down and the cold clearness left showed things plainly, yet was not
light. In front of the cabin-rows the small children of the place were
screeching over their final romp and quarrel, as they did every evening;
fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the
squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on
the brown-hollowed grass-bank between Colgan’s and O’Reilly’s, old
Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly scraping and twangling, according
to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even
the wisps of straw and scraps of paper blowing down the middle of the
wide roadway seemed to have whirled over and over and caught in the
rough patches of stone, just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to
the Joyces’, Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A
broad and burly man, who says “shoo-shoo” to a high-piping cluster of
tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from
straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather
an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have
seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick
experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come
out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter’s cheerful “Fine
evenin’.” What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be
fine or foul?
Altogether, it had been a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in taking
precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles which
had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling
than ever. For the intervening months had not brought the desirable
“thrifle more wit” to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the contrary,
was developing into one of those people whose good-for-nothingness is
taken as a matter of course even by themselves; and a bolt was thus, so
to speak, drawn across Mick’s locked door.
He set off betimes on his long ramble. It was a cloudless July
morning--the noon of summer by air and light as well as by the calendar.
Even the barest tracts of the bogland, which vary their aspect as
little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with
golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton,
and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot. Mick rather hurried over
this stage of his “stravade,” partly because he foresaw a blazing hot
day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are
sheltered hollows scooped in the “knockawns,” and cool patches under
their bushes and boulders. He entered the region of these things before
his shadow had shrunk to its briefest; for not so very far beyond
Kilmacrone the smooth floor of the big bog crumples itself into crests
and ridges, as if it had caught the trick from its bounding ocean; and
the nearer it comes to the shore the higher it heaves itself, until at
last it is cut short by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles
and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of
exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is
fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing
oceanwards, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain-fiords, straits, and
bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver
in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull’s dipping wing, or add to
the terror of the tempest, as they start out black and unmoved behind
rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land
and water, but wrought in less high relief. A tract of lonely strands,
where shells and daisies whiten the grass, and pink-belled creepers
trail entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are apt
thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam, when
you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on
sturdy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently
supposed the unstable furrows of the sea. And the intricate ground-plan
of the district must be long studied before you can always feel sure
whether the low-shelving swarded edges by which you are walking frame
salt or fresh water.
Mick was bound eventually for one of those ravines which cleave the
cliff’s precipitous wall and give access to the shore, generally by a
deep-sunken sandy boreen. Here, under a tall bank, there are a couple of
cabins, besides another which, having lost its roof, may be reckoned as
a half; so that Tullykillagin is not a large place, even as places go in
its neighbourhood. He knew, however, that he could count upon getting
something to eat at either of the two cabins first mentioned, and,
indeed, at the bare-raftered one also if, as often chanced, it was
occupied by Tim Fottrel, the gatheremup; and this prospect served for an
incentive, feeble enough, though it strengthened a little as the hours
wore on. So languid, in fact, was his resolution that at one moment he
thought he would just sthreel home again without going any further; if
he went aisy everybody would have cleared out of Kilmacrone before he
got back. But at this time he was sitting among some broom bushes, under
which last year’s withered black pods were strewn, and he determined
that if there were an odd number of seeds in the first one he opened he
would go on to Tullykillagin. There were nine in it, and he logically
continued to loiter seawards.
He dawdled so much that when he came to the cliff the sun already hung
low over the water, and as he walked along the edge, his shadow
stretched away far inland across the dappled pale and dark green of the
furze-fretted sward. The sea unrolled a ceaseless scroll of faint
wild-hyacinth colour, on which invisible breeze-wafts inscribed and
erased mysterious curves and strokes like hieroglyphics. Here and there
it showed deep purple stains; for a flight of little snowflake clouds
were fluttering in from the Atlantic, followed at leisure by
deep-folded, glistering drifts, now massed on the horizon-rim to muffle
the descending sun. Yet that tide, with all its smoothness, showed a
broad band of foam wherever it touched the pebbles, which lay dry before
its sliding--for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff’s
foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked
down on a small field of very green grass, set as an oasis between the
waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders
to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the
highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of
occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes,
and a clump of scarlet-tasselled fuchsia. To heighten the incongruity of
its aspect, this pasture was inhabited by a large strawberry cow, who
seemed to be enjoying the alternate mouthfuls of seaweed and woodbine,
which she munched off a thickly-wreathed boulder, untroubled by the fact
that the meal bade fair to be her last, since the rising spring tide had
already all but cut off access on either hand, and would still flow for
some hours.
