this time, and the long aisle of the elm-walk, where the straight
trunk columns showed themselves momentarily and vanished as the
mist-wreaths floated and melted through them, was weirdly alluring.
When Eileen had followed it to its end, she found another vista
opening before her out on the green slope, closed ever and anon, and
temptingly cleared again by capricious wafts of dimness. For as she
went there was setting in a general movement among all that great
gathering of vapours; their assembly was lingeringly breaking up; a
spectral city going to wrack. Vast cloaked and hooded shapes seemed
curtseying ceremoniously to one another from opposite sides of the
glens, while here and there some loftily towering pile might be seen
to betray the frailness of its structure by a shivering from top to
base like that of a sail in a veering wind. But hardly a breath was
stirring in Glendoula, so that the dispersion proceeded by very slow
degrees, with many fitful pauses.
Eileen’s little footpath led her so closely in the wake of a
receding cloud-wave that she could watch the bracken-plumes emerge
frond by frond from its filmy borders, and descry the gold of the
furze-blossom glimmering through the white, before the sombre
branches became visible. On either hand, low trailing fleeces were
caught and carded into filaments on tussocks and bents and briers.
Farther up it seemed as if a spectral net cast over the hills were
being hauled in with torn meshes teased and tangled. And behind all
this shadowy shifting drifting there were vague motions of light,
hinted at by sudden wan shimmerings of the canopy that screened it.
Eileen was always half intending to turn back, yet she went on and
on, sometimes noticing these things, and occasionally stopping to
gather a shrivelled dandelion bud, or a russet plantain head for
the old moping parrot in the parlour at home, until at last she
knew that she must have come near the stone chest. It had no bitter
associations for her now. Rather she would have looked upon it as
the auspicious starting-point whence she had fared to the highest
fortune. Even the failure of her scheme for producing a relief fund
did not any longer grieve her, for Pierce had undertaken that help
would be forthcoming, and to Pierce’s keeping she had transferred
herself, responsibilities and all, which she found a wonderful
ease to her mind. So light of heart, indeed, it made her that she
now began softly to sing a sorrowful little ditty, which she used
long ago to hear crooned by her poor old nurse, who had a turn for
sentiment:
“_Oh sunny blooms Slieve Cryan, where the gold boughs creep
together,
With honey on the high cliff in ten thousand bells of heather.
For the morn that fears no morrow is there bliss in flower and
bee,
And in one heart sorrow, sorrow, for the hope that wafts to
sea._”
But as she sang, in a voice small and sweet, of this heart sorrow,
she looked on before her with shining eyes, very sure of seeing all
she wanted to crown the moment’s gladness come presently to meet her
from among the shrouding white mists.
* * * * *
Hidden among them just then, not many yards away, half-a-dozen
people were at work around the big boulder, digging and boring,
with frequent mention in their discourse of needles and trains
and matches. Their operations were by this time, however, nearly
finished, and after the last of them, which was the kindling of a
lacklustre red flare with a sheet of grease-stained brown paper,
the whole party withdrew hastily through the Nick of Time, and
retreating some little distance down the slope on the other side,
stood still in apparent expectation of an event. It happened very
soon. First a fierce sharp-edged clatter, that crashed into a booming
roar, followed by a duller sound of rushing thuds, as if a scattered
flock of unwieldy birds had swooped down close at hand in headlong
flight. An abrupt silence succeeded, for few echoes gossip among the
Letterglas hills. It must have lasted unbroken for a long minute at
least. For the men had re-entered through the gap, where they found
the fog thickened by a sulphurous reek, and Pierce, making out amid
it the expected new vacant place, was considering how he would now
hurry home and fetch Eileen hither as soon as possible, that there
might be no further delay in the clearance of their pleasant path—“my
sweetheart,” he was saying to himself with a remorseful remembrance
of her sad eyes yesterday—when the air filled, the wide world
filled as if it could never empty again, with a shriek and a shriek
reiterated, shrill and wild, you could not have told whether man’s or
woman’s, hardly whether a human being’s, it was a skirl of such sheer
despair. Yet Pierce thought he recognised in it a name that snatched
away his breath.
“What was that, man? What is it?” he said, pulling the sleeve of
Paddy Murray, who was nearest to him.
