TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES
“Ὅσσ’ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθ’· ὅσα δ’ οὐχ ἕλομεν, φερόμεσθα.”
A CREEL OF IRISH
STORIES
BY
JANE BARLOW
AUTHOR OF “IRISH IDYLLS”
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
1897
PRINTED BY
W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD
RIVERSIDE PRESS
EDINBURGH
TO
J. W. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE KEYS OF THE CHEST 1
A DESERTED CHILD 97
AN ACCOUNT SETTLED 125
M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP 155
THE SNAKES AND NORAH 185
THREE PINT MEASURES 211
THE SURREE AT MAHON’S 231
THE SHORTEST WAY 253
THE STAY-AT-HOMES 271
A PROUD WOMAN 299
THE KEYS OF THE CHEST
THE KEYS OF THE CHEST
The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome
place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people
who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that
its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden.
It runs westward—that is, towards the ocean—but never reaches the
shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the
end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to
north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple
construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their
smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the
sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at
one point—about midway on the right hand looking westward—it is
suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like
an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybody _the Nick
of Time_. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me
over the opposite hills, but he replied: “Sure, what else would they
be callin’ it?” Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory
explanation.
The effect of Letterglas’s solitude and verdure somehow seems to be
heightened if one notices its single visible sign of human handiwork.
This is a road-track, now all but quite grassed over, leading into
the valley from its open end, where the Clonmoragh highway passes,
and stopping aimlessly at the slope immediately below the Nick,
having first flung two or three zig-zag loops up the hillside.
A rust-eaten, handleless shovel, and the wreck of an overturned
wheelbarrow, still mark the point where the work was abandoned on a
misty morning in April, more than fifty springs ago; but the track
itself is now merely a most faint difference of shade in the sward,
which has crept back again indefatigably, even where the austere
road-metal had been thrown clattering down.
A day before that misty morning, if anybody had climbed up and
had passed through the Nick of Time, in at which the new road was
to go, he would have found himself on a long level of fine-bladed
turf, stretching like a lofty causeway laid down atop of the
hill-embankment Everything else up there looked so softly smooth and
flecklessly green that the eye was at once caught by a big block of
stone, which stood just opposite the gap, at a few yards’ distance.
It was an oblong mass of blackish limestone, perhaps seven feet by
four, with a shape curiously symmetrical for a piece of Nature’s
rough-hewing; plumb-and-rule guided chisel could scarcely have made
its lines truer. That, and its solitariness, uncompanioned as far
as could be seen by so much as a single pebble, gave its aspect an
incongruity which prompted the question how it had come there; for
whose answer we must revert through unimaginable wastes of years to
the time when our last huge ice-sheet was scoring and grinding all
the country’s face on its slithering way to the western ocean. Then
it was that this big boulder dropped fortuitously through a small
rent in the isle-wide coverlid, and so being left behind did not
share in the final weltering plunge a few miles farther on, where
the stark folds slipped over the sea-cliffs like the counterpane
off a restless sleeper’s bed. Ever since that catastrophe it had
sat there looking rather like a rude unwieldy coffer or chest,
a portion—as in fact it had been—of the impedimenta carried and
lost by some Titanic traveller. The resemblance was increased by a
clean-cut horizontal crack, no doubt sustained when the mass came
_sogging_ heavily to earth, which ran all round it, a few inches
from the top, counterfeiting a lid. All the old ages that had passed
over it afterwards had wrought only slight changes in its aspect. As
the years went on, the dark peaty mould deepened a little about its
base, and dull golden and silvery lichen-circlets crept out here and
there like wraiths of the sun and moon beams that had touched it.
Otherwise it was unaltered, and for many a long century so were its
surroundings.
But at last a new feature appeared among them; a very inobtrusive
one. Fifty years ago, anybody approaching the big stone from the Nick
of Time might have observed that a little footpath led up to it from
the contrary direction, and went no farther. A more inartificial path
could not well be: a simple product of steps going to and fro. You
might have supposed a sheep-walk, only that there were no fleeces
nibbling over Letterglas. Indeed, its most frequent passers-by being
such promiscuous wayfarers as the shadows of wings and clouds, it
was not easy to conjecture any plausible _raison d’être_ for this
track, which ran distinctly defined, though faintly, merely a crease
in the flowing sward mantle, not a seam worn threadbare, so to speak,
through to the brown earth. Certainly the rather gloomy-looking block
had no apparent attractions wherewith to invite resort, not even a
view, as it stood at the bottom of a very shallow dent in the green.
Yet there the path ended; and if you took a dozen steps to the brow
of the hill, you could trace the course of that pale thin line far
down the slopes; through the fenceless “mountainy land” first, and
then into two or three steep, dyke-girdled fields, before it was lost
among the round-topped trees which gathered about a rambling old
mansion-house. Whoever visited the big stone evidently thought it
worth while to come a long way.
Such an humble and artless path has always a certain element
of romance about it, lacking in more pretentious thoroughfares
contracted for at so much a mile. They differ as does a brook from a
canal. Like the brook, which has wrought itself as it went along,
with and by its own purpose, the little footpath has some special
meaning and object, albeit perhaps a less obvious one. It is the
visible trail of a want or wish, though of what kind we may be
unaware, and with want or wish it will cease to exist, or soon after.
