
Barry with a couple of eggs to sell on commission for her next door
neighbour—the Widow Shanahan, who “could get that far be no manner of
manes herself, the crathur.”

“And they’re the last ones you’ll be takin’ off her, Miss Eileen,
she bid me tell you,” said Widow Barry. “For she’s after killin’ her
ould hin this mornin’, because it’s torminted she was to be seein’ it
mopin’ around starvin’ the same as a raisonable body, sorra a bit had
she to be throwin’ it this great while back whativer. ’Deed now, you
might as well be walkin’ along the shore of the say these times as
along be the dures down the street, for e’er a scrap of pitaty-parin’
or anythin’ else you’d find lyin’ about. The crathur had to be
contintin’ itself wid whativer it could pick out of the ground, and
bedad I won’er it had the heart to think of layin’ e’er an odd egg
at all. So she took and wrung its neck this mornin’, and she said
the sup of broth ’ud keep the life in herself and poor Katty for a
day or so anyway. But och, Miss Eileen dear, it’ll be the weeny sup
entirely. For ’twas meself caught the crathur for her, and I declare
to goodness it wasn’t the weight in me hand of a little wisp of
hay. Sez I to her, the feathers on it ’ud be heavier be thimselves.
But sure she could do no betther; and if it boiled into the name of
broth even, it’d give them the notion they was aitin’ somethin’.”
In prospect of this repast, the sixpence that Pierce sent seemed
to him hardly more than an emphasising of a “strong distemper and a
weak relief”; but the Widow Barry, who went her way filled with a
gratitude to God and man, may have understood the situation better.

And then the two young people set out on their rambles. They took
their old favourite route up Slieve Ardgreine, for the first time
since Pierce’s visit, on Eileen’s part, as the milder weather had
been “soft” too, turning the mossy nap of the turf into a treacherous
sponge, that squelched coldly over-shoes at the lightest footfall.
To-day, however, it might be traversed dry-shod, given a discreet
avoidance of extra vivid patches in the golden green; and a busy
thirsty breeze had left scarcely a dewdrop in the glazed cups of the
celandines and the pink-rimmed saucers of half-blown daisy-buds. Up
this daintily carpeted path Eileen picked her steps rather silently.
Her companion thought that she had been saddened by the incident of
the ill-faring fowl, but that was not the reason. What pre-occupied
her was the great venture which she appeared to be approaching more
or less in spite of herself. The very direction which their walk
was taking, at no choice of her own, was like a hand beckoning
imperiously. On the way up she hovered towards the verge of it, and
recoiled from it, and came stealing back to it again, oftener than
the flitting clouds furled and unfurled their shadow-mats at her
feet; and the big boulder, the stone plate-chest, hove in sight while
she was still wavering. Failure would be so very terrible to her. She
knew that if Pierce were shocked or indignant, or even amused, she
would be miserable indeed; and she could not by any means convince
herself that he would not be all these things. Yet, when they were
standing beside the tall, blackish shape together, just as in old
times—only it used to be the taller then—she felt desperately that,
chance what might, she must not go away without speaking the sentence
she had been mentally rehearsing all the week. It rang in her ears
like a clamorous bell, and made her deaf to any other speech, so
evidently that Pierce stopped in the middle of what he was beginning
to remark, as if she had interrupted him. Just at that moment the
sun swam out clear of a high-tossed drift, and sent a golden wave
sweeping widely up and down the hill-slopes. It broke against the
big stone, shining into Eileen’s face with all the dazzlement of
an April forenoon, and she accepted the omen as if it had been the
cordial clasp of some encouraging hand. Before the radiant rim had
slidden on many paces farther, she took heart of grace, and the
irrevocable word was spoken.

       *       *       *       *       *

“There was one thing I wanted to ask you about, Pierce,” she said.
She had moved round to the opposite side of the chest, and was
looking at him across the lid, with eyes very bright and wistful
beneath her broad-brimmed straw hat, which had brown ribbons tied
in a bow under her chin. “I shouldn’t wonder if you thought it very
dreadful of me,” she continued; “but I really don’t think it is
myself. After all, I only want to use my own things, and that can be
no great harm; and if these don’t belong to me now, they don’t belong
to anybody, which is absurd. At any rate, it couldn’t possibly make
any difference worth speaking of to those people up at the office in
Dublin, and it would make all the difference in the world to the poor
people here; so ‘the right of it over-leps the wrong of it,’ as old
Murtagh Reilly used to say.” She was gradually arguing herself into
courage; still a mere shadow falling anywhere would have routed it.

“I hope it is something truly appalling, or else I’ll be horribly
disappointed now,” Pierce replied, a little puzzled by this prologue,
but rather pleasantly so, because he liked her to consult him.
“You’ve raised my expectations cruelly.... But if you wish, I’ll
undertake not to think it very dreadful, nor dreadful in the least
degree,” he added, as after a short pause she seemed still to be
hesitating. He would have said that he had never made a safer promise.

“Well, then,” said Eileen; “do you remember how you said one time
that you could easily get a key for this old chest of ours? Here’s
the keyhole, you see, all right. I’ve always kept it clear of moss.
And, I wonder, would you mind—if it didn’t give you a great deal of
trouble—getting one for me now? Without telling anybody else, I mean,
for of course they wouldn’t let me. I know I can have no legal right
to take anything out of it until I come of age; but that’s only the
_law_, and really when people are starving, one can’t be expected to
wait for years and years just on account of such nonsense. At the
best of times it seems a great pity to keep it lying here useless
for so long, but now it’s like locking up other people’s lives. If
I can’t get at it in time to do anything for them, I might as well
never have it at all—there’ll not be a soul left in Glendoula. You’ve
no idea how hateful it makes one feel. Sometimes it seems to me that
I’m nearly as bad as the wretches who go on carting off their wheat
and oats to sell in England. Only it isn’t my fault in reality, for
until you came I never had a chance of speaking to any possible
person about it. And then, Pierce, I was thinking that when we have
got this opened, you’d maybe help me to manage about selling the
silver. It must be worth a great deal of money: enough, at any rate,
to last while they are waiting for the potatoes; for we really had
very fine plate, I believe, though it mayn’t be quite so splendid as
old Timothy used to declare—he _is_ a little given to romancing. And,
of course, these times I don’t expect to find the yards of pearl and
ruby ropes that were in the _Glittering Hoard_! You do remember that
I told you, and that you promised about the key, don’t you, Pierce?”
she said anxiously, perplexed by his expression, for he was looking
hard at her with a sort of bewildered blank dismay, almost as if
something had frightened him—an effect which she had not included
among her many apprehensions.

He was taken wholly unprepared, because during her irresolution
Eileen naturally had shunned the perilous subject, and he had himself
for the time being entirely forgotten the existence of that old
childish myth. But now he did indeed remember it, as clearly as if it
had happened yesterday, instead of all those long years ago. There
had stood the little girl eagerly telling him her absurd story,
to which he listened with amused forbearance, thinking to himself
that he must not vex her by incredulity, and carelessly noticing
how swiftly her small face flushed, and how brightly her large eyes
shone in the excitement of her narrative. And to-day the same thing
seemed coming to pass again—but with differences. For here unchanged
in the sunshine was the dark stone block with its yellow dappling of
lichen, and that same clear voice came to him across it, speaking so
much in earnest that the transparent flower-flush rose and the glance
brightened just as of old. But the small child had grown into a tall
maiden, and her voice was the one that gave meaning to all the other
sounds in his world, and her absurd story no longer amused him in the
least, seemed liker breaking his heart, seemed the pronouncing of
an evil spell, that blurred the light of his eyes, and conjured up
a web of black forebodings over the fair horizon of his future. If
the soft-aired spring morning had suddenly began to scowl and keen
around him, and sting him with frozen pellets, it would have faintly
shadowed forth the transition. A man’s mood, however, may fall from
one level to another in much less time than it takes to tell, and
Eileen thought his answer came quickly.

“Don’t you know that you’re talking nonsense, Eileen?” he said.

She had never heard him speak so sharply, almost roughly—not even
when he had seen his case of mathematical instruments dropped by
Hughey Brian into the bottomless bog-hole, nor when he had come
upon the Donnellys’ little goat tethered with the remnant of
an urgently-needed and long-sought measuring-line. And she was
immediately aware that the very worst had befallen. Her plan was
impracticable, and she had disgusted Pierce by proposing it. The
poor Glendoula people must starve, and her cousin, who had been so
good-natured, could never like her any more. Probably he considered
her request worthy of a dishonestly-minded idiot, and was deeply,
perhaps justly, offended at her suggestion that he should take part
in such a transaction. Certainly, he would not hear of the scheme,
so all her hopes were scattered like mist before a hurrying wind,
and there again loomed the grim trouble ahead, with its inexorable
face turned unveiled upon her. Just at that moment, however, it was
partially screened by the interposition of a still uglier one, which
would thrust itself between, asking and answering a question with the
same tormenting result: What must Pierce be thinking of her? He had
surely meant worse than “nonsense.”

Amid this rude crowding in on her of disappointment jostling with
grief and mortification, Eileen clung half-consciously to the sense
that it behoved her by all means to retain the footing of her
self-possession, and she replied very gently: “Not exactly nonsense,
I think; but perhaps—I daresay it would be quite out of the question
to take these things now, and not even right. It seemed to me the
only way I could do any thing to help the people, but of course I
knew it mightn’t be possible at all. I don’t understand much about
the law. Don’t you think it’s getting rather cold up here? Perhaps
we’d be wiser to come back before the day clouds over.”

This dignified composure seemed to Pierce as it were a seal set upon
his fear, the document of which her fantastic story had supplied,
and he dejectedly turned down the hill-path with her in silence. The
sullen-looking stone which they left behind them, a blot on the sunny
sward, might have been a little ancient altar to some unpropitious
God, whence they were taking home, sorrowfully, discomfortable
oracles. In truth, one of them had there said farewell to an old
hope, and the other struck up an acquaintance with a new fear; both
experiences apt to arouse pre-occupying meditations. Neither of the
cousins gave much heed to their surroundings as they went. The small
wild clouds flirted the sunshine about as if flocks of white wings
were flickering by; here and there they flung down the shadows which
make one marvel how their “little-seeming substance” can be the cause
of such deep purple stains. But now nobody marked them, nor the
far-off pipe of the plover, nor the fragrance of the basking herbage
underfoot.

Thus they presently came to the gapped dyke leading into the first
field, and all the way neither of them had spoken a word. Now, at
that moment it happened that Eileen was looking very straight before
her, with her head held rather high, and her eyes steadily opened,
to give the tears a chance of going back the way they had come, and
walking warily as one who felt how even the quiver of an eyelash
might be fatal. Yet these precautions defeated themselves, for they
were the reason why she stumbled at the flat stepping-stones, so that
Pierce had to save her from falling just as he had done nearly nine
years before. This time, however, he did not let her go again with a
laugh. He held her close and said: “Oh, my darling, my sweetheart,
don’t be vexed, don’t be vexed. It will be all right, never fear.
We’ll pull them through—all of them—safely somehow. Don’t think about
that old silver any more; and you won’t mind what I said just now?
I’m a stupid brute, you see, sweetheart; but there’s nothing on earth
that I wouldn’t do for you.”

While she listened to this statement, Eileen went through, in an
intensified form, an experience somewhat resembling that of the
bygone summer morning when the unknown Pierce had first spoken to
her: a sudden surging up of dread, that wave-like took her off her
feet for the instant, but only to lift her unharmed into a new
world, most beautifully strange, and shut out from all troubles
of the mere earth with the light that never was on land or sea. A
reflection of it in her eyes encouraged him to pursue that line
of argument, and he said a great deal more, all much to the same
purport, as they went down the steep green fields, where the
young bracken-fronds were uncoiling their flossy silken whorls
beneath last season’s weather-beaten brown plumes, and the golden
blossom-flakes were melting off the tall winter furzes; and then on
between the fledged boles of the elm-grove, and under the scented
shadow of the laurel-walk, until at the hall-door Eileen ran away
to make a solitary survey of the unexplored regions in which she
had wonderfully arrived. Just for the moment Pierce felt gratefully
disposed towards the big stone, which had, at all events, given him
his cue.

       *       *       *       *       *

But later on that afternoon he spoke very bitterly to his Aunt
Geraldine, whom he found alone in the book-room. The hearing of
candid opinions is a privilege not uncommonly enjoyed by spinster
aunts.

“You’ve kept her moping here all these years,” he said, “without
companions or amusement or occupation, till it’s no wonder that she
has taken up queer fancies. Why, it was enough to drive her—to make
anybody unlike other people. Surely you might have managed better for
her somehow.”

“It really wouldn’t have been easy,” his aunt said, but meekly on the
defensive; “we always have had so little ready money, and then your
poor Aunt Gerald’s wretched health is another difficulty. Besides
that, I never noticed anything odd about Eileen. She always seems
contented and cheerful enough, and I thought she was a sensible
sort of child, and very quiet. Just once or twice, now that I
think of it, she has said something that rather puzzled me about a
plate-chest, but I had no idea she had any delusion of the kind.”

“Yes, that’s just where it is; nobody has cared to look after her or
take any trouble about her,” Pierce said, wrathful and reproachful,
a little unreasonably; so fresh was his discovery that concern for
Eileen’s welfare ought to be the prime consideration in every rightly
ordered mind. He did not surmise, either, that he was upbraiding a
friend. Yet such was the case. For, from the very first evening,
their Aunt Geraldine had guessed whither things were tending, and
ever since had been watching their course, a melancholy sort of
Prospero, who was powerless to work any wonders, and whose joy at
nothing could be much, but who did feel some pleasure in the growing
likelihood that her favourite sister’s son would some day reign in
the wreck of the old place, and take charge of the person whom she
had always regarded half-pityingly, half-impatiently as “Eileen,
poor child.” Therefore the cropping up of this ominous obstacle was
a disappointment by which she felt so cast down that she had not
the spirit to rebut with any energy the accusation of contributory
negligence.

Neither she nor Pierce had spoken of the circumstances that lent the
matter its menacing aspect, but they were uppermost in the mind of
each. What made Eileen’s futile story sound so warningly in their
ears was the remembered existence of that baneful spectre whose
mischief might be traced among the annals of the Fitzmaurice family,
as well in the notorious eccentricities which had preluded poor
Sir Gerald’s last desperate act, as in the more or less pronounced
oddities and deficiencies which had wrought the history of this
kinsman and the other into a tragedy with a grotesquer plot.

“I can’t think what has put such a notion into her head,” Miss
Fitzmaurice said dejectedly. The workings of Eileen’s mind could
hardly indeed have been more remote from her observation if they
had gone on in a different planet. “But, after all, Pierce, if one
considers how young she is—scarcely more than a child.”

“No reasonable child would believe anything so preposterous,” Pierce
replied with gloom. “A rough lump of a boulder with moss growing in
the cracks!”

“And did you tell her so?” asked his aunt.

“Well, no, not exactly; we began talking about something else, and
I thought I’d better see whether you knew anything about it; but
apparently you don’t,” said Pierce.

“Oh, you must just laugh her out of it,” his aunt said, laughing
nervously herself, and had not any more helpful suggestion to offer.
Pierce left the interview dissatisfied and unreassured.

       *       *       *       *       *

Towards sunsetting, however, he found himself once more on the summit
of Slieve Ardgreine. He had promised to go and see after Barney
Foyle, who had been “took bad wid the road-sickness” on the day
before, and as the Foyles’ cabin stood by the side of the Clonmoragh
road, his shortest route was up and down through the Nick of Time.
The sight of the solitary boulder, squatting there starkly black
amid the flushed western glow, made him realise his trouble with
much searching of heart. It seemed a symbol, or something more than
a symbol, a visible tangible embodiment of the obstruction which had
thrust itself into the clear path of his desires. Now, Pierce Wilmot
was alike by nature and training a person who could not, without
great and grudging reluctance, admit impediments to his progress
along the way wherein he would go; and in this case he felt more loth
than ever before. As he crossed the stretch of sward towards the gap,
he eyed the dark mass with a hot thrill of resentment, as if against
somebody who had wittingly baulked and baffled him. Yet withal it
was for him so obviously nothing more than just an ordinary lump of
limestone, that in view of it Eileen’s quaint belief took a stronger
tinge of unreason. Nor did he possess, to soften it down, any
knowledge of how the seed had been sown in her mind, and had grown
up, fostered and never disturbed, through the long years of a lonely
childhood. So, for a few paces, his heart sank and sank, till it
reached depths where a poignant pity was the most endurable element
in his mood.

But before he reached the Nick of Time, an idea that flashed across
him made him deviate several yards to the right, and walk up to the
big stone. He stood still beside it, reflecting for a while, and
then gave it a slight kick, as though to mark his arrival at some
definite conclusion. At that moment he was saying to himself: “In
any case it would be better out of this; and I’ll do it the first
thing to-morrow, by Jove I will! Then I’ll bring her up here, and the
chances are that when once she’s seen it in fragments she’ll never
give the matter another thought. There was that young fellow the
Barnards knew, who got rid of a curious hallucination in much the
same sort of way. They burned an old paper on which he had taken it
into his head that the safety of the whole world depended; and when
he found that nothing happened, he grew perfectly rational about it.
And so will she. For indeed she’s as sensible as anybody can be,
except just on that one point, which won’t signify an atom, if it’s
taken in time. It’s a good job the notion occurred to me. Ay, that’s
the kind of key I must get you, sweetheart—poor little Bright-Eyes.
However, I’ll take good care that she shan’t be vexed about it. So
there’ll be a short end of you, you old _stookawn_, and joy go with
you,” he said half-aloud, with a defiant flourish of his blackthorn
towards the big stone, which, as he turned his back upon it, flung a
long, murky shadow after him, like a scowl, over the sheeny grass.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next morning did not smile upon anyone’s undertakings; rather,
it might be said to survey them unsympathetically through a blank,
expressionless mask. For Letterglas and all its neighbouring glens
were full of a white fog. It was not merely the soft mist that
clings about distant tree-clumps and cabin-clusters when the sun is
still low, and uncurls slowly, peeling off from round them, while
he climbs, giving one an impression that the landscape is a fragile
work of art, not yet quite finished careful unpacking out of delicate
cotton-wool wrappings. All the night through a vast white cloud
had been adrift thither from the westward, over seas, hanging low
always, and sometimes trailing on the very face of the water like a
huge disabled pinion. Beneath it the dim blue tide had crept to the
limitary foot of the cliffs, furtively, as if from an ambush; but the
wavering ribbon of weed and froth set no boundary for the thronging
vapour-masses, which passed on wafted inland through rifts and over
crests, till at length the escorting breeze dropped and left them
halted motionless, a crowd checked by invisible barriers. Round about
Glendoula they made all the valleys into one, spanning the ravines
with ghostly causeways and bridges, and levelling the peaks, lost
among aërial snowfields. The curd-white impenetrable wall looked at
a few yards’ distance so dense and solid that the thought of walking
through it almost took away one’s breath, and people about to emerge
from it loomed along with such dim, unsubstantial shapes that their
voices sounded startlingly loud and near.

Yet, notwithstanding these obstructive conditions, work was going
on in Letterglas valley, where wheel-barrows trundled to and fro
invisibly, tilting out clattering loads, and picks swung unseen till
one stood close to the wielder’s elbow. Pierce, the inspector, had
made his way thither, gropingly, at an early hour, having a special
job in view, which he was anxious to get done as soon as might be.
But since a field of vision wider than the present was desirable for
his operations, he consulted the weather-wise among his men as to the
probability of the fog clearing off. In old Murtagh Reilly’s opinion,
which was highly esteemed upon such points, this might be expected to
take place before they were much older.

“I wouldn’t wonder if it was very apt to be givin’ itself a heft
agin we’re done breakfast, your honour,” he said; “and once it fairly
gits a rise on it, it won’t be long streelin’ itself off out of your
way. It’s quare somewhiles to see the rate them mists ’ill be skytin’
up the hillside at, and not a breath of win’ stirrin’ that ’ud
thrimble the feather of steam whiffin’ out of an ould kettle’s spout,
let alone liftin’ a big cloud fit to thatch a townland.”

“Sure it’s the sun shinin’ on the wrong side of them does be drawin’
them up,” said Christy Martin instructively, “like as if they was a
wet shirt shrinkin’ in front of the fire. The flannen’s a terror for
cocklin’ up into nothin’ if the hate’s too strong for it.”

“I dunno where the great likeness is then,” said old Reilly, who had
not a taste for instruction.

“Maybe there’s not, Christy,” said Christy’s brother Willy; “very
belike there is not. But all the same, you and me’d be glad enough
of a pinny for ivery time we’ve seen the sun comin’ out red on this
side, lookin’ the livin’ moral of a hot cinder burnin’ through a
blanket.”

“Have it your own way, lads,” said old Reilly, sublimely abandoning
the whole expanse of the heavens to them with a comprehensive
flourish of his hand. “Howsomiver, your honour, if you was axin’ me,
I’d say this day’s apter than not to be takin’ up prisintly, or next
door to it, as thick as it is this instiant minyit.”

Old Reilly seemed to have said truly, for by the time that everybody
rose from the sodded bank, on which some of them had been eating
slices of bread as they sat—others were in the same plight as John
O’Mahony, who remarked humorously that it saved a dale of throuble
to have your breakfast yisterday or else to-morra—there was a
perceptible curtailment in the flowing drapery of the hill-slopes,
and a thinning of its texture, paler shimmering brightness running
through it here and there, to show that the opaque folds might shake
out into diaphanous tissues of pearl and silver.

Accordingly, a small knot of men by-and-by detached themselves from
the rest, and began to ascend towards the Nick of Time, whose gap
was still hidden by an ample curtain. Pierce was one of the party,
which carried up with it a supply of gritty black grains and sundry
coercive-looking tools. He invited Murtagh Reilly to accompany them,
but the old man cried off the expedition. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll stop
where I am,” he said, “for these times when there does be a notorious
curse on the counthry, and the hungry-grass growin’ over ivery inch
of it, troth it’s as much as a man’s life’s worth—and if that’s no
great things, it’s the most he has—to be settin’ his misfortnit fut
e’er a step further than he’s bound. But you’ve a plinty of the lads
along widout me, your honour.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Just at the same time, Larry M‘Farlane also set off up the slope,
by a different route from the others, however, and with a different
goal. He was taking the shortest way to the Big House down at the
bottom of Glendoula. The fog there had begun to recede a little
earlier than in Letterglas, but still muffled things very closely,
making mysteries of the most familiar objects, and Larry, who, to
judge by his headlong bounds and plunges all the way, might have
been racing for at least his life, collided more than once with a
tree-trunk when he came among the plantations. And he reached the
house panting, only to run up against more hampering blocks of delay.
For in the kitchen was nobody except Mrs Dunlop, the cook, busied
with frizzling preparations for the breakfast, and all she could be
got to say was, “Aw, ax Mr Gabbett, Larry man; he’ll be apt to know
if she’s after goin’ out, and if she isn’t, she might be indures
yit.” And when he rushed on to the pantry, old Timothy, who had
overheard the voice of an unfavoured visitor, shot the bolt of the
door, and was long deaf to all thumps and calls. In fact, Larry, the
urgency of whose errand divided every minute infinitely, was turning
away in despair, when the old man shouted a surly, “What’s a-wantin?”
and he had to waste another tormenting interval before a churlish
chink opened.

“Wantin’ to spake to Miss Eileen?” said old Timothy. “Then want’ll be
your master, me hayro of war, for I seen her goin’ out a while back.
So if that’s what all you had the prancin’ in the passage for, like a
cross-tempered carriage-horse kep’ standin’ in a could win’——”

“Murther alive and wirrasthrew and bad luck to it,” Larry said,
“what’ll I do at all now? And which way did she go, Mr Gabbett? Was
it up Slieve Ardgreine she wint, do you suppose? For it’s biddin’ her
keep off goin’ up it I’d be.”

“Well to be sure, and set you up. Yourself’s the great one to be
givin’ your orders. And how the mischief could I be tellin’ you where
she’s went, except be the sound of the hall-door clappin’? But I
dunno what’d take her sthreelin’ very far up the hill, unless she was
wishful to lose herself body and bones in the thick of the fog that
you might take and cut like the side of a rick. And if you’re from
the place where they’re workin’, sure you’d ha’ met her comin’ along,
supposin’ she’s gone that way.”

“I might ha’ passed her by twinty times over unbeknownst, up about
the top of the fields, where you couldn’t see a goat’s horns and tail
together,” said Larry; “nor I wasn’t keepin’ along be the path the
most part of the way; I just slapped down the shortest I could. But
if I’d had the wit of an ould blind crow, I would ha’ sted on her own
path, and then I might ha’ stopped her. But I’ll be hard set now to
git a chance of findin’ her at all.”

With that, Larry bolted away too hurriedly for any further questions,
thus frustrating the curiosity of old Timothy, left wondering “What
for in the nation the bosthoon would be warnin’ Miss Eileen off the
hill,” a riddle for which he could invent himself no plausible
answer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Larry’s surmise was partly right, Eileen having in reality been
on her leisurely way up Slieve Ardgreine while he sped hot-foot
down it. She had slept little in the night, and would have almost
grudged that little, had it not been for the pleasantness of waking
to the recollection that she was not only dreaming. The last time
she did so, the silvery lines framing the shuttered window, though
but faint as yet, convinced her that it could not be too early
to get up. Rising, she was fascinated by the spectacle of one of
the snow-whitest and stillest fogs she had ever seen in the dozen
years or so during which she had been capable of meteorological
observations; and she stood looking on at it for some time. But when
the fabric of the spacious pavilion began to give ground a little
and sway to and fro, restoring glimpses of a substantial world and
shifting them away again, no longer contented with her watch from the
window, she determined to run out and survey more thoroughly this
rare aspect of things. On the way downstairs she stopped to tap at
her mother’s door, very softly—a velvet-suited bee would have made
more noise flying against it—hoping to be let in, and fearing to
rouse a sleeper. An answer did set out to her, but the feeble drowsy
voice failed to reach her, so she stole on cautiously, a little sorry
that she must put off her good morning until she should return.
Eileen was wearing a favourite blue and white mousseline-de-laine,
and had not forgotten to fasten its collar with her silver key. Over
her head she had thrown a grey woollen shawl, because the April
morning air was soft rather than warm. It was a somewhat shabby old
shawl, and Eileen vainly reflected that if she met anybody she could
just slip it off and be carrying it on her arm.

Anybody might be coming down the hill home to his breakfast about
this time, and the long aisle of the elm-walk, where the straight
trunk columns showed themselves momentarily and vanished as the
mist-wreaths floated and melted through them, was weirdly alluring.
When Eileen had followed it to its end, she found another vista
opening before her out on the green slope, closed ever and anon, and
temptingly cleared again by capricious wafts of dimness. For as she
went there was setting in a general movement among all that great
gathering of vapours; their assembly was lingeringly breaking up; a
spectral city going to wrack. Vast cloaked and hooded shapes seemed
curtseying ceremoniously to one another from opposite sides of the
glens, while here and there some loftily towering pile might be seen
to betray the frailness of its structure by a shivering from top to
base like that of a sail in a veering wind. But hardly a breath was
stirring in Glendoula, so that the dispersion proceeded by very slow
degrees, with many fitful pauses.

Eileen’s little footpath led her so closely in the wake of a
receding cloud-wave that she could watch the bracken-plumes emerge
frond by frond from its filmy borders, and descry the gold of the
furze-blossom glimmering through the white, before the sombre
branches became visible. On either hand, low trailing fleeces were
caught and carded into filaments on tussocks and bents and briers.
Farther up it seemed as if a spectral net cast over the hills were
being hauled in with torn meshes teased and tangled. And behind all
this shadowy shifting drifting there were vague motions of light,
hinted at by sudden wan shimmerings of the canopy that screened it.

Eileen was always half intending to turn back, yet she went on and
on, sometimes noticing these things, and occasionally stopping to
gather a shrivelled dandelion bud, or a russet plantain head for
the old moping parrot in the parlour at home, until at last she
knew that she must have come near the stone chest. It had no bitter
associations for her now. Rather she would have looked upon it as
the auspicious starting-point whence she had fared to the highest
fortune. Even the failure of her scheme for producing a relief fund
did not any longer grieve her, for Pierce had undertaken that help
would be forthcoming, and to Pierce’s keeping she had transferred
herself, responsibilities and all, which she found a wonderful
ease to her mind. So light of heart, indeed, it made her that she
now began softly to sing a sorrowful little ditty, which she used
long ago to hear crooned by her poor old nurse, who had a turn for
sentiment:

      “_Oh sunny blooms Slieve Cryan, where the gold boughs creep
            together,
      With honey on the high cliff in ten thousand bells of heather.
      For the morn that fears no morrow is there bliss in flower and
            bee,
      And in one heart sorrow, sorrow, for the hope that wafts to
            sea._”

But as she sang, in a voice small and sweet, of this heart sorrow,
she looked on before her with shining eyes, very sure of seeing all
she wanted to crown the moment’s gladness come presently to meet her
from among the shrouding white mists.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hidden among them just then, not many yards away, half-a-dozen
people were at work around the big boulder, digging and boring,
with frequent mention in their discourse of needles and trains
and matches. Their operations were by this time, however, nearly
finished, and after the last of them, which was the kindling of a
lacklustre red flare with a sheet of grease-stained brown paper,
the whole party withdrew hastily through the Nick of Time, and
retreating some little distance down the slope on the other side,
stood still in apparent expectation of an event. It happened very
soon. First a fierce sharp-edged clatter, that crashed into a booming
roar, followed by a duller sound of rushing thuds, as if a scattered
flock of unwieldy birds had swooped down close at hand in headlong
flight. An abrupt silence succeeded, for few echoes gossip among the
Letterglas hills. It must have lasted unbroken for a long minute at
least. For the men had re-entered through the gap, where they found
the fog thickened by a sulphurous reek, and Pierce, making out amid
it the expected new vacant place, was considering how he would now
hurry home and fetch Eileen hither as soon as possible, that there
might be no further delay in the clearance of their pleasant path—“my
sweetheart,” he was saying to himself with a remorseful remembrance
of her sad eyes yesterday—when the air filled, the wide world
filled as if it could never empty again, with a shriek and a shriek
reiterated, shrill and wild, you could not have told whether man’s or
woman’s, hardly whether a human being’s, it was a skirl of such sheer
despair. Yet Pierce thought he recognised in it a name that snatched
away his breath.

“What was that, man? What is it?” he said, pulling the sleeve of
Paddy Murray, who was nearest to him.