“Somebody’s hurted for sartin,” declared Paddy.
But this was probably a mistake. The fragment of the big stone that
had struck Eileen on the temple, seemingly had thereby opened for her
and shut the dark door, whose threshold the senses may not cross, all
in an instant, before the happiness could fade out of her face, or
the little bunch of carefully-gathered weeds drop from her hand. It
might, by the way, be feared that poor Polly would enjoy no more such
feasts henceforward to the end of his tedious days.
Larry M‘Farlane it was, arrived with his belated warning, who had
raised the outcry on beholding this proof that his panic-stricken
hurry had been all bootless, and that the evil dream which had
possessed him ever since he casually overheard talk of Mr Pierce’s
project was come most terribly true. Some of the others now bade him
whisht and run for Dr Blake and Father O’Connor, who might both of
them very belike be below at Denroche’s cottages, where the Maddens
and young Joe Hanlon were mortal bad last night; though, for the
matther of that, it was aisy enough to see there’d be little anybody
could do here—goodness pity them all. But as there was nothing
else whatever that Pierce could do—he who used to be so ready with
resources—he fixed his mind upon their coming with a desperate grip,
while he stood by and waited idly.
* * * * *
He felt bewildered, chiefly by the sameness of most things, which
were unaccountably going on much as they had been doing a minute
before, when Eileen could have spoken to him. The white mists were
still curtseying to one another across wider spaces in the valley,
and the dim light behind them grew slowly stronger. There was a scent
of turf-smoke on the air from a fire which someone had lit under a
bank a little way down the hill. The very strokes of old Dan Heron’s
hammer continued to come up in a faint rap-tap from the roadside,
where he was breaking lumps of reddish sandstone; for Dan was so deaf
that he applied himself to his tasks with abstracted concentration,
and could not easily be interrupted. Evidently the news had not
penetrated to him. A murmur of voices was passing to and fro in a
knot of men gathered at a short distance. Pierce might have caught a
sentence now and then.
“You’d a right to ha’ sent them word to keep out of it—you had so—the
way she’d niver ha’ come widin raich of harm.”
“Sure, we was intendin’ to get it done that arly there’d ha’ been no
fear of e’er a sowl about; ’twas the fau’t of the divil of an ould
fog delayin’ us.”
“Ah, now, but it’s the woful thing, however it come to happen. And
she the on’y one her poor mother has. Is anybody runnin’ down to tell
them?”
“Och you may depind—half-a-dozen.”
“Well, it’s a quare ugly world she’s took out of any way, the
crathur, God knows. ’Deed now, I do be wonderin’ somewhiles what He’s
at wid bringin’ the likes of her into such a place at all.”
“And small blame to you to be wonderin’ that same, Jim, if it’s for
nothin’ betther than to take and knock the bit of life out of her, as
if it was a gossoon slingin’ stones at a little wran hoppin’ along in
the hedges.”
“That’s no sort of talk. God be good to the crathur, she looks as if
no great harm was after happenin’ her any way.”
“It’s not kilt at all she is, I’m thinkin’. The Docther’s apt to say
she’ll be finely agin prisently.”
“Bedad now, you might ha’ more wit, man—Och, it’s on’y poor Crazy
Christy.”
The sound, but not the sense, of this discussion reached Pierce, and
vaguely irritated him, because he thought it might prevent him from
hearing the approach of what he forced himself to imagine possible
assistance. But when Father O’Connor, not long afterwards, did come
up to him, it was with no more practical suggestion than: “God help
you.”
“_God?_” said Pierce. “What on earth can God do? I think it has
killed her.” He put his question like one assuming some self-evident
proposition, and the kindly old man turned away from him with a shake
of the head, and no attempt to gainsay.
