The most noteworthy event in Cocky M‘Cann’s history up to its ninth
year was the accident by which he broke his arm and became for some
weeks an inmate of the Ballygowran Union Infirmary. That this disaster
befell him in the course of a repeatedly-forbidden attempt to mount Mr
Scanlon’s cross mare, and that he himself laid all the blame on the
bosthoons who “were after coverin’ her wid an ojis ould bit of sackin’
as slithery as ice, the way nobody could get e’er a firm holt of her
at all,” were characteristic features easily recognisable by any of
Cocky’s acquaintances. That it _had_ befallen him anyhow seemed a very
serious matter to himself, but still more so to his mother, upon whom
it entailed the grievous necessity of a temporary separation from her
idolised only child. Nevertheless, his removal beyond reach of her
petting and humouring gave him leisure to draw the morals pointed by
his own doing and suffering, and to study various object lessons that
were set before him as he roved convalescent through the wards. But
although these were not wholly without effect, and although he did
return to Ballylogan a few degrees less headstrong than he had left
it, he had unluckily taken up one new notion which tended to obscure
any traces of improvement, and even led his neighbours occasionally to
pronounce him “twyste as ungovernable as he was before.”
This notion was a firm belief that during his sojourn in hospital he
had acquired such skill in medicine and surgery as fully qualified him
to prescribe for any of his ailing fellow-creatures, or to operate
upon them, as circumstances seemed to demand. Of course, if Cocky had
confined himself to entertaining this vainglorious opinion, it would
have been a very harmless vanity, calling for nothing more censorious
from his elders than: “Och, now, isn’t it the quare, ould-fashioned
crathur?” But that was by no means the case. Cocky always had a
perilous propensity for putting his theories into practice, nor did
he forbear to do so here whenever he saw a chance. And in consequence
he became more than ever a terror to adjacent owners of small live
stock, human and otherwise. Mrs M‘Loughlin, for instance, was only
just in the nick of time, by the best of good luck, to prevent him
from administering to her little Lizzie a murky mixture compounded of
varnish, washing-soda, soft soap and tea, which he declared looked and
smelt the very same as the black bottle he used to be seeing Nurse Lane
at the Infirmary curing hundreds and thousands of childer out of, that
was worse with the whooping-cough than Lizzie.
Luck did not always intervene so opportunely. In the case of the
Nolans’ duck circumstances enabled Cocky to carry out his treatment
with more freedom from interference. Having kept his patient under
observation for some time, he had formed the opinion that it was
“waddling as crooked as a ram’s horn,” and furthermore that “the left
leg was bruck on it, and had a right to be plastered up stiff,” in
the manner, as much as possible, of a fractured limb, which he had
watched with interest during his attendance at his medical school; and
the result was that after a day’s anxious search the hapless fowl was
discovered helplessly rooted to a retired spot by the ponderous ball
of mortar and clay in which one leg had been encased. When extricated
with difficulty its lameness appeared to be so much aggravated that
Mrs Nolan was presently obliged to kill it to save its life, at a dead
loss. “The finest young duck,” she protested, “in the parish, and
worth every penny of half-a-crown, if it wasn’t only for disthruction
bein’ done on it by a bould-behaved little tormint, that the polis
ought to be walkin’ off to the lock-up out of dacint people’s way,
if the seargint was good for anythin’ else except playin’ poker in
the barrack-room and not mindin’ his business.” It is fair to note,
on the other hand, how, in Mrs M‘Cann’s opinion, so confident as to
be proclaimed loudly from her own front door: “One-and-six would ha’
bought the last feather on the crathur’s back twyste over, and divil a
much else anybody’d ha’ got off it--a skinny little bag o’ bones, wid
ne’er a penn’orth of dirty male thrown to it ever since it looked out
of the shell.” As for Cocky, in response to all upbraiding he simply
“gave impidence,” and declared with exasperated regret that: “If the
fool of a baste ’ud ha’ kep’ aisy wid its quackin’ and bawlin’ he’d
have had it grandly cured soon enough, for there was nothin’ else ’ud
ha’ been bringin’ anybody next or nigh th’ ould shed wunst in a month
of Sundays.”