“Musha, now I’ll be skivered,” said Mick, standing still, “if that’s not
Joe McEvoy’s ould cow. You’ll be apt to experience a dampin,’ ould
woman, if you don’t quit out of there. Whethen, it’s a quare man he is
to lave the baste sthrayin’ about permiscuous in the welther of the
tide.”
He peered over the edge of the cliff, evidently mistrusting its smooth
face; and then he threw several stones and clods at the cow, with shouts
of “Hi! out of that,” and “Shoo along!” but his missiles fell short of
their mark, and if his voice reached her, she treated it with the placid
disregard of which her kind are mistress on such occasions, and never
raised her crumple-horned head.
“Have it your own way, then,” said Mick cynically; “it’s nothin’ to me
if you’ve a mind to thry a taste of swimmin’ under wather.”
He had not, however, strolled much farther, when he met with somebody
who was vastly more concerned about the animal’s impending fate. This
was old Joe McEvoy himself, who, out of the mouth of a steep sandy
boreen, sprang up suddenly, like a Jack-in-the-box,--one of the
shock-wigged, saturnine-complexioned pattern. But no Jack-in-the-box
could have looked so flurriedly distracted, or have muttered to itself
such queer execrations as he did, hobbling along.
“A year’s loadin’ of bad luck to the whoule of thim!” he was saying with
gasps when Mick approached; “there’s not a one of thim but ’ud do
desthruction on herself sooner than lose a chanst to be annoyin’
anybody, if she could conthrive it no other way.”
“If it’s th’ ould cow you’re cursin’,” said Mick, “she’s down below
yonder.”
“Och, tell me somethin’ I dunno, you gomeral, not but what I’m nigh as
big a one meself as can be, to go thrust her wid that little imp of
mischief. Bad scran to it; I must give me stiff leg a rest, and she’ll
be up here blatherin’ after me before you can look round, you may bet
your brogues she will.”
“Gomeral yourself and save your penny,” said Mick, whose temper was not
at its best after his long day of hungry discontent. “And the divil a
call you have to be onaisy about the crathur follyin’ you anywheres.
Stayin’ where she is she’s apt to be, until she gets the chanst of goin’
out to say wid the turn of the tide, and that’s like enough to happen
her.”
“And who at all was talkin’ of the cow follyin’? It’s ould Biddy Duggan
down below that niver has her tongue off of me, nagglin’ at me for
lettin’ the poor crathur pick her bit along the beach, and it a strip of
the finest grass in the townland, when it’s above wather, just goin’ to
loss. A couple of pints differ extry it does be makin’ in the milkin’ of
a day she’s grazed there. But it’s threatenin’ dhrownin’ and
disthruction over it th’ ould banshee is this great while; and plased
she’ll be, rael plased and sot up. Sure that’s what goes agin me, to be
so far gratifyin’ her, and herself as mischevious, harm-hopin’ an ould
toad as iver I hated the sight of--Och bejabers, didn’t I tell you so?
It’s herself comin’ gabble-gobblin’ up.”
As he spoke, a very small meagre ragged old woman emerged swiftly from
the lane, accompanied by one younger and stouter and less nimble of
foot, her temporary neighbour, Mrs Gatheremup. Mrs Duggan seemed to bear
out Joe’s character of her; for now, like Spenser’s hag Occasion, “ever
as she went her tongue did walk,” and the path it took was not one of
peace. Maybe, after this happenin’, some she could name might have the
wit to believe what other people tould them, who knew better than to be
thinkin’ to feed a misfortnit crathur of an ould cow on sand and sayweed
as if she was a sayl or a saygull, and it a scandal to the place to
behould her foostherin’ along down there wid the waves’ edges slitherin’
up to her nose, and she sthrivin’ to graze, and the slippery stones fit
to break her neck. Such was the purport of Mrs Duggan’s remarks, which
were punctuated by Joe McEvoy’s peremptory requests that she would lave
gabbin’ and givin’ impidence, and his appeals to the others to inform
him whether they weren’t all to be pitied for havin’ to put up wid the
ould screech-owl’s foolish talk.
