At that moment the old woman caught sight of an approaching car, and
exclaimed, 'Auch, wirra' it's ruined I am, I'm desthroyed enthirely.
Here's the gauger comin' up to the dure wid a polisman beside him,
an' me niver to notice him attendin' on yous jintlemen,' and she made
a grab at the jar to hide it.
'Never mind that; it's too late now,' I said, 'and I'll see you
through. Come in, Gillespie, and have a drink with me.'
'I don't mind if I do for once,' replied the gauger; 'a man wants
something inside him sitting on a car in a day like this. It is the
coldest day I ever was out in. But you must have that stuff outside
the house the next time I come this way, Mrs. M'Intyre.'
Meanwhile the policeman and Hughie had foregathered in a corner, and
were having a drink together; but the effect of the whisky made
itself rapidly apparent, coming upon the change from the biting air
outside to the stuffy atmosphere of the hut. Presently their voices
became raised, and we heard the policeman saying,--
'Stan' up agin' me, is it? ye little gingerbread whipper-snapper ye.
I'll tell ye what I'll do; I'll put down me five pound agin' yours,
an' I'll box you for twenty rounds, an' sweem yous a mile, an' run ye
five, the best man to lift the hard stuff.'
'Box? is it yous?' said Hughie scornfully. 'D'ye see that little
roun' button on the top ov yer saucepan? I'll putt ye on that an'
twirl ye roun' for half an hour, see that now,' and he put his leg
behind the crook of the other's knee, and giving him a push on the
chest, sent him toppling his full length on the floor.
Hughie looked rather frightened at the success of his wrestling
trick, as the policeman rose quivering with passion; but remembering
he was in the presence of his superior, the latter touched his cap
and contented himself with remarking, 'Wait till the next time I
catch ye, me bould buck, dhrunk in the streets, or by your lone in
the counthry, an' I'll giv ye a bastin' ye won't forgit, I promise
ye.'
I thought by this time it was time to go, and saying good-day, went
out. As I went out I heard the policeman say to Hughie, 'By the way,
me boys, suppose ye let us see your license now.'
'License is it?' said Hughie; 'what wud I want wid a license? I
haven't fired a shot the day. Shure, this is the masther's second
gun I'm carryin',' and he came scuttling after me.
'Oh, but them polis is botheration,' he said, when he reached me;
'there's too many ov them in the counthry be half; ye cud feed the
pigs aff ov them ahl winter an' not fin' the differ.'
From that point home was a straight walk in along a hard level road,
and we swung briskly along in the frosty air.
'Not bad walking,' said I, as we entered the outskirts of the town,
'four miles in three-quarters of an hour.'
'Walkin', says you,' replied Hughie, with impartial justice, 'it's
not us at ahl as did it; it's the putcheen. It's a powerful strong
walker is putcheen. Thank ye kindly, Masther Harry,' and Hughie
touched his cap, put his hand in his pocket, and walked away.
'THE FINAL FLICKER'
Charlie Vaughan sat playing chess with his sister, as they had played
it every night these thirty years. They belonged to the yeomanry
class, a class that is mostly English or Scotch by extraction, and
has few Irish characteristics. In the narrow circle of their lives
on the lonely farm there was not much room for variety; they did the
same things at the same hour of the day from one year's end to
another.
As bedtime drew near they began to quarrel. She said that he had
taken his finger off a piece before altering his mind, and moving it
back; he denied it, and they quarrelled. The same quarrel had
occurred every night in all those years. They loved each other
dearly, but the game wouldn't have been a game without its quarrel.
She swept the pieces off the board in a passion, and he wandered
gently off into the night to see that all the gates about the farm
were locked and the house securely barred.
To-night he was not quite in his usual mood. Perhaps the quarrel had
been a little more real than usual, and had jarred upon his nerves.