For the living green things will creep back and efface it speedily.
But meanwhile it seems half to keep and half to betray a secret: you
can only guess what has brought feet thither day by day to tread it
out.
* * * * *
Fifty years ago or more, you would have been likely enough any fine
morning to catch the chief maker of this particular path in the
act. If the years were, say, ten more, it would have proved to be
a very little little-girl, whose brown hair held both sunshine and
shadow, and whose hazel-green eyes were softly lit, and who in those
early days of hers always wore an ugly reddish checked pelisse, and
a broad-brimmed straw hat with velvet rosettes to match. This was
little Eileen Fitzmaurice, six or seven years old, who, ever since
she could recollect anything, and maybe some twelve months longer,
had lived with her mother and aunt at the Big House in Glendoula. As
you would, no doubt, never guess her errand up the side of Slieve
Ardgreine, I will at once explain that she was seeing after the
safety of her family plate.
Although Eileen had herself no recollection of anywhere else than
this Glendoula, a valley much resembling its neighbour Letterglas,
but with its green dotted and chequered by a few cabins and fields,
she knew by hearsay that there was another place in the world, a most
wonderful place called Drumlough Castle or At Home, where “there
wouldn’t be as much as a wing of a cold chicken served in the parlour
without its silver dish under it, and as for the ould black sideboard
of an evenin’ there would be company in it, that now was somethin’
worth lookin’ at; the full moon on a dark night was a joke to the big
salvers.” To be sure there were there other fine things innumerable,
which would have appealed quite as strongly to her imagination, if
they had had equal justice done to them; however, it was upon these
that Eileen’s informant always laid most stress, for she looked
back to her ancient home through the eyes of old Timothy Gabbett,
the lame butler, whose pride and affection had dwelt in his pantry
and plate-chest, enjoying their supreme moments before a gala-night
spectacle of snowy and crystal and lustrous argent gleams.
Yet this paradise, of which old Timothy used to say mournfully,
“Ah, Miss Eileen, them was the rael times,” was haunted by lurking
shadows. Eileen never learned the true reason of their exile: how
wild Sir Gerald, her father, had been found one summer morning
entangled among the serpentine coils of the water-weeds at the end of
the lake, with his only son and heir dead in his arms, three-year-old
Jack, who, when told by the garden-boy Mick that the master was
looking for him high ways and low ways, had stumped off greatly
elated, with no foreboding of the method in which Sir Gerald had
resolved to settle his grievously involved affairs. She had been
too small a baby then to be conscious of her mother’s flight from
the memories of Drumlough, and the circumstances of their coming
to Glendoula remained for her in their original obscurity. But
she very quickly perceived that it was worse than useless to ask
questions on such subjects of anybody except old Timothy, and that
any allusion to his stories in the presence of her elders was a grave
misdemeanour, which made her invalid mother cry, and her melancholy
aunt scold; and Eileen would have desisted at a subtler hint. She
did not often wonder why this should be, because her world was so
full of mysteries that she generally accepted their existence as a
matter of course. There was just one of them, however, that exercised
her mind not a little, and that she sometimes vainly tried to get
cleared up. She wanted to know what had become of all those most
beautiful silver things that Timothy talked about—the great shining
salvers, the claret-jugs, the tankards and flagons, the piles “as
high as your head, Miss Eileen,” of plates with a polish on them “the
stars in the sky might be the betther of gettin’,” and the grand
potato-rings, and the frosted cake-baskets, and the tall _up-urny_,
which seemed to be a marvellous composition of lights and flowers.
Of all these resplendent objects, the only one, a few uninteresting
spoons and forks excepted, that apparently had moved with the family
to Glendoula, was an antique teapot of fantastic shape. It could
no longer be used for its proper purpose, owing to the infirmity of
its dragon-tail handle, but old Timothy turned it to account in his
own way. You would always have been warned that it was Quality—and
Quality was almost invariably either Dr M‘Clintock or Canon Roche—who
had called at Glendoula House had you seen Timothy hobbling to
answer the bell. For, having reconnoitred through the half-glass
back hall-door, it was his practice in such cases to equip himself
with the old teapot and a bit of “shammy,” that he might appear
rubbing up ostentatiously, and muttering a stereotyped apology: “Beg
your pardon, sir, but there does be such a terrible sight of silver
clanin’ in this house that I scarce git time to lay a bit out of me
hand.” All the while he felt more than half-conscious that it was a
poor and rather unseemly pretence; but he had not much invention, and
could devise no better expedient for the magnifying of his diminished
office and the upholding of the family’s fallen fortune. Nor was
he ready with any very satisfactory answers when Eileen questioned
him about the present bestowal of his treasures. Full well he
knew that they had long since gone to the Jews and other hopeless
destinations, and were by this time irrecognisably melted down, or,
more intolerable still, adorning alien boards, and subject to alien
powder and brushes. This knowledge gave him acute pangs, which made
his replies curt and vague. “Where are they now, Miss Eily? Ah, sure,
just put away somewheres safe; they’re not wanted these times, when
the poor misthress is seein’ no company; but it won’t be so one of
these days.... Ah no, Miss Eily darlint, I couldn’t be showin’ them
to you—sure, they’re not in this house at all.” And once he added:
“They’re just stored up handy, Miss Eily, waitin’ till you’re grown a
big enough lady to be ownin’ of them.”