The duck’s fate thrilled from end to end of the M‘Canns’ cabin-row,
and the shock would have been more entirely unpleasurable if it had
happened at the expense of some family other than the Nolans. They had
never been very well liked at Ballylogan, especially since a married
daughter and son-in-law had come to live with them. Nobody, indeed, had
much to say against old Jim Nolan, nor the daughters, Katty and Anne,
while the sayings against his wife and the two Gildeas were rather
vague, being seldom more definite than statements which set forth that
Mrs Nolan was a quare one, and that Patsy Gildea had the face of an
ass. Widow Gilletty gave voice to the prevailing sentiment when she
remarked of the Gildea-Nolan alliance that “by the rule of contraries
she’d have expected that Rose to have took up wid some dacinter man
than himself.” Still, this hazy misliking would have in a measure toned
down the neighbours’ disapproval of Cocky’s unsuccessful experiment,
had not their righteous wrath been sustained by a strong sense of the
possibility that he might at any moment seek a subject among their
own belongings, an uneasiness which found relief in anticipating the
curtailment of Cocky’s ill-employed hours of idleness by his attendance
at the Letterowen National School. He had lately begun his education
there in accordance with directions left by his seafaring father,
happily so much to his taste that he really followed the line of least
resistance in carrying them out. Enforced abstinence now whetted his
appetite for knowledge until he was eager to resume his studies almost
before Mrs M‘Cann considered his recovery sufficiently complete. The
daily setting forth of Cocky M‘Cann on an absence of several hours’
duration was viewed with complacency by the eye of Ballylogan. His
mother’s tendency to regret was too trivial an exception to be regarded
as more than, so to speak, a very slight cast in that composite orb.
Before long, however, his schooling was again interrupted, this time
by a local epidemic of influenza, which caused a prolongation of the
Christmas holidays. They were at Ballylogan a dismal season, what with
one thing and another, including, it must be said, the presence of
Cocky, who turned the calamity to his own purposes. His pleasure was to
call upon house-bound sufferers, whom if he could not always persuade
patiently to receive his medicine, he not seldom succeeded in seriously
alarming by the grave nature of his diagnoses. “I declare to goodness,
ma’am,” Mrs Sweeny reported to a crony, “it’s terrified entirely me
poor sister was yesterday evenin’ wid the romancin’ he had out of him.
Sittin’ all of a shake in her chair she was when I come in, and says
I to meself the minyit I laid eyes on her: ‘As sure as anythin’, the
woman’s got the shiverin’ ague;’ but says she to me ’twas just the
turn she was after gettin’ wid the awful talk of Cocky M‘Cann. For
says she he run in and tould her he well knew by the look of her it
was mortal bad she was wid ivery sort of desperit sickness. ‘Bedad,’
says she, ‘I couldn’t make an offer at repaitin’ the quare-soundin’
words he said was ailin’ me; for,’ says she, ‘I never heard the like
of them before--not wid Dr Whyte himself,’ says she. ‘And sure,’ says
she to me, ‘if it was about gettin’ her death she was wid any nathural
description of complaint, that might be no more than the will of God,
and some sinse and raison in it.’ But what all that Cocky was after
tellin’ her was a dale worse than the _new-money_ or the _bluerissy_,
and it gave her the cowld creeps. And to the back of that, there was
some manner of outrageous ould brash he was biddin’ her cure herself
wid--lamp-oil and traicle and salt--I dunno the half of it--and axin’
me she was should she be thryin’ it. So says I to her, if she’d be
said by me, she’d just dhrink a good sup of hot buttermilk-whey, and
let alone meddlin’ wid any of the spalpeen’s prescriptions--set him
up--that were fit to poison the parish. But sure now, ma’am, Mrs M‘Cann
had a right to keep the tormintin’ brat at home, instead of him to be
runnin’ into other people’s houses, and frightenin’ them out of their
misfortnit minds.” To whom Julia Hogan replied: “Och, Mrs M‘Cann is it?