The subtle seduction of the moonlight moved him. He felt a void in
his life, a vague craving for sympathy, for something which he had
never known. After a time he identified the feeling as one which had
occurred periodically to him before. It was a yearning for one sip
of the wine of life before it was too late, a sense of weariness, of
discouragement at the thought that he had never known that joy which
is every man's birthright once in his lifetime, the joy of knowing
the full meaning of a woman's love.
Now he remembered the incident that had started the train of thought.
He had been making a move, and his eyes fell upon his hand, and he
had recognized with a strange outwardness for the first time that it
was the hand of an old man, the fingers bent and gnarled, the nails
dull, the muscles corrugated, and the veins dried up and withered.
If he was ever to know more about women than he knew now, it behoved
him to act quickly ere his manhood had quite died within him.
Once or twice before he had awakened to the same fact, but never with
such urgency as now. Even still he was the wreck of a fine man, and
there had been a time when he might easily have found favor with
women, but he had let his chances slip. A bookworm and a dreamer, he
had let his youth slide by before he knew that it was gone. His
manhood he had spent beneath the rule of his elder brother. Once he
had asserted his right to an individual soul, and fallen in love with
a woman, and she was ready to reciprocate his love. But when he went
and t told his brother, the elder replied: 'You can marry if you
like, but as sure as you do, out you go out of my house. There's not
enough on the farm to keep more than the three of us. I've never
married, and I don't see why you should.'
For the moment his manhood rose in arms, and he determined to go out
into the world and make a place for himself; but he put it off and
put it off, and his brother was twenty years older than himself, and
it seemed a pity to lose his chance of the farm, so the time never
came, and he grew old waiting for his brother's death, and the woman
that he loved grew old too.
At last his brother died, and he went to her and asked her to marry
him, but she said: 'I loved you well once, and would have stood by
your side if you had had the heart to make a fight for me. I've
waited for you all these years, but now it's too late. I'm too old
to change,' and she died also, and they were never married.
After her death he was numbed for a time, for he had so little that
the loss of even the placid affection of their later years made a
great gap in his life. Then the farm began to go wrong; he had not
the practical head to manage it as his brother had managed it; and
though he worked as hard as ever, what had formerly sufficed to keep
the three in comfort could now barely support the remaining two. In
truth, weakness of character had been his bane all his life, and
would be to the end. He had not the strength to carry any purpose to
its appointed goal. He was strong neither for good nor for evil. He
was cursed with the curse of Reuben, 'Unstable as water, thou shalt
not excel.' But he knew that he was weak, and it was very pitiful.
To-night, after shutting up the house, he went to his bed; and as he
lay awake there through the watches of the night, his desolation came
home to him and ate into his heart, and he pitied himself exceedingly.
About three o'clock, the darkest part of the night, he rose and
wandered restlessly out into the garden, and sat alone there with the
'night of the large few stars, the mad naked summer night,' till its
fascination entered into his marrow and stirred his placid soul with
a strange disturbance.
As he sat there in the darkness, suddenly there was a movement in the
hedgerows and all the trees around him, and a twittering burst forth
on every side; it was the birds rousing themselves from their night's
slumber. For five minutes the matin song lasted, and then as
suddenly ceased, and a great stillness reigned over the world,
waiting for the birth of another day. Five minutes later the first
ray of dawn tinged the eastern horizon, and the birds burst into song
a second time to hail the new-born day.
Often before he had noticed that sudden outburst and sudden hush
before the dawn, and vaguely wondered what it meant. But the sound
of cocks crowing and the wakened life of a farmyard came to his ears,
and reminded him of the thread of his daily duties that had to be
taken up.
When he entered the house one of the maids was already down, and was
cleaning the kitchen window, kneeling upon the table, with her back
to him. He went up to her, and to attract her attention laid his
hand upon her ankle. He felt a sudden tremor run through her, and at
the contact a flood of fire pulsed through his own veins, for the
glamour of the night was still over all his senses.
She turned and looked at him with a wanton twinkle in her eye; they
were bold, black eyes in a gypsy face, and he wondered he had never
noticed before how pretty she was. Something in her gaze struck him.