“Somebody’s hurted for sartin,” declared Paddy.

But this was probably a mistake. The fragment of the big stone that
had struck Eileen on the temple, seemingly had thereby opened for her
and shut the dark door, whose threshold the senses may not cross, all
in an instant, before the happiness could fade out of her face, or
the little bunch of carefully-gathered weeds drop from her hand. It
might, by the way, be feared that poor Polly would enjoy no more such
feasts henceforward to the end of his tedious days.

Larry M‘Farlane it was, arrived with his belated warning, who had
raised the outcry on beholding this proof that his panic-stricken
hurry had been all bootless, and that the evil dream which had
possessed him ever since he casually overheard talk of Mr Pierce’s
project was come most terribly true. Some of the others now bade him
whisht and run for Dr Blake and Father O’Connor, who might both of
them very belike be below at Denroche’s cottages, where the Maddens
and young Joe Hanlon were mortal bad last night; though, for the
matther of that, it was aisy enough to see there’d be little anybody
could do here—goodness pity them all. But as there was nothing
else whatever that Pierce could do—he who used to be so ready with
resources—he fixed his mind upon their coming with a desperate grip,
while he stood by and waited idly.

       *       *       *       *       *

He felt bewildered, chiefly by the sameness of most things, which
were unaccountably going on much as they had been doing a minute
before, when Eileen could have spoken to him. The white mists were
still curtseying to one another across wider spaces in the valley,
and the dim light behind them grew slowly stronger. There was a scent
of turf-smoke on the air from a fire which someone had lit under a
bank a little way down the hill. The very strokes of old Dan Heron’s
hammer continued to come up in a faint rap-tap from the roadside,
where he was breaking lumps of reddish sandstone; for Dan was so deaf
that he applied himself to his tasks with abstracted concentration,
and could not easily be interrupted. Evidently the news had not
penetrated to him. A murmur of voices was passing to and fro in a
knot of men gathered at a short distance. Pierce might have caught a
sentence now and then.

“You’d a right to ha’ sent them word to keep out of it—you had so—the
way she’d niver ha’ come widin raich of harm.”

“Sure, we was intendin’ to get it done that arly there’d ha’ been no
fear of e’er a sowl about; ’twas the fau’t of the divil of an ould
fog delayin’ us.”

“Ah, now, but it’s the woful thing, however it come to happen. And
she the on’y one her poor mother has. Is anybody runnin’ down to tell
them?”

“Och you may depind—half-a-dozen.”

“Well, it’s a quare ugly world she’s took out of any way, the
crathur, God knows. ’Deed now, I do be wonderin’ somewhiles what He’s
at wid bringin’ the likes of her into such a place at all.”

“And small blame to you to be wonderin’ that same, Jim, if it’s for
nothin’ betther than to take and knock the bit of life out of her, as
if it was a gossoon slingin’ stones at a little wran hoppin’ along in
the hedges.”

“That’s no sort of talk. God be good to the crathur, she looks as if
no great harm was after happenin’ her any way.”

“It’s not kilt at all she is, I’m thinkin’. The Docther’s apt to say
she’ll be finely agin prisently.”

“Bedad now, you might ha’ more wit, man—Och, it’s on’y poor Crazy
Christy.”

The sound, but not the sense, of this discussion reached Pierce, and
vaguely irritated him, because he thought it might prevent him from
hearing the approach of what he forced himself to imagine possible
assistance. But when Father O’Connor, not long afterwards, did come
up to him, it was with no more practical suggestion than: “God help
you.”

“_God?_” said Pierce. “What on earth can God do? I think it has
killed her.” He put his question like one assuming some self-evident
proposition, and the kindly old man turned away from him with a shake
of the head, and no attempt to gainsay.

The next voice to arouse Pierce’s attention was that of a youngish
woman, worn and weather-beaten, whose grey ragged shawl hooded black
wings of hair, and the dark eyes that often look out so full of cares
from such surroundings. He recognised her as Norah O’Neil, by birth
Kinsella, and she was saying: “So I thought maybe the Docther might
be up here, Mr Pierce—but sure it’s all one. There’s nobody can do a
hand’s turn for him or any of us now, on’y God. For himself’s lyin’
dead too, sir, be the roadside down beyant the bridge. And, truth
to tell you, it’s quare set agin stirrin’ out he was this mornin’,
wishful he was to be lyin’ in his bed, for he said he felt cruel
wakely in himself altogether. But it’s losin’ the day’s wages I was
thinkin’ of, and settlin’ to call him all the lazy hounds I could
lay me tongue to—poor Mick, that was good to us ever—for ’fraid we’d
be starvin’ to-morra. So he went off wid himself. And the God that’s
above me knows well, on’y for the childer I wouldn’t ha’ said a word.
But, Mr Pierce, the faces of thim is gone to nothin’; there isn’t
a one of thim the width of the palm of your hand. And on’y for the
childer, to be lavin’ thim, God knows I’d liefer be lyin’ the way
Miss Eileen is this minyit, instead of her, the Saints in Heaven be
good to her, that’s the young crathur. Many’s the time I’ve carried
her up half-ways to this very place, when I wasn’t so much oulder
meself. For what else will I be doin’ all the rest of me life, but
remimberin’ the day I dhruv poor Mick out of the warm house to get
his death on the roadside, when all the while I knew in me heart he
wasn’t rightly able to stand on his feet. And he——”

But Norah’s story was here jostled aside by Con Furlong, the foreman,
a stolid, business-like person, who wished to mention that the men
were all quitting their work, and to receive instructions about
paying for a couple of loads of stones that were just after coming
over from Smith’s place beyond Clonmoragh, where _he_ had never
ordered them. These details somehow helped Pierce to realise more
fully that he was to be still alive. Meanwhile the sun had found a
clear path earthward among the mists, and shone out through them with
all the glamour of dawn and splendour of high-noon, so that swift
lights strode hither and thither upon the hills, and the haze melted
into the deepening blue as fast as foam on a summer sea, until the
spring-day was golden over the whole countryside. It was just the
world and the weather for those grand times which, as Pierce now
suddenly remembered, he had promised that Eileen should have when he
came with the key.




A DESERTED CHILD




A DESERTED CHILD


The Round Lodge at Kilrath is so ornate a little structure, with
its pillared portico and fantastic pagoda-like roof, that it looks
as incongruous in the lonesome grass-lands, amongst which it is
solitarily set, as a single pelargonium or calceolaria would look
among their ragweed and thistles. Only the old people recollect how
it was built by way of being a gate-lodge on one of the new roads
which there was talk of young Mr Hall making at the time he came into
the property, but which, like many more of his schemes, were never
carried out. None of them, in fact, ever took a substantial form
except the Round Lodge, his promptness in this matter being caused
by a long-standing promise to his old nurse that if he succeeded to
the Kilrath estate she should have “a little house of her own.” As
his regard for the old woman was one of the few interests he had left
unshrivelled by the gambling fever that had fastened on him, he found
an eager pleasure in keeping his word to her, and travelled all the
way down from Dublin that he might be present at her induction into
her new abode.

It was a moteless morning in early summer, when the curved masses
of the wood still had a misty softness of hue, and the green of the
fresh lawns looked as unwitherable as the domed blue above them.
The Round Lodge gleamed most spick and span within and without,
its brilliant tiles glowing, and the violet and amber panes in its
glass door richly staining the sunbeams that crowded into the little
porch. Mrs Moran, glancing round the cosy sitting-room with bright
quick eyes like a bird’s, felt herself happy indeed, though she only
_said_ she dared say she might make a shift to manage well enough,
once she had the things set to rights a bit herself in her own way;
which would have sounded faint praise to anybody who did not know
her. But when she was left there to her own devices, she became
subject to fits of forlorn “lonesomeness,” at intervals which grew
shorter day by day as the first gloss of ownership wore off. It did
so the more rapidly because the Round Lodge was so far out of the
way that she seldom had a visitor to whom she could exhibit her
possessions with proud disparagement. We all like to look at our
own happiness through other men’s eyes, a process by which it seems
to gain a sort of stereoscopic solidity. Her nearest acquaintances
were the old coachman and cook couple who lived as caretakers in
the gaunt, empty mansion two miles away; for though the village is
considerably closer by, a bit down the road after you turn out of the
boreen, anybody who supposes that Mrs Moran could have associated
on terms of intimacy with its inhabitants must be sadly to seek in
a knowledge of our finely shaded social distinctions. Mrs Dowling
alone, who was mistress of the post-office and shop, and who wore a
bonnet at Mass, might have been an appropriate crony, but she was at
this time “mortal bad wid the janders.” Hence the clear summer noons
and nights often strung themselves into a whole week without giving
Mrs Moran an opportunity of saying anything more to the purpose than
the occasional “Fine day, ma’am,” which even neighbours who are not
acquaintances must exchange when they meet. This was a dull state of
things, and made the hours wagged out by the bland-faced clock lag
and loiter strangely. Sometimes, if she had not recollected that she
was at last in the long-desired little house of her own, she would
have almost thought she had been in better places; and satisfaction
that has to be conjured up by an effort of memory comes cold and flat.

A few perches to the westward of the Round Lodge a belt of timber
breaks the smooth sweep of the broad pastures that encircle it. If
you thread the narrow footpath between the delicate grey beech-trunks
for quite a long distance, you come to the edge of a high bank,
which overhangs a deep-sunken lane, a mere boreen joining two more
important thoroughfares. Thence the trees turn at right angles
to fringe the brink of this lane. Across it you look into a wild
country. The great Shangowragh bog rolls from the horizon almost to
your feet, and on the right hand, towards Lisconnel, spreads far
away, a spacious level that seems brown until you have called it so,
and then you see many other colours struggling duskily through, olive
and purple and red. To the left there is rougher ground, mottled
with grey-gleaming boulders and clumps of furze, and lifting itself
up lazily to a stony ridge. Beyond that rise darkly a pair of domed
mountain summits, the same that are seen more dimly from Lisconnel.
Here they have the aspect of two huge hooded heads, bowed over a
mysteriously folded hollow. When Mrs Moran came within view of this
landscape, she generally shrank back among the sheltering trunks,
and went home the way she had come. She said it made the flesh creep
upon her bones, and she wouldn’t stop where she’d have one of those
ugly black-lookin’ blocks of hills grimacin’ at her from mornin’
till night, not if she was paid for it by the hour. The fact was
that she had lived all her life in the corner of a softly contoured
up-and-down county, where the little rounded grass hillocks and
frequent hedges make the countryside look as if it had been crumpled
into green bunches, and where the prospect seldom extends over more
than a few hawthorn-bounded fields at a time. So that these vast
stretches of wilderness were for her a new and startling revelation
of possibilities in Nature, which she was somewhat disposed to
resent. On the whole, though she would by no means have allowed it,
even to herself, the little house of her own was more or less a
disappointment, and disappointments that occur when one is verging
on threescore-and-ten have a discouraging air of finality.

But with that first long summer at the Round Lodge, Mrs Moran’s
solitude was ended by the arrival there of her daughter-in-law, Mrs
Peter, and of her three grandchildren, Nannie and Biddy and Con.
Their coming was caused by a very tragical occurrence, and apart
from the melancholy circumstances, I doubt that it added to the old
woman’s contentment. She had long since made up her mind that she
would not like a bone in her son’s wife’s skin, and the prejudice
did not melt away upon acquaintance, while the children were rather
oppressive to her after her long holiday from such society. Since
the infancy of Mr George, now in the Lancers, she had scarcely seen
a child to speak to, in the grown-up Halls’ deserted nursery; and
she said aggrievedly that they _moidhered_ her, and that ne’er a one
of them featured their poor father. Nannie and Biddy, good-natured,
hot-tempered little girls, shocked her by their romps and quarrels;
and four-year-old Con, a small, melancholy child with a turn for
metaphysics, caused her some chagrin by his unthriving aspect; she
said that he looked like a hap’orth of soap after a week’s washin’,
wid the face on him no broader than a farthin’ herrin’. With all
their shortcomings, however, the young Morans were presently the
means of bringing a still less promising inmate to the Round Lodge.

About this time Kilrath happened to be suffering from a visitation
of the Tinkers, who had established themselves as usual in the row
of deserted cottages at the end of the boreen. The Tinkers were
people who spent all the tolerably warm part of the year among the
benettled wall-rims of deserted cabins, and under the arches of
bridges, and in the hollows of old quarries, making progresses to and
from these quarters with the help of two donkey-carts. Most of the
party passed the heart of the winter in the less primitive shelter of
whatever Union workhouse was nearest when the first unbearably cold
night overtook them. Now and then a member of their confraternity
disappeared for a space into the more rigorous seclusion of some
county jail, but that was an accident of occurrence less common than
their temporary neighbours could have wished. For the Tinkers, it
is said, stole all before them. Middle-aged inhabitants of Kilrath
remembered when the band had filled only one cart; but of late years
they had over-flowed into a second, the owners of which were known
as the Young Tinkers. It was considered that the Young Tinkers were
collectively greater thieves of the world than the Ould, but that no
single individual could hold a candle for villainy to Luke Maguire,
the very ancient commander of the original vehicle. People wondered
sometimes that the Young and Ould Tinkers did not part company, and
take different routes, as their joint arrival at any camping-ground
was generally the signal for a frantic fight between the two
sections. However, they continued to stick together, which, as a
Kilrath housewife remarked, was “a rael charity, for if they took to
scatterin’ themselves over the whole countryside, like a flock of
turkeys in a stubble-field, she should suppose there wouldn’t be a
him or an egg to be had in it from one year’s end to the other.”

So not long after the Peter Morans’ establishment at the Round
Lodge, the Tinkers sent to the door a deputation composed of a
woman and two children, all wildly ragged, and hung about with
samples of their flashing tinware in such profuse festoons that
their approach sounded, one may suppose, somewhat like the onset
of a mail-clad knight of old romance. Their call was but brief,
for their appearance did not favourably impress the two Mrs Morans,
who were afterwards careful to exhort Nannie and Biddy and Con
that they must on no account have anything to say to “them young
rapscallions,” if met with on their walks abroad. The little Morans,
who had been staring with all their eyes full of envious admiration
at their two contemporaries permitted freely to handle and clink
those resplendent and resonant cans, felt vaguely the existence of
compensations and complications in the scheme of things, when they
learned that these privileged persons were nevertheless to be shunned
as somehow inferior and reprehensible, and “not anyways fit company
for respectable people’s childer.”

But on the next Saturday their mother went to shop in the village,
and up at the Round Lodge the children found the morning as long as
mornings can be when one is under seven, and the end of an hour is
out of sight. By the time that Nannie and Biddy and Con had finished
their midday dinner, they felt quite convinced that if their mother
meant ever to come back to them at all, she must now be somewhere
near at hand; and while their grandmother was busy washing up, they
slipped away to meet her along the path among the beeches. It was a
pleasant autumn day, with crisp leaf-drifts to scuffle underfoot, and
here and there a more or less ripe blackberry attainable, amusements
which drew them on until they reached the brink of the abrupt descent
into the boreen. They saw no sign of their mother coming, and the
bank looked so very high and steep that they could not even think
of climbing it. But while they strayed desultorily on the top,
somebody, swinging from clumps of weeds to handles of looped roots
in monkey-like fashion, came suddenly scrambling up it, and then
squatted down cross-legged under a sloe-bush. The new-comer seemed
to the children a very large person, being a well-grown girl of ten
or eleven. Her dress consisted of a brown skirt, which looked as if
it had once been a sack, with a man’s old jacket for a bodice, eked
out by a screed of greenish shawl. She was barefooted and bareheaded,
with a great shock of black hair making thick eaves over her brows,
under which her light-grey eyes shone like the gleam of pools caught
through dark-fledged boughs. This was Judy Flower, eldest daughter
of Jack Flower, head of the family of the Young Tinkers. Strictly
speaking, Jack’s surname was Murphy, but Jack’s father, who had
enjoyed some local renown as a wrestler, had been styled by his
admiring neighbours “The Flower of Clonmoyle,” and his children had
been spoken of as the Young Flowers, until the nickname hardened
into a patronymic, which Jack took with him when he sank into the
tinkering line. Judy’s mother, on the other hand, had real gipsies
among her ancestry, which was, perhaps, the reason why Judy sat
cross-legged, and had something weirdly Oriental in her aspect.

The Moran children sidled away a few paces, eyeing her doubtfully;
but she took no notice of them, and began to eat a bunch of
remarkably large and ripe blackberries, evidently the remains of much
similar spoil, for her hands and lips were blue with juice-stains.
When she had finished them all but the last, which was also the
biggest and blackest, she suddenly held it out to Con, saying,
“There’s for you, young feller, and a grand one it is—a dewberry.
Stuff it in your mouth, and no more talk out of you.” She spoke in
a high-pitched gabble, and with a peremptoriness of manner modelled
upon that used by her elders to herself. Con was half-scared, and
Biddy plucked Nannie by the sleeve, whispering dismally, “Let’s go
home, she’s ugly-lookin’.” However, the plump-seeded, glossy berry
proved irresistible, and Con’s hesitation ended in a furtive grab.
Nannie, emboldened by this mark of confidence, came a step nearer to
Judy, and said, peering down the bank wistfully, for her gleanings by
the way had only served to whet her appetite, “There would be a dale
of berries in it over yonder?” Judy craned her neck round the bush,
and looked down the bank too, and then at the three small children,
who stood in a row. “Is it berries you’re after?” she said, “and is
it over there you’d be goin’? Whethen now, if you knew what all was
in it over there, ’tisn’t about berries you’d be talkin. Och no,
murdher alive, not indeed, bedad.”

“Over where is it?” said Nannie, impressed and alarmed by the
redundancy of Judy’s asseverations.

Judy pointed up the boreen, which just there turned sharply, and
under a roof of reddening boughs formed a vista, ended by the dark
mountain-wall. “Och if you was after seein’ the laste taste of a
sight of a one of them”—she said, with appalling vagueness. “Och
mercy on us all and more too, if you on’y was.”

“What sort seein’?” said Nannie, with increasing anxiety. The row
had shortened itself considerably, the children had shrunk so close
together.

“Crathurs,” said Judy. “Och my goodness the crathurs. Tiger-bastes,
and camel-horses, and mambolethses—rael frykful. I cudn’t tell you
the half-quarter of them. But the crathur of all the crathurs is the
big red snake that’s in it. Awful _he_ is. Och the dear help us, I
hope he’ll bide contint where he is, I hope he will. Wirrasthrew, if
he was to get hearin’ any sort of noise that ’ud wake of him out of
his sleep—whoo-oo, that’d be the bad job for us all.”

The children stared at her round-eyed like a bunch of fascinated
little birds.

“Well now, but it’s the terrible big red snake _he_ is,” Judy went on
contemplatively, “and the great hijjis lump of a black head he has
on him; it wouldn’t scarce fit in between them two bushes; and the
long len’th he is, that’d raich aisy to the far end of the boreen—and
he asleep up yonder, ready to wake every instant minute of time that
happens—and bould little children talkin’ of leppin’ down the high
banks after blackberries.”

“We worn’t,” said Biddy, with a howl.

“Where is he asleep at all?” said Nannie in a hoarse whisper.

“Sure, up there in his black hole,” said Judy, pointing through
the trees, “wound himself up he has—round and round and
round-an’-round-an’-round”—she described a rapid eddy in the air with
her forefinger—“wid his big ugly head cocked in the middle, listenin’
till he hears somethin’ to wake him up—and then, good gracious, is
it what’ll he do?” she said, replying to an interrogative gasp from
Nannie, “Murdher alive!” She ducked down until her shock-head nearly
touched the ground, and recoiled immediately to an erect sitting
posture with a jack-in-the-box-like spring. Then she elongated her
neck preternaturally, and twisting it from side to side, glared about
her with a ferocious goggle and grin. “That’s what he’ll do first,”
she said, “to find out what way the noise was comin’ wakenin’ of him.
And after that, he lets a couple of roars out of him, and he begins
to unrowl himself—round and round an’ round-an’-round—the wrong way.
And as soon as he’s stretched his len’th, out he’ll take wid himself
slitherin’ down the hill to us, and through the trees there he’ll
come smashin’ desthruction off of all before him. Ragin’ mad he’ll be
for bein’ woke up. Och the creels of him and the crawls of him,” said
Miss Judy, rocking herself to and fro, so that the withered leaves
on the thorny bush behind her fell over her like a shower of little
golden coins, “och the creels of him and the crawls of him, and the
roars of him and the bawls of him—there was never anything aquil to
it. ’Twould terrify the clouds out of the sky.... And mercy be among
us, what was that at all now? Was it him beginnin’? I dunno but I
heard him over yonder, like as if he was sayin’ _cruel_ to himsel,
‘Whoo-oo-o, let me be comin’ at them.’”

This was too much for the fortitude of Biddy, a small fat child with
no great force of character, and she broke into an uncontrollable
roar, to the wrathful despair of Nannie, who shook her passionately,
saying, “Whisht, whisht, you little madwoman! do you want to have
us all destroyed?” Con, on the other hand, not less dismayed, flew
frantically at Judy with a snatched-up stick, confusing the causer
with the object of his terror. Judy herself rose to her feet, and
resorted to precipitate flight, not by reason of Con’s assault, but
because at this moment a voice called shrilly through the trees, “You
young miscreant there, what at all are you doin’ wid the childer?”
It was old Mrs Moran, who, alarmed by the stillness, had set out
in quest of her grandchildren. Judy, who had no wish to explain
the situation, sought to escape from it by a hasty retreat down
the boreen bank, but her attempt was unlucky. For in her hurried
swinging of herself over the edge, she trusted her weight to a tuft
of ragweed, whose roots ripped faithlessly out of the crumbling soil,
and let her drop amongst a scattering of earth and pebbles into the
middle of the lane, where she lay stunned and incapable for the
present of any further romancing.

It was in this way that Judy Flower became an inmate of the Round
Lodge, being carried up there by Michael Kelly, a turf-cutter, who
appeared opportunely on the scene. He then tramped off several miles
to summon the doctor, observing as he started that there was likely
to be an Inquist to-morrow. But when the doctor came, he pronounced
the case one of merely slight concussion of the brain, and predicted
a rapid recovery, if the child were properly cared for, which Mrs
Moran resolved that she should be. “The crathur might stop where she
was for a few days at any rate, till she came round a bit.”

The Tinkers themselves did not display much concern about the fate
of their youthful comrade. On the evening of the accident, two of
the women came to make inquiries at the Round Lodge, and their
report seemingly satisfied Judy’s family, for next morning the
whole party decamped, moving on in the direction of Castlebawn. But
it had happened that just at this time Judy’s mother was absent,
tramping the country on a professional tour, with a baby and a bunch
of tinware, and so heard nothing of what had befallen her daughter
until she rejoined the caravan at Castlebawn. They picked her up in
a dreary little back lane, where she awaited their coming, seated
on a broken-down mud wall. Her tin cans were nearly all slung about
her still, but she had nothing in her arms, for the baby had died of
bronchitis in the cold weather the week before, little to anybody
else’s regret, perhaps not even its own. But the event had disposed
Mrs Flower to take a tragical view of things, and therefore, when her
family equipage creaked near enough to admit a counting of black
and red heads, which showed that one was missing, she immediately
formed the gloomiest conclusions about the fate of the absentee. Nor
were the explanations she received particularly re-assuring. Little
Jimmy, her eldest boy, reported that Judy had fell off of the top of
somethin’, he didn’t rightly know what, and hadn’t come home since.
And his aunt Mrs Massey’s account of the matter ran: “Och, sure she’s
after givin’ herself a crack on the head, but the ould woman that
picked her up off the road was a dacint body, and she’s took her
in. She might get over it and do right enough yet. Anyway, the best
chance was to lave her where she is. It’s late we are, for the roads
is that heavy they’re nearly pullin’ the hoofs off of the misfort’nit
asses’ ould feet. How did she get the crack? Sure the on’y wonder is
she hasn’t broke her neck a dozen of times wid the way she climbs
over all before her. And so the baby’s died on you? Ah the crathur,
God be good to it! ’Deed now, it would be cruel knocked about in the
perishin’ weather. Belike it’s better off. Did you sell anythin’ at
all? Musha then, woman, you needn’t be frettin’ after Judy, for
she’s apt to play plinty more fool’s thricks yit, if that’s all ails
you.”

Mrs Flower was, however, bent on not only fretting, but going to
see after and if possible repossess herself of Judy. She was ill
and miserable, and had been looking forward to the close of her
weariful, lonesome tramp, and a spell of easier days, jogging along
on wheels among familiar faces. But Judy was the eldest of her
children, and had perhaps never quite lost the glamour of a wonderful
new possession, which her mother could not contemplate in another
person’s keeping without a pang of jealousy. At any rate, she made up
her mind to resume her solitary way, and she kept her resolve despite
the disapproval of her family, of her gaunt-looking husband, who said
she’d a dale better stop wid the childer and him and mind them a bit,
and of the childer themselves, who, feeling mocked and defrauded by a
glimpse of comfort so speedily withdrawn, howled dismally and drummed
protests on the sides of their cart, as they saw the much-desired
wisp of black shawl recede fluttering down the wet street.

Under these discouraging circumstances, aggravated by wild wind and
rain, Mrs Flower started on her doubtful quest. Four days she had to
trudge in solitude, and three nights she had to shelter as best she
could, the best being on two occasions no better than the lee-side
of a dyke and a clump of rustling furze-bushes. Such wide tracts
of bogland intervened between cabins where a night’s lodging may
generally be had for the asking, because the indwellers have little
else to bestow. But she consoled herself with the hope that on the
way back she should have her daughter’s company. She durst not now
face the possibility of “anythin’ havin’ happint Judy,” so that she
would after all return alone. That would have been to look recklessly
down a gulf of despair. So she allowed herself to doubt of nothing
except her chances of reaching her goal before she was perished
outright, or “took rael bad intirely.” When she came to the village
of Kilrath, a wannish gleam of prosperity flickered out on her, for
she succeeded in persuading Mrs Nally, the owner of a stray spare
penny, to buy a tin-mug, which was described as being “that iligant
and polished up, ’twould be a pleasure to drink anythin’ out of it,
if ’twas on’y a sup of ditch-water, and strong? Och goodness preserve
us, ma’am dear, you might take and batter it agin that wall there
the len’th of the day, and sorra a dint there’d be in it when you’d
done.” As she knew that the Round Lodge could not be very far off,
she expended the proceeds of this sale in purchasing a little flour
cake for Judy at the shop. It was richly yellowed with soda, and
showed three currants on its surface, which could not fail to tempt
the most delicate appetite. “And sure the bit of a crathur would be
finely agin now.”

By the time that Mrs Flower came to the Round Lodge, the wintry dusk
had thickened so that the driving sleet-sheets were more felt than
seen. The leafless beech-grove was roaring in the wind with the voice
of a foam-fretted shore, and straining and swaying to the stress of
the blasts until it looked like an anchored cloud. She groped baffled
among the dripping trunks for a long while before she found a clue in
a line of red light to guide her across the dim grass-field, until
she stood under the porch of the Round Lodge. It was the Tinkers’
habit to be stealthy in their movements, and she passed through the
coloured glass door unheard, and down the short passage to where
another door stood rather widely ajar, revealing an interior of
ruddily lit warmth, paradisiacal to anybody peering in very cold and
wet and hungry. Only Mrs Moran and Judy were in the kitchen, which
glowed all round its curved walls so that the room looked like a
cupful of light filched from the ebbing day. Judy, now convalescent,
installed in one of the fine new arm-chairs by the fire, with locks
clipped and combed, and wearing a neat lilac print frock and little
plaid shoulder-shawl, was wonderfully transformed in aspect. She was
eating a broad slice of buttered griddle-cake, and listening to a
long story, which Mrs Moran had drawn from her store of reminiscences
about the Quality she had lived with. While Mrs Flower watched, the
old woman got up and brought the girl something in a large mug. “It’s
a nice sup of buttermilk for you,” she said; “sup it up, honey, along
wid your cake. I declare now, you and I are great company together
intirely.”

“Ay are we,” said Judy complacently; “and if I had me strip of
knittin’, I might be tryin’ did I remember the stitch you was showin’
me. Sure none of them at home could do knittin’ no more than the
crows in the field. And what become of Miss Lily’s grey horse?
They’d be apt to put it out of that, after it doin’ such a thing.”

Judy’s mother never heard the answer to that question, for she was
pre-occupied by a struggle towards a difficult resolve. When it was
formed at last, she turned to slip noiselessly away. “Sure she has
her chance there, me jewel,” she said to herself. “I’ll let her be.”
But she was not destined to depart uninterrupted. As she turned to
go, one of her cans swung, clanking against the door-edge, and Judy
had espied her before she could retreat.

“Why, there’s me mammy!” Judy said. “It’s comin’ she’ll be to take me
home.” Her exclamation began jubilantly but ended in a minor cadence,
for her present quarters were in most ways very much to her mind, and
being still less vigorous than usual, made her feel all the more loth
to resume the rough faring upon which she looked back across this
brief novel experience of cosy chimney-corners and ample meals. It
struck her that her mammy might have arrived more appropriately some
other time; _some_ time, of course, but _other_ certainly; and the
opinion betrayed itself on her countenance.

“Well, and what way are you, Judy?” said Mrs Flower, pausing as she
found herself observed; “grandly you look to be set up in there,
bedad.”

“Oh, she’s doin’ finely?” said Mrs Moran. “You’d better step inside,
ma’am—if you’re Judy’s mother,” she added, though she could not
forbear a mistrustful glance from her visitor’s bedraggled rags
to her own clean boards and good bit of carpet. “It’s wet walkin’
to-night.”

“I dunno but I’d a right to stop where I am,” said Mrs Flower,
standing still. “Drippin’ I am, sure enough; the showers this day’d
drinch a water-eel. I was on’y trampin’ round wid the things; and as
for takin’ you along, Judy, ’deed for the matter of that, sorra the
hurry I’m in at all, unless them that have got you so be.”

“There’s no hurry whatsomever,” said Mrs Moran rather stiffly. “Let
alone that the child’s noways fit to be streelin’ about the counthry.”

“The saints above know I’ve no wish to be saddlin’ meself wid her,”
said Mrs Flower defiantly. “It’s just a livin’ torment she’d be to
me, and divil a hap’orth else.”

“Well, to be sure, one’d ha’ thought you might ha’ found somethin’
more agreeable to say of your own child,” said Mrs Moran, “even
supposin’ it isn’t convenient to have her along wid you these times.”

