with dignity, for Mrs Knox’s remarks had been threaded on a creaking
laugh. Among farming people, even a small lay blunder supplies matter
for infinite jest. “I daresay it _is_ better to burn it up,” he said.
They were just then passing a gap in the hedge, on the other side of
which lay a newly-weeded turnip-field, and close by, a withered heap was
crackling and sending up a blue-writhing column, through which the
flames could hardly make a wraith-like glimmer against the strong
sunshine. The white flakes of the ashes came fluttering across and
sprinkled him, as two blissful small boys stirred up the fire with
sticks. Mac would have liked to stand and look on, but Mrs Knox said:
“Ah, come along out of the blindin’ smoke, Master Mac dear, or we won’t
have time to get Gracie to wet us a cup of tay.”
When they reached the farm, Mrs Knox was glad to sit down and wait for
that refreshment in the cooler parlour, while Mac preferred to
accompany Nellie Reilly, the ploughman’s daughter, on her mission
styeward with the pig’s bucket. He did not, however, consider himself
under her surveillance, and she being intent upon collecting eggs, and
gossiping over the yard-wall with some friends returned from the
hay-fields, made no attempt to exercise any. So he presently strayed
down to the far end of the farm-yard, where he made a most important
discovery. Sitting on the top of the broken door-post belonging to a
ruined shed, he found a little green and yellow match-box. It had a
portrait of Parnell on one side, and a political cartoon on the other,
and it contained a single slender pink-headed match. Mac had so often
been warned against meddling with matches, that to strike one seemed an
exquisite pleasure. But just now his mind was occupied with more serious
matters than mere present enjoyment. Close by was the open door of the
haggard, and it immediately occurred to him that this gave him a grand
opportunity for securing the splendid sum which his imperfect knowledge
of the insurance system led him to look upon as the meed of the
incendiary. Here was quite as much hay as up at the Castle, and here
were the means of setting it all in a magnificent blaze; and with five
hundred pounds warily stowed away, safe from a Mrs Mac of predatory
habits, he felt that the fear of the old beggar-man’s fate need no
longer trouble him. “For,” he reasoned, “if a person had even as much as
one pound, one wouldn’t go about after people saying: ‘Och, your
Honour’s glory, give a poor man a copper, and the blessin’ of God be wid
you.’” And thereupon, with his precious box in hand, he proceeded to the
haggard.
Some loose bundles of hay scattered near where one of the largest ricks
stood on its low platform of stones and logs, seemed to him a suitable
starting-point for the conflagration. The striking of the match took
place successfully, and the delightful fizz and splutter and sulphureous
odour left nothing to be desired. But to the eye the result was
decidedly disappointing. Even under the shadow of the big rick, the air
was so full of light that the little artificial flame could make only a
faint bluish quivering in it, hardly visible, and Mac at first thought
with dismay, “It’s gone and went out.” When it touched the hay, however,
matters improved. Small golden stars began to kindle, and run twinkling
along the fibres, and now and then a tiny red tongue flickered
perceptibly through a puff of white smoke like a tuft of thistle-down.
John Loughlin, sauntering in the paddock not many hundred yards distant,
might well have been smitten with a foreboding of ill, but he continued
to gaze complacently upon his treasury, recking naught of the destroyer,
who at that moment was squatting in the midst of it, clad in a brown
holland suit and a broad-brimmed straw hat several sizes too large.
And after all, Mac’s triumph was but brief. For a while the fiery golden
stars increased and multiplied, and hurried hither and thither like a
raid of luminous ants. But soon they began to dwindle and diminish,
vanishing with a blink as bubbles do, until at length their bright array
had been reduced to a solitary spark, the progress of which he watched
with the deepest concern. It ducked and dived in and out of sight among
the soft grey-green tangle, alarming him by prolonged disappearances,
and then gleaming forth again, after he had almost given it up for lost.