“Me?” said Eileen, startled.
“Why, in coorse, Miss Eileen. Who else has anythin’ else to say to
thim after poor little Master Jack, that had a right to ha’ been Sir
John, gettin’ dhrown—bein’ took suddint, I mane, that way? Hiven be
good to the both of them. Ay, to be sure, honey, it’s all in a very
safe place waitin’ for you. And thank ’ee kindly for bringin’ me in
the grand little bunch of daisies—they smell iligant.”
After learning this fact about her far-off proprietorship in the
hoarded plate, Eileen thought about it oftener than ever, though from
motives of delicacy she spoke about it seldomer, lest she should
appear unduly prying and eager on her own behalf. And for a long time
the more she pondered the matter, the less possible she found it to
excogitate any possible hiding-place. But at last she made a fateful
discovery.
* * * * *
It was one fine May morning when she went for an unusually long
ramble with Norah Kinsella, the housemaid. Norah—a tall, strong,
cheerful lass, far more active than rheumatic old nurse—thought
nothing of carrying her pet, little Miss Eileen, who at six years
old was still only “a light fairy of a crathur,” up and down steep
places, so that they could go all the farther. On this occasion they
climbed right up to the top of the hill behind the house, higher
than Eileen had ever been before; and one of the first things she
noticed was the great boulder-block. She never had seen a stone of
nearly so large a size, nor imagined one; and she did not now class
it with the small unshapely fragments and insignificant pebbles with
which she was familiar. Rather, it reminded her of the turf-stacks
that she had watched people building up carefully in the yard. Yet a
turf-stack it certainly was not.
“Doesn’t it look like a great big box, Norah?” she said.
“Ay, indeed does it, Miss Eily,” Norah said; “and a fine power of
things it ’ud hould inside of itself, too. Sure now, you could be
puttin’ away a one of them little houses down below there in it, or
very nearly.”
“It must be extrornarly heavy, Norah,” Eileen said, patting the
sun-warmed side of the stone with her hand. “If that’s its lid, I
couldn’t lift it.”
“Sorra a bit of you, honey, nor ten like you. Troth, ’twould take
ten strong men to give that a heft,” said Norah, making as if she
would prise it up with the flat of her hand. “Whativer was inside it
’ud have to stay there for you or for me, if it was silver or gould
itself—we’d ha’ ne’er a chance.”
Her random words gave Eileen the shock of a new idea. Perhaps there
really might be silver, quantities of silver, in it. For why
should not this be the handy safe place that old Timothy meant? A
safer there could not well be, since it was so far removed from all
meddlers; and she almost thought that she did espy a bright twinkle
as she stared hard at the lid-like crack, which was just on a level
with her eyes. She discreetly said nothing about it to Norah, and her
pre-occupation with the subject made her so abstractedly silent on
their way home that Norah feared the walk must have been too long.
But, in fact, she was considering whether or no she should mention
her discovery to old Timothy. He might be vexed, she thought, at her
finding out what he had refused to tell her: still, she would have
liked to ask him whether her guess were right. The point needed much
deliberation, and remained undecided for many days.
* * * * *
Meanwhile she chanced upon something that seemed to be an
independent corroboration of her own theory. By nature Eileen had
not particularly studious tastes, but solitariness had early driven
her to seek for company on the shelves in the long low-windowed
book-room. She did not find there much that was very congenial.
Sixty years ago juvenile literature was, as a rule, a solemn and
dreary thing; and Eileen’s meagre library was not even up to that
date, having for the most part belonged to the preceding generation.
The favourite authors of the day would appear to have been infested
with a mole-like fancy, which commonly led them to linger among
tombs and worms and epitaphs, seldom, indeed, stopping short at
those grisly precincts, or forbearing to light them up with a lurid
flare from the regions beyond, but, nevertheless, dwelling upon them
with a fond elaboration of detail. Accordingly, a few days after her
first ascent of Slieve Ardgreine, Eileen fished down from its shelf
a small, old dusty, half-calf volume, which was composed of several
short stories bound together. One of them, entitled _The Churchyard
Prattler_, related the experiences of a child, aged four, who, as
an appropriate and improving pastime, was sent out provided with a
string of his own length, and instructed to ascertain by measurement
how many of the graves in his cheerfully chosen playground were
shorter than himself. He was pictorially represented as attired in a
long bib and a broad-brimmed chimney-pot hat, and he moralised his
lively researches into the strains of a brief rime-doggerel hymn:
“_Oft may be found
A grassy mound
By the yew-tree,
Much less than me;
It seems to cry:
Prepare to die!_”
Another showed how a frivolous little girl, in a huge coal-scuttle
bonnet, had her sinful hankering after toys and such vanities rebuked
by being conducted past a series of attractive shop-windows, from
each of which she was bidden to select herself a present, until she
arrived at an undertaker’s establishment, where she was likewise
required to place an order.
