"Aren't you Mrs. Nevill's little girl, from the Bend?"
"Yep. Gran'pa's house is jest back there." She jerked her head up
the road.
"How's your mother? I'll step in and see her, as I'm here."
"Mother's up. She's been washin'."
She began to retreat up the road, with the sudden movement of a
half-wild thing, and I followed her, glad enough to turn my back on
the chicken-huckster's dwelling. The moaning of the cow was in my
ears again as I walked on.
I knew the Nevills' cottage, and my road from there lay straight
enough. I had never approached the Bend before from this side, and
so the lie of the land was unfamiliar to me. The Nevills were one of
the few Irish families about. The household consisted of a rheumatic
old grandfather, his daughter, whom I had attended a short while ago,
and her husband, a steady young fellow who worked at a harness
factory in the village.
Paddy was an old sinner if there ever lived one, but now, along in
the green seventies, he confined himself to the cultivation of
religion and the smoking of a particularly vile corncob pipe. He had
been employed most of his life on the railway, and his rheumatism was
the result of six weeks' work in a flooded cutting. Providence had
released him some two years ago from a vituperative wife, whose
latter years had been soured by the burden of an invalid husband; I
gathered from the old man's talk that she had to her last day
regarded his rheumatism as a form of criminal idleness, and since her
death Paddy had taken a fresh lease of life.
I found him on his usual corner of the cottage porch, his square old
head with its bristly jaws--Paddy still shaved once a week--framed by
the window-ledge and its row of flowering plants in tin cans. His
daughter was inside, getting supper, and the new baby lay in a
ramshackle baby-coach near Paddy's elbow. He was rocking the coach
with one toe on the wheel while he smoked, the smell of his
unspeakable tobacco mingling with that of the frying onions in the
kitchen, through the open door.
I always felt like holding my breath when I approached the Nevill
cottage. The stuffiness was of that permanent, impenetrable sort
which seems to encompass the house solidly for a radius of five yards
at least.
I sat down on the porch step and asked after Paddy's rheumatism. He
looked down at his feet, shapeless in list slippers, like fearsome
parcels.
"I ain't long fur this world, doctor, and that's truth I'm tellin'
yer. Don't I know it? We ain't a long-lived fam'ly. Me father died
at seventy-eight an' me brother at eighty, an' I'm thinkin' I won't
be long after thim." He raised his voice suddenly to a shout,
without turning, "Mary, git a cheer out fur th' doctor!"
I refused the chair hastily; the porch step at least bordered on
fresh air.
"I've just come round by Aaron Menning's place," I said. "I met the
little girl there."
Paddy's face darkened.
"Ain't I allus tellin' the young limb I won't hev her hangin' round
the likes of thim dirrty Dutchmen! It's her mother'll be after
takin' the strap to her fur that. The place ain't fit fur a dog
these days. Did ye take heed to the cow there?"