The next voice to arouse Pierce’s attention was that of a youngish
woman, worn and weather-beaten, whose grey ragged shawl hooded black
wings of hair, and the dark eyes that often look out so full of cares
from such surroundings. He recognised her as Norah O’Neil, by birth
Kinsella, and she was saying: “So I thought maybe the Docther might
be up here, Mr Pierce—but sure it’s all one. There’s nobody can do a
hand’s turn for him or any of us now, on’y God. For himself’s lyin’
dead too, sir, be the roadside down beyant the bridge. And, truth
to tell you, it’s quare set agin stirrin’ out he was this mornin’,
wishful he was to be lyin’ in his bed, for he said he felt cruel
wakely in himself altogether. But it’s losin’ the day’s wages I was
thinkin’ of, and settlin’ to call him all the lazy hounds I could
lay me tongue to—poor Mick, that was good to us ever—for ’fraid we’d
be starvin’ to-morra. So he went off wid himself. And the God that’s
above me knows well, on’y for the childer I wouldn’t ha’ said a word.
But, Mr Pierce, the faces of thim is gone to nothin’; there isn’t
a one of thim the width of the palm of your hand. And on’y for the
childer, to be lavin’ thim, God knows I’d liefer be lyin’ the way
Miss Eileen is this minyit, instead of her, the Saints in Heaven be
good to her, that’s the young crathur. Many’s the time I’ve carried
her up half-ways to this very place, when I wasn’t so much oulder
meself. For what else will I be doin’ all the rest of me life, but
remimberin’ the day I dhruv poor Mick out of the warm house to get
his death on the roadside, when all the while I knew in me heart he
wasn’t rightly able to stand on his feet. And he——”
But Norah’s story was here jostled aside by Con Furlong, the foreman,
a stolid, business-like person, who wished to mention that the men
were all quitting their work, and to receive instructions about
paying for a couple of loads of stones that were just after coming
over from Smith’s place beyond Clonmoragh, where _he_ had never
ordered them. These details somehow helped Pierce to realise more
fully that he was to be still alive. Meanwhile the sun had found a
clear path earthward among the mists, and shone out through them with
all the glamour of dawn and splendour of high-noon, so that swift
lights strode hither and thither upon the hills, and the haze melted
into the deepening blue as fast as foam on a summer sea, until the
spring-day was golden over the whole countryside. It was just the
world and the weather for those grand times which, as Pierce now
suddenly remembered, he had promised that Eileen should have when he
came with the key.
A DESERTED CHILD
A DESERTED CHILD
The Round Lodge at Kilrath is so ornate a little structure, with
its pillared portico and fantastic pagoda-like roof, that it looks
as incongruous in the lonesome grass-lands, amongst which it is
solitarily set, as a single pelargonium or calceolaria would look
among their ragweed and thistles. Only the old people recollect how
it was built by way of being a gate-lodge on one of the new roads
which there was talk of young Mr Hall making at the time he came into
the property, but which, like many more of his schemes, were never
carried out. None of them, in fact, ever took a substantial form
except the Round Lodge, his promptness in this matter being caused
by a long-standing promise to his old nurse that if he succeeded to
the Kilrath estate she should have “a little house of her own.” As
his regard for the old woman was one of the few interests he had left
unshrivelled by the gambling fever that had fastened on him, he found
an eager pleasure in keeping his word to her, and travelled all the
way down from Dublin that he might be present at her induction into
her new abode.
It was a moteless morning in early summer, when the curved masses
of the wood still had a misty softness of hue, and the green of the
fresh lawns looked as unwitherable as the domed blue above them.
The Round Lodge gleamed most spick and span within and without,
its brilliant tiles glowing, and the violet and amber panes in its
glass door richly staining the sunbeams that crowded into the little
porch. Mrs Moran, glancing round the cosy sitting-room with bright
quick eyes like a bird’s, felt herself happy indeed, though she only
_said_ she dared say she might make a shift to manage well enough,
once she had the things set to rights a bit herself in her own way;
which would have sounded faint praise to anybody who did not know
her. But when she was left there to her own devices, she became
subject to fits of forlorn “lonesomeness,” at intervals which grew
shorter day by day as the first gloss of ownership wore off. It did
so the more rapidly because the Round Lodge was so far out of the
way that she seldom had a visitor to whom she could exhibit her
possessions with proud disparagement. We all like to look at our
own happiness through other men’s eyes, a process by which it seems
to gain a sort of stereoscopic solidity. Her nearest acquaintances
were the old coachman and cook couple who lived as caretakers in
the gaunt, empty mansion two miles away; for though the village is
considerably closer by, a bit down the road after you turn out of the
boreen, anybody who supposes that Mrs Moran could have associated
on terms of intimacy with its inhabitants must be sadly to seek in
a knowledge of our finely shaded social distinctions. Mrs Dowling
alone, who was mistress of the post-office and shop, and who wore a
bonnet at Mass, might have been an appropriate crony, but she was at
this time “mortal bad wid the janders.” Hence the clear summer noons
and nights often strung themselves into a whole week without giving
Mrs Moran an opportunity of saying anything more to the purpose than
the occasional “Fine day, ma’am,” which even neighbours who are not
acquaintances must exchange when they meet. This was a dull state of
things, and made the hours wagged out by the bland-faced clock lag
and loiter strangely. Sometimes, if she had not recollected that she
was at last in the long-desired little house of her own, she would
have almost thought she had been in better places; and satisfaction
that has to be conjured up by an effort of memory comes cold and flat.