The last story in the volume, however, was of a very different type,
and upon it Eileen now alighted, instinctively judicious in her
skipping of its ghoulish companions. It was called _The Glittering
Hoard in the Coffer of Stone_; and the passage that most profoundly
impressed her ran as follows: “The flare of the scented torches
fell upon the vast coffer of dark stone, which stood in one corner
of the cavern. Its smooth sides were crusted here and there with
patches of lichen and grey moss, and it looked as if no hand had
touched it for many an age. But at a gesture from the Prince, six
gigantic black slaves raised up the massive slab which formed its
lid. As they did so, the foot of one of them slipped, and before he
could recover himself, the unwieldy weight slid down with a crash,
and was shattered into three fragments on the floor. Nobody heeded,
however, for the light that broke out of the open chest drew all
eyes thither. It was like a cistern filled with crystalline fire.
“Empty it, my son,” said the old Sultaness, and the Prince began to
lift out one by one the treasures it contained. Silver goblets there
were and flagons, great gilt bowls and ewers, filigree caskets set
with diamonds, chains of red gold, and ropes of milk-white pearls,
diadems and necklaces, armlets and girdles, whose pendant gems
dripped a many-coloured brilliance, as of flower-distained dew. At
the bottom of the chest lay a round golden buckler, studded with
knots of jewels, and a mighty sword in an ivory scabbard inlaid with
pale coral and amber: the hilt was carved out of a single lump of
apple-green chrysoprase. All these, strewn over the flagged floor,
shimmered and bickered under the glancing torch-gleams, until it
seemed as if a rippled and moon-lit sea lay there flashing around a
murky rock. The beholder could hardly realise that its uncouth bulk
had indeed been the receptacle of a treasure so richly wrought and
exquisite.”
Eileen read and pored over this account with keen interest and
pleasure. From the first she drew a parallel between the two great
blocks of stone, so that the wealth disclosed by the one strengthened
her most splendid conjectures about the other. As she read, she
easily shifted the scene from the shadowy cavern to the sunny
hill-top, and imagined the grass all scattered over with shining
gear, which by some strange decree of fortune she was to look upon as
her own property. Silver dishes and jewelled diadems, the _up-urny_
and the buckler, both these alike fascinatingly mysterious, sparkled
for her in the clear light of day. The only objects in the picture
that she shrank from reproducing were those six gigantic black men,
whose presence she felt to be an ugly blot upon the brightness. But
then she reflected that the lifters of the lid perhaps need not be
either black or gigantic. Dan Donnelly, and Christy Shanahan, and
Murtagh Reilly, would surely be strong and big enough to do it;
and they were all pleasant familiar faces, who said “Good mornin’
to you kindly, Miss Eily,” or “The Lord love you,” with friendly
smiles, whenever they met her, and were in no wise alarming. So she
substituted them for the formidable figures, and could almost hear
old Murtagh saying, “Hup boyos! or what for was yous aitin’ all them
pitaties?” which was his usual exordium upon such strenuous occasions.
* * * * *
The next time that she went for a walk with Norah Kinsella, which
happened soon after this, in the continuance of old nurse’s
rheumatism, Eileen said, half-scared at her own temerity: “Let us
go up again to the big box”; and she felt happy when Norah at once
assented, tacitly accepting the fact that a box it was. Eileen wanted
to see whether she were tall enough to look in, supposing the lid
removed, and she found, to her gratification, that on tiptoe her
stature sufficed.
It was some while longer, however, before she ventured to touch
upon it in conversation with old Timothy; nor did she then make any
point-blank statement. She introduced the subject allusively and
implicitly. “That _is_ an exceedingly safe place where you keep the
plate now, Timothy, isn’t it?” she said to him one day when she was
helping him to lay the table, by following him with a little sheaf of
spoons as he hobbled round it. Her brown frock was hidden beneath a
white cambric pinafore, and her large eyes glinted wistfully through
a soft cloud of hair.
“It is so bedad, missy,” said the old man resignedly, “we’ve took
good care of that.”
“How many people do _you_ think it would take to lift off the lid of
the chest?” said Eileen.
“Is it the led, Miss Eily? Troth, now, they’d be bothered to do that
on us at all, if they was as many as they plased, and the kay of it
put away out of the raich of them—or the likes of them,” old Timothy
said, arbitrarily blackening her colourless term.
“Oh, then, it’s locked?” said Eileen.
“To be sure it is, Miss Eily. Why now, if it wasn’t, you might as
well be gad’rin’ the things together handy for villins to run away
wid thim convanient. But ah, sure, you’re innicent yet, Miss Eily,
and small blame to you, or you’d understand the raison of kays.”
“So I do, Timothy,” said Eileen. “It’s villins. But I think I don’t
quite understand the reason of _them_.”
She went away pondering. This locking of the chest compelled her
to modify somewhat the details of the opening scene. However, she
quickly re-arranged them completely to her satisfaction, and her
fondness for visiting the site of it did not diminish. About this
time she began to be allowed to ramble out unattended, for old nurse
went invalided home, and Eileen had acquired the character of a
quiet, sensible child, not apt to get into mischief. The use she made
of her liberty was a daily pilgrimage up to the big stone, where she
dreamed away many pleasant hours, largely occupied with plans for the
future, when she should have found that key. Sometimes she brought
the _Glittering Hoard_ book up with her, and read it there to whet
the edge of anticipation; but in general she was content to weave a
dazzling fabric out of the material supplied her by old Timothy’s
reminiscences.
