A GOOD TURN
Along the road to Sallinbeg little seemed to be abroad besides foul
weather, but there was a great deal of that. The gusts that came
flapping wide-winged over the bog met the wayfarer with a furious hurtle
and grapple, as if for want of better sport they had concentrated all
their forces upon his sole repulse; and the drops they dashed into his
blinded eyes and against his benumbed hands were as icy as they could be
without ceasing to be wet. Their combined assaults were calculated
feelingly to persuade a man of his uninfluential position in the scheme
of things--his voice in this matter was so tyrannically howled down--or,
if of less philosophic mind, to bring home to him the special
disadvantages of going half-starved and clad in threadbare tatters. This
was the plight of Thady Quinlan as, leaving Lisconnel, soon lapt out of
sight behind him amid the grey web of the rain-mists, he tramped
haltingly away, with Mrs. Kilfoyle's cloak bundled under his arm, and
the dread of pursuit on his mind, and in his heart a great remorse, the
object of which you are perhaps guessing wrongly. But he had also a hope
and a purpose, and is therefore not wholly to be pitied, although the
one did wane until the other looked impossible, as mile after mile
unrolled its drenched and dreary length without bringing him apparently
nearer to his goal.
All the while, however, he was slowly gaining upon a traveller, who had
taken the same road a few hours earlier, hopelessly and aimlessly, and
even more inadequately equipped than he. It was his sister Judy Quinlan,
from whom he had parted on the worst of terms about three o'clock that
morning. The fact is that the Tinkers' raid upon Jerry Dunne's premises,
although carried out with unusual success, had led, not at all
unusually, to complications when it was time to divide the spoil. Over
Mrs. Dunne's second-best shawl it was that the difficulty arose. Mrs.
Dunne, despite her husband's thrifty turn, owned many shawls, few of
them inferior enough to be worn at all frequently, and she had pinned on
this one three times only during the half-dozen years of her
proprietresship. So it was certainly bitter bad luck that she should by
chance have worn it to Confession on Friday, and got it soaked coming
home, and hung it up in the passage by the back door to dry slowly,
"instead of to be all cockled into gathers wid the heat of the fire
blazin' on it, you stookawn," as she explained with exasperation to
Ellen Roe, her servant-girl, who had officiously suggested the kitchen
hearth. For this precaution proved tragically self-defeating, and put
its object into the very hands of Thady Quinlan and Joe Smith, when,
under cover of the wild, wet night, they forced the feeble lock, and
made a clean sweep of all portable property that lay within easy reach.
The shawl formed the most valuable prize. It was very admirable, indeed,
being of a dappled fawn colour, with an arabesque border of shaded
chocolate and amber; but in the eyes of its new owners its greatest
charm was its weight and thickness. Judy Quinlan declared, pinching a
fold fondly between a finger and thumb, that just the feel of it done
your heart good. Her own shawl was really only a ragged cotton
table-cover, and had, as she often remarked, "no more warmth in it than
an ould dish-clout." I should observe, to make the situation clear, that
the Tinkers' confraternity at this time consisted of Thady Quinlan and
his sister Judy, and their married sister Maggie Smith, with her
husband, and his brother, and his father, and three or four children.
Hence it is obvious that in any dispute which might arise between Judy
and Maggie, the latter was likely to have numbers preponderantly upon
her side. And this was what now actually took place, the place being the
driest end of the un-roofed cabin in Dunne's boreen, where the Tinkers
had for some time past made their camp.
The screed of thatch still adhering to the wall sheltered their fire of
purloined sods, and it burned steadily and strongly between the blasts
which made its red flame duck and sweel, and sent the white ash-flakes
fluttering. So there was light enough to show how covetous gleams from
the sisters' eyes flashed together on the shawl, of which each held a
corner. And no great wisdom was needed to forecast a storm. Mrs. Smith's
shawl was undeniably better than Judy's by many degrees but she had not
the magnanimity to consider this, even so far as to propose that Judy
should at any rate enjoy the reversion of her own. On the contrary, she
had rapidly planned its division between her two little ragged girls.
Judy, for her part, had set her heart desperately upon the acquisition,
and she deemed it her best policy to say in a tone studiously
matter-of-course:
"Faix, now, it's glad enough I'll be to get shut of this ould wad that's
on me. Every breath of win' goes thro' it as ready as if it was a
crevice in a wall, fit to freeze you into mortar."