“Sure, that’s the way they do be keepin’ it up continial, Micky lad,”
Mrs Fottrel called to him, shrilly, as if athwart gusts of high wind.
“I’ll pass you me word the two of them ’ill stand at their doors of an
evenin’ an give bad langwidge to aich other across the breadth of the
road till they have us all fairly moidhered wid the bawls of them, and I
on’y wonder the thatch doesn’t take and slip down on their ould heads.”
“Belike it’s lave of the likes of _you_ I ought to be axin’ where I’m to
git grazin’ for me own cattle?” a growl of sarcastic thunder was just
then observing, to which flashed a scathing response: “And bedad, then,
it’s lave you had a right to be axin’ afore you sent off me poor son
Hughey’s bit of a Pat, to be wastin’ his time mindin’ your ould
scarecrow and gettin’ himself dhrownded in the tide. It’s no thanks to
you if the innicent child isn’t as like as not lyin’ this minute under
six fut of could wather, instead of fetchin’ me in the full of me kettle
that I’m roarin’ to him for this half-hour, and ne’er a livin’ sinner
widin sight or----”
“Saints above! is little Pat strayin’ along wid the cow?” said Mrs
Fottrel, much aghast. “I was noticin’ I didn’t see him anywheres this
evenin’. What’s to become of him down there, and it risin’ beyond the
heighth of iverythin’ as fast as it can flow? Sure this mornin’ ’twas
wallopin’ itself agin the wall, back of our place, fit to swally all
before it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the child was below?” said Mick. “I’d lep down
there and fetch him up aisy enough; on’y there was no mortial use goin’
after the cow, for ne’er a crathur that took its stand on four hoofs ’ud
git its own len’th up the cliff, unless it might be some little divil of
a goat. And the wather’s dhrowndin’-deep alongside it afore now.”
“Musha, good gracious, sure all I done was to bid the spalpeen be
keepin’ an eye on her now and agin while he would be playin’ about
there,” said Joe; “and it’s twinty chances if iver he did at all.
Trapesed off wid himself somewheres; he’ll be right enough be this time.
’Tisn’t the likes of him go to loss, it’s the quare five-poun’ note he’d
fetch at Athenry fair.”
“He might ha’ broke his legs climbin’ disp’rit on the rocks,” said Mrs
Fottrel, unconvinced by the argument from unsaleability, “and be lyin’
there now waitin’ for the say-waves to wash the life out of him. Heaven
pity the crathur!”
“Sure I’ll step down and see what’s gone wid him,” said Mick.
The descent of the cliff, though not riskless, was no great feat for an
active youth, and Mick accomplished it safely, but to little purpose, he
thought at first, since the irreclaimable cow appeared to be the sole
denizen of the shrinking beach. However, when he had shouted and
scrambled for some time without result, he came abruptly upon a nook
among the piled-up rocks, where a very small black-headed boy in
tattered petticoats was digging the sandy floor with a razor-shell.
“Och, it’s there you are,” said Mick, stepping down from a weedy ledge;
“and what have you in it at all that you didn’t hear me bawlin’ to you?”
“Throops,” said Pat gloatingly, almost too absorbed to glance off his
work; “it’s Bally-clavvy, the way it did be in the school readin’-book
at Duffclane. There’s the Roossian guns,”--he pointed to a row of
black-mouthed mussel-shells, mounted on periwinkle carriages--“and
here’s the sides of the valley I’m makin’; long and narrer it was. Just
step round and look at it from where I am, Micky, but don’t be clumpin’
your fut on the French cavalary.”
“The divil’s in it all,” said Mick, with a sudden bitter vehemence,
which he accounted for to himself by adding, as he pointed towards the
seething white line: “D’you see where that’s come to, you little
bosthoon? And you sittin’ grubbin’ away here as if you were
pitaty-diggin’ a dozen mile inland.”
