When Mick Doherty heard that there was to be route-marching next day in
the neighbourhood of Kilmacrone, he determined upon going off for a long
“stravade” coastward over the bog, where there were no roads worth
mentioning, and no risks of an encounter with the military. In this he
acted differently from all his neighbours, most of whom, upon learning
the news, began to speculate and plan how they might see and hear as
much as possible of their unwonted visitors. Opinions were chiefly
divided as to whether the Murghadeen cross-roads would be the best
station to take up, or the fork of the lane at Berrisbawn House. People
who, for one reason or another, could not go so far afield, consoled
themselves by reflecting that the band, at any rate, would be likely to
come through the village, and would no doubt strike up a tune while
passing, as it had done a couple of years ago, the last time the
redcoats had appeared in Kilmacrone. And, och, but that was the grand
playin’ intirely! It done your heart good just to be hearin’ the sound
of it, bedad it did so. Old Mrs. Geoghegan said it was liker the sort of
thunder-storms they might be apt to have in heaven above than aught else
she could think of, might goodness forgive her for sayin’ such a thing;
and Molly Joyce said she’d as lief as not have sat down and cried when’t
was passed beyond her listenin’, it went that delightful thumpety-thump,
wid the tune flyin’ up over it.
The military authorities at Fortbrack were not ignorant of this popular
sentiment, and had considered it in the order of that day. For
experience had shown that a progress of troops through the surrounding
country districts generally conduced to the appearance before the
recruiting officer of sundry long-limbed, loose-jointed Pats, Micks, and
Joes; and a recent scarcity of this raw material made it seem expedient
to bring such an influence to bear upon the new ground of remote
Kilmacrone. Certain brigades and squadrons were accordingly directed to
move thitherward, under the general idea that an invading force from the
southeast had occupied Ballybeg Allan, while in pursuance of another
general idea, really more to the purpose, though not officially
announced, the accompanying band received instructions to be liberal and
lively in its performances by the way.
All along their route through the wide brown land the soldiers might be
sure of drawing as much sympathetic attention as that lonesome west
country could concentrate on any given line. Probably there would be no
one disposed, like Mick Doherty, to get out of the way, unless some very
small child roared and ran, if of a size to have acquired the latter
accomplishment, at the sound of the booming drums. To the great majority
of these onlookers the spectacle would be a rare and gorgeous pageant, a
memory resplendent across twilight-hued time-tracts as a vision of
scarlet and golden gleams, and proudly pacing horses, and music that
made you feel you had never known how much life there was in you all the
while. Some toll, it is true, had to be paid for this enjoyment. When it
had passed by things suddenly grew very flat and colourless, and there
was a tendency to feel more or less vaguely aggrieved because you could
not go a-soldiering yourself. In cases, however, where circumstances
rendered that obviously impossible, as when people were too old or
infirm, or were women or girls, this thrill of discontent, seldom very
acute, soon subsided, by virtue of the self-preserving instinct which
forbids us to persist in knocking our heads hard against our stone
walls. But it was different where the beholder was so situated that he
could imagine himself riding or striding after the rapturous march-music
to fields of peril and valour and glory, without diminishing the
vividness of the picture by simultaneously supposing himself some quite
other person. The gleam in young Felix M’Guinness’s eyes, as he watched
the red files dwindle and twinkle out of sight, was to the brightening
up beneath his grandfather’s shaggy brows as the forked flash is to the
shimmering sheet-lightnings, that are but a harmless reflection from
far-off storms. And there, indeed, pleasure paid a ruinous duty. If
those who were liable to it did not imitate Mick Doherty’s prudence and
hold aloof, the reason may have been that they had not fortitude enough
to turn away from excitement offered on any terms, or that their
position was less desperately tantalising than his; and the latter
explanation is the more probable one, since few lads in and about
Kilmacrone can have had their martial aspirations baulked by an
impediment so flimsy and yet so effectual.