Sure she’s that foolish about him, it’s my belief she consaits he’s the
great docther entirely. If he bid her take and ait the ashes off the
hearth she’d be apt to go do it; and as for him minding anythin’ she
said, she might all as well be spakin’ to the sparras hoppin’ in the
hedges.”
Several other neighbours were visited with similar warnings and advice,
which Cocky’s mother was in truth quite powerless to prohibit. But
before school opened again his attention was diverted from the health
of Ballylogan by a momentous occurrence. It was a piece of great luck,
nothing less than his picking up on the road an envelope containing a
five-pound note. The white cover had not a stroke of writing on it,
and the note, its sole contents, looked speckless too, as if little
handled. Now, however, it was subjected to much fingering and minute
scrutiny by a selection of the M‘Canns’ acquaintances, losing under the
process some of its unsullied crispness, while its genuine character as
a Bank of Ireland note, worth a twelve months’ rent and more, seemed
to be thereby only the firmlier established. Opinion was far less
decided about the probable way in which it had come to be so improbably
lying on the path under O’Carroll’s fence, just at the gap where the
Ballylogan children climb up and down to and from school. The most
opposite views, again, were held as to what Mrs M‘Cann should do with
this treasure-trove. They ranged from those of the rigid moralist who
laid down the stern law that “she had a right to go straight off and
lave it wid the polis or Father Mooney,” to the reckless declaration
that she would be “the biggest fool ever walked if she didn’t spind
ivery pinny of it just as she pleased.” In the end she compromised
the matter by determining to put it up safely until she could consult
Himself, otherwise Bernard M‘Cann, who was expected home from a voyage
in a few weeks’ time.
This arrangement met with, on the whole, approval, not being opposed
even by Cocky, who was actually almost slightly over-awed by the
magnitude of his own achievement. The possibility of personally
consuming such vast wealth did not occur to his wildest imagination,
and he readily assented to the bestowal of the precious envelope in a
recondite nook. But he did make his find a pretext for demanding more
than usually frequent pennies from his mother. “Just you wait, then,
till I come home wid the next pounds-and-pounds note I get, me good
woman,” he would retort at any demur. And he so often heard laudatory
comments upon “the cuteness of the crathur, mind you, that had the
sinse to know it was somethin’ val’able in place of to be tearin it
up the way the other childer’d ha’ been apt to do,” that, what with
conceit of wisdom, and exultance in many extra sugar-sticks, his
elation waxed apace. In fact, his spirit might at this time have been
augured strutting with very appropriate gait towards an imminent fall.
As for Mrs M‘Cann, the keen edge of her pleasure at their good luck was
prematurely turned by a misfortune commonplace enough--too common--in
the shape of a bad toothache which presently attacked her. Upon its
advent all her joy in the prospect of riches vanished away with the
promptitude which occasionally disposes us to wonder that happiness,
perpetually suspended at the mercy of any one among a myriad nerve
threads, should ever attain to even the briefest span of existence.
Being a very robust person, she naturally took a despondent view of her
case, and when the malady had tormented her for a night and a day she
lost hope and temper. She morosely repelled the neighbours’ sympathy,
and even Cocky found his proffers of infallible remedies, extraction
included, received with testy curtness, a novel and disconcerting
experience, which made him all the more anxious that a state of things
so uncongenial should come to a speedy end. He was far from pleased at
being summarily told to run off wid himself and lave moidherin’ a body
gabbin’ about what they done in the Infirmary; ’twas no manner of use,
and the cowld pitaties ’ud do plinty well enough for the dinner; _she_
didn’t want anythin’ at all, and couldn’t be bothered warmin’ them up.
It was on his way to fetch a jug of water from the public pump, about
sunset, that Cocky fell in with Mrs Gildea, going the same errand.
