for dwelling upon the dark side of things. Their depression caused by
the collapse of the Christmas box was superficial, and soon passed
away. When in course of the evening the two young men went out to
feed the pigs, Rose and Mary accompanied them to the back door,
where they all loitered so long that the patience waiting round the
empty trough must have been sorely tried. Sounds of their talking
and laughing came down the passage and were heard plainly in the
kitchen, whence Mrs Kenny had slipped up her ladder stairs to say
her rosary, so that Norah was for the time left quite alone. She
was decidedly out of humour, albeit by no means on account of the
others’ rapid reverse of fortune. Rather, we may apprehend, she had
viewed that incident as a not regrettable check to a tide of affairs
which was unduly sweeping all manner of good luck her neighbours’
way, and unjustly leaving her high and dry. This grudging spirit had
forbidden her to appear interested in the examination of the box, but
now she could satisfy without betraying her curiosity. As she drew
her fingers aimlessly round its smooth inner surface, there was a
sudden snap and jerk, and out slid a secret drawer, which had been
concealed by a false bottom. It was filled with rose-pink wadding,
amongst which lay the coils of a long gold snake necklace. She lifted
it out amazedly, and held it up in the firelight, with jewelled head
gleaming and enamelled scales, a far finer piece of workmanship than
she knew, though the flash of brilliants and rubies assured even her
uninstructed eyes that she had come on something of much value.
While she was still looking at it she heard steps returning up the
passage, and forthwith tried hastily to replace it in the box. But
at a clumsy touch the drawer flew back into its former invisibility,
and her flurried fumbling failed to press the lurking spring. Then,
as the steps came very near, she thrust her ornament into her pocket,
and moved away from the table on which the box stood. In doing so,
she was conscious only of a proud perversity which made her loth to
be found meddling with what she sullenly called “no consarn of mine.”
Presently, however, other motives for concealment grew clearer and
stronger. Of course, the longer she retained it the more difficult
would the restoring of it be. Her crossness made it impossible for
her to imagine a joke as a natural explanation of her conduct.
Moreover, a covetous wish to keep the beautiful thing for its own
sake sprang up, and had a swift growth. She said to herself that “she
didn’t see why she need have any call to be givin’ it up, after all.
Wasn’t she after findin’ it in the quare little slitherin’ tray,
and the rest of them wid no more notion of it bein’ there at all
than ould Sally the goat had? It might be lyin’ where it was till
the world’s end on’y for her? And sure, for the matter of that, the
ould box itself was no more a belongin’ of the lads to give away
than of any other body that might ha’ happened on it tossin’ about
the shore. So if it wasn’t theirs be rights, she thought she’d be a
fine fool to not keep what she’d got.” Sophistical arguments such as
these convinced her reason easily enough, but her conscience was less
amenable to them. They were reinforced by some further considerations
which possessed no ethical value at all, and which she had the grace
to be ashamed of putting into clearly outlined thoughts. She allowed
herself to have only a vague sense of grievance at the fact that
Rose and Mary had “presents, and people to be makin’ fools of them,
and all manner,” whereas none of these desirable things were bestowed
on her. Yet it formed a mental atmosphere which made the prospect of
yielding up her discovery seem incongruous and odious, in the same
way that a bitter wind blowing makes us loth to throw open our doors
and windows.
