person indeed would have been satisfied with it. The henwife's
cottage and the poultry settlement might have been many miles from a
human habitation, so lonely were they. They were in a glen of red
sandstone, and half the wood lay between them and the Hall. The great
red walls stood so high round the glen that you could not even hear
the sea calling. As for the village, it was a long way below. You had
to go down a steep path from the glen before you came to an open
space, where you could see the reek of the chimneys under you. Every
morning Margret brought the eggs and the trussed chickens to the Hall.
But no one disturbed her solitude, except when the deer, or the wild
little red cattle came gazing curiously through the netting at Margret
and her charges. There, for twenty-seven years, Margret lived with no
company but the fowl. On Sundays and holidays she went to mass to the
Island Chapel, but gave no encouragement to those who would have gone
a step of the road home with her. The Island women used to wonder how
she could bear the loneliness.--'Why, God be betune us and harm!'
they often said, 'Sure the crathur might be robbed and murdhered any
night of the year and no wan the wiser.' And so she might, if the
Island possessed robbers and murderers in its midst. But it is a
primitively innocent little community, which sleeps with open doors as
often as not, and there is nothing to tempt marauders or even beggars
to migrate there.
By and by a feeling got about that Margret must be saving money. Her
wage as a henwife was no great thing, but then, as they said, 'she
looked as if she lived on the smell of an oil-rag,' and there was
plenty of food to be had in the Hall kitchen, where Margret waited
with her eggs and fowl every morning. Certainly her clothes, though
decent, were worn well-nigh threadbare. But the feelers that the
neighbours sent out towards Margret met with no solid assurance. Grim
and taciturn, Margret kept her own counsel, and was like enough to
keep it till the day of her death.
Jack Laffan, Margret's brother, is the village carpenter, a sociable
poor man, not the least bit in the world like his sister. Jack is
rather fond of idling over a glass with his cronies in the
public-house, but, as he is well under Mrs. Jack's thumb, the habit is
not likely to grow on him inconveniently. There are four daughters and
a son, a lad of fifteen or thereabouts. Two of the daughters are
domestic servants out in the big world, and are reported to wear
streamers to their caps and fine lace aprons every day. Another is
handmaiden to Miss Bell at the post office, and knows the contents of
all the letters, except Father Tiernay's, before the people they
belong to. Fanny is at home with her father and mother, and is
supposed to be too fond of fal-lals, pinchbeck brooches and cheap
ribbons, which come to her from her sisters out in the world. She
often talks of emigration, and is not sought after by the young men of
the Island, who regard her as a 'vain paycocky thing.'
Mrs. Jack has the reputation of being a hard, managing woman. There
was never much love lost between her and Margret, and when the latter
came back from her six years' absence on the mainland, Mrs. Jack's
were perhaps the most ill-natured surmises as to the reasons for
Margret's silence and the meaning of that queer checked garb.
For a quarter of a century Margret lived among her fowl, untroubled by
her kin. Then the talk about the money grew from little beginnings
like a snowball. It fired Mrs. Jack with a curious excitement, for she
was an ignorant woman and ready to believe any extravagant story. She
amazed Jack by putting the blame of their long ignoring of Margret
upon his shoulders entirely, and when he stared at her, dumb-founded,
she seized and shook him till his teeth rattled. 'You great stupid
omadhaun!' she hissed between the shakes, 'that couldn't have the
nature in you to see to your own sister, an' she a lone woman!'
That very day Jack went off stupidly to try to bridge over with
Margret the gulf of nearly thirty years. He got very little help from
his sister. She watched him with what seemed like grim enjoyment
while he wriggled miserably on the edge of his chair and tried to talk
naturally. At length he jerked out his wife's invitation to have a bit
of dinner with them on the coming Sunday, which Margret accepted
without showing any pleasure, and then he bolted.
Margret came to dinner on the Sunday, and was well entertained with a
fat chicken and a bit of bacon, for the Laffans were well-to-do
people. She thoroughly enjoyed her dinner, though she spoke little and
that little monosyllabic; but Margret was taciturn even as a girl, and
her solitary habit for years seemed to have made speech more difficult
for her. Mrs. Jack heaped her plate with great heartiness and made
quite an honoured guest of her. But outside enjoying the dinner
Margret did not seem to respond. Young Jack was brought forward to
display his accomplishments, which he did in the most hang-dog
fashion. The cleverness and good-looks and goodness of the girls were
expatiated upon, but Margret gave no sign of interest. Once Fanny
caught her looking at her with a queer saturnine glance, that made
her feel all at once hot and uncomfortable, though she had felt pretty
secure of her smartness before that. Margret's reception of Mrs.