A few perches to the westward of the Round Lodge a belt of timber
breaks the smooth sweep of the broad pastures that encircle it. If
you thread the narrow footpath between the delicate grey beech-trunks
for quite a long distance, you come to the edge of a high bank,
which overhangs a deep-sunken lane, a mere boreen joining two more
important thoroughfares. Thence the trees turn at right angles
to fringe the brink of this lane. Across it you look into a wild
country. The great Shangowragh bog rolls from the horizon almost to
your feet, and on the right hand, towards Lisconnel, spreads far
away, a spacious level that seems brown until you have called it so,
and then you see many other colours struggling duskily through, olive
and purple and red. To the left there is rougher ground, mottled
with grey-gleaming boulders and clumps of furze, and lifting itself
up lazily to a stony ridge. Beyond that rise darkly a pair of domed
mountain summits, the same that are seen more dimly from Lisconnel.
Here they have the aspect of two huge hooded heads, bowed over a
mysteriously folded hollow. When Mrs Moran came within view of this
landscape, she generally shrank back among the sheltering trunks,
and went home the way she had come. She said it made the flesh creep
upon her bones, and she wouldn’t stop where she’d have one of those
ugly black-lookin’ blocks of hills grimacin’ at her from mornin’
till night, not if she was paid for it by the hour. The fact was
that she had lived all her life in the corner of a softly contoured
up-and-down county, where the little rounded grass hillocks and
frequent hedges make the countryside look as if it had been crumpled
into green bunches, and where the prospect seldom extends over more
than a few hawthorn-bounded fields at a time. So that these vast
stretches of wilderness were for her a new and startling revelation
of possibilities in Nature, which she was somewhat disposed to
resent. On the whole, though she would by no means have allowed it,
even to herself, the little house of her own was more or less a
disappointment, and disappointments that occur when one is verging
on threescore-and-ten have a discouraging air of finality.
But with that first long summer at the Round Lodge, Mrs Moran’s
solitude was ended by the arrival there of her daughter-in-law, Mrs
Peter, and of her three grandchildren, Nannie and Biddy and Con.
Their coming was caused by a very tragical occurrence, and apart
from the melancholy circumstances, I doubt that it added to the old
woman’s contentment. She had long since made up her mind that she
would not like a bone in her son’s wife’s skin, and the prejudice
did not melt away upon acquaintance, while the children were rather
oppressive to her after her long holiday from such society. Since
the infancy of Mr George, now in the Lancers, she had scarcely seen
a child to speak to, in the grown-up Halls’ deserted nursery; and
she said aggrievedly that they _moidhered_ her, and that ne’er a one
of them featured their poor father. Nannie and Biddy, good-natured,
hot-tempered little girls, shocked her by their romps and quarrels;
and four-year-old Con, a small, melancholy child with a turn for
metaphysics, caused her some chagrin by his unthriving aspect; she
said that he looked like a hap’orth of soap after a week’s washin’,
wid the face on him no broader than a farthin’ herrin’. With all
their shortcomings, however, the young Morans were presently the
means of bringing a still less promising inmate to the Round Lodge.