Chiefly out of perversity, he held this unpopular person in somewhat
high esteem, and treated her to more civility than he generally
bestowed upon the other neighbours. Mrs Gildea had just then been
having words with her husband, who was sitting, head in hands, on a tub
at her father’s door. Her words had been to the effect that if there
was a bigger ould slouch in the country than himself, she didn’t know
where he look for him. Tom Gildea, whose several questionable qualities
did not, to do him justice, comprise a huffy temper, had merely
replied: “The county be choked. Sure what chance has a man to be doin’
anythin’ in the likes of this little ould glory-hole? Onless he’d the
luck of the young rapscallion there I see runnin’ out of Mrs M‘Cann’s
house, that’s after pickin’ up a fortin off the road, would ha’ took
the two of us over to the States you do be ravin’ about.” To which his
wife had rejoined, with acrimony: “Bedad, then, it’s one while a lazy
divil like you’d be pickin’ up e’er a fortin in the States, or any
place else.”
But when, by-and-by, not many yards away, she overtook Cocky M‘Cann at
the pump, her manner and speech were bland and suave. Mrs M‘Cann, she
said to him, was a very lucky woman to own a sinsible, handy boy, that
would be fetchin’ her in her jugs of wather, let alone findin’ her a
pocketful of money, and handin’ her ivery pinny of it to keep, which
was more than many a one would ha’ done. This flattery was especially
refreshing to Cocky, who had missed his usual household affluence of
it, and he responded by pumping for Mrs Gildea so vigourously that her
jug suddenly overflowed into her shoes. “Och, bad luck to you--to the
ould spout of it that’s quare,” she said, with a jump backwards. “But
sure there’s no harm meant or done. Is it wetted you are, sonny dear?
Well, now, you’re a good boy, and the next time you get anythin’ on the
road, I only hope you’ll be bringin’ it in to me. I might be chance
have a load of sweeties to swap for it.”
“There mightn’t ever be anythin’ more on the road again,” Cocky said,
discreetly avoiding a committal of himself to this barter.
“Ah, sure it’s just jokin’ I am,” said Mrs Gildea, “for, of coorse,
you’d be a-bringin’ whatever it was home to your mammy, to put up
somewhere safe, the way she’s after doin’ wid the five-pound note, I’ll
be bound.”
“We have so,” said Cocky.
“I wouldn’t suppose she’d be apt to be tellin’ _you_, now, what place
she’s keepin’ it in,” said Mrs Gildea. “She’d liefer not, for fear
you’d be meddlin’ wid it, and losin’ it on her.”
“Oh, wouldn’t she not?” said Cocky. “When only for me she’d never ha’
thought of the little ould black tay-caddy in the houle in the wall,
back of the dresser, by the fut of the bed, that’s a dale the best
place to be keepin’ it in.”
“Why, tubbe sure, and so it is. Yourself was the cute one to be
thinkin’ of it. Back of the dresser, be the fut of the bed--so that’s
where she has it, and a very handy, safe place entirely. You needn’t be
lettin’ on to her that you was tellin’ me; not that I’d be passing any
remarks about it, no fear. It’s nothin’ to me where other people do be
keepin’ their ould tay-caddies. And what’ll your poor mammy do widout
you at all, to be runnin’ her messages for her, when you’re prisintly
goin’ back again to the school?”
“To-morra I’m goin’,” said Cocky. “But she’s well able to be fetching
the wathur and everythin’ herself, only she’s bad these two days wid
the toothache, and as cross as the cats. Not a bit of her would thry
the cowld starch poultice I bid her, or I daresay she’d be well agin
now. But she might be better in the mornin’.”
On the contrary, however, in the morning Mrs M‘Cann was worse, or at
anyrate looked so, because her face had swelled all on one side; “as
big as two sizeable heads of cabbage,” Cocky assured Mrs Gildea, whom
he found waiting for him when he passed her door on his way back from
the pump, before breakfast, with a can of water. At this time Cocky
was under some concern about his mother’s affliction, and this from
fairly disinterested motives, as his absence all day at school would
make her doleful and irascible mood a matter of small importance to
himself personally. His wish for her relief was, therefore, mainly not
a self-regarding sentiment, though he did in some measure consider the
possible effect upon the replenishing of his dinner-basket.