Jack's overtures did not satisfy that enterprising lady. When she had
departed Mrs. Jack put her down as 'a flinty-hearted ould maid.' 'Her
sort,' she declared, 'is ever an' always sour an' bitther to them the
Lord blesses wid a family.' But all the same it became a regular thing
for Margret to eat her Sunday dinner with the Laffans, and Mrs. Jack
discovered after a time that the good dinners were putting a skin and
roundness on Margret that might give her a new lease of life--perhaps
a not quite desirable result.
The neighbours looked on at Mrs. Jack's 'antics' with something little
short of scandal. They met by twos and threes to talk over it, and
came to the conclusion that Mrs. Jack had no shame at all, at all, in
her pursuit of the old woman's money. Truth to tell, there was
scarcely a woman in the Island but thought she had as good a right to
Margret's money as her newly-attentive kinsfolk. Mrs. Devine and Mrs.
Cahill might agree in the morning, with many shakings of the head,
that 'Liza Laffan's avarice and greed were beyond measure loathsome.
Yet neither seemed pleased to see the other a little later in the day,
when Mrs. Cahill climbing the hill with a full basket met Mrs. Devine
descending with an empty one.
For all of a sudden a pilgrimage to Margret's cottage in the Red Glen
became the recognised thing. It was surprising how old childish
friendships and the most distant ties of kindred were furbished up and
brought into the light of day. The grass in the lane to the glen
became trampled to a regular track. If the women themselves did not
come panting up the hill they sent the little girsha, or wee Tommy or
Larry, with a little fish, or a griddle cake, or a few fresh greens
for Margret. The men of the Island were somewhat scornful of these
proceedings on the part of their dames; but as a rule the Island wives
hold their own and do pretty well as they will. All this friendship
for Margret created curious divisions and many enmities.
Margret, indeed, throve on all the good things, but whether any one
person was in her favour more than another it would be impossible to
say. Margret got up a way of thanking all alike in a honeyed voice
that had a queer sound of mockery in it, and after a time some of the
more independent spirits dropped out of the chase, 'pitching,' as they
expressed it, 'her ould money to the divil.' Mrs. Jack was fairly
confident all the time that if any one on the Island got Margret's
nest-egg it would be herself, but she had a misgiving which she
imparted to her husband that the whole might go to Father Tiernay for
charities. Any attempt at getting inside the shell which hid Margret's
heart from the world her sister-in-law had long given up. She had also
given up trying to interest Margret in 'the childher,' or bidding
young Jack be on his best behaviour before the Sunday guest. The young
folk didn't like the derision in Margret's pale eyes, and kept out of
her way as much as possible, since they feared their mother too much
to flout her openly, as they were often tempted to do.
Two or three years had passed before Margret showed signs of failing.
Then at the end of one very cold winter people noticed that she grew
feebler. She was away from mass one or two Sundays, and then one
Sunday she reappeared walking with the aid of a stick and looking
plainly ill and weak. After mass she had a private talk with Father
Tiernay at the presbytery; and then went slowly down to Jack's house
for the usual dinner. Both Jack and Mrs. Jack saw her home in the
afternoon, and a hard task the plucky old woman found it, for all
their assistance, to get back to her cottage up the steep hill. When
they had reached the top she paused for a rest. Then she said quietly,
'I'm thinkin' I'll make no more journeys to the Chapel. Father
Tiernay'll have to be coming to me instead.'
'Tut, tut, woman dear,' said Mrs. Jack, with two hard red spots coming
into her cheeks, 'we'll be seein' you about finely when the weather
gets milder.' And then she insinuated in a wheedling voice something
about Margret's affairs being settled.
Margret looked up at her with a queer mirthfulness in her glance.
'Sure what wud a poor ould woman like me have to settle? Sure that's
what they say when a sthrong-farmer takes to dyin'.'