About this time Kilrath happened to be suffering from a visitation
of the Tinkers, who had established themselves as usual in the row
of deserted cottages at the end of the boreen. The Tinkers were
people who spent all the tolerably warm part of the year among the
benettled wall-rims of deserted cabins, and under the arches of
bridges, and in the hollows of old quarries, making progresses to and
from these quarters with the help of two donkey-carts. Most of the
party passed the heart of the winter in the less primitive shelter of
whatever Union workhouse was nearest when the first unbearably cold
night overtook them. Now and then a member of their confraternity
disappeared for a space into the more rigorous seclusion of some
county jail, but that was an accident of occurrence less common than
their temporary neighbours could have wished. For the Tinkers, it
is said, stole all before them. Middle-aged inhabitants of Kilrath
remembered when the band had filled only one cart; but of late years
they had over-flowed into a second, the owners of which were known
as the Young Tinkers. It was considered that the Young Tinkers were
collectively greater thieves of the world than the Ould, but that no
single individual could hold a candle for villainy to Luke Maguire,
the very ancient commander of the original vehicle. People wondered
sometimes that the Young and Ould Tinkers did not part company, and
take different routes, as their joint arrival at any camping-ground
was generally the signal for a frantic fight between the two
sections. However, they continued to stick together, which, as a
Kilrath housewife remarked, was “a rael charity, for if they took to
scatterin’ themselves over the whole countryside, like a flock of
turkeys in a stubble-field, she should suppose there wouldn’t be a
him or an egg to be had in it from one year’s end to the other.”
So not long after the Peter Morans’ establishment at the Round
Lodge, the Tinkers sent to the door a deputation composed of a
woman and two children, all wildly ragged, and hung about with
samples of their flashing tinware in such profuse festoons that
their approach sounded, one may suppose, somewhat like the onset
of a mail-clad knight of old romance. Their call was but brief,
for their appearance did not favourably impress the two Mrs Morans,
who were afterwards careful to exhort Nannie and Biddy and Con
that they must on no account have anything to say to “them young
rapscallions,” if met with on their walks abroad. The little Morans,
who had been staring with all their eyes full of envious admiration
at their two contemporaries permitted freely to handle and clink
those resplendent and resonant cans, felt vaguely the existence of
compensations and complications in the scheme of things, when they
learned that these privileged persons were nevertheless to be shunned
as somehow inferior and reprehensible, and “not anyways fit company
for respectable people’s childer.”
But on the next Saturday their mother went to shop in the village,
and up at the Round Lodge the children found the morning as long as
mornings can be when one is under seven, and the end of an hour is
out of sight. By the time that Nannie and Biddy and Con had finished
their midday dinner, they felt quite convinced that if their mother
meant ever to come back to them at all, she must now be somewhere
near at hand; and while their grandmother was busy washing up, they
slipped away to meet her along the path among the beeches. It was a
pleasant autumn day, with crisp leaf-drifts to scuffle underfoot, and
here and there a more or less ripe blackberry attainable, amusements
which drew them on until they reached the brink of the abrupt descent
into the boreen. They saw no sign of their mother coming, and the
bank looked so very high and steep that they could not even think
of climbing it. But while they strayed desultorily on the top,
somebody, swinging from clumps of weeds to handles of looped roots
in monkey-like fashion, came suddenly scrambling up it, and then
squatted down cross-legged under a sloe-bush. The new-comer seemed
to the children a very large person, being a well-grown girl of ten
or eleven. Her dress consisted of a brown skirt, which looked as if
it had once been a sack, with a man’s old jacket for a bodice, eked
out by a screed of greenish shawl. She was barefooted and bareheaded,
with a great shock of black hair making thick eaves over her brows,
under which her light-grey eyes shone like the gleam of pools caught
through dark-fledged boughs. This was Judy Flower, eldest daughter
of Jack Flower, head of the family of the Young Tinkers. Strictly
speaking, Jack’s surname was Murphy, but Jack’s father, who had
enjoyed some local renown as a wrestler, had been styled by his
admiring neighbours “The Flower of Clonmoyle,” and his children had
been spoken of as the Young Flowers, until the nickname hardened
into a patronymic, which Jack took with him when he sank into the
tinkering line. Judy’s mother, on the other hand, had real gipsies
among her ancestry, which was, perhaps, the reason why Judy sat
cross-legged, and had something weirdly Oriental in her aspect.