everybody thought that his widow would surely quit the sandy peninsula,
and seek some less isolated home. But everybody was mistaken, for, on
the contrary, Mrs Wade stayed on at the cottage, and in six months
married Mr Miles Roche, whom she had met at Crutwell the lawyer’s
office, where she had gone on business. This marriage was probably the
first step of any importance that she had ever ventured on spontaneously
in all her life; as the match with Billy Wade, thirty years her senior,
had been made up for her quite independently, and ever since she had
taken her orders dutifully from husband and child. Unfortunately, it
could not be called a prudent measure. Miles Roche was a middle-aged
man, whose journey through the world had all been downhill. He had
started in life as a sort of squireen, his family being just on the
borderland of quality, not over well reputed, and with steadily
dwindling resources. Towards maintaining himself in even this position
young Miles had never done anything more to the purpose than drink
rather too much whisky, and lose what money he could at horse-races, and
other events chronicled in the sporting intelligence. These pursuits he
carried on industriously enough, though on a small scale, during a long
series of years, and the process of deterioration, physical, moral, and
social, which they involved was leisurely and gradual. But at last bad
times and other adverse circumstances began to co-operate with them, and
his decline then became more rapid, so that by the time when Mrs Wade,
in her new black clothes, passed him lounging on Crutwell’s steps, he
had, as his neighbours expressed it, “lost himself entirely.” By this
they meant that he had sunk out of the class in which birth had placed
him. Time was when he had walked with something of a swagger over his
own fields, among his own not very thriving flocks and herds, and had
ridden, on rather sorry nags, to the meets of the Harveystown Hunt,
where he could, without undue presumption, join the party at the
breakfast, spread for all acquaintances by old Colonel Meade of Meade
Court. Nowadays, though he still kept his swagger, except when his gait
was controlled by influences more potent than self-conceit, not a rood
of land remained in his possession, not a four-footed beast owned him
for master, not a hat was touched to him in the country-side, and Peter
Molloy, of the general shop, dropped the “mister” as often as not when
asking him gruffly if he was thinking of settling that account. In fact,
Miles Roche had degenerated into a needy loafer, who felt in no way
above his company of a Saturday night at Donnelly’s bar, whither
resident labourers brought their dole of wages, and passing tramps their
more variable gains. And his pride had so far fallen with his fortunes,
that he did not disdain the expedient of mending them by a marriage with
old Billy Wade’s widow, who was reported to have been richly left in a
small way. The old man had, so rumour ran, both inherited and amassed
savings of indefinite amount--some said “pounds,” and some said
“hundreds.” Everybody said, “There was never a one of the Wades yet but
was as close and naygurly as could be consaived.” “Sure, the money stuck
to them,” Peter Molloy averred, “like the flies on a dhrop of treckle.”
These considerations were undoubtedly the mainspring of Miles’ design,
though Mrs Wade’s faded sea-pink-like prettiness may have helped to
bring about his eventual perseverance in it. For her part she felt that
she had drawn a prize. Miles was big and burly, and by any friendly
observer might still have been described as a fine figure of a man,
especially when he had on the respectable hat and coat, which he had
borrowed, and the new scarf, which he had bought on credit, to do his
“coortin’” in. His manners, too, could be, upon occasion, softly
insinuating, and had not wholly lost the stamp of his better days.
Perhaps this is nearly all that could be said in his favour; but it
sufficed to make Mrs Wade a proud woman the first time she walked
through Clonalty with Miles Roche as her accepted suitor, and this
albeit she was well aware how many of the neighbours were of the same
opinion which old Mrs Cleary, who, having attained to “a won’erful great
age entirely,” could say anything she liked, expressed with much candour
in lieu of congratulations. It ran as follows: “Ay, woman dear, but it’s
the quare gaby you’re about makin’ of yourself, takin’ up wid that big
slouchin’ son of ould Charley Roche, that was good for little enough
himself. Sure, he’ll be dhrinkin’ you out of house and home as fast as
the say flows, and sorra a bit ’ill you pacify him wid it all--not if
you had the full of it to be givin’ him.”
