INTO DONEGAL
“A homely-looking folk they are, these people of my kin;
Their hands are hard as horse-shoes, but their hearts come through the
skin.
Old Michael Clancy said to me (his age is eighty-seven),
‘There’s no place like Australia—barring Ireland and Heaven!’”
V. J. DALEY.
‟WE ought to be nearly there,” said Jim.
“‘Ought’ seems to be the last argument that counts on this railway
line,” his father answered. “What grounds have you for your fond
belief?”
“It’s not time-tables,” his son admitted. “They wore out long ago; I
scrapped them when they got to the stage when reading them only led to
despair. Partly I’m hoping that the guard wasn’t merely trying to keep
up my spirits when he told me we’d get to Killard at three o’clock if
Jamesy Doyle wasn’t late with his milk-cans at Ballymoe; only he added
that ’twas the bad little ass Jamesy had, and if it lay down in the cart
how would the poor man be in time?”
“And will they wait for Jamesy and his cans?” queried Wally.
“Most certainly, I should think. Passengers are just odd happenings, to
the guard; but Jamesy is married to a woman that’s the cousin of his
wife’s aunt, and the guard evidently has a strong family sense. This
train exists as much to carry Jamesy’s cans as anything else. However,
there’s Ballymoe, and the gentleman on the platform looks as if he might
be Jamesy. And there’s the ass in the cart outside, standing up. I
expect it’s all right.”
The little train drew slowly into the wayside station, and the guard,
descending, wrung the hand of the somnolent gentleman enthroned upon the
milk-cans. Together they proceeded to load them into the van, but being
overcome by argument in the middle of the operation, relinquished work,
sat down on the cans, and gave themselves up to the delights of
conversation. The Linton family got out, and walked along the platform.
They had been travelling from early morning into the wilds of Donegal,
and, since leaving the main line for a succession of local trains, had
grown well accustomed to these sociable delays. Presently the
engine-driver and his fireman left their engine and joined the
discussion on the milk-cans. Norah strolled to the road and scratched
the ass gently, a proceeding accepted by the ass without resentment, but
without enthusiasm. Time went by.
The gathering on the platform dissolved itself after a while, the first
move being made by Mr. Jamesy Doyle, who remarked that his wife’d be
tearing the hair off of him, and she waiting for him for dinner.
“She’ll not wait long on ye; I know that one!” said the guard.
“She will, then; sure, haven’t I it bought in the little cart yonder?”
said Jamesy, with the calmness of certainty. He assisted to place the
remainder of his property in the van, and the guard, addressing Norah
with enormous politeness, mentioned that when she was quite ready the
train would go on. “Let you not be hurrying yourself—sure we’re that
late already as makes no difference,” he added, pleasantly. They climbed
in, and the little train clanged and rattled on its way.
At the next station two energetic men in tweed suits descended hurriedly
from the one first-class smoking-carriage and demanded their bicycles,
which had been put in an empty truck—the train being of the type known
as a “mixed goods.” Thereafter arose sounds of wrath and vituperation.
“Something’s up; I’m going to see,” said Wally.
They all went to see. The two cyclists, visions of helpless rage,
confronted a scene of desolation. The truck, being opened, disclosed
upon the floor a mingled heap of scrap-iron and twisted metal, which had
once been two fair bicycles: in the midst of which, firmly caught among
the battered spokes, a couple of fat wethers stood and bleated a woe
almost equal to that of the cyclists. A dozen more sheep, most of them
bearing traces of conflict with the defunct machines, in the shape of
scarred legs, pressed about the doorway, while the guard, distraught to
incoherence, endeavoured to restrain them from escaping while attempting
to justify himself before the outraged owners. Totally unsuccessful in
the second endeavour, he was only partially fortunate in the first: a
black-faced sheep, bearing a mudguard wedged upon his horns, made a dash
for freedom and fled wildly down the platform, apparently maddened by
his unfamiliar adornment.
“And I after putting them in at one end of the truck!” lamented the
guard—“and them bikes standing against the other end! Wasn’t there room
for them all—how would I know they’d mix up on me! Get back there, bad
luck to ye, ye vilyun!”—to another black-faced aspirant for liberty.