A very vain device, for her sister promptly rejoined with a sarcastic
laugh and a tightened grip: "Musha moyah, how bad you are entirely.
Don't you wish you may?" which intimated plainly that the shawl was not
to be had uncontested.
At this crisis Judy had fully expected to be backed up by Thady; but he
naturally taking a more dispassionate view of the matter, recognised
with reluctance the futility of pitting himself singly against three
opponents, two of them better men than he, who was "no great things at
all, let alone havin' one knee quare." Therefore he turned his back upon
the controversy, and feigned unconsciousness of it, instead of bouncing
up and saying with appropriate action, "And I'd like to know who at
all's got a better right to it than herself has?"
His defection aggrieved her so bitterly, that the fiercest of her wrath
turned upon him; and after a wrangle wherein all the parties concerned
had made liberal use of those "aculeate and proper" words against which
the wary Bacon warns his quarrelling readers, she flounced away into the
darkness of the small hours of the stormy December morning, loudly
avowing her determination never to see a sight of the ugly, dirty,
mane-spirited poltroon, or open her lips to him as long as she had an
eye or a tongue in her head. Jeering laughter followed her exit on a
skirl of sleet-fledged wind.
She seethed over her anger for many a long mile, to such fierceness was
its flame fed by disappointment and more potent jealousy. For had not
Thady, the only person she cared much about in all the world, turned
against her and sided with Maggie, "who was always a greedy grabbin'
little toad ever since she stood the height of a creepy stool?" It was
an hour or so before daybreak when she sat down to rest under an immense
bulging boulder that loomed dimly on her beside the road a little way
beyond Lisconnel. Then she began to look backwards and forwards. Far
back to the time when her father kept a little shop in Bantry, before he
was stone broke one bad year and took to carrying the remnant of his
stock-in-trade about in a basket as a higgler, which eventually led
other members of his family to wander, less reputably, for their
livelihoods. She remembered that even in those days Thady was always her
ally, and had lamed himself for life by a fall on the road when running
to rescue her from the Hutchinsons' wicked mastiff, who had knocked her
down near their gate, and was standing over her with a growl and a grin
of which she still sometimes dreamed. And again she remembered how once
she had been laid up for a long while with the fever, and had crept out
of the Union infirmary to find that her relations, supposing her dead,
had all "tuk off wid thimselves to the States," and was keening like one
demented over her desertion outside McNeight's public, when what should
come familiarly round the corner but Thady himself, who had stopped
behind, foregoing his assisted passage, because the divil a fut of him
would stir out of it so long as there might be e'er a chance at all of
Judy coming back. Whereupon it recurred vividly to her mind how she had
just called him, among other things, "a great dirty, good-for-nothin'
hulk of a poltroon," and had expressed a hope that she might never again
see sign nor sight of any such a hijjis baste hobblin' anywheres on her
road; to which he had rejoined that she might go to blazes and welcome
for anythin' _he_ had to say agin it, and that bedad a crosser-tempered
ould weasel of a wizened-up ould witch wouldn't be apt to land there in
a hurry. At last, being very tired, she escaped for a while from these
fluctuations of wrath and ruth into a nook of sleep, but the bitter cold
routed her out of it soon after sunrise, and she took the road again,
cramped and numbed, in the teeth of the gusty showers that were still
stalking over the bogland.
As she went, the hills beyond Sallinbeg rose up frowning before her
through rifts in the cold white fleece trailed and knotted about their
front of harsh purple gloom, on which the streaks and patches of ravines
and fences and fields, with here and there a cabin gleaming, began by
degrees to be traced dimly as if a fragment of the countryside were
reflected on a dark thunder-cloud. But she was now thinking more about
her journey's end than about anything she saw on the way thither--the
bleak many-windowed workhouse at Moynalone that she well knew must be
presently her fate. Since she had thrown herself on her own resources,
three ha'pence was all she could command for ransom from the durance
into which self-preservation assuredly would not forbear to betray her.
Experience gave a dreary definiteness to anticipation. Once again she
would morning by morning awaken in the grim whitewashed ward to all the
old hardness and roughness of existence with a tyrannous restraint and
monotony superadded. She said to herself, it is true, that she might as
well be in one place as another, since she would not have Thady to go
along with anymore--the black-hearted, thievin' miscreant--and if she
had as much wit in her as an ould water-rat, she'd just creep away into
some dry ditch, and be done with the whole of it. Still, as she did come
short of that wisdom, the alternative continued to lie across her path,
a murky shadow, which she could by no means evade nor disperse.