“Convenient, is it?” said Mrs Flower. “Be jabers, it’s them that has
the rarin’ of the likes of her knows the throuble of it. Troth, you
might be tired bangin’ her about and givin’ her abuse from one day’s
end to the other, and get no good of her at the heel of the hunt.”

“’Deed then, if you can conthrive nothin’ better to do wid her than
that, I’d a dale sooner she sted where she is,” said Mrs Moran, with
increasing sternness, and a change of mind about the propriety of
offering Mrs Flower a cup of tea. “She’s an unnatural crathur,” she
said to herself, “and all she cares for is to be shut of the child.”

“Well, good-bye to you, Judy,” said her mother. “I’ll not come near
you, I’m that muddy and wet.”

“But you’ll be comin’ back some time soon, mammy?” said Judy, who
had hitherto kept silence, somewhat shocked and affronted at her
mother’s disparagement, which was a new experience to her, as at home
Mrs Flower had been always wont to defend Judy’s character and extol
her, without much cause, “for lendin’ a great hand wid the childer,”
and other domestic virtues. Now, however, Judy was stricken with
remorse as she saw the familiar black shawl and weather-worn face
disappearing into a darkness which led towards the dreary noises of
the wild night. She got out of her arm-chair, and despite Mrs Moran’s
remonstrance, ran across the room and down the passage, hobblingly,
because she was still lame from her fall. When she reached the porch,
her mother, though close by, was almost swallowed up in the gloom,
which had superseded the last glimmers of twilight. Only in the
farthest west lingered a dull-red band, hardly more luminous than a
drift of the dead beech-leaves. Judy stood on the steps peering out,
with the hearth-glow behind her. “Stop a minute, mammy,” she called;
“I’m after forgettin’ to bid you good-bye or anythin’. And I’ll ax
herself inside to be wettin’ the tay——”

Mrs Flower looked round, and halted for a moment. Then she shook
her fist menacingly at her daughter. “Be off and run in wid you out
of that, you young divil!” she shouted hoarsely. A gust of wind
intercepted and bore away the words, but her threatening gesture was
plain enough against the fading wraith of the sunset. And it was the
last that Judy ever saw of her unnatural mother.




AN ACCOUNT SETTLED




AN ACCOUNT SETTLED


One wet autumn evening, Mr Natty Grogan was taking stock and making
up his books with the assistance of his family. When thus occupied,
the young Grogans were wont to complain that he would be trotting
after them with dogs’ abuse from Billy to Jock, till you couldn’t
tell where to have him; while he used to declare that the lot of
them all together were more different kinds of fools than you’d find
anywhere else in the breadth of Ireland, and so was their mother
before them. She had died many years since and her husband was
reported to have remarked that the event would save him a couple
of shillings a week, anyway, for milk and chicken-broth. But it is
fair to observe that unfeeling speeches were likely enough to be put
into his mouth on this occasion—such was his character among his
neighbours. They said that his wife had been “a very dacint poor
woman, and a dale too good for any such an ould slieveen, and it was
a pity all the childer, except, maybe, Andy, took after himself.”

For the present, however, popular disapproval of the Grogans was in
abeyance, as almost everybody else had gone to bed and to sleep,
so that Athcrum’s one wide street lay deserted and blank. It was a
very wet evening, and the whitewashed house-fronts had an ample dado
of mud splashes about their doors and lower windows, but they were
all now muffled up in darkness. The Grogans’ late sitting threw no
light on the outer gloom, for the battered shop-shutters were up,
and business proceeded in the little back room, whence old Natty lit
himself every now and then with a sweeling dip, to grope among his
stock-in-trade in the adjoining shop. He accompanied these researches
with dissatisfied grunts, rising occasionally into requests
wrathfully shouted to his family, for an explanation of what he found
or missed. They grimaced at one another, and sometimes whispered
together before they complied with his demands—Nannie and Tom and
Stevie, seated round the table, where the strong lamp-light flared
in their faces. Their father, peering in at them from murky recesses
behind the counter, half saw and half surmised these signals, which
did not soothe his irritation.

“What at all’s gone wid the rest of the ten-pound tin of arrowroot
biscuits?” he called suddenly. “It was better than three parts full
last time I seen it, and, accordin’ to the accounts, there’s no right
to be anythin’ out of it since then, but ne’er an atom have you left
in it, on’y a dust of crumbs.”

“Belike _they_ niver put down the last person had some,” suggested
Tom, disassociating himself from the transaction with prompt presence
of mind.

“And why the mischief didn’t you? Am I keepin’ the pack of yous
foolin’ here to be slingin’ me goods about the parish, and not so
much as take the trouble to scrawm it down? There’s not an infant
child goin’ to school but ’d make a better offer at doin’ business.”

“It’s very apt to ha’ been Mrs Moriarty,” said Nannie, choosing to
ignore this aspect of the matter; “she did be gettin’ them kind of
things the time the childer was sick. We can aisy charge them to her.”

“Mrs Moriarty’s great-grandmother’s cat!” said her father. “You
might as well save yourself the trouble—and there’s none readier—of
chargin’ anythin’ to her these times. The people at the post-office
was tellin’ me this mornin’ that the last American letter come
for her, sorra the money-order was in it at all, except word of
the daughter bein’ in hospital, and the husband out of work. It’s
one while before she’ll be settlin her account. Howsome’er, charge
the biscuits to her, and don’t be makin’ too free wid allowin’ her
anythin’ else on credit. Whose bill’s that you’re makin’ out there,
Stevie?”

“Yourself’s after biddin’ me get Dan Farrell’s,” Stevie replied.

“Ay, did I? It’s the best chance we have to be gettin’ anythin’
out of the man, and he wid his couple of bastes in at Kenmare fair
yisterday. If we don’t look out sharp, his story’ll be that the agent
took the price off him for rint. The divil mend the both of them for
a pair of thievin’ villins! Sure Widdy Rourke below was tellin’ me
she seen Dan diff’rint times comin’ out of Carmody’s as hearty as
anythin’; and when’s he had a glass from us at all? Ah, musha! long
life to him. A great notion he has to be spendin’ his ready money
at Carmody’s, and we to be givin’ him credit for everythin’ else he
happens to fancy. Plase the pigs, I’ll learn him the differ! What’s
the amount he’s owin’? Eighteen shillin’? Then just set him down a
couple of pound of them biscuits, or anythin’—the way there’ll be no
bother wid change comin’ out of his note.”

“Biscuits he didn’t get, I’ll take me living oath,” said Stevie
confidently.

“Keep your oaths till they’re axed for. ’Twas as apt to be biscuits
as anythin’. And I’ll tell you what it is, me young shaver, _you_’ll
step over to Farrell’s to-morra mornin’ and get the bill ped.” Old
Natty gave these commands in a triumphant tone, meaning them to be a
penalty for his son’s contumacious contradiction; and Stevie did say
grumblingly—

“Troth and bedad, it’s nicely bogged a man’ll be thrampin’ them roads
after these polthogues.”

But the young Grogans had a way of posing in aggrieved attitudes from
motives of policy, and the commission was really much to Stevie’s
mind, the office of collector being always in request among them,
because it was endowed with what they called their chances. These
consisted in a private lengthening of the bill by addition of sundry
fictitious items, the price of which the inventor pocketed. Thus, on
the present occasion, before Stevie went to bed he was careful to
supplement Dan Farrell’s account with the following entries, which
were purely efforts of imagination—

                  _s._  _d._

  Extry male        2     3
  Shuger            1     0
  Other extrys      1     9

Five shillings was an unusually large toll to levy in this way, but
Stevie knew his man, and had little fear of failing to extract it;
easy-going Dan would so certainly be loth to “get argufyin’ and
risin’ ructions.”

Next morning, Stevie started betimes on his two-mile walk. The
raindrops had only just ceased pricking the wide, continuous puddle,
which lent a Venetian aspect to the main street, and sounds of
gurgling and dripping were audible all around, as if everything
were talking over the late downpour. When Stevie faced towards the
purple mountain range, in the direction of which lay Dan Farrell’s,
he saw the pale mists creeping along the ridges, and writhing up the
ravines, and swirling in the curved hollows, and the air had the
breath of autumnal chill that comes with rain in harvest time. Water
gleamed greyly from the furrows of every little field that he passed,
and he passed scores of them before he reached the river bridge,
where he was within a few perches of his goal. He might have taken a
shorter route, but it included a swampy patch and the passage of some
stepping-stones, for which he considered the state of affairs “too
soft altogether”; and he therefore kept upon comparatively dry land.
The dryness was very comparative indeed all over Dan Farrell’s little
holding, which occupied the entrance to a winding green glen, where
both stream and hillside curved suddenly, leaving a triangular bit of
level ground. During the past night, however, this had undergone an
abrupt change of contour, as the swollen river had flung an impetuous
arm across it, islanding its apex and rejoining the main stream,
turbid with melted clods and tangled with wisps of drowned green oats.

When Stevie came to the bridge, Dan Farrell himself was standing up
to his knees in the soaked grain by the water’s edge and thinking of
his bad luck, without any presentiment that more was on its way. He
was a tall, black-bearded man, and had been a gaunt and grizzled one
ever since a virulent attack of rheumatism last spring had changed
him from middle-aged to elderly in a few racking weeks. This illness
had brought Sarah Tighe, his sister’s daughter, from her home in
Athcrum to nurse him and manage his forlorn household, for Dan had
lately been left a widower, and his four children were incapably
small. Sarah was now calling to him from the door to the effect that
he hadn’t as much sense as little Bobby, or else he’d come in out of
streeling through them oats, and they as wet as the waves of the say,
unless maybe he’d a mind to have himself bawling for the next month
with the pains in his bones. But Dan turned a bothered ear to her
warnings, until she added—

“And if here isn’t one of the young Grogans slingein’ along over the
bridge.”

Then the recollection of his growing account at the shop started out
from the misty background of his troubles, and took up a commanding
position in the forefront. He cast a glance of listless despondency
on the flooded field and turbulent river, and began to walk slowly up
the plashy furrow towards his house, set in motion by a vague sense
that it was more fitting for him than for his niece to receive young
Grogan. By the time he reached the door, Stevie was already there
talking to Sarah, a plump young woman, whose colouring suggested an
autumn hedgerow, with gleams of ruddy berries and black, and warm
brown leaves. She was naturally conversational and vivacious, but it
may be feared that her consciousness of Brian Mahony inside there
disapproving of the colloquy led her to carry it on with increased
animation. Had nobody been by to mind, Mr Stephen Grogan might have
received a welcome more in accordance with Sarah’s own private
opinion of him, which was low. When her uncle came up, she stood
demurely aside, and waited while his health was inquired after and
the weather bewailed. Then Stevie asked—

“And what way was the fair a’ Tuesday?”

“As bad as anythin’ at all,” said Dan, “onless you was to be payin’
the dalers to take your bastes off you for a complimint.”

“But you’re after selling a couple?” said Stevie.

“Och, did I—and what’s four pound ten to git for a grand little
heifer, and she a rael dexter, if you was to be tired swearin’ agin
it? Worth three times the money she’d ha’ been to me, if I could ha’
held on to her a sixmonth longer.”

“Sure, now, it’s you farmers that are the rich people, makin’
nothin’ of pound notes at that rate,” said Stevie, laughing with
a sort of uneasy jocularity. Dan knew quite well what was coming,
before the other went on, “So as I was passin’ this way, I just
looked in wid our bit of account, Misther Farrell; it’s been runnin’
this good while now.”

“Ay, bedad,” Dan assented dejectedly, “will you be steppin’ inside?”

Inside reigned a brownish twilight, and the corners were all rounded
off with smoke-haze. One of them was occupied by Brian Mahony, a
neighbour of the Farrells, who, since Dan’s illness, had often come
in to lend him a hand. This morning he had undertaken the repairs of
a turf-creel. He was a powerful-looking young man, with a shock of
chestnut hair and tawny tufts and frills about his face, which just
then wore a glum expression, misliking the entrance of Stevie Grogan.
His dissatisfaction caused him to appear deeply absorbed in his task,
and to discuss it with the little Farrells, who stood around to watch
his splicing and weaving. They were unsuspectingly flattered by his
unusual disposition to consult them, and they favoured him with much
criticism and advice.

“Sit you down, man, and warm yourself,” said Dan, taking the glazy
blue paper which young Grogan had extracted from a thin pocket-book
bound in black American cloth, and tied round with frayed strings
of pink tape. “I’m afeard we haven’t e’en a sup of anythin’ in the
house.”

As Stevie seated himself near the circle of glowing sods, Dan carried
his bill over to the window, that the light of its one deep-set pane
might assist his somewhat feeble scholarship in spelling out the
items. Many of them baffled him completely, but the grand total of
one pound five shillings appeared with cruel distinctness, and caused
him serious dismay. He had been prepared for a sum that would make
a very large hole in one of his few precious notes, and even this
prospect was grievous. But the demand for a whole note, body and
bones, and some silver too, came as an unexpected stroke. His hands
shook as he held the paper to the light, obscured by the leaves of a
straggling geranium plant, and he felt bitterly convinced that he was
being cheated. Manners, however, would not permit him to enter any
protest beyond saying to his niece—

“Musha, Sally, it’s a terrible sight of sugar you seem to ha’ been
usin’.”

Upon this Stevie of course said—

“And I’m sure _she_ doesn’t want it, anyway,”—smirking gallantly at
Sarah, who had sat down in the adjacent chimney-corner and taken up
her strip of lace-work.

“Won’erful fine talk you have,” said Sarah.

“And divil a word but the truth, talkin’ of you,” rejoined Stevie,
sidling a little nearer to her along his rickety-legged bench.

Sarah replied by making a threatening demonstration with her needle,
which caused her frail thread to snap.

“There now, you have it broke on me,” she said, “and sorra the bit of
you’s worth the throuble of tyin’ a knot.”

“Ah now, don’t say so, Miss Tighe,” Stevie said insinuatingly.
“That’s an iligant little pattron you have been doin’, oncommon
tasty. We have some thread-lace edgin’ at our place that I declare
isn’t a ha’porth better, and it comes to as much as thruppence a
yard.” He intended the highest compliment, but did only plunge
himself the deeper into the depths of her disfavour by thus evening
her delicate point to his coarse, machine-made wares. She chose,
however, for the time being, to dissemble her wrath against him,
because she was angrier with Brian Mahony for his persistence in
evidently ignoring her flirtation, and keeping up an unconcerned
chatter addressed to the children. So she accepted Stevie’s offer
to join the broken thread for her, and was coquettishly derisive of
his clumsy-fingered failures, with much tittering and ostentatious
enjoyment of the situation; and, in like manner, Brian worked away at
the ragged-rimmed creel, and only desisted occasionally to scuffle
sportively with Jimmy or Biddy for the possession of a long supple
osier. Nobody could suppose him to care a thraneen what Sarah and the
chap from Grogan’s found so amusing. He had something else to do than
to be botherin’ his head about them.

Meanwhile the master of the house was performing his part—a sad
one—in the small drama. He lifted a brown earthenware teapot out
of its niche in the mud wall projecting beside the hearth. Its
removal discovered the opening of another recess, whence he drew a
rough deal box with a broken lid. In this the Farrells apparently
stored miscellaneous valuables, for it contained a little roll of
bank-notes, a grey flannel bag with silver in it, an old prayer-book
that had belonged to Mrs Farrell, some spools of cotton, and so
forth. Dan slowly peeled off one of the begrimed Munster notes, and,
pre-occupied with regretful calculations, he forgot the shillings
which were due, and restored box and teapot to their places. Then he
laid down the note on the window-seat, spread out the bluish bill
beside it, and stood smoothing both bits of paper with the palm of
his hand.

“There’s that,” he said.

“Sure, I’ll be signin’ the resate,” said Stevie, jumping up with
alacrity, and producing his shiny black pocket-book and red chalk
pencil. But he came to a pause as he noticed the absence of the
silver. He looked interrogatively at Dan. The man’s careworn,
broken-down aspect, his lined face and tattered garments gave his
creditor a conscience-stricken twinge, and for an instant suggested
the possibility of renouncing that toll. Stevie, however, quickly
ascertained that this was too much to expect from himself; the sum
would come in just then too handily to be forgone, and he compromised
the matter by resolving to see that the Farrells were let off
easily in their next account. Future generosity is always easier
than present justice, especially when the postponed virtue can be
practised at somebody else’s expense. So—

“There was thim five shillin’s comin’ to us,” said Stevie, continuing
to look at Dan.

“Och, murder, tubbe sure there was. It’s meself’s the gaby,” said Dan
disconcertedly; and he went towards the niche to rectify his blunder,
but he was interrupted by his niece.

“Sure I’ll fetch it out, Uncle Dan,” she said. “It’s throublesome for
you to be stoopin’. Mr Grogan can be puttin’ his name on the account.”

She fumbled for a few moments in the box, and came over to the window
with a large silver coin in her hand. It was a crown-piece, which,
although it bore the stamp of the fourth George, still retained its
sturdy thickness and bold outlines unimpaired, as if it had changed
owners slowly. Around this she was wrapping a bit of crumpled, thin
paper, perceiving which her uncle said—

“Sure, girl alive, I’ve got the note here right enough.”

“But it’s my belief ’twas the dirtiest one you had that you sorted
out,” replied Sarah promptly. “Now _I_’ve found him a dacint clane
one; and I’m sure you’d a dale liefer be takin’ it wid you, Mr
Grogan?”

“’Deed you may depind upon that, Miss Tighe,” Stevie said, with an
elated smirk; “and hard-set I’ll be to part wid it, when I consider
how you put yourself about to be pickin’ and choosin’ for me.”

Here Brian Mahony abruptly threw down his creel and flung out of
the house, with a scowl which did not escape Sarah’s observation.
It did not please her, somehow, any better than his previous air
of unconcern, whence we may infer that her mood was capricious and
contrary. Stevie Grogan, at any rate, presently had reason to think
it so, and a flatness and tartness came over the conversation, not
inviting him to prolong his visit. After three snubs—

“The day’s darkenin’ again,” he said, “and I’ll be getting along
afore there’s another plump of rain.” He took leave of Dan, who was
reflecting sorrowfully how much poorer a man the last half-hour had
made him, and went to the door, accompanied by Sarah. “Bedad!” he
said, glancing around, “I think the sthrame looks to have quieted
itself a goodish bit. I might be steppin’ across them stones, it
saves better than a mile when you get into the bog over yonder.”

It is possible that Stevie was determined to adopt this course less
by the aspect of the river than by a glimpse which he at that moment
had had of Brian lounging moodily upon the bridge where he must
otherwise pass. But if that were the case, his plan failed of its
purpose. For as he walked through the tangled oats followed by Sarah,
who had bethought her of a message to give him for her mother, Brian
espied them, and immediately descended from the bridge and made for
the ford along the river’s bank. He could not resist the spell which
drew him to every opportunity of tormenting himself by witnessing
what his jealous mind regarded as Sarah’s marked preference for young
Grogan, and he sped so recklessly, stumbling and tripping over wisps
of weeds and grass, that he reached the stepping-stones just as the
others did.

On this occasion, however, his feelings were not to be harrowed by
the display of much sentiment or facetiousness at leave-taking, as
it was drowned in a sudden burst of rain, which made Sarah pull her
fringed shawl into deep eaves over her face, and gasp out with ducked
head—

“Och, mercy on us, here’s polthogues—I must run for me life, and
you’d best step out, Stevie Grogan, or you’ll be bogged entirely
before you get home.”

Thus exhorted, Stevie began hurriedly to stride from stone to stone.
In one hand he held the shiny pocket-book, and with the other
he clutched the brim of his black felt hat, which a rising gust
momentarily threatened to whisk away. He was nearly half over, when
the wind came swooping past in a furious flurry, and at the same
time a thicker coil of the brown river-water broke on the stones,
making one on which he had just set his foot wobble violently. The
consequence was that he stumbled badly, only keeping his balance by
a headlong plunge forward with outspread arms; and not till he had
floundered on to the opposite bank did he perceive that his hat and
book were both missing. His hat, after a high-whirled flight, lit on
the rapid stream, and went skimming down it without let or hindrance,
while his more precious book described a parabolic curve in the air,
and dropped into the water near the place where Brian and Sarah
stood. For a moment it lay on the surface, and Brian, leaning over
at a dangerous angle, tried to reach it with his long osier rod. Upon
which Sarah, gripping him by the arm, pulled him back with all her
might, saying in an agonised tone:

“Och, goodness gracious, man, get out of that, and let it be!” But
even as she spoke, the black cover, weighed down, no doubt, by the
filched crown-piece, sunk out of sight and was no more seen. A
few seconds later, however, the rough brown eddies a little lower
down became strewn with small flecks whiter than the creamy foam.
Evidently the strings and covers had collapsed, and let their frail
contents go to wrack.

“Sure it’s every bit of it flitthered into laves,” said Sarah,
releasing Brian’s arm; “niver sight nor light of it he’ll get the
chance to lay eyes on agin, note or no note.” The tone in which she
announced this fact was both relieved and triumphant. As for the
owner of that perishing property, he stood on the opposite bank,
bareheaded in the pelting rain, discontented and woe-begone, an
object to move pity. But Sarah added: “And the divil’s cure to him,
the thievin’ slieveen. We’ve got the resate off him all right any
way.”

Brian, on the contrary, now took off his own limp cloth cap, crumpled
it round a great shingle stone for ballast, and flung it across to
Stevie.

“Clap that on your head, and be leggin’ it home wid you, if you’ll
take my advice,” he shouted against the wind; “you’ll get nothin’,
unless it’s your death of could, standin’ there in the rain. Belike
we might be some odd chance get the five shillin’ piece at the
bottom, when the river goes down, but them bits of papers is past
prayin’ for intirely.” This seemed obvious even to the unwillingly
convinced Stevie, and he started dolefully through the driving rain,
half-blinded by it and the descending peak of Brian’s too roomy cap.
The others raced home under much less trying circumstances, and were
speedily sheltered beneath Dan Farrell’s thatch.

Sarah took her strip of lace-work, and sat down with it in the
brighter patch by the window. She was filling in the centre of a
fantastic blossom with a pattern which seemed to have been suggested
by the dewy web of some long-legged spinner hitched from blade point
to point. Brian Mahony fetched his creel and osiers out of the
corner, and stood opposite to her, busy with his coarse weaving. Now
and then he looked at her complacently as she stooped over her fine
stitches, and for some time neither of them spoke. At last Brian said—

“That was a fine fright I’m after giving you down there, Sarah. You
have the sleeve nearly rieved out of my ould coat. Was it dhrowndin’
meself you thought I’d be that you took such a hould of me?”

“Dhrowndin’ himself? Frightenin’ me? Musha good gracious, what talk
has the man out of him at all?” Sarah said with shrill ejaculation.
“Bedad, if that was all that ailed the likes of you, I’d ha’ had
somethin’ better to be at than throublin’ myself to interfere wid
you. But afeared I was that you’d be hookin’ that chap’s ould book
ashore on us; thryin’ your best you were to do that fool’s thrick.”

“And what for wouldn’t I be saving it if I could?” said Brian, partly
consoled for the unflattering explanation of his solicitude by the
animosity of her tone when she mentioned that chap; “sure, onst the
money was ped away, you were nothin’ the betther for it goin’ to
loss.”

“That’s all you know about it,” said Sarah, with mysterious glee. She
glanced round to see whether her uncle by the hearth were listening,
and as he appeared to be half-asleep, she went on in a lower tone:
“Why, look here, Brian—sure that grand clane pound-note I let on to
be sortin’ out for him, ne’er a note it was at all, but just an ould
bit of the silver-paper pattron I had workin’ me lace from; when it’s
crumpled up and creased like, it looks the very moral of one, and the
great gomeral stuck it into his book widout takin’ the throuble of
unfoldin’ it, be good luck.”

“And what at all did you do that for?” asked Brian after a puzzled
pause.

“What for?” said Sarah, “sure in the first beginnin’ of it ’twas
just to be risin’ a laugh on him; that was all the notion I had. It
come in me head when I was lookin’ for the shillin’s, and seen the
thin paper there. But afterwards, when he tuk and put it up widout
mindin’, thinks I to myself, I’ll ha’ given him a good long thramp
over it anyway; it’s back he’ll be thrapesin’ to-morra or next day to
get the right one, in a fine fantigue. But now when he’s slung the
whole affair into the wather, so as nobody’ll be the wiser what was
in th’ ould pocket-book and what wasn’t, that’s the greatest chance
could ha’ happened, and we wid the resate signed and all, the way he
can’t say a word agin us. It’s as good as a pound saved to me uncle,
poor man, that’s annoyed enough wid his bit of harvest ruinated and
everythin’. And you doin’ your endeavours to destroy it all wid
fishin’ the book out; small blame to me if I’d pulled the fool’s arm
off of you, let alone your ould sleeve.”

“It was no thing to go do,” said Brian gruffly, “to be playin’ them
sort of thricks.”

“Sorra the ha’porth of harm was there in it,” Sarah replied airily;
“and considerin’ that whatever he got’s swallied up in the river,
’twould ha’ been a cruel pity if we’d gave him anythin’ betther.”

“You’d a right to be sendin’ him the rael note now,” said Brian with
decision.

“Saints above! Whethen now, I hope you’ll get your health until I
do,” said Sarah, with a shrillness subdued by her uncle’s proximity.
“That’d be a nice piece of foolery. Why, you sthookawn, the young
slieveen’s no worse off this minute than he would ha’ been if I was
after givin’ him a five-pound note to drop out of his hand.”

“You got the resate off of him for nothin’ at all,” said Brian; “he’s
never been ped. And the river makes no differ. How would it, when he
hadn’t anythin’ of yours to lose in it?”

“That’s just what I’m sayin’. It makes no odds to him; he’d ha’ lost
it whether or no. And for the matther of that, he’s been ped times
and again for anythin’ Uncle Dan ever got from them, poor man; for
them Grogans are notorious thieves, as everybody well knows. Me
sister was tellin’ us the other day, they charge three shillin’s a
pound for tay that’s on’y eighteen-pence in Dublin. It’s a charity
to let them have a taste of chatin’ for themselves. Not that we’re
chatin’ them at all at all, it so happens.”

Brian listened quite unimpressed, having no turn for casuistry.
He now condescended, however, to urge an objection based upon the
expedient.

“And what’ll your uncle say to it, when he finds he’s got a pound too
much?”

“I was thinkin’ of that,” said Sarah, nowise disconcerted. “Belike
I could persuade him he miscounted them at the fair. But I dare say
’twould be better if I just slipt one off the roll, and kep’ it to
get odds and ends of things wid for him, accordin’ as they would be
wanted, and never let on about it. Och, no fear, but I’ll conthrive
one way or the other.”

“Ay, bedad; it seems to me that you’re great at conthrivin’ and
schemin’,” said Brian bitterly. “I’ve as good a mind as ever I had in
me life to tell him the whole affair.”

“And if you offer to do such a thing on me, you ould clashbag, you!”
Sarah said in a furious whisper, “sorra a word I’ll spake to you agin
as long as I live in the world.”

“Faix, then, perhaps I won’t be throublin’ meself to ax you in a
hurry,” retorted Brian, “when the on’y talk people has out of them is
tellin’ lies and makin’ fools of everybody. My notion is, the fewer
words they spake to you, the luckier you’ll be.”

“Plase yourself, and you’ll plase me,” said Sarah, with an assumption
of calm indifference, which would have been more successfully
achieved if she had not flushed to the scarlet of a frost-nipt brier
leaf, besides adding inconsistently, “I’d liefer hear the pigs
gruntin’ in the ould stye than to be listenin’ to some people gabbin’
and blatherin’.”

“And plenty good enough company they are, too, poor bastes, for the
likes of some I could name—and long sorry I’d be to stop anywheres I
wasn’t wanted, wastin’ me time mendin’ things, and gettin’ imperance
for it—and one while it’ll be afore you’ll have raison to complain
of me disturbin’ you,” said Brian, whose wrath had flared up even
more ruddily than hers. And thereupon he bolted away into the rain,
without waiting to borrow the loan of Dan’s hat. At which Sarah
through all her huff, stood somewhat aghast, knowing that for a man
to go out of doors bareheaded argues no ordinary perturbation of
spirit.

After this there were many more wet days, and a few golden fine ones,
and the harvest was got in one way or the other, and the winter came,
and Sarah Tighe went home to live with her family at Athcrum, and
finished her fine lace border. But she and Brian did not meet again.
At last, one bright, frosty morning, not long before Christmas,
they ran against each other coming round the corner of the row in
which the little post-office stands. Sarah was so startled that for
a moment or two she halted, irresolute, ere she recollected that it
behoved her to flounce past him with up-tilted chin. She was just
proceeding to do so, when he twitched her shawl, and said, in an
expostulatory tone—

“Och now, Sarah, is it cross wid me ye’re goin’ to be all this time?”

“It isn’t me that’s cross wid anybody at all,” said Sarah, subsiding
lamentably from her dignified attitude.

“Sure then,” said Brian, “I was on’y wantin’ to tell you what I’ve
done about that pound-note was owin’ to the Grogans. Sooner than that
you’d have anythin’—anythin’ quare-like on your conscience, I’ve
saved up, and sent it to th’ ould miscreant in a letter. So it can’t
come agin you now anyway. I’m just after postin’ it this minute.”

“Och, murdher! and are you so?” said Sarah, with an accent of the
keenest regret. “And weren’t you the gomeral to not tell me that last
week?”

“And I on’y droppin’ it in the letter-box this instiant of time?”
said Brian. “But at all events, what differ’d that have made?”

“Differ enough,” said Sarah ruefully. “You see, the fact of the
matter was, when I come to considher, I didn’t know but the ould
naygur Grogan had a right to that pound-note after all; so last week,
when I sold me flounce of deep lace for thirty shillin’s, I got an
order, and put it in a cover, and sent it to ould Natty himself. I
wasn’t goin’ to let that young thief of the world, Stevie, be layin’
one of his greasy fingers on it, anyhow; and even so I thought badly
enough of postin’ it away. For now the winter’s comin’ on us, there
was a dale of things I’d liefer ha’ done wid it.”

“Begorra, that’s the very same way it was wid me just now,” said
Brian.

“Maybe the post-mistress’d give it back to you, if you thried,”
suggested Sarah. “She couldn’t hardly ha’ done anythin’ wid the
letters yet.”

“Sorra a thry I’ll thry,” said Brian, with decision. “Sure I wasn’t
manin’ to say that I begrudged it e’er a bit, Sally, when it was
settin’ things straight for you, acushla.”