Helpers, divided in their sympathies, but with the preponderance of
feeling on the side of the guard, appeared mysteriously from an
apparently empty landscape and disentangled the sheep from the ruins.
The engine-driver, cutting the Gordian knot of debate, discovered that
the time-table demanded that the train should proceed forthwith; and the
cyclists were left foaming over a twisted heap on the platform,
threatening immediate telegrams to headquarters, and, if necessary,
murder. As the train slid away from the sound of their lamentations, the
fugitive sheep could be descried standing on a bank, his black visage
melancholy beneath the mudguard.
At the next station, the guard, with a chastened face, appeared at the
window.
“Killard, sir,” he stated. “And Patsy Burke, he have the outside car and
an ass-cart for ye.”
Mr. Linton and his party obeyed the summons gladly. They found
themselves on a grass-grown platform, boasting very rudimentary
station-buildings. Beyond, a road ran east and west, bordered by high
banks, while on either side were small fields and wide, flat stretches
of bog. A long, thin man advanced to meet them. No one else had left the
train, and he accepted them, without introduction, as his
responsibility.
“The car is below in the road,” he said. “The little horse, he have an
objection to the train; he’d lep a ditch sooner than face it. I’ll throw
the luggage on the ass-cart, sir, before I take you up.”
The guard, still subdued in spirit, was diligently hauling out boxes
from his van. A suit-case and the rod-box, failing to appear, were made
the objects of fevered search, despaired of, promised by the next train,
and finally discovered in an empty third class carriage, all within the
space of five minutes. The ass-cart, drawn by a dispirited donkey
without energy to disapprove of trains, was backed on to the platform,
and the luggage piled upon it in a tottery heap, secured—more or
less—by an assortment of knotted string and old rope. Then the guard
and engine-driver, both of whom had assisted enthusiastically, bade an
affectionate farewell, and the train disappeared slowly, while the
Australians followed Patsy Burke meekly to the outside car.
Dublin had already introduced them to the jaunting-car of Ireland, and
they had fallen instant victims to the fascination of that most
irresponsible vehicle. English tourists are wont to regard it with fear
and trembling until familiar with its ways: to hold on desperately, to
sit stiffly, and, very frequently, to fall off when rounding corners.
That the Linton party did none of these things was not due to any
superior intelligence on their parts, but merely to the fact that the
back-to-back position on the open-air cars of the Melbourne tramways
proved an excellent introduction to the Irish vehicle—insomuch that the
force of habit was so strong in Wally that the Melbourne gripman’s
habitual ejaculation, “Hold _tight_ round the curve!” sprang unbidden to
his lips every time the jarveys took a corner on one wheel. The Dublin
jarveys had liked the cheery Australians, who paid well and frankly
averred that there was never any conveyance like the jingling cars with
their merry little bells, and their good horses; and the jarveys of
Dublin are a critical race, with quick tongues and quicker wits. They
had confided to them their woes, which centred round the introduction of
motor-cars and the complete indifference of pedestrians to the rule of
the road—an indifference universal throughout Ireland, where the
unseasoned traveller is perpetually a-shiver with dread at threatened
street tragedies, perpetually averted by good luck that amounts to a
miracle.
“I never seen the equal of these people,” one of their drivers had said,
emitting a roar like a bull of Bashan, which barely saved an elderly
woman from what looked like deliberate suicide under his horse’s hoofs.
“Yerra, ma’am, is it owning the road you are?”—to the lady, who pursued
her leisurely way with the calmness born of many such episodes. “Young
or old, ’tis all the same; they do be strolling the streets for all the
world as if they was picking mushrooms, and taking no notice of you till
you’d be knocking them down—and then they do be annoyed! There’s only
one way, and that is to let a roar out of you at them—and then the look
they give you is worse than a curse!”
“I suppose you get into trouble if you kill more than six a day,” Wally
had said.
The jarvey grinned.
“Trouble, is it? Sure, some of them makes a trade of it; there’s them
old wasters in this town that’d ask nothing better than that you’d knock
’em down—not to kill them, but to knock a small piece off them, the way
you’d have to support them afterwards. There’s one man I but tipped with
the end of a shaft, and he strolling at his aise in a crowd. Crawling at
a slow walk I was; and what did he do but rowl on the ground before me,
letting on that he was kilt. There was none of the polis about, so I
left him rowling and calling murder!”