“Cock them up to be gettin’ everythin’,” she said to herself, as she
sat in a corner with her hand in her pocket, and drew through her
fingers the cold, smooth coils, remembering how the gem-encrusted
head had blazed in the firelight. She wished that she could venture
to take it out and proudly display it as her property; but she was
far from daring to do so. On the contrary, she felt herself laden
with a guilty secret, and was presently beset by all the misgivings,
suspicions, and surmises which infest people who carry about such
a burden. Whenever anyone went near the box her heart thumped with
terror lest the drawer should be detected, and its rifled condition
somehow traced to her. Then she trembled to think that the lads
perhaps knew all the time of the necklace’s existence, and were
just reserving it for a grand surprise; or she imagined herself
letting it drop accidentally and being unable to account for her
possession of it. These speculations so pre-occupied her that she
was obliged to explain her absent-mindedness by declaring herself
“intirely disthracted wid the toothache”; upon which the condolences
and sympathy of the others aggravated her uneasiness with remorseful
gratitude. Her conscience nipped her shrewdly when Rose said, “Ah,
the crathur, I’ll run over to-morra early and bring you the bottle
ould Matt Farren gev me mother; it’s the grandest stuff at all for
the toothache,”—Rose whom she was defrauding of a share in that
golden marvel! At length she had resource to a plan which promised
her temporary relief from urgent fears and self-reproaches. This was
to hide away the necklace in some cranny of the rocks on the shore,
where, if it should be rediscovered, nothing would implicate her in
the matter. She said to herself, indeed, that they would have just
as much chance of finding it there as in the mysterious drawer;
but beneath that soothing reflection lay a resolve to minimise
the chance by choosing the most unlikely chink possible. Since the
evening was by this time far spent, and the O’Mearas had already
taken leave, she knew that she must hurry to execute her design
before Joe came in from seeing after the cattle, when the house would
be shut up. So she slipped quietly out of doors.
It was a dark, gusty night, and the waves, still turbulent after
their late uproar, were clattering noisily up the shingly ridges of
the beach. As Norah ran along she could barely discern the glimmering
of pale grey stones and white foam-crests. She kept on by the lough
side of the isthmus, because the walking there was smoother, but when
she thought she had come a safe distance she stopped, intending to
cross over and seek a hiding-place for her spoil among a small chaos
of weeded boulders. Looking for a moment athwart the black water, she
saw a dim streak of light in the sky above it. The moon was glimpsing
out of an eastern cloud-rift, and throwing down a meagre web of rays,
which the unquiet dark surface caught fitfully and shredded into
the broken coils of a writhing silver serpent. Perhaps it was this,
or perhaps the golden snake-chain in her hands, that suggested the
thing, but at any rate Norah suddenly bethought her of the _Piast_.
For Lough Fintragh is haunted by the terror of one of these monsters,
a huge and grisly worm, dwelling down in the shadowy end of the
lake, where the water is said to have no bottom, and to wander in
labyrinthine caverns about the roots of the mountains. The creature
had not been very often seen, but Norah well knew what a direful fate
had overtaken every soul to whom its shag-maned, lurid-eyed head
and rood-length of livid scales had disastrously appeared. One of
its least appalling habits, ran report, was to glare fixedly at its
victim, until fascinated and distraught he leaped wildly into the
jaws gaping for their prey. In the lonesome, murmurous dimness by the
shore, Norah did not care to linger over such incidents, and she was
turning away quickly, when a shock of fright almost paralysed her.
Within a few yards of her feet she saw two reddish amber eyes glowing
through the gloom, and from the same place came a sound of something
in rustling, flapping motion.
It was, in fact, only a harmless and rather bewildered seal, who,
during the past night’s turmoil, had somehow got into the lough, and
who now, instinctively aware of the rising tide, had set out eager
to quit the insipid fresh water for his strong-flavoured Atlantic
brine. But Norah naturally jumped to the conclusion that nothing less
fearsome than the _Piast_ itself was flopping towards her, and she
fled away before it in a headlong panic, which culminated a moment
afterwards when she ran against some large moving body. This, again,
was simply her brother Joe, returned from setting his friends on
their way; but Norah, with a wild shriek, gave herself up for lost,
and did actually come near putting an end to herself by tumbling
in frantic career over one stone, and striking her head violently
on another. She had to be carried home insensible, and Christmas
Day had come and gone before she found her way back gropingly to
consciousness.
Meanwhile conjectures, of course, were rife as to the origin of her
mishap, and the antecedents of the “iligant gold snaky chain” that
she was grasping. “Sclutched that tight she had it in her sclenched
fist, we were hard set to wrench it out of her hand,” Mrs Kenny
volubly told her neighbours. The favourite theory held that she
“was after pickin’ it up on the shore, and would be skytin’ home wid
it in a hurry, not mindin’ where she was goin’, and that was the
way she got the ugly toss.” And when Norah had recovered from the
effects of it sufficiently to be asked for her own account of the
matter, she could throw but little light thereon. Her accident had
left, as so often happens, a strange misty gap in her memory, which
it was vain to scan. The space between her first sight of the box
and her blinding crash down on the shingle was all a confused blank.