“Ah, but to think of payin’ them twyste over—that’s what distresses
me,” said Sarah, who did not, however, look inconsolable. “’Deed,
now, we managed it finely, Brian; I’m afeard that you and I are a
great pair of fools.”

But Brian replied with complacent promptitude, “True for you, then,
Sally, machree; that’s just the way it is. Fools we are, very belike,
and a pair we are for sartin. Och now, honey, be aisy; sure ’twas
yourself said it. And maybe we’ll do all as well as if we’d had more
wit. It’s continted I am, anyway. Ay, bedad, a pair of fools—but them
Grogans are welcome to their couple of pounds.”




M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP




M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP


The feud between the Timothy O’Farrells and Neil M‘Neills at
Meenaclure was not of very long standing, for the dowager Mrs
O’Farrell and the elder Mrs M‘Neill, who had been by no means young
when it began, were still to the fore, and not yet even considered
to have attained “a great ould age intirely.” This seems a mere
mushroom-growth compared with some of our family quarrels, which
have been handed down from father to son through so many generations
that everybody regards them as a part of the established order of
things in the world of their parish. Still, to the younger people,
who had been but children at its birth, it seemed to have lasted a
long while, and their juniors would have found a different state of
affairs almost unthinkable. For them the origin of the enmity had
already begun to loom dimly through a mist of tradition, which would
tend as time went on to grow vaguer and falser, until at length
nobody would be left who could give a clear account of what it was
all about. So far, however, all the neighbours who were “any age to
speak of” knew the rights of the case well enough. And this is what
had happened.

It was a cloudless midsummer evening, perhaps twenty years
back—nobody is over-particular about chronology at Meenaclure—and
all the dogs and children were away out on the wild land towards
the mountains, minding the sheep, to keep them from coming home and
eating up the crops. From April to October that was every year their
occupation, and a very engrossing one they found it. For the scraggy
little sheep of the district are endowed with an appetite for green
food worthy of any locust, added to a cleverness at taking fences
that would discredit no hunter; and this makes them a constant peril
to the painfully-tilled fields, whose produce they threaten like a
sort of visibly-embodied blight. Luckily, it is one whose ravages
can be averted by timely precautions; and therefore, as soon as
potatoes are _kibbed_, and oats sown, the sheep are driven off to
a discreet distance on the moors, whence they are prevented from
returning by a strong cordon of wary mongrels and active spalpeens.
The children of such places as Meenaclure find the sunnier half of
the year a season of perpetual school-vacation, when the longest days
are watched out to their last lingering glimmer among the tussocks
and boulders, so that the morning seems to have begun ages and ages
ago by the time one straggles home, three-parts asleep on one’s feet,
the flocks having already betaken themselves to completer repose, or,
recognising the unattainability of young green oats, having set their
nibbling mouths safely up the swarded hill-slopes. For that night the
fields may lie secure from marauding trespassers.

On this particular day, however, owing to some remissness of the
young M‘Neills and their shrewd-visaged dog, who were all led away
by the excitement of a rabbit-hunt, one of the sheep under their
charge successfully eluded observation, and broke through the line,
with two comrades presently pattering after her. With a wiliness well
masked by her expression of meek fatuity, she slunk along unseen
in furzy folds of the broken ground, and late in the afternoon had
arrived near the forbidden pastures. There she lurked furtively for a
while, fully determined to hop over the fence of Timothy O’Farrell’s
oatfield, the very first moment that nobody seemed to be about.
This opportunity soon occurred, as the O’Farrells’ holding lies
somewhat apart in a slight hollow, which secludes it from the little
cabin-cluster standing a bit higher round a curve in the long green
glacis-like foot-slope of Slieve Gowran.

Thus it came to pass that when Timothy O’Farrell returned from
turf-cutting on the bog with his sister Margaret and his brothers
Hugh and Patrick, the first thing they noticed was an object like a
movable grey boulder cropping up on the delicate sheeny surface of
their oat-patch. Whereupon: “Be the powers of smoke,” said Timothy,
“if there isn’t them bastes in it agin.”

“Three of them, no less,” said Margaret.

“M‘Neills’, you may bet your brogues,” said Hugh.

“The divil doubt it,” said Timothy. Patrick, who was a youth of
action rather than speech, had already plunged head-foremost towards
the scene of the trespass.

There were several reasons why doubts of the M‘Neills’ responsibility
in the matter should be relegated to the divil. In the first place,
the M‘Neills owned more sheep than anybody else at Meenaclure,
whereas the O’Farrells owned none; and secondly, the O’Farrells had
sown an unusually extensive patch of oats, while the M‘Neills had
planted potatoes only. The tendencies of this situation are obvious.
Again, the O’Farrells had more than once before undergone the like
inroads, and on these occasions Neil M‘Neill had not, Timothy
considered, shown by any means an adequate amount of penitence.
“Bedad, now,” Timothy reported to his family, “he was cool enough
over it. Maybe it’s _his_ notion of fine farmin’ to graze his bastes
on other people’s growin’ crops.” A deep-rooted sentiment of respect,
however, restrained him from uttering these sarcasms in public. For
Timothy, though the head and father of a family, had seen not many
more than a score of harvests; and Neil, a dozen years his senior,
enjoyed a high reputation among the neighbours as a very knowledgable
man altogether. After the second incursion, it is true, Timothy’s
wrath had so far overcrowed his awe as to make him “up and tell” Neil
M‘Neill that “if he didn’t mind his ould shows of sheep himself, he’d
be apt to find somebody that’d do it in a way he mightn’t like.”
Still, the affair went no farther, and Timothy had soon reverted to
his customary attitude of amicable veneration. But at this third
repetition of the offence his anger could not be expected to subside
so harmlessly.

Pat’s shouts and flourishing gallop speedily routed the
conscious-stricken sheep, and two of them whisked up the hillside
like thistledown on a brisk breeze; but the third, who was the
ringleader, leaped the fence with so little judgment that she came
floundering against Timothy, who grasped her dexterously by the
hind-legs.

Now, to catch a Slieve Gowran sheep alive in the open is a rare and
difficult feat—proverbially impossible, indeed, at Meenaclure; but
Timothy and his brethren were at a loss how they should best turn
this achievement of it to account. They felt that simply to let the
creature go again would be a flat and unprofitable result, yet what
else could they do with it? While they pondered, and their captive
impotently wriggled, Hugh suddenly had an inspiration. It came to
him at the sight of two large black pots, which stood beside a
smouldering fire against the white end-wall of their little house.
To an unenlightened observer, they might have suggested some gipsy
encampment, but Hugh knew they betokened that his mother had been
dyeing her yarn. The Widow O’Farrell was a great spinner, and a large
part of the wool shorn in the parish travelled over her whirring
wheel on its way to Fergus the weaver’s loom. A few old sacks lying
near the fire had contained the ingredients which she used according
to an immemorial recipe. From the mottled grey lichen, _crottal_,
which clothes our boulders with hues strangely like those of the
fleeces browsing among them, she extracted a warm tawny brown; a
flaky mass of the rusty black turf-soot supplied her with a strong
yellow, and the dull-red bog-ore boiled paradoxically into black.

“Be aisy, will you, you little thief of the mischief,” Hugh said to
the sheep. “M‘Neills’ she is, sure enough; there’s the mark. Musha,
lads, let’s give her a dab or so of what’s left in the ould pots.
’Twould improve her apparance finely.”

“Ay would it,” said Timothy. “She’s an unnathural ugly objic’ of
a crathur the way she is now. Bedad, they’ve a couple of barrels
desthroyed on us.”

“A few odd sthrakes of the black and yella’d make her look iligant,”
said Hugh. “Do you take a hould of her, Tim. Och, man, don’t let her
away, but lift her aisy. Maggie, did you see e’er a sign of the stick
they had stirring the stuff wid? But it’s apt to be cool enough agin
now.”

“Ah, boys dear, but it’s ragin’ mad M‘Neills ’ll be if you go for to
do such a thing,” Margaret said, half-scared, and blundering in her
flurry on a wrong note, as she at once perceived. For her brothers
promptly responded in a sort of fugal movement—

“And sure who’s purvintin’ of them? They’re welcome, bedad, them,
or the likes of them. Is it ragin’? Maybe it’s raison they’ll have
before they’re a great while oulder, musha Moyah.” And they proceeded
with all the greater enthusiasm to carry out their design, which
became more ambitiously elaborate in the course of execution.

Early next morning, while the mountain-shadow still threw a purple
cloak over the steep fields of Meenaclure, where all the dewdrops
were ready to twinkle as soon as a ray reached them, and when Mrs
Neil M‘Neill was preparing breakfast, which at this short-coming
summer season consisted chiefly of Indian meal, her eldest daughter
ran in to her with news. There was somethin’, Molly said, leppin’
about in the pigstye. Now, the M‘Neills’ stye just then stood empty,
in the interval between the despatch of their last lean fat pig
to Letterkenny fair and the hoped-for fall in the market-price of
the wee springy which was to replace him. So Mrs Neil said, “Och,
blathers, child alive, what would there be in it at all?”

“But it’s rustlin’ in the straw,—I heard it,—and duntin’ the door wid
its head like,” Molly persisted.

“Sure then, run and see what it is, honey,” said her mother, who was
pre-occupied with a critical stage of her porridge; and a piece of
practical business on hand generally disposes us to adopt a sceptical
attitude towards marvels. “Maybe one of the hins might have fluttered
into it; but there’s apter to not be anythin’.”

Molly, whose mood was not enterprising, reinforced her courage
with the company of Judy and Thady before she went to investigate;
and a minute afterwards she came rushing back uttering terrified
lamentations, whereof the burden seemed to be, “It’s a tiger-sheep.”
Her report could no longer be disregarded, and the rest of the family
were presently grouped round the low wall of the little lean-to
shed, which did really contain an inmate of extraordinary aspect. Its
form was that of a newly-shorn sheep, long-legged and lank-bodied
like others of its race, but in colouring altogether exceptional.
Boldly marked stripes of black and tawny yellow alternated all over
it, with a brilliant symmetry not surpassed by the natural history
chromograph which flamed on the wall of Rathflesk National School,
and which now recurred to little Molly’s mind in conjunction with
the fact that the wearer of the striated skin “was a cruel, savage,
wicked baste, that would be swallyin’ all before it,” whereupon she
had shrieked “Tiger-sheep!” and fled from ravening jaws.

Her parents and grandparents, on the contrary, stood and surveyed
the phenomenon with almost unutterable wrath. Traces of a human hand
in its production were plain enough, for the beast had been fastened
into the stye by a rope round her neck, which was further ornamented
with long bracken-fronds and tufts of curiously-coloured wool,
studiously grotesque. In fact, had she been mercilessly endowed with
“the giftie,” she would no doubt have suffered from a mortification
as acute as was that of her owners, instead of trotting off quite
satisfied, when once she was released and at liberty to resume her
fastidious nibbling among the dewy tussocks.

“That’s some divilment of the O’Farrells, and the back of me hand
to the whole of them!” said Neil M‘Neill, with clenched eyebrows.
“Themselves and their blamed impidence, and their stinkin’ brashes!
The ould woman’s niver done boilin’ them up for her wool. It’s
slung about her head I wish they were, sooner than to be used for
misthratin’ other people’s dacint bastes.”

“’Deed now, thrue for you,” said his mother. “Sure wasn’t she tellin’
me herself yesterday evenin’ she’d been busy all day gettin’ her
yarn dyed, agin she would be knittin’ the boys their socks? Gad’rin’
the sut she said she was this good while. That’s the way they done
it—och, the vagabones!”

“It’s a bad job,” said old Joe M‘Neill, shaking his despondent white
head.

“I wouldn’t ever ha’ thought it of them,” said Mrs Neil. “On’y
them boys is that terrible wild; goodness forgive them, there’s no
demented notion they mayn’t take into their heads. But what at all
could we do for the misfort’nit crather? Sure it’s distressful to
see her goin’ about that scandalous figure. I can’t abide the sight
of her.”

Our bogland dyes, however, are very fast, and for many a day that
summer Mrs Neil had to endure the apparition of the O’Farrells’
victim, who of course became a painfully conspicuous object on the
hillside, where she roamed blissfully unaware of how her owners’ eyes
followed her with gloomy resentment, and of how their neighbours’
children, catching up Molly’s cry, shouted one to another derisively,
“Och, look at M‘Neills’ tiger-sheep!” But long and long after the
parti-coloured fleece had vanished for good and all, the effects of
the outrage continued to make themselves felt in the social life of
Meenaclure, where it must be owned that the inhabitants are rather
prone to keep their grudges in the same time-proof wallet with their
gratitudes. And the grudges, somehow, often seem to lie atop. In this
case, moreover, the injury had an especial bitterness, because the
M‘Neills came of an old sheep-keeping class, whose little flock was
an inheritance handed down, dwindling, through many generations, and
whose main interests and activities had time out of mind turned upon
wool, so that everything connected with it had acquired in their eyes
the peculiar sanctity with which we often invest the materials and
implements belonging to our own craft. A chimney-sweep has probably
some feeling of disinterested regard for his bags and brushes.
Accordingly, sheep were to them a serious, almost solemn subject,
altogether unsuitable for a practical joke; and an insult offered to
them was felt to strike at the honour of the family. Small blame to
them, therefore, if, as the neighbours said, they were ragin’ mad
entirely, and turned a deaf ear to all pacific overtures.

The O’Farrells, to do them justice, admitted upon reflection that
they had maybe gone a little beyond the beyonds, and were disposed to
be apologetic and conciliatory. But when old Mrs O’Farrell, one day
meeting the two smallest M‘Neills on the road, presented each of them
with a pale brown egg, which she had just found in the nest of her
speckled hen away down beside the river, the result merely was that
her gifts were smashed into an impromptu omelet before the M‘Neills’
door, by the direction of the master of the house, who only wished
the ould sinner had been there herself to see the way he’d serve
that, or anythin’ else she’d have the impidence to be sendin’ into
his place. And later on, when the feathery gold of the O’Farrells’
oatfield had been bound in stooks, and the hobbledehoy Pat was
despatched to inquire whether the M‘Neills might be wantin’ e’er a
thrifle of straw after the thrashin’ for darnin’ their bit of thatch,
the polite attention elicited nothing except a peremptory injunction
to “quit out of that.”

In taking up this attitude, the M‘Neills had at first the support
of their neighbours’ sympathy, public opinion being that it was no
thing for the O’Farrells to go do. But as time went on, people began
to add occasionally that sure maybe they didn’t mean any such great
harm after all, and that they were only young boyoes, without as much
sense among the whole of them as would keep a duck waddling straight.
What was the use of being so stiff over a trifle? These magnanimous
sentiments were, no doubt, strengthened by the fact that in so small
a community as Meenaclure a permanent breach between any two families
could not but entail some inconveniences upon all the rest. It was
irksome, for instance, to bear in mind throughout a friendly chat
that at the casual mention of a neighbour’s name the person you
were talking to would look “as bitter as sut” and freeze into grim
dumbness; or to have to consider, should you wish for a loan of Widdy
O’Farrell’s market-basket, that you must by no means “let on” to her
your intention of carrying home in it Mrs M‘Neill’s grain of tea;
or to be called upon to choose between the company of Neil M‘Neill
and Hugh O’Farrell on the way home from the fair, because neither
of them, as the saying is, would look the same side of the road as
the other. Such obligations lay stumbling-blocks in our daily path,
and nip growths of good fellowship, and are generally embarrassing
and vexatious. However, Meenaclure had to put up with this state
of things for so many a long day that people learned to include it
unprotestingly among their necessary evils.

Under these circumstances, it was of course only in the nature of
things that the little M‘Neills and O’Farrells, the smallest of whom
had not been born at the time of the quarrel, should always put out
their tongues at one another whenever they met. They regarded the
salutation, indeed, as a sort of ceremonial observance, which could
not be omitted without a sense of indecorum. Thus, one inclement
autumn, when Patrick O’Farrell was no longer a hobbledehoy, but
“as big a man as you’d meet goin’ most roads,” he went off to a
_rabble_, that is, a hiring-fair, at Letterkenny, and took service
for six months with a farmer away at Raphoe. On the day that he left
Meenaclure, he happened, just as he was setting out, to meet Molly
M‘Neill, who had by this time grown into “a tall slip of a girl going
on for sixteen,” and they duly exchanged the customary greeting, Pat
getting the better of her by at least half-an-inch of insult. But
when he returned on a soft April evening, it chanced again that one
of the first persons he fell in with was Molly. She was coming along
between the newly-clad hedges of a narrow lane, and when he caught
sight of her first he mistook her for his cousin, Norah O’Farrell,
she looked so much taller than his recollections. But, on perceiving
his error, he merely gave up his intention of saying, “Well, Norah,
and how’s yourself this great while?” and slunk past without making
any demonstration whatever. Molly would hardly have noticed it,
indeed, as when she saw him coming she began to minutely examine the
buds on the thorn-bushes, and did not lift an eyelash while they
were passing. Yet, as they went their several ways, Pat felt that
he had somehow shirked a duty; and Molly, for her part, could not
shake off a sense of having failed in loyalty to her family until
she had relieved her conscience by announcing at home that she was
“just after meetin’ that great _ugly_-lookin’ gomeral, Pat O’Farrell,
slingein’ down the road below Widdy Byrne’s.”

The year which followed this spring was one of bad seasons and
hard fare at Meenaclure, and towards the end of it Pat O’Farrell
came reluctantly to perceive that he could best mend his own and
his family’s tattered fortunes by emigrating to the States. His
resolve, though regretted by all his neighbours, except of course the
M‘Neills, was considered sensible enough; and at the “convoy” which
assembled according to custom to see him off on his long journey
the general purport of conversation was to the effect that, bedad,
everybody’d be missing poor Pat, but sure himself was the fine clever
boy wouldn’t be any time gettin’ together the price of a little
place back again in the ould country. The M‘Neills alone were of the
opinion, expressed by Neil’s mother, that “the only pity was the rest
of the pack weren’t goin’ along wid Pat; unless, like enough, they’d
be more than the people out in those parts could put up wid all at
onst, the way they’d be landin’ them back on us like a bundle of ould
rubbish washin’ up agin wid the tide.”

But surprise was the universal feeling when, about six months later,
it became known that Neil M‘Neill’s eldest child Molly had also made
up her mind to cross over the water. Her own family were foremost
among the wonderers; for Molly had always been considered rather
excessively timid and quiet—certainly the very last girl in the
parish whom one would have thought likely to make such a venture.
They half-believed that when it came to the point, “sorra a fut of
her would go”; and they much more than half hoped so, notwithstanding
that their rent had fallen into alarming arrears, and none of her
brethren were old enough to help. Molly, however, actually went, amid
lamentations and forebodings, both of her own and other people’s,
all alike unavailing to stop her. Mrs Timothy O’Farrell said she’d
be long sorry to have a daughter of hers streeling off to the ends
of the earth. And I think that Molly’s mother _was_ long sorry, poor
soul, through many a lonesome day and anxious night.

After these two departures, things at Meenaclure took their wonted
course, a little more sadly and dully perhaps than heretofore.
Communications from abroad came rarely and scantily, for neither
of the absentees had much scholarship. Their sheep-herding summers
had greatly curtailed that, and it would have been difficult to say
whether Pat’s or Molly’s scrawls were the briefer or obscurer. But
not long after Molly M‘Neill had gone, one of Pat O’Farrell’s letters
contained an important piece of news—nothing less than that he was
“just about gettin’ married.” He did not go into particulars about
the match, merely describing the future Mrs Pat as the “best little
girl in or out of Ireland,” and opining that they mightn’t do too
badly. His family were not overjoyed at the event, which might be
considered to presage a falling off in remittances; and his mother
was much cast down thereby, her thoughts going to the tune of “my son
is my son till he gets him a wife.” Still, she was not so dispirited
as to be past finding some solace in an innuendo; and she almost
certainly designed one when she took occasion to remark just outside
the chapel door, where she had been telling the neighbours her news:
“But ah, sure, I don’t mind so long as he hasn’t took up wid one of
them black-headed girls I never can abide the looks of. And ’deed now
there’s no fear of that. Pat’s just the same notion as myself, I know
very well.” For Mrs Neil M‘Neill was standing well within earshot,
and, as everybody remembered, “there wasn’t a fair hair on the head
of e’er a one of her childer.” However, Mrs Neil proved equal to the
emergency, and remarked, addressing Katty Byrne, that “It was rael
queer the sort of omadhawns she’d heard tell of some girls, who,
belike, knew no better, bein’ content to take great lumberin’ louts
of fellers, wid the ugly-coloured hair on their heads like nothin’
in the world except a bit of new thatch before it would be combed
straight.”

She spoke without any presentiment that she would soon have to go
through much the same experience as old Mrs O’Farrell; but so it
was. For a week or two later came a letter from Molly stating that
she was “just after gettin’ married.” Her husband, who she said
was earning grand wages, bore the obnoxious name of O’Farrell, but
there was nothing strange in the coincidence, as the district about
Meenaclure abounds in Farrells and Neills, with and without prefixes
of O and Mac; and it seemed only natural to suppose a similar state
of things in New York. Nobody could deny that there were plenty of
O’Farrells very dacint people. So Molly’s mother mourned in private
over an event which seemed to set a seal upon the separation between
her daughter and herself; and in public was well pleased and very
proud, laying great stress upon the fact that Molly had sent the
money-order just as usual,—“Sorra a fear of little Molly forgettin’
the ould people at all,”—and serenely scorning Mesdames O’Farrell’s
opinion that “when a girl had to thravel off that far after a
husband, it was the quare crooked stick of a one she’d be apt to pick
up.”

After this Meenaclure received no very thrilling foreign news for
about a twelve-month. Then one fine Sunday, the Widdy O’Farrell was
to be seen sailing along Masswards, with her head held extremely
high in its stiff-frilled cap and dark blue hood, and with a swinging
sweep of her black homespun skirt, which betrayed an exultant stride.
All her family, indeed, wore a somewhat elated and consequential
air, which most of her neighbours allowed to be justifiable when she
explained that she had become the happy grandmother of her Pat’s fine
young son: the letter with the announcement had come last night. This
was indeed promotion, for her son Tim’s children were all girls. With
the congratulations upon so auspicious an event even old Mrs M‘Neill
could mingle only subdued murmurs about brats taking after their
fathers that weren’t good for much, the dear knows. However, she had
not long to wait for as good or better a right to strut chin in air,
since it was with a great-grandmother’s dignity that a few days later
she could inform everybody of the arrival of Molly’s boy. She would,
I believe, have found it very hard to forgive Molly if the child had
been merely a daughter.

This rivalry, as it were, between the estranged families in the
matter of news from their non-resident members recurred with the
same equipoised result on more than one similar occasion, and was
extended even to less happy events. For instance, one time when Pat
wrote in great distraction, and a wilder scrawl than usual, that the
“three childer was dreadful bad wid the mumps, he doubted would they
get over it,” the next mail brought just such a report from Molly;
which was rather awkward for her mother and grandmother, who had been
going about passing the remark that “when childer got proper mindin’
they never took anythin’ of the sort.”

At length, however, when perhaps half-a-dozen years had gone by, the
balance of good fortune dipped decidedly towards the O’Farrells.
One autumn morning a letter came from Pat to say that he and his
family were coming home. He had saved up a tidy little bit of money,
and meant to try could he settle himself on a dacint little bit of
land; at any rate he would get a sight of the ould place and the
ould people. Great was the rejoicing of the O’Farrells. Whereas for
the M‘Neills at this time the meagre mail-bags contained no foreign
letter, no letter at all, bad or good, let alone one fraught with
such grand news. Molly’s mother, it is true, dreamt two nights
running that Molly had come home; but dreams are a sorry substitute
for a letter, especially when everybody knows, and some people
remind you, that they always go by contraries. So Mrs Neil fretted
and foreboded, and had not the heart to be sarcastic, no matter how
arrogantly the O’Farrells might comport themselves.

Then the autumn days shrivelled and shrank, and one morning in late
November the word went round Meenaclure that the _Kaley_ that evening
would be up at Fergus the weaver’s. This meeting-place was always
popular, Fergus being a well-liked man, with a wide space round his
hearth. And this night’s conversazione promised to be particularly
enjoyable, as it had leaked out that Dan Farrell and Mrs Keogh and
Dinny O’Neill were concerned in what is at Meenaclure technically
termed “a join,” for the purpose of treating the kaleying company to
cups of tea. In fact, the materials for that refreshment, done up in
familiar purple paper parcels, lying on the window-seat, were obvious
to everybody who came into the room, though to have seemed aware of
them would have been a grave breach of manners. When all the company
were mustered, and the fire was burning its brightest, Fergus might
well look round his house with satisfaction, for so large an assembly
seldom came together, and universal harmony seemed to prevail. This
was not disturbed by the fact that several both of the Timothy
O’Farrells and Neil M‘Neills were present, as by this time everybody
thoroughly understood the situation, and the neighbours arranged
themselves as a matter of course in ways which precluded any awkward
juxtapositions of persons “who weren’t spakin’.”

It was a showery evening, with a wafting to and fro of wide gusts,
which made the Widdy O’Farrell wonder more than once as she sat on
the form by the hearth, with the Widdy Byrne interposed buffer-wise
between her and old Joe M‘Neill. What she wondered was, whether
her poor Pat might be apt to be crossin’ over the say on such an
ugly wild night. Just as Mrs Keogh, with an eye on the lid-bobbing
kettle, was about to ask Fergus if he might happen to have e’er a
drop of hot water he could spare her—that being the orthodox preface
to tea-making on the occasion of a join—the house-door rattled
violently, and opened with a fling. As nobody appeared at it, this
was supposed to be simply the wind’s freak, and Fergus said to Mick
M‘Murdo, who sat next to it, “Musha, lad, be givin’ it a clap to
wid your fut.” But at that instant a voice was heard close outside,
calling as if to another person a little farther off, “Molly, Molly,
come along wid you; they’re all here right enough, and I wouldn’t be
keepin’ the door open on them.” Whereupon there was a quick patter
of approaching feet, followed by the entrance of two bundle-bearing
figures. As they advanced into the flickering light, it showed that
the figures were a man and a woman, and the bundles children; and in
another moment there rose up recognising shrieks and shouts of “Pat”
and “Molly,” and then everybody rushed together tumultuously across a
chasm of half-a-dozen years.

“They tould us below at Widdy Byrne’s that we’d find yous all up
here,” said Pat O’Farrell, “so we left the baby there, and stepped
along. Och, mother, it’s younger you’re grown instead of oulder, and
that’s a fac.’”

“And where’s the wife, Paudyeen agra?” said Pat’s mother; “or maybe
she sted below wid the child?”

“And where’s himself, Molly jewel?” said Molly’s mother. “Sure you
didn’t come your lone?”

“Why, here he is,” said Molly. “Pat, man, wasn’t you spakin’ to me
mother?”

“Och, whethen now, and is it Pat O’Farrell?” his mother-in-law said
with a half-strangled gasp.

“And who else would it be at all at all, only Pat?” said Molly, as if
propounding an unanswerable argument.

“Mercy be among us all—and you niver let on—och, you rogue of the
world—you niver let on, Patsy avic, it was little Molly M‘Neill you’d
took up wid all the while,” said his mother.

“Sure I was writin’ to you all about her times and agin,” Pat averred
stoutly.

Perhaps things might have turned out differently if people had not
been delighted and taken by surprise. But as it was, how could a feud
be conducted with any propriety when Mrs Neil had unprotestingly been
hugged by Pat O’Farrell, and when old Joe M‘Neill and his wife and
daughter were already worshipping a very fat small two-year-old girl,
who unmistakably featured all the O’Farrells that ever walked? The
thing was impossible.

For one moment, indeed, an unhappy resurrection seemed to be
threatened. It was when everybody had got into a circle round the
hearth, in expectation of the cups of tea, which were beginning to
clatter in the background, and when Pat O’Farrell, who was talking
over old times with Neil M‘Neill, suddenly gave his father-in-law
a great thump on the back, exclaiming with a chuckle, “Och, man,
and do you remimber your ould sheep that we got in the oats, and
gave a coloured wash to? Faix, but she was the comical objec’—‘the
tiger-sheep,’ the childer used to call her.” Whereupon all the rest
looked at one another with dismayed countenances, as if they had
caught sight of something uncanny. But their alarm was needless.
For Neil returned Pat’s thump promptly with interest, and replied,
“Haw, haw, haw! Bedad, and I do remimber her right well. Och now,
man alive, I’ll bet you me best brogues that wid all you’ve been
behouldin’ out there in the States you niver set eyes on e’er a
baste’d aquil her for quareness—haw, haw, haw!” And the whole company
took up the chorus, as if minded to make up on the spot all arrears
of laughter owing on that long unappreciated joke. Amid the sound of
which I have reason to believe that there fled away from Meenaclure
for ever the last haunting phantasm of the unchancy tiger-sheep.




THE SNAKES AND NORAH




THE SNAKES AND NORAH


The Kennys’ little farmstead was a somewhat amphibious one, occupying
the southern end of the isthmus which keeps the Atlantic foam from
riding into Lough Fintragh, a small, dark-watered nook niched in the
shadow of steep mountain slopes. Another murkier shadow brooded over
it in the opinion of the Kennys, who, like most of their neighbours,
at least half-believed that its recesses harboured a monstrous
in-dweller. Their thin white house stood fronting the seashore, with
a narrow grazing strip behind, while their yard and sheds lay along
the dwindling isthmus, which becomes a mere reef-like bar of boulders
and shingle before it again touches the mainland. In calm weather
Joe Kenny might see his unimposing ricks reflected from ridge to
butt, with gleams of ochre and amber and gold in both salt and fresh
water; but in stormy times, which came oftener, it might befall him
to witness a less pleasing spectacle of hay-wisps and straw-stooks
strewn bodily, floating and soaking on the wasteful waves. So he
was not surprised to find that this had happened when he walked out
one December morning after a wild night whose blustering had mingled
menace with his dreams. Despite its close-meshed roping and thick
fringe of dangling stone weights, the more exposed haystack had been
seriously wrecked and pillaged. “Och, bad cess to the ould win’ and
its whillaballoos!” said Joe, as he surveyed the distorted outlines,
and made a rueful estimate of the damage. “If I got the chance to
slit its bastely bellows for it, ’twould be apt to keep its huffin’
and puffin’ quiet for one while—it would so.” This was not, however,
the limit of his losses. Presently he stood looking vexedly over the
door of a half-roofed shed, which contained a good deal of sea-water
and weed; also a very small red calf, and a large jelly-fish. The
calf was drowned dead, but the jelly-fish seemingly lived as much
as usual. “Eyah, get out wid you, you unnathural-lookin’ blob of a
baste!” said Joe, giving this unprofitable addition to his stock a
contumelious flick with his blackthorn. “There’s another good fifteen
shillin’s gone on me. I’d never ha’ thought ’twould ha’ tuk and
slopped over the wall that way. Sorra the bit of a Christmas box I’ll
be able to conthrive her this year, and that’s a fac’; and to-morra
fair day and all—weary on it!”

