manin’ to say that I begrudged it e’er a bit, Sally, when it was
settin’ things straight for you, acushla.”
“Ah, but to think of payin’ them twyste over—that’s what distresses
me,” said Sarah, who did not, however, look inconsolable. “’Deed,
now, we managed it finely, Brian; I’m afeard that you and I are a
great pair of fools.”
But Brian replied with complacent promptitude, “True for you, then,
Sally, machree; that’s just the way it is. Fools we are, very belike,
and a pair we are for sartin. Och now, honey, be aisy; sure ’twas
yourself said it. And maybe we’ll do all as well as if we’d had more
wit. It’s continted I am, anyway. Ay, bedad, a pair of fools—but them
Grogans are welcome to their couple of pounds.”
M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP
M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP
The feud between the Timothy O’Farrells and Neil M‘Neills at
Meenaclure was not of very long standing, for the dowager Mrs
O’Farrell and the elder Mrs M‘Neill, who had been by no means young
when it began, were still to the fore, and not yet even considered
to have attained “a great ould age intirely.” This seems a mere
mushroom-growth compared with some of our family quarrels, which
have been handed down from father to son through so many generations
that everybody regards them as a part of the established order of
things in the world of their parish. Still, to the younger people,
who had been but children at its birth, it seemed to have lasted a
long while, and their juniors would have found a different state of
affairs almost unthinkable. For them the origin of the enmity had
already begun to loom dimly through a mist of tradition, which would
tend as time went on to grow vaguer and falser, until at length
nobody would be left who could give a clear account of what it was
all about. So far, however, all the neighbours who were “any age to
speak of” knew the rights of the case well enough. And this is what
had happened.
It was a cloudless midsummer evening, perhaps twenty years
back—nobody is over-particular about chronology at Meenaclure—and
all the dogs and children were away out on the wild land towards
the mountains, minding the sheep, to keep them from coming home and
eating up the crops. From April to October that was every year their
occupation, and a very engrossing one they found it. For the scraggy
little sheep of the district are endowed with an appetite for green
food worthy of any locust, added to a cleverness at taking fences
that would discredit no hunter; and this makes them a constant peril
to the painfully-tilled fields, whose produce they threaten like a
sort of visibly-embodied blight. Luckily, it is one whose ravages
can be averted by timely precautions; and therefore, as soon as
potatoes are _kibbed_, and oats sown, the sheep are driven off to
a discreet distance on the moors, whence they are prevented from
returning by a strong cordon of wary mongrels and active spalpeens.
The children of such places as Meenaclure find the sunnier half of
the year a season of perpetual school-vacation, when the longest days
are watched out to their last lingering glimmer among the tussocks
and boulders, so that the morning seems to have begun ages and ages
ago by the time one straggles home, three-parts asleep on one’s feet,
the flocks having already betaken themselves to completer repose, or,
recognising the unattainability of young green oats, having set their
nibbling mouths safely up the swarded hill-slopes. For that night the
fields may lie secure from marauding trespassers.
On this particular day, however, owing to some remissness of the
young M‘Neills and their shrewd-visaged dog, who were all led away
by the excitement of a rabbit-hunt, one of the sheep under their
charge successfully eluded observation, and broke through the line,
with two comrades presently pattering after her. With a wiliness well
masked by her expression of meek fatuity, she slunk along unseen
in furzy folds of the broken ground, and late in the afternoon had
arrived near the forbidden pastures. There she lurked furtively for a
while, fully determined to hop over the fence of Timothy O’Farrell’s
oatfield, the very first moment that nobody seemed to be about.
This opportunity soon occurred, as the O’Farrells’ holding lies
somewhat apart in a slight hollow, which secludes it from the little
cabin-cluster standing a bit higher round a curve in the long green
glacis-like foot-slope of Slieve Gowran.
Thus it came to pass that when Timothy O’Farrell returned from
turf-cutting on the bog with his sister Margaret and his brothers
Hugh and Patrick, the first thing they noticed was an object like a
movable grey boulder cropping up on the delicate sheeny surface of
their oat-patch. Whereupon: “Be the powers of smoke,” said Timothy,
“if there isn’t them bastes in it agin.”
“Three of them, no less,” said Margaret.
“M‘Neills’, you may bet your brogues,” said Hugh.