“The face of her swelled up awful, and got ne’er a wink of sleep the
whole night?” Mrs Gildea repeated upon hearing these symptoms. “Deed
now, the poor woman’s to be pitied. But look here, sonny, I’ve got a
little drop of stuff here, you might be givin’ her, would make her
sleep grand, and do her all the benefit ever was.” She showed, from
beneath her shawl, a hand holding a small, nearly empty bottle. “It
always sent me poor father-in-law off like a top, when he was bad a
couple of years ago, every time he took it; you might as well ha’ been
offerin’ to wake up a one of the hearth-stones as him, ten minyits
after he’d had his dose of it. Little enough of it he left behind him;
but there’s somethin’ better than a small-sized spoonful in the bottle
yet, and that ’ud do her finely. So just bring it home to her, there’s
a good boy, and bid her dhrink it straight off, the way she may git
somethin’ you may call a sleep, and as like as not be quit of the ugly
toothache agin she wakes.”
“There wouldn’t be an atom of use biddin’ her take it,” said Cocky,
“or anythin’ else there wouldn’t. I tould her of plinty of things to
cure herself wid, but she won’t touch e’er a one of them. As headstrong
as can be she is over it. She’s past _my_ conthrol,” Cocky asserted,
solemnly, adopting a somewhat familiar phrase, not without enjoyment of
it. “So you may be keepin’ the little ould bottle.” He was not quite
sure whether he regretted or rejoiced to have this reason for rejecting
Mrs Gildea’s offer. Certainly he did wish for his mother’s cure; but
that it should be wrought by another person’s advice and assistance,
when his own was disregarded and disparaged, would have seemed a very
undesirable fulfilment of his desire. On the whole, probably, he was
glad of the excuse. But Mrs Gildea persisted. “Sure people do often
be conthrairy like in themselves when they’re sick,” said she. “It’s
humourin’ them one must be in a way. Wouldn’t she be takin’ e’er a sup
of tay now?”
“And what else would I be fetchin’ the wather for if it wasn’t to boil
the kettle?” said Cocky. “She says a hot sup might be apt to do her
good.”
“Well, thin, I’ll tell you how you could conthrive. Just git her
attintion disthracted a bit, and slip what’s in the bottle, body and
bones, into her cup, when she isn’t lookin’. Ne’er a taste she’ll get
off it in the strong tay, but drink it down iligant unbeknownst, if
you do the way I bid you, like a clever boy. And when you run home
this evenin’ you’ll find she’s after sleepin’ beautiful all the while
you were away, and sorra the talk of any more toothache,” Mrs Gildea
predicted, holding out the little bottle.
Cocky stood irresolute. The plan had an attractive aroma of practical
joking, while the promise of a mother once more cheerful and laudatory
was undeniably alluring; but the conditions galled his professional
pride.
“And you needn’t ever be lettin’ on I gave it to you, or anything about
it,” Mrs Gildea continued, “for very belike she might be mad wid
us.” This hint perceptibly strengthened Cocky’s inclination towards
compliance, for it showed that she did not propose to claim any credit
from the cure, which seemed to him some amends for being unable to do
so himself. Yet his jealous dread of a rival was a stubborn thing,
and he hesitated still. Perhaps it would ultimately have prevailed
with him, had not little Tim Daly happened just then to pass, pouring
his soul, in rapt enjoyment, through a newly-acquired penny whistle.
Tim’s face, always of a rather comic full-moon pattern, was for the
time being a caricature, because he had blown “the swoln cheek of a
trumpeter;” and the sight of the grotesque profile somehow recalled
to Cocky his mother’s visage as he had last beheld it, distorted and
woebegone. Whereupon he suddenly extended his hand, saying, “Gimme.”
He had resolved, not without an effort of difficult virtue, to try Mrs
Gildea’s remedy.
