I
The Widow M‘Gurk flung down a black sod into the midst of the
blossom-like pink-and-white embers and ashes on her hearth with a shock
that splashed up vivid sparks in all directions, causing a pair of
long-legged, panic-stricken chickens to fly higher, far less nimbly,
and seek refuge from the startling shower among the rafters overhead.
Her action was symbolical, for as she performed it she said: “It’s
gone; there’s the whole of it. And you might as well be holdin’ your
tongue till you’ve got somethin’ raisonable to say.” As a matter of
fact, her niece, Minnie Walsh, had not been making any observations;
but Mrs M‘Gurk had some excuse for indiscriminate censoriousness just
then, seeing that she referred to the loss of nothing less than what
she called “the greatest chance ever she got in her life’s len’th.”
Perhaps that rather long length had really been not more productive
of great chances than is usual in the lives of people who dwell on
the bog-lands at Lisconnel. Yet her neighbours were disposed to
consider that she had enjoyed a somewhat full share of good luck. They
all remembered, for instance, the handsome legacy of half a dozen
half-crowns that had once come to her from the States, and some of
them would say when discussing her affairs: “And she widout a crathur
to be thinkin’ of only herself.” This latter circumstance could, of
course, be otherwise stated as the fact that “she had not a soul
belonging to her in the wide world to be doing e’er a hand’s turn for
her”; and when she was first left a childless widow, many years ago,
that view had predominated. It still prevailed among most of the older
inhabitants, whose children were grown up, and capable of lending a
helping hand, sometimes from across the western foam; but they of a
younger generation, whose long families were as yet the “burden” which
the Gaelic sorrowfully calls them, would speak of her loneliness in
a tone implying: “It’s well to be her.” In this opinion the widow’s
proudly independent spirit helped to confirm them, her habit being to
pose as a prosperous person, resentful of any sympathy which appeared
incongruous with that attitude, while she adopted an extension of the
principle: “_Tell thou never thy foe that thy foot acheth_,” in this
respect treating everyone impartially as an enemy. Here, however, was a
quite exceptional occurrence, upon the cruel unluckiness of which the
most stoical pride could scarcely be imagined to forbear exclaiming. It
came about thus.
Early in the summer, Mrs M‘Gurk’s portly yellowish hen had hatched
her a clutch of eggs with such singular success that not one of the
whole baker’s dozen failed to produce its chick, and had brought
them up so discreetly and warily that all, save the solitary victim
of a bright-eyed hawk’s swooping pounce, had come securely to a more
profitable fate. Mrs M‘Gurk, furthermore, had obtained remarkably
good prices--as much, sometimes, as eighteenpence a couple--for
them down beyond in the town, and the consequence was that, after
paying her rent at Michaelmas, and buying several parcels of tea for
distribution as well as for her own use, she found herself one day
possessed of two shillings, which she had no immediate occasion to
spend. Now it happened that she was at this time entertaining as a
guest her niece’s daughter, Minnie Walsh, who had been visiting some
relations away over beyond Moyallen, and found her great-aunt’s cabin
a convenient halting-place on her journey back to her home near the
town of Ballytrave. Her father’s cousin, Peter M‘Gonigal, had promised
to pick her up in his cart, which would be passing within a mile or
so of Lisconnel on its return from leaving a couple of calves over at
Letter-french; and Peter’s own destination being within an easy walk
of the long-car from Ardlesh to Ballytrave, Minnie’s route lay smooth
and clear. All the while she stayed at Lisconnel she kept on counting
the days until she could set off, less from impatience to rejoin
her domestic circle than because of a wonderful festival which was
in prospect at Ballytrave. It would even be grander, she had heard
tell, than the ones last autumn, and everybody had said that the like
of _them_ nobody had ever beheld--play-acting, and dancing, and the
beautiful music, with a roomful of fiddlers and pipers, and a couple
of big harps that were like a fairy wind through the trees, and the
songs that would make you wish you couldn’t tell what, and think you
were come just near to getting it somehow. And the whole of them in
Gaelic, too, the very same way, people said, that they did be in the
old ancient times. She wouldn’t miss it for anything at all.