Pat looked in the desired direction, but misapprehended the object to be
the western sky, where an overblown fiery rose seemed to have scattered
all its petals broadcast. “Sure that’s on’y the sun settin’ red like,”
he explained indifferently, and would have resumed his excavations if he
had not been seized and hustled half-way up the cliff before he could
disengage his mind from his brigades and batteries. Both heads soon
bobbed up over the edge without accident; for Pat climbed like a monkey
when once he had grasped the situation. His grandmother’s attitude
towards Joe McEvoy constrained her to receive him effusively as prey
snatched from the foaming jaws of death; but it was out of Mrs Fottrel’s
pocket that a peppermint drop came to sweetly seal his new lease of
life.
“And what are you after now, Mick?” she said, observing that, instead of
drawing himself up to level ground, he stood poised on an uncomfortable
perch, and looked back the steep way he had come.
“I’m thinkin’ to slip down agin,” he said, “and see if be any manner of
manes I could huroosha th’ ould baste round the rocks yonder. The wather
mightn’t be altogether too deep there yit; at all evints she’s between
the divil and the deep say where she is now; it’s just a chanst.”
“Sorra a much,” said Joe disconsolately, “scarce worth breakin’ your
bones after, any way.”
“Bones, how are you? Sure, there’s no call to be breakin’ bones in the
matter,” said Mick, beginning to descend. This was true enough, if he
had minded what he was about; but then he did not. So far from it, he
was saying to himself: “One ’ud ha’ thought now she might ha’ took a
sort of pride in it,” when the bottom of the world seemed to drop away
from under his feet, and his irrelevant meditations ended in a
shattering thud down on the rocky pavement a long way below. He never
heard the shouts and shrieks which the incident occasioned above his
head. Once only he became dimly conscious of a quivering network of
prismatic flashes, which he could not see through, and a booming throb
in his ears, which made him murmur dazedly: “Wirra, I thought I’d got
beyond hearin’ of them drums.” In another moment: “What’s took me?” he
said, with a start. But the depths he sank among remain always dark and
silent.
Next day messengers from Tullykillagin told Mrs Doherty that the Lord
had took her son Mick, and that “he had gone out to say wid the tide,
before they could get anybody to him, and there was no tellin’ where he
might be swep’ up, if ever he came to shore at all.”
“And the quarest part of it was that Joe McEvoy’s ould cow that he went
after had legged herself up, somehow, on the rocks out of reach, and
niver a harm on her when they found her in the mornin’. But she’d been
all of a could quiver ever since, and himself doubted if she’d rightly
git over it,--might the divil mend her, and she after bein’ the death of
a fine young man. Sure, every sowl up at Tullykillagin was rael annoyed
about it. Even ould Biddy Duggan, that was as cross-tempered as a
weasel, did be frettin’ for the lad; and Joe McEvoy was sittin’ crooched
like an ould wet hen, over his fire black out, that he hadn’t the heart
to be lightin’.”
Mrs Doherty said she didn’t know what talk they had of the Lord and the
say and the ould cow; but she’d known well enough the way it was when
Mick niver come home last night. He’d just took off after the souldiers,
as he’d a great notion one time.
She was, as may have been observed, rather a dull-witted woman, and
proportionately hard to convince against her will.
“A great notion intirely,” she said; “on’y I’d scarce have thought he’d
go do such a thing on me in arnest. And I runnin’ away indoors yisterday
out of the heighth of the divarsion, when the band-music was a thrate to
be hearin’, just to see his bit of supper wouldn’t be late on him. And
the grand little pitaty-cake I had for him; I may be throwin’ it to the
hins now, unless Molly might fancy a bit; for we’ll not be apt to set
eyes on him this three year. Och wirra! and he that contint at home, and
ne’er a word out of him about the souldierin’ this long while. If it had
been poor Thady itself, ’twould ha’ been diff’rint; but Mick--I’d scarce
ha’ thought it of him; for he’d a dale of good-nature, Mrs Geoghegan,
ma’am.”
“He had so, tub-be sure, woman dear,” said Mrs Geoghegan, “or he might
be sittin’ warm in here this minnit.”
“The back of me hand to thim blamed ould throopers,” said Mrs Doherty,
“that sets the lads wild wid their thrampin’ around.”
“Poor Mick would be better wid them than where he is now--God have mercy
on his soul,” said a neighbour solemnly.