“The divil doubt it,” said Timothy. Patrick, who was a youth of
action rather than speech, had already plunged head-foremost towards
the scene of the trespass.
There were several reasons why doubts of the M‘Neills’ responsibility
in the matter should be relegated to the divil. In the first place,
the M‘Neills owned more sheep than anybody else at Meenaclure,
whereas the O’Farrells owned none; and secondly, the O’Farrells had
sown an unusually extensive patch of oats, while the M‘Neills had
planted potatoes only. The tendencies of this situation are obvious.
Again, the O’Farrells had more than once before undergone the like
inroads, and on these occasions Neil M‘Neill had not, Timothy
considered, shown by any means an adequate amount of penitence.
“Bedad, now,” Timothy reported to his family, “he was cool enough
over it. Maybe it’s _his_ notion of fine farmin’ to graze his bastes
on other people’s growin’ crops.” A deep-rooted sentiment of respect,
however, restrained him from uttering these sarcasms in public. For
Timothy, though the head and father of a family, had seen not many
more than a score of harvests; and Neil, a dozen years his senior,
enjoyed a high reputation among the neighbours as a very knowledgable
man altogether. After the second incursion, it is true, Timothy’s
wrath had so far overcrowed his awe as to make him “up and tell” Neil
M‘Neill that “if he didn’t mind his ould shows of sheep himself, he’d
be apt to find somebody that’d do it in a way he mightn’t like.”
Still, the affair went no farther, and Timothy had soon reverted to
his customary attitude of amicable veneration. But at this third
repetition of the offence his anger could not be expected to subside
so harmlessly.
Pat’s shouts and flourishing gallop speedily routed the
conscious-stricken sheep, and two of them whisked up the hillside
like thistledown on a brisk breeze; but the third, who was the
ringleader, leaped the fence with so little judgment that she came
floundering against Timothy, who grasped her dexterously by the
hind-legs.
Now, to catch a Slieve Gowran sheep alive in the open is a rare and
difficult feat—proverbially impossible, indeed, at Meenaclure; but
Timothy and his brethren were at a loss how they should best turn
this achievement of it to account. They felt that simply to let the
creature go again would be a flat and unprofitable result, yet what
else could they do with it? While they pondered, and their captive
impotently wriggled, Hugh suddenly had an inspiration. It came to
him at the sight of two large black pots, which stood beside a
smouldering fire against the white end-wall of their little house.
To an unenlightened observer, they might have suggested some gipsy
encampment, but Hugh knew they betokened that his mother had been
dyeing her yarn. The Widow O’Farrell was a great spinner, and a large
part of the wool shorn in the parish travelled over her whirring
wheel on its way to Fergus the weaver’s loom. A few old sacks lying
near the fire had contained the ingredients which she used according
to an immemorial recipe. From the mottled grey lichen, _crottal_,
which clothes our boulders with hues strangely like those of the
fleeces browsing among them, she extracted a warm tawny brown; a
flaky mass of the rusty black turf-soot supplied her with a strong
yellow, and the dull-red bog-ore boiled paradoxically into black.
“Be aisy, will you, you little thief of the mischief,” Hugh said to
the sheep. “M‘Neills’ she is, sure enough; there’s the mark. Musha,
lads, let’s give her a dab or so of what’s left in the ould pots.
’Twould improve her apparance finely.”
“Ay would it,” said Timothy. “She’s an unnathural ugly objic’ of
a crathur the way she is now. Bedad, they’ve a couple of barrels
desthroyed on us.”
“A few odd sthrakes of the black and yella’d make her look iligant,”
said Hugh. “Do you take a hould of her, Tim. Och, man, don’t let her
away, but lift her aisy. Maggie, did you see e’er a sign of the stick
they had stirring the stuff wid? But it’s apt to be cool enough agin
now.”
“Ah, boys dear, but it’s ragin’ mad M‘Neills ’ll be if you go for to
do such a thing,” Margaret said, half-scared, and blundering in her
flurry on a wrong note, as she at once perceived. For her brothers
promptly responded in a sort of fugal movement—
“And sure who’s purvintin’ of them? They’re welcome, bedad, them,
or the likes of them. Is it ragin’? Maybe it’s raison they’ll have
before they’re a great while oulder, musha Moyah.” And they proceeded
with all the greater enthusiasm to carry out their design, which
became more ambitiously elaborate in the course of execution.