“Did you hear any more of him?”
“I did. Didn’t he come to me that evening and say he had his witnesses
ready, and he’d be making a polis-court matter of it if I didn’t give
him five pounds? ‘I do be making twenty-eight shillings a week,’ says
he, ‘in me health,’ says he, and now ’tis the way I cannot lift me hand
to me head,’ he says. Him, that never earned five shillings in a week in
his life, and not that, if he could steal it! I towld him to bring his
polis-court and his dirty witnesses, and that if he did, I’d pay the
five pounds for the pleasure I’d have in belting the life out of him.”
“And did he bring it?”
“He did not. I seen him a week after that, and he cleaning steps. ‘I’m
glad to see you looking so well and hearty, me poor man!’ says I to him;
and he thrun a look at me fit to kill. Sure I knew that one’d be more
anxious to keep out of the way of the polis than to be dandhering about
them with his cases!”
The Dublin cars had been smart affairs, spick-and-span with bright paint
and clean upholstering, every buckle on their harness polished brightly.
Their rubber tyres strove to soften the asperities of cobbled streets.
But the car to which Patsy Burke led the Australians was of a different
aspect: small and forbidding, with straight up-and-down seats whereon
reposed cushions from which the stuffing had chiefly escaped, the
insignificant remnant remaining in hard knobs in the corners. The
original wood peeped out through faint streaks of the original paint,
while here and there patches of deal and hoop-iron lent variety to the
exterior. Many different sets had contributed towards the composition of
the harness, wherein nothing matched except in age and decrepitude. A
tattered urchin stood at the head of the little horse which had an
objection to trains. The horse was asleep.
“If I were asked,” murmured Norah, surveying him, “I would say he had an
objection to moving at all.”
“He looks as if he would like to lean up against a tree and dream,” said
Wally, “and good gracious! is he going to drag the lot of us!”
“Why wouldn’t he?” asked Mr. Burke, with some asperity. “Git along with
ye to the ass, John Conolly,”—to the boy—“and lend a hand to the big
thrunk when the road does be rough, or it will fall off on ye. Will ye
get up, miss?”
“Is it far?” asked Norah, regarding the somnolent horse with troubled
eyes.
“’Tis five Irish miles, miss.”
“But can he take us all? There’s—there’s so much of us,” said Norah,
her glance roving over her tall menfolk, and dwelling finally on Mr.
Burke, who was not less tall.
“Him!” said Mr. Burke. “But isn’t the luggage on the ass-cart? Sure
it’ll only be a luxury for him—many’s the time I’ve known that one with
seven or eight behind him, going to a funeral, and he that full of
courage, I’d me own throubles to keep him from bolting? Let ye get up,
and ’tis little he’ll be making of ye.”
They got up, unhappily, and Mr. Burke hopped into the driver’s
seat—which is occupied only in time of stress, the jarvey greatly
preferring to drive from the side. He said, “G’wan, now!” to the little
horse, and that animal awoke and took the road gallantly, while a
cracked bell on his collar rattled a discordant accompaniment to his
hoof-beats.
They jogged on between the high banks. The scent of the whitethorn that
made snow upon their crests flooded the air, and mingled with deep wafts
of odour from clumps of furze lying golden in the fields. There were
other flowers starring the hedges; honeysuckle, waving long arms of
sweetness, and, nestling closely in the grass-grown banks, clusters of
wild violets, starry celandines and even a few late primroses. There
were many houses in sight; little whitewashed cabins scattered over the
hills, approached by narrow boreens or tiny lanes, so narrow that it
seemed that even an ass-cart could scarcely manage to squeeze in between
their towering banks.
“Did you ever see such little paddocks—fields, I ought to say?” uttered
Wally. “And the great fat banks and hedges between them! Why, they must
cover as much ground as there is in many of the fields!”
“We’d put wire-fences, in Australia,” said Mr. Linton, laughing. “It’s
queer, when you come to think of it: we’re supposed to have land to
spare, but we put the narrowest fences that can be made; and here, there
isn’t enough to go round, and they cover up ever so much of it with
their banks.”
“Oh, but aren’t you glad they don’t make wire-fences!” Norah broke out.
“They’re so hideous: and these hedges are just exquisite.”