The invisible sun was low when Judy came to a place where the road
forks, sending one branch to creep across the level bogland towards
Sallinbeg, and one to climb up among the first tilted slopes of the
mountains. Here the Rosbride river comes jostling its way down a rocky
ravine spanned at the mouth by a bridge, past which the swift, brown
stream darts along in a more spacious and smoother channel, bound for
Rosbride Bay. Judy stood for a while and looked down over the parapet at
the swirls of creamy foam that swept under the arch. Then she took out
of her pocket a battered-looking heel of a loaf, and began to munch it.
But before she had half finished it, she tossed the crust away into the
river, being too heartsick to go on eating once the rage of hunger was
subdued. She wished sincerely that she dared fling herself after it, but
she was far too much cowed by cold and weariness to muster the courage
for such a resolve. Perhaps there was not under Irish skies that
December day, a more miserable woman than Judy Quinlan as she stood all
alone in the world on Rosbride bridge, while a black mountain rampart
lifted itself slowly against the shrouded west, and the dusk thickened
on the long, shelterless road, whence eager blasts whistled a summons to
her, nearer and nearer, till they fluttered her rags, and keened about
her ears, and chilled her to the bone.
Suddenly something heavy and soft seemed to grasp her by the shoulders,
and thence fall around her in long, wide folds, covering her from head
to foot, much as if a small tent had been blown down on her. Of course
she screamed shrilly, and almost in the same breath she saw that Thady
was at her elbow. He had for some little time been stalking her warily,
with the great coat expanded ready to throw over her, and having done
so, was now holding it on with a rough hug. The joy with which he had at
last caught sight of the forlorn, bedraggled figure had overflowed
irrepressibly into this joke, and its successful accomplishment put the
finishing touch to his happiness. As for Judy, if the sun had leaped up
again in a fiery flurry, till the hills and the plain and the river were
all flooded with flushed light, gleaming and glowing, it would have but
dimly symbolised the transfiguration of her world. In the twinkling of
an eye her stark despair was changed into rapturous relief, a miracle
which just at first made the marvellous cloak seem almost a matter of
course. Any good thing might naturally be expected to befall her since
Thady was not estranged and lost to her after all. "Whethen now, and is
it yourself come streelin' along?" she said. "You tuk your time, bedad.
I'm here this half-hour."
"Sure, I stopped till I would get a thrifle of things together," said
Thady. "And what d'you call that for an ould flitterjig?"
"It's not too bad," said Judy, stroking down the cape with caressing
fingers. "A grand weight there's in it, to be sure. But where at all did
you come by it? You're not after gettin' it off of thim thievin'
rapscallions of Smiths, anyway?"
"Thim or the likes of thim--sure not at all," said Thady, loftily.
"'Twas in a house away down below there at Lisconnel. A young woman bid
me step in to ait a pitaty, and, tellin' you the truth, I'd no fancy to
be delayin', for I'd a mistrust in me mind that the pólis was follyin'.
The notion I had was to ax her had she seen you goin' by, on'y I wasn't
wishful to be lettin' on I was anythin' to you, in case they come along.
So I thought she might be chance pass the remark herself. But out she
ran, and the first thing I noticed was this consarn lyin' convanient to
me hand in the windy. And wid that I whipped it up and made off. For
anythin' I could tell, I might ha' met me fine gintleman full tilt at
the door; and begorrah, it's as heavy to carry as a pair of fat geese.
Howane'er, I knew it's distressed you were entirely for the want of such
a thing, and bejabers, you've got it now."
"Troth have I," said Judy, delightedly groping her way about her new
garment. "Rael dacint it was of you to be bringin' it to me, for
perished and lost I did be, and that's no lie. Och but it's the grand
one. Look at the hood there is to it. Sure it's as good as a little
house of your own. You might be out under buckets of wet in it, and
ne'er a tint you'd git whatever."
"Ay, or, for that matter, takin' a rowl through the river there, and
sorra the harm it 'ud do you wid that on," said Thady, with pride. "But
we'd better be quittin' out o' this," he added, with a shrug and a
shiver, "for the win's tarrible, and there's a shower comin' up on us
yonder as thick as thatch. I was thinkin' you'd maybe had thrampin'
enough for this day. 'Twill be as dark prisintly as the inside of a cow,
and we'd see daylight agin before we come to Moynalone. So we might put
the night over under th'ould bridge. There's a good dry strip along the
one side of it, and the way the rain's dhrivin' we'd git a grand
shelter."