He was quite successful in administering it surreptitiously. By the
simple device of yelling: “Och, look at what’s goin’ up the road!” he
made himself an opportunity for tilting the contents of the little
bottle into his mother’s just-poured-out cup. It suited his purpose
all the better that, in her indignation at what appeared to her his
ill-timed pleasantry, she drank up her drugged tea with hurried and
heedless gulps. Even so she alarmed him once by declaring that she
“got an ugly onnathural sort of flaviour off it.” However, she
accounted for this by supposing herself to have “lost the right taste
of her mouth wid the tormentin’ cowld she had in her unlucky teeth;”
and though she left some spoonfuls in her cup, Cocky opined that she
had swallowed enough to test the efficacy of those dark-trickling
drops. His opinion was confirmed when he soon saw her begin to exhibit
unmistakable signs of drowsiness, and heard her announce that “the two
eyes of her were sinkin’ into her head,” and that as soon as he had run
off to school, “she’d lie herself down on the bed to try could she get
the chance of a sleep.” So he sugared his slices of bread with a lavish
hand, unreproved, and started for Letterowen in a sanguine frame of
mind.
Not long after his departure, Mrs Gildea knocked at the M‘Canns’ door.
She knocked pretty loudly, and receiving no answer, stepped in, and
rapped loudlier on the table. Then she coughed violently, and kicked a
can standing on the floor so as to cause a sharp clatter. But finally,
as the slumber whose depths she was gauging satisfactorily stood all
these cautious trials, she stole swiftly up to the dresser, with its
dangling jugs, and began a rapid groping behind it. “At the fut of
the bed,” she was thinking to herself, “Back of the dresser, in a
little ould tay-caddy.” But when in a few minutes she slipped quietly
out again, nobody could have guessed the presence of a small, black
japanned box hidden away under her shawl.
This was quite early in the day, a couple of hours at least before the
sluggard midsummer sun had attained his noon; but though the dusk had
spread abroad out of every corner by the time that Mrs M‘Cann had any
more visitors, they found her still sleeping heavily. They were her
near neighbours, Maggie Daly, and Anne Hunt, and Widow Kennan, who had
come with such interesting news to tell and questions to ask that they
shrilled and shook her into some sort of wakefulness after a while. But
she remained so stupid and dazed that she took in at first only a small
portion of the story they were relating. It was in substance that the
two Gildeas had suddenly made a flitting, to the best of everybody’s
belief, for good and all. Tom Gildea had been seen setting off with
himself and a bundle about sunrise that morning, and the beholders had
assumed that he was merely going on the _shaughraun_, according to
his custom, for a day or two. Andy Cole, the letter-carrier, however,
reported that about twelve o’clock he had met Mrs Gildea up beyond
Dunathy tramping towards Oughterone, and likewise laden with a large
bundle; which had suggested a different significance for the movements
of the pair. “So we was wonderin’, ma’am,” said Anne Hunt to Mrs
M‘Cann, “did Mrs Gildea herself happen to tell you they were quittin’
when you was talkin’ to her this mornin’, for the Nolans let on she
niver said a word to them of intendin’ any such a thing.”
“Is it Mrs Gildea?” Mrs M‘Cann replied perplexedly. “I never seen sight
nor light of her this day at all, let alone spakin’ to her.”
“Och, woman alive, is it in your sinses you are at all? Didn’t meself
and Mrs Kennan here see her comin’ out of your door this mornin’, wid
our own eyes, and we hangin’ up clothes?”
“Ay, bedad, did we,” corroborated Widow Kennan. “It was no great while
after Cocky goin’ to school. Sure the woman’s not rightly in her
sinses.”
“I dunno about thim,” Mrs M‘Cann said in bewilderment. “But if anybody
come in, I wasn’t mindin’ them. Ever since I took me cup of tay at
breakfast time me head’s swimmin’ off me shoulders, and ten strong men
couldn’t hould me eyes open. Ugly tay it was as ever I tasted.”
Mrs Daly pounced swiftly upon the teacup, which was still standing on
the table. “Goodness be wid us!” she exclaimed in continuation of a
prolonged sniff, “it’s lodnum she’s after takin’--enough to poison the
parish. Small blame to her to be bothered and stupid; the only wonder
is that the life’s left in her at all. Stand up on your feet, ma’am,
this minyit, and keep stirrin’ about, for it’s lost you are if you fall
off asleep agin. Sure, now, maybe the toothache had you distracted, but
’twas an awful thing to go take lodnum.”
