on him to emphasise his injunction; but everybody else took, or
professed to take, Mrs Knox’s view of the matter, and she said, ah sure,
it couldn’t have been that way at all, for if Master Mac had had
anything to say to it, it would have been in blazes of fire long and
long before. A burning spark wasn’t a sort of thing could go crawling
about any length of time unbeknownst like a hayspider in a haycock.
Their scepticism aggrieved and enraged Mac, as it threatened to filch
from him the fruit of his successful enterprise; but his wrath seemed to
avail nothing, and presently his grandfather said that they must be
getting home, as it was nearly luncheon-time. The group accordingly
separated, John Loughlin with his sister and the girls returning towards
the devastated farmstead, through the meadows, where he imagined,
reluctantly enough, the cold gleam of the ploughshare shredding up their
old green mantle. Mac and his grandfather went back to their somewhat
out-at-elbows looking little ancient Castle, but they proceeded
severally and silently, for Mac’s resentment led him to stalk on ahead
and decline entering into conversation. He was already sitting on the
steps at the end of the terrace when Lord Ballyduff arrived just as the
luncheon bell rang.
“Come along, Mac,” said Lord Ballyduff.
But Mac replied without stirring: “If I do be an old beggar-man, I can
tell you I’ll never say ‘Long life to your Honour,’ and ‘Heaven be your
bed,’ no matter _how_ many pennies you give me.”
The contemplation of this prospective revenge so far soothed his
feelings that they permitted him to follow his grandfather into the
dining-room. Yet, in the middle of his sago-pudding he remarked to his
neighbour, Frances, with little apparent relevance, but much scathing
sarcasm: “Some people are so wonderful fine and clever that they can’t
believe anything a person tells them.”
To which Frances, turning upon him wide and melancholy eyes, made
answer: “Maybe some day you won’t know any better, Mac, yourself.”
And Mac said reflectively, looking towards his grandfather’s end of the
table: “I suppose they get all the sense used up that they had when they
were rather youngish. Do you think your mamma’s a hundred, Frances? A
person must make ’lowances for them. But they may burn up their old
ricks themselves next time. _I_ intend to get my own living in another
way.”
[Illustration]
A VERY LIGHT RAILWAY
The newly-finished railway ran by Mrs Dowdall’s front door with only the
breadth of the narrow lane between. This was towards the middle of May,
the construction having begun early in April, when the air first grew
mild enough to make sitting out on the bank seem pleasant. An unusually
long spell of fair weather had favoured the work in its progress, and
hastened its completion; more than a month of innocent-looking
daisy-and-speedwell skies had surveyed it, and no flaws of wind and rain
had come to damage or delay. I am not sure whether it could be correctly
called a Relief Work, but it undoubtedly did take the burden of many a
leaden hour off Johnny Dowdall’s mind. For, being so lame that the
journey from one end of the lane to the other was quite beyond his
powers, he rather often found himself hampered, when casting about for
employment, by the meagreness of the resources within his range. All the
eight years of his life had been dominated by the fact that one of his
legs was “quare,” and tended constantly to become “quarer” still.
Indeed, upon the last occasion when he and his mother had sought medical
advice, the doctor talked of such desperate remedies that they had
abruptly ceased to consult him, and for many days after, Johnny’s master
dread had been a vision of Dr Lawson’s trap drawing up at their door.
But since their removal out of the village row to the cabin lonesome
among bye-lanes, this terror had faded from his thoughts, and did not
molest him at his railway works. Over these he presided in every
capacity, from chief engineer to delving navvy, and he, therefore,
regarded the design and its execution with the fond delight which the
artist can feel only for the poor thing that is all his own.
When finished, it was extremely complete, as far as it went, which,
however, was not beyond two or three yards. The top of the grassy
roadside bank had been laboriously hollowed out and levelled, and at one
point even tunnelled through by means of a superannuated fire-shovel.