There was nothing in the world to hinder Mick from enlisting except just
the unreasonableness of his mother, and that was an unreasonableness so
unreasonable as to verge upon hat her neighbours would hare called
“quare ould conthrariness.” For, though a widow woman, and therefore
entitled to occupy a pathetic position, its privileges were defined by
the opinion that “she was not so badly off intirely as she might ha’
been.” Mick’s departure need not have left her desolate, since she had
another son and daughter at home, besides Essie married in the village,
and Brian settled down at Murghadeen, here he was doing well, and times
and again asking her to come and live with him. Then Mick would have
been able to help her out of his pay much more efficaciously than he
could do by his earnings at Kilmacrone, where work was slack and its
wage low, so that the result of a lad’s daily labour sometimes seemed
mainly the putting of a fine edge on a superfluous appetite. All these
points were most clearly seen by Mick in the light of a fiercely burning
desire; but that availed him nothing unless he could set them as plainly
before some one else who was not thus illuminated. And not far from two
years back he had resolved that he would attempt to do so no more.
The soldiers had been about in the district on the day before, scattered
like poppy beds over the bog, and signalling and firing till the misty
October air tingled with excitement. When you have lived your life among
wide-bounded solitudes, where the silence is oftenest broken by the
plover’s pipe or the croak of some heavily flapping bird, you will know
the meaning of a bugle-call. Mick and his contemporaries had acted as
camp-followers from early till late with ever intensifying ardour; one
outcome whereof was that he heard his especial crony, Paddy Joyce,
definitely decide to go and enlist at Fortbrack next Monday, which gave
a turn more to the pinching screw of his own banned wish. It was with a
concerted scheme for ascertaining whether there were any chance of
bringing his mother round to a rational view of the matter that he and
his friend dropped into her cabin next morning on the way to carry up a
load of turf. Mrs. Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked aprons
in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick thought he had introduced the
subject rather happily when he told her “she had a right to be takin’
her hands out of the suds, and dippin’ the finest curtsey she could
conthrive, and she wid the Commander-in-Gineral of the Army Forces
steppin’ in to pay her a visit.” Of course this statement required, as
it was intended to require, elucidation, so Mick proceeded to announce:
“It’s himself’s off to Fortbrack a-Monday, ‘listin’ he’ll be in the
Edenderry Light Infantry; so the next time we set eyes on him it’s
blazin’ along the street we’ll see him, like the boys we had here
yisterday.”
“Ah! sure now, that’ll be grand,” said Mrs. Doherty, unwarily
complaisant; “we’ll all be proud to behold him that way. ’T is a fine
thing far any young man who’s got a fancy to take up wid it.”
“Och, then, bedad it is so!” said Mick, with emphasis, promptly making
for the opening given to him.
“Bedad it is,” said Paddy.
“There’s nothin’ like it,” said Mick.
“Ah, nothin’ at all,” said Paddy.
Mrs. Doherty made no remark as she twisted a dripping apron into a
sausage-shaped roll to wring the water out.
“How much was it you were sayin’ you’d have in the week, Paddy, just to
put in your pocket for your divarsion like?” inquired Mick, with a
convenient lapse of memory.
“Och, seven or eight shillin’s anyway,” said Paddy, in the tone of one
to whom shillings had already become trivial coins; “and that, mind you,
after you’ve ped for the best of aitin’ and dhrinkin’, and your kit
free, and no call to be spendin’ another penny unless you plase. Sure,
Long Murphy was tellin’ me he was up in the town awhile ago, on a day
when they were just after gettin’ their pay, and he said the Post-Office
was that thick wid the soldier lads sendin’ home the money to their
friends, he couldn’t get speech of a clerk to buy his stamp be no manner
of manes, not if he’d wrecked the place. ’T was the Sidmouth Fusileers
was in at that time; they’re off to Limerick now.”
“But that’s a grand regulation they have,” said Mick, “wid the short
service nowadays. Where’s the hardship in it when a man can quit at the
ind of three year, if he’s so plased? Three year’s no time to speak of.”
“Sure, not at all; you’d scarce notice it passin’ by. Like Barney
Bralligan’s song that finished before it begun--isn’t that the way of
it, ma’am?”