Early next morning, while the mountain-shadow still threw a purple
cloak over the steep fields of Meenaclure, where all the dewdrops
were ready to twinkle as soon as a ray reached them, and when Mrs
Neil M‘Neill was preparing breakfast, which at this short-coming
summer season consisted chiefly of Indian meal, her eldest daughter
ran in to her with news. There was somethin’, Molly said, leppin’
about in the pigstye. Now, the M‘Neills’ stye just then stood empty,
in the interval between the despatch of their last lean fat pig
to Letterkenny fair and the hoped-for fall in the market-price of
the wee springy which was to replace him. So Mrs Neil said, “Och,
blathers, child alive, what would there be in it at all?”
“But it’s rustlin’ in the straw,—I heard it,—and duntin’ the door wid
its head like,” Molly persisted.
“Sure then, run and see what it is, honey,” said her mother, who was
pre-occupied with a critical stage of her porridge; and a piece of
practical business on hand generally disposes us to adopt a sceptical
attitude towards marvels. “Maybe one of the hins might have fluttered
into it; but there’s apter to not be anythin’.”
Molly, whose mood was not enterprising, reinforced her courage
with the company of Judy and Thady before she went to investigate;
and a minute afterwards she came rushing back uttering terrified
lamentations, whereof the burden seemed to be, “It’s a tiger-sheep.”
Her report could no longer be disregarded, and the rest of the family
were presently grouped round the low wall of the little lean-to
shed, which did really contain an inmate of extraordinary aspect. Its
form was that of a newly-shorn sheep, long-legged and lank-bodied
like others of its race, but in colouring altogether exceptional.
Boldly marked stripes of black and tawny yellow alternated all over
it, with a brilliant symmetry not surpassed by the natural history
chromograph which flamed on the wall of Rathflesk National School,
and which now recurred to little Molly’s mind in conjunction with
the fact that the wearer of the striated skin “was a cruel, savage,
wicked baste, that would be swallyin’ all before it,” whereupon she
had shrieked “Tiger-sheep!” and fled from ravening jaws.
Her parents and grandparents, on the contrary, stood and surveyed
the phenomenon with almost unutterable wrath. Traces of a human hand
in its production were plain enough, for the beast had been fastened
into the stye by a rope round her neck, which was further ornamented
with long bracken-fronds and tufts of curiously-coloured wool,
studiously grotesque. In fact, had she been mercilessly endowed with
“the giftie,” she would no doubt have suffered from a mortification
as acute as was that of her owners, instead of trotting off quite
satisfied, when once she was released and at liberty to resume her
fastidious nibbling among the dewy tussocks.
“That’s some divilment of the O’Farrells, and the back of me hand
to the whole of them!” said Neil M‘Neill, with clenched eyebrows.
“Themselves and their blamed impidence, and their stinkin’ brashes!
The ould woman’s niver done boilin’ them up for her wool. It’s
slung about her head I wish they were, sooner than to be used for
misthratin’ other people’s dacint bastes.”
“’Deed now, thrue for you,” said his mother. “Sure wasn’t she tellin’
me herself yesterday evenin’ she’d been busy all day gettin’ her
yarn dyed, agin she would be knittin’ the boys their socks? Gad’rin’
the sut she said she was this good while. That’s the way they done
it—och, the vagabones!”
“It’s a bad job,” said old Joe M‘Neill, shaking his despondent white
head.
“I wouldn’t ever ha’ thought it of them,” said Mrs Neil. “On’y
them boys is that terrible wild; goodness forgive them, there’s no
demented notion they mayn’t take into their heads. But what at all
could we do for the misfort’nit crather? Sure it’s distressful to
see her goin’ about that scandalous figure. I can’t abide the sight
of her.”