Round willow twigs, deftly fitted together, made rails laid on broader
sticks for sleepers, and other twigs set upright, peeled white,
blackened duly with soot, and connected with cotton threads, were
telegraph posts, so realistic that you could almost hear the wind hum in
the wires. Orderly piles of stones and cinders and timber flanked the
line, where a junction was indicated by a maze of confluent metals
traced in labyrinthine sidings. But his crowning achievement was perhaps
the tall signal-post, whose arms of different coloured woods could be
moved up and down. Johnny had wrestled long with a mechanism of crooked
pins before he attained to this delightful result. If he prided himself
more upon anything else, it was his rolling stock, which consisted of a
truck and a carriage. They were both built of materials derived from the
small paper-covered matchboxes, of which you can buy as many as six for
one penny in the Dublin streets, or even seven--so I am told--if you
craftily “let on” to walk away from the ragged urchin without coming to
terms. In a happy hour Johnny chanced upon an accumulation of these
boxes lying empty on the window-ledge, and he found that their garish
yellow and green gave very effective touches of colour to his handiwork,
especially after he had fashioned one strip into a flag, and had stuck
poster-wise on the face of a smooth stone the full-length portrait of a
popular statesman, which adorned the lids. At a little distance it
looked just like one of the soap or mustard advertisements which were
inseparably associated with his idea of a railway.
This accuracy in details was due to his reminiscences of the time when
he lived in the village--he called it the town--of Ballyhoy, and had
been used to spend much of his leisure on the parapet of the bridge,
whence he looked down into the little station, with its periodical
flurries of arriving and departing and passing trains. A thunderous
locomotive charging the arch at full speed, and enveloping him in a
cloudy swirl of its wild white mane, was a strong sensation, which he
relinquished with regret when they moved out of the village. That
flitting had followed the death of Johnny’s father, late head porter at
Ballyhoy, and memories of the railway were accordingly fraught for Mrs
Dowdall with the melancholy of good days done, so that her son’s
engineering operations rather distressed her when she first noticed
them. Her shrinking from the subject yielded, however, to her conviction
that “’twas a good job the crathur had somethin’ to be divartin’ its
mind wid, and she away in the fields the len’th of the day.” So she had
fluent praises forthcoming upon demand, and added with sincerity: “Sure
now, Johnny avic, it ’ud be a great convanience to us of a Saturday, if
it was a somethin’ more commodious size.” For now that two long miles
intervened between her and Ballyhoy station, her weekly marketing became
a serious item in the recurrent fatigues of her life. It was a terrible
tag, she would remark disconsolately, as having replaced the deep-eaved
lilac sun-bonnet in which she weeded turnips, or gathered stones, or
planted cabbages all the week, by the small very old black straw
reserved for town wear, she trudged away with her large battered basket.
Sometimes when her wants were not of a bulky sort, her nearest neighbour
spared her the tramp by doing her errands along with her own. This
neighbour was a tall thin elderly woman, who occupied the cabin just out
of sight round the turn. She lived quite alone, and as she had never
been married, was spoken of unceremoniously as Maggie Ryan, a title to
which the younger people were now beginning to prefix “ould.”
There were no other dwellers in the lane and very few passers by, facts
which had been consolatory to Johnny ever since he set about laying
down his line. For it was of course accessible to the public, and could
hardly have been proceeded with in the face of much traffic. A few
random footsteps might have devastated it in all its length, and equally
fatal would have been the pecketing of poultry and the nibbling of
goats. But none of those dangerous creatures menaced the construction,
which grew dearer to Johnny with every day’s new device. When not
actually working at it, he kept on it a jealous eye, though the only
practical precaution he could take was to drag a trail of barbed thorny
briar across the low end of the bank, in hopes that this would deter any
wayfarer from ascending. His most anxious moments were of an evening
when Tom and Peter Denny would occasionally return home by that route
from their field-work, not always with the steadiest gait. Johnny’s grey
eyes grew black with trouble in his harassed face as he watched
apprehensively for the lurch or stagger that might lay his permanent way
in ruins. However, this threat of disaster always passed on unfulfilled.
But all through these busy weeks an unrecked-of peril was growing up
against him. It might have been tracked to a secluded corner of Maggie
Ryan’s dark kitchen, where a lily-white hen was sitting on a clutch of
brown eggs. She was a very comely fowl, whose fleckless feathers looked
as if they had been carved out of a faery marble; and in due time she
emerged triumphant, surrounded by a brood of ten downy fluff-balls, who
promised to wear exactly the like snowy plumage in maturer months. For
the first few days the newcomers confined their explorations of the wide
world which had opened upon them to the immediate precincts of Maggie’s
little house; but one fine morning, when the sun was warm on the dewy
grass-banks, and grubs abounded, the whole family were tempted to
prolong their rambles some way further up the lane. Thus it happened
that Johnny, hobbling out of doors with his head full of fresh plans,
was sorely chagrined to find the scene of his labours occupied by a
party, clucking and piping, and more banefully scratching and bobbing
about. The damage they had as yet done extended only to the knocking
down of one telegraph-post; it was the future mischief too surely
augured by their appearance which caused his dismay. He could, of
course, drive them off for the time being, but he knew that he could
not keep perpetually on guard against their incursions. So he scared
them with shouts, and then sat down to revolve plans of defence. After
some meditation an idea occurred to him, and made him start on an
unwontedly long walk--all the way, about a hundred yards, to Maggie
Ryan’s house.