However, two results of the affair emerged, and, though their cause
remained untraceable, had a distinct influence upon her future. One
of them was, that she would on no account permit the snake necklace
to be regarded as her property. She persistently asserted that it
belonged to Mary and Rose; and when Dr Mason, who had undertaken to
dispose of it in Dublin, remitted an incredible number of pounds, she
would hear of no arrangement save dividing them between her sister
and sister-in-law elect. The other had more important consequences
to the whole course of her life. It was an abiding dread of their
connecting isthmus, which had become so horrible a place to her
that never again would she cross over it, even when promised the
protection of the most stalwart escort. Now, as the isthmus is very
much the nearest way from the Kennys’ farm to any other habitations,
this peculiarity of Norah’s cut her off greatly from whatever
society the neighbourhood afforded, besides gaining her a reputation
for “quareness” not likely to increase her popularity. Probably,
therefore, it may have been part of the reason why the years as they
came and went that way found her rooted fast and growing into a
settled old maid.
Those glowering yellow eyes being blurred out of her recollection,
the _Piast_ did not occur to her as the object of her fear. But some
people were not slow to connect it with the uncanny inhabitant of the
lough, and in process of time their various imaginations hardened
into a circumstantial narrative of an especially terrific appearance
of the monster. To this day, indeed, so current is the story, that
many a wayfarer along the bleak shingle strip goes the faster for
a doubt whether such an awful experience as befell Norah Kenny may
not be writhing towards him beneath the sunless waters of Lough
Fintragh.
THREE PINT MEASURES
THREE PINT MEASURES
The little stream which flows southward through Ballyhoy must be
one of the smallest contributions accepted anywhere by the sea, so
insignificant in quantity is the water trickling over the smoothed
stone step under the low arch on the shore. Yet the course of its
channel can be traced, when the tide is out, in gleaming sky-coloured
loops far across the mud-flats. As a rule the tide there _is_ out:
some of the neighbours indeed, have a theory, no doubt scientifically
untenable, that it comes in only about once a week. For this narrow
creek, cut off from the Bay by the great grassy sandbank of the North
Bull, is steadily silting up, so that its soundings grow shallower
every year, and rarer the occasions when we see a plain of sapphire
or mother-o’-pearl, threaded with paths of silver rippling, spread
all the way between us and the cliffs at purple Howth. It looks as
if the Bull would ultimately join the mainland without intermission.
Even now, at low water, the passage to and fro can be effected
fairly dry-shod by well-chosen routes. These are known to the cattle
who graze on the salt herbage among the bent-grown sandhills; and at
the fitting time and place, a procession red and white and black may
be watched making its way thence in single file towards the strip
of common-like pasture beside the sea-road. But the transit, if
undertaken by the unwary or ignorant, is beset with serious peril,
owing to sundry treacherous mud-holes, which lurk around. Their
smothering toils have in time past engulfed much vainly floundering
prey, both man and beast, and at the present day several of them
are called by the names of their respective victims—Byrne’s Hole,
Clancy’s Hole—obscurely commemorating tragedies not less piteous
perhaps than those of the Kelpie’s Flow and the Sands of Dee.
I have never heard of any such disaster befalling a class of people
who might be supposed peculiarly liable to it, since so much of their
time is spent on the dangerous ground. All the shore from Ballyhoy to
Portbrendan is haunted by cockle-pickers, who come out from Dublin,
where they lodge among the Liberties or other purlieus, climbing
down into subterranean cellars, or perhaps mounting wide oaken stairs
to spacious upper chambers with the carven panels and mantelpieces
and ceilings of the past commenting ironically on the inartistic
rags and squalor and famine of to-day. They time their arrival to
correspond with low water, so that when you meet a batch of them
jogging along the road, you can infer the state of the tide from the
contents of the baskets they shoulder, according as these include a
heap of grey-fluted shells and a trail of brown seaweed, or nothing
except a dull tin measure and a grimy little pipe. Nobody ever sees
a cockle-picker apart from his or her basket, yet one of them would
be recognised without it, so constant is the type in the species. All
are neither young nor old, all are wind and weather-beaten, all are
short of stature, any original excess in height being compensated
for by a more pronounced stoop, and the garments of all reproduce
the tints of blackish mud and greenish slime as accurately as if
the wearers were animals whose existence depended upon the power of
going invisible. This is not the case, however. Unaggressive and
inoffensive in their habits, the cockle-pickers have no especial
enemies save the seasons’ difference, and the dwellers by the shore
regard their proceedings with hardly more suspicion than those of the
white sea-gull flocks which sprinkle the neighbouring dark fields,
when the lea is broken up and disturbed grubs abound. A favourite
fishery is the strand along by the Black Banks, a little to the
eastward of the Ballyhoy river; and on most days of the year sombre
figures are to be seen there, paddling and poking, barefooted, in the
mud, even when the pools have ice at the rim, and the green weed is
stiff instead of slimy.