Mrs. Jack was too fearful of possible consequences to press the
matter. She was anxious that Margret should have Fanny to look after
the house and the fowl for her, but this Margret refused. 'I'll be
able to do for myself a little longer,' she said, 'an' thank you
kindly all the same.'
When it was known that Margret was failing, the attentions to her
became more urgent. Neighbours passed each other now in the lane with
a toss of the head and 'a wag of the tail.' As for Mrs. Jack, who
would fain have installed herself altogether in the henwife's cottage,
she spent her days quivering with indignation at the meddlesomeness of
the other women. She woke Jack up once in the night with a fiery
declaration that she'd speak to Father Tiernay about the pursuit of
her moneyed relative, but Jack threw cold water on that scheme. 'Sure
his Riverince himself, small blame to him, 'ud be as glad as another
to have the bit. 'Twould be buildin' him the new schoolhouse he's
wantin' this many a day, so it would.' And this suggestion made Mrs.
Jack look askance at her pastor, as being also in the running for the
money.
It was surprising how many queer presents found their way to Margret's
larder in those days. They who had not the most suitable gift for an
invalid brought what they had, and Margret received them all with the
same inscrutability. She might have been provisioning for a siege.
Mrs. Jack's chickens were flanked by a coarse bit of American bacon;
here was a piece of salt ling, there some potatoes in a sack; a slice
of salt butter was side by side with a griddle cake. Many a good woman
appreciated the waste of good food even while she added to it, and
sighed after that full larder for the benefit of her man and the weans
at home; but all the time there was the dancing marsh-light of
Margret's money luring the good souls on. There had never been any
organised robbery in the Island since the cattle-lifting of the kernes
long ago; but many a good woman fell of a tremble now when she thought
of Margret and her 'stocking' alone through the silent night, and at
the mercy of midnight robbers.
There was not a day that several offerings were not laid at Margret's
feet. But suddenly she changed her stereotyped form of thanks to a
mysterious utterance, 'You're maybe feeding more than you know, kind
neighbours,' was the dark saying that set the women conjecturing about
Margret's sanity.
Then the bolt fell. One day a big, angular, shambling girl, with
Margret's suspicious eyes and cynical mouth, crossed by the ferry to
the Island. She had a trunk, which Barney Ryder, general carrier to
the Island, would have lifted to his ass-cart, but the new-comer
scornfully waved him away. 'Come here, you two gorsoons,' she said,
seizing upon young Jack Laffan and a comrade who were gazing at her
grinning, 'take a hoult o' the thrunk an' lead the way to Margret
Laffan's in the Red Glen. I'll crack sixpence betune yez when I get
there.' The lads, full of curiosity, lifted up the trunk, and preceded
her up the mile or so of hill to Margret's. She stalked after them
into the sunny kitchen where Margret sat waiting, handed them the
sixpence when they had put down the trunk, bundled them out and shut
the door before she looked towards Margret in her chimney-corner.
The explanation came first from his Reverence, who was walking in the
evening glow, when Mrs. Jack Laffan came flying towards him with her
cap-strings streaming.
'Little Jack has a quare story, yer Riverince,' she cried out panting,
'about a girl's come visitin' ould Margret in the glen, an' wid a
thrunk as big as a house. Him an' little Martin was kilt draggin' it
up the hill.'
His Reverence waved away her excitement gently.
'I know all about it,' he said. 'Indeed I've been the means in a way
of restoring Margret's daughter to her. You never knew your
sister-in-law was married, Mrs. Laffan? An odd woman to drop her
married name. We must call her by it in future. Mrs. Conneely is the
name.'
But Mrs. Jack, with an emotion which even the presence of his
Reverence could not quell, let what the neighbours described
afterwards as a 'screech out of her fit to wake the dead,' and fled
into her house, where on her bed she had an attack which came as near
being hysterical as the strong-minded woman could compass. She only
recovered when Mrs. Devine and Mrs. Cahill and the widow Mulvany,
running in, proposed to drench her with cold water, when her heels
suddenly left off drumming and she stood up, very determinedly, and
bade them be off about their own business. She always spoke afterwards
of Margret as the robber of the widow and orphan, which was satisfying
if not quite appropriate.