But finally it sped and hid itself in the heart of a more intricate
wisp, and thence he was never to see it re-emerge, though he watched
for it long and earnestly, as a cat watches the hole’s mouth in at which
an expeditious mouse has slid. At last he had sorrowfully to abandon the
hope that it would ever come gliding and glimmering back. His grand
design had failed, and for the moment he perhaps regretted the glorious
blaze that had been frustrated more than the accession of wealth which
should have therefrom accrued. As he trotted back into the yard he
resolved to say nothing about the matches. Mac’s experience of life had
not been very great, yet it sufficed to teach him that success justifies
the means, and throws a handsome cloak over sins which would have worn a
far less reputable habit if things had turned out otherwise. If he had
burned John Loughlin’s ricks down to the ground, he would have proudly
owned the deed, and would have expected to receive not only his five
hundred pounds, but also many praises unqualified by any moral
reflections upon the impropriety of meddling with matches. Whence it
appears that, although his premises were not altogether founded upon
fact, he reasoned from them correctly enough. As it was, he could only
rejoin Nellie rather crestfallen, and soon afterwards he set out for
home. His little cousins had returned before him; Ethel out of humour
at her relapse into private life and an old frock, and Frances
preoccupied with her own affairs, so the evening closed dully.
Yet all the while, had he but been aware, the fire-seed he had sown was
thriving to his heart’s desire. At first, indeed, a dampness in the lock
of hay had most gravely menaced it with extinction, but it survived this
peril and kept its hold on existence with gradually strengthening grip,
until about sunset a waft of breeze came ruffling lightly over the
littered floor of the haggard, and at a critical moment fanned the spark
into a delicate flame. As the dusk fell this grew from the dimness of a
wild violet’s petal to the vividness of a scarlet poppy--of a great
glowing cactus-cup--and then flared into a many-leaved brilliance such
as never yet endowed any blossom sprung from the black earth.
John Loughlin had slept only a short while when he awoke to the
consciousness of a fierce red light streaming into his little bedroom,
and fluttering against its white wall like the reflection of a flaming
wing. His window looked over the yard to the haggard, but he hardly
needed the sight to assure him, he knew so well what must have happened.
The nightmare of many a sleep had come true. Those awful pinions were
indeed flapping and soaring around his ricks, with pale smoke rolling
and rushing between, against the massed shadow of the trees and the
smooth-vaulted dark of the moonless sky. From the first moment when the
glare met his dazed eyes he felt that his fate was sealed, and the knot
of onlookers who gathered about the doomed stacks were unanimously of
the opinion that “wid the hould the fire had took on them, and the quare
dryness of everythin’, you’d as much chance of puttin’ them out as of
puttin’ out the stars in the sky.” There was some running about with
bucketfuls from the failing pump, and some futile splashing of water,
but everybody recognised the bootlessness of the attempt, and soon
desisted from it.
The spacious night all around him was very dark and still as John
Loughlin stood watching his ricks burn away. A belated corncrake far off
across the fields creaked faintly, as if the wheels of time needed
oiling, and a star looked down a long way, here and there; else the fire
alone made sound and light. It roared and crackled as it leaped and
soared, scaling the carefully heaped-up hay mounds; sometimes it dragged
down from their sides, as if with a giant hand, great masses that came
slipping and flaring to the ground, and sometimes it plucked off flaming
plumes and bore them up into the air. Some of these were caught on the
overhanging boughs of the elms, where they hung like strange fruit,
which shrivelled and blackened the fresh green leaves. The scattered
litter of hay and straw underfoot burst every now and then into a blaze,
so that the whole haggard seemed to be paved with a fiery sheet,
presently smothered beneath a heavy rug of woolly smoke beaten back by
some caprice of the breeze. All spectators had to keep on the dark side
of the low surrounding wall; not even a dog ventured in, though rats
could be heard flopping desperately off the rick-stands, and rustling as
they fled. But shrill yelps at a prudent distance showed that the
fugitives were not escaping unmolested, and green, blinking eyes peered
out of ambushes whence many a productive pounce was made.
So hungrily swift was this fire, and found fare so much to its mind in
the drought-parched stacks, that it had well-nigh made an end of
consuming them before the prompt midsummer dawn came back, cold and grey
as a lingering remnant of the sunset. It showed sundry shapeless black
heaps, which lay with white smoke straining up through them, and shook
into spangles of crumbling gold if they were stirred. John Loughlin’s
ricks, in short, had resolved themselves into materials over which he
could no longer exercise any owner’s rights, and he was a ruined man.
Not a penny of them was insured. He had obstinately refused to take this
precaution, not because he grudged the expense, but from a superstitious
prejudice against acting on the hypothesis of so intolerable a calamity.