Our bogland dyes, however, are very fast, and for many a day that
summer Mrs Neil had to endure the apparition of the O’Farrells’
victim, who of course became a painfully conspicuous object on the
hillside, where she roamed blissfully unaware of how her owners’ eyes
followed her with gloomy resentment, and of how their neighbours’
children, catching up Molly’s cry, shouted one to another derisively,
“Och, look at M‘Neills’ tiger-sheep!” But long and long after the
parti-coloured fleece had vanished for good and all, the effects of
the outrage continued to make themselves felt in the social life of
Meenaclure, where it must be owned that the inhabitants are rather
prone to keep their grudges in the same time-proof wallet with their
gratitudes. And the grudges, somehow, often seem to lie atop. In this
case, moreover, the injury had an especial bitterness, because the
M‘Neills came of an old sheep-keeping class, whose little flock was
an inheritance handed down, dwindling, through many generations, and
whose main interests and activities had time out of mind turned upon
wool, so that everything connected with it had acquired in their eyes
the peculiar sanctity with which we often invest the materials and
implements belonging to our own craft. A chimney-sweep has probably
some feeling of disinterested regard for his bags and brushes.
Accordingly, sheep were to them a serious, almost solemn subject,
altogether unsuitable for a practical joke; and an insult offered to
them was felt to strike at the honour of the family. Small blame to
them, therefore, if, as the neighbours said, they were ragin’ mad
entirely, and turned a deaf ear to all pacific overtures.
The O’Farrells, to do them justice, admitted upon reflection that
they had maybe gone a little beyond the beyonds, and were disposed to
be apologetic and conciliatory. But when old Mrs O’Farrell, one day
meeting the two smallest M‘Neills on the road, presented each of them
with a pale brown egg, which she had just found in the nest of her
speckled hen away down beside the river, the result merely was that
her gifts were smashed into an impromptu omelet before the M‘Neills’
door, by the direction of the master of the house, who only wished
the ould sinner had been there herself to see the way he’d serve
that, or anythin’ else she’d have the impidence to be sendin’ into
his place. And later on, when the feathery gold of the O’Farrells’
oatfield had been bound in stooks, and the hobbledehoy Pat was
despatched to inquire whether the M‘Neills might be wantin’ e’er a
thrifle of straw after the thrashin’ for darnin’ their bit of thatch,
the polite attention elicited nothing except a peremptory injunction
to “quit out of that.”
In taking up this attitude, the M‘Neills had at first the support
of their neighbours’ sympathy, public opinion being that it was no
thing for the O’Farrells to go do. But as time went on, people began
to add occasionally that sure maybe they didn’t mean any such great
harm after all, and that they were only young boyoes, without as much
sense among the whole of them as would keep a duck waddling straight.
What was the use of being so stiff over a trifle? These magnanimous
sentiments were, no doubt, strengthened by the fact that in so small
a community as Meenaclure a permanent breach between any two families
could not but entail some inconveniences upon all the rest. It was
irksome, for instance, to bear in mind throughout a friendly chat
that at the casual mention of a neighbour’s name the person you
were talking to would look “as bitter as sut” and freeze into grim
dumbness; or to have to consider, should you wish for a loan of Widdy
O’Farrell’s market-basket, that you must by no means “let on” to her
your intention of carrying home in it Mrs M‘Neill’s grain of tea;
or to be called upon to choose between the company of Neil M‘Neill
and Hugh O’Farrell on the way home from the fair, because neither
of them, as the saying is, would look the same side of the road as
the other. Such obligations lay stumbling-blocks in our daily path,
and nip growths of good fellowship, and are generally embarrassing
and vexatious. However, Meenaclure had to put up with this state
of things for so many a long day that people learned to include it
unprotestingly among their necessary evils.
Under these circumstances, it was of course only in the nature of
things that the little M‘Neills and O’Farrells, the smallest of whom
had not been born at the time of the quarrel, should always put out
their tongues at one another whenever they met. They regarded the
salutation, indeed, as a sort of ceremonial observance, which could
not be omitted without a sense of indecorum. Thus, one inclement
autumn, when Patrick O’Farrell was no longer a hobbledehoy, but
“as big a man as you’d meet goin’ most roads,” he went off to a
_rabble_, that is, a hiring-fair, at Letterkenny, and took service
for six months with a farmer away at Raphoe. On the day that he left
Meenaclure, he happened, just as he was setting out, to meet Molly
M‘Neill, who had by this time grown into “a tall slip of a girl going
on for sixteen,” and they duly exchanged the customary greeting, Pat
getting the better of her by at least half-an-inch of insult. But
when he returned on a soft April evening, it chanced again that one
of the first persons he fell in with was Molly. She was coming along
between the newly-clad hedges of a narrow lane, and when he caught
sight of her first he mistook her for his cousin, Norah O’Farrell,
she looked so much taller than his recollections. But, on perceiving
his error, he merely gave up his intention of saying, “Well, Norah,
and how’s yourself this great while?” and slunk past without making
any demonstration whatever. Molly would hardly have noticed it,
indeed, as when she saw him coming she began to minutely examine the
buds on the thorn-bushes, and did not lift an eyelash while they
were passing. Yet, as they went their several ways, Pat felt that
he had somehow shirked a duty; and Molly, for her part, could not
shake off a sense of having failed in loyalty to her family until
she had relieved her conscience by announcing at home that she was
“just after meetin’ that great _ugly_-lookin’ gomeral, Pat O’Farrell,
slingein’ down the road below Widdy Byrne’s.”