Judy readily agreed, and they descended the little stony footpath which
led down to the river. Beneath the arch, where Thady's booted steps
reverberated hollowly, they found, as he had said, a broadish strip of
dry ground, for the bridge had allowed the stream ample measure in its
stride. The little platform was bordered by a scattering of stones and
boulders, amongst which the shallow water gurgled. It seemed to Thady
and Judy that their quarters would be very tolerable; but they soon made
a discovery which promised luxury indeed. This was a dead branch, which
lay at one end of the arch, having evidently been floated down the
current, and perhaps hauled out of the water by some thrifty body, who,
however, had made no further use of it. Long ago that must have been,
for it was dried and bleached till it glimmered through the dusk like an
intricate white skeleton. Better fuel no one could desire. Thady made
for it at once with knife and matchbox, and in a few minutes crackling
flames were crunching up the twigs and gnawing at a log. The red light
washed flickering over the wet walls, and was caught on the glancing of
the water as it fled by, rapid and dark. Blue smoke trailed up lazily
against the frame of the arch, blurring gleams of tossed foam as it
melted out into the mist.
But a fire naturally suggested food, and Judy said ruefully, after
feeling in her empty pocket: "It's starved wid the hunger you'll be,
Thady, and the sorra a taste of anythin' have I in the world. 'Deed now,
if I'd on'y known the way it 'ud be, and I passin' thim houses below in
the boreen a while ago! I seen where there was a big cake of
griddle-bread coolin' itself, laned agin the windy-ledge, and man nor
mortal near it. I might ha' raiched it down as aisy as puttin' me fut to
the ground. But sure I was that knocked about wid one thing and another,
I thought I wouldn't be bothered wid it, so I just left it where it was,
I did so--may God forgive me," she said, with unfeigned contrition.
Thady, however, did not seem to share in her regrets. He was lifting his
cluster of cans off his shoulders, and extracting from one of them a
bundle tied up in a red handkerchief. "Is it starved you'd have us?" he
said as he untied the first corner. "Starved! How are you?" And he
continued to repeat: "Is it starvin' she said?" while he was undoing the
several knots. When they were all unfastened, the handkerchief was seen
to hold a number of eggs and a fair supply of broken bread. Thady might
well scout the possibility of famishing. "That's somethin' like," he
said, as he saw Judy surveying his stores, "and I've a shillin'
somewheres besides."
"Glory be!" said Judy, looking as if she could scarcely realise a world
with which they were so much beforehand.
"And we'll be givin' them a boil in a one of the little saucepans," said
Thady. "Raw eggs do be ugly could brashes, and we've plinty of wather
handy--lashins and lavins of dhrink runnin' on tap there, so to spake."
Supper was accordingly prepared on these simple lines with much success.
They boiled many eggs and ate them, using their scraps of bread for
plates--an expedient not unknown at far earlier banquets--and they
scooped up water to drink out of the palms of their hands--also in an
old-fashioned manner. But when they had finished Thady gave a
comparatively modern touch to the entertainment by lighting his pipe. He
occupied the nearest place to the fire, in consideration for the
scarecrow-like raggedness of his garments, which now began to weigh upon
Judy's mind amid the comfort of her magnificent wrap.
"Froze stiff you'll be in thim ould tatters, man alive," she said
despondently. "Sure, you might as well be slingin' yourself round wid
the ould wisps of spiders' webs up over your head for any substance
there is in thim. I won'er, now, could I conthrive to reive the top-cape
off of this. 'Twould be as good that way as a cloak apiece for the two
of us."
Thady, however, said decidedly: "Blathers, not _at all_. Is it
destroyin' it you'd be after? I'm plinty warm enough." And he rolled the
big red handkerchief which had held the eggs into many folds about his
neck, tucking it down under his coat-collar all round. "There was a
surprisin' hate in it," he said.
By this time the dusk far and near had gloomed into darkness--the black
beetle had scared away the grey moth. As Thady and Judy sat with their
backs to the curving wall, they caught only fitful glimpses of the
opposite one when any long-fronded flickers of the fire-light waved
across and touched it. More often they fell short, and made quivering
circles shine where they struck the broken water in the mid-stream.