If his death had seemed as odious to him, he would never have made the
will which was locked up in a drawer with his lease, and a few things
that had belonged to his wife. But now that the dreadful event was an
actually accomplished fact, he seemed to contemplate it with rather
surprising equanimity. He made no comment when Tim Mahony, close beside
him, said to Andy Farrell: “Bejabers, it’s plenty of room we’ll have
there, and we drawin’ in to-morra,” and Andy replied: “To-morra? Faix
then we’d be the fine fools to go about that job to-morra, or next day,
and the place as thick wid red sparks lyin’ as a hayloft wid
seeds--wouldn’t we, sir?” Only as he turned back through the cold
dimness to his house--a meagre little white-washed box, originally a
barn, and hardly so big as his most sizeable rick had been--a cock hard
by uttered a drowsy crow, whereupon he looked round at the men who were
following him and said: “Some of yous wring th’ ould screech-owl’s
neck.” And they muttered among themselves: “Och, the poor man--to be
sure he would be greatly knocked about.”
It seemed, indeed, as if his granddaughter Grace were more crushed by
the misfortune than he. After they had finished their dreary breakfast,
she retreated into a dark corner of the kitchen, where she sat such a
picture of despondency, that the old man, watching her, began vaguely to
wish he could offer her any consolation. He recalled her long visit
yesterday from Ned Lawlor, and it suggested to him how probably she was
fretting over the lost prospect of that alliance. This notion somehow
touched his pride, and set a spring of energy stirring through the dull
lethargy in his mind. To himself he said: “Sure I might be conthrivin’
as good a match for her one of these days yet;” and to Grace he observed
encouragingly: “Well, it’s a grand warm mornin’ anyway.” Grace only
murmured something dolorously; and in a while he got up and went out of
doors. As he did so the first object he noticed was Daddy Yellowman set
on a window-ledge in the sun. Daddy Yellowman was a very large
canary-coloured delft jug, which had lived for a long time on the
Loughlin’s dresser, and had become quite an institution at hay making,
when carried afield with the froth of porter at its lips. John Loughlin
now took it up, and filled it, for conveyance to Long Leg, where he knew
there were people working. By the act he seemed to turn and face the
possibility of going on.
Not long afterwards, Grace, who for her part had recognised the
necessity of putting on the potatoes for dinner, was startled as she
made up the languishing summer fire by the entrance of Nellie Reilly,
wearing an expression of very contagious alarm. She had run at full
speed through two or three fields, and was much out of breath as she
clutched Grace’s arm and said, between frequent pants: “I’m just after
meetin’ himself--the poor master--up in Killenbeg Corner--widin a
stone’s throw of the pond. It’s there he was goin’ as sure as
anythin’--och saints--and about dhrowndin’ himself he might be as like
as not, that’s what I’m thinkin’--for the lads was sayin’ he’s clane
ruinated entirely--and indeed he was lookin’ as black and as bitter as
sut, and I passin’ him by, the poor man, he was so. But mercy on us all,
there’s ten fut of wather standin’ in the deep pool up under th’ ould
thorn-bushes--and the botthom all a mask of thick mud--if a body got in
there you’d never see sight nor light of him agin.”
The two girls stared dumbly at one another for a few moments, with a
sort of horror reflecting itself to and fro between their faces, and
growing on its way. Then Grace rushed out of the house, retaining the
fire-shovel unawares, and Nellie followed at her heels. They raced on
over the pale-green of the lately shorn meadows, catching their feet in
scattered wisps of hay, and stooping their heads against the dazzle of
the sunbeams. And as, cresting the slope in Killenbeg Corner, they came
close upon the pond, the first thing they beheld was Daddy Yellowman
shining very brightly set beside the edge. At sight of it Nellie gave a
scream. “The Lord be good to us all,” she said, “carryin’ it he was;
he’s after throwin’ himself in.” But Grace flung herself down on the
bank under the hedge, with her apron over her face and her fingers in
her ears, and rocked herself as if she would lull her remaining senses
to sleep. Whereupon Nellie broke into a wailful lament. She had an
unsuspected listener, whose emergence from behind a curve of the hedge
struck her overawedly mute; and Grace heard a voice enquiring: “What’s
the matter with her?” It was no less than Lord Ballyduff, who had come
across the fields upon the report of the disaster befallen his old
acquaintance and tenant John Loughlin. Grace recognised the voice, but
through too stormy a cloud of trouble to leave her any constraining
respect for persons, not even for Quality in the shape of a lordship and
a landlord. So she continued to rock and bemoan herself. “What’ll I do
at all at all? Och me heart’s broke. Sure it’s meself’s the wickedest
crathur this day in the width of Ireland that’s as good as took and
burnt up me poor grandfather’s haggard on him, forby dhrownin’ of him in
the black pool. But sure if I’d ha’ thought he’d go for to do that, I
wouldn’t ever ha’ let the big rick get on fire, ’deed and I wouldn’t,
not if there was forty Ned Lawlors botherin’ one in it. Dhrownded dead
he is be this time, and it all along of me burnin’ his ricks, that
dhruv him distracted.”