Minnie Walsh was generally a silent, quiet girl, but when she spoke
of this _Feish_, she brightened up out of a dulness which made her
enthusiasm the more striking by contrast. Its glow was caught by
her hearers, and often gave a livelier turn to assemblies of the
neighbours, whether on the swarded edges of the bog, basking in long,
honey-coloured sunbeams, or gathered closer, on rough-hewn stools and
benches, about a less distant hearth-fire. Mention of the jigs and
_rinca-fadhas_ would set the young folk dancing, and their elders’
memories were stirred into another sort of activity, producing
fragments of half-forgotten ditties, and familiar phrases long disused.
For Lisconnel had hardly any Irish speakers in those days except Pat
Ryan’s very old mother, who so seldom said anything, that her language
might indeed be a matter of conjecture. She pricked up her ears one
evening upon hearing her son exchange certain guttural greetings
with Joe Sheridan, and she suddenly declaimed in her corner a long
Gaelic ballad, relating the adventures of a Princess, a Giant, and an
enchanted steed, which seemed but gibberish to some of her audience,
and to the rest would have seemed so, only that it being a widely
spread folk-tale, they were able to guide themselves through it by the
clues of a word or name recognised here and there. At the end of it,
Widow M‘Gurk sighed profoundly with a regretful satisfaction, and said:
“Sure now the sound of it does me heart good. It must be a matter of
fifty year since ould Kit Maher would be singin’ the very same at me
poor father’s house away in Asherclogher. But, bedad, if I got a sight
of a one of them reels, Minnie says is to be in it, I’d consait I was a
little _girsheach_ again, I would so.”
“And why wouldn’t you come see them?” said her grand-niece. “Me mother
was biddin’ me many a time to be bringing you along, and me cousin
Peter’d take the two of us just as ready as one; and he could drop you
here on his way back in a couple of days as handy as anythin’.”
“Them two shillin’s I have saved would just pay me car fare goin’ and
comin’,” said her great-aunt, “supposin’ I was fine fool enough to
think of such a thing.”
It was from this doubtful beginning that Mrs M‘Gurk’s resolve to attend
the Ballytrave _Feish_ sprang and rapidly matured. Everything helped
it on. Minnie Walsh, desirous of company on her formidable day-long
journey, coaxed and cajoled, the neighbours athirst for even vicarious
variety and excitement, encouraged and urged her, and above all her
own wishes took her by the hand. It would be one while, she said to
herself, before she got such another chance; you might think it had all
happened on purpose. Her pitaties finished lifting, and her turf well
saved, just at the time when a cart was going and coming that way, and
she so far beforehand with the world that, as she reasoned, the journey
wouldn’t cost her a penny. So the expedition was speedily determined
upon, and her plans approached the brink of accomplishment without a
check.
The possibility of the whole project, however, was for the time being
compressed into the shape of two current coins, those marvellous
seeds from which most heterogeneous crops are raised at all seasons;
and since so much hinged upon her possession of them, “Sure now Mrs
M‘Gurk was the very foolish woman”--as neighbours repeatedly pointed
out to her--“to go put her two shillings into a pocket with a hole in
it.” Yet that was exactly what she did one unlucky afternoon. She had
been in the act of transferring them from a little lustre jug on the
dresser to an old patchwork bag, when sounds of barking and bleating
made her apprehend that the Sheridans’ young collie was molesting her
kid, tethered on a grassy strip beside the bog stream. Whereupon she
had slipped the shillings into her pocket, and ran down to the rescue.
And, alas, as she was recrossing the stepping-stones, she had put her
hand into that pocket and discovered there only _one_ shilling and a
hole very amply large enough to account for the absence of the other.