“It’s a goodish len’th of a while,” said Mrs. Doherty.
“But thin there’s the lave; don’t be forgettin’ the lave, Paddy man.
Supposin’ we--”
“Tub be sure, there’s the lave. Why, it’s skytin’ home on lave they do
be most continial. And the Edenderrys is movin’ no farther than just to
Athlone; that’s as handy a place as you could get.”
“You’d not thravel from this to Athlone in the inside of a week, if it
was iver so handy,” said Mrs. Doherty.
“Is it a week? Och! blathershins, Mrs. Doherty, ma’am, you’re mistook
intirely. Sure, onst you’ve stepped into the town yonder, the train’ll
take you there in a flash. And the trains do be oncommon convenient.”
“Free passes!” prompted Mick.
“Ay, bedad, and free passes they’ll give to any souldier takin’ his
furlough; so sorra the expense ’t would be supposin’ Mick here had a
notion to slip home of an odd day and see you.”
“_Mick_!” said Mrs. Doherty.
“Och well, I was just supposin’. But I’m tould”--the many remarkable
facts which Paddy had been tould lost nothing in repetition--“that
they’ll sometimes have out a special train for a man in the army, if he
wants to go anywhere partic’lar in a hurry; there’s iligance for you.
And as for promotion, it’s that plinty you’ll scarce git time to
remimber your rank from one day to the next, whether it’s a full private
you are, or a lance-corporal, or maybe somethin’ greater. Troth, there’s
nothin’ a man mayn’t rise to. And then, Mrs. Doherty, it’s the proud
woman you’d be--_anybody’d_ be--that they hadn’t stood in the way of it.
And pensions--he might be pensioned off wid as much as a couple of
shillin’s a day.”
“Not this long while yet, plase the pigs,” broke out Mick, squaring his
shoulders, as if Time were a visible antagonist, and momentarily
forgetting the matter immediately in hand. “But there’s chances in
it--splendid--och, it’s somethin’ you may call livin’.”
“And,” said his friend, “the rations, I’m tould, is surprisin’ these
times. The top of everythin’ that’s to be got, uncooked, widout bone.”
Paddy and Mick discoursed for a good while in this strain about the
dignities and amenities of a military life, and Mrs. Doherty had not
much to say on the subject. During the conversation, however, she
continued to rinse one of her aprons, and wring it dry very carefully,
and drop it back into the water, like a machine slightly out of gear,
which goes on repeating some process ineffectually. The two friends read
in her silence an omen of acquiescent conviction, and congratulated each
other upon it with furtive nods and winks. Mick went off to the bog in
high feather, believing that the interview had been a great success, and
that his mother was, as Paddy put it, “comin’ round to the notion
gradual, like an ould goat grazin’ round its tetherin’ stump.” His
hopes, indeed, were so completely in the ascendant that he summed up his
most serious uneasiness when he said to himself: “She’ll do right
enough, no fear, or I’d niver think of it, if Thady was just somethin’
steadier. But sure he might happen to git a thrifle more wit yet; he’s
no great age to spake of.”
But when he came home about sunsetting, his mother was feeding her few
hens outside their cabin, the end one of a mossy-roofed row, with its
door turned at right angles to the others, looking out across the purple
brown of the bog-land to the far-off hills, faint, like a blue mist with
a waved pattern in it, against the horizon. Mick, brought up short by
the group, woke out of his walking dream, in which he had been
performing acts of valour to the tune of the “Soldier’s Chorus” in
Gounod’s Faust, the last thing the band had played yesterday; and he
noticed a diminution in the select circle of fowls, who crooned and
crawked and pecked round the broken dish of scraps.
“I see the specklety pullet’s after strayin’ on you agin,” he said;
“herself’s the conthrary little bein’; I must take a look about for her
prisintly.”
“Ah, sure she’s sold,” said his mother; “it’s too many I had altogether.
I was torminted thryin’ to git feedin’ for them. So I sold her this
mornin’ to Mrs. Dunne at Loughmore, that gave me a fine price for her.