Without, beyond either arch, nothing was distinguishable except glimmers
of white foam shaken and tossing. On the left, looking up the river, it
seemed as if many spectral hands, borne nearer and nearer, came waving
and beckoning out of the night, to pass by and away down the river,
still beckoning and waving, carried further and further, on into the
night again. Every now and then a waft of the wind sighed in on them
along with the river, puffing about the flame and smoke, and blowing
ice-cold in their faces. When it had passed Thady always inquired: "Is
it warm at all, Jude?" and she always answered, drawing "its" folds
together with ostentatious satisfaction: "Och scaldin'."
But between whiles there was little conversation to interrupt the
monologue of the river, which seemed to find itself many voices under
the bridge. The one unceasing rustle of the main stream was frayed along
its margin into a myriad finer noises of murmuring and plashing, as the
massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate
traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water
whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and
against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils
rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it
chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades.
At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of
another, and flap-flapped, bobbing up and down as the ripple rose and
fell. Sitting idle in the firelight, warmed and fed to unwonted
contentment, Judy watched it half drowsily for a while. Presently she
said:
"That's the very way the lid of our ould kettle would be goin' at home
when it was on the boil, and me poor mother 'ud bid us keep an eye on
it--like enough to keep us out of divilmint. Och, but that was a cosy
little room of a could night. D'you mind it, Thady?"
"Ay, sure," said Thady, "but it's one while ago."
"It is that. A matter of thirty year and more, anyway, since we owned
the little shop. Sure now I remimber the day they shut it up, and put us
out of it, as plain as if it was on'y this mornin'. Grand we that was
childer thought it, because of somebody givin' us the ind of an ould jar
of sweets out of the windy to pacify us. Bedad the fightin' we had over
it was fit to ha' raised the town. But I grabbed meself a biggish lump
of peppermint twist, and would be slinkin' behind me mother to finish
it, and she talkin' at the door to ould Mrs. McClenaghan, and I heard
her sayin' her heart was broke. So I got wond'rin' to myself if the
raison was maybe that we'd ate it all on her. Och, but it's the quare
foolishness people does be remimberin'!"
"Belike the raison of that is because it's as plinty as anythin' else
wid thim," said Thady, cynically, "or maybe a trifle plintier."
"Sure we was on'y brats thim times," said Judy, apologetically. "For
anythin' we could tell we might as well be streelin' about under the
width of the sky like a string of wild duck, as stoppin' at home wid a
roof over our misfort'nit heads. Ould Mrs. McClenaghan next door had a
cloak the same pattern as this," Judy continued, selecting her memories
with better judgment. "But 'twas all tatters at the bottom, not worth a
bawbee to mine."
And Thady said with interest: "Had she now?"
"And as for me ould shawl," Judy went on, "it's been a scandal and a
caution this last three or four year; droppin' in bits it is, and small
blame to it. I wish I'd a penny for every mile I've tramped in it. Do
you remimber the joke me mother had about it's bein' a conthráry thing
that people thravellin' 'ud always begin a mile at the wrong ind? She'd
be talkin' that way to hearten up me father; but as often as not he'd
on'y let a roar at her to whisht, he was that discouraged. 'Twas a great
wish he had, poor man, to git her back settled in a little place of her
own before he was took. But 'twas in the big barracks of a Union at
Monaghan----"
"Well, it's all one to the two of thim now anyway," said Thady, finding
that Judy's reminiscences of their family history did not tend to
enliven his meditations over his pipe.
"Ah sure, everythin' will be all one to the whole of us, plase God, one
of these days," said Judy, who in her present mood could not easily have
realised the keen contentions and scorching jealousies of the night
before; "and when we get done with the thrampin', 'twill make little
enough differ whether it's one mile we wint or twinty hunderd. On'y I'd
liefer than a good dale thim two had had better luck wid it all. Cruel
put about they were many a time, and wantin' the bit to keep the life in
thim, and it just fretted out of thim in the ind I'm thinkin'. The
thought of it comes agin a body when one's sittin' warm and snug," Judy
said, gazing remorsefully round her shadowy, gusty lodging, and then
into the flames, lighting up a bare earth-patch, and down at the dark
folds that fell about her as she crouched on it. She seemed sunk into a
reverie. But after a while she looked up and said without apparent
relevance: "Heaven be her bed this night, the cratur. Thady, you
heathen, we'd a right to be sayin' the Rosary before we git too stupid
altogether. The eyes of you are droppin' into your head wid sleep this
minnit."