Maggie was hanging up her blue-rimmed breakfast cup on the brass
dresser-hook, when she became aware of a small grey-ragged figure halted
at her threshold. “Och! and is it yourself, Johnny lad?” she said,
rather surprised, for her dwelling lay almost beyond Johnny’s invisible
tether, and he but rarely appeared there; “was your mother wantin’
anythin’?”
“I’m after seein’ a big wild cat,” said Johnny, “up above under the
hedge.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper, which the old woman heard
imperfectly, and she crossed over hurriedly to the door, saying: “What
was that, sonny?”
“A great big yella wild cat it was,” said Johnny, “sittin’ yonder behind
the bank. The size of a calf it was. Watchin’ for chuckens it looked to
be.”
“Bedad, then! that’s like enough, and bad luck to it,” said Maggie Ryan,
peering out anxiously. “I wonder where at all the white hin has
streeled herself off to.”
“If you had her shut up in the little shed, there couldn’t anythin’ be
gettin’ at them,” Johnny observed pointedly.
“Thrue for you,” said Maggie Ryan, “and ’twould be a good plan to keep
them up till they’re a trifle grown anyway, if there’s e’er such a
bastely brute slingein’ about the place. And you were an iligant child
to come tell me. Have a bit of flour-cake, honey,” she continued,
casting about her for some impromptu reward of merit, and finding
nothing more appropriate than a griddle-cake, “I’ll be steppin’ out and
drivin’ in the hin.”
Johnny heard her intention with unqualified approval, and received her
gift with more mingled feelings. The three-cornered cake looked
inviting, but his conscience flavoured it for him with a tincture of
remorse, which is a seasoning to nobody’s taste. He took one bite, still
lingering at the door, and then said indistinctly: “Plase, ma’am--it
wasn’t maybe altogether the size of a calf.” However, he was so uneasy
about the possible effects of even this grudging concession to veracity,
that he hastened to add: “But it’s a terrible great bigness
entirely--and lookin’ out it is to catch _somethin’_.”
“Ah sure, child alive, calf or no, ’twould be to the full big enough to
swally down one of them scraps of chuckens, if it got the chance,” said
Maggie, “and I’ll put them in out of the way of it the next minute....
Ah now, to think of the crathur comin’ creepin’ along all that way to
warn me,” she said to herself, looking ruthfully after the small figure
as it limped and dragged itself out of her ken down the green and
gold-spangled space between the hedgerows, “’tis a good-hearted poor
little imp, the Lord may pity it.” But I fear that the crathur was at
this moment sophistically saying in its good heart: “And sure there
might aisy be an odd wild cat in it all the while, and I not seein’ it.
Very belike there _is_ a one--or maybe a couple.”
For a few days the result of Johnny’s stratagem was all that he could
desire. The white hen reluctantly found her wanderings circumscribed by
the mud walls of the lean-to shed with its thatch of shrivelled
potato-haulms, and Johnny was thus enabled to continue his work secure
from harassing incursions. He gloatingly gave it several new touches,
the most notable being the erection of a heap of old iron, gathered
from the bunches of rusty “keys,” which the willow-boughs had kept, like
a cherished grievance, to dangle among their fresh spring foliage. But
then rose a Saturday morning when Maggie Ryan, rather late and flurried
in setting out to catch the train at Ballyhoy, failed to adequately
fasten the door of the shed where she had been feeding her captive fowl,
and the consequence of this oversight was that five minutes afterwards
the whole brood were gleefully at large in the lane. As ill-luck would
have it, the sedate stalk of the matron tended towards the Dowdall’s
cabin, retarded but not deflected by her incidental scrapings and
pokings, and in her wake the round downy chicks followed dispersedly,
yet steadily as foam-bells bobbing along in the current of a stream. So
that the prospects of the neighbouring light railway became every moment
more seriously imperilled, and had it been vested in a company, its
shares might well have fallen with a run.