“Her” was Rose O’Meara, Joe’s sweetheart; and since he had long
looked forward to the opportunity of the Christmas gift as likely
to bring about a favourable crisis in his courtship, the falling
through of his plan made him feel dejectedly out of humour, in which
unenjoyable mood he strolled on towards the pigstye. Traces of the
spent storm lay all around him. The tide had receded some way, but
the waves were fast by, still hissing and seething, and flinging
themselves down with hollow booms and thuds. They had evidently been
beating high against the yard-wall, for all along it they had left
great masses of brown sea-wrack tossed in bales and clumps, as if
loaded out of a cart; and these were connected by trails of green
and black weed, skeleton branches, shells, clotted froth, driftwood,
and other debris, all in an indescribable tangle. As Joe stumped
through it, he trucks his foot sharply against something hard, and
nearly tripped up. When he recovered his balance, he saw that the
obstruction was not the boulder which he had already execrated in
haste. It was a wooden box. In much excitement Joe picked it up, and
set it on the top of the wall for exacter scrutiny. The tides were
constantly sweeping in with miscellaneous fringes on the Kennys’
demesne, but seldom did they bring anything that might not be justly
termed “quare ould rubbish.” During all the course of Joe’s life,
and he was not in his first youth, no waif had been washed up so
promising in appearance as this box. About ten inches square it was,
and made of a fine grained dark wood, which seemed to have been very
highly polished. The corners were clamped with bronze-like metal,
elaborately wrought, and plates of the same inlaid the keyhole and
hinges. So strong was the lock, that when he tried to wrench off the
lid he seemed to have a solid block in his hands, and it shut so
tightly that the lines of juncture were almost invisible. Its weight
was considerable enough to increase his conviction that it held
something very precious.

Joe’s first impulse was to rush home with his prize, exhibit and
examine it. Immediately afterwards, however, it flashed across him
like an inspiration that here was Rose’s Christmas box; and upon
this followed a more leisurely resolve to keep it a secret until he
should present her with it intact on Christmas morning, still distant
three whole days. This course would cost him the repression of much
impatient curiosity, but it was recommended to him by a sense that
it would enhance the value of the gift. He would be making over to
Rose all the vague and wonderful possibilities of the treasure-trove,
which in his imagination were more splendid than any better-defined
object, as they loomed through a haze of unseen gold and jewels.
Disappointment had scanty room among his forecasts. “Sure, I’d a
right to give it to her just the way it is, wid anythin’ at all
inside it, for amn’t I axin’ her to take meself in a manner like
that, whether good, bad, or indiff’rint comes of it?—on’y it’s scarce
as apt, worse luck, to be any great things as the full of a grand
lookin’ box is. But she might understand ’twas as much as to say I’d
be wishful she had every chance of the best that I could git for
her, the crathur, if it was all the gold and silver and diamonds that
ever were dhrownded under the say-wather, and’d never think to be
lookin’ to reckon them, no more than if they were so many handfuls of
ould pebbles off of the strand.” Thus reflected Joe, who had a vein
of sentiment, which sometimes outran his powers of expression. And
thereupon, leaving the box atop of the wall, he went to look after
the pigs. He found them all surviving, though the storm had caused
some dilapidations in their abode, which obliged him to do a little
rough carpentry, and kept him hammering and thumping for several
minutes. And when he returned to the place where he had left the box,
the box was gone.

He searched wildly for it among the litter on both sides of the
wall, and nowhere could it be seen. Yet at that hour what man or
mortal was there abroad to have stirred it? Then he thought that
the weeds looked wetter than they had been, and he said to himself
that “one of them waves must ha’ riz up permiscuous and swep’ it
off in a flurry while his back was turned; and a fine gomeral
he’d been to go lave it widin raich of such a thing happenin’ it.”
So as no more satisfactory explanation was forthcoming, he turned
homeward, empty-handed and crestfallen. But before he had taken many
steps, he saw sitting under the lee of the yard-wall Tom O’Meara,
Rose’s brother, who was generally recognised to be courting Mary
Kenny, Joe’s youngest sister. The O’Mearas lived a good step beyond
the other end of the isthmus, and Joe had begun to speculate what
so early a visit might signify, when the greater wonder abruptly
swallowed the less as he became aware that Tom had the twice-lost box
in his hands.

“Look-a, Joe, at what I’m after findin’,” he called jubilantly.

“Findin’? Musha moyah! that’s fine talkin’,” said Joe. “And where at
all did you find it, then?”

“Where it was to be had,” said Tom, promptly adjusting his tone to
Joe’s, which was offensive.

“Then it’s sitting atop of our wall there it was,” said Joe.
“Whethen, now, some people has little enough to do that they can’t
keep their hands off meddlin’ wid things they find sittin’ on other
people’s yard-walls.”

“And suppose it was sittin’ on anybody’s ould wall,” said Tom, “what
else except a one of them rowlin’ waves set it sittin’ there wid
itself, and it all dhreepin’ wet out of the say? Be the same token
it’s quare if one person hasn’t got as good a right to be liftin’ it
off as another. Troth and bedad, I’d somethin’ betther to do than
to be standin’ star-gazin’ at it all day, waitin’ to ax lave of the
likes of yous.”

“I’ll soon show you the sort of rowlin’ wave there was, me man, if
you don’t throuble yourself to be handin’ it over out of that, and I
after pickin’ it up this half-hour ago,” said Joe, with furious irony.

“Come on wid you, come on!” Tom shouted, jumping to his feet with a
general flourish of defiance. At this point the dispute bade fair to
become an argument without words, and would probably have done so
had it not been that the two young men were the brothers of their
sisters. As it was, a sort of Roman-Sabine complication fettered and
handcuffed them. “Divil a thing else I was intendin’ to do wid it,
but bring it straight ways in to your sister Mary,” said Tom, “that
you need go for to be risin’ rows about the matter.”

“It’s for Rose’s Christmas box; that’s what I think bad of,” said Joe.

“Let’s halve it between the two of them, then, whatever it is,” said
Tom, feeling that a compromise was the utmost he could reasonably
expect from circumstances.

And so it was arranged, rather weakly on Joe’s part, he being the
better man of the two, and well within his rights, if he had chosen
to claim the box unconditionally. The joint presentation should take
place, they agreed, on Christmas Eve, the next day but one, when
Rose O’Meara would be visiting the Kennys; and then Tom departed
whistling, with the pick he had come to borrow the loan of, while Joe
consoled himself as best he could for this arbitrary subtraction of
more than half the pleasure and romance from his morning’s find.

Late on Christmas Eve, when the Kennys’ kitchen was full of glancing
firelight, and the widow Kenny, with her son and daughters and her
guests, Tom and Rose O’Meara, had all had their tea, Joe and Tom
were seen to often whisper and nudge one another, until at last
Joe got up and produced the box from its secret hiding-place. But
Tom hastened to forestall him as spokesman, placing considerable
confidence in his own perspicacity and grace of diction. He said—

“See you here, Mary and Rose. This consarn’s a prisint the two of us
is after gettin’ the two of yous—I mane it was Joe found it aquilly
the same as me, that picked it up somethin’ later. And it’s he’s
givin’ the whole of his half of the whole of it to Rose; but he’s
nothin’ to say to the rest of it; and it’s meself that’s givin’ Mary
the half of the whole of the half—och no, botheration! it’s the whole
of the—it’s the other whole half of it—”

“You’ve got it this time,” Joe remarked in a sarcastic aside.

“—I’m givin’ Mary. So that’s the way of it, and when we’ve got the
lid prized off for yous, you’ll just have to regulate it between
yous, accordin’ to what there is inside.”

“And if it’s all the gold and diamonds in the riches of the world,”
said Joe, “you’re kindly welcome to every grain of it, Rose jewel—ay,
bedad, are you.”

“To the one half of it,” corrected Tom, with emphasis. But his
sister tapped him with the pot-stick, and said, “Whisht, you big
omadhawn, whisht.”

“It’s a pity of such a thing to be knockin’ about and goin’ to loss,”
said Mary, rubbin’ her finger on the embossed metal-work; “and I
wonder what’s gone wid whatever crathur owned it. Under the salt say
he’s very apt to be lying this night—the Lord be good to him!” The
rustle of the waves climbing up the shingle outside seemed to swell
louder as she spoke.

“For anythin’ we can tell, he might be takin’ a look in at us through
the windy there this minute to see what we’re doin’ wid it,” said Joe.

Everybody’s eyes turned towards the dark little square of the window,
and Mary left off handling the box as suddenly as if it had become
red-hot.

“Oh, blathers!” said Tom. “Just raich me the rippin’-chisel that’s
lyin’ on the windy-stool, Norah, and we’ll soon thry what it is at
all.”

Norah, the elder sister, made a very long arm, and secured the tool
with as little approximation as might be to the deep-set panes. She
had neither sweetheart nor Christmas box, and was disposed to take a
rather languid and cynical view of affairs.

“There’s apt not to be any great things in it, I’m thinkin’,” said
the widow Kenny from her elbow-chair by the hearth. The truth was
that she had been reflecting with some bitterness how not so many
years since Joe would have “come flourishin’ in to her wid any ould
thrifle of rubbish he might ha’ picked up outside,” whereas now he
had kept this valuable property silently in his possession for three
days, for the purpose of bestowing it upon the O’Mearas’ slip of a
girl. Consequently, Joe’s mother held aloof from the eager group
round the table, and uttered disparaging predictions of the event.
Tom and Mary did make a prudent attempt to fend off their collision
with the disappointment which might emerge from the mists ahead
by repeating, as the chisel wrestled with the stubborn hasps and
springs, “Sure, all the while belike there’s on’y some quare ould
stuff in it, no good to anybody.” Joe and Rose, on the contrary,
chose to run under crowded sail towards the possible wreck of their
hopes, and talked of sovereigns and bank-notes and jewels while the
lid creaked and resisted.

But when at length it yielded with a final splinter, it disclosed
what no one had anticipated—namely, nothing. The box was quite
empty. Daintily lined with glossy satinwood, as if for the reception
of something delicate and precious, but bare as the palm of your
hand. There was not even so much vacant space as might have been
expected, for the sides were disproportionately thick. Very blank
faces exchanged notes with one another upon this result. Almost any
contents, however inappropriate and worthless, would have been their
“advantage to exclaim upon,” and more tolerable for that reason than
mere nullity, about which there was little to be said. Rose was the
first to rally from the general mortification, observing with forced
cheerfulness that “sure ’twould make an iligant sort of workbox, at
all ivints, and ’twas maybe just as handy there bein’ nothin’ in it,
because ’twould hould anythin’ you plased.” To which Mary rejoined,
dejectedly refusing to philosophise, “Bedad, then, you may keep it
yourself, girl alive, for the lid’s every atom all smashed into
smithereens.”

The young people were not, however, with one exception, in the mood
for dwelling upon the dark side of things. Their depression caused by
the collapse of the Christmas box was superficial, and soon passed
away. When in course of the evening the two young men went out to
feed the pigs, Rose and Mary accompanied them to the back door,
where they all loitered so long that the patience waiting round the
empty trough must have been sorely tried. Sounds of their talking
and laughing came down the passage and were heard plainly in the
kitchen, whence Mrs Kenny had slipped up her ladder stairs to say
her rosary, so that Norah was for the time left quite alone. She
was decidedly out of humour, albeit by no means on account of the
others’ rapid reverse of fortune. Rather, we may apprehend, she had
viewed that incident as a not regrettable check to a tide of affairs
which was unduly sweeping all manner of good luck her neighbours’
way, and unjustly leaving her high and dry. This grudging spirit had
forbidden her to appear interested in the examination of the box, but
now she could satisfy without betraying her curiosity. As she drew
her fingers aimlessly round its smooth inner surface, there was a
sudden snap and jerk, and out slid a secret drawer, which had been
concealed by a false bottom. It was filled with rose-pink wadding,
amongst which lay the coils of a long gold snake necklace. She lifted
it out amazedly, and held it up in the firelight, with jewelled head
gleaming and enamelled scales, a far finer piece of workmanship than
she knew, though the flash of brilliants and rubies assured even her
uninstructed eyes that she had come on something of much value.

While she was still looking at it she heard steps returning up the
passage, and forthwith tried hastily to replace it in the box. But
at a clumsy touch the drawer flew back into its former invisibility,
and her flurried fumbling failed to press the lurking spring. Then,
as the steps came very near, she thrust her ornament into her pocket,
and moved away from the table on which the box stood. In doing so,
she was conscious only of a proud perversity which made her loth to
be found meddling with what she sullenly called “no consarn of mine.”
Presently, however, other motives for concealment grew clearer and
stronger. Of course, the longer she retained it the more difficult
would the restoring of it be. Her crossness made it impossible for
her to imagine a joke as a natural explanation of her conduct.
Moreover, a covetous wish to keep the beautiful thing for its own
sake sprang up, and had a swift growth. She said to herself that “she
didn’t see why she need have any call to be givin’ it up, after all.
Wasn’t she after findin’ it in the quare little slitherin’ tray,
and the rest of them wid no more notion of it bein’ there at all
than ould Sally the goat had? It might be lyin’ where it was till
the world’s end on’y for her? And sure, for the matter of that, the
ould box itself was no more a belongin’ of the lads to give away
than of any other body that might ha’ happened on it tossin’ about
the shore. So if it wasn’t theirs be rights, she thought she’d be a
fine fool to not keep what she’d got.” Sophistical arguments such as
these convinced her reason easily enough, but her conscience was less
amenable to them. They were reinforced by some further considerations
which possessed no ethical value at all, and which she had the grace
to be ashamed of putting into clearly outlined thoughts. She allowed
herself to have only a vague sense of grievance at the fact that
Rose and Mary had “presents, and people to be makin’ fools of them,
and all manner,” whereas none of these desirable things were bestowed
on her. Yet it formed a mental atmosphere which made the prospect of
yielding up her discovery seem incongruous and odious, in the same
way that a bitter wind blowing makes us loth to throw open our doors
and windows.

“Cock them up to be gettin’ everythin’,” she said to herself, as she
sat in a corner with her hand in her pocket, and drew through her
fingers the cold, smooth coils, remembering how the gem-encrusted
head had blazed in the firelight. She wished that she could venture
to take it out and proudly display it as her property; but she was
far from daring to do so. On the contrary, she felt herself laden
with a guilty secret, and was presently beset by all the misgivings,
suspicions, and surmises which infest people who carry about such
a burden. Whenever anyone went near the box her heart thumped with
terror lest the drawer should be detected, and its rifled condition
somehow traced to her. Then she trembled to think that the lads
perhaps knew all the time of the necklace’s existence, and were
just reserving it for a grand surprise; or she imagined herself
letting it drop accidentally and being unable to account for her
possession of it. These speculations so pre-occupied her that she
was obliged to explain her absent-mindedness by declaring herself
“intirely disthracted wid the toothache”; upon which the condolences
and sympathy of the others aggravated her uneasiness with remorseful
gratitude. Her conscience nipped her shrewdly when Rose said, “Ah,
the crathur, I’ll run over to-morra early and bring you the bottle
ould Matt Farren gev me mother; it’s the grandest stuff at all for
the toothache,”—Rose whom she was defrauding of a share in that
golden marvel! At length she had resource to a plan which promised
her temporary relief from urgent fears and self-reproaches. This was
to hide away the necklace in some cranny of the rocks on the shore,
where, if it should be rediscovered, nothing would implicate her in
the matter. She said to herself, indeed, that they would have just
as much chance of finding it there as in the mysterious drawer;
but beneath that soothing reflection lay a resolve to minimise
the chance by choosing the most unlikely chink possible. Since the
evening was by this time far spent, and the O’Mearas had already
taken leave, she knew that she must hurry to execute her design
before Joe came in from seeing after the cattle, when the house would
be shut up. So she slipped quietly out of doors.

It was a dark, gusty night, and the waves, still turbulent after
their late uproar, were clattering noisily up the shingly ridges of
the beach. As Norah ran along she could barely discern the glimmering
of pale grey stones and white foam-crests. She kept on by the lough
side of the isthmus, because the walking there was smoother, but when
she thought she had come a safe distance she stopped, intending to
cross over and seek a hiding-place for her spoil among a small chaos
of weeded boulders. Looking for a moment athwart the black water, she
saw a dim streak of light in the sky above it. The moon was glimpsing
out of an eastern cloud-rift, and throwing down a meagre web of rays,
which the unquiet dark surface caught fitfully and shredded into
the broken coils of a writhing silver serpent. Perhaps it was this,
or perhaps the golden snake-chain in her hands, that suggested the
thing, but at any rate Norah suddenly bethought her of the _Piast_.
For Lough Fintragh is haunted by the terror of one of these monsters,
a huge and grisly worm, dwelling down in the shadowy end of the
lake, where the water is said to have no bottom, and to wander in
labyrinthine caverns about the roots of the mountains. The creature
had not been very often seen, but Norah well knew what a direful fate
had overtaken every soul to whom its shag-maned, lurid-eyed head
and rood-length of livid scales had disastrously appeared. One of
its least appalling habits, ran report, was to glare fixedly at its
victim, until fascinated and distraught he leaped wildly into the
jaws gaping for their prey. In the lonesome, murmurous dimness by the
shore, Norah did not care to linger over such incidents, and she was
turning away quickly, when a shock of fright almost paralysed her.
Within a few yards of her feet she saw two reddish amber eyes glowing
through the gloom, and from the same place came a sound of something
in rustling, flapping motion.

It was, in fact, only a harmless and rather bewildered seal, who,
during the past night’s turmoil, had somehow got into the lough, and
who now, instinctively aware of the rising tide, had set out eager
to quit the insipid fresh water for his strong-flavoured Atlantic
brine. But Norah naturally jumped to the conclusion that nothing less
fearsome than the _Piast_ itself was flopping towards her, and she
fled away before it in a headlong panic, which culminated a moment
afterwards when she ran against some large moving body. This, again,
was simply her brother Joe, returned from setting his friends on
their way; but Norah, with a wild shriek, gave herself up for lost,
and did actually come near putting an end to herself by tumbling
in frantic career over one stone, and striking her head violently
on another. She had to be carried home insensible, and Christmas
Day had come and gone before she found her way back gropingly to
consciousness.

Meanwhile conjectures, of course, were rife as to the origin of her
mishap, and the antecedents of the “iligant gold snaky chain” that
she was grasping. “Sclutched that tight she had it in her sclenched
fist, we were hard set to wrench it out of her hand,” Mrs Kenny
volubly told her neighbours. The favourite theory held that she
“was after pickin’ it up on the shore, and would be skytin’ home wid
it in a hurry, not mindin’ where she was goin’, and that was the
way she got the ugly toss.” And when Norah had recovered from the
effects of it sufficiently to be asked for her own account of the
matter, she could throw but little light thereon. Her accident had
left, as so often happens, a strange misty gap in her memory, which
it was vain to scan. The space between her first sight of the box
and her blinding crash down on the shingle was all a confused blank.
However, two results of the affair emerged, and, though their cause
remained untraceable, had a distinct influence upon her future. One
of them was, that she would on no account permit the snake necklace
to be regarded as her property. She persistently asserted that it
belonged to Mary and Rose; and when Dr Mason, who had undertaken to
dispose of it in Dublin, remitted an incredible number of pounds, she
would hear of no arrangement save dividing them between her sister
and sister-in-law elect. The other had more important consequences
to the whole course of her life. It was an abiding dread of their
connecting isthmus, which had become so horrible a place to her
that never again would she cross over it, even when promised the
protection of the most stalwart escort. Now, as the isthmus is very
much the nearest way from the Kennys’ farm to any other habitations,
this peculiarity of Norah’s cut her off greatly from whatever
society the neighbourhood afforded, besides gaining her a reputation
for “quareness” not likely to increase her popularity. Probably,
therefore, it may have been part of the reason why the years as they
came and went that way found her rooted fast and growing into a
settled old maid.

Those glowering yellow eyes being blurred out of her recollection,
the _Piast_ did not occur to her as the object of her fear. But some
people were not slow to connect it with the uncanny inhabitant of the
lough, and in process of time their various imaginations hardened
into a circumstantial narrative of an especially terrific appearance
of the monster. To this day, indeed, so current is the story, that
many a wayfarer along the bleak shingle strip goes the faster for
a doubt whether such an awful experience as befell Norah Kenny may
not be writhing towards him beneath the sunless waters of Lough
Fintragh.




THREE PINT MEASURES




THREE PINT MEASURES


The little stream which flows southward through Ballyhoy must be
one of the smallest contributions accepted anywhere by the sea, so
insignificant in quantity is the water trickling over the smoothed
stone step under the low arch on the shore. Yet the course of its
channel can be traced, when the tide is out, in gleaming sky-coloured
loops far across the mud-flats. As a rule the tide there _is_ out:
some of the neighbours indeed, have a theory, no doubt scientifically
untenable, that it comes in only about once a week. For this narrow
creek, cut off from the Bay by the great grassy sandbank of the North
Bull, is steadily silting up, so that its soundings grow shallower
every year, and rarer the occasions when we see a plain of sapphire
or mother-o’-pearl, threaded with paths of silver rippling, spread
all the way between us and the cliffs at purple Howth. It looks as
if the Bull would ultimately join the mainland without intermission.
Even now, at low water, the passage to and fro can be effected
fairly dry-shod by well-chosen routes. These are known to the cattle
who graze on the salt herbage among the bent-grown sandhills; and at
the fitting time and place, a procession red and white and black may
be watched making its way thence in single file towards the strip
of common-like pasture beside the sea-road. But the transit, if
undertaken by the unwary or ignorant, is beset with serious peril,
owing to sundry treacherous mud-holes, which lurk around. Their
smothering toils have in time past engulfed much vainly floundering
prey, both man and beast, and at the present day several of them
are called by the names of their respective victims—Byrne’s Hole,
Clancy’s Hole—obscurely commemorating tragedies not less piteous
perhaps than those of the Kelpie’s Flow and the Sands of Dee.

I have never heard of any such disaster befalling a class of people
who might be supposed peculiarly liable to it, since so much of their
time is spent on the dangerous ground. All the shore from Ballyhoy to
Portbrendan is haunted by cockle-pickers, who come out from Dublin,
where they lodge among the Liberties or other purlieus, climbing
down into subterranean cellars, or perhaps mounting wide oaken stairs
to spacious upper chambers with the carven panels and mantelpieces
and ceilings of the past commenting ironically on the inartistic
rags and squalor and famine of to-day. They time their arrival to
correspond with low water, so that when you meet a batch of them
jogging along the road, you can infer the state of the tide from the
contents of the baskets they shoulder, according as these include a
heap of grey-fluted shells and a trail of brown seaweed, or nothing
except a dull tin measure and a grimy little pipe. Nobody ever sees
a cockle-picker apart from his or her basket, yet one of them would
be recognised without it, so constant is the type in the species. All
are neither young nor old, all are wind and weather-beaten, all are
short of stature, any original excess in height being compensated
for by a more pronounced stoop, and the garments of all reproduce
the tints of blackish mud and greenish slime as accurately as if
the wearers were animals whose existence depended upon the power of
going invisible. This is not the case, however. Unaggressive and
inoffensive in their habits, the cockle-pickers have no especial
enemies save the seasons’ difference, and the dwellers by the shore
regard their proceedings with hardly more suspicion than those of the
white sea-gull flocks which sprinkle the neighbouring dark fields,
when the lea is broken up and disturbed grubs abound. A favourite
fishery is the strand along by the Black Banks, a little to the
eastward of the Ballyhoy river; and on most days of the year sombre
figures are to be seen there, paddling and poking, barefooted, in the
mud, even when the pools have ice at the rim, and the green weed is
stiff instead of slimy.

Very differently does the little Black Banks settlement view the
coming of some other visitors, who put in an appearance more seldom.
But the tinkers are quite used to cool receptions, and if they
went only where they were welcome, would find their journeys much
restricted. So as this nook offers them a camping-ground conveniently
accessible from the high road, they occasionally guide their jolting
donkey-cart down the shingly track, undeterred by the disapproving
eyes that watch them from the adjacent cabin-cluster. One row of
these has for some time past been standing roofless, a circumstance
which points it out as appropriate quarters for all manner of
vagrants, who have forfeited, if indeed they ever possessed, the
right to expect the luxury of thatch overhead. And here the tinkers
are wont to spend a few weeks every summer, seriously to the
discomfort of their temporary neighbours. It must be allowed that
they have righteously earned the evil repute which dogs them. Seven
ordinarily ingenious magpies would be less grievous to the owners
of hen-roosts and other portable property than a single tinker.
On many a night odours of savoury cooking, wafted from within the
ruined mud walls, have roused rueful suspicions in the proprietor
of some “grand young pullet” or “iligant fat duck,” which has been
mysteriously absent at the last feeding-time; and the stealthiness
wherewith a youthful tinker will creep in the small hours of the
morning, tin-mug in hand, to milk somebody else’s goat tethered
behind a rickety-boarded fence, would discredit no Blackfoot on the
hunting-trail. Also the tinker men drink and brawl, and the women
storm and screech, and the children interminably romp and quarrel,
while the whole confraternity use language so wildly bad that it is
“fit to rise the hair up off of your head,” as scandalised matrons
observe standing at their doors, and calling Biddy and Pat and
Larry and Rose to “come in out of that and not be listening to such
ungovernable talk.” And to atone for these causes of offence the
tinkers bring no social advantages, if you except now and then the
excitement of a stand-up fight between a couple of the men, who have
grown pugnacious over their whisky, or the thrilling spectacle of an
arrest, which sometimes occurs when the proceedings of the band have
come under the consideration of the constabulary in the whitewashed
barracks above at Ballyhoy. Dramatic incidents are, be it said, very
highly valued hereabouts; but the price of the tinker’s performance
is more than can be paid without repining.

One day in the course of their last visit, it did seem as if they
were going to produce a satisfyingly strong sensation. It came about
in this way. Foxy Cullen, their recognised chief, had returned late
in the warm afternoon to the Black Banks from a tramp round the
district with a basket of tinware. He had not invidiously omitted to
call at the various “publics” which he passed, and the consequence
was that he now “had drink taken,” a state more perilously conducive
to rash and reprehensible acts than downright drunkenness. On the
present occasion, however, nothing more erratic suggested itself to
Foxy than an idea that he would before he went home “just step across
to the Bull and see what sort of a place at all it was over there.”
He had often wished to do that, and as the tide had gone black out,
leaving no water visibly intervening, save the river’s fine-drawn
thread, the opportunity appeared favourable. So he set down his
basket on the wayside sward, kept close-shaven by the goats, and
he called to his daughter Peg, whom he saw at hand, to come along
with him. Peg, a queer, monkey-like little figure in a scarlet print
frock, wore gleeful grins as she obeyed, for her ragged red-bearded
father was to her the flower and sum of things; and the pair walked
on over the grass until its daisies turned into sea-pinks, and until
the seaweedy shingle which succeeded them gave place to a breadth of
glistening mud.

By the time they had got so far, Bill Duffy came round the turn
of the road, faring homewards with his load of cockles. Bill had
had good luck with his fishing that day, and had filled his basket
almost before the tide was at its lowest ebb, and it should perhaps
be accounted a prolongation of his luckiness that the shimmering tin
things in Foxy’s basket now beckoned to him from the sunny bank. He
concluded that some of the tinkers were about, but he saw nobody
near. The tinkers were slight acquaintances of his, and he had in
fact just been trying to negotiate the sale of some of his stock with
Mrs Foxy up at the roofless cabin. Unsuccessfully, for she told him
with regret that she was “stone broke, and until himself come home,
you might all as well be lookin’ to find a penny in a cockle-shell as
in her ould pocket.” To which Bill replied, “Och sure you don’t get
that on’y in an odd one or so,” and departed acquiescent. But this
derelict basketful of tinware proved to be a matter less easily dealt
with. At first indeed he seemed about to pass it by with merely a
casual glance, which, however, suddenly took on fixity and meaning,
as he stopped short and stood looking earnestly at the contents.
These were mostly tin pint measures, a dozen of them, maybe, all very
new and clean and shiny.

Now it so happened that at this time Bill badly wanted such an
article. Anybody might have inferred as much from the dingy,
battered aspect of the little vessel lying atop of his blackish-grey
cockle-heap. In truth, ever since an accident which it had sustained
a good while ago, it could only by sheer courtesy be described as
a measure at all. For a dray-horse in Capel Street had set his
shaggy foot upon it, treatment which no bit of white metal could be
expected to endure, and it had accordingly collapsed into a great
dinge, rendering its capacity henceforth a question of intricate
calculations, far beyond the tether of Bill or his clients. This
unchancy distortion had only the night before lost him a customer,
a housewife who had “priced” his wares as he passed her half-door,
and showed every symptom of coming to terms, when an over-officious
friend nudged her elbow, observing “Laws bless us, woman, look at
what he’s be way of measurin’ them wid. Sure it wouldn’t hold a
skimpy handful, let alone a pint.” Bill protested that it held the
biggest pint in the County Dublin, and that he, inconsistently,
always allowed the half full of it over and above, to make up for any
possible deficiency; nevertheless the prudent matron transferred her
patronage to Mary Cassidy, who just then came by, and he was left in
the lurch with his damaged mug. But now, when he felt keenly alive
both to its shortcomings and to the difficulties of mustering the few
pence needed to replace it, here he was all at once confronted with
an assortment ready to his hand, nothing apparently interposing to
hinder him from acting on the principle that Heaven helps those who
help themselves.