We all heard afterwards how Margret had married on the mainland, and
after this girl was born had had an attack of mania, for which she was
placed in the county asylum. In time she was declared cured, and it
was arranged that her husband should come for her on a certain day and
remove her; but Margret, having had enough of marriage and its
responsibilities, left the asylum quietly before that day came and
made her way to the Island. She had been well content to be regarded
as a spinster till she felt her health failing, and then she had
entrusted to Father Tiernay her secret, and he had found her daughter
for her.
Margret lived some months after that, and left at the time of her
death thirty pounds to the fortunate heiress. The well-stocked larder
had sufficed the two for quite a long time without any recourse to
'the stocking.' There was very little further friendship between the
village and the Red Glen. Such of the neighbours as were led there at
first by curiosity found the door shut in their faces, for Mary had
Margret's suspiciousness many times intensified. After the Laffan
family had recovered from the first shock of disappointment Fanny made
various approaches to her cousin when she met her at mass on the
Sundays, and, unheeding rebuffs, sent her a brooch and an apron at
Christmas. I wish I could have seen Margret's face and Mary's over
that present. It was returned to poor Fanny, with a curt intimation
that Mary had no use for it, and there the matter ended.
I once asked Mary, when I knew her well enough to take the liberty,
about that meeting between her and her mother, after the door was shut
on young Jack's and little Martin's departing footsteps. 'Well,' said
Mary, 'she looked hard at me, an' then she said, "You've grown up
yalla an' bad-lookin', but a strong girl for the work. You favour
meself, though I've a genteeler nose." And then,' said Mary, 'I turned
in an' boiled the kettle for the tay.'
The money did not even remain in the Island, for as soon as Margret
was laid in a grave in the Abbey--with a vacant space beside her, for,
said Mary, 'you couldn't tell but I'd be takin' a fancy to be buried
there myself some day,'--Mary fled in the early morning before the
neighbours were about. Mary looked on the Island where so many had
coveted her money as a 'nest of robbers,' and so she fled, with 'the
stocking' in the bosom of her gown, one morning at low tide. She
wouldn't trust the money to the post office in the Island, because her
cousin Lizzie was Miss Bell's servant. 'Divil a letther but the
priest's they don't open an' read,' she said, 'an' tells the news
afterwards to the man or woman that owns it. The news gets to them
before the letter. An' if I put the fortune in there I'm doubtin'
'twould ever see London. I know an honest man in the Whiterock post
office I'd betther be trustin'.
And that is how Margret's 'stocking' left the Island.
V
HOW MARY CAME HOME
The Island people seldom marry outside the Island. They are
passionately devoted to each other, but as a rule look coldly upon the
stranger. Swarthy Spanish sailors put in sometimes, and fair-skinned,
black-eyed Greeks, and broad-shouldered Norwegians, all as ripe for
love as any other sailor, but that they should carry away an Island
girl to their outlandish places over sea is a thing almost unheard of.
The Island girls are courted by their own blue-jerseyed
fisher-lads--and what a place for love-making, with the ravines and
caves in the cliff-sides, and the deep glens in the heart of the
Island, so lonely except for the lord's red deer and little fierce
black cattle. Why, if one of those foreign sailors attempted
love-making with an Island lass, just as likely as not a pair of
little brown fists would rattle about his amazed ears; the girls there
know how to defend their dignity.
But one spring there was a sensation little short of a scandal when it
became known that Mary Cassidy, the handsomest girl of the Island, was
keeping company with a Spanish sailor who had come into harbour on a
Glasgow barque. The stage of keeping company was not long. So violent
was the passion that flamed up between the two that there was no
gainsaying it. Mary was the one girl in a family of five tall
fishermen. Father and mother were dead--the father drowned in a wild
night while trying to make the treacherous mouth of the inadequate
harbour, the mother dead of her grief. Mary had known fathering and
mothering both from the brothers. She was the youngest of them all,
and their pride and glory.
She was tall and generously proportioned, with ropes of red gold hair
round her small head, and her face had the colour of the sea-shell. In
her large brown eyes, sleepily veiled by long lashes, smouldered a
hidden fire: her step was proud and fearless, and she was as strong as
a beautiful lithe young animal. The brothers brought her gay prints
and woollens and rows of beads when they came home with the fishing
fleet, and with these she adorned her beauty--a beauty so brilliant
that it glittered of itself.
There was no use opposing her once she had fallen in love with Jacopo.