Should anybody hence infer that Eileen Fitzmaurice must have been
in her early youth an avaricious sort of person, he cannot be
flatly contradicted; for so she was, in a way. But in a way it
was. Her theories about the privileges of property were peculiar,
and restrictive. For instance, in her definition “my own” meant
merely “promptly transferable”; and the Paradise she supposed was
a place where everybody else would like everything that she had.
Here, the failure of her few possessions to please other people
not infrequently caused her disappointment; and she occasionally
thought scorn of herself for having only trifles to offer so scant
and paltry. Sometimes, indeed, it was nothing better than a bunch or
so of blackberries, perhaps wanting still several shades of their
mature glossy jet, which she had torn hands as well as frock in
extricating from among their barbed briers—the greediest child never
plucked with a more eager recklessness. When she could meet with
no friend who was imprudent or complaisant enough to accept these
spoils, she would, a little crestfallen and regretful, scatter them
on some walk or window-stool, in hopes that at least the small birds
might condescend to benefit thereby. She was all the more dependent
upon opportunities for bestowing such a tangible proof of her regard,
because she seldom had any for others of the less material kind. Her
mother was too drearily isolated by ill-health and despondency to
be within reach of caresses, while her aunt Geraldine was mostly
absent, inhabiting some remote volume, and seemed to be rather bored
by the people whom she encountered in her brief visits to the outer
world. The acquisition of the wonderful chest, however, would release
Eileen from these straitened circumstances, as its contents would
surely comprise what could not but give satisfaction to all. She
could scarcely believe that anybody, not even poor mamma, who only
pretended so badly to care about her presents of wild flowers and the
like, could really be indifferent to the set of six little silver
salt-cellars shaped like water-lilies, which old Timothy described
so fondly. It might be possible also to provide Aunt Geraldine with
something of which she should not say hurriedly, coming reluctantly
out of her book: “Oh, thank you, my dear child, but what use would it
be to _me_?” Then there were Norah Kinsella, and old nurse, and old
Timothy, and after them a small crowd of neighbours, very adequately
representing the population of Glendoula, so catholic being Eileen’s
good will that there was hardly a dresser in the hamlet on which
some brilliant object should fail to shine. And if anything remained
over after the distribution, she thought to herself that she would
leave it for the villins, who would no doubt be much disappointed,
supposing they ever did come to look and found nothing at all. Such
plans as these were commonly in her mind as she toiled up and trotted
down the smooth-swarded steps, where the thread-like track of her
footsteps slowly began to follow them.
* * * * *
Generally Eileen went to and fro quite alone beneath the spacious
domed skies, which seemed to make no more account of her than of
the rabbits, who played here and there on the side of the hill.
The rabbits evidently did not think much of her either, and hid
themselves when she came near without any great show of flurry or
fright, rather intimating by their demeanour that they had simply
no wish to make her acquaintance. But Eileen used to watch them
wistfully from their prescribed distance, and think to herself that
they looked enviably sociable and friendly together. Sometimes, too,
she wished that her tame robin would hop along with her farther than
to the end of the holly walk, but it never would; and one day the
black cat ate it, all except a fluff of heart-rending feathers,
no doubt to warn her that her desires were vain. For destiny had
assigned her little intercourse with her fellow-creatures.
Once, however, she had a companion for a while. It was during her
seventh summer, when her cousin Pierce Wilmot spent his holidays at
Glendoula House. Just at first Eileen found this an experience as
alarming as it was novel. Breakfast and luncheon became such serious
ordeals when she had to confront a great-sized stranger—Pierce was
about double her age and much more than twice as big—concerning whom
the furtive glances she ventured upon gave her an impression of a
very black head, and eyebrows as dark and straight as if they had
been ruled with pen and ink. She thought he looked ferocious, and
privately inquired of Norah whether holidays were _many_ days.
But on the second morning, after breakfast, this forbidding person
suddenly said to her: “Come along, little Bright-Eyes, and show
me everything.” At which address her terror culminated, and then,
as terrors sometimes do, toppled over into nothing at all. A few
minutes later they were going about together quite amicably out of
doors. Pierce was so immeasurably Eileen’s superior in age and all
its privileges that he had no need to assert his dignity by keeping
her at a distance—as the rabbits did—and they fraternised apace.
The July morning was still freshly fair, with a twinkling trail
of dew shifting along from blade to leaf up the sun-lit sward, as
the moon’s silver-spun wake shifts over a rippled water, and with
gossamer threads, that might have been ravelled out of a rainbow,
woven between furze and broom bushes, when Eileen and Pierce began
to ascend Slieve Ardgreine. For one of the first things she had to
show him was her stone chest. She took an especial pleasure in doing
so, because she very seldom had an opportunity of even talking about
it to anybody, the matter being, she felt, a family affair, which
she could not with propriety enter upon except to old confidential
Timothy, whose distaste for the subject she was bound to respect.
“Why, _you’ll_ never get up there,” Pierce said with some
incredulity, when, in answer to his inquiry whither he was being
taken, Eileen pointed to the ridge above their heads, “_Were_ you
ever up so high?” he asked, doubtfully.
Eileen would have been very sorry to let him perceive how absurd she
thought this curious misconception, and she only replied: “Every
fine day, if they don’t say the grass is too boggy altogether. And
old Murtagh says I skyte up as fast as his Cruiskeen going after a
rabbit.”