Nevertheless, willing as she was to be wooed, the negotiations all but
fell through when, upon more exact enquiry, Miles ascertained that the
widow’s fortune had been grossly exaggerated, as she really possessed an
income of dimensions which prescribe the plainest of plain living, and
only a life interest in the little bit of property that produced it. The
discovery, as I have said, nearly terminated the courtship, and quite
put an end to all its pleasantness. For the mixture of motives which
determined Miles to fulfil his promise was only just strong enough to
effect this, without leaving any margin for a good grace. His
disappointment, indeed, sometimes expressed itself with such brutal
frankness that Mrs Wade now and then wished, before the wedding day
arrived, for strength of mind to pluck up a spirit, and send him about
his business. But Mrs Roche reiterated the wish much more fervently when
it was too late; and in course of time the sentiment became as habitual
as her husband’s alternations of uproarious frenzy and ferocious gloom.
For Miles’s unsteadiness increased from year to year, until she grew to
regard the remote situation of their cottage as an advantage, because it
withdrew them beyond the neighbours’ close observation of their
miserable life. It could not, however, remain a secret, and at length
wore into so open a one that she could bewail herself with little
reserve to sympathising matrons on market-days.
Now it is tolerably certain that none of these things would have come to
pass if Hannah Wade had been living with her mother. Her will, though
only fifteen years old, would effectually have asserted itself against
that of her elders, and Miles Roche’s suit would have been short and
unsuccessful. But Hannah had moped and fretted so after her father’s
death, that she had been sent to stay for a change with his sister away
at Lettercrum. There she received the news of the match with an intense
wrath, which her mother trembled at, even in remote imagination. For a
few days following, she was haunted with apprehensions of her daughter’s
immediate return to upbraid and prohibit; but it presently appeared that
the girl’s indignation had taken the shape of a resolve to stay away
permanently; and during more than five years she never set foot next or
nigh Clonalty. At the end of that time, her step-father’s habits took a
turn for the worse, leading him to behave in a manner which the Clonalty
folk described as “beyond the beyonds altogether;” while her mother,
who, according to the same authorities, was “to be pitied wid the
drunken baste, the crathur,” fell ill, and wrote miserably, begging
Hannah to come home.
Whereupon, one thundery summer evening, Hannah Wade arrived with the
mail-bags and two or three packages, on Patsy Flood’s car. She had grown
into a tall, stalwart lass of twenty or so, with black hair and black
eyebrows ruled very straight over her dark grey eyes, which looked clear
and resolute. Neighbours who saw her pass along the street, remarked
among themselves that “yon looked to be a fine, clever, sturdy girl, and
Miles Roche was maybe apt to find he’d met wid somebody who’d make him
behave himself a thrifle more dacint; he was aisy enough frightened, for
all his crackin’ and braggin’, whenever he’d raison to know he wouldn’t
be put up wid.” And they added that it would be “a rael charity if he
was purvinted of bargin’ and bullyraggin’ the misfort’nit little ould
wisp of a woman, who’d been the great fool to have anythin’ to say to
the likes of him.”
However, as it turned out, Hannah had very little opportunity for
testing her powers of coercion, as the day but one after her return,
Miles Roche suddenly disappeared, and Clonalty saw him no more. Where he
had taken himself off to nobody wasted much time in conjecturing. The
neighbours were unanimously of the opinion that he was apt to be after
no good, and that the best thing could have happened his wife and
step-daughter was to be rid of him. Sometimes they congratulated Hannah
jocularly upon the promptitude which she had shown in “puttin’ him out
of it,” but the pleasantry was not apparently to her taste. This was
when Mrs Roche and her daughter had quitted their old home, and settled
in Dunphy’s Row at Clonalty, which they did only a week after the event.
Mrs Roche was down-hearted and complaining, a state probably due to her
bad health, rather than to regret at her desertion, since it was obvious
that she would be far better off as a widow bewitched, if she were
allowed to remain so. Mrs Tuohy and Mrs Maguire, now her next-door
neighbours, used to drop in occasionally and tell her re-assuringly of
their conviction that she would never be troubled with setting eyes on
him again: “For as like as anythin’ he’d run off to the States, and at
all events, he wouldn’t be very long drinkin’ himself out of this world,
the way he was goin’ on when he quit.” But Mrs Roche did not respond
with much cordiality to their well-meant consolations. In fact, both she
and her daughter showed a disposition to keep themselves to themselves,
which is a very sure way of laying one’s conduct and character open to
hostile criticism.