Very differently does the little Black Banks settlement view the
coming of some other visitors, who put in an appearance more seldom.
But the tinkers are quite used to cool receptions, and if they
went only where they were welcome, would find their journeys much
restricted. So as this nook offers them a camping-ground conveniently
accessible from the high road, they occasionally guide their jolting
donkey-cart down the shingly track, undeterred by the disapproving
eyes that watch them from the adjacent cabin-cluster. One row of
these has for some time past been standing roofless, a circumstance
which points it out as appropriate quarters for all manner of
vagrants, who have forfeited, if indeed they ever possessed, the
right to expect the luxury of thatch overhead. And here the tinkers
are wont to spend a few weeks every summer, seriously to the
discomfort of their temporary neighbours. It must be allowed that
they have righteously earned the evil repute which dogs them. Seven
ordinarily ingenious magpies would be less grievous to the owners
of hen-roosts and other portable property than a single tinker.
On many a night odours of savoury cooking, wafted from within the
ruined mud walls, have roused rueful suspicions in the proprietor
of some “grand young pullet” or “iligant fat duck,” which has been
mysteriously absent at the last feeding-time; and the stealthiness
wherewith a youthful tinker will creep in the small hours of the
morning, tin-mug in hand, to milk somebody else’s goat tethered
behind a rickety-boarded fence, would discredit no Blackfoot on the
hunting-trail. Also the tinker men drink and brawl, and the women
storm and screech, and the children interminably romp and quarrel,
while the whole confraternity use language so wildly bad that it is
“fit to rise the hair up off of your head,” as scandalised matrons
observe standing at their doors, and calling Biddy and Pat and
Larry and Rose to “come in out of that and not be listening to such
ungovernable talk.” And to atone for these causes of offence the
tinkers bring no social advantages, if you except now and then the
excitement of a stand-up fight between a couple of the men, who have
grown pugnacious over their whisky, or the thrilling spectacle of an
arrest, which sometimes occurs when the proceedings of the band have
come under the consideration of the constabulary in the whitewashed
barracks above at Ballyhoy. Dramatic incidents are, be it said, very
highly valued hereabouts; but the price of the tinker’s performance
is more than can be paid without repining.
One day in the course of their last visit, it did seem as if they
were going to produce a satisfyingly strong sensation. It came about
in this way. Foxy Cullen, their recognised chief, had returned late
in the warm afternoon to the Black Banks from a tramp round the
district with a basket of tinware. He had not invidiously omitted to
call at the various “publics” which he passed, and the consequence
was that he now “had drink taken,” a state more perilously conducive
to rash and reprehensible acts than downright drunkenness. On the
present occasion, however, nothing more erratic suggested itself to
Foxy than an idea that he would before he went home “just step across
to the Bull and see what sort of a place at all it was over there.”
He had often wished to do that, and as the tide had gone black out,
leaving no water visibly intervening, save the river’s fine-drawn
thread, the opportunity appeared favourable. So he set down his
basket on the wayside sward, kept close-shaven by the goats, and
he called to his daughter Peg, whom he saw at hand, to come along
with him. Peg, a queer, monkey-like little figure in a scarlet print
frock, wore gleeful grins as she obeyed, for her ragged red-bearded
father was to her the flower and sum of things; and the pair walked
on over the grass until its daisies turned into sea-pinks, and until
the seaweedy shingle which succeeded them gave place to a breadth of
glistening mud.