Bill Duffy was, as things go, at least indifferent honest; yet his
integrity made but a brief stand against the assault thus suddenly
sprung upon it. He cast a furtive glance around, and then, with a
rapid dive, clutched a measure, and thrust it over his shoulder down
deep among his cockles, which rattled clatteringly together to hide
the stealth. The next moment he started violently, and felt certain
that he was caught. For at no great distance there rose up a skirl
of shrieking shriller than had ever issued from sea-fowl’s throat,
and looking in the direction of the sound, he saw a small and gaudy
figure running towards him. It advanced in short rushes, now and
then stopping to dance up and down as if in an ecstasy of rage or
terror, but it screamed unintermittently, so that Bill could not be
sure whether or no he did hear basser shouts the while proceeding
from a point somewhat farther off. Presently, however, the note of
terror grew predominant enough to change his opinion about the cause
of the outcry, and set him off trotting to meet it. This red-frocked
screeching child turned out to be Peg Cullen, and the burden of her
lamentations was something unintelligible concerning “Daddy,” whose
bawls in the background here became, fortunately for him, so distinct
as to furnish an explanatory note. Foxy had evidently blundered
into a mud-hole, which was now, in conformity with its agreeable
custom, taking prompt steps to secure and secrete him. Bill rapidly
grasped the situation, and unhitching his heavy basket he detached
its long strap, and sped to the rescue, which, as Foxy was not yet
very deeply engaged, he found himself able to effect. A few frantic
plunges and desperate hauls set Foxy on firm ground, exceedingly miry
and alarmed, and quite sober; Peg left off screaming and dancing, and
they all returned to the road, stepping gingerly while they were on
the mud, but stamping boldly once they felt the dry sod under their
feet.

When they came where the tinker’s basket was, Foxy fell to emptying
his black-oozing brogues, whilst Bill, case-hardened by much wading,
began to splice his strap, which had nearly marred all with symptoms
of fracture during the last critical tug. He had for the time being
forgotten all about the pint measure. By-and-by, however, Foxy,
flinging away the grass-wisp he had used to wipe off the mud, and
shuffling uncomfortably in his soaked boots, said with a dissatisfied
grunt, “Augh, bad luck to it for a deceptionable ould brash. I may go
now and get another sup of somethin’ or else it’s destroyed I’ll be
wid the could creeps in me bones agin mornin’; wud you take a glass,
man?”

“Sure, no,” said Bill; “I’m shankin’ into town meself as soon as I
can get th’ ould strap mended.”

“That’s not much of a concern you’ve got there,” said Foxy, pointing
to Bill’s old mug as it lay dinted side uppermost on his cockles;
“past mendin’ it is, I should say. Look-a, here’s a somethin’ better
quality you’d be welcome to.” He held out one of his measures
to Bill, who shrank back as if its glittering surface had been
incandescent with white-heat. The consciousness of what was hidden
in the depths of his basket seemed to scorch his face and dazzle his
eyes.

“Och, not at all, thank ’ee,” he said; “sure this I have usin’ does
grand; it’s the handiest one I ever owned. And I have a couple or so
of spare ones lyin’ about at home if I would be wantin’ them. Och,
not at all.”

“It’s a quare fancy you’d be havin’, then, to go about wid the likes
of that,” said Foxy. “Musha, man, how ready you are to make a lie and
tell it. Sure it’s no compliment to be takin’ such a trifle off me,
when I’ve got a basket full of them, and more-be-token I couldn’t
say how many quarts of the bastely black mud I mightn’t be after
swallyin’ down agin now if it wasn’t only for you lendin’ me a hand
out—bejabers it was the sizeablest cockle you ever landed. Bad cess
to the could wather, it’s at the bottom of every manner of mischief.
I’m steppin’ along for a drop of spirits, and I’ll lave the bit of a
mug wid you, whether or no.” He thrust it into Bill’s basket and went
off, followed jealously by Peg.

For a moment Bill stood staring blankly after them, but then an idea
suggested itself, and hoisting his basket on his arm he started in
the opposite direction.

At his goal, which was the tinker’s cabin, he found Mrs Foxy stooping
over her smoky driftwood fire, in a “quare ugly temper,” as her
family could have told him. “Whethen now and is it yourself botherin’
back agin?” she said upon seeing him; “didn’t I tell you a while ago
as plain as I could spake that we weren’t wantin’ cockles to-day?”

“Ah whisht, honey, and don’t be strikin’ up ahead of the fiddler,”
said Bill suavely. “Amn’t I just after meetin’ himself out there, and
he biddin’ me be bringin’ you up three pints for your suppers?”

Mrs Foxy’s countenance cleared up. “Well, tubbe sure,” she said;
“it’s not often the man has the wit or the money left to do anythin’
so raisonable wid this hour of the evenin’. But they’ll come in
oncommon handy, for it’s cleared out we are to-night intirely. What
all I have for the supper wouldn’t pacify a scutty wren.”

The whole Cullen family looked on with a sense of brightened
prospects while Bill dropped the cockles resonantly into a tin
can. It is part of Fate’s irony towards the tinkers that, however
plentiful may be the lack of viands in their larder, they are always
abundantly provided with cooking utensils. He meted out his three
pints with a reckless liberality which convinced Mrs Foxy that her
husband must have ordered, and paid for, a couple of quarts at least.
And when he took his departure, he successfully accomplished the
stratagem, which had been the main object of his visit, by laying
down, unperceived, Foxy’s glowing gift upon a nettle-girt stone just
inside the threshold. This done, he went on his way greatly relieved
and self-conciliated.

But he had not trudged many paces before scurrying feet pursued and
overtook him. Somebody had espied the purposely forgotten measure,
and had remarked: “Och, he’s after lavin’ his mug behind him”; upon
which somebody else rejoined: “’Deed, then, we’ve slathers of them
litterin’ about widout it, so there’s no good keepin’ it on the man.
Skyte after him wid it, Lizzie.” And Lizzie skyted, sped by a desire
to be but briefly absent from the scene of preparations for supper,
so that she tossed the mug into Bill’s basket with scant ceremony,
and was off again ere he well knew what had befallen. When it grew
clear, a leaden conviction dumped down on him that he might give
up setting his wits against Destiny. “Sure it was to be,” he said
to himself drearily, as he resumed his plodding, bent dejectedly
under a heavier weight than his moist basket. He resorted rather
frequently to this obvious truth, whence we may infer that his stock
of consolatory reflections was not extensive.

When he came once more where the road crossed the river, he,
according to custom in warm weather, climbed down the grassy bank for
a drink. On this occasion, however, his first act was to take all
his three pint measures out of the basket and set them in a row—the
one he had been given, and the one he had stolen, and the battered
old one that had, in a manner, caused the whole difficulty. Bill
eyed them gloomily as they glinted in the long rays. “Troth, it’s
themselves are the iligant lookin’ collection,” he said to himself
with some resentment, “and a grand ould slieveen’s trick it was to
be thievin’ a poor man’s bit of property, and he all the time widin
two twos of dhrowndin’ dead, scarce a stone’s-throw away. Ay, bedad,
it was so. But, musha, it was to be.” As he mused mutteringly, he
picked up a mug at random and dipped it carelessly in the stream,
but something surprising followed. For the water it scooped up
straightway plashed out of it again, as if poured through a funnel.
Of course, Bill investigated the reason of this, and the result
was a discovery which lit up his face with a broad grin. Through
some defect in the soldering, the bottom of the vessel had almost
detached itself from the rim, and flapped out like a swing door at
the slightest touch. It could, clearly, hold nothing; and it was the
stolen mug—he recognised it by the handle.

“Bless me ould bones, look at that now,” Bill said gleefully,
“you might all as well be axin’ wather to stop aisy in the holes
of me ould basket here. Sure it wouldn’t hould e’er a hap’orth of
anythin’ wet or dhry”—he dropped a handful of cockles into it, and
triumphantly watched them slip through and fall with tiny thuds on
the grass. “Ay, begorra, it’d ha’ never been a thraneen of use to man
or mortal; ne’er a brass bawbee was it worth all the time, glory be
to God.”

He gloated over its dilapidations for a while longer, and at last
poked it in behind a stone under the arch, where, for aught I know,
it may remain to the present day. Then he gathered up the rest of his
effects, and finally resumed his interrupted journey Dublin-wards,
facing a sky where the sunset grew as golden as the light in a
crocus-cup. But he no longer muttered: “It was to be.” The burden of
his meditations was: “Bedad now, it’s a good job I happened to be
widin hearin’ of their roars, or else they might be lettin’ them yet.
And belike I wouldn’t ha’ been, if it wasn’t only be raison of me
stoppin’ to—to—to look at them pint mugs.”




THE SURREE AT MAHON’S




THE SURREE AT MAHON’S


Few people, I think, can ever have been impressed by the liveliness
of little Killymeen, set in its nook among the lonesome mountain
and moorland, its one humble street forming the nucleus of a sparse
cabin-sprinkling, which strews white flecks on the far sweeping
green folds hardly plentier than hailstones on a grass plot half a
sunny hour after a July thunderstorm. Yet to Bridget Doran, the girl
who had lately taken service with the Caseys up at the Quarry Farm,
it seemed a centre of fashion and gaiety, being, indeed, the most
considerable place she had seen in all her seventeen years. For they
had been spent up at Loughdrumesk, a hamlet fully ten miles deeper
among the wildest townlands, with only a rough cart-track threading
a black bog, and climbing endless shaggy slopes, and dropping over a
purple mountain shoulder to connect it with Killymeen. She had left
behind there, three months ago, her feeble old grandfather and alert
old grandmother, in a tiny, high-perched cabin, which felt a world
too wide for its other indwellers when this third of their lives had
gone. And since then there had been much travelling of thoughts to
and fro between it and the Casey’s prim whitewashed farmhouse at the
foot of Slieve Glasarna. At first Bridget’s had made the journey as
constantly as her grandmother’s, but she was young and busy and in a
new place, and as the weeks went on she became more engrossed with
what lay immediately before her.

The Surree at Mahon’s, fixed for a day in Christmas week, was the
most exciting of the fresh prospects that unfolded themselves, and
was looked forward to with much pleased interest by Killymeen at
large. There had been no Surrees in the neighbourhood during a long
spell of bad times, but this year matters were looking brighter, and
old Barney Mahon, who had a thrifty turn and a commodious kitchen,
was encouraged to make a venture which promised fair profits at a
small risk. For a Surree, which has with quaint effect borrowed its
name from polite French, is a sort of subscription dance, little more
elaborate in its arrangements than are the kaleys, or conversazioni,
that beguile so many wintry hours in Donegal homes, when all the
dark out-of-doors hurtles and splashes with wind and rain, and the
neighbours drift into their places round some appointed hearth as
promiscuously as a wreath of dry leaves swept rustling together
by an aerial eddy. At a Surree each couple pay a shilling, but no
refreshment is expected save frugally-dispensed tea; and the fiddler
is content to scrape for a modest fee and his chances of small
coins from the dancers. Dark Hugh M‘Evoy, being Barney’s cousin,
was willing to supply the music for this occasion on specially
easy terms; and, in short, circumstances conspired to make it seem
desirable that Barney should meet the often-expressed wish of his
younger friends by announcing the first Surree of the season.

It would be Bridget’s first taste of any formal dissipation, and Rose
Casey, her master’s niece, and Kate Duffy, his ploughman’s daughter,
who lived in the yard, set her expectation on tiptoe extremely by
their accounts of like entertainments. Kate and she were to go
together, as it is the custom to attend Surrees in couples. These
often are formed of a colleen with the boy who is “spakin’” to her,
but often also a brother and sister make a pair, or any other two
friends. Rose Casey was to marry Peter O’Donoghue at Shrovetide,
so she would, of course, go with him—a fact of which she made a
little parade to Bridget, who felt, however, perfectly content with
Kate’s escort: a sweetheart of her own would have seemed, indeed, an
alarming possession. Her mistress had advanced her a shilling out of
her quarter’s wages—a whole pound—and she had expended the sixpence
left after securing her admission to the Surree upon a splendid red
glass brooch, which made her think her equipment very complete.

But just when everything seemed gliding most smoothly towards the
delightful goal, an obstacle suddenly cropped up and threatened
to overthrow all her plans with one disastrous jolt. On a certain
frost-spangled morning the postman brought to Bridget a letter,
whose contents agreed with her wishes as ill as a dash of vinegar
would have done with the thick cream which she was churning when the
mail arrived. Her grandmother wrote to say that “she thought bad of
Biddy to be trampin’ the long way her lone from Killymeen to their
place, and that old Bill Molloy was slippin’ over wid his pony and
a gatherin’ of eggs to the Magamore on next Thursday morning, and’d
give her a lift if she’d start along wid him when he would be goin’
back. So Biddy had a right to ax lave of her mistress, and come home
wid ould Bill, who’d turn a bit out of his way to pick her up? and
real glad they’d be to set eyes on her again.” For Mrs Casey had
promised Biddy her choice of three days in Christmas week to spend
at home, dairy work being slack. Bridget had looked forward to the
holiday with a glow of pleasure, and meant to take it on the Friday,
which would be Christmas Eve, and the day after the Surree. But her
grandmother’s injunction was not compatible with this arrangement.

“Sure I’d miss all the fun and everythin’ if I took off and went
wid ould Bill—I wish he and his baste of an ugly skewbald ’d keep
themselves out of botherin’ where they arn’t wanted,” she said,
half-crying, to her friends Rose and Kate, as she showed them the
letter in the kitchen.

“Musha, good gracious,” said Rose, “you wouldn’t ever think of goin’?
Just bid the ould man step along wid himself, and say you’ll come on
Friday.”

“But me grandmother’d be rale vexed if I done that, and he after
goin’ out of his road to call for me,” said Bridget doubtfully.

“Well, then,” said Kate, “you might write and tell her not to send
him. This is only Tuesday; there’s plenty of time yet, and I’ve a
stamp in me box this long while you’re welcome to.”

“Ay, to be sure,” said Rose, “and say me aunt can’t spare you
convanient afore Friday.”

“But,” said Bridget, looking disconcerted, “I’m after sendin’ her
word be Judy Flynn that I’d got lave to come any day at all this
week.”

“Oh, botheration to it,” said Rose. “Then say you’re too bad with
a cowld, and couldn’t be thravellin’ that far. Bedad, I heard you
coughin’ this mornin’ fit to fall in pieces like the head of the
witherdy geranium there. Morebetoken, the red one in the windy
corner’s dhroppin’ itself into the pan of buttermilk where you’ve set
it; you’d better be movin’ it out of that.”

“I have a heavy cowld on me sure enough,” said Bridget, coughing to
convince herself, but her disconcerted expression remained, and she
fidgetted about uneasily. “For the matter of writin’,” she said, “you
see the time I was gettin’ me schoolin’ I did be mostly mindin’ the
sheep, and I can make some sort of an offer at the readin’ if it’s
wrote pretty big, but writin’ oneself is quare nigglety work.”

“Mercy on us, girl alive, if that’s all that ails you, I’ll write
a letter for you meself in a minyit and a half,” said Rose with
alacrity. “Bedad will I. Sure I’ve wrote to Peter times and again
when he was stoppin’ away at Manchester. So don’t bother your head
about it; lave the regulation of it to me. I’ve plenty of paper
meself, and Kate’ll give me her stamp.”

Bridget agreed to this plan, though not without some qualms of
conscience, which made her refrain guiltily from inquiring about
the details of its execution, thereby giving Rose a free hand,
of which she availed herself without much scruple. She had an
imaginative turn of mind, and a taste for fiction, so her story grew
under her scratching pen until in the end she produced a letter
purporting to come not from Bridget, but from herself, and describing
Bridget’s indisposition as not a simple cold, but an attack of
“plussery-newmoney.” This formidable complaint would hinder her
from returning with Bill Molloy. “But she’ll come,” wrote Rose, “as
soon as ever she’s able. And that won’t be before Friday anyway,
if she overs it at all.” The last clause struck her as giving an
effective completeness to the composition, and she read it over with
a complacency which did not take into account how it might be spelled
out in the bleak little hillside cabin off away at Loughdrumesk.

The evening of the Surree arrived in due course, and with it a
flutter of snow, swirling on rough and unruly blasts. Silver-white
threads and stitches had begun to embroider the purple folds of
Slieve Glasarna before the mists descended muffling and blurring;
and the paths crunched crisply under brogues, and made cold clutches
at bare feet by the time that the neighbours were approaching Barney
Mahon’s door. They remarked to one another that it was hardy weather,
and added that they were apt to have it “sevare,” which is some
degree worse than hardy. Few people, however, had been daunted into
staying at home, and there was much shaking of powder flakes out of
shawl-folds and off rough coat-sleeves at the entrance to Barney’s
lustily flickering room.

When Rose and Kate and Bridget got there, which they did as soon as
ever they could finish “readying up” after tea, most of the company
had assembled, and dancing was about to begin. Rose’s temper was
somewhat ruffled because Peter O’Donoghue had not kept his promise
of coming to escort her. But his sisters now hastened to explain how
he had been delayed by the sudden illness of their calf. “Howane’er
the baste was comin’ round finely when they left,” they reported,
and Peter would be after them in no time. So his _fiancée_ was
appeased, and contented herself provisionally with Larry Sullivan for
a partner. “Faix, now, it’s on’y an odd turn the rest of us boys gets
wid you these times,” he said to her gallantly as the fiddler struck
up. “Ne’er a chance we have at all, unless when the luck keeps him
that’s luckier away.”

Do not suppose that the Surree danced jigs. Later on in the
evening a couple might stand up and perform one while the others
were recovering their breath; but at the outset it was a vigorous
round dance that began to gyrate with a step which, though perhaps
not recognised in any academy, kept time to Hugh’s music with much
accuracy, and made light of the difficulties opposed by an uneven mud
floor. The crockery on the dresser jingled merrily to the rhythmical
beat of their feet; and each pair of bobbing heads that passed in
front of it, might be seen to make an abrupt dip down and up again.
This was caused by an unusually deep hollow which occurred in that
part of the floor, and Barney Mahon, looking on with the elders
from their circle round the hearth, observed it and said—“Begob, I
must see to having that houle filled up before next time, or else
somebody’ll be trippin’ up in it, and gettin’ a quare toss.”

The other spectators sat well content with their share of the
entertainment. Pungently-puffing cutty pipes solaced the men, and
the women kept their knitting-needles twinkling; in fact, they
would almost as soon have left off breathing by way of rest and
relaxation. For further amusement they had the affairs of the
countryside to discuss, enlivened by an occasional anecdote or
riddle. Dan Goligher had just propounded one of the latter which
successfully puzzled everybody who had not heard it before—

            _A brown lough
            Wid a white strand,
      Sorra the ship could sail around it,
      But I can hould it in my hand_;

and he was triumphantly explaining, “Sure a cup of tea,” when two
people came bolting in at the door, which they forthwith began to
secure behind them, as if they were shutting out some deadly peril.
They said nothing, but their speechless hurry was more suggestive
than words.

“Whethen now, Peter O’Donoghue and Ned Kinsella, what’s took you at
all to be flouncin’ in on the people that a-way?” said Barney Mahon,
somewhat affronted at their unceremonious entrance and dealings
with his fastenings and furniture. “That’s a great ould slammin’ of
the door you have—and what for would you be jammin’ the bench again
it, unless you’re intendin’ the next body that comes thro’ it to be
breakin’ his shins?”

“Troth, I on’y hope it may—and its neck too, between us and harm—if
it’s offering to come in on us—I do so,” said Peter O’Donoghue,
panting. He left his comrade to finish barricading the door, and
pushed himself farther into the room, until several groups interposed
between him and the dangerous point. “After us it may be this minyit
of time,” he said. “Och, but that was the quare fright I got; the
saints look down upon us this night!”

“It’s herself below at th’ ould gate there,” said Ned Kinsella,
who was calmer than Peter, though evidently much alarmed. “And
more-be-token it’s not inside she is this night, but sittin’ crouched
up on the bank be the path, and the grab she made at Peter going by;
’deed, I thought he’d never get his coat-tail wrenched out of her
ould hand.”

“It might as well ha’ been caught in a rat-trap the way she held on,”
said Peter. “I give you me word me hair’s standin’ on end yet, fit to
rise me hat off the roof of me head. What wid that and the onnathural
screeches she let, I won’er you didn’t hear them here. And it’s my
belief she set off leggin’ after us—goodness preserve us—on’y I was
afraid of me life to look round and see.”

These tidings spread general consternation among the company, as
under the circumstances they well might do. For only a few hundred
yards down the loaning lay an ancient burying-ground, with its
ruined chapel and weed-entangled tombstones, a place whose ghostly
reputation had long been established at Killymeen. In particular
the wraith of a little old woman was often to be seen of an evening
peering out through the rusty gate-bars, and sometimes stretching
forth a fearsome hand to pluck at the unwary passer-by. But her
appearance out on the roadside was a new development, and one which
made Peter and Ned’s report unpleasant hearing for people who would
presently be obliged to take that route home. The dance came to a
standstill, and in its stead a series of dismal ghost-stories began
to circle round the room. Perhaps the most gruesome of them was Nick
Carolan’s. He related how he had once lived in a place where there
was in the middle of the yard a deep well, out of which on certain
moon-lit nights a dark figure would emerge and go gliding round and
round it, making a wider and wider circuit, until she reached the
house, at whose door she rapped loudly as she passed by. And whenever
that happened there would be a death in the family before the
twelve-month was out as sure as fate. A general shudder followed this
_dénouement_, and old Mrs Linders made a particular application of it
by remarking gloomily that it was a poor case to have the likes of
such crathurs about; but Mrs Coleman, a comely matron, who continued
to sit by the fire unperturbed, said placidly in a pause, “Sorra a
bit of harm there’s in it this night I’m a-thinkin’. If the lads seen
anythin’, it’s apt to ha’ just been some poor body after missin’ her
way in the snow.”

“Troth and bedad, then it was the quare body altogether,” Peter
asseverated, “and the hair of me head, as I was tellin’ you,
bristlin’ straight wid the dhread of her the first minyit I come nigh
the place.”

“Ah, sure, some people’s as ready at that as a dog at cockin’ his
ears,” said Joey Nolan. “Maybe we’d a right to go look is there e’er
a one in it. Some crathur might be strayin’ about perishin’, and it
snowin’ again as thick as sheep’s wool.”

“Begor you won’t persuade me to go foolin’ along wid you,” said
Peter; “I couldn’t be gettin’ my heels out of it fast enough. May
the saints have me sowl, but I thought I’d lose me life afore ever I
landed inside—and here I’ll stop. Nobody need be axin’ me, for divil
a fut I’ll stir.”

“Good people are scarce,” Joe observed sarcastically; but Peter
went on in a half-complacent tone, “One while it’ll be afore I’m
the better of that frightenin’ I got. Every mortal bit of me’s in a
thrimble wid it yet.”

“Musha, then, you gaby, can’t you whisht about it, instead of to be
tellin’ everybody the sort of ould polthroon you are?” Rose Casey
whispered to him fiercely, ready to cry with mortification as she
saw significant smiles passing round at the expense of her happily
unconscious betrothed.

As she spoke, the door resounded with a heavy thump, which made
those who were standing next it hop back with a scarcely dignified
haste. Some of them tried to carry it off by pretending that they
were merely getting out of one another’s way, while some shrieked
unfeignedly, and above all ejaculations rose Peter O’Donoghue’s
voice, shrill with undissembled terror, saying: “Oh to goodness,
don’t open it for your lives. Run that other form again it, you
that are widin raich. Mercy be among us, she’s apt to have us all
destroyed.”

“Arrah, now, will you be lettin’ us in out of that, you jackasses,
you?” shouted a voice reassuringly familiar and irate. It was young
Larry Sullivan, who had slipped out through the back door a few
minutes before, and whose impatience at being kept waiting had
nothing supernatural about it. Despite Peter’s remonstrances, the
door was thrown open, and disclosed Larry, standing tall against a
background of glimmering white, in a gloom which, when you looked
into it anywhere steadily, grew full of wandering flakes like
scattered bread-crumbs. Beside him appeared a smaller figure, whom
he pulled indoors along with him before anybody well had time for
terrific surmises, and whom the firelight showed to be a little old
woman, wrapped up in a powdered brown shawl. She was breathless and
bewildered and forlorn-looking, as she peered round from face to
face, all strange, all comfortless—but no! for the moment Bridget
Doran set eyes on her she sprang at her and caught her in a great hug—

“Why, granny darlint, and is it yourself?” she said. “And how at all
did you come this night in the snow? It’s kilt you are entirely. You
can’t ever ha’ come wid ould Bill Molloy?”

“Ah, honey, I thramped it,” said old Mrs Doran. “Sure I couldn’t rest
aisy, thinkin’ me little Biddy was took that bad away all her lone
among the strange people. But finely you’re looking, glory be to
goodness. ’Deed now me heart’s been fit to break frettin’ ever since
I got the letter this mornin’, sayin’ that belike you wouldn’t get
over it.”

“An’ I to be dancin’ round like a zany bewitched, and you all the
while streelin’ through the snow,” said Bridget, with acute remorse.
“It’s sorry I am that I let anybody send you such owld lies.
But”—looking indignantly at Rose—“I only said to say that I had a
cowld.”

“And I lost me way in the dark,” went on Mrs Doran plaintively, “and
what at all I’d ha’ done I dunno, on’y for the dacint boy coming by,
for nought else the other two’d do but let yells at me, and run away
like scared turkeys.”

“Creepin’ along under the high bank she was, the crathur, when I met
her,” Larry meanwhile was telling the others, “and scarce able to
contind wid the blasts of the win’. And sez she to me, ‘For the love
of God, just stop to tell me am I anywhere near the Casey’s house?’
And sez I to her, ‘Is it the Quarry Farm you’re wantin’?’ And sez
she to me, ‘Ay, it’s where my poor Katey’s little daughter Bridget
Doran’s in service, and dyin’ wid some manner of outlandish sickness:
It’s to her, I’m goin’,’ sez she. So sez I to her, if it was Bridget
Doran she was wantin’, I’d seen the girl three minyits ago, and ne’er
a sign of dyin’ on her whatsome’er, and I just brought her along
here. It’s perished and stupid the crathur is wid the cowld. You’d a
right to get her a cup of hot tay, and a warm at the fire,” concluded
Larry, thereupon bestirring himself to superintend the carrying out
of this prescription. And a little later he prompted his mother to
offer Mrs Doran a night’s lodging at their house close by, thus
entailing upon themselves more hospitality than they had foreseen.

For of the Surree at Mahon’s all’s well that ends well could not
quite be said, as some of the guests were disposed to say prematurely
when the assembly was breaking up. To begin with, old Mrs Doran had
caught a very bad chill during her snowy wanderings, and now had a
severe illness which endangered her life, and obliged Bridget to
pay many an anxious and conscience-stricken hour as a fee for her
deceptive letter, while a difference which she had next morning with
Rose Casey about the unauthorised mendacity of its contents led to
a permanent cooling down of their friendship. Moreover, Rose, on
the very same day, spoke in such scathing terms to Peter O’Donoghue
with reference to his panic on the night before, that even his
impenetrable self-satisfaction was touched, and a violent falling out
ensued. The consequence was that no wedding took place at Shrovetide;
and the last time I had news from Killymeen “there was no talk of
it at all, at all,” so the breach may be considered final. In fact,
it is commonly supposed that he has some notion of transferring his
attentions to Bridget Doran. But I happen to know that the only
one among the boys she thinks anything of is Larry Sullivan, whom
she always remembers gratefully as the rescuer of her grandmother.
Whereas, if Larry fancies anyone, it is Kate Duffy.

Whence it appears that some rather complicated cross currents in
the stream of life flowing through Killymeen have started from this
Surree at Mahon’s.




THE SHORTEST WAY




THE SHORTEST WAY


District-Inspector Rochfort had risen very early on that wet August
morning, to go trout-fishing along the Feltragh River. He hoped to
get a couple of hours at it before breakfast; so he was not best
pleased when Hugh Christie accosted him as he crossed the Ivy Bridge.
Hugh was looking over the wreathed parapet up the river, and did not
take his eyes off it; only put out a hand as Mr Rochfort passed, and
stopped him with a touch on the arm. Undoubtedly Hugh had queer ways.
His neighbours pronounced him to be “not all there,” which seemed an
inappropriate description of his peculiarities, as rather there was
more of him than of other people. But the more was something uncanny.
He now said, still watching the water: “I was thinkin’ the Sargint
might come by; howsome’er, sir, you’ll do as well.”

“That I won’t, my man,” said Mr Rochfort, “unless it can be done
uncommonly smart, for I’ve no time to waste.”

“It’s as short as it’s long,” said Hugh. “But you needn’t mind about
_thim_”—he pointed to the young man’s rod and creel—“there’ll be none
of that work till it’s gone down, and risin’ it’ll be yet awhile.”

Mr Rochfort looked where Hugh was looking, and had reluctantly to
admit the truth of this. The river ran far below them, down in a
narrow steep-walled little glen, one of the many cracks that fissure
Lisvaughan’s wind-swept, limestone plain. Almost each of these
ravines has a stream in it, with a remnant of trees huddled together
for shelter from the storms, whose stress they dare not meet in the
open, and with ferns venturing out of the rock-clefts to droop ample
fronds over the boulders on the margin. It is thus with Feltragh
River, which rises in the moorland towards Shrole, and here, at the
Ivy Bridge, comes round a sharp turn down a very stony stair. On the
other side of the arch it broadens slightly, and a somewhat longer
reach of it is in view; but Hugh Christie was staring up-stream,
where the water rushed into sight abruptly within a pebble’s cast of
his station. Swirling and tumbling it came, thrusting thick glassy
strands between the boulders, or seething over the tallest of them
in creamy fleeces. A roar ascended from those rapids hollowly and
fitfully, so that the District-Inspector looked up and down the road
occasionally, thinking a heavy cart must be lumbering along.

“There’s a strong current in it now,” said Hugh. “Man nor mortal
couldn’t stand agin it. ’Twould lift a dead cow, let alone—anything
else.”

“You’ve chosen a good place for a drenching,” said the
District-Inspector, for the wind was driving its cold spray into
their faces; “but I don’t see what else is to be got by staying in
it.” And he was moving on, when Hugh said—

“Just wait a bit, till I tell you.”

Hugh’s clothes had a sodden appearance, as if they had given up
trying to get any wetter, and his brown beard was all in a silvery
mist of tiny drops; therefore he was not sensitive about the dampness
of the weather. But what he said, though the District-Inspector did
wait, was nothing more to the purpose than: “Last night was powerful
dark; but it didn’t settle to rain till goin’ on for one o’clock—not
to spake of, any way.”

“Well, it’s making up for lost time now, at all events,” said the
District-Inspector, and had to be stopped again.

