The voyager up Lough Orren, having passed through the straits where
it is cut nearly in two by the shears of opposing hills, will see on
ahead a snowy gleam, which grows on his sight from what might be a
floating lily, a gull’s wing, a skiff’s sail, into the white front of
the MacNees’ little house. It stands on a steep bank overlooking the
lough, whence its reflection often strikes back sharp and clear, for
this green-rimmed bowl of fair water is seldom a flawed mirror. Jim
Moriarty had not been long at Beltranagh before he learned to welcome
the white fleck when it came into view as he made his way towards
it by boat or on foot. These MacNees were distant cousins of the
Moriartys, and for all an intervening league, their nearest neighbours,
so lopsided visiting terms were maintained between the two families.
That is to say, the Moriartys occasionally called upon the MacNees,
who did not return their visits. It had long been a joke among them to
apologise and account for this by declaring that the lough was double
the length going backwards. Andy had more recently begun to add, with
significance, to his versions of the jest: “Sure it knows who it does
be separatin’ us from, isn’t that the raison, Lizzie?” But Lizzie
had never yet “let on” that she heard him. It was true enough that
the MacNees’s situation seemed almost more out-of-the-way than their
friends’, considering the disabilities of the household: Mrs MacNee, an
elderly little widow woman, with her two daughters, Maria an invalid,
and Lizzie, whom her sister half wistfully called “as cogglesome
about settin’ out to go anywheres when she got the chance as if every
fut she put down would be treadin’ on red-hot pitaties.” Accordingly
they were rarely to be met abroad. Andy and Biddy were rowing over
to them one fine Sunday afternoon when Biddy invited Jim to join the
party, mainly that it might be graced by his fine Mallow tweed suit,
but also to disoblige Andy, with whom she was temporarily affronted,
and who she well knew would have preferred his brother’s room. Jim,
on his part, regretfully consented, lest they should “think too bad”
of his refusal. But the expedition after all proved more agreeable
than he could have by any means expected; he was afflicted much less
than usual with gawky dumbness, and in fact found it so possible to
converse with Mrs MacNee that he regarded the visit as a rare social
success. This encouraged him to repeat it, and he presently acquired a
habit of doing so at short intervals. Sometimes he went with Andy and
Biddy, but more often with Jack to supplement his one-armed rowing;
or he tramped alone round by the lough side, a longer and slower
route. Soon, as he grew quite at his ease in the society of the quiet,
good-natured sisters, their kitchen, being warm and weather tight,
with a transfiguring illumination of fire-light shaken over it, seemed
to him a far pleasanter living-room than his own at Beltranagh, which
had several of the features of a sea-cave. Still, his original and
permanent attraction was old Mrs MacNee in her frilled white cap and
large-plaided little shawl, with her last-generation reminiscences, and
her assumption, not displeasing to his consciousness of approaching
thirty, that he had not yet ceased to be merely a youth.
Now nobody could be long in Mrs MacNee’s company without becoming
aware of her three ruling passions. These might be summed up as a
love, a fear, and a hate, of which the respective objects were her
son, ghosts, and spiders. None of these emotions existed unmixed with
another. As no one holds any such possessions in fee simple, she had
to pay a heavy fine of fear for her interest in Paddy, all the heavier
on account of his absence in terribly far-off States. Fear, again,
mingled with her abhorrence of the long-legged spinners, who, hideously
sprawling, let themselves down by sudden threads from the rafters “on
top of a body’s cap” maybe, or glanced in hobgoblin gallops over wall
and floor. Nor could she truthfully have denied, though she dared not
avow, a mortal antipathy to those ghostly enemies, whose presence,
less frankly manifested, was scarcely a whit more doubtful, and more
dreadful by far. She found it a solace to discourse about these things
to a sympathetic hearer, and such a one she had in Jim Moriarty. With
respect to Paddy and the ghosts he was nothing more. All he could
do was to listen appreciatively while she expatiated on the various
virtues of her son, or related how the lough and its shores had come
to be infested with phantoms of an ill-omened sort. But in the matter
of the spiders he was able to lend more practical assistance, and it
became his custom to spend part of each visit in pursuing them, with
the help of a heather-tipped oar-handle, to their most obscure and
recondite recesses. Lizzie doubted whether “he mightn’t as well be
offerin’ to hunt the clouds off the sky as them crathurs that kep’ on
patchin’ up their old webs out of nothin’ at all;” and Maria sometimes
complained that he stirred up the dust to fly about choking them; but
as the chase seemed a satisfaction to Mrs MacNee, it was persevered in
until at length it brought disaster.