During her stay with her aunt, Hannah had forsaken her out-of-door life,
and learned to sit for long hours over embroidery and other needlework.
But now she resumed her earlier more active habits, and saw little
daylight indoors. Her boating, however, had come to an end, and she
never cared to go near the shore, where her father’s old _Mary Anne_
might still be seen afloat, owned now by Micky Devlin, to whom Miles
Roche had sold her at a price which did not keep him in whisky for the
inside of a week. Hannah’s occupation lay inland among the
hedge-screened fields and lanes, where the sea betrays its neighbourhood
only by sending flocks of snowy gulls to gleam through the black cloud
of crows that hover in the wake of the sliding ploughshare. At first she
weeded and picked stones, and did other such field work in a flapping
sunbonnet, but after a while the Cochranes up at Donamoate Farm
employed her about their dairy: and it was there that she made the
acquaintance of their nephew Francis Conroy.
Yet nearly seven years had gone by since her return to Clonalty, when
her great day dawned upon her. That is to say, Francis Conroy proposed
and was accepted. Some of the neighbours, indeed, maintained the opinion
that it was no fault of hers he’d been so long over his courting. It
wasn’t, they said, for want of getting every encouragement. Ay, bedad,
she’d done some of it for him; trouble enough she’d took, and maybe
she’d got no such great things after all. Commentaries of this kind,
however, were only to be expected under the circumstances, and they
neither had nor merited any weight with the community at large. On the
same principle these critics averred that it was downright ridiculous of
a young chap like Francey Conroy to be thinking of a girl like Hannah
Wade, who was growing old as fast as a dog could trot. They wondered he
didn’t ask old Batt Hearn’s sister Judy while he was about it. The
innuendo contained in this sarcasm had only a very slender foundation in
facts, for the disparity of age between the sweethearts did not exceed a
couple of years, and Hannah’s dark comeliness was of a sort that wore
well and had lost nothing with the passing of her first youth. As for
the young man himself, he was a straight-featured, curly-haired lad, of
a rather slight make than otherwise, both physically and mentally, whose
worst enemies, just then the people who would have liked to call him
son-in-law, found nothing seriously bad that they could call him instead
with any plausibility. He worked with his uncle Arthur Cochrane, who,
being childless, would, it was confidently expected, do something for
him--stock a little farm, maybe. Altogether, no dispassionate onlookers
could deny that Hannah was in luck, and they generally said so with the
addition that she was “a dacint hard-workin’ girl, and apt enough to
make the lad a good wife.”
It was on a warm long-lighted summer evening that Francis spoke out:
just when they were bundling up the last row of lap-cocks in the shady
corner of Little Fortyfurzes. At first she felt as if she must be
dreaming; and then as if she had never had anything but dreams until
that very moment. Glad she was to waken from some of them. When she went
home a while later through the hushed meadows, her heart was as full of
rest and calm as the soft air was full of the scent of dewy hay. A more
rapturous and jubilant mood might have been expected in her by anybody
acquainted with her somewhat strenuous and stirring ways. Hannah did not
take life easily. Only that morning a fellow-worker had said to her
remonstrantly: “It’s yourself’s the quare onaisy crathur, Hannah Wade.
If you’re not doin’ one thing, you’re doin’ another. I declare to
goodness, one might think the Old Fellow himself was drivin’ you; but if
I was you I’d give him the go by now and agin anyway.” Thus a spell of
quietude may have been her most needed and enjoyable refreshment. But as
the days went by, her spirits did begin to rise above the level of
serenity. She felt not simply at peace with all the world, but also
entrenched in a position where she need fear no challenge nor assault
from any quarter, not even from Fortune, whom she had long accounted her
foe. Therefore she only laughed good-humouredly, and said, sure people
would be talking when some officious clashbag repeated to her the sundry
strictures upon her engagement. And she accepted the congratulations of
her acquaintances with cordiality, as if they pleased her and she had
no wish to shun them. She actually asked Mrs Coleman to step in and see
her mother on the way back from Mass, a thing she had never been known
to do before in all the years they had lived in Dunphy’s Row. “You might
ha’ thought,” somebody once had said, affronted, “that every fut in at
their ould door was a penny out of their pockets, they were that
delicate about lettin’ a person inside it.” To which somebody else
naturally had rejoined: “That there was no such great things to be seen
when you got there, as Thady Bourke said when the train he was
travellin’ on stopped in the middle of the dark tunnel.”
