'Oul' Shan the Pote,' as the townsfolk called him, was a descendant
in the direct male line of Shan O'Neill, the great rebel of Queen
Elizabeth's day. He had a fine pedigree, but little else; for of all
the possessions of his forefathers, all that remained to him was an
old battered, silver punch-ladle and a silver-mounted dirk with a
cairngorm in the hilt of it, which the envious-minded amongst his
neighbors declared to be a bit of yellow glass. At such insinuations
Shan used to wax mightily indignant, showing that he still retained
his pride of birth; but on ordinary occasions that feeling was
entirely subordinate in him to two others--his belief in his own
genius as a poet, and his overflowing love for 'me daughter Kathleen,
what's in Australey, the crathur.'
His actual position in the social scale did not quite coincide with
his high ancestry and literary pretensions. He was a stone-cutter by
trade, and had been for some years at one time in his life in my
grandfather's service as odd man. With the partisanship of the Irish
peasant, he thought that the latter circumstance made the family in
general, and me in particular, his peculiar property, and used to
treat us accordingly. When he was a young man, and the sap was still
effervescent in him, he had been in the habit of going an occasional
'tear;' and once my grandmother, seeing the recumbent form of a man
very drunk sleeping peacefully in the middle of the road in front of
the house, and having a vision of carts jolting over him, called in
the police to remove him to the lock-up. In the morning it turned
out, much to her dismay, that the man she had thus given into custody
was Shan, whom she was called upon to go and bail out again. That
was the standing joke of his life. Whenever he saw her in his latter
days he used to say, 'Ah, now, misthress dear, don't be ang-ery an'
go an' give poor oul' Shan up to the polis, bad scran to thim,' and
then he cackled vehemently at his own wit.
The last time I saw him was when I was a schoolboy of fifteen home
for the holidays. He was then a little thin old man with deep
wrinkles in his face, and long wispy gray hair that used to blow
round his face in a dishevelled halo. I can see him now ambling
along the street of the little town with his eyes fixed straight in
front of him, with the inward gaze of the poet and the dreamer;
'moonin' down the road like a jackass wid a carrot in front of his
nose,' his persecutors, the street boys, used to call it.
When he was more than usually elated by the recent appearance of some
piece of doggerel of his in the poet's corner of the local rag, he
would be heard crooning over to himself with a curious kind of
sing-song lilt the words of his great poem, that had made his local
reputation,--
'Oh, the banks an' braes o' wild Kilcross,
Where the blue-bells blow
An' the heath an' fern an' soft green moss
In the springtime grow,
Where the lads an' lasses take their play
Of a Sunday morn,
An' the blackbirds sing the livelong day
In the rustlin' corn.'
When I used to point out to him that 'the rustlin' corn' was a pure
myth of his imagination, as the cliffs of 'wild Kilcross' were as
bleak a place as you would find in 'a month of Sundays,' and that not
a blade grew anywhere within a mile of them, he used to reply, 'Ah!
whisht now, can't ye? If them wans haven't got the sinse to plant a
lock ov oats, is it me as ye'd blame for it? Ahl that the likes av
thim has a mind for is shpuds.'
But his favorite haunt where I could always find him at need was in
the churchyard under the shadow of the square, ugly tower of the
barn-like church, amongst 'the beautiful uncut hair of graves.' At
that time he did very little work, and used to spend the greater part
of his day there stringing rhymes together, while he renewed the
inscriptions upon the old weather-beaten stones, and made them once
more legible; for the lapse of time and lichen-growth make those
memorials of us in stone hardly more enduring than human life itself.
There I used to seek him out with offerings of snuff, to get him to
tell me those stories of the ancient grandeur of his race which I
loved to hear; for youth has always a tinge of snobbishness, which is
at the root of that hero-worship common to all children.