One evening after tea Jim was flourishing his mop with especial
energy on the track of a huge spider, which his hostess had descried
“leggin’ it up the wall beside the turf-bin, with horns on it’s
hijjis head the len’th of your arm and as black and hairy in itself
as the divil’s hind-foot.” This prodigious object was elusively swift
in its movements, and dodged about for a long while among the rafters
with tantalising disappearances and reappearances, until at last Jim,
making a desperate lunge, tripped over a stool and brought down his
weapon with much violence on the jingling dresser. It stood so thick
with crockery that the resulting damage seemed strangely slight, being
limited to the fracture of a single cup. Only Jim and Lizzie witnessed
the accident, Mrs MacNee having stepped into the other room bringing
tea for Maria, who was laid up with asthma. “That’s contrary now,” said
Lizzie. “Of course nothin’ would suit it but to be the one our Paddy
gave me mother just before he quit, and that she sets the greatest
store by at all.”
“Ay, ay, ay, it’s too bad altogether,” Jim said, standing in large
disconcertion, and looking down on the small pink-and-white victim of
his clumsiness.
“The worst of it is,” said Lizzie, “that she’ll be sure to think
it’s a sign of somethin’ happenin’ him, and fretting herself into
fiddlestrings she’ll be till we hear from him agin.”
“I wonder now would there be e’er a chance I could match it anywhere,”
Jim said, ruefully examining the pink-banded cup with the piece out of
its side. “It’s not too oncommon a pattron.”
“It wouldn’t be the same thing to her as Paddy’s one, even so,” said
Lizzie.
“Suppose it happened she didn’t know the differ,” said Jim.
“To be sure if I kep’ the right side turned out she might maybe never
notice it till you thried for the other,” said Lizzie.
“Do then, like a jewel,” said Jim.
“It might be the best plan,” said Lizzie. “For I well know she’d have
us all bothered hearin’ banshees, and dreamin’ ugly dreams, and sayin’
it was a sign of troubles. And you might have a good chance of matchin’
it at the fair there is to-morrow or next day down below.”
“I will so,” said Jim.
Thus the conspiracy was hatched, with what seemed a fair prospect of
success. But the Fowl of Fortune never will sit upon only a single egg;
and it seldom happens that at least one of the brood does not turn out
an unchancy bird.
On the next day was Haganstown Fair, at which six of the Moriarty sheep
off the mountainy lands were to be sold. Andy had intended to drive
them over with the help of Garry the collie and Jack; but at the early
breakfast Jim proposed to come instead of the latter. He said it was
because the young chap had a heavy cold on him to be going out under
the wet, and Andy said (aside to Biddy) it was because the big ass
did be always stuffin’ himself wherever he wasn’t wanted; but neither
explanation was strictly true. And at the Fair the first acquaintance
Jim fell in with was Lizzie MacNee, who for a wonder had been persuaded
to accept a seat on the Duffs’ side-car. The meeting seemed a lucky
event, as they both hoped that the right teacup might be found in time
for Lizzie to carry it home with her. “And that,” said Lizzie, “would
be a great thing; for she’s apt enough to take the notion of usin’ it
at the party to-morra night, and then where’d we be?” To-morrow was
no less an occasion than Shrove Tuesday, which the MacNees were to
celebrate with friends to tea. But the Duffs were in a hurry home out
of the rain, and Lizzie had to go before the china-hunt had well begun.
“I’ll get it sure enough yet, no fear,” Jim prophesied at parting.
“’Twill be on one of them stalls. And I brought the broken bit along,
the way I mightn’t be mistook in the colour.” He showed her, with
some pride at his own providence, the pink-and-white fragment which
protruded from a pocket of his best coat.
“Don’t be late bringin’ it over to-morra,” said Lizzie. “Of course
Biddy and little Jack ’ill be comin’ along--and Andy, maybe, that’s too
much took up wid his ould sheep to come and spake a word to anybody.”
Andy, standing black-browed at a little distance, looked as if any
words he might see fit to speak would be far from agreeable. He had
watched the meeting of Lizzie with Jim, and through the voluble
bargaining of old Joe Megarity had overheard snatches of their
conversation, which he thought betokened some secret understanding
between them. His impression when setting out had been that Jim was
coming to keep an eye on the sale of the sheep, lest he should be
defrauded of the profits in which he owned so large a share. But now a
different motive suggested itself, and shrivelled up the more sordid
suspicion as a wave of flame might scorch up a muddy little puddle.
As the Duffs’ car drove off he withdrew scowlingly into the seclusion
of a dense crowd, and for the remainder of the Fair evaded notice so
completely that Jim had to return alone.