“See here, Mr Rochfort, you’re newish to the place; but ax anybody—ax
his Riverence, or Mr Lennon at the public, or Sargint Moore—and every
one of them’ll say I was niver known to raise a hand to do murdher on
man or woman—or I might say child,” Hugh added after a pause, as if
he felt that he was making large demands upon credulity.

“If I were you, Christie, I’d go home, out of the rain,” replied the
District-Inspector.

“Och, no matther for that. I was goin’ to ax you, sir, did you
remember the McAuliffes—the widdy and her daughter: that was all of
them was in it, ever since you come to Lisvaughan.”

“Who lived at Brierly’s cottages over yonder?” the District-Inspector
said, pointing towards the smooth-faced crag whose jut prevented
them from seeing any farther up the Feltragh River. “I believe I do
remember the old woman creeping to Mass—a little lame body; didn’t
she die the other day?”

“Ay did she, last Friday week in Shrole Union; for the daughter that
kep’ her out of it went wid the fever in the spring, and her son
Dan that ped their rint in ’Sthralia, was niver sendin’ her a word
iver since. So she made up her mind he was dead too, and she didn’t
care what become of her after that; and she broke her heart fretting
in the Infirm’ry. But last night Dan landed home lookin’ for her, as
plased as anythin’.”

“The unlucky devil,” said the District-Inspector.

“You may say that,” said Hugh; “but there’s unluckier. Sure it was
meself met him a trifle down the road, and on’y for that, ’twould ha’
been nobody’s doin’, and done all the same. And if it hadn’t been
that outrageous dark, I’d never ha’ seen a sight of him. But sure
up agin ourselves we foosthered on the path, and I wasn’t long then
doubtin’ who had the discourse out of him about the Divil and such.
So: ‘Is it after desthroyin’ you, I am, Dan?’ sez I. And sez he, ‘To
your sowl, if it’s yourself, Hughey Christie,’ he sez, for he and I
did be as thick as thieves in the ould times. And ‘Come a step along
wid me,’ sez he, ‘for I can’t be delayin’.’ ‘Sure where’s the hurry
at all?’ sez I, misdoubtin’ what might be in his mind, if he knew
no betther or worser. ‘Why, man,’ sez he, ‘isn’t it goin’ on for ten
year since I was at home? And like a living dhrame to me now I’m
thinkin’ I’m that near her agin.’ So sez I to myself, ‘The Divil’s
in it’; and sez I to himself, ‘Take care it isn’t too soon you’ll be
gettin’ there, since you couldn’t conthrive it any sooner.’ Sure now,
you’d ha’ supposed he’d ha’ had the wit to git a fright at that. But
all he said was, ‘Ah,—the sisther, poor Lizzie, the crathur; ’deed,
then, that was the great pity entirely, and a cruel loss to her for
sartin. But sure that’s the raisin of me comin’ home at all, thinkin’
me mother’d be left too lonesome altogether. And what wid th’ ould
stame-boat bustin’ up in her ingines,’ sez he, ‘and meself takin’ bad
where they stopped for repeers, I’ve been twyste the time I’d a right
to on the way. She’ll be in dhread there’s somethin’ happint me.
Howane’er, sorra a much fear of that is there now, Hughey man, and
me, so to spake, at the door goin’ in to her, thanks be to goodness,’
sez he.

“And niver a word out of me head to that. But I declare to you,
sir, you might ha’ thought the river itself, that’s a dumb crathur,
was thryin’ its best to tell him, accordin’ to the quare mutterin’
like it kep’ on wid down below. For stumpin’ up the Quarry Lane he
was, that’s the nearest road to his house; ’twas just turnin’ into
it I met him. Nor aisy it wouldn’t ha’ been any ways to git a word
into the talk he had, and it mostly all about what he’d saved in
’Sthralia, and the fine counthry it was, and the grand thing to ha’
got away out of it. ‘But,’ sez he, ‘maybe I’d ha’ sted in it a while
longer, if I hadn’t been afeard me ould woman here’d get mopin’ and
frettin’ left all to herself, which I couldn’t abide the thoughts
of. For right well I was doin’ out there,’ sez he, ‘and in another
couple of years I’d ha’ had a goodish bit more to be bringin’ home
wid me.’ And, bedad, you could see the truth of that, because every
glimmer of light in the black of the night was shinin’ on the len’ths
of the gould watch-chain he had wearin’ on his weskit. ‘Howiver,’ he
sez, ‘I’ve plinty to be keepin’ her iligant, and what great matther
about anythin’ more, when herself’s the on’y mortal crathur I have
belongin’ to me in the width of the world? Sure, if I hadn’t her to
be spendin’ it on,’ sez he, ‘I’d as lief be slingin’ ivery blamed
ould pinny I own over the bank there into the rowlin’ river, and
meself after it—faix would I, the Lord knows.’

“Well now, sir, after his sayin’ that, wouldn’t tellin’ him ha’ been
as good as biddin’ him go dhrownd himself? I put it to you: wouldn’t
it now?”

“It’s hard to say,” said the District-Inspector: “but what _did_ you
do?”

“Stumpin’ along wid him I was, lettin’ on I was listenin’ to him, and
all the while I was makin’ no more sinse of it than if he’d been a
bullock I had dhrivin’ to market, that would be lettin’ a roar now
and agin, at the mischief knows what. For thinkin’ to meself I was
that unless I quitted foolin’ him, he’d be very prisintly walkin’ up
to his door, and one of the Duggans, that he niver set eyes on in his
life, shoutin’ to know who he was, and what he wanted, and tellin’
him the Union was after buryin’ his mother on him. So at last I’d
twisted up me mind wid the notion I’d spake out the next time he said
anythin’, and if I did, that minyit he hit me a clout on the back,
and, ‘Och, Hughey, you bosthoon,’ sez he, ‘herself’ll be sittin’ this
instiant of time be the fire in there, and niver thinkin’ I’m comin’
along a few perch down the ould road.’

“And sez I, ‘Tubbe sure, Dan, she’s thinkin’ no such thing at all’;
and, for that matther, what truer could I ha’ said? And as sure as
I’m alive, I’d ha’ gone on wid it, I would so, on’y ’twas just then
we come round the turn opposite them Brierly Cottages. You know,
sir, where they’re cocked up, across the river, fornint Fitzsimmons’
lime-kiln, wid ne’er a handy way of gittin’ at them except be the
bridge; the next one above this it is—a wooden fut-bridge wid a
hand-rail. But not a sight of it could we see in the dark, or
anythin’ else, on’y the light burnin’ in the Duggans’ windy, the way
it used to be afore they come there.

“And when Dan seen that, he let a sort of yell, and sez he, ‘There it
is—there’s her ould bit of a lamp lightin’ the same as it was ever,
and meself beholdin’ it agin—_glory be to God_.’ The Divil’s in it,”
Hugh said, with a fierce clutch at the dripping ivy-sprays. “If the
crathur hadn’t been so ready to be gloryin’ God, I’d ha’ found it
in me heart to ha’ tould him the whole thing straight out—goodness
help him!—but instead of that, I thought to be comin’ at it gradial.
So I sez to him, lettin’ on I wasn’t mindin’ what he’d said, ‘Is
it a star you’re lookin’ at?’ And sez he to me, ‘Musha, not at all,
man; it’s somethin’ a dale nearer than a one of thim.’ And, ‘There’s
things farther off than stars,’ sez I; and, ‘Belike there is,’ sez
he, ‘but I’m not apt to be throublin’ me head about them when me ould
woman’s waitin’ for me unbeknownst just across the sthrame. So I’ll
be sayin’ good-night to you kindly, Hughey, and skytin’ over. Where
at all’s the bridge? I can’t make out a stim before me. Ah, here it
is!’ sez he, ‘right enough in its own place.’

“And it’s the truth I’m tellin’ you, Mr Rochfort, the truth I’m
tellin’ you: not till the man was grabbin’ the rail wid one hand and
mine wid the other, biddin’ me good-night, did the recollection come
into me mind of anythin’ amiss. And then I dunno rightly how it was,
but the same time I got considherin’ the way ’twould be, supposin’
I held me tongue for that minyit. For if I didn’t tell him the one
thing, nobody’d ever tell him the other, and ’twould save throuble in
a manner. Och, I dunno what come over me, but in the end all I sez to
him was, ‘You’ll have to be walkin’ cautious, Dan,’—God forgive me,
but for sure He won’t: that was every word I said.”

“But why should you have said more?” asked the District-Inspector.
“The bridge is safe enough. Wasn’t the man sober?”

“Safe enough, begorra!” said Hugh. “If there warn’t six fut smashed
slap out of the middle of it wid the big ash-tree buttin’ its head
through it, that was blown off the top of the bank in the storm the
night before last. Six fut clever and clane, and maybe six times six
fut under it to drop down on the river and the rocks.”

“And you sent him over that in the dark?” said the
District-Inspector. “What on earth possessed you?” This question,
however, was merely a phrase, for he seemed to know the reason very
well. “Was he killed?” he demanded, with the inquest in his mind.
“Where’s the body lying?”

“It’s that I’m watchin’ for,” said Hugh, his eyes still following
the rough white race below, “ever since I had light to see. He might
be comin’ by any minyit now. But until the river riz wid the rain a
couple of hours back, I doubt was there water enough to bring him;
there was no very great dale runnin’ in it before then. So I wouldn’t
think he could ha’ slipped past, and I not to notice.”

“Do you mean to say,” said the District-Inspector, “that you went off
and left the unfortunate man there, without so much as ascertaining
whether he was dead or alive?”

“Alive is it?” said Hugh. “Sure the wooden bridge is a good bit
higher than this one; but if I tuk a standin’ lep off of the ledge
here, it’s breakin’ me neck I’d be afore I knew where I was. And
the jagged lumps of big stones is terrible; he might be wedged in
between two of them. Och, no! for all the life’s left in him, poor
Dan’ll ha’ had a paicibler night of it up there than meself had here,
considherin’ quare things in the dark this long while. Ay will he,
for the sort of moanin’ and screeches there was in it now and again
was nothin’ on’y the win’, and the rain polthoguin’, I very well
know.”

“And are you certain that the bridge hadn’t been mended?” said the
District-Inspector.

“How could I help bein’ sartin sure? And I goin’ by it on’y a while
before, in the grey of the light, and Mrs Duggan herself bawlin’
across to me that they were kilt thrampin’ half-a-mile or so afore
they could git over anywheres.”

“But if you didn’t wait, how do you know that he mayn’t have turned
back?”

“Wait? Bedad no, it’s runnin’ away down here I was, as fast as I
could pelt. But what was to turn him back, and he flourishin’ off wid
himself in the greatest hurry at all? You might ha’ thought it was
ten fine fortin’s he was goin’ after; and not a stim to see a step
before him wid. So if it isn’t a murdher, get me one. And that’s the
raison I was thinkin’ I’d a right to be mentionin’ it to yourself,
sir, or the Sargint.”

“It’s a very curious case,” said the District-Inspector, beginning
instinctively to grope about for precedents, and finding none.

“But murdher or no,” said Hugh, “I do be thinkin’ diff’rent ways
of it, and some of them’s bad. For I sez to meself, ‘In a fine
disthraction poor Dan’d ha’ been, when he heard tell of th’ ould
crathur breakin’ her heart in the House.’ And then again I sez to
meself, ‘And supposin’? Many’s the fine disthraction you’ve been in
yourself, me man, and niver tuk a lep into the river out of it.’ And
arter that agin sez I to meself, ‘But sure, if some one’d ha’ up and
shoved me over unbeknownst, so to spake, sorra the blame I’d ha’
blamed him.’ However, since the day’s light’nin’ overhead, little
doubt I’ve had in me mind but that I’d liefer see him comin’ along
the road on his feet, disthracted or not disthracted; and that’s what
I’ll niver behould, if it was twyste as clear. Terrible clear it is
gettin’,” he said, glancing furtively up.

The sky was all one floating, drifting greyness, dim and impenetrable
even in a place rather low on the east, where many invisible hands
seemed to be straining the vast web in devious directions, so that it
thinned and paled. But at this moment it rent there right through,
leaving a rift filled strangely with a liquid radiance of silver
light glowing into amber, which suddenly darted into the eyes of the
two men, and threw their shadows across the wet road, and set the
puddles on fire.

“Look,” said Hugh excitedly, standing up straight and pointing
towards the water.

A wave wider and wilder than the others was coming down the river,
with something lapt round in it that made a dark core to its turbid
brown. But this was borne along no farther than to the first ridged
step in the fleeting rapids. There it halted and lay still, while
the turmoil of water and foam fell away from about it in a flurry,
draining off through the interstices of the boulders, or pouring
over their veiled crests. It was the body of a man. One arm hung
down against the straight rock-ledge, and the face looked up to the
sun-gleam so naturally that when the next wave rushed by, weltering
on and on and on interminably over it, the District-Inspector gave a
gasp as if something had been taking his own breath.

“There he is, the very way I tould you,” said Hugh. At the sound of
his voice the District-Inspector turned quickly, and, seeing that he
had stepped up on to the low, ivied parapet, made a grasp at him, but
was not in time to reach him. “Stop where you are, Dan, one instiant
yet,” Hugh shouted: “for here I am, too!”




THE STAY-AT-HOMES




THE STAY-AT-HOMES


On the 1st of March, last year, it might have been noticed that
people were continually going in and out of Letterowen Railway
Station; yet the number of passengers who arrived and departed by
train was certainly no larger than usual. The station is rather a new
feature in the village, children of smallish growth remembering a
time when its fine pink-washed gables, and brilliant flower-borders,
and curious turnstile did not exist; still it had been there long
enough for the charm of novelty to have been worn off, and that
was not the _comether_ which on this dusty-grey, east-windy March
Sunday drew thither so many visitors, who had no tickets to buy, nor
other official business to transact. What they dropped in to look
at was placarded upon the walls of the bare little waiting-rooms,
where Jim Neligan, the porter, had been busy with a paste brush the
evening before—so excessively so, indeed, being new to his post and
zealous, that the station-master had inquired sarcastically whether
he intended to paper the whole place over entirely, and if he didn’t
think he might as well stick on another layer atop of the first. But
the result of Jim’s lavishness was that wherever you turned there
were the thick black letters announcing a special cheap excursion
to Dublin on next Tuesday fortnight, which, as everybody well knew,
would be St Patrick’s Day. Peter Carroll, who helped to clean lamps
at the station, and his mother, who scrubbed floors there, had
spread the report of the advertisement overnight, and it sounded so
very remarkable that more people than not twirled the turnstile in
the course of the morning and came down the zig-zag path to see for
themselves.

The inhabitants of Letterowen are not great travellers. Their railway
is only a branch of a branch line, and while most of them have not
gone farther along it than Brockenbeg Junction, seven miles north,
by no means few have never got even so far. It is a place where in
soft weather the platform frequently takes a pattern of bare feet,
and bare feet seldom set out on long journeys by rail. As for Dublin,
that had hitherto seemed a goal which remoteness and magnitude made
hardly accessible even to imagination. Letterowen folk considered
vaguely that it would need a sight of money and a powerful length of
time to bring you thither, and what might be expected to befall you
there was so hard to say that your return seemed misty indeed. Yet
here was a printed notice boldly promising—“To Dublin and back for
two shillings,” and going into circumstantial details about a train
departing at six in the morning and arriving at noon, and leaving
again at midnight. “Twenty-four hours for twenty-four pence,” it
ended epigrammatically, and some of its readers felt no manner of
doubt that each one of them would be an hour of rapture unalloyed.
Others were less confident. Old Dan Molloy had heard tell of there
being such thick fogs in Dublin most whiles that people “were as apt
to walk plump into the river as anywhere else, which was a terrible
dangerous thing.” And the Widow Loughlin had been told that “thim
quare excursion trains as often as not got shunted off into a siding
before they came to any place, and the crathurs in them did be left
there perishin’ for nobody knew how long.” Several of the neighbours
also wondered whether the people would have to be sitting in their
seats all the time she was stopping in Dublin station, for that
wouldn’t be very gay at all. Mr Farrell, the station-master, was
frequently called upon to clear up this or some similar perplexity,
and he generally did so satisfactorily, pointing out at the same time
that the terms were uncommonly reasonable. I do not think that they
struck most of his hearers in just that light. The opinion rather
inclined to be that they certainly offered a great deal for the
money, but that the money, as certainly, was a great deal to pay. For
pence are pennies at Letterowen. Thus the price specified for the
four-and-twenty hours had in some cases an effect not intended by the
company.

“Four-and-twinty pence—goodness guide us; sure I would be four days
arnin’ meself that much at the weedin’ or stone-gatherin’ if I was on
full woman’s wages itself,” said Anne Reilly, who in slack seasons
often had to be content with half that amount; “and to go spind it
away between one mornin’ and the next, as if you could pick it up
handy along the side of the road. Musha, long life to them; I hope
they’ll be gettin’ their health till I do.”

“And, mind you, the two shillin’s isn’t the whole of it—where’s your
bit of food comin’ from? Or is it starvin’ you’d go there and back
again?” said Anne’s niece, Katty M‘Grehan, meaning to discourage her
sister Maggie, whom she suspected of harbouring extravagant ideas,
which Maggie quite understood, and rejoined to, saying with some
heat: “Then is it aitin’ nothin’ at all a body’d be, supposin’ they
was sittin’ mopin’ at home? ’Twould be all the one thing to take it
along in the ould can. For the matter of that there’s nothin’ aisier.”

“Nor wastefuller,” Katty said, sticking obdurately to her point,
with her worst suspicions confirmed. She wanted to save those two
shillings, having planned a treat for her crippled father, “the
crathur.”

“Well, glory be to goodness, Jimmy,” old Mrs Walsh remarked to
her contemporary, James M‘Evilly, who, like herself, had listened
dispassionately to the little skirmish, “you and me is too ould and
ancient altogether for to be botherin’ about goin’ or stayin’—the
trees in the hedges is as apt to be thinkin’ of takin’ runs up the
road, and it saves a power of throuble.”

This view of the situation prevailed more or less among the elders of
Letterowen, but not universally. Here and there an old body held an
alert and agile mind, which, according to circumstances, chafed at
its restraints, or made a shift to get about in spite of them. Such
was the case with Mrs Rea, whose age, never estimated at less than
“rale ould entirely,” is by some people asserted to be “every day of
ninety year.” She herself acquiesces cheerfully in any figure between
that and threescore and ten. Certain it is, at all events, that she
seems quite as active and vigorous as many of her much less venerable
neighbours. Still they were surprised when, a few days later, she was
amongst the first to announce that she intended to “thry her chance,
and see what sort of a place Dublin might be at all at all.” Behind
her back, they declared that it was “no thing for the ould crathur
to take upon herself to be doin’,” and that “she might very aisy
lose her life over it if she didn’t mind what she was at.” And some
of them called upon her in her house at the end of the post-office
row, fronting the railway embankment, for the express purpose of
remonstrating with her in scarcely less outspoken terms. “Ah, woman
dear,” they would say, “is it dotin’ you are, or what at all’s come
over you to put such a notion in your head? Sure it’s losin’ yourself
ten times you’ll be going that far, let alone breakin’ the ould bones
of you clamberin’ in and out of them high carriages, and up and down
them cruel steep stairs. Or else, ma’am, desthroyed you’ll surely
be in the streets, where they say an ould person creepin’ about is
as apt to get dhruv over as a weeny chucken that sets itself up to
be runnin’ under the people’s feet, and they coming out from Mass.”
But for all of these she had the same answer: “Well now, ma’am, if I
amn’t ould enough to take care of meself at this time of day, I dunno
when I’m likely to be.” To which piece of inconsequence they commonly
replied, “that them that was wilful’d go their own way,” and took
leave huffily, unconvincing and unconvinced.

Their axiom was truer in Mrs Rea’s case than might have been
anticipated from her circumstances; for she was a solitary widow,
and the way that such persons go is often determined by quite other
considerations than their own wilfulness, especially if there be a
question of as much as two shillings involved. Mrs Rea, however, had
one son prospering in the States, and another long established as
under-gardener to very high-up quality in the county Sligo, and both
of them were “rale good lads to their mother,” which set her above
anything she or her neighbours would have called want. Just now,
moreover, her “odd few ould hens,” had been laying unusually well,
so that her railway fare was forthcoming with little difficulty. The
chief obstacle she encountered was public opinion, which, although
she thought as lightly of it as might be, she could not completely
disregard. It is impossible to set out on a great enterprise with an
unperturbed mind in the face of unanimous prophecies that you will
never come back alive; even if you do let on to consider them “all
blathers and nonsense.” So Mrs Rea, while dealing summarily with the
objections urged by her ordinary acquaintances, would condescend
to argue the matter at much length with her especial crony, Julia
Carroll.

Julia disapproved of the project rather decidedly for her, she being
by no means an opinionated person. “’Deed, now, Joanna,” she said,
in the course of their first discussion, “supposin’ I had the chance
itself, which I havn’t, it’s long sorry I’d be to be settin’ off
on any such a deminted sthravade. Sure, woman alive, them that has
the age on them of you and me is bound to be travellin’ prisintly,
whether or no, far enough to contint anybody, unless it was the
Wanderin’ Jew. So where’s the sinse of tatterin’ about afore thin in
them racketin’ smoky trains? I declare to you, I hate the noise and
smell of them passin’ by there, goodness forgive me, and it only the
nathur of them after all.”

“But bedad thin, Julia, that’s the very thing I was considherin’,”
said Mrs Rea. “For if it’s stuck down in the one place we’re to
be all the while till we’re took, we’ll get that disaccustomed to
everythin’ out of the way we won’t know what to do wid ourselves
anywheres else. So for that raison we’d a right to jaunt about now
and agin to diff’rint places the way we’ll be a thrifle used to what
we’re strange to, and not amazed and moidhered entirely wid the
quareness of it.”

“Well, now, I’d never have that notion,” said Julia Carroll, “for
it’s the quare quareness and the sthrange sthrangeness I’ll be
throublin’ me head about when once I get the chance of goin’ the
road after some of them that’s wint afore me. Sure as long as there
was the ould people in it it might be the most outlandish place one
could consaive and I’d niver notice it, I’d be that took up wid
meetin’ them, nor you wouldn’t aither, Joanna. Morebetoken, I’m often
thinkin’ these times that the old place is the sthrangest of all
since they’re quit out of it—and no fear of gettin’ used to it, sorra
a fear!”

“Maybe that’s very thrue for you,” said Mrs Rea. “But, talkin’ of the
ould people, there’s another raison I have. Do you remimber Biddy
Loughlin—thim that lived below the forge?”

“In a manner I remember her, but which of them was Biddy I couldn’t
say for sure. They was only slips of girls the time they stopped
here, and we never had much doin’s or dalin’s wid them.”

“Well, Biddy married a man of the name of Jackson that lives up there
in Dublin. Her aunt was telling me she heard from her last Christmas.
Keepin’ a fine little shop, they are, in some sthreet—I must ask her
the name—convenient to the railway station. So I was thinkin’ I’d
write her word when I was comin’, and maybe bid her meet me at the
thrain. ’Twould be pleasant to see a body one knew.”

“Middlin’ pleasant it might be. But, saints above, woman, you needn’t
tell _me_ that you’re takin’ off up to Dublin for a sight of Biddy
Loughlin, that I believe you’d scarce know from her grandmother’s
ninth cousin, as the sayin’ is, if she walked into the room this
instiant minyit. For that is too onraisonable a raison altogether.”

Mrs Rea looked rather defiantly conscience-stricken. “To spake the
moral thruth,” she said, “I wouldn’t wonder if all the while I wasn’t
goin’ for e’er a thing else except a bit of divarsion; and I dunno if
that’s any great sin.” “Sure not all,” Julia Carroll said, more from
politeness than conviction, for she was an ascetic both by nature and
training. “Only it’s the quare divarsion’d take me thravellin’ over
the counthry if I had a grand little room of me own to be stoppin’
paiceable in.” She glanced covetously round her friend’s house, in
which they were talking. For Julia, having lagged superfluously long
behind her own generation, was wearing out the fag end of her days in
a grand-nephew’s family, where the tolerance she met with, though
good-natured enough, could not benumb her sense that only in this
world she filled up a place which, albeit cold and comfortless, could
with difficulty be spared to her. Therefore she looked wistfully
round Mrs Rea’s domain and said, “Very paiceable I’d stop in it, ay
would I.”

“There’ll be a good few out of this goin’ on it besides me, you may
dipind,” said Mrs Rea, “Dinny Fitzpatrick is, for one, I know.”

“Ah, poor Dinny’s a young chap, the crathur; where’d he get a
ha’porth of wit,” said Julia, this time with unintentional severity.
“And be the same token, there was his head went by the windy. Gettin’
on for six o’clock it must be if he’s lavin’ work, and I’ve a right
to be steppin’ along wid meself.”

“Is it wit?” said Mrs Rea; “the lad has plinty of that, according to
aught I ever seen of him. If there’s anything ails him, it’s bein’
a thrifle ugly in his temper, as his father was before him. ’Deed,
them Fitzpatricks have the name of bein’ cross-tempered people—dacint
and cross-tempered. That’s the way he got quarrellin’ wid Norah
M‘Grehan, she he was spaking to a long while, just about the time
she took her situation in Dublin. And my belief is he has some notion
now of makin’ it up wid her, and that’s what’s startin’ him on the
excursion; for until he heard tell of it his mind was set on goin’ to
the Malahogue Races. I’d be glad if the two of them got frinds ag’in;
poor Norah’s a good-nathured little girl, the crathur, and all Dinny
wants is a bit of humourin’ to keep him plisant, and whativer the
raison may be, he’s mostly seemed as discontinted as an ould hin in a
shower of sleet ever since Norah quit.”

Denis Fitzpatrick, whose clear-cut profile and rough tweed cap had
just crossed Mrs Rea’s greenish pane on his way up the dusk-dimmed
street, was a good-looking sturdy young fellow, with a countenance
which bore out her assertion that he had plenty of wit. She was
right, too, in her conjectures about the motive which lay at the
bottom of his plans for St Patrick’s Day. At that very moment, in
fact, he was considering how he might best ascertain Norah M‘Grehan’s
Dublin address without compromising his dignity by any direct
inquiries from her family, who had been stiff enough for some months
past. He thought he would ask ould Mrs Rea, who was likely to know,
and, failing her, Norah’s sister Maggie, as she looked several
degrees less forbiddingly upon him than Katty had done since the
falling out.

But after all he need not have troubled himself with these
arrangements. On the afternoon of the Sunday before the holiday Mrs
Rea was happily busy over her fire when a long shadow fell in at her
door and ran up the wall.

“Well, Dinny,” she said, recognising it without turning her head,
“and what’s the best good news wid you?”

“Och nothin’ at all, ma’am,” said Dinny.

“There couldn’t be less,” Mrs Rea said cheerfully; “I’m makin’ meself
a bit of griddle bread to take along in the thrain, and I’ll ha’
plinty for you in it too, Dinny.”

“Thank’ee kindly, ma’am,” Dinny said, gloomily, “but divil a thrain
I’ll be thravellin’ in.”

“Mercy on us all—what’s after happ’nin’ you, man?” she said, whirling
round in consternation.

“Sure because I’m claned out—stone broke,” said Dinny. “Didn’t I
put me half-crown on Black Knot, that was runnin’ yesterday for the
Balmarina Cup, and what’d suit the baste but to go break his ugly
neck at the first lep? It was Sargint Duffy himself bid me put every
penny I could on him, and he knows people that knows all manner. Two
pounds he had on him himself. The divil’s in it.”

“You great, big, stupid ass, you,” said Mrs Rea. “Och, well now,
wouldn’t anybody think an infant child might have the sinse to keep
out of them ould barracks, where it’s bettin’ and foolery the len’th
of the day? And small blame, maybe, to the polis, that’s nothin’
betther to do, and plinty of money to be pitchin’ under the horses’
feet; but for the likes of you to go settin’ up to ruinate yourself!
Faix but you’re the quare fool.” Her genuine vexation at his mishap
came to the surface in a bubbling of wrath, while her plain speaking
was made all the more natural by the fact that it seemed to her only
the other day since six-foot Dinny stood scarcely as high as her
table, and that in Dinny’s recollections Mrs Rea had always been
a rather comical old personage, from whom desirable sugar-sticks
and cakes and negligible threats and reproaches were occasionally
forthcoming. “The grandest chance at all,” she said, “and everythin’
settled—and Norah, the crathur. Och, now, Dinny Fitzpatrick, if
yourself’s not the most unchancy stookawn of a gomeral on the
townland, just get me him that is?”

“I’ve raison to be greatly obligated to you, ma’am,” said Dinny;
“and the next time I want somebody to gab the hind leg off a dog, I
know where to be comin’ to.” So he went away in high indignation.
Whereupon Mrs Rea thought ruefully to herself, “Sure, maybe I’d no
right to be annoyin’ him, and he disappointed wid losin’ his holiday
and all, the mislucky bosthoon.”

Annoyed him she had, however, so seriously, that next evening he had
twenty minds at least to make as if he did not hear her calling him
across the street, when he was going by from his work. Only that
there seemed to be a hoarse sort of despair in her “Dinny, man,
Dinny,” resentment would undoubtedly have got the better of him; but
as it was, he came over and asked what ailed her.

Mrs Rea looked rather dreadful, for she had her head muffled in
two large shawls, one grey and one black, and had wisped round her
throat a white apron, which gave a curious conventual touch to her
appearance. She explained that she was destroyed with a very bad
cold, some sort of asthmy or influenzy she thought it must be,
it had come on so sudden, and her corroborative coughs were quite
alarmingly loud. “Ne’er a fut’ll I git out to-morra,” she said, “not
if the city of Dublin was just across the width of them two rails
there, instid of len’th-ways. And me writin’ word to poor Biddy
Loughlin I was comin’ at twelve o’clock. Lookin’ out for me she’ll
be.”

“Sure you could aisy send her a message be some of them that’s
goin’,” said Dinny. “Art Walsh is, I know, and his sisther.”

“’Deed but I wouldn’t like to be disthressin’ them to be wastin’
their day runnin’ about after me messages,” Mrs Rea said, “nor I
wouldn’t like poor Biddy to be losin’ her time expectin’ me.”

“Well, thin, I dunno how you can manage it,” said Dinny. “One thing
or the other you must do—send it or let it alone.”

“Where’s yourself, lad?” said Mrs Rea.

“And didn’t I tell you I hadn’t a penny to me name? Not unless it’s
borryin’ I was, and then where’d me wages be on Sathurday? I wouldn’t
mind if it was meself only, but I can’t be lavin’ the ould bodies at
home too short, and that’s the end of it. There’s no use talkin’.”