’Deed she’d have took her off of me this while back, on’y I’d just a
sort of notion agin’ partin’ from the crathur. But be comin’ in to your
supper, child alive; it’s ready waitin’ this good while. Molly’s below
at her sister’s, and I dunno were Thady’s off to, so there’s on’y you
and me in it to-night.”
In the room the more familiar odour of turf-smoke was overborne by a
crisp smell of baking, and Mrs. Doherty picked up a steaming plate which
had been keeping warm on the hearth. “Isn’t that somethin’ like, now?”
she said, setting it on the table triumphantly. “Rale grand they turned
out this time, niver a scorch on the whole of them. I was afeard me hand
might maybe ha’ got out o’ mixin’ them, ’t is so long since I had e’er a
one for you; but sure I bought a half-stone of seconds wid the price of
the little hin, and that’ll make a good few, so it will, jewel avic, and
then we must see after some more. Take one of the thick bits, honey.”
Probably most of us have had experience of the unceremonious methods
which Fate often chooses when communicating to us important
arrangements. We have seen by what a little seeming triviality of an
incident she may intimate that our cherished hope has been struck dead,
or that the execution of some other decree has turned the current of our
life away. It is sometimes as if she contemptuously sent us a grotesque
and dwarfish messenger, who makes grimaces at us while telling us the
bad news, which is ungenerous and scarcely dignified. So we need not
wonder if Mick Doherty had to read the death-warrant of his darling
ambition in a pile of three-cornered griddle-cakes. At any rate, he did
read it there swiftly as clearly. Most likely he knew it all before the
plate was set on the table, and his heart had already gone down with a
run when he replied to his mother’s commendations that they looked
first-rate. As he indorsed this praise with what appetite he could,
being, indeed, mechanically hungry, the uppermost thought in his mind
was how he should at once let his mother understand that she had got the
price she hoped for her pet hen; and after considering for a while, he
said: “Did you ever notice the quare sort of lane-over the turf-stack
out there’s takin’ on it? I question hadn’t we done righter to have took
a leveller bit of ground for under it. But I was thinkin’ this
mornin’”--of what a different subject he had been thinking!--“that next
year I’d thry buildin’ it agin’ the back o’ th’ ould shed, where there
does be ne’er a slant at all.”
“Ay, sure that ’ud be grand,” said Mrs. Doherty, much more elated than
if she had heard of a large fortune; “you couldn’t find an iliganter
place for it in the width of this world.” She felt quite satisfied that
her craftily timed treat had dispelled the dreaded danger, which
actually was the case in a way. But if Mick would stay at home with her,
she was perfectly content to suppose that she came after a griddle-cake
in his estimation. Her relief made her unusually talkative; but Mick was
reflecting between his answers how he must now tell Paddy Joyce that
they were never to be comrades after all.
He went out on this mission immediately after supper. The sun had gone
down, and the cold clearness left showed things plainly, yet was not
light. In front of the cabin-rows the small children of the place were
screeching over their final romp and quarrel, as they did every evening;
fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the
squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on
the brown-hollowed grass-bank between Colgan’s and O’Reilly’s, old
Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly scraping and twangling, according
to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even
the wisps of straw and scraps of paper blowing down the middle of the
wide roadway seemed to have whirled over and over and caught in the
rough patches of stone just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to
the Joyces’, Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A
broad and burly man, who says “shoo-shoo” to a high-piping cluster of
tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from
straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather
an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have
seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick
experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come
out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter’s cheerful “Fine
evenin’.” What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be
fine or foul? Altogether, it was a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in
taking precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles
which had confronted him nearly two years back were now more
hope-baffling than ever. For the intervening months had not brought the
desirable “thrifle more wit” to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the
contrary, was developing into one of those people whose
good-for-nothingness is taken as a matter of course even by themselves;
and a bolt was thus, so to speak, drawn across Mick’s locked door.
He set off betimes on his long ramble. It was a cloudless July
morning--the noon of summer by air and light as well as by the calendar.