By the time they had got so far, Bill Duffy came round the turn
of the road, faring homewards with his load of cockles. Bill had
had good luck with his fishing that day, and had filled his basket
almost before the tide was at its lowest ebb, and it should perhaps
be accounted a prolongation of his luckiness that the shimmering tin
things in Foxy’s basket now beckoned to him from the sunny bank. He
concluded that some of the tinkers were about, but he saw nobody
near. The tinkers were slight acquaintances of his, and he had in
fact just been trying to negotiate the sale of some of his stock with
Mrs Foxy up at the roofless cabin. Unsuccessfully, for she told him
with regret that she was “stone broke, and until himself come home,
you might all as well be lookin’ to find a penny in a cockle-shell as
in her ould pocket.” To which Bill replied, “Och sure you don’t get
that on’y in an odd one or so,” and departed acquiescent. But this
derelict basketful of tinware proved to be a matter less easily dealt
with. At first indeed he seemed about to pass it by with merely a
casual glance, which, however, suddenly took on fixity and meaning,
as he stopped short and stood looking earnestly at the contents.
These were mostly tin pint measures, a dozen of them, maybe, all very
new and clean and shiny.
Now it so happened that at this time Bill badly wanted such an
article. Anybody might have inferred as much from the dingy,
battered aspect of the little vessel lying atop of his blackish-grey
cockle-heap. In truth, ever since an accident which it had sustained
a good while ago, it could only by sheer courtesy be described as
a measure at all. For a dray-horse in Capel Street had set his
shaggy foot upon it, treatment which no bit of white metal could be
expected to endure, and it had accordingly collapsed into a great
dinge, rendering its capacity henceforth a question of intricate
calculations, far beyond the tether of Bill or his clients. This
unchancy distortion had only the night before lost him a customer,
a housewife who had “priced” his wares as he passed her half-door,
and showed every symptom of coming to terms, when an over-officious
friend nudged her elbow, observing “Laws bless us, woman, look at
what he’s be way of measurin’ them wid. Sure it wouldn’t hold a
skimpy handful, let alone a pint.” Bill protested that it held the
biggest pint in the County Dublin, and that he, inconsistently,
always allowed the half full of it over and above, to make up for any
possible deficiency; nevertheless the prudent matron transferred her
patronage to Mary Cassidy, who just then came by, and he was left in
the lurch with his damaged mug. But now, when he felt keenly alive
both to its shortcomings and to the difficulties of mustering the few
pence needed to replace it, here he was all at once confronted with
an assortment ready to his hand, nothing apparently interposing to
hinder him from acting on the principle that Heaven helps those who
help themselves.
Bill Duffy was, as things go, at least indifferent honest; yet his
integrity made but a brief stand against the assault thus suddenly
sprung upon it. He cast a furtive glance around, and then, with a
rapid dive, clutched a measure, and thrust it over his shoulder down
deep among his cockles, which rattled clatteringly together to hide
the stealth. The next moment he started violently, and felt certain
that he was caught. For at no great distance there rose up a skirl
of shrieking shriller than had ever issued from sea-fowl’s throat,
and looking in the direction of the sound, he saw a small and gaudy
figure running towards him. It advanced in short rushes, now and
then stopping to dance up and down as if in an ecstasy of rage or
terror, but it screamed unintermittently, so that Bill could not be
sure whether or no he did hear basser shouts the while proceeding
from a point somewhat farther off. Presently, however, the note of
terror grew predominant enough to change his opinion about the cause
of the outcry, and set him off trotting to meet it. This red-frocked
screeching child turned out to be Peg Cullen, and the burden of her
lamentations was something unintelligible concerning “Daddy,” whose
bawls in the background here became, fortunately for him, so distinct
as to furnish an explanatory note. Foxy had evidently blundered
into a mud-hole, which was now, in conformity with its agreeable
custom, taking prompt steps to secure and secrete him. Bill rapidly
grasped the situation, and unhitching his heavy basket he detached
its long strap, and sped to the rescue, which, as Foxy was not yet
very deeply engaged, he found himself able to effect. A few frantic
plunges and desperate hauls set Foxy on firm ground, exceedingly miry
and alarmed, and quite sober; Peg left off screaming and dancing, and
they all returned to the road, stepping gingerly while they were on
the mud, but stamping boldly once they felt the dry sod under their
feet.