“Och, you gaby, wasn’t I manin’ you to go on me own couple of
shillin’s in place of meself, and take me message? Supposin’ you’d
nought betther to do. It’s too late to be writin’ be the post, and if
Biddy doesn’t get word, as like as not she’ll be in a fine fantigue,
considherin’ I’m lost and sthrayed away; but when you tould her that
kilt wid a cowld was all I was, she’d know nothin’ ailed me. Quite
convanient she lives to the station, so ’twouldn’t delay you above
a minyit, and then all the rest of the while you could be seein’
anybody else there was, and the sights of Dublin, and everythin’.”
Mrs Rea was so bent upon recommending her plan that she forgot her
hoarseness and bad cough. However, this signified little, as Dinny
was too well pleased with the project to be critical about symptoms.

“I give you my word, Judy, woman,” she said, when shortly afterwards
relating the incident to her friend, “the eyes of him shone out of
his head at the notion like the two bright lamps in the tail end of
the thrains runnin’ by there on a black night.”

Thus it came to pass that Denis Fitzpatrick was after all one of
the party who on the morrow made an early start from Letterowen.
It was a still, soft morning, discreetly hooded in grey, but with
an indefinable atmosphere abroad, as if the air were full of some
secrets that might be told when the sun got a little higher. Quite a
crowd of the neighbours were on the platform seeing the excursionists
off, some of them with rather envious eyes. And among those
malcontents was Maggie M‘Grehan, who felt herself aggrieved by her
failure to capture her railway fare, notwithstanding that she had the
prospect of a drive to the Malahogue Races for her holiday amusement
while her sister Katty looked after their bedridden father. Her mood
lightened, however, at the sight of Denis actually starting with the
rest, because, for reasons of her own, she had been considerably put
out by the stoppage of his expedition.

Mrs Rea did not appear. Of course it would have been unwise of
her to venture out with her cold, although her violent cough had
wonderfully subsided. But she saw the train whisked by as she was
making herself very busy over cleaning up the inmost recesses of
her dresser; and her comment was, “Ah, well; sure ’twould ha’ been
a pity to stand in their way, the crathurs.” Her day after this
passed without noteworthy incidents until about tea-time, when, as
she and Julia Carroll were sitting quietly at the brightening fire
something unwelcome occurred. To all appearances, it was nothing
worse than the entrance of a pleasant-looking, dark-eyed girl, in a
becoming velvet-trimmed hat and neat cloth jacket; yet the tone of
the ejaculations with which Mrs Rea greeted her clearly betokened
an untoward event. “Och, glory be to goodness, is it yourself here,
Norah M‘Grehan? Whethen now, how did you come whatever? Isn’t the
childer at your place took sick, the way you couldn’t git lave at
all, so Katty was tellin’ me—the last time you wrote?”

“But sure they’ve got finely now, and the misthress is takin’ them
out to Dalkey for a bit of a change. I wrote home word on Sathurday.
Didn’t they tell you?”

“Deed no; I seen naither of them; and there I am after packing off
poor Dinny Fitzpatrick up to Dublin this mornin’ arly. Ragin’ he is
this minyit of time, you may depind, findin’ nobody in it.”

“And what’d ail him to be ragin’?” said Norah, “or what call’d he
have to be thinkin’ of findin’ anybody? He knew as well as I did I
was comin’ down to-day. So off he wint, and joy go wid him and the
likes of him. Be good luck I’ll be out of it on the eleven o’clock
train to-night afore he’s back.”

“Well, if he knew, it’s a quare thing,” Mrs Rea began.

“Quarer it’d be if he didn’t,” Norah said, interrupting, “when he
heard it from Maggie last night. Katty was tellin’ me—for Maggie’s
off to the races—she seen her talkin’ to him outside, so she was
checkin’ her for havin’ anythin’ to say to him, not bein’ friendly
these times, since he took upon himself to give me impidence about
the Molloy’s party. And Maggie said he stopped her to ax would I be
comin’ home on the holiday, and she tould him as plain as she could
spake that I was. So that was the way of it, and the best thing could
happen.”

“Well, well, well, but that bangs Banagher,” Mrs Rea said, not
disguising her chagrin. “What was he up to then at all? Troth now,
you might as aisy make an offer to count the grains of sugar meltin’
in your tay as tell the contrariness and treachery there does be in
another body’s mind. But we’d betther just be sittin’ down; ’twill
be drawn be this time. Wait till I reach down a cup and saucer for
you, Norah alanna; it’s somethin’ to git a sight of you at all
evints.”

It is to be feared that Norah did not find this tea a very lively
entertainment, although she talked away at a great rate, telling all
her Dublin news. Mrs Rea listened with only a divided attention, the
other half, and the largest, being occupied by the thought that after
all she might better have gone on the jaunt herself. A sacrifice
thrown away is generally an irritating and depressing subject for
meditation; and Mrs Rea’s seemed to have been worse than merely
wasted, as she said to herself that “all the good her stayin’ at
home had done anybody was only harm.” These reflections made her a
dull and silent hostess. Then, during a pause in the conversation,
Julia Carroll expressed her belief that she herself “as like as not
wouldn’t be dhrinkin’ tay anywheres by next St Patrick’s Day.” The
little old woman spoke in a hopeful tone, looking as if she saw many
pleasant possibilities in the conjecture; but a slip of a girl of
Norah’s age and experience could scarcely share that view, and the
remark did not tend to cheer her.

However, when they had finished tea, Mrs Rea went out into the grey
dusk at the door to collect her hens with the few crumbs, and a
moment afterwards Norah, who was putting turf on the fire, heard a
sound that made her drop the sod out of her hand suddenly enough
to set the white ashes fluttering about like snow-flakes, while
the golden sparks darted up straight like shooting stars. It was
Mrs Rea exclaiming: “Och, mercy be among us! is it yourself, Dinny
Fitzpatrick? And what at all brought you back so soon, and how did
you conthrive to come?” To which the voice of Dinny replied: “Sure,
ma’am, when I got there I found there was nothin’ to be keepin’ me in
it whatsome’er, so one of the guards at the station was a dacint chap
from Youghal, and for the sixpence I had along wid me for a dhrink,
he let me come back on the two o’clock mail that stops next to
nowhere for man or baste, and that way I got home very handy. And was
you seein’ anythin’ to-day of Norah M‘Grehan? But, bedad, ’twould be
just of a piece wid the rest of it if she was on the road thravellin’
back to Dublin agin now.”

“Musha, thin, she’s not got very far yet, that’s sartin. But,
goodness help you, man alive, wouldn’t it ha’ been a dale more
sinsible to ha’ axed the question afore you took skytin’ the len’th
of the counthry, and nothin’ at the end of it?”

“And, begorra, didn’t I ax it? Sure I knew there was some talk of her
comin’ home, so I axed her sisther Maggie last night, and no, sez
she, sorra a fut could she get lave.”

“It was an onthruth she tould you,” said Mrs Rea.

“Troth, now, I had me doubts it was, ever since the ould woman I seen
at her place in Dublin said she well remembered Norah writin’ home to
say she was goin’; and, if I’m not mistaken, it’s not the first ugly
turn that Maggie’s after doin’ agin us. But did you say, ma’am, that
Norah was above at her house?”

“What for would _I_ go to be tellin’ lies on you? Sure, not at all,
but if you’ve a fancy to be standin’ on the one flure wid her, just
step your feet over the hins’ ould dish, and there you are.”

Dinny stepped accordingly, and immediately afterwards found himself
shaking hands vehemently with Norah M‘Grehan, and inquiring what way
she was this long while. Norah replied that she must be running home
to her poor father and Katty, for she’d presently have to be settin’
off again to catch the Dublin train. But Mrs Rea, bustling jubilantly
about the dresser, said, “Aisy now, honey. You’ll give the poor lad
time just to swallow his cup of tay, and then he’ll be all ready to
go along wid you.”

While Dinny gulped down a very hot mixture of sugar chiefly and
grounds, Julia Carroll took the opportunity to draw from the events
of the day a moral in support of her favourite contention against
travelling about, pointing out what a sight of trouble it would have
saved if Dinny had “stopped paiceably at home, the way he needn’t ha’
been scaldin’ and chokin’ himself for want of a few minutes to spake
to his frinds.” Mrs Rea, however, rejoined—“And supposin’ Norah had
took it into her head to stop paiceable where she was too, where’d
the both of them be this evenin’?” And although she answered readily
enough, “Sure, where Norah was, she wasn’t at home,” the argument
did not convince anybody. Certainly not Mrs Rea. For when Dinny had
just started with Norah he wheeled round suddenly to make a penitent
confession. “Och, murdher! Och, Mrs Rea, ma’am, I niver remimbered
it till this instant, but tellin’ you the thruth, I niver went
next or nigh the ould woman you bid me be bringin’ word you wasn’t
comin’—cliver and clane I forgot it, and went off straight to look
for the Square—Well now, wasn’t I the bosthoon?”

“Sure, no matther,” Mrs Rea said, blandly. “It’s little Biddy
Loughlin’d be troublin’ her head about me goin’ or stayin’, for the
thruth is, there was niver much love or likin’ between any of us and
any of thim.”

Dinny looked hard at her for a moment, “And another thing I
disremimbered,” he said, “was to be axin’ you after your terrible bad
cowld.”

“Bedad, Dinny, I’m thinkin’ it wint off to Dublin along wid you,” she
said. “Anyhow it’s quit away surprisin’.”

“It’s my belief, you’re a great ould rogue, ma’am, yourself and your
cowld,” said Dinny. “But I’d as lief I hadn’t lost thim two shillin’s
and everythin’ on you.”

“Sure what matther at all?” Mrs Rea said again. “And who can tell
but I mightn’t get as good a chance next St Patrick’s Day, and be
travellin’ up to Dublin iligant after all? I wouldn’t wonder if I
was—there’s time enough.”




A PROUD WOMAN




A PROUD WOMAN


Peter Mackey, the Carrickcrum Doctor’s man, introduced me to Mrs
Daly one early summer morning, when her table was flecked with small
quivering shadows by the young beech-leaves. That such a ceremony was
required argued me a stranger to the place, for “ould Anne Daly” at
her stall had a speaking acquaintance with almost every passer-by.
Her rickety deal board stood at the cross-roads under the beech-tree
whose trunk was built into the wall behind the National School, where
she had a view of Carrickcrum’s street on either hand, and looked
up the road to the bridge, and down the road to the police barracks
as well. She was a picturesque figure in her black gown and bluish
apron; for her hair made white light beneath broad cap frills hooded
with a heavy grey shawl, and the brown eyes among their weather-worn
wrinkles still glanced as brightly as the waters of a bog-stream. Her
knitting-needles twinkled up at them, in and out of the dark, rough
stocking-leg that lengthened in her hands, as she sat perched on a
crippled chair, dexterously propped against the beech’s roots. Upon
the planks before her glowed a small heap of half-a-dozen oranges,
and as many pink sugar-sticks protruded from a white Delft jam-pot.
That was all her stock-in-trade, and even the golden dance over it
of the spangling sunbeams could not give it an opulent aspect. What
caught my eye at once, however, was a signboard nailed to the trunk
just above her head, bearing on a brilliant ultramarine ground, in
letters of fiery vermilion, the words:—

  THE SENTRALL IMPOREOM.

The inscription somehow took my fancy, and I had scarcely beheld
it when I seemed to be reading in the catalogue of a certain art
exhibition: “No. 34. The Sentrall Imporeom, by Charles Hamilton,
price ——.” Whereupon followed a vision of the corresponding work—the
quaint old country woman presiding over her simple wares beneath
her leafy canopy and grandiloquent label, with perhaps a hint of
the village street in the distance to explain the situation. I
presaged “a hit,” and felt impatient to set about it at once. There
was a grass-patch over the way that would conveniently accommodate
my easel. Then I wondered who had put up the gaudy signboard, and
why; whether in pompous earnest, or intending a jest at the poor
little establishment: and what might be Mrs Daly’s sentiments on the
subject. So, with a design to elicit these, I remarked: “That’s a
fine piece of painting you have up there.”

“’Deed now is it, sir?” Mrs Daly replied, darting a quick look at
me to ascertain whether my admiration was unfeigned, much as I
have seen her prove the soundness of her pears with the point of
her knitting-needle. It stood the test with effrontery, and she
proceeded: “That was Joe Lenihan. He done it last winter wid the bit
of paint he had over after finishin’ Mr Conroy’s new cart. Joe’s a
terrible handy boy. It’s got a nice apparence off it, to my mind,
and ne’er a harm at all that I can see; but, och! the Gaffneys were
ragin’ mad over it—them at the shop below there, sir.” She pointed
down the street, and I took a few steps backwards to get a glimpse
of its single plate-glass pane, which displayed groceries, hardware,
millinery, and other things, and above which ran, large and yellow,
“GENERAL EMPORIUM.” “Ragin’ they were,” Mrs Daly said in a tone that
was half-gratified and half-rueful. “Sure to this day they won’t
look the way I am. But I dunno what call they have to set themselves
up to be the only Imporum in the place, and they just ‘P. Gaffney,’
sorra a hap’orth more, and plenty good enough, for them, until before
last Christmas they got a man over from Newtownbailey to do their
paintin’. There was nobody here aquil to it, I should suppose. So now
they’re of the opinion I had a right to ha’ hindered Joe of doin’ me
a Imporum as well, and I wid ne’er a notion he was plannin’ any such
a thing. Howsome’er, he made a very good job of it, sir, as you was
sayin’.”

“It’s a fine morning, Mrs Daly,” someone said at my elbow, and,
turning round, I saw beside me a tall, respectable-looking young man
in a grey tweed suit. “I’m just after shooting old Mr Carbury dead
with the rook-rifle, and throwing him over the wall into the river
below at Reilly’s,” he said.

“And is it yourself, Mr Ned? I never heard you comin’. Well now, but
you’re terrible wicked to go do the like of that,” Mrs Daly said, as
placidly as she had praised Joe Lenihan’s handiness. “It’s hangin’
you they’ll be this time for sartin. So you’re off to the barracks?”

“Straight,” said Mr Ned gravely, “and they needn’t offer to say it’s
manslaughter either, for it’s an awful murder. You might have heard
the shot. But to see him rolling down the river, over and over—I
didn’t wait till he sank, for it’s time I gave myself up on the
charge of committing a cold-blooded murder.”

He strode away abruptly with an air of solemn fuss, and Mrs Daly
said, looking after him commiseratingly: “He’s a son of the Clancys
at Glen Farm. Asthray in his mind he is, the crathur, and scarce a
mornin’ but he comes by here on his way to the polis wid a story of
some quare villiny he’s after doin’. My belief is he dhrames them
in the night, and when he wakes up he can’t tell the differ as a
sinsible body would. Anyhow he niver harmed man or baste. But sure
the Sargint and all of them up there knows the way it is, and they
niver throuble their heads about his romancin’, or now and again they
put him up in the guard-room for a while, just to contint him.

“Only one day be chance he landed in on them when there was nobody
in it except a young constable that was new to the place, and him he
had in a sarious consternation wid the slaughtherin’ he was tellin’
him of. Fit to raise the counthryside he was before the other men
came home. It’s as good as a play to hear Joe Lenihan tellin’ it.
’Deed now, we’d maybe do betther to not be takin’ divarsion out of
the crathur’s vagaries, that’s to be pitied, the dear knows. But sure
your heart might be broke waitin’ for somethin’ to laugh at, if you
was to look black at everythin’ wid a grain of misfortin in it, for
that comes as nathural as the grounds in your cup of tay.”

So Mrs Daly philosophised; and when she had finished I bought an
orange, and went on my way.

This, however, was only the first of many visits to the Sentrall
Imporeum. My wish to paint it and its proprietress continued, and
she presently gave me a series of sittings, in the course of which
I learned a good deal about her character and affairs. Mrs Daly
lived close by, in a very miserable little shanty, windowless and
chimneyless, built against a sunken bank, so that its ragged thatch
was on a level with the roadway. How she lived seemed less obvious
than where, as although she owned three or four hens, and did some
coarse knitting while she sat all day at the table with its screed of
sweets and fruit, one would have estimated the combined profits of
these to fall far short of sufficiency for even her modest wants. Her
lameness debarred her from more active industries, she having been
crippled by an accident at the same disastrous period—about thirty
years before—when her husband died, and her son ’listed, and her
daughter married an emigrant to the States.

Perhaps it should be reckoned as another disability that she was the
proudest woman in the parish, to whom an offer of assistance seemed
an insult, and who would accept nothing from her neighbours beyond
a most rigorous equity. For instance, Arthur Kelly, the struggling
farmer who owned the shed which she inhabited, would gladly have
allowed her to occupy it rent free, but was obliged every week
compunctiously to receive sixpence.

I myself experienced the same sort of thing in my trivial dealings
with her. Small artifices, prompted by baffled speculations as to
how she made out a subsistence, all signally failed. If I contrived
one day to over-pay for a purchase, pleading want of change, on the
next the undesired pennies were sure to be awaiting me inevitably
and inexorably. She refused point-blank to sell me the crushed and
over-ripe gooseberries with a fancy for which I had been seized, and
she insisted upon taking a farthing apiece off the price of some
apples that were fully half-sound. In fact, I was soon compelled
to desist from practising any such stratagems, perceiving that our
sittings and conversations would otherwise abruptly end. But being
wise in time, I kept on good and improving terms with Mrs Daly, and
made my studies at the Sentrall Imporeum desultorily all through the
summer. Still, when it drew to a close, I was quite aware that our
friendliness had not brought me a step nearer venturing upon any
attempt to undermine her rigid principle of independence.

This being so, I was not a little surprised when one wet evening at
tea-time Mrs Daly paid me a visit for the purpose of asking me to do
her a favour. The cottage I had taken that summer stands on the same
side of the road as her tiny cabin, but about half-a-mile farther
from Newtownbailey. It belongs to the brother-in-law of Peter Mackey,
Dr Kennedy’s man, which is how I came to hear of it, and it contains
no less than three rooms on the ground—literally ground—floor,
besides two little attics huddled up under the thatch. As it has a
strip of privet hedge in front, and a path three flag-stones long
leading to the door, and a hen-house leaned-to against one end, it
may be considered superior to the neighbouring residences, though
unsophisticated mud and straw are the main ingredients in its,
as well as in their, composition. With the help of loans from my
friend the Doctor, and some properties of my own, I had furnished
it in a style which I believe excited admiration on the whole. Yet
the establishment did not reach the standard of what was deemed
appropriate for “rael quality,” especially as I did for myself
single-handed, with only an old woman from next door to “ready up”
things in the morning; and my social standing was consequently always
regarded as an ambiguous and perplexing point at Carrickcrum.

Mrs Daly arrived with something evidently on her mind. She was not
likely, indeed, to have undertaken that slow and painful hobble
through the pelting rain without some object; but she seemed to find
much difficulty in disclosing it. At last, however, having repeated
incredibly often that it was “a very soft night intirely,” she made
the following more pertinent statement:—

“I’m after gettin’ a letter to-day from me brother Hugh’s son. That
was Hugh went out to the States I couldn’t tell you what ould ages
ago, and be all accounts he’s made the fine fortin in it. But the
time he went I was about gettin’ married, and he set his face agin
that altogether. No opinion he had of poor Andy, that wasn’t to say
very well to do, and maybe not over-steady. So he wouldn’t allow me
to be spakin’ to Andy at all, and he was wantin’ me to go out along
wid himself, for Hugh and I were always frinds. Infuriated he was
when he couldn’t persuade me; the last time I seen him, there was no
name bad enough for him to be callin’ poor Andy, and he up and tould
me that, as sure as he was alive, the next time he set eyes on me
’twould be beggin’ he’d find me, unless it was in the workhouse. And
sez I to him he might make his mind aisy that, whativer place he
might find me in, the on’y thing I’d be beggin’ of him’d be to keep
himself out of it. And we’ve niver been friendly since. Sorra the
letter I’ve wrote to him, nor he to me. But now there’s the young
chap writin’ me word from Queenstown that he’s crossed the wather to
see the ould counthry, and that before he wint his father bid him go
look up his Aunt Nan while he was at home. Sure, I scarce thought he
as much as knew where I was livin’ these times. So me nephew’s comin’
to-morra on the train to Newtownbailey.... Well, now, you know me
house, sir? It isn’t too bad a little place at all, but you couldn’t
say it was very big.”

You certainly could not say so, upon almost any scale of measurement,
or with any approximation to truth, I reflected; for I had seen its
tenant creeping in and out at its low black doorway, which would
hardly have made an imposing entrance to an average rabbit-burrow.

“And I was thinkin’,” she continued, “that if the young fellow come
there, it might be apt to give him the notion I was livin’ in a
poorish sort of way—for the dear knows what quare big barracks of
places he’s maybe used to at home—and I’m no ways wishful he’d bring
back any such a story wid him to his father, after the talk he had
out of him about the workhouse and the beggin’.

“And another thing is, Hugh’d say ’twas next door to it, me sellin’
them hap’orths of sweets outside there; he would, sure enough, for
none of me family done the like ever. Och, I’d a dale liefer he’d ha’
sted away; but I can’t put him off of comin’. And I was thinkin’—I
was thinkin’, sir....” But Mrs Daly’s further thoughts could not be
put into words without much stumbling and hesitation. “What I was
thinkin’ was, that if be any chance you were out paintin’ the way
you do mostly be, sir, after dinner-time to-morra, you’d be willin’,
maybe, to let me bring me nephew in here just for the couple of hours
he has to stop—comin’ on the half-past two train he is, and lavin’ on
the five—and loan me the fire to make him a cup of me own tay. For
then, sir, you see, he could niver say a word to anybody except that
I was livin’ rael dacint and comfortable—ay, bedad, it is so,” she
said, glancing wistfully round the ruddily-lighted room. “But it’s a
terrible dale to be axin’ you; and very belike ’twill be a pourin’
wet day, and you not stirrin’ out,” she added, looking behind her as
if she had several minds to vanish away through the dim rain without
waiting for an answer.

I lost no time in cordially assenting to her plan, and the sympathy
inspired by a sincere commiseration for her dilemma, caught as she
was between two scathing fires of pride, enabled me, I believe, to
convince her that I really expected to derive some benefit from the
proposed arrangement, as I pointed out how, only for her presence
there, the house would be left empty all the afternoon, a probable
prey to passing tramps. I mentioned also that, if I happened to
appear upon the scene, it might be in the character of her lodger.
These suggestions seemed to relieve her mind. But as she was turning
to go, a difficulty occurred to me.

“How will your nephew find his way here, Mrs Daly?” I said. “If he
asks it, you know, they’ll direct him to the wrong place.”

“Why, sir,” she said, “I was intindin’ to step over wid meself and
meet him at the Newtownbailey station. I’ll get him aisy enough, for
there does mostly be no such great throng on the platforrm”—(arrivals
generally averaged about three)—“that I’d have much throuble sortin’
him out. And then I could bring him along back wid me as handy as
anythin’.”

“It’s a long walk for you, though,” said I, for Newtownbailey is a
good two miles from Carrickcrum, and a mile was a mile indeed, at the
little old woman’s “gait o’ goin’.”

“Sure I’m well used to it,” said she, “I do be thravellin’ it these
times every Saturday after me few sugar-sticks. At Gaffney’s here
I was gettin’ them for a great while, but ever since I set up the
Sentrall Imporum, they’re chargin’ me fi’pince a dozen, and that I
couldn’t afford. Ould Gaffney himself he sez to me the laste they
could do was to be puttin’ on a pinny to the price, now that I’d took
to keep such a grand place. But fourpince is all I have to pay at
Newtownbailey.”

“That was a spiteful trick,” I said. And a reply came from without,
as the speaker departed over the slippery, wet flags:

“What can you get from a hog but a grunt?” said Mrs Daly.

The morrow was not wet, as she had foreboded, but rather sultry and
showery. In the morning, with the help of my friend the Doctor’s
wife, I made some preparations for my coming guest. Part of these
consisted in hanging up on my wall-hooks sundry warm woollen skirts
and bodices, and a fine lilac-ribboned cap, with respect to which I
cherished designs. Also I spread a table with the materials for a
tea, comprising a richly-speckled barn-brack, and a seed-cake pinkly
frosted.

I meant to go a-sketching for the day, but had not yet started
when, about noon, I saw Mrs Daly toiling up to the door laden with
a large basket—come, no doubt, to make final arrangements, before
proceeding to fetch her nephew from the station. I was in the little
room adjoining the kitchen, and, as the door stood slightly ajar, I
could watch her unpack her basket. Evidently she had determined to
trespass upon my hospitality only to the extent of house-room, for
she produced several sods of turf, besides cups, saucers, and teapot
(which held a drop of milk), paper wisps of tea and sugar, and half
a loaf of bread. These being set on the table, I saw her, to my
mortification, remove from it the cakes and other eatables, and stow
them away carefully out of sight in a press. I noticed, too, that she
laid on the shelf along with them a pair of her knitted socks, which,
I conjectured—rightly, as I afterwards learned—were a present to me
and a peace-offering to her pride. I blamed myself for not having
foreseen this preliminary visit, and deferred my preparations until a
time when she would have no opportunity to cancel them. And at first
I thought of lingering behind, and re-arranging the tea-table when
she had gone; but upon reflection it seemed more forbearing to leave
her to her own devices; so I slipped away unobserved.

The picture of the Sentrall Imporeom still lacked a few finishing
touches, which I had, fortunately, resolved to give it in the course
of that day; and I was at work down there towards three o’clock,
when Mrs Daly drove by on a car, sitting beside a well-dressed,
middle-aged man. She wore her fine Sunday shawl, whose ample folds of
cream and fawn colour could charitably cover many defects in a body’s
toilette, and she held up her head with an air of resolute dignity,
which grew almost defiant at sight of her residence and business
premises. She gave me a stately nod as she passed, turning then to
her companion with some remark which was, I fancied, explanatory
and apologetic. I watched them round the corner, regretting that
they were on their way to such frugal fare, and hoping that the
entertainment might go off satisfactorily, despite Mrs Daly’s refusal
of my contributions to its success.

The afternoon slid by rapidly on the rollers of my work, which was
interrupted by the occurrence of more than one sharp thundery shower.
I was still struggling to catch the effect of a sunbeam blinking
Turneresquely on a little pile of shrivelled oranges, and snatched
away capriciously by shifting clouds, when the car re-appeared,
trotting back very fast with the same load as before.

“Sure, me nephew,” Mrs Daly told me afterwards, “found himself so
comfortable up above there, and was in such an admiration of the
grand little room, that he sted talkin’ of all manner till he’d left
himself scarce betther than a short quarther of an hour to git his
thrain, so he bid the man dhrive for every cent he was worth. He’s
a queer, outlandish way of spakin’. And I sez to him I had some
shoppin’ to do in the village, so he was givin’ me a lift.”

Just as the car passed between my easel and the beech, a fierce
flicker of lightning quivered through the boughs, causing the horse
to shy with a wide-sweeping swerve, which brought the car-wheel full
tilt against the rickety table, whose flimsy boards fell asunder,
strewing their burdens around, while the sudden jerk flung the old
woman on the road.

For a moment I feared some damage more tragical than that sustained
by the ruined stall; but Mrs Daly picked herself up with great
promptitude, and without any apparent injury. Her presence of mind
was evidently unscathed, for she at once remarked, calmly surveying
the wreck—

“Bedad, now, that’ll be a loss to whatever poor body owns it.”

“I expect it will, indeed,” said her nephew, who looked much more
perturbed than she. “It’s considerable of a smash, anyway. But look
here, Aunt Anne, perhaps you’d have no objection to taking charge of
the dollars to make all square? Because, if you’re really none the
worse for your fall, I must be making tracks for the depôt, or I’ll
not get on the cars this evening at all; and I wouldn’t miss them for
a long figure, and that’s a fact.”

He was pulling out a bank-note, but his aunt waved it away superbly.

“Ah, no, lad; not be any manner of manes,” she said. “Sure, what
matter about it? They were on’y a thrash of ould sticks.”

“Speak for yourself, Mrs Daly,” I said. “The person they belong to
wouldn’t thank you.”

“That’s so, sir,” said the stranger, who was obviously divided
between anxiety to do justice and to avoid delay. “I wonder now would
_you_ have the goodness to pass this on to the proper party?”

I assented to the proposal with an alacrity which, had it not been
for his own hurry, might have struck him as suspicious; whereupon he
handed me the note, and drove away. He had placed, I was gratified to
learn, ten pounds’ worth of confidence in me at first sight.

Long and elaborate, however, were the arguments which I had to use
before Mrs Daly would permit me to execute his commission. They
were tedious to recapitulate, and the most effective of them was
probably the least logical—that, namely, which urged the exultation
to be presumed in the mean Gaffneys at her unretrieved disaster.
Her scruples yielded to a judicious insistence upon this, and she
suffered the making of her fortune. For her acquisition of ten pounds
was nothing less than that, as will be readily understood by anyone
who has tried to live, for any length of time, on the profits arising
from the sale of a dozen half-penny sugar-sticks. It enabled her to
rent a much superior dwelling with a window, and to invest in quite
a large assortment of miscellaneous goods for exhibition behind the
panes, besides adding to her stock of “chuckens”; and, according to
latest reports, she was doing grandly. But the Sentrall Imporeom no
longer exists. A few days after the accident, the gaudy blue-and-red
board was found to have been removed from the beech-trunk—a deed
with which the parodied Gaffneys were credited, and at which Mrs
Daly felt rather aggrieved, as she had wished to set it over her new
door, having given up the hardships of an open-air stall. However,
she has plenty of things to pride herself on these times. And, as she
moralised: “It’s the quare low-lived tricks people does be at by way
of settin’ themselves up.”


THE END




  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

  Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
  when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

  Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the
  text, inconsistent or archaic usage, and dialect have been left
  unchanged.

  Pg 27: ‘little intercouse’ replaced by ‘little intercourse’.
  Pg 49: ‘incident befel’ replaced by ‘incident befell’.
  Pg 72: ‘spinister aunts’ replaced by ‘spinster aunts’.
  Pg 110: ‘at the the three’ replaced by ‘at the three’.
  Pg 114: ‘up their by’ replaced by ‘up there by’.
  Pg 129: ‘rest of the the’ replaced by ‘rest of the’.
  Pg 240: ‘she produeed’ replaced by ‘she produced’.
  Pg 287: ‘negligable threats’ replaced by ‘negligible threats’.





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