Even the barest tracts of the bog-land, which vary their aspect as
little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with
golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton,
and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot. Mick rather hurried over
this stage of his “stravade,” partly because he foresaw a blazing hot
day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are
sheltered hollows scooped in the “knockawns,” and cool patches under
their bushes and boulders. He entered the region of these things before
his shadow had shrunk to its briefest; for not so very far beyond
Kilmacrone the smooth floor of the big bog crumples itself into crusts
and ridges, as if it had caught the trick from its bounding ocean; and
the nearer it comes to the shore the higher it heaves itself, until at
last it is cut short by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles
and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of
exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is
fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing
oceanward, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain fiords, straits, and
bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver
in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull’s dipping wing, or add to
the terror of the tempest as they start out black and unmoved behind
rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land
and water, but wrought in less high relief--a tract of lonely strands,
where shells and daisies whiten the grass, and pink-belled creepers
trail, entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are
apt thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam
when you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on
sturdy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently
supposed the unstable furrows of the sea. And the intricate ground-plan
of the district must be long studied before you can always feel sure
whether the low-shelving swarded edges by which you are walking frame
salt or fresh water.
Mick was bound eventually for one of those ravines which cleave the
cliffs’ precipitous wall and give access to the shore, generally by a
deep-sunken sandy boreen. Here, under a tall bank, there are a couple of
cabins, besides another which, having lost its roof, may be reckoned as
a half; so that Tullykillagin is not a large place, even as places go in
its neighbourhood. He knew, however, that he could count upon getting
something to eat at either of the two cabins first mentioned, and,
indeed, at the bare-raftered one also, if, as often chanced, it was
occupied by Tim Fottrel, the gatheremup; and this prospect served for an
incentive, feeble enough, though it strengthened a little as the hours
wore on. So languid, in fact, was his resolution that at one moment he
thought he would just sthreel home again without going any farther; if
he went aisy everybody would have cleared out of Kilmacrone before he
got back. But at this time he was sitting among some broom-bushes, under
which last year’s withered black pods were strewn, and he determined
that if there were an odd number of seeds in the first one he opened he
would go on to Tullykillagin. There were nine in it, and he logically
continued to loiter seaward.
He dawdled so much that when he came to the cliff the sun already hung
low over the water, and as he walked along the edge his shadow stretched
away far inland across the dappled pale and dark green of the
furze-fretted sward. The sea unrolled a ceaseless scroll of faint
wild-hyacinth colour, on which invisible breeze-wafts inscribed and
erased mysterious curves and strokes like hieroglyphics. Here and there
it showed deep purple stains; for a flight of little snowflake clouds
were fluttering in from the Atlantic, followed at leisure by
deep-folded, glistering drifts, now massed on the horizon-rim to muffle
the descending sun. Yet that tide, with all its smoothness, showed a
broad band of foam wherever it touched the pebbles, which lay dry before
its sliding, for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff’s
foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked
down on a small field of very green grass, set as an oasis between the
waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders
to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the
highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of
occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes,
and a clump of scarlet-tasselled fuchsia. To heighten the incongruity of
its aspect, this pasture was inhabited by a large strawberry cow, who
seemed to be enjoying the alternate mouthfuls of seaweed and woodbine,
which she munched off a thickly wreathed boulder, untroubled by the fact
that the meal bade fair to be her last, since the rising spring tide had
already all but cut off access on either hand, and would still flow for
some hours.
“Musha, now I’ll be skivered,” said Mick, standing still, “if that’s not
Joe McEvoy’s ould cow. You’ll be apt to experience a dampin’, ould
woman, if you don’t quit out of there. Whethen, it’s a quare man he is
to lave the baste sthrayin’ about permiscuous in the welther of the
tide.”
He peered over the edge of the cliff, evidently mistrusting its smooth
face; and then he threw several stones and clods at the cow, with shouts
of “Hi, out of that!” and “Shoo along!” But his missiles fell short of
their mark, and if his voice reached her, she treated it with the placid
disregard of which her kind are mistress on such occasions, and never
raised her crumple-horned head.