From the first it seemed a sadly hopeless case. The bit of ground on
which the shilling must have been dropped was, indeed, of limited
extent, not many yards square; but the rough surface, shagged with
tangled tussocks, furzes, heather clumps, and marsh greenery, mocked
at the quest for a thing so small, and she had moreover passed the
black mouths of two or three bog-holes, which might have irretrievably
swallowed it up. Mrs M‘Gurk almost despaired on the spot, though
she groped wildly till she was too stiff for longer stooping. But
when the news of her loss spread, there was no lack of volunteers to
carry on the search. A party of them, including representatives from
nearly all the half-score houses of the hamlet, were to be seen at any
day-lit hour diligently employed. The children especially found it a
fascinating new pastime, and, fired as much by a spirit of emulation as
by several promises of a halfpenny, threw themselves into the pursuit
with ardent zeal and supple joints. Yet the widow drew little or no
comfort from the sight of their energy. She said they might all as
well be looking for it to come tumbling down out of the stars, the way
Crazy Mick was looking for his wife and childer that died on him. Her
neighbours’ other attempts at consolation were equally unsuccessful,
Mrs Doyne’s being perhaps the most complete failure. A person of
invariably dark forebodings, she now suggested that if Mrs M‘Gurk had
gone, she might have been very apt to lose her life. Them long cars
were terrible dangerous things. Or else the playhouse at Ballytrave
might be going on fire, and everybody in it burning to ashes--the Lord
have mercy on them. She was reading of that same happening on the paper
not so long ago. And it would be a deal worse than losing a shilling,
or two shillings, for that matter. Mrs M‘Gurk replied that if some she
could name lost all the sinse they ever had, it would make no great
differ; and strode indignantly away from the group of bucket-filling
women, while Judy Sheridan said apologetically: “The crathur’s annoyed.
Sure her heart was set on gettin’ the jaunt.”
The mishap had necessarily brought the whole scheme to an end. For
as she no longer possessed the price of her return fare, how would
she ever get home again to her cabin on the knock-awn’s side, her
field-fleck, her turf-stack, her few hens and her old kid--all her
worldly wealth? “’Deed then, ma’am, ’twould be like slammin’ a door wid
the handle on the wrong side of you,” Mrs Rafferty reluctantly agreed,
when talking over the disaster with her. Mrs Rafferty was to have had
the kid’s milk during Mrs M‘Gurk’s absence, in return for boiling the
few hens their bit of food, and the arrangement had seemed to her so
advantageous that she regretted its collapse on personal grounds. But
regrets, interested or otherwise, were alike futile; and now on the day
but one before she should have been starting, Mrs M‘Gurk, shaking off
the last twining tendril of withered hope, had gloomily faced the worst.
Having thus summarily mended her fire and snubbed her grand-niece, the
Widow M‘Gurk went out of doors again, in pursuit of a white chicken,
which she had espied astray at a dangerous distance when she was
fetching in her turf. It gave her a long and exasperating chase over
the bog before it would be captured, and as she tramped back heavily
with it under her shawl, she commented to herself that the only thing
she wondered at was how it had contrived not to get lost on her too.
The golden beams that slanted to her from a fiery scaffolding in the
west dazzled her sight, and made her stumble over stocks and stones,
but in her mind she beheld nothing except the eclipse of her bit of
pleasure darkening with its shadow her whole horizon. Yet at this very
moment Minnie Walsh, with sunshine and glee brightening her fair hair
and blue eyes, was watching at the house-door for its unforeseeing
mistress, whom she greeted with: “It’s found, Aunt Bridget; glory be to
goodness, it’s found.”
“Och, don’t be romancin’,” Mrs M‘Gurk said, while the chicken screeched
in her excited grasp. “Who was it?” she shouted jubilantly as she
mounted the steep little footpath.
“Ould Mr Rafferty brought it just after you goin’ out,” Minnie
explained, as they bustled in together; “he got it down below.” And,
sure enough, there on the smoke-darkened deal table gleamed a silver
shilling. Mrs M‘Gurk seized it eagerly, as if grasping a friend’s hand,
and then--dashed it down with a rap on the table again, pressed under
a wrathful thumb. “The ould liar,” she said bitterly, “the ould liar,”
and closed a mouth whose grimness was mutely very eloquent. Minnie
stared at her with a pink and white face of disappointed perplexity.
“Is it lettin’ on to you he was that this is me own shillin’ he’s after
findin’ yonder?” Mrs M‘Gurk said, “and it wid the new pattron of the
Queen on it, in the little quare crown, and 1889 on it as plain as
print, when me own one’s wore that thin an smooth, you’d say she hadn’t
a hair on her head, let alone anythin’ else, and 1861 just dyin’ off
it. It’s fools he was makin’ of you and me.... And what’s this, to
goodness?” she continued, catching sight of another coin on the table,
“a sixpenny bit it is--and where might that come from, if you plase?”