But Shan's mind was fixed on other things. He would parry my
inquiries by bringing out a roll of old newspaper cuttings, which he
always carried about with him, and use me as an audience for the lack
of a better, spreading the precious morsels out on the flat tombstone
on which we were sitting, and holding the fluttering paper down with
a thumb on each corner as he read them aloud, although he knew every
word by heart. Or he would say, as he chipped away at his labor of
love with deft strokes of the hammer on the head of his chisel,--
'Tell ye how I knew that oul' ladle really belonged to the great Shan
O'Neill, is it? Well, this is the way ov it, d'ye see? Min' the
shparks, sonny, or they'll be fly in' in yer eye. While I'm thinkin'
ov it, did I iver tell ye the shtory of the road Kathleen an' yours
kim to be thegither. It was whin yous was a wee fellah, a weeshan
roun' roll of fat in yer perambulator, an' ye kim down to the big
meady wan day whin they was puttin' in a shtack of hay; I mind it was
the year afore I got the toss off of the cart of hay, an' tuk harrum
in me innards, an' I was niver the same man afther; an' ahl the
quality from the big house was there havin' a picnic, an' Kathleen
she was a bit slip ov a gurl ov thirteen at the time, an' she kim to
help carry the tay. Well, yous an' she made great frien's, an' ye
rouled in the hay an' covered aich other up till many's the time ye
were shtuck be the forkers ahl but. An' whin they tuk yous home in
the evenin', Kathleen she started to roar an' to cry afther yous, an'
there was no houlin' her; we thried ahl we knew to quiet her, but
deil a hate wud she quit, an' her mother was fair moidhered wid her,
an' at last she ups an' takes her in unner her shawl, an' walks her
ivery fut ov the road up to the big house, an' lan's her in there at
ten o'clock ov night, an' she ups an' says, says she, to the
misthress, as bowl' as ye plaze, "Mam," says she, "ye've made
Kathleen here that conthrairy, yous an' that babby ov yours, that
there's no houlin' her. I'm fair broke wid her, so I am. So I've
brought her up till ye, an' ye must just kape her, for I can do
nothin' wid her." An' the misthress she laughs an' says, says she,
"Well, if I must, Biddy, I shuppose I must. Must is a harrud
worrud," says she; an' so Kathleen she shtops from that day out in
the house an' luks afther yous. I min' well she used to wheel ye in
the perambulator, an' many's the time she shpilt ye in the shtreet,
but devil a hate did yous care, ye just rouled in the gutter, an'
laughed till she picked yous up agin. An' she shtayed as long as
yous was there,--she was terrible fond ov yous; it bet ahl iver I
see. But when yous was eight year oul', an' she was goin' on near
han' twinty, an' a fine han'some soople lass she was too, glory be!
They tuk an' sint yous away to school in England, an' she was that
lonesome afther yous she was neither to houl' nor to bind, an' she
just tuk a notion, an' she ups an' she emigrates to Australey. An'
she was there in service for foor year, an' she wint wid wan and wid
another, an' no wunner, for she was the purtiest gurl in the foor
baronies, an' at last she marries a squatter-fellah out there, an'
now I hear tell she has a grand carriage an' servants galore to her
back. But she doesn't forgit her oul' daddy, she's not the wan to go
for to do that; but she sinds me enough ivery month to kape me at me
aise like a lord wid lashins ov tobaccy, an' shnuff, an' tay, an'
shugar. But ahl the time she thinks a power ov yous till this minit,
more be a dale, I'm thinkin', than ov her oul' man himself, as she
calls him. Many's the time she's axed me to go out till her, but I
wouldn't lave the oul' place even for her; I'll lay me bones, plaze
God, where I spint me youth. May the saints purtect her, and may her
children stan' by her as she has stud be her oul' father an' mother.'
At this point in the story the old man always found it necessary to
see in which direction the clouds were blowing, and I took diligently
to making out the rest of the inscription upon which he was at work.