“Have it your own way, then,” said Mick, cynically; “it’s nothin’ to me
if you’ve a mind to thry a taste of swimmin’ under wather.”
He had not, however, strolled much farther when he met with somebody who
was vastly more concerned about the animal’s impending fate. This was
old Joe McEvoy himself, who, out of the mouth of a steep, sandy boreen,
sprang up suddenly, like a jack-fn-the-box-one of the shock-wigged,
saturnine-complexioned pattern. But no jack-in-the-box could have looked
so flurriedly distracted, or have muttered to itself such queer
execrations as he did, hobbling along.
“A year’s loadin’ of bad luck to the whoule of thim!” he was saying with
gasps when Mick approached; “there’s not a one of thim but ’ud do
desthruction on herself sooner than lose a chanst to be annoyin’
anybody, if she could conthrive it no other way.”
“If it’s th’ ould cow you’re cursin’,” said Mick, “she’s down below
yonder.”
“Och, tell me somethin’ I dunno, you gomeral, not but what I’m nigh as
big a one meself as can be, to go thrust her wid that little imp of
mischief. Bad scran to it, I must give me stiff leg a rest, and she’ll
be up here blatherin’ after me before you can look round, you may bet
your brogues she will.”
“Gomeral yourself and save your penny,” said Mick, whose temper was not
at its best after his long day of hungry discontent. “And the divil a
call you have to be onaisy about the crathur follyin’ you anywheres.
Stayin’ where she is she’s apt to be, until she gets the chanst of goin’
out to say wid the turn of the tide, and that’s like enough to happen
her.”
“And who at all was talkin’ of the cow follyin’? It’s ould Biddy Duggan
down below that nivir has her tongue off of me, nagglin’ at me for
lettin’ the poor crathur pick her bit along the beach, and it a strip of
the finest grass in the townland, when it’s above wather, just goin’ to
loss. A couple of pints differ extry it does be makin’ in the milkin’ of
a day she’s grazed there. But it’s threatenin’ dhrowndin’ and
disthruction over it th’ ould banshee is this great while; and plased
she’ll be, rale plased and sot up. Sure, that’s what goes agin’ me, to
be so far gratifyin’ her, and herself as mischevious, harm-hopin’ an
ould toad as iver I hated the sight of--Och, bejabers, didn’t I tell you
so? It’s herself comin’ gabble-gobblin’ up.”
As he spoke, a very small, meagre, raggged old woman emerged swiftly
from the lane, accompanied by one younger and stouter and less nimble of
foot, her temporary neighbour, Mrs. Gatheremup. Mrs. Duggan seemed to
bear out Joe’s character of her; for now, like Spenser’s hag Occasion,
“ever as she went her tongue did walk,” and the path it took was not one
of peace. “Maybe, after this happenin’, some she could name might have
the wit to believe what other people tould thim, who knew bitter than to
be thinkin’ to feed a misfortnit crathur of an ould cow on sand and
sayweed as if she was a sayl or a saygull, and it a scandal to the place
to behould her foostherin’ along down there wid the waves’ edges
slitherin’ up to her nose, and she sthrivin’ to graze, and the slippery
stones fit to break her neck.” Such was the purport of Mrs. Duggan’s
remarks, which were punctuated by Joe McEvoy’s peremptory requests that
she would lave gabbin’ and givin’ impidence, and his appeals to the
others to inform him whether they weren’t all to be pitied for havin’ to
put up wid the ould screech-owl’s foolish talk.
“Sure, that’s the way they do be keepin’ it up continial, Micky lad,”
Mrs. Fottrel called to him, shrilly, as if athwart gusts of high wind.
“I’ll pass yon me word the two of thim ’ll stand at their doors of an
evenin” and give bad langwidge to aich other across the breadth of the
road till they have us all fairly moidhered wid the bawls of thim, and I
on’y wonder the thatch doesn’t take and slip down on their ould heads.”