“Sorra the sup I took,” Mrs M‘Cann said, standing up dizzily. “Glad of
it I’d ha’ been, but I hadn’t got a drop to me name.”
“Smell it, ma’am, smell it,” Mrs Daly said, handing the cup round
appealingly, and her companions both said, with confirmatory
inhalations: “Lodnum it is.”
“And some other stuff along wid it, I’m thinkin’,” Mrs Daly said after
further examination. “If it wasn’t herself, it was that Cocky at his
thricks agin, you may safely depind.”
“The poor child wouldn’t do such a thing,” his mother said feebly, a
protest which was not considered to call for notice.
“Where’d he get it?” Anne Hunt inquired more pertinently.
“I seen him colloguin’ wid Mrs Gildea this mornin’ early,” Widow Kennan
suggested, “outside of her door.”
“Then, mark my words, it was that one gave it to him,” said Mrs Daly,
“and put it into his head to be poisonin’ his poor mother’s cup of tay
wid it. She done it a-purpose, very belike, thinkin’ to have the poor
woman sleepin’ stupid if anybody come in for to ransack the house on
her, and she all alone in it by herself--the very way it happint. I’ll
bet you anythin’ Tom Gildea and she had it settled up between them,”
Mrs Daly went on, skipping from conclusion to conclusion as nimbly as a
series of dexterously-made ducks and drakes. “To be takin’ off out of
this to-day, wid whatever she was after grabbin’. A five-pound note,
ma’am, she’d find oncommonly handy, and you lyin’ there as good as a
block of wood all the while she was ferretin’ about here.”
“The five-pound note--och, to goodness, woman, don’t say so,” Mrs
M‘Cann said, pierced with dread through all her drowsiness. “Sure she
doesn’t know where I’m keepin’ it.”
“She’d get that aisy enough out of Cocky,” said Mrs Daly; “and be the
same token, here he is himself,” she added, moving quickly towards the
door.
So it befell Cocky, as he bolted headlong over his dusky threshold,
to find himself obstructed by a matronly form, and sternly addressed:
“Och, you _bould_ boy! What for did you be poisonin’ your poor mammy
wid lodnum?” The object with which Mrs Daly had adopted this attitude
and tone was completely gained by the result, for Cocky, so much taken
aback that he thought only of self-defence, replied incriminatingly:
“Git out of my road. It was nothin’ but a weeny tint out of a little
bottle Mrs Gildea gave me to make her get a wink of sleep.”
Mrs Daly wheeled round triumphant upon her gossips: “What did I tell
yous? Ay, to be sure, she had her sleepin’ rael convanient, while she
herself was layin’ hands on your fine five-pound note.”
“Y’ ould gaby,” said Cocky, recovering his confidence. “Do you imagine
or suppose I’d ha’ tould her we had it in the tay-caddy if I didn’t
know me mother kep’ the kay in her pocket, that nobody can git at, or
else yourself’d be as apt as any.” But he was dismayed by a burst of
derisive laughter. “Och, goodness pity the crathur,” said Widow Kennan.
“What differ does he think a kay makes in or out of a pocket when
there’s nothin’ to hinder any person grabbin’ the little box and away
wid it?”
And through all the other voices struck one more thrilling as Mrs
M‘Cann, who had been groping behind the dresser, rose from her knees
with a piercing wail: “Och, wirrasthrew, it’s gone sure enough--there’s
the empty place it was in. She’s took it while I was dead asleep, and
we’ll niver set eyes on it agin.”
They never have from that good day to this. The loss, with its
attendant circumstances, was intensely mortifying to Cocky M‘Cann,
and put him quite out of conceit with a medical career. Perhaps the
most unpalatable draught in his cup of afflictions was the recital
which he could not always avoid hearing his mother give to sympathetic
neighbours; and the bitterest drops were always at the bottom, for she
invariably wound up the narrative with: “But what I think baddest of
was her makin’ a fool that way of the innicent child.”