Mrs Roche, too, in her little old woman’s degree, was cheered and
pleased by the event. She had long been an ailing, complaining person,
whose grey days had often taken a bleak east-windy atmosphere from a
certain austere constraint in Hannah’s demeanour towards her. But now
happiness substituted for this an unwonted softness and geniality, and
Francis Conroy, dropping in of an evening, was found by his
mother-in-law elect to be “very friendly and agreeable.” So that she
took heart of grace, and ventured upon several small sayings and doings
from which she had been refraining for fear of a rebuff. For instance,
she re-arranged all the crockery on the dresser, and she remarked that
if Hannah had had any sense, she’d ha’ reared a brood of turkey-poults;
there was nothing so profitable of a dry saison, and they might ha’ got
a grand run in Saunder’s bit of stubble. To which Hannah responded
hopefully: “Ah, sure, you may ha’ turkeys and all manner yit.” Then the
Cochranes, whose liking of the match was an important and somewhat
doubtful point, proved to be well affected, and did talk of giving a
hand with stocking a little farm. Altogether, the hot haymaking
fortnight which followed was made up of halcyon days for both daughter
and mother, with many hopes hatching unmolested. But at the end of that
time a shadow and a ripple came by, nothing of much consequence indeed,
yet it broke up the season of calm weather.
One evening Francis Conroy, who had been working for the day away at
Portallen, found himself towards sunset on the shore, where a
high-brimmed tide quivering its clearness under the green cliff-shadow
tempted him and three or four comrades to take a dip. It was one half of
the mishap that he left his much-prized watch in the pocket of his
vest, and the completion of it that Bob Flynn, when they were dressing,
picked up the garment, unaware of its valuable freight, and tossed it
across a deep pool to the rock-ledge whereon Francis stood aghast. For
during the transit there was a silvery flash, fleeting as the jump of a
trout, a dismayed howl from Francis, and the watch had vanished
irretrievably, sunk among oozy rock-crannies in many fathoms of water.
The loss was a serious one in those times when a watch cost a couple of
months’ wages; and Francis bemoaned himself over it next morning to
Hannah and all his friends coming and going to Mass. He seemed much
depressed all the afternoon, and when she asked him if he was going to
play hurley, he replied mournfully: “’Deed no, and me wid me poor
grandfather’s good watch sittin’ there at the bottom of the say, beyond
raich of man or mortal, unless them little ugly crabs skytin’ over it.”
Hannah was disposed to think it a harsh and inscrutable decree of Fate
that Francey Conroy should lack anything he desired, and she would
blithely have despoiled a whole constellation to provide him with what
he wanted. But this measure being out of her power, she began to frame
a resolve, one which, a few weeks before, would have seemed dreadfully
impossible to her, and which even now needed all her newly-acquired
sense of security and belief in good luck to make it look practicable.
Monday morning was as warm and bright as ever, and when the Egans’
cochin china cock roused Mrs Roche at an early hour, she woke up to it
with no presentiment of trouble. The hot weather always made her feeble
and lazy, a state which she herself described as not being worth
tuppence, and she thought she would lie where she was, in the recess
beside the hearth, until she had had her cup of tay, to the arrival of
which she looked forward with drowsy patience as a pleasant conclusion
to a series of many naps. But it came to her along with a terrible
announcement, which set the cup and saucer clattering in her hand more
violently than a moderate shock of earthquake would have done. “I was
thinkin’,” Hannah said, carelessly, as she stood by the little square
window, and twitched a yellow leaf or so off the geranium plants which
filled it, “I might maybe take a run over to the ould place there this
mornin’, and fetch back me father’s watch out of it.”
There was a dead silence for a few moments, and then Mrs Roche said in a
slow, dull way, as if she were still half-stunned: “Ah no--to be sure
you wouldn’t ever go for to do such a thing.”
“And what for wouldn’t I then?” said Hannah, “it’s the greatest pity to
have a grand watch lyin’ there all these years stuck in an ould crevice,
like a dead beetle--supposin’ it isn’t stole out of the place before now
wid some tramp passin’ by.”
