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STRANGERS AT LISCONNEL
_A SECOND SERIES OF IRISH IDYLLS_
BY
JANE BARLOW
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1895
_Copyright, 1895_,
by
Dodd, Mead and Company.
TO
M. L. B.
[Gaelic: Is fada mé beo do dhiaigh.]
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
OUT OF THE WAY 1
CHAPTER II.
JERRY DUNNE'S BASKET 14
CHAPTER III.
MRS. KILFOYLE'S CLOAK 31
CHAPTER IV.
A GOOD TURN 53
CHAPTER V.
FORECASTS 80
CHAPTER VI.
A FAIRING 112
CHAPTER VII.
MR. POLYMATHERS 139
CHAPTER VIII.
HONORIS CAUSA 168
CHAPTER IX.
BOYS' WAGES 211
CHAPTER X.
CON THE QUARE ONE 235
CHAPTER XI.
MAD BELL 271
CHAPTER XII.
A FLITTING 303
CHAPTER XIII.
A RETURN 324
CHAPTER XIV.
GOOD LUCK 340
CHAPTER I
OUT OF THE WAY
To Lisconnel, our very small hamlet in the middle of a wide bogland, the
days that break over the dim blue hill-line, faint and far off, seldom
bring a stranger's face; but then they seldom take a familiar one away,
beyond reach, at any rate of return before nightfall. In fact, there are
few places amid this mortal change to which we may come back after any
reasonable interval with more confidence of finding things just as we
left them, due allowance being made for the inevitable fingering of
Time. We shall find some old people who have aged under it, and some
who, as certain philosophers would hold, have grown younger again. The
latter may be seen just beginning, perhaps, to sit up stiff on a woman's
arm, or starting for a trial crawl over mother earth; and of them we
remark that there is another little Ryan or Quigley; while the former
stay sunning themselves so inertly, or totter about so shakily, that we
notice at once how much old Sheridan, or the Widow Joyce, has failed
since last year. These babies and grandparents often associate a good
deal with one another at the stage when the old body is still capable of
"keepin' an eye on the child," and the child still resorts to all fours
if it wants to get up its highest speed. But this companionship does not
last long in any given case. Very soon the expanding and the contracting
sphere cease to touch closely. On the one hand, the world widens into
more spacious tracts for nimbler and bolder ranging over with all manner
of remarkable things growing and living upon it, to be gathered and
captured, or at least sought and chased, among pools, and hillocks and
swampy places. On the other, it shrinks to within the limits of a few
dwindling furlongs and perches, traversed ever more feebly, until at
length even the nearest stone, on which the warm rays can be basked in,
seems to have moved too far off, and the flicker-haunted nook by the
hearth-fire becomes the end of the whole day's journey.
Thus the generations, as they succeed one another, wave-like preserve a
well-marked rhythm in their coming and going--play, work, rest--not to
be interrupted by anything less peremptory than death or disablement.
This wag-by-the-wall swings and swings its bobbed pendulum without
pause, but one swing is much like the other, and their background never
varies. Little Pat out stravading of a fine morning on the great
brown-wigged bog, and, it may be hoped, enjoying himself thoroughly, is
taking the same first steps in life as young Pat his father, now busy
cutting turf-sods, and old Pat, his grandfather, idly watching them
burn, with a pipe, if in luck, to keep alight. And the Lisconnel folk,
therefore, because the changes wrought by human agency come to them in
unimposing forms, are strongly impressed by the vast natural
vicissitudes of things which rule their destinies. The melting of season
into season, and year into year, the leaf-like withering and drifting
away of the old from among the fresh springing growths, are ever before
their eyes, and the contemplation steeps them in a sense of the
transitoriness of things good and bad. Even the black soil they tread on
may next year flutter up into a vanishing blue column through a
smoke-hole in somebody's thatch. They carry this sense with a light and
heavy heart. In like manner they make the very most of all unusual
events. They find materials for half-an-hour's talk in the passage by
their doors of one of those rarely coming strangers, who do appear from
time to time, as frequently, indeed, as anybody would expect, having
surveyed the thoroughfare that links us with humanity. For if we follow
it southward, where, like the unvanishing wake of some vessel, it
streaks the level plain, that is lonely as a wide water, but stiller, we
pass by Dan O'Beirne's forge, now neighbourless, and through humble
Duffclane, and on to Ballybrosna, our Town; but we must go many a mile
further to reach anything upon which you would bestow that title. Or, if
we turn northward, we only find it seaming another ample fold of
bogland, outspread far and far beyond Lisconnel before a grey hill-range
begins to rise in slow undulations, crested with furze and broom. Here
we smell turf-smoke again, and see a cabin-row that is Sallinbeg, and
hence the road strikes north-westward in among the mountains, where a
few mottled-faced sheep peer down over it from their smooth green walks,
but do not care to trust their black velvet legs upon it. And then, by
the time that the air has become sea-scented, the road climbs to the
top of a hill, and stops there abruptly, as if it had been travelling
all the while merely to look at the view. The truth is that the funds
for its construction would go no further, and, in consequence, wayfarers
coming along by the shore still have to tread out a path for themselves
across a gap of moorland, if they are bound for Lisconnel.