The year which followed this spring was one of bad seasons and
hard fare at Meenaclure, and towards the end of it Pat O’Farrell
came reluctantly to perceive that he could best mend his own and
his family’s tattered fortunes by emigrating to the States. His
resolve, though regretted by all his neighbours, except of course the
M‘Neills, was considered sensible enough; and at the “convoy” which
assembled according to custom to see him off on his long journey
the general purport of conversation was to the effect that, bedad,
everybody’d be missing poor Pat, but sure himself was the fine clever
boy wouldn’t be any time gettin’ together the price of a little
place back again in the ould country. The M‘Neills alone were of the
opinion, expressed by Neil’s mother, that “the only pity was the rest
of the pack weren’t goin’ along wid Pat; unless, like enough, they’d
be more than the people out in those parts could put up wid all at
onst, the way they’d be landin’ them back on us like a bundle of ould
rubbish washin’ up agin wid the tide.”
But surprise was the universal feeling when, about six months later,
it became known that Neil M‘Neill’s eldest child Molly had also made
up her mind to cross over the water. Her own family were foremost
among the wonderers; for Molly had always been considered rather
excessively timid and quiet—certainly the very last girl in the
parish whom one would have thought likely to make such a venture.
They half-believed that when it came to the point, “sorra a fut of
her would go”; and they much more than half hoped so, notwithstanding
that their rent had fallen into alarming arrears, and none of her
brethren were old enough to help. Molly, however, actually went, amid
lamentations and forebodings, both of her own and other people’s,
all alike unavailing to stop her. Mrs Timothy O’Farrell said she’d
be long sorry to have a daughter of hers streeling off to the ends
of the earth. And I think that Molly’s mother _was_ long sorry, poor
soul, through many a lonesome day and anxious night.
After these two departures, things at Meenaclure took their wonted
course, a little more sadly and dully perhaps than heretofore.
Communications from abroad came rarely and scantily, for neither
of the absentees had much scholarship. Their sheep-herding summers
had greatly curtailed that, and it would have been difficult to say
whether Pat’s or Molly’s scrawls were the briefer or obscurer. But
not long after Molly M‘Neill had gone, one of Pat O’Farrell’s letters
contained an important piece of news—nothing less than that he was
“just about gettin’ married.” He did not go into particulars about
the match, merely describing the future Mrs Pat as the “best little
girl in or out of Ireland,” and opining that they mightn’t do too
badly. His family were not overjoyed at the event, which might be
considered to presage a falling off in remittances; and his mother
was much cast down thereby, her thoughts going to the tune of “my son
is my son till he gets him a wife.” Still, she was not so dispirited
as to be past finding some solace in an innuendo; and she almost
certainly designed one when she took occasion to remark just outside
the chapel door, where she had been telling the neighbours her news:
“But ah, sure, I don’t mind so long as he hasn’t took up wid one of
them black-headed girls I never can abide the looks of. And ’deed now
there’s no fear of that. Pat’s just the same notion as myself, I know
very well.” For Mrs Neil M‘Neill was standing well within earshot,
and, as everybody remembered, “there wasn’t a fair hair on the head
of e’er a one of her childer.” However, Mrs Neil proved equal to the
emergency, and remarked, addressing Katty Byrne, that “It was rael
queer the sort of omadhawns she’d heard tell of some girls, who,
belike, knew no better, bein’ content to take great lumberin’ louts
of fellers, wid the ugly-coloured hair on their heads like nothin’
in the world except a bit of new thatch before it would be combed
straight.”