"And me just after lightin' me pipe," remonstrated Thady.
"Ah thin, hurry up and finish it," said Judy, betraying by this
injunction an invincible ignorance touching a man's sentiments towards
his last screw of tobacco, "or else I'll be off sound. It's the fine
warmth makes me sleepy. Sure wid this on me sorra a breath of could gits
next or nigh me to be keepin' me awake."
"Och thin, wait till it's out," said Thady.
"I will so," said Judy. "Sling another stick on the fire, lad, the way
you won't be perished sittin' there in thim woful ould rags. I've plinty
of prayers I might be sayin' till you're ready."
But in a little while, Thady, lingering over his pipe, became aware,
somewhat to his relief, that she had gone fast asleep, muffled up to the
chin in her cloak, with her head leaning back against the stone wall. He
sat and looked at her for some moments with an expression partly
complacent and partly compunctious. "Bedad now the crathur was bein'
perished alive before I brought that to her," he said to himself. "Very
apt she was to be gettin' her death. 'Twas great luck I had entirely to
pick it up. It's the hard life the likes of her has whatever thrampin'
around. Ay, glory be to God, 'twas the best good turn iver I done her."
Just at the time when Thady the Tinker was making these reflections
while the firelight flickered and the waters fleeted under Rosbride
bridge, some mile or so higher up the stream, where the long mountain
slopes are folded closer and steeper about it, a great turmoil had
arisen in a deep hollow among walls of the bare rock. Down one face of
these, a huge glistering slab, the river had for certain thousands of
years been taking a foamy leap; but to-night it happened that the rains,
beating for many days on the mountains, had eaten away the clay setting
which cemented a ponderous lump of rock into a niche immediately over
the fall, and the mass had now crashed down into the channel on the very
verge, blocking all the waterway. This, however, was a door hard to keep
shut, when every affluent rill and runnel out on the broad mountain
shoulders went darting swift and white, so that every minute swelled the
forces gathering pent in the barred passage. As the bridled torrent
seethed and climbed, hissing, behind that barrier, the great stone
tottered and swayed, and before the first foam-crest could overpeer it,
yielded to the weight of waters leaned against it, and rocks and flood,
thunderously roaring, rushed down together.
The sound of it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and
Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was
getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they
were, instead of to be setting off tramping on such a dirty wild night.
God knew where they might have got to.
The flood that broke away, with wave tumbled over wave, out of the
whirling pool, had not far to race down its stony stairs before it
reached a place with a turbulent floor, where the white mouths of other
two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either
hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in
heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and
drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold,
as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its
surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature that writhed. Its
mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where
circles of thin froth swam round on it slowly, it was as black and white
as a bit of the bog in a snowstorm or under a drift of summer daisies.
At the turn of the ravine's last winding above the bridge, it plucked
away as it passed a small company of fir-trees, that long had dropped
their cones and needles into the river from a coign of vantage on a
jutting crag, and a minute after, anybody who had looked up from beneath
the arch would have seen the glimmering points of foam extinguished like
lights, further and nearer, lost amid the shadowy onsweeping of
something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing
unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading
fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos,
which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell.
But as it happened nobody was keeping a watch there.
What wakened Thady was the clang of his cluster of tinware, which the
wave dashed against the wall behind him. But before he knew this, it had
gathered him up and swung him across with it over to the other side of
the arch. There he caught hold of a twisted ivy-tod and a bough of
mountain-ash, whence he dropped on the bank, and crawled up it out of
reach, commenting in forcible language upon the occurrence, by which he
was still astoundedly bewildered.
Judy, who was aroused in like manner, had her chance too. For a branch
of the same tree crooked a friendly arm towards her as she was borne
past, and she would have grasped it only that the weight of her heavy
cloth cloak dragged her down. So that instead of returning to dry land
for many a long day's tramp, she went out to sea in company with sundry
wrenched-off boughs, and mats of heather, and bundles of withered
bracken, and other such waifs and strays, none of which were ever again
heard tidings of any more than they were inquired after in the lonely
places they had left. Only for some stormy days the wrecked and sodden
banks of the Rosbride river were haunted by a forlorn-looking object of
a lame tramp, who sought vainly what his despair hoped to find. As he
roamed about in it, he had just one spell of consolation, which he was
often muttering over to himself. It was something he called, "The best
turn, anyway, I iver done the crathur in her life. Little enough, God
knows, little enough, but the best good turn."