“Not being a landholder, I am, indeed,” said her father. “The idea of
this landscape given up to wire-fences is depressing—long may they
stick to their banks! And their shelter must be valuable in this
country; they don’t seem to have many trees.” His eye ran over the bare
little fields. “Don’t you grow trees, in Donegal?” he asked of the back
of Mr. Burke.
That gentleman, feeling himself addressed, swung round.
“There do be plenty in the woods and in gentlemen’s grounds, sir. I
never seen any in the fields. They do say there was any amount in the
ould ancient days, or how would the bogs be there? Forests, no less; and
quare beasts in them. I’ve seen ould heads of deer with horns that wide
you’d never get them up a boreen. There were no fields and no fences in
those days, and people lived by hunting—great hunting those big deer
would give them, to be sure. If you’d kill a rabbit nowadays it’d be as
much as you’d do to ate it before the polis had you!”
“If killing rabbits is what you care for, you might come to Australia,”
said Jim, laughing. “You would certainly be welcome there. Only after a
little while, you wouldn’t eat any.”
“There was a lad I knew in Derry went out to them parts,” said Mr.
Burke, “and he sent home letters with such tales of his doings you
wouldn’t believe them. He said there were beasts that hopped on their
tails faster than a horse ’ud gallop, and rabbits that had the face ate
off the country. Like a carpet on the floor, he says. But sure he was
always the boy that’d spin you a yarn.”
“It was a true yarn, anyhow,” Jim remarked.
“Do ye tell me, now?” The long face of Patsy Burke was respectful, but
incredulous, “And another thing he said, that a man couldn’t believe:
that the genthry’d go out and poison foxes!”
“They would,” said Mr. Linton. “Gladly.”
“But——” Words failed Mr. Burke. He gaped at his passengers. The horse
dropped to a walk, unheeded.
“Poison them, or shoot them, or get rid of them in any way possible,”
said Jim, enjoying the mounting agony of Mr. Burke. “We can’t do much
hunting, you see, when we live on big places, with the nearest neighbour
perhaps twenty miles off; and often the hills are so steep and rough,
and so thick with fallen timber, that horses and hounds would want wings
to hunt through them. But a man may have thousands of sheep on hills
like that.”
“Do ye tell me? Thousands, is it?”
“Rather. And the foxes breed like rabbits in those hills, and there’s
nothing they like so well as young lambs. You can go out in the morning
and find forty or fifty dead lambs—the cruel brutes of foxes just eat
their noses and go on to the next. When you see that number of little
lambs killed, in that fashion, you’re ready to start poisoning foxes.”
“Ye would so,” said Mr. Burke, explosively. “And no one interferes with
ye?”
“Why, you get paid for it,” Jim said. To which Mr. Burke replied by a
gasp of “God help us!” and relieved his feelings by lashing the horse
with a shout of “G’wan, now!” The horse broke into a surprised canter,
and they rocked down a little hill. At its foot a wide expanse of bog
stretched westward, looking like a great grassy plain. Here and there,
near the road, men were working at cutting turf, armed with the loy or
narrow, sharp spade, which takes out a sod of turf, the size of a brick,
to be stacked to dry in the sun. A great corner had already been cut
away, and lay bleak and desolate. Above its level the wall of turf rose
three or four feet, a dark-brown glutinous-looking mass, smoothly marked
with the scars of the loy. There were deep pools of water here and
there: the brown bog-water that scares the English tourists who finds it
in a bedroom jug in a hotel, and gives foundation for future scathing
comments on the dirty ways of Ireland: the fact being that if its
exquisite velvet-softness could be taken to London, most of the Bond
Street complexion specialists would go out of business for lack of
customers.
“So that’s turf,” commented Wally, looking curiously at the rough stacks
of sods, which the sun was drying to a lighter colour than the deep
brown of the bog-face. “It doesn’t look the sort of stuff you’d make
fires of—wherein I expect I show my hideous ignorance.”
Mr. Burke had begun with a snort at the first part of this remark, but
checked it in its birth at the frank avowal of the conclusion.
“Wait till ye see it burn, sir,” he said. “Ye’d not want a better fire,
barring ye could get a bit of bog-wood to mix with it. Then ye’d not get
its aiqual if ye were walking the world all your life.”