“Sure, Mrs Fahy it was come wid that a little while ago,” Minnie said
with much diffidence; “she said she was just after pickin’ it up on the
very same place where you lost the shillin’, and she had the notion it
might ha’ been two sixpennies you dropped; and says I to her I well
knew it was not. But says she to me it wasn’t hers anyway, and she’d
lave it wid you on chance. So I couldn’t forbid her.”
“The schamin’ thief,” said Mrs M‘Gurk, “and yourself was the quare
_stronseach_. Just let her wait aisy till I tell her what I think of
herself and her impidence and her dirty sixpennies.” In the meanwhile
she relieved her feelings by hurling away the white chicken from
beneath her plaid shawl, and hunting it to its roosting-place among the
rafters of the inner room, whither she followed it.
Minnie stood looking out at the front door. She was cast down by the
repudiation of the shilling, which had once more shattered her hopes
of a travelling companion, and she perceived that her great-aunt
considered her in some degree to blame for an offence whose nature she
did not clearly understand. This made her view with misgivings the
approach of another visitor, who now came quickly up the footpath.
It was no acquaintance of hers, a tall thin girl, with a baby on her
arm, and so poor-looking, even for Lisconnel, that Minnie thought her
errand would be some request. But when a slender brown hand opened to
disclose several dark “coppers,” Minnie was not much surprised to hear:
“I’m after findin’ these four pennies down below, so I thought I had a
right to be bringin’ them up here, in case it was some of the money Mrs
M‘Gurk is after losin’ out of her pocket.”
“It is not,” said Minnie, “by any manner of manes. She lost nothin’
only a shillin’. You might be takin’ them away, if you plase, and thank
you kindly, for it’s annoyed me aunt is.” She tried to intercept the
girl, who slipped past her and laid the money on the table. “Ah, now,
don’t be lavin’ them there,” said Minnie in a whisper, “she’s inside in
the room this minyit, ragin’. Or, at all events, tell her yourself,
the way she won’t be blamin’ me for lettin’ you. For she’s torminted
already wid people bringin’ her the wrong things. I’ll call her out to
you.” The girl, however, said: “Ah! not at all,” and ran swiftly away.
While Minnie stood doubting whether or no to pursue her with the
pennies, Mrs M‘Gurk’s voice came through the inner door: “What talk was
that you had wid Joanna Crehan, and what brought her trapesin’ up here?”
“She’s after findin’--” Minnie began to reply deprecatingly, but a
peremptory injunction cut her short.
“Sling it out to her then, and bid her not throuble herself to be
comin’ next or nigh my place again,” Mrs M‘Gurk shouted, with an
evident desire to be overheard.
Before Minnie could have taken any steps towards executing this
delicate commission, a little gossoon bolted into the house, and the
jingle of something in his hand was hardly needed to apprise her of
his business. “It’s entirely too bad, and so it is,” she grumbled to
herself, slipping out at the door. “I’ll just go and sit the other
side of the hill for a while, till they’ve done pickin’ up pinnies and
shillin’s down below. Plase goodness it ’ill soon be too dark now to
see a stim. But bedad there must ha’ been a quare dale of money dropped
on that one little small bit of ground. I wonder how it happened at
all.”
Minnie, whose imaginative powers were limited, could descry no probable
explanation; but she pondered over it among the furze bushes, until
the September dusk fell so greyly over their fairy golden lamps of
blossoms that she thought she might safely venture back. When she went
indoors she saw her great-aunt standing by the table, on which several
additional coins seemed to have been deposited--more pennies, and,
Minnie thought, another shilling; but the fire-light flickered on them
uncertainly, and the expression of her great-aunt’s countenance was a
warning notice to questioners. Mrs M‘Gurk surveyed them in silence for
a few moments longer, and then she swept them together with the side of
her hand, more contemptuously than if they had been potato skins. “Just
wait, me tight lads,” she said, “and I’ll larn yous to be litterin’ up
me house wid your ould thrash.”