“And so it is, long ago, you may depind--stole away it would be,” said
Mrs Roche, with a clutch at the idea. “Sorra a bit of it you’d git wid
goin’. Och be aisy, for God’s sake, and let it alone.”
“It’s aisy talkin’ that way,” said Hannah, “but all the while it’s maybe
lyin’ there just to me hand, you may say; and--other people at a loss
for it.... And I’m thinkin’ it’s a quare way to be servin’ a thing me
poor father was after givin’ me in a prisint.”
“Oh ay, and it’s fine talk _you_ have about your poor father and
prisints,” said Mrs Roche, bitterly, “and I knowin’ as well as if I was
inside of you this minute, that you’re on’y wantin’ to get it to give to
Francey Conroy. Och, but there’s plenty of fools in this world.”
“And meself was one of them, then,” said Hannah, “that I didn’t take
care to bring me watch over meself, instead of trustin’ it to you. But
sure who’d ever ha’ thought you could conthrive to forget it--and it the
raison of the whole thing happenin’--unless you left it behind on
purpose maybe.”
“I wish it was lyin’ at the bottom of the say,” said Mrs Roche, “and
meself along wid it, the way I wouldn’t be hearin’ you talkin’ of
destroyin’ us this black day.”
“Whist, whisht, mother, and don’t be sayin’ such things,” said Hannah.
“’Deed now, ne’er a word would I ha’ tould you about the matter, on’y I
amn’t clear in me mind which side of the fireplace you had it kep’ in,
so I thought I’d ax you first. But a fut I won’t go after it, if you
think that bad of it--there now. I’ll let it stop where it is, goin’ to
loss, and gettin’ stolen, if that ’ill satisfy you. I dunno what notion
you have about bein’ destroyed. Howane’er, I’ll let it alone.”
But Mrs Roche said: “Goin’ you’ll be for sure and for sartin, goodness
may pity the two of us. What notion have I? Och, I couldn’t be tellin’
you--I dunno. But goin’ you’ll be and destroyin’ us, that I know right
well.”
This, and the like, she continued to reiterate, and Hannah found
counter-protestations on her part as ineffectual as they would have been
against some low-moaning wind that had come keening about the house. At
last, in hopes that deeds might prove more convincing than words, she
took out a long neglected strip of white embroidery, and sat down to
stitch at her over-casting. She had given up her dairy-work in favour of
her wedding-clothes, and was meditating an expedition to the shops of
Glasmena; however, she said to herself that she had better stay at home
this morning and keep her mother pacified. “I won’t torment her, if
she’s that set against it,” she thought, with an impatient regret at the
weakness which had been, no doubt, the cause of her mother’s whim, and
was a reason for humouring it. Yet she was not perhaps without a sense
of relief and escape in deciding thus.
But when they had finished their early dinner, to which Mrs Roche got up
disconsolate, Hannah grew so thoroughly tired of her long morning
indoors, that she felt as if she must run out for a bit into the strong
sunshine that was making veined green transparencies of the geranium
leaves in the window, and dulling the embers on the hearth into a wreath
of pink and white blossom. She had really for the time being forgotten
all about the watch; but when her mother saw her get up and put her grey
shawl over her head, she groaned despairingly and said: “She’s
goin’--Holy Virgin, she’s goin’, for all I could do or say--cruel
headstrong, she always was, goodness forgive her, and now the Lord knows
what she’ll bring on us wid it.” This reminded Hannah again of the plan
which she had given up, and at the same time proved that her
renunciation had failed in its object; and she flung angrily out of the
house without replying. Just at the door she heard her mother calling
her, but she ran down the street and did not look back.
The little old woman, left comfortless, sat a while crouched in the
shadowiest corner of the dimly-lit room, beyond the reach of the longest
sunbeam. One might have fancied that she was hiding from some dreadful
thing; but whatever it was had got at too close quarters with her to be
thus eluded. Then, as the glowing afternoon wore on, she grew drowsy
and chilly, and thought she would cheer herself with a cup of tea, only
the big black kettle seemed so heavy that it was not worth the trouble
of lifting, and she lay down instead under her scarlet-diamonded
patchwork quilt, where sleep presently accepted her invitation, and with
it dreams that came unbidden.