“Are those pools deep?” Norah asked, looking at the still brown water,
fringed with reeds and sedges.
“Some of ’em’s no depth at all; and there’s some that deep that no man
knows the bottom of ’em. They’d take anyone and swallow him entirely,
the way he’d never be heard of again; and they do say the bog keeps ’em
fresh as if they’d just fallen in, only I dunno would it be true: I
never seen anybody that had come out. It’s one of the old stories that
do be going in the country.”
“When _we_ talk about a bog, we mean something that looks—well, boggy,”
Norah said. “I never thought an Irish bog looked so pretty; all grass
and rushes, like a big plain. Why do they call it a bog?”
“You’d know if you got into it,” said Mr. Burke, bearing patiently with
the ignorance of the foreigner. “There’s parts of it firm enough to
gallop a horse over; but you’d want to know where you were going, it’s
that treacherous—it’d let you down as deep as your waist in a second,
and it looking safe as a street. Some of the mosses that do be growing
on it ’ud warn you: there’s one or two kinds that only grow where it’s
deep and quaking. As for pretty—it’s airly yet for flowers; but you’d
see it like a garden, in the autumn, with meadowsweet and loosestrife
and canavan, that they call the bog-cotton, like snow lying on it.
There’s no end to the quare things that do be growing in a bog.”
They passed ass-carts, built up with basket work to form creels, piled
high with turf,—generally in the charge of a barefooted urchin,
dark-eyed and graceful in his rags, who would fling a cheery “Good-day”
at the car rattling by, touching his cap to “the genthry.”
“’Tis a great year for saving turf,” Mr. Burke told them. “There’s no
knowing what the war’ll be doing with prices; they say the poor
people’ll be hard put to it to go on living at all. So everyone’s
getting turf; sure, it’s easier to be hungry if you’re warm. I dunno, at
all, why would they make a war: didn’t we have enough and too much to
pay for tea and tobacco as it was without the ould Kaiser poking in his
nose?” Thus adjusting satisfactorily the responsibility for his
financial troubles, Mr. Burke addressed the horse angrily, and drove on
in silence.
They came to a little river, brawling merrily under a bridge of grey
stone. A turn in the road brought trees in view, fringing a lough that
lay tranquil in the sunlight; a placid sheet of blue water broken here
and there by tiny islands. Towards the end that was nearest, the trees
were thickly planted. Between them they caught glimpses of an old stone
house nestling in a wilderness of a garden that ran down almost to the
edge of the lough.
Patsy Burke swung the little horse in through a gateway, the iron gates
of which stood invitingly open. They jogged up a winding avenue,
overhung with lofty beech-trees. It ended suddenly in front of the
house. Through a wide doorway they could see a dim hall, where a
bewildering collection of old guns and blunderbusses was ranged over a
massive mahogany table, the legs of which ended in claw-feet that would
have drawn a connoisseur like a magnet. Honeysuckle and roses climbed
together up the old walls, framing the doorway in blossom.
“Are ye there, ma’am?” bawled Patsy.
A pleasant-faced woman came through the hall quickly.
“I’d have given up expecting you, if that old train was ever in time,”
she said, giving a hand to Norah as that damsel hopped from the car.
“Aren’t you all tired out, and you travelling since early morning? Come
in then—there’s hot water waiting in your rooms, and tea will be ready
in ten minutes. Is the luggage coming, Patsy?”
“It is, ma’am,” responded Mr. Burke. “Lasteways, if that image of a John
Conolly doesn’t play any of his thricks with the ass.”
“Perhaps, now, you’d be better going back to meet him when you have the
horse stabled,” suggested his mistress. “I wouldn’t have the luggage
delayed.”
“Ah, sure, it will be all right,” said Mr. Burke, hastily, “John
Conolly’s not that bad; he’ll get it here sometime, but where’d be the
use of hurrying the ass? Well, I’ll throw a look down the road when I’m
after putting the car by, ma’am.”
“And that makes sure of me poor Brownie getting a good grooming,”
murmured the landlady, ushering her guests into the house as the car
jogged stablewards. “Patsy’s not that fond of a walk that he’d scamp his
job to be travelling the road after John Conolly. Are you there,
Bridget?”
“I am, ma’am,” said a pretty girl, appearing from the back of the hall
with such swiftness as to compel the belief that she had been
surreptitiously observing the new-comers.