He looked at her shiftily. He wanted to take her in his arms, to ask
her to kiss him, and he opened his mouth to do so; but, after all
those years, the hinges of his tongue worked creakingly, the thought
of taking decided action of any kind out of his ordinary groove
daunted him, from long disuse his executive faculties were no longer
under the control of his will, and the words that issued from his
mouth were quite different from what he had intended, they were
dictated by habit; he jerked out with parched lips,--
'Where's the key of the byre, Cassy?'
'Troth, sir, you have it hangin' on yer little fing-er,' she replied,
with a glance that showed understanding and a spice of contempt for
his weakness of purpose.
'Oh, ay, so it is,' he answered, and turning, shuffled hastily out in
confusion.
But he couldn't settle down to his work, and soon gave it up, and
started for a walk in the cool morning air, hoping thus to allay the
fever of his blood. All the way he was arguing with himself,
despising himself for the failure of his overtures, and yet
frightened at the idea of their succeeding. He tried to persuade
himself that it was respect for his sister that had withheld him, but
even he could not sink to such self-deception as that.
It was haytime, most of the mowing was already over, and nothing
further could be done with the grass until the sun and wind had had
time to dry the dew of the night. Few people, therefore, were yet
stirring, no smoke rose out of the cottage chimneys, not a sound was
to be heard but the croak of the corn-crake running before him in the
meadow, the juicy swish of a distant scythe through the wet grass, or
the strident sound of the whetstone upon the blade. Crossing a
field, he met the daughter of one of his tenants carrying two pails
of foaming milk--a pretty, fair girl with a sun-tanned face. She was
not the least like the other, but again the same mad longing came
over him, checked by the same infirmity. He wanted to ask her to put
down her pails and to give him a kiss, but, unready as ever, all he
could force his lips to stammer out was,--
'Good-morning, Mary.'
'Good-morning, surr,' she answered, with a courtesy, and passed on to
tell her mother that 'big Misther Vaughan' knew her Christian name--a
depth of interest of which she had never suspected him before.
For some days afterwards every time he met Cassy about the house she
looked at him, and every time she looked at him he made up his mind
to kiss her the next. At last he met her on the stairs early one
morning, and did kiss her. She made a slight scuffle, and, more from
his nervousness than her resistance, the kiss only fell on the tip of
her ear, and she scuttled downstairs laughing. But nevertheless he
felt uplifted in his own esteem all that day; he actually had
achieved the task he had set himself.
The next day Cassy was missing, and never returned. For a time there
were some queer rumors about her, which at last were confirmed by the
birth of her child. And soon afterwards, to his great dismay, he was
served with an order for maintenance as the father.
Of course he went to law about it; but, as he afterwards told himself
bitterly, he was fool enough to admit that he had kissed her once,
and in the light of that admission the jury found against him with
£100 damages.
Not long afterwards Cassy was married, and it began to be whispered
about that her husband was the real father of the child, and the pair
had taken advantage of Vaughan's simplicity to saddle him with the
responsibility.
Mingled with their disapprobation before there had been a certain
respect in people's attitude to him; they were surprised, and said,
'They didn't think Charlie Vaughan had it in him.' But now all this
was changed to amusement and contempt.
But that did not affect 'old Vaughan,' as he now began to be called.
He was too much taken up with his own disillusionment to mind other
people's conduct. From Cassy's manner he had thought that he had at
last attained the wish of his life, but he now recognized the meaning
of her regard for what it really was, the mere ephemeral desire of a
pregnant woman; and he had let her see through his weakness, and
himself suggested to her the means of his own undoing.
His old sense of weariness and discouragement returned upon him and
settled down over his life. He saw that with the ridicule in which
he was held what had now become his consuming desire, the only means
of renewing his self-respect, had become utterly hopeless. His
thirst for the wine of life had come to him too late to be ever
quenched. He lost heart. The sap went out of him. The neighbors
noticed that he failed visibly, and grew rapidly gray. Within the
year he was dead, and no woman had ever loved him.