But the voice that replied: “Musha good gracious, what talk have you,
girl alive, about burnin’ and dhrowndin’?” made her uncover her face, to
confront a refutation of her despair. For her grandfather, safe and
sound, stood beside Lord Ballyduff, with whom, indeed, he had merely
been conversing just round the corner. He was eyeing Grace with some
disapproval. It seemed to him all of a piece--a small piece of
course--with his other misfortune that his granddaughter should be
discovered by his lordship sitting keening under a hedge, bare-headed,
holding an irrelevant sooty shovel in her lap, and accusing herself
vehemently of disastrous crime. “What ails you, then, to be sittin’
there makin’ a show of yourself wid our ould shovel?” he said to her in
a mortified undertone, “Faix, one might ha’ thought you’d had enough of
fires at home to contint you.” An appeal to regard for appearances was,
however, thrown away upon Grace, whom more tragical thoughts were
engrossing wholly. “Glory be to goodness if you’re not dhrownded,” she
said, “but sure it’s no thanks to me, after lettin’ the whole place
burn to black cinders. For there it was, when I run down to the haggard
late last night after the supper, to see had e’er a one of the hins been
layin’ in it--somethin’ I noticed shinin’ alongside the big rick, and
sure enough, the bit of ground was creepin’ all over wid sparks and wee
flames of fire, like as if somebody’d dropped a lightin’ match among the
hay. And first of all I was goin’ to let a yell for the lads to come and
put it out; but then I thought to meself ’twas a good chance to be
gettin’ shut of him, if I just let it alone. So I slunk in wid me, and
never a word I said about it.”
“And what the mischief at all made you go do that?” said her
grandfather, feeling himself threatened with the disclosure of fresh
afflictions.
“It was--it was Ned Lawlor,” said Grace, beginning to stammer a little
over her explanation. “You see I knew his father and you had talk of him
and me. And in course it was on’y the bit of money they was after, you
would be givin’ wid me--and every penny of that in the ricks--and I
can’t abide the thoughts of Ned Lawlor--I hate the name of him.”
“Then the divil’s in it that you couldn’t ha’ said so,” her grandfather
said bitterly. “Sure if you’d tould me, never a word more talk would
there ha’ been about the matter. Sorra the match ’ill I make up for a
girl agin her will, not if the other folk was offerin’ to stock the
counthry-side for her--troth no wouldn’t I. There was me poor sister
Maggie, her they gave to an ould feller up at Annalone, whether she
would or no, and if they did, it’s follyin’ at her buryin’ we were widin
a twelvemonth of the weddin’. Sez I to meself that same day, it was
neither art nor part I’d have in any such a thing in the len’th of me
life, and I hadn’t, nor I wouldn’t. Your mother plased herself. But
bedad now a lass is more conthráry to ha’ doins or dalins wid than a
dumb baste of the field, for sooner than spake a sensible word to you,
she’ll take and set house and home flarin’ in a blaze about your ears.”
Her grandfather’s censure of her silence might not have been
unanswerable, but Grace’s mood was too remorseful to seek for justifying
arguments, and she resumed her lamentations under her apron, saying,
“Sure, I tould you I was the wickedest crathur ever walked. Deed, I
wish I was after dhrowndin’ meself in th’ ould pond there, and a better
job it would ha’ been.” This could not be permitted, and the old man
said soothingly, “Ah, whisht, then, whisht; that’s no sort of talkin’.
And sure now, maybe there’s no such great harm done after all. Maybe
it’s foolin’ meself I was, in a manner, thryin’ to fill up me mind wid
the thought of th’ ould stacks. I’d do righter to be breakin’ up the
meadows, and gettin’ in the crops--If I could conthrive it,” he added,
brought up short by the recollection that his ways and means had largely
become dust and ashes.