“Take the gentlemen to their rooms,” commanded the landlady. “Will you
come with me, Miss Linton?”
Norah followed her up the broad staircase. A wide corridor led through
mouldering archways, whence passages branched off to right and left. The
walls bore signs of decorations of a bygone day, now faint and faded
with age. The landlady threw open the door of a large room, with two
windows looking over the lough. A huge bed occupied an alcove: bare
acreages of floor intervened between isolated pieces of furniture, with
rugs lying, like islands, on the stained boards.
“I took up the carpet—’twas old and there were holes in it you’d fall
through,” said the landlady. “But I could put you in a smaller room if
you’d rather have a carpet.”
“I like this,” Norah said, looking round the clean bareness of the room.
“But can’t I have the windows open?”
“You’ll have to fight Bridget over them,” replied the landlady, flinging
both windows wide. “I opened them twice this morning, but she shut them
again; and the second time she was so anxious about all the deaths you’d
be dying with the dint of the cold blast sweeping in, that I let them
stay.”
“I didn’t think there was any cold blast,” Norah said laughing.
“There wasn’t; but Bridget thinks that any air that comes in through an
open window is a blast, even if it’s the middle of summer. Have you
everything you want, Miss Linton? I’m sure you’ll all be famished for
your tea, and I’ll run and see to it.”
“I think this is a jolly place,” Norah said, as they gathered, ten
minutes later, round a table that might certainly have groaned under its
load of good things, had it not been made of exceedingly solid old
mahogany. “It’s not a bit like a boarding-house, is it? There’s such a
home-y feel about it.”
“There’s a home-y look about this table,” Jim averred. “I haven’t seen
anything like it since we left Billabong.”
There were crusty loaves of Irish soda-bread, which is better than
anything else except the home-made bread of Australia, heaps of brown,
crisp scones, buttered hot-cakes, and glass dishes with ruby-coloured
jams. A bowl of cream was in the middle, and a dish of rich dark honey
in the comb—not like the anæmic honey one buys in London, which is made
by fat and lazy bees out of dishes of sugar and water, and tastes like
it. The Irish bees had worked over miles of heathery moorland, and their
honey held something of the heather’s fresh sweetness.
“Think of the trenches—and bully beef!” ejaculated Wally. “I say,
what’s this?”
He had uncovered a smoking plateful of a queer flat substance, on which
attention was immediately focussed.
“Does one eat it?” Norah queried.
“Blessed if I know,” Jim answered. “It looks a bit queer.”
Light suddenly illumined Mr. Linton.
“Bless us, that’s potato-cake!” he exclaimed. “I haven’t tasted it for
many a year, and it’s one of the best things going. It ought to be eaten
so hot that it burns the mouth, so I advise you not to lose time.’ He
helped himself, declaring that no considerations of etiquette were to
stand in the way of the proper temperature of a potato-cake, and the
others somewhat doubtfully followed his example. In a very short time
the plate was empty.
“_That’s_ a recipe I’ll take back to Brownie!” was Norah’s significant
comment. “Do you think Mrs. Moroney would let me have a lesson on it in
the kitchen?”
“Mrs. Moroney seems inclined to eat from one’s hand,” said Mr. Linton.
“She’s desperately anxious for us to be comfortable. You know, we were
told in London that she had only begun this business since the war—her
husband is at the front—so time hasn’t soured her as it sours most
landladies. We’re lucky in catching her in the fluid state: later on
she’ll solidify into the adamantine condition that is truly
landladylike.”
“Meanwhile, she’s rather an old duck,” said Wally. “Hallo, who’s that?”
A small rosy face, crowned with a tangle of yellow curls, was peeping
round the doorway. Finding itself observed, it hastily disappeared.
Norah snatched a sponge-cake and went in swift pursuit, returning, a
moment later, with a very small boy clad in a blue shirt and
ridiculously diminutive knickerbockers, who greeted the company with a
friendly smile somewhat complicated by a large mouthful of cake.
“Well, you’re a cheerful person,” Jim said. “What’s your name?”
“Timsy,” said the new-comer. “And I’m eight.”
“I call that genius,” said Wally. “He knew you’d ask him that next, so
he saved you the trouble. Do you live here, Timsy?”