On the way up, Eileen gave her companion, whose life seemed to
have been spent chiefly in towns, a good deal of information about
common natural objects. Some of this she had excogitated for herself
during her solitary rambles, and it appeared to surprise and amuse
him rather unaccountably. Her explanation, for instance, of how the
hedgehogs came and stuck themselves over with the withered spines of
the furze-bushes, that had dropped off mottled and grey. Among other
things she showed him two or three rabbit-holes; but here it was
Pierce who had new facts to impart. “So that’s where they sleep, is
it?” he said, “I always thought they hung themselves up like bats,
head downwards against a wall; at any rate, that’s how they manage in
Dublin.”
“That _is_ funny,” said Eileen; “I don’t think they ever do here. And
I suppose they drop down when they awake?”
“Oh, I rather fancy they never do awake,” said Pierce.
“Never at all? Are you quite sure, now, that they’re not _dormouses_,
Pierce?” said Eileen wisely.
“Am I sure that you’re not an elephant, Miss Eileen?” he said,
mimicking her. “But I can tell you that if I can borrow a gun, I’ll
soon teach your rabbits the same trick. Why, haven’t you ever been in
a poulterer’s shop”—Eileen never had—“and seen them hanging up?”
“Oh,” said Eileen. She disliked guns and shooting, and moreover
became suddenly aware that she must have displayed a ridiculous
stupidity about Pierce’s joke. This made her turn disconcertedly
pink, so that Pierce was afraid he must have hurt her feelings, which
he had not meant to do. Therefore he was glad to find, when a few
minutes afterwards they reached the big stone, that she had evidently
quite forgotten any little vexation in the excitement of relating
its wonderful romance. He was careful to listen with such interest,
and seemingly so fully share all her sentiments, that she very soon
ventured upon confiding to him a particular anxiety which had of late
grown up in her mind. “Do you see what a small keyhole it has?” she
said, pointing to a little round orifice which occurred high up on
one side of the block, and the discovery of which had been to her
a source both of hopes and fears. “Only a tiny little _pinny_ key
would fit into it. Wouldn’t you think it would take a bigger one to
open a box like this?” As the hole barely admitted the tip of her
forefinger, it could not be considered roomy, but Pierce replied with
decision: “The largest box in the world might be opened with the
smallest key that ever was made”; and one of her haunting fears being
thus dispelled, she produced another, which took this form: “Well,
but supposing the people somehow _lost_ the key, then I suppose the
box couldn’t ever be opened again, even if the person that the things
in it were belonging to did live to be as much as twenty—old enough
to be let have them, you know?” And again Pierce could re-assure her.
“Why, there’d be nothing easier than to get another key made. One
takes an impression of the lock with cobbler’s wax; _I_ could do it
myself. So if they lose it on you, little Bright-Eyes, just send word
to me, and I’ll come and settle it for you.” Eileen looked grateful
and relieved. “It won’t be for a long while, but I’ll not forget,”
she said.
As they returned down the hill she said: “I wonder whether there
is that very fine sort of sword in this chest too. I hope so, and
perhaps there may be, only old Timothy never told me. I must ask him
about it, and if there is one, Pierce, I’ll give it to you.”
“And then I’d maybe kill you with it,” Pierce said, absently joking,
for just at that time he was speculating upon his chances of getting
a shot at the rabbits. But Eileen replied quite solemnly: “I don’t
believe you’d ever like to do that on purpose—at any rate, not unless
I growed up very detestfully nasty; and you’re too big to do anything
by accident.” And she proceeded home, much cheered by the event of
their walk.
* * * * *
Less satisfactory was the result of an interview which she had
shortly afterwards with old Timothy. For, in the first place, she
regretted to hear that “he couldn’t be sure, but he thought it
noways likely there would be a sword, or any such description of
an ould skiverin’ conthrivance, put up along with the good plate;
at all events, he never remimbered any talk of e’er a one—not to
his knowledge.” And still more mortifying than this, she quickly
perceived that the old butler had no liking for her cousin. What
Timothy said on the subject was exactly as follows:—“Goin’ out wid
Master Pierce, missy jewel? Och well, to be sure, he’s a fine young
gentleman, considherin’. If the night’s black enough, the baste’s
white enough, as Andy Goligher said, and he misdhrivin’ home the
wrong Kerry bullock.” An aphorism the application of which may seem
rather obscure to the undiscerning, but which Eileen quite clearly
understood as an intimation that of Master Pierce Timothy thought
poorly, and she was sorry for this, as she would have liked her old
and her new acquaintance to be friends.
The grounds of Timothy’s prejudice, however, she did not guess. The
fact was that he had a few days before scowlingly from his pantry
window espied Master Pierce “discoorsin’ as plisant as anythin’”
with young Larry M‘Farlane, “that was sister’s son to ould Pather
Doran, and bad luck to _him_.” Now, maybe as many as a dozen years
ago, Timothy and Pather had differed in a discussion about the proper
season for sowing asparagus, and one of Pather’s arguments had been:
“That it was no great thanks to Timothy if he _had_ sted a goodish
while wid the Family, and he, you might say, tied to thim be the
leg like a strayin’ jackass.” Pather’s allusion was to the effects
of an accident, which, met with by Timothy on the cellar-stairs at
Drumlough Castle in his youth, had left him a hobbler for life; and
since the controversy Pather and he “weren’t spakin’.” Therefore,
now, if Master Pierce chose “to be great wid a one of that pack,
and to go sthreelin’ up the hill wid him after the rabbits,” it was
only natural that old Timothy should entertain no high opinion of so
indiscriminating a person.