Meanwhile, Johnny was unaware of the approaching danger, his attention
being quite engrossed by an unusual spectacle. A great yellow
furniture-van had come lumbering and creaking by, bound for sea-side
Quinton, and threading a short cut thither through the lane-labyrinth
north of Ballyhoy. Just opposite Mrs Dowdall’s residence, which it could
have stowed away with ease, some part of the harness collapsed,
compelling a halt for repairs, and while one of the two men in charge
was splicing and tying, the other opened the van-door to make a change
in the disposition of the load. To Johnny, staring hard close by, there
was something rather awful about the aspect of the dark interior thus
revealed, with the legs and other salient features of its freight dimly
visible against a background of cavernous gloom. He thought those black
recesses must hold something more mysterious than the indications of
tables and chairs which actually met the eye. But he was diverted from
his speculations on this point by a very self-complacent clucking croak,
which sounded near at hand, and betrayed to him Maggie Ryan’s white hen
in the act of knocking down his precious signal-post. Her chickens were
scattered out all along the line. It was a grave disaster.
Johnny could not run fast to the rescue, and his consciousness of this
disability increased the exasperation with which he sent on ahead of his
painful hobble his voice uplifted in shrill railing. “Git along out of
that, you great ugly, dirty, big bastes of brutes!” he yelled at the
little snow-ball chickens. Perhaps also it gave force and precision to
his aim when he flung a stone after them. At any rate, the missile came
skimming in among the scurrying cluster, and knocked down one of the
smallest chickens, which had been running very fast across the road, and
chirping at the top of its voice. Its brethren now continued their
fleeing and piping, but it remained lying still and silent in the dust.
The sight smote Johnny with compunctious dismay, which deepened as he
picked it up, and felt how fluffily soft it was, and saw its absurd beak
finer than a thorn. He had not thrown the stone with murderous intent,
for though he sincerely desired the absence of the family, their
slaughter had never occurred to him as a means to that end. Again, he
remembered having heard Maggie Ryan say to his mother that she hoped to
goodness she might rear the whole clutch, an aspiration which could now
never be fulfilled--“and she after often givin’ him bits of cake, and
bringin’ home sugar-sticks from town.”
These reflections, and not the wreckage of his railway, were uppermost
in his mind as he sat on the grassy bank with the lifeless chicken held
carefully. It seemed to throw a shadow over everything, although the May
morning was still radiant, and the dandelions were glowing and blazing
on the sod, like the suns in old engravings, all translated and
transfigured. Presently he began to consider how he should best conceal
his own rather large share in the tragedy, the revelation of which
would, he thought, by no means mend matters. What seemed the simplest
plan was to hide away the remains before his mother returned from the
fields and Maggie Ryan from town, and let it be supposed that the yellow
wild cat had had a privy paw in the affair. This would be merely a
sequel to his former fiction, demanding no further imaginative efforts,
an advantage, as Johnny did not from choice exercise his ingenuity in
that way. He looked down into the tangle of weeds and briars at the
bottom of the ditch, which did no doubt offer an obviously convenient
sepulchre; but somehow he felt that he would hate to know it was lying
there, and he paused irresolute on the brink of dropping it in. Just
then his eye was caught by the furniture-van, which still stood with
open door, while both its men were round in front working at the
harness. Its black depths of darkness looked capable of keeping any
secret confided to them, and the idea suddenly struck him that here was
a chance of ridding himself effectually of all embarrassments connected
with the presence of the little dead bird. Whereupon he arose hastily,
hobbled his swiftest, and was barely in time to thrust it as far as he
could into the gloomy interior before the vanman came and banged the
door. In another minute the clumsy gaudy vehicle was crawling away
between the hedges, taking with it the most urgent of Johnny’s
anxieties. This being removed, he settled down to the repair of his
line, and soon became so deeply absorbed in it that he nearly forgot the
late catastrophe and the trouble which the straying white hen with her
diminished brood threatened to cause him in the future.