The small boy nodded vigorously.
“Me daddy’s gorn,” he volunteered.
“Where?”
“Fightin’ the Gair-mins. They’s bad—they’s after hurtin’ him in the
laig.”
“Did they?” said Wally, sympathetically. “Poor daddy! Is he better?”
“He is. He’s goin’ to shoot me some.”
“Is he, now? Will he bring them home?”
“I dunno will he. I asked the postman, an’ he said daddy couldn’t post
’em.”
“That wasn’t nice of the postman,” said Jim. “What would you do with
them if you got them?”
“Frow fings at ’em,” said Timsy, valiantly.
“Good man!” said Jim. “We’ll have you in the trenches before the war’s
over, I expect. Another cake, old chap?”
Timsy accepted the cake graciously, digging his white teeth into it with
appreciation.
“I’m after having me tea,” he confided. “An’ Bridget said there wasn’t
any cake. But there’s lots.” His eye swept the table.
“There is, indeed,” said Jim, guiltily. “Just you have as much as you
feel like.”
“Are you a soldier?” demanded Timsy, his eyes on Jim’s uniform.
The boy nodded.
“Like me daddy?”
“Not as good, I expect,” said Jim.
“Me daddy’s the finest soldier ever went out of Ireland—old Nanny told
me he was. And she said if once he met that old Kaiser he’d be sorry he
ever got borned. An’ he would, too, if me daddy cot him. An he’s a
sergeant, ’cause he’s got free stripes on his arm. Why hasn’t you got
any?”
“I don’t know as much as your daddy,” said Jim, probably with perfect
truth. “When I get bigger they may give me some.”
“You’re bigger than me daddy, now,” said Timsy, surveying him. “Only you
haven’t got any whiskers. I ’spect you have to have whiskers before you
get free stripes.”
“I expect so,” Jim agreed. “I’ll grow some the first minute I get time.
What have you done with your legs, Timsy?”
“Scratched ’em, I ’spect,” said Timsy, indifferently, casting a fleeting
glance at his bare brown legs, which bore many marks of warfare. “They’s
bwambles in the wood. Why is your buttons dif-runt to me daddy’s?”
“What are your daddy’s like?”
Timsy fished laboriously in the pocket of his shirt.
“I got one here,” he said. “It came uncottoned, an’ fell off, an’ daddy
said I could have it. Look—it’s nicer than yours.”
“Of course it is—isn’t your daddy a sergeant?” said Jim, gravely. Timsy
looked up sharply, and was seized with compunction.
“Don’t you mind,” he said, hastily putting away his cherished button,
lest dangling it before the eyes of his new friend should excite vain
longings in his soul. He slipped a grimy little paw into Jim’s. “’Twill
not be long at all before they make a sergeant of you. Can you hurry up
an’ grow whiskers?”
“I’ll do my best,” returned Jim, laughing. “You’re a good old sportsman,
Timsy. Have another cake.”
Timsy’s head was bent over the dish in the tremendous effort of
selection, when a slight commotion was heard in the hall.
“I was without in the scullery,” said a high-pitched voice, “and I after
giving him his tea. ‘Let you sit quiet there till I have a minute to put
a decent appearance on you,’ says I. ‘’Tis not in them ould rags you’d
be having the genthry see you,’ I says. With that I wint back, an’ the
kitchen was as bare as the palm of me hand. I’ve called him till me
throat’s cracking——”
“Is that you, Timsy?” whispered Norah. The dancing eyes of the culprit
were sufficient answer.
“Blessed Hour!” said the voice of Mrs. Moroney, torn between relief and
wrath. Her good-natured face hung in the doorway, presently followed by
her ample form. “Is it you, then, Timsy Moroney, disgracing me and
annoying the gentleman! Why would you have him on your knee, sir, and he
the ragamuffin of the world? I’d not have you troubled with him.”
“He’s not troubling me at all, Mrs. Moroney,” Jim assured her. “He’s an
awfully friendly little chap. Does it matter if he has cakes?”
The question savoured of shutting the stable-door after the stealing of
the steed. Timsy ate his cake hurriedly, lest disaster await him in the
answer.
“There’s nothing he doesn’t eat,” said his mother resignedly. “But I’d
not let him annoy you, sir.”