You may perceive, therefore, that Lisconnel lies out of the way, on the
route to no places of importance, and as its own ten or a dozen little
houses are, I fear, collectively altogether insignificant, it has small
reason to expect many visitors. The Widow M'Gurk said one day that you
might as well be living at the bottom of the boghole for any company you
got the chance of seeing; but this was an exaggeration. She was vexed
when she made the remark, because Mrs. Dooley, old Dan O'Beirne's
married daughter, then staying at the forge, had promised to come and
inspect a pair of marketable chickens, in anticipation of which Mrs.
M'Gurk had wetted a cup of tea and used up her last handful of wholemeal
for a cake, that Mrs. Dooley, who was in rather affluent circumstances,
might not think them "too poorly off altogether." But, after all, the
hours had slipped blankly by, and nobody had arrived. So the widow had
ruefully put her teapot to sit on the hob until himself came in--for,
properly speaking, she was at this time not yet a widow--and had stepped
down her tussocky slope with her double disappointment to Mrs. Kilfoyle.
Mrs. Kilfoyle was knitting at her door and not looking out over the bog,
where the flushed light of the sunset drowsed on the black sod in an
almost tangible fire-film. Against it the poppies stood up dark and
opaque, but the large white daisies had caught the wraith of the glow on
their glimmering discs. She had been thinking how not so long ago her
son Thady used to come whistling home to her across the bog when the
shadows stretched their longest. The sunset still came punctually every
evening, but had grown wonderfully lonesome since the kick of a
cross-tempered cart-horse had silenced his whistling and stopped his
home-coming for ever. Thady's whistling had been indifferent, considered
as music, yet it had sounded pleasant in her ears, and Mrs. M'Gurk's
trouble seemed to her not very serious. However, she replied to her
complaint: "Ah, sure, woman dear, like enough she might be here
to-morra."
"And if she is, she'll be very apt to not get e'er a chuck or a chucken
off of me--not the feather of a one," said Mrs. M'Gurk, resentfully,
"plenty of other things I have to do besides wastin' me time waitin' for
people that don't know their own minds from one minyit to the next, and
makin' a fool of meself star-gazin' along the road, and ne'er a fut
stirrin' on it no more than if it was desolit wildernesses."
She would not for the world have alluded to her expenditure of more
material resources, and accordingly had to explain her vexation by
putting a fictitious value upon her time, which, in reality, was just
then drearily superabundant.
"Sure," suggested Mrs. Kilfoyle, "the poor woman maybe was kep' at home
some way, and she wid ivery intintion to be comin'. I declare, now,
you'd whiles think things knew what you was manin' in your mind, and riz
themselves up agin it a' purpose to prevint you, they happen that
conthráry."
As Mrs. M'Gurk's experience did not dispose her to gainsay this
proposition, and she was nevertheless disinclined to be mollified by it,
she likewise had recourse to generalities, and said:
"'Deed then it's welcome anybody is to stop away if they're wishful,
hindered or no. Long sorry I'd be to have people disthressin' themselves
streelin' after _me_." And she added, rather inconsistently, the remark
already mentioned: "But the likes of this place I never witnessed. You
might as well be livin' at the bottom of the blackest ould boghoule
there, for e'er a chance you have to be seein' a bit of company."
"And it's yourself 'ud make the fine sizeable waterask, ma'am," a
high-pitched voice said suddenly from within doors, causing Mrs. M'Gurk
to start and peer into the dark opening behind her, somewhat taken aback
at finding that she had had an unsuspected audience, which is always
more or less of a shock. The first object she descried through the hazy
dusk was the figure of the old woman known to Lisconnel as Ody
Rafferty's aunt, but in fact so related to his father, sitting with her
short black dudeen by the delicate pink and white embers, for the
evening was warm and the fire low. Ody himself was leaning against the
wall, critically examining Brian Kilfoyle's blackthorn, and forming a
poor opinion of it with considerable satisfaction. Not that he bore
Brian any ill-will, but because this is his method of attaining to
contentment with his own possessions.
"Whethen now and is it yourself that's in it, Ody Rafferty?" said Mrs.
M'Gurk, as she recognised him. "And what talk have you out of you about
waterasks? You're the great man, bedad."
"Me aunt's lookin' in on Mrs. Kilfoyle, ma'am," said Ody, "be raison of
Brian bein' off to the Town. And right enough you and me knows what's
took him there; and so does Norah Finegan. Och, good luck to the pair of
thim."