“Belike it’s lave of the likes of _you_ I ought to be axin’ where I’m to
git grazin’ for me own cattle?” a growl of sarcastic thunder was just
then observing, to which flashed a scathing response: “And, bedad, then,
it’s lave you had a right to be axin’ afore you sent off me poor son
Hughey’s bit of a Pat, to be wastin’ his time mindin’ your ould
scarecrow and gettin’ himself dhrownded in the tide. It’s no thanks to
you if the innicent child isn’t as like as not lyin’ this minute under
six fut of could wather, instead of fetchin’ me in the full of me kettle
that I’m roarin’ to him for this half-hour, and niver a livin’ sinner
widin sight or--”
“Saints above! is little Pat strayin’ along wid the cow?” said Mrs.
Fottrel, much aghast. “I was noticin’ I didn’t see him anywheres this
evenin’. What’s to become of him down there, and it risin’ beyond the
heighth of iverythin’ as fast as it can flow? Sure, this mornin’ ’t was
wallopin’ itself agin’ the wall, back of our place, fit to swally all
before it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the child was below?” said Mick. “I’d lep down
there and fetch him up aisy enough; on’y there was no mortial use goin’
after the cow, for niver a crathur that took its stand on four hoofs ’ud
git its own len’th up the cliff, unless it might be some little divil of
a goat. And the wather’s dhrowndin’-deep alongside it afore now.”
“Musha, good gracious! sure, all I done was to bid the spalpeen be
keepin’ an eye on her now and agin while he would be playin’ about
there,” said Joe; “and it’s twinty chances if ivir he did at all.
Trapesed off wid himself somewheres; he’ll be right enough be this time.
’T is n’t the likes of him to go to loss, it’s the quare five-poun’ note
he’d fetch at Athenry fair.”
“He might ha’ broke his legs climbin’ disp’rit on the rocks,” said Mrs.
Fottrel, unconvinced by the argument from unsaleability,” and be lyin’
there now waitin’ for the say-waves to wash the life out of him. Heaven
pity the crathur!”
“Sure, I’ll step down and see what’s gone wid him,” said Mick.
The descent of the cliff, though not riskless, was no great feat for an
active youth, and Mick accomplished it safely, but to little purpose, he
thought at first, since the irreclaimable cow appeared to be the sole
denizen of the shrinking beach. However, when he had shouted and
scrambled for some time without result, he came abruptly upon a nook
among the piled-up rocks, where a very small black-headed boy in
tattered petticoats was digging the sandy floor with a razor-shell.
“Och, it’s there you are,” said Mick, stepping down from a weedy ledge;
“and what have you in it at all that you didn’t hear me bawlin’ to you?”
“Throops,” said Pat, gloatingly, almost too absorbed t o glance off his
work; “it’s Ballyclavvy, the way it did be in the school readin’-book at
Duffclane. There’s the Roossian guns” (he pointed to a row of
black-mouthed mussel-shells, mounted on periwinkle carriages), “and
here’s the sides of the valley I’m makin’; long and narrer it was. Just
step round and look at it from where I am, Micky, but don’t be clumpin’
your fut on the French cavalary.”
“The divil’s in it all,” said Mick, with a sudden bitter vehemence,
which he accounted for to himself by adding, as he pointed toward the
seething white line: “D’ you see where that’s come to, you little
bosthoon? And you sittin’ grubbin’ away here as if you were
pitaty-diggin’ a dozen mile inland.”
Pat looked in the desired direction, but misapprehended the object to be
the western sky, where an overblown fiery rose seemed to have scattered
all its petals broadcast. “Sure, that’s on’y the sun settin’ red like,”
he explained, indifferently, and would have resumed his excavations if
he had not been seized and hustled half-way up the cliff before he could
disengage his mind from his brigades and batteries. Both heads soon
bobbed up over the edge without accident; for Pat climbed like a monkey
when once he had grasped the situation. His grandmother’s attitude
toward Joe McEvoy constrained her to receive him effusively as prey
snatched from the foaming jaws of death; but it was out of Mrs.
Fottrel’s pocket that a peppermint-drop came to sweetly seal his new
lease of life.