But his veiled disparagement did not check the progress of a real
friendship between the cousins, and when the end of Pierce’s holidays
came, Eileen thought they had not been nearly many enough. On the
regretful evening before he went, they paid a farewell visit to the
big boulder, and, standing by it, Eileen said forlornly: “Next time
I’ll only be myself.”
“Perhaps I may be here again next summer,” Pierce said encouragingly.
He had already learned by experience that even twelve months are not
interminable.
“I wish it would be next year always,” said Eileen. “For that’s the
time when people come back. The Widow Shanahan’s son’s coming home
from the States next year, please goodness; but she says she’ll not
be in this world then, so he might as well stop where he’s gettin’
the fine wages. Norah says that she means that she’ll be dead. I
wonder who told her, or how she knows. _You_ don’t know how soon you
are going to die, Pierce, do you?”
“Not I, nor anybody else,” said Pierce.
“I wanted to give her her little silver jug,” said Eileen; “she’s
to have the little fat one that’s gilt inside and has two spouts,
because it’s the nicest, and she’s to be pitied, the dear knows,
Norah says, with one thing and the other. But if she goes and dies
first, I never can. Do you think she’d wait a while, if I told her
about it as a secret?”
“She mightn’t be able,” said Pierce.
“Ah, and then it would only tantinglise her,” said Eileen, “so I’d
better not. But I’m sorry.”
“Don’t forget that you must send me word, if they lose the key, and
you want another,” Pierce said to change the subject.
“I’ll remember,” said Eileen. “But I’ll have to keep on living for
ever so much longer before they’ll let me want it. You see, I’ll not
be twenty-one even next year, I should think.”
“I should think not indeed, Miss Eileen,” said Pierce; “you’re no age
worth speaking of at all.”
They were now descending the hill, and for some way Eileen mused
vainly about possible remedies for this deplorable state of affairs.
“I wish,” she said at length, “that a great many days would happen
all together sometimes—in bunches like the black and white currants,
instead of one by one and one by one: ever so long they last, when
there’s nobody here but me. One might get old pretty quick then.
Wouldn’t you like it better, Pierce?”
“Well, no,” said Pierce. “If the days were used up that way, there’d
be so little time for doing anything. Mostly they’re short enough;
and there’s no hurry about getting old, as you call it—an old woman
of twenty—you’re a queer young person, Eileen.”
“I was only thinking,” said Eileen, “that perhaps I mightn’t be able
to wait a great while, any more than the Widow Shanahan. And it would
be a pity if I wasn’t in this world when the chest is opened”; and
although Pierce replied: “Oh, nonsense; where else should you be?”
she continued to contemplate this contingency in sad silence as they
trotted down after their perch-long shadows over the sunny turf with
its jewelled embroideries of golden trefoil and pearly eyebright, and
dim amethystine thyme. But when they had just come to the gap in the
dyke, where you step across two flat stones into the highest field,
a somewhat consolatory thought struck her. It was: “Perhaps, then,
they’d give all those things to you, Pierce, and I’ve told you what
everybody’s to have, so mind you don’t forget.”
She was so engrossed by the idea that she nearly tripped over the
unheeded stones, and her heir and executor, preventing her tumble,
said: “Oh, it will be all right, never fear; but meanwhile, little
Bright-Eyes, you’d better not break your neck. We’ll both of us have
grand times when I come with the key.”
* * * * *
Eileen had many of her long years, almost nine, in fact, during which
she might have forgotten Pierce and his promises, but she never did.
Only once in all that time did anything happen to remind her of
them, and that was on the Christmas after his visit, when Tom Roe,
the postman, brought the first letter that had ever been addressed
to Miss Eileen Fitzmaurice. Being opened hastily, it was found to
contain a little white cardboard box, within which lay among rosy
cloudlets of marvellous pink cotton-wool a tiny silver key, sent
to Eileen by her cousin Pierce—her affectionate cousin, Pierce’s
mother, who put up the packet for him, had written him down without
consulting him, as a matter of form. The gift filled Eileen with
gratitude and delight. Yet, in the course of the morning, her Aunt
Geraldine came upon her when she sat in the book-room window, eyeing
her new possession with a somewhat doubtful countenance. “I’m almost
afraid,” she said half-aloud, “that it isn’t quite long enough. And I
never did see a key with a pin in it before.”
“Long enough for what?” said her Aunt Geraldine. “It seems to me to
be a very pretty little brooch, and it was exceedingly good-natured
of your cousin to think of sending you one.”
“Oh yes, indeed, and it is very pretty, as pretty as can be,”
Eileen protested. She flushed distressfully at the implication of
ingratitude partly, and partly at this new view of the trinket,
which would involve the vanishing of its peculiar charm. “I was
only thinking,” she said, “that I have poked my finger farther
down the hole than this would reach; but, of course, if it’s a
brooch”—Aunt Geraldine had not stayed to hear her explanation; and
Eileen presently put away the little box in her drawer, feeling that
something had blunted the fine edge of her pleasure.