"Coortin'," said his aunt, who preferred to put things briefly and
clearly. "But I was tellin' Mrs. Kilfoyle to not be frettin', for sure
God is good, and they'll be apt to keep her in it all's one."
"Goodness may pity you, woman," said Mrs. M'Gurk. "Brian 'ud as lief
take and bring home a she _hyenna_, and it ravin' mad, as anybody 'ud
look crooked at his mother, I very well know."
"Norah's a rael dacint little slip of a girl," Mrs. Kilfoyle said
tranquilly, considering that her son's character needed no certificate.
But the old woman only grunted doubtfully, and said: "Och, is she?" For
she had been a superfluous aunt so long that she found it hard to
believe in anything better than toleration.
"Talkin' of company," said Ody, to change the subject--which his aunt's
remarks often disposed people to do--"Mad Bell's just after shankin'
back wid herself; she's below colloguin' wid Big Anne. It's a fine long
tramp she's took this time; so if she was in the humour she'd a right to
ha' plinty to be tellin' us."
"Well, now, I'm glad the crathur's home," said Mrs. Kilfoyle. "It's
lonesome in a manner to think of the little ould bein' rovin' about the
world like a wisp of hay gathered up on the win'; for all, tubbe sure,
it's her own fancy starts her off."
"I won'er where to she wint this time," said Mrs. M'Gurk.
"You might as well," said Ody, "be won'erin' where a one of thim
saygulls goes, when it gives a flourish of its ould flippers and away
wid itself head foremost--barrin', in coorse, that Mad Bell's bound to
keep on the dhry land at all ivents. But from Sallinbeg ways she come
this evenin', singin' 'Garry Owen' most powerful--I know that much."
"Ah, then she might be chance ha' been as far as Laraghmena, and ha'
seen a sight of me brother Mick and Theresa," Mrs. Kilfoyle said, with
wistful interest. For at Lisconnel we still look not a little to the
reports brought by stray travellers for news of absent friends, much as
we did before the days of penny posts and mail trains. And our
geographical lore is vague enough to impede us but slightly in our hopes
of obtaining information from any quarter. Only the probability seems to
be increased if the newcomer arrives from the direction in which our
friend departed.
"Sure she might so," said Ody. "But niver a tell she'll tell onless she
happens to take the notion in the quare ould head of her. It's just be
the road of humouring her now and agin, and piecin' her odd stories
together, you git e'er a discovery, so to spake, of the places she's
after bein' in."
The scenes of Mad Bell's wanderings did indeed reveal themselves to her
neighbours confusedly and dispersedly in her fitful and capricious
narrative, like glimpses of a landscape caught through a shifting mist.
As this sometimes distorts the objects that loom within it, so Mad
Bell's statements were occasionally misleading. Once, for example, she
threw the Quigley family into most distracted concern by her accounts of
the terrific "shootin' and murdherin' and massacreein'" she had seen in
progress down away at Glasgannon, where Joe Quigley had taken service
with a strong farmer; these disturbances being in reality nothing more
than a muster of the county militia.
"But I can tell you how she thravelled a good step of the way home," Ody
now continued, "for she tould me herself. The Tinkers gave her a lift in
their ould cart. Somewheres beyant Rosbride she met wid them; glory be
to goodness 'twasn't any nearer here they were, the ould thieves of sin.
Howane'er, _Mrs. M'Gurk_ belike 'ud be wishful to see thim comin' along.
Fine company they'd be for anybody begorrah. Troth, it's the quare ugly
boghoule she'd find the aquil of thim at the bottom of."
Mrs. M'Gurk, however, said protestingly, "Och, wirrasthrew, man, don't
be talkin' of the Tinkers. They'd a right to not be let set fut widin
tin mile of any dacint place. Thim or the likes of any such rogues."
And Mrs. Kilfoyle said, "I'd liefer than a great deal they kep' out of
it. Ne'er a one of the lot of them I ever beheld but had the eyes
rowlin' in his head wid villiny. And the childer, goodness help them, do
be worse than the grown people."
And Ody Rafferty's aunt said, "Bad cess to the whole of them."
For in Lisconnel nobody has a good word to say of the Tinkers.
The tribe and their many delinquencies have even supplied us with a bit
of the proverbial philosophy in which not a little of our local history
is epitomised. The saying, "As pat as thievin' to a tinker" is probably
quoted among us as frequently as any other, except, perhaps, one which
refers to Jerry Dunne's basket. This latter had its origin in a certain
event, not like the former in the long-accumulating observation of
habits and propensities, and to explain it therefore is to write a
chapter of our chronicles. Moreover, the event in question is otherwise
not unimportant from a sociological point of view, because it is very
likely to have been the first morning call ever made at Lisconnel.