But Mick’s mother continued to bewail herself: “And I missin’ the best
of all the tunes they played, so Molly was tellin’ me, for ’fraid he’d
be kep’ waitin’ for his supper, and he comin’ home to me hungry; and
now---- There’s a terrible len’th of time in three year. I wouldn’t ha’
believed he’d ha’ done it on me.”
AFTER SEVEN YEARS
Looking southward from the strand at Clonalty, you can see Wade’s house
still making an opaque white gleam at the sharp-pointed end of the sandy
spit, which, a wedge of silver and green on sunny days, thrusts itself
out from the opposite shore into the shallow-rippling estuary. Viewed
from such a distance, its aspect is just that of the other whitewashed
cabins, which are dotted about on the Clonalty side; but at closer
quarters, signs of its many years’ desertion peer out of its small blank
windows, and perch on its too-ruffled thatch, and rustle in its deep
border of weeds. These latter are not so luxuriant a growth as they
would be in most places, because the soil of the little peninsula is so
nearly pure sand that vegetation has a hard struggle on it for a stunted
existence. Old Billy Wade used to have the work of the world over his
potato-patch, which, however, in most years did much credit to his
admixture of “careful dirt.” All about it the sand spreads
unadulterated, heaving and sinking in hillocks and hollows, where little
grows except dry grey-green bent grasses, which look as if they had been
withered in some earlier state of life, and, close to the water’s edge,
tufts of faint-coloured sea-pinks, whose very scent is faded. In wild
weather the flying sand tinkled against the panes like fine-ground hail,
and made sloping drifts in the sills of window and door. From the
landward side the cottage is approached (very seldom) by a rude track
sunken between high banks, which come slipping down in spreading slides
if anybody scrambles up them, in hopes of finding firmer ground a-top,
so that he gets there with many additional grains in his gritty shoes. A
few perches from the door this track dips down to the shore at a place
which is a miniature bay at full tide. At other times it is a quicksand,
and since, long ago, one Larry Keogh’s stray horse blundered into it and
was swallowed up, it became locally known as Larry’s horse-pond.
Nowadays the shadow of a more tragical event broods over it, but it
keeps the old name.
Inhabitants of Clonalty have been heard to express their belief that the
tide comes in there only once a week or so; and undoubtedly its visits
to this extreme end of the long sea-arm are of but brief duration,
scarcely more protracted than an orthodox morning call. During the
greater part of the four and twenty hours a brown flat lies between
shore and shore, looking as if nothing could be simpler than to tramp
across it. Moderately prudent people, however, do not attempt the
passage, for it is full of “quick” and “soft” places, death-traps which
have from time to time taken a victim, who has left nothing behind him
except his name to commemorate the disaster. Murphy’s and Dowling’s and
Cassidy’s respective “holes” are a salutary warning to unwary walkers.
The Wades, therefore, and their few visitors had to go a long step round
on the way to and from Clonalty, and as the mainland at their back was
for several miles mostly sand-hills, where the residents were chiefly
rabbits, the cottage was a lonesome place to live in, and as
inconvenient, Mrs Wade used to complain on market-days, “as the desert
of the wilderness, with every hap’orth you wanted to be carried from the
world’s end.” In fact, the residence offered scanty attractions to
anybody save old Billy Wade, whose heart was usually in his
lobsterpots, or at the end of his fishing-lines, and who, paddling off
complacently, whenever the tide served, in his broad-bottomed black boat
to see after them, spent at least half his time afloat. Often he took
his only child Hannah along with him, a proceeding to which his wife
objected more and more as the girl grew old enough to be serviceable and
companionable indoors. But her objections were always over-ruled by
Hannah, who had no taste for domestic affairs, and who was so thoroughly
spoilt that she knew she need only dance desperately on the water’s edge
to make her father pull back for her, no matter how nearly he had got
out of sight. This had happened on occasions when he had tried to slip
away unbeknownst, thinking the weather doubtful. Her mother said she was
as stubborn as a young buffalo-bull--an animal of whose dispositions she
can have had no personal experience--when she took a notion into her
head; but Hannah was not a whit abashed by the comparison, nor moved to
relinquish her voyages, and Mrs Wade’s discontent with her dwelling had
many a long solitary day in which to strike deeper roots.