“There was no cake in the kitchen!” said Timsy, fixing reproachful eyes
on his parent. “How would I have me tea, an’ no cake?”
“Cock you up with cake!” returned Mrs. Moroney, spiritedly. “Well able
to go without it you are, for once in a while.” She relented before her
son’s appealing gaze. “Come away, then, and let Bridget wash you: sure,
she’s screaming all over the place after you.”
Timsy hesitated, regarding Jim with affection.
“Can I come back some time?” he demanded.
“Of course you can,” said Jim.
The small boy climbed down slowly.
“I’m destroyed with washin’,” he complained. “’Tis only at dinner-time
she had me all soaped. An’ I _hate_ shoes . . .” The voice of his
lamentations died away as his mother swept him from the room.
“Nice kid,” said Jim, getting up. “Let’s go out and reconnoitre.”
The shadows were lengthening across the strip of tree-fringed grass
leading to the gate. Near the house, the garden was a wilderness of
colour and fragrance. Roses and sweet-peas, stocks and asters,
nasturtiums and clematis, in a bewildering tangle, jostled each other in
the untidy beds and on the old stone walls. Here and there was a
mouldering summer-house, its entrance almost blocked with hanging
creepers, while in shady nooks in the winding walks were seats with an
appearance of old age that suggested prudence in sitting down.
Presently they came upon a path leading abruptly down-hill to the lough.
They followed it, passing out of the garden into a little field where
small black Kerry cattle looked inquisitively at them, and through a
rickety gate on to the shore, where grey pebbles made a rough beach. A
disconsolate donkey, attached to a windlass, walked round and round in a
weary circle, pumping water up to the house—a spectacle which promptly
set Norah to hunting for a thistle for him, which the donkey received
coldly.
“It would take more than a thistle to sweeten that job,” said Wally.
“Come and look at the boat.”
Mr. Patsy Burke was rather feverishly busy with the boat—it had
apparently occurred to him that since the new-comers would assuredly
want her it might be as well to make certain that she was sound. She was
not sound—to rectify which obvious condition Mr. Burke laboured
mightily.
“She’s seen better days,” remarked Mr. Linton, looking at the ancient
vessel with critical eyes. Already she had been extensively patched: her
paint was merely a memory, and she bore “a general flavour of mild
decay.” The oars, which lay near, had also been mended many times. They
did not match: a fact which the Australians were to discover later.
“Ah, sure, she’s a good boat,” said Mr. Burke. “’Tis only the thrifle of
a leak she have in her. You wouldn’t ask an aisier or a kinder boat to
pull than that one—begob, she’s the best boat to be found on any lough
hereabouts.” This assertion also was to be verified by time. “In the
ould times, when the family was here, many’s the day I’ve seen her, full
of red cushions and fine ladies, and she tearing up the lough like a
racehorse!” The poetic nature of Mr. Burke’s memories moved him to a
sigh.
“Who was the family?” queried Mr. Linton.
“The O’Donnells, to be sure,” answered Mr. Burke, his long face
expressing faint surprise at ignorance so vast. “They owned all this
country, from the ould ancient times—but there’s none of them left now.
Me gran’father, and his gran’father before him, was tenants under them.
I’m told they were kings, one time. But there’s nothing left of any of
the ould stock now—all their houses is sold, or falling to pieces, an’
they at the ends of the earth, seeking their fortune.”
“The house is very old, isn’t it?” Norah asked.
“’Tis ould, and ’tis falling to decay—it ’ud take a power of money to
put it right. Ah, the good days is gone from Ireland—what with the land
war and the famine, all the money was swept from her.” Mr. Burke stopped
abruptly. He pulled his battered felt hat over his eyes and hammered
vigorously at the old boat.
They went up through the fragrant garden, now heavy with evening
shadows. Above them the gaunt old house towered, bosomed in its trees,
dim with the night mist from the lough. Lights were beginning to twinkle
from the windows, and the faint acrid smell of turf fires stole upon the
still air. To Norah’s fancy the silent garden was peopled with shadowy
forms—tall gallants and exquisite ladies of a bygone day, and little
children who ran, laughing, along paths that had no tangle of neglected
growth. It was theirs; the dream visions made her feel an interloper as
she crossed the threshold into the lit hall.