He was a handsome, dark fellow, with insinuating manners, and a voice
like a blackbird. When the two were together there was no one else in
the world for them. He had flamed up with the fierceness of his
southern nature: she with the heat of a heart slow to love, and once
fired slow to go out.
When Jacopo had settled things with Father Tiernay and had gone on his
last trip before he should come to make Mary his wife, the girl walked
the Island like one transfigured. The light burned steadily in her
deep eyes, her cheeks flamed scarlet, her lips were red as coral. She
went about her household duties with her head in the air and her eyes
far away. The brothers when they came home of an evening sat silent
in a ring, for the grief was on them: but if the girl knew she did not
seem to know. Of the five brothers not one had thought of marrying.
What any one might do as soon as the golden thread that held them
together was snapped no one could say; but they were grizzled or
grizzling men, and had long ago been put down by the Island folk as
confirmed bachelors.
Father Tiernay had talked with Jacopo about his religion, and had
declared him an excellent son of Mother Church, so there was nothing
against him on that ground. The captain of his ship gave him a good
character, and Jacopo had been with him three seasons. He had a tidy
little house near Greenock, and a bit of money saved. Yet the brothers
were not satisfied. 'Why couldn't she have fancied a lad of the kindly
neighbours?' grumbled William, the eldest. And the youngest, Patrick,
answered in the same strain, 'Wasn't the Island good enough for her
but she must go to foreign lands?' And then five melancholy heads
shook in the twilight.
They had a cold, awkward, insular distrust and shyness of the
Spaniard. They made no response to his professions of goodwill and
brotherhood, poured out fluently in his yet difficult Scots-English.
They noticed and commented afterwards upon his contemptuous shrug,
when one feast night he was invited to join the family at its
Rosary,--for they are devout people, the Islanders.
Yet, distrust or no distrust, the girl must go to him. He came back
one summer day with a fine rig-out for his wedding, and a bonnet and
cloak for the bride such as were never dreamt of in the Island. She
was an impassioned bride, and as she came down the church with her
husband, her eyes uplifted and shining like stars, she seemed rather
to float like a tall flame than to walk like a mortal woman.
Five men watched her then with melancholy and patient faces. The five
went with her to the boat on which she was to cross to the mainland to
take the Glasgow steamer. As the little ferry plied away from the pier
it was at her husband she looked, not at them and the Island, though
it stood up purple and black, and she had well loved the rocks and
glades of it, and though they had fostered her.
The five men went back to their lonely cottage and began to do for
themselves. They were handy fellows, as good at frying a fish as
catching it, and they were not minded to put a woman in Mary's place.
They kept the cottage tidy enough, yet it was a dreary tidiness. The
fire generally went out when it was no longer required for meals, and
as the brothers came in one after the other, from smoking a pipe on
the quay, they went to bed in the dark, or by the shaft of moonlight
that came in through the window overlooking the old Abbey and its
graves. They were always silent men, and now they grew more taciturn.
Even when at first letters came from Mary full of her husband and her
happiness, they spelt them out to themselves and did not take the
neighbours into their confidence. And more and more they came to be
regarded as 'oddities' by the Island people.
About a year after Mary's marriage there came a letter from Jacopo
announcing that she was the mother of a son. That child formed a
tremendous interest to his five uncles. They did not talk much about
it, but a speech from one or another told what was in all their minds.
'The lad'll be fine and tall by this,' one would say. 'Ay,' the other
would respond, 'he'll be maybe walking by now.' 'He'll have the looks
of his mother,' suggested James. 'Ay: he was a fair child from the
beginning,' Thomas would agree.
Seeing the child was so much in their minds it was strange none of
them had ever seen it. At first after she was married Mary had been
fond of pressing them to come to the Clyde, if it was only for a look
at her. But little by little the invitations had dropped off and
ceased. They had been shy of going in the early days. It was not that
they feared the journey, for some of the brothers had fared much
further afield than Scotland; but in their hearts, though they never
complained, they remembered how she had not looked back on them as the
ferry swung from the pier, and feared that they might be but
half-welcome guests in the house of her husband.
At first Jacopo often wrote for his wife, but after a time this too
ceased. Then the praises of him by degrees grew spasmodic. There were
often two or three letters in which his name found no place. The
brothers with the keenness of love noted this fact, though each of
them pondered it long in his mind before one evening Patrick spoke of
his fear, and then the others brought theirs out of its hiding-place.