“And what are you after now, Mick?” she said, observing that, instead of
drawing himself up to level ground, he stood poised on an uncomfortable
perch, and looked back the steep way he had come.
“I’m thinkin’ to slip down agin,” he said, “and see if be any manner of
manes I could huroosha th’ ould baste round the rocks yonder. The wather
mightn’t be altogither too deep there yit; at all evints, she’s between
the divil and the deep say where she is now; it’s just a chanst.”
“Sorra a much,” said Joe, disconsolately; “scarce worth breakin’ your
bones after, any way.”
“Bones, how are you? Sure, there’s no call to be breakin’ bones in the
matter,” said Mick, beginning to descend. This was true enough, if he
had minded what he was about; but then he did not. So far from it, he
was saying to himself, “One ’ud ha’ thought now she might ha’ took a
sort of pride in it,” when the bottom of the world seemed to drop away
from under his feet, and his irrelevant meditations ended in a
shattering thud down on the rocky pavement a long way below. He never
heard the shouts and shrieks which the incident occasioned above his
head. Once only he became dimly conscious of a quivering network of
prismatic flashes, which he could not see through, and a booming throb
in his ears, which made him murmur dazedly: “Wirra, I thought I’d got
beyond hearin’ of them drums.” In another moment: “What’s took me?” he
said, with a start. But the depths he sank among remain always dark and
silent.
Next day messengers from Tullykillagin told Mrs. Doherty that the Lord
had “took” her son Mick, and that “he had gone out to say wid the tide,
before they could get anybody to him, and there was no tellin’ where he
might be swep’ up, if ever he came to shore at all.”
“And the quarest part of it was that Joe McEvoy’s ould cow that he went
after had legged herself up, somehow, on the rocks out of reach, and
niver a harm on her when they found her in the mornin’. But she’d been
all of a could quiver ever since, and himself doubted if she’d rightly
git over it--might the divil mend her, and she after bein’ the death of
a fine young man. Sure, every sowl up at Tullykillagin was rale annoyed
about it. Even ould Biddy Duggan, that was as cross-tempered as a
weasel, did be frettin’ for the lad; and Joe McEvoy was sittin’ crooched
like an ould wet hen, over his fire block out, that he hadn’t the heart
to be lightin’.”
Mrs. Doherty said she didn’t know what talk they had of the Lord and the
say and the ould cow; but she’d known well enough the way it was when
Mick niver come home last night. He’d just took off after the souldiers,
as he’d a great notion one time.
She was, as may have been observed, rather a dull-witted woman, and
proportionately hard to convince against her will.
“A great notion intirely,” she said; “on’y she’d scarce have thought
he’d go do such a thing on her in airnest. And I runnin’ away indoors
yisterday out of the heighth of the divarsion, when the band-music was a
thrate to be hearin’, just to see his bit of supper wouldn’t be late on
him. And the grand little pitaty-cake I had for him; I may be throwin’
it to the hins now, unless Molly might fancy a bit; for we’ll not be apt
to set eyes on him this three year. Och, wirra! and he that contint at
home, and niver a word out of him about the souldierin’ this long while.
If it had been poor Thady itself, ’t would ha’ been diff’rint; but
Mick--I’d scarce ha’ thought it of him; for he’d a dale of good-nature,
Mrs. Geoghegan, ma’am.”
“He had so, tub-be sure, woman dear,” said Mrs. Geoghegan, “or he might
be sittin’ warm in here this minnit.”
“The back of me hand to thim blamed ould throopers,” said Mrs. Doherty,
“that sets the lads wild wid their thrampin’ around.”
“Poor Mick would be better wid them than where he is now--God have mercy
on his soul!” said a neighbour, solemnly.
But Mick’s mother continued to bewail herself: “And I missin’ the best
of all the tunes they played, so Molly was tellin’ me, for ’fraid he’d
be kep’ waitin’ for his supper, and he comin’ home to me hungry; and
now--There’s a terrible len’th of time in three year. I wouldn’t ha’
believed he’d ha’ done it on me.”