As for the yellow van, its depressed sorrel pair dragged it at length
out of the many winding lanes, and drew up on the crunching gravel in
front of Marine View Villa, which had a pinkish stucco face, and a mock
ruin on the lawn. Pat Magennis, the driver’s subordinate, let down the
board and opened the door preparatory to unloading; but he was amazed,
in a small way, to see a tiny round white object emerge from the darkest
corner, and come running towards the light with an interrogative chirp.
“Musha, good gracious! and what at all might _you_ be offerin’ to call
yourself?” said Pat; “may I land anywhere if one of them white chickens
there was skytin’ about the place we stopped at in the lane isn’t after
leppin’ in and comin’ along wid us.”
“I wish they’d throuble themselves, thin, to keep their ould fowls and
crathurs out of streelin’ into _my_ loads, where they’re not wanted,”
said glumly the driver, who had started that day in a captious temper.
“Just chuck it down out of that, and be gettin’ at them arm-chairs.”
Pat obeyed this behest, with modifications, for he deposited the
stowaway chicken carefully under a rose-bush in a round box-edged
flowerbed. “Sure ’twas the quare notion took you to not be stoppin’
paiceable in your own place,” he said to it with some sternness; but the
white chicken cocked its eye at him unabashed, and its self-confidence
increased when he shook a few bread-crumbs for it out of the red
handkerchief which held his luncheon. He was so much interested in
watching its meal that he did not turn away until bawled at by his chief
to “lave foolin’ there and be mindin’ his business,” when he had to take
up the less congenial occupation of carrying about heavy furniture. The
chicken, he thought, would surely have disappeared before he was free
again; but having got through his tasks, he found it where he had left
it, safe and brisk, and apparently not loth to be recaptured. By this
time Gaffney, the driver’s, bad temper had worsened to such an
intolerable degree that Pat preferred a journey home, sitting
uncomfortably with dangling legs on the board at the van door, to the
alternative share of the front seat. The rather because he was now
conveying the chicken in his breast pocket, whence its alert head
protruded, and where it would, he knew, be made a theme of morose
sarcasms by his grumpy companion. He half intended to bestow it upon his
sister’s small children when he got back; a prospect which might have
caused its friends to bless its stars that it did not possess the
faculty of looking before and after.
While the empty van proceeded with undulatory motion townwards, Mrs
Dowdall and Maggie Ryan on their way from field-work and marketing, fell
in with one another at the end of the lane, and arrived home
simultaneously. Johnny had forgotten all about them in a rapt attempt to
mimic, with bent twigs and the bottom of an old tin mug, the marvellous
revolving turn-table which he had once admired at the big Dublin
terminus; but when he espied their two long-drawn shadows preceding them
down the sun-set litten lane, his thoughts immediately reverted to the
morning’s mishap, and he glanced uneasily around in quest of the white
hen. He was annoyed to see her approaching from the opposite direction,
so that the loss would most likely soon be noticed. “There niver was
such an ould crathur for comin’ where she isn’t wanted,” he said to
himself, regarding her with the gaze of concentrated bitterness so
commonly encountered by objects that manifest this unpopular propensity.
Well for them if they can meet it with the serene indifference of Maggie
Ryan’s hen.
But Maggie’s mind was evidently preoccupied just then to the exclusion
of concern about her poultry. She set down her old, broken-lidded basket
on the bank, and began to grope among its contents with an air of
exultant mystery. “Well, Johnny lad,” she said; “them’s great
conthrivances you’ve got there entirely, but I question now would you
iver ha’ put together the likes of that.” So saying, she produced a toy
tin railway carriage about two inches long, and handed it to Johnny. It
was painted a strong green, picked out with scarlet, and might be
considered a very brilliant and highly-finished pennyworth. If Johnny’s
conscience had been clear, such a gift would have afforded him the
liveliest pleasure, stirring his imagination to fresh delightful
activity; as things were, however, there at once arose before him a
piteous downy spectre, which poignantly upbraided him with the loss
sustained at his hands by the bestower of such benefits. So he only
turned scarlet, and stared dumbly at the carriage. The two women
attributed his embarrassed silence to shyness and surprise. “’Deed now,
ma’am, it was too good of you altogether to be thinkin’ of him,” said
his mother; “sure, he’s fairly took aback wid your kindness. Bad
manners to you, Johnny, haven’t you so much as a thank you at all?”
“Och, the crathur!” said Maggie Ryan, deprecatingly. “Thry will it run
along on the line for you, sonny.”