Those nine long years passed by uneventfully. It seemed, indeed,
as if fewer things and fewer happened at Glendoula. In the Big
House life went on somewhat in the manner of a machine gradually
slowing down. Lady Fitzmaurice grew from season to season a little
more invalided and melancholy, her sister-in-law more abstracted
and apathetic, old Timothy stiffer and lamer in his gait. Even the
ancient grey parrot on his pole in the parlour sank deeplier into his
dotage, and only grimaced silently at Eileen when she tried to start
a conversation with him. Eileen herself was an exception, though
perhaps potentially rather than actually, the fresh spirit of youth
making less resistance than is commonly imagined for it against the
coercion of dreary external circumstances. Still her disposition was
naturally blithe and hopeful, and she would have been ready enough
with her: O brave new world! if any fair wind had borne the good ship
into her ken. But instead of that she was destined to see a woeful
wreck come drifting by.
* * * * *
It was gradually, by an aggregation of rumours, faint and vague
at first, that warnings of the black time impending stole into
Glendoula valley, much as the wan mists creep thither from seaward,
a mere smoke-wreath falling away down the purple-rifted shoulders
of Slieverossan, with the murk of a sky-enfolding cloud gathered up
opaquely behind them. Felix O’Riordan, returning from Clonmorragh
fair one July day, first brought authentic news of how “the quare
ugly blackness on the pitaties, the same that done destruction last
year on the crops away down in different parts of the counthry, was
desthroyin’ all before it now no farther off than Kilfintragh, just
at the back of the hills.” And through the rainy harvest weather
ensuing, reports of the like became as frequent as the unkindly
and chilly showers that drip-dripped unseasonably over the little
fields. Then fell a heavy thunderous night, with flickerings of
sheet-lightning fitfully casting an evil eye through the dark, and on
the morrow, when its pall lifted, there was grief and fear among the
neighbours at Glendoula, for the sober green ridges looked as if a
scorching breath had passed over them, and from their drooping haulms
and leaves came wafted the ill-auguring odour.
After that the trouble throve and waxed like the most unmolested
weed. A man perhaps seldom tastes despair much cruder and sheerer
than when at the impatiently desired potato-digging he turns up
spadeful after spadeful, spadeful after spadeful, nothing but
dangling lumps of malodorous slime, nothing but that whatever, on to
the very end of the drill, where the wife stands watching him and
saying: “Ah, the Lord be good to us—have we ne’er a sound one in it
at all?” with the childer beside her looking on, piteously concerned
or piteously indifferent. Before Slieverossan had drawn down his
winter snow-hood, the dearth wrought by the ruined harvest was
finding its victims far and wide. Serious distress existed in the big
houses, where people were at their wit’s end to devise some agreeable
substitute for that empty dish on the dinner table. Savoury rice,
they tried, and stewed toast, and Yorkshire pudding, and many other
such things, but none of them satisfactorily filled the place of the
missing potato. There still remained a gap all-thing unbecoming at
their feast. It was a dreadful loss. But in the small houses people
were spared all worry of that sort at least, because when they had no
pitaties, they had nothing else to eat, bad or good, which made their
bill of fare a perfectly simple matter, thus illustrating, no doubt,
the providential law of compensation.
Eileen’s mind, however, was not philosophic enough to show her this
aspect of the case, and what she did actually see and hear smote
her with sorrow and dismay. It seemed as if the way of her world,
hitherto a tranquil, sometimes rather tedious, one, had changed into
the path of a surging flood, whence cries of despair and beseeching
hands appealed to her vainly where she stood, secure herself and
helpless and remorseful. So little for anybody could she do, who
would fain have rescued them all. Even if she had commanded the
whole resources of the household, they would have been miserably
inadequate; but as it was, Aunt Geraldine said drearily that she
supposed it was no use giving to vagrants, and old Timothy, whose
inborn tendency towards “naygurliness,” had developed into a
vice-like clamp, which acted automatically at the pressure of a
petition, kept one watchful eye perpetually upon the hall-door,
and another on the little store-room across the passage. Only by
rare conjunctions of good luck with agility could Eileen elude his
vigilance so far as to fetch and carry between them unbeknownst. More
often than not, she arrived too late to do anything; and at best,
her stealthiest operations among the bread-crocks and biscuits were
pretty sure to bring the old man shuffling thither in defence of the
menaced commissariat.
“Arrah now, Miss Eily, what work have you there, cuttin’ up the fresh
loaf? and the laws bless us all, but that’s the hunch! If there was a
slab of a brick wantin’ for repeerin’ the house-wall, you could make
a shift wid that.”
“There’s a very decent poor man at the door,” Eileen might say, “who
looks as if he had been starving for a month of Sundays; and he has a
scrap of a baby with him; its mother died yesterday at Kilfintragh.
I must get it a piece of soft bread, and a drink of milk, if there’s
any left.”
“And what for need you be destroyin’ a whole loaf for a crathur o’
that size? Sure, I seen it comin’ past me window, sittin’ cocked up
like a kitten bewitched. I’ve some stale bits in the other crock ’ud
do it grand.”
“Oh, those are nothing but little crumbs, only fit for the chickens.”