“Here’s your sister, Loughlin,” said Lord Ballyduff, somewhat relieved
by the diversion, as Mrs Knox appeared at the neighbouring gate. “And,
by Jove, I believe there’s that young scamp.” For a small figure
scudding along by the hedge developed itself into unmistakably Mac.
Mrs Knox arrived first. The business which had brought her hurrying
through the noontide heat was so important that she did not hesitate to
enter upon it even in the presence of his lordship. “Well, to be sure,
John,” she said to her brother, “you’re the unlucky man. Howsome’er,
it’s unluckier you’d be this minute if everybody else was as headstrong
as yourself--Gracie, child, have you a mind to be ravin’ wid a
sunstroke, that you’ve run out wid ne’er a shadow of a shawl over your
head? But as for your hay, John, that’s clane destroyed and gone to loss
if there was nobody, only you, mindin’ it, that wouldn’t put it under
the insurance for man or mortal, it’s right enough all the while, be
raison of me payin’ it into the Alliance office for you this last five
year as regular as the clock. All the papers I have belongin’ to it up
at the Castle. Four hundred pounds they’ll pay you on it, and if that
doesn’t cover it all, ’twill make a good offer at it any way.”
“Troth and it’s youself’s the quare one,” said John Loughlin.
“I always said that Mrs Knox was one of the most sensible women I knew,
Loughlin,” said Lord Ballyduff, “I believe the best thing I could do
would be to appoint her my man of business. But you should come up to
the Castle at once and look at these papers. Mac, you run up against one
like a spent cannon-ball.”
“Never mind,” said Mac forbearingly, “I suppose you weren’t looking.”
“As far as I can judge, your lordship,” said Mrs Knox, highly
gratified, “all we have to do is, send word of the fire to the Insurance
Company, and they’re bound to pay us the money, though whether to me
brother or meself I can’t precisely say. To him, I should suppose, but
anyhow, it’s all the one thing, for ’twas on his account I done it.”
“It’s a great lie,” said Mac. “Look here, grand-governor, she’s telling
a _most awful_ untruth.” Although manners had indeed kept him from
breaking in upon Mrs Knox’s speech, excitement and impatience now made
the tone of his interruption all the more unconventional. “She didn’t
burn them a bit, don’t believe a word she says,” he asseverated. “It was
me lit them with a match, and I thought it had went out on me, but it
mustn’t have, after all. So it’s _me_ that they’re to pay the four
hundred pounds to, and not to anybody else. Why couldn’t you stop and
wait for a person? I’ve been running after you all the way to tell you
that you’ll have to write for the money to those people, because I don’t
exactually know where they live. But mind you say it wasn’t she burnt
them at all--it was me with a pink-headed match that I found in the
yard. Young O’Sullivan told me they were all destroyed.”
“This is a very shocking story of yours, Mac,” said his grandfather,
looking aghast, “and I hope to goodness that you’re only romancing.”
“Why, to be sure it is, your lordship,” said Mrs Knox with conviction,
“Sure, how at all would the innicent child get to do such a thing, and
he never next or nigh the place till yesterday evening, when he came
over wid me, and wasn’t out of me sight, except only a few minutes that
he ran out into the yard along wid Nellie Reilly there, and she’d take
good care of him, or else I’d not have trusted----”
“’Deed then, we were only just through the yard--never set fut in the
haggard, bad or good; and where’d he get matches, ma’am? Sorra a one was
there,” Nellie protested loudly, recoiling scared by the sudden prospect
of being drawn into the meshes of responsibility. “I never took me eyes
off him the whole time,” she averred.
“Oh didn’t you, _my friend_,” said Mac, with crushing emphasis, “had you
them on me when you were talking to the people with pitchforks in the
lane over the wall, that you said you wouldn’t listen to gabbin’
nonsense out of them? And I _was_ in the hay-place, and I _did_ find
some matches--it was only one match--in a little yellow box with
pictures on it, that was near the calves’ house. But it went off
beautifully against the scrapey stuff on the side. And if you don’t
believe it, you may go and see where it is, for I put the box back there
when I was coming in. Only there’ nuffin in it now, except itself.
Grand-governor, you’ll have to write for my four hundred pounds.”