He told his story all in a breath, and always in the same words, as a
parrot might, from long habitude. It was the old story of Irish
emigration. Sons and daughters, not content with a fare of potatoes
and tea and a futureless outlook at home, drift off one by one as
they grow up to different parts of America and Australia; there they
form new ties, and forget the old folks at home and all they owe
them. In this case one of the daughters did not forget her debt;
and, as rarely happens in this world, it was the most prosperous and
best beloved of all who was thus mindful of her old parents and
supported them in their age.
It was seven years before I revisited the sleepy little town, and I
had heard nothing of old Shan for a long time. The day after my
arrival I went for a drive on a hired car; the Jarvey was the same
old character that I remembered from my youth up, but I had outgrown
his failing memory; the mare was the same old screw, only a little
grayer and scraggier than of old. She was painfully climbing the
steep hill just outside the town, when she suddenly stopped in the
middle and turned round her head to look at us.
'Ah, luk at that now. She says she's tired, the crathur, an' wud
like a rist,' cried her compassionate driver with the familiarity of
a privileged class. 'Shure yous is in no hurry. What 'ud ail ye?'
and he got down and put a stone behind the wheel to keep the car in
position, while we surveyed the view.
Opposite and behind us another hill rose steeply, even more
precipitous than the one we were on, which had proved too much for
the mare--a green knoll crowned with the gray old church, its summit
fenced with the back wall of the churchyard. Along the strip of
level ground on the dividing line, from which the twin hills sprang,
wound a gray ribbon of dusty road; and as we watched, a singular
procession crawled slowly along its length below us. Four old men in
the light blue workhouse uniform painfully bore a long oblong black
box upon their shoulders; behind them followed two old women, also in
light blue. It was a pauper funeral.
'Luk at yon now. Troth, there's a sight ye wudn't see the like ov
anywhere outside of the foor baronies, an' mebbe ye might niver see
agin,' said the driver, with a complacency in this unique local
spectacle evidently bred by the remarks of previous strangers.
As he spoke the procession halted at a stile, from which a footpath
sprang straight up the hill to an opening in the shoulder of the
churchyard wall: it led to the portion of ground outside 'God's Acre'
allotted to those outcasts, who, by venturing to die within the walls
of the 'Poorhouse,' forfeited that last right of miserable humanity,
a resting-place in consecrated ground.
The old men rested their burden on the stile and grouped themselves
round it.
'What are they doing now?' I asked.
And the driver replied, 'They're fittin' the rope till it. Them oul'
flitters isn't fit to carry a heavy corp, lit alone the coffin, up
yon brae, the crathurs, so they tie a rope till it and dhrag it up.'
The group opened out and resolved itself into its parts as it slowly
climbed the hill. First came two old men bent double, each straining
at a loop of rope passed over one shoulder and across their chests;
behind them jolted the coffin, to which they were harnessed, over the
uneven ground; next came the other two men as a relay, ready to
relieve their comrades when tired; and behind them the mourners, the
two old women.
I now noticed that the path was composed of three parallel lines upon
the green sward. On each side was a footway, worn smooth and bare by
the feet of the men and the following mourners. In the middle was
vaguely outlined a strip less distinct where the grass was beaten
down like a pock-marked field of oats after a rainstorm, and was
thinned and straggling like the hair upon a head beginning to grow
bald. That was the mark where the coffin was dragged.
'Whose funeral is it?' I asked, with a pitying sigh at this outrage
upon the dead.
'Oul' Shan O'Neill's,' came the startling answer; 'he was a
stone-cutter, and a gran' han' at the pothery; he cud write a pome as
fast as another man cud mow a fiel' ov hay. Troth cud he!'
'But I thought his daughter kept him.'
'Holy Post-Office, how did ye come to know that?' exclaimed the
driver, in surprise at the unexpected extent of my information; 'that
was Kathleen, the wan dacint wan ov the whole bilin'. She kep' him
till a year ago. But thin she lost ahl her money in wan ov thim
banks in Australey, and the other childher' wudn't give no help, and
so the oul' man come on the parish, an' he niver hel' up his head
from that day out, and now they're buryin' of him.'
And so the descendant of all the O'Neills was haled at the end of a
rope to a pauper's grave.