smother of smoke inside, and the flames might be heard gnashing their
teeth among the crackling rafters. Then she ran on round the corner of
the house, and there, sure enough, were two men, one of whom, standing
on the pig-stye wall, was poking a pitchfork into the thatch. The fact
was that Alec Anderson, who had a thrifty turn, had noticed a fresh
golden patch where Pat Mahony had lately darned his roof, and now deemed
it worth while to rescue the good bit of straw from the conflagration
for use on his own premises. Burning cabins is hot and thirsty work on a
radiant July day, and Anderson’s mood had become irritable over it. So
when a dishevelled slip of a vagrant girl, wrapped in an old rag of a
shawl surmounted by an incongruous gay hat, came rushing up to him, and
in horror-stricken accents asked would he plase be tellin’ her where Mrs
Mahony was gone, he felt moved to reply by tossing down a bundle of
thatch on her off his fork, and saying: “Ou spier that at somebody that
kens or cares, me hizzie, and dinna be bletherin’ here awa’.” Unluckily
the bundle had a red-hot smouldering core, and as it dropped on
Rosanne’s head, it knocked off her hat, and set her hair alight, and
fell in scorching flakes before her eyes. She was fleeing away, blinded
and terrified, but she tripped over a stone, and fell with her head
against the wall, which stunned her into unconcern.
By the time that her troublesome world came back to her, she had been
conveyed to the infirmary ward of the Hewitstown workhouse, a doleful
white-washed place, where the last red rays of the sunset were beating
on the grimy windows. Poor Rosanne’s fortunes had sunk so deeply within
the last four and twenty hours that you would hardly have recognised her
as the same girl who had talked to her cousin Martha at the gate among
the hay-fields, while the sun went down behind a screen of rounded
tree-tops. For her clothes were blackened and drenched with fire and
water, and, much worse, her pretty curling hair was all burnt off, and
one side of her face was scorched. Next morning her neighbour in the
ward thoughtfully lent her a bit of broken looking-glass that “she might
see the quare show she was;” but she had scarcely energy to glance at
it, and was faintly shocked by the disfigured image. For two days she
lay in a dull apathetic state, and took little heed of anything. It
seemed to her as if she had been there always in a dreary sort of dream.
But on the Monday, when the creeping shadow on the floor had shrunken
almost to its noontide skimpiness, she suddenly roused up quite awake.
Just outside the door, which was close to her bed, she heard a familiar
voice speaking--the voice of Dan McClean. Rosanne held her breath as the
nurse, a square framed stolid person, was called out to interview “a
young man from about Kilbracken, that was come axin’ after a girl.”
Dan’s voice would have sounded like heavenly music to her, if the echo
of Martha’s had not come harshly through it and jarred it into discord.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” she heard him say diffidently, “might there be
a girl be the name of Rosanne Tierney in it?”
“Is it the name?” said the nurse, “sure I couldn’t be tellin’ you the
names of the half of them that comes and goes. What sort is she?”
“Och, a slip of a girl,” said Dan, whose descriptive powers were not
great, “a slip of a girl--wid black hair--and a smallish size she is.”
“There’s plenty of them like that, if that’s all,” said the nurse,
“we’ve a black-haired one come in the other day, not over big. Some sort
of a tramp she is, and got a crack on the head wid a bit of the roof
slippin’ down on her; but I could be axin’ her her name. Rosanne Tierney
did you say? And what might you be to her supposin’ she is? Her brother
maybe?”
It seemed to Rosanne as if an endless pause followed this question; yet
Dan only hesitated for a moment before he answered. “Och well, ma’am,”
he said, “you might say I’m as good as a brother anyway.”
And with that a stormy darkness fell upon Rosanne. For what could “as
good as a brother” signify, except marriage with the stepsister Maggie
Walsh? She hoped to goodness she might never have the misfortune to set
eyes on either of the two of them to the end of her life’s days--and
she’d as lief that mightn’t be very long--a pair of black-hearted
rogues--the villain might just go back the way he came.
When a minute afterwards the nurse returned to make her enquiry, the
tramp kept her head under the blanket, and would only mutter in a husky
mumbling way: “I dunno any such people at all--Bid him get along out of
that--me name’s Isabella Hill,” facts which were at once reported to Dan
outside in the passage, with the additional details that the crathur
seemed to be a cross-tempered one, and perhaps not quite right in her
senses. But at this moment another visitor arrived, in the shape of a
small freckled and red-haired boy, who was carrying, with an averse
expression of countenance, a large, gaudily-wreathed straw hat. “And
what might _you_ be wantin’, Matthew Flanigan?” said the nurse.
“Me mother bid me be bringin’ th’ ould hat,” said Matthew. “It dropped
off the girl that got hurted up at Pat Mahony’s on Friday, and me
brother brought it home, but she sez it might be a loss to the crathur
that owned it, so she sent me along wid it, and it’s him she’d a right
to ha’ sent----”
“Be the powers of smoke,” Dan exclaimed, seizing hold of the hat,
“that’s belongin’ to Rosanne Tierney; she got it new at Easter, and as
proud of herself in it she was as a little paycock. Sure I remember this
tuft of yeller roses wid red glass beads in them cocked up at the side
of it; I was tellin’ her it looked for all the world like a one of our
ould donkey’s ears; and was axin’ her why wouldn’t she be sticking up
the other to match it.”
“For the matter of that,” said the nurse, “there’s dozens of quare hats
goin’ about the world, and all of them that deminted lookin’ you’d be
hard set to tell the one from the other. The aquil of the outlandish
gazaboes you see on people these times I niver witnessed.”
“Ah, but I couldn’t be mistook in this one be any manes,” said Dan,
continuing to examine the hat, “sure ’twas sittin’ in front of me in the
trap all the way drivin’ over from her place to our place and back agin
of Easter Sunday, an’ here it is the very same. Couldn’t I be seein’ the
girl, ma’am, just for a minyit, for if she isn’t Rosanne----.”
But here a voice called loudly and clearly through the half open door.
“Don’t you offer to be comin’ next or nigh me, Dan McClean. I’m no such
thing. Git away home to Maggie Walsh,” it said, and Dan’s sunburnt face
grew two inches shorter at the sound. “Glory be to goodness, it’s
herself,” he said, “and me heart broke thinkin’ what had become of her
ever since Saturday mornin’. Sure, I’ll not be comin’ in if you’re not
wishful, jewel,” he said, peering warily round the edge of the door,
“but what talk at all was that you had about Maggie Walsh?”
“It was me cousin Martha Reilly was tellin’ me all manner,” said
Rosanne, who felt as if she were wakening up out of a very ill-favoured
nightmare.
“Trust Martha Reilly to be gabbin’ about what doesn’t consarn her,” said
Dan. “Troth I well knew your stepmother was puttin’ that story about
this while back, and divil a word of truth in it. ’Deed Rosanne, that
ould woman isn’t any too good I’m thinkin’. But sure what matter about
the pack of them? Your aunt Lizzie Mahony’s stoppin’ wid her
sister-in-law away at Drumcastle. I discovered that much yisterday--and
they bid me be bringin’ you to stay up there till we would be gittin’
married afore raipin’ begins. Maggie Walsh bedad! Is it idling me time
I’d be trampin’ over the country after her on a Monday mornin’ in the
middle of haymakin’? So hurry up, honey, and git all right agin, the way
I can be comin’ to fetch you. I’ll borry Jimmy Byrne’s side-car.”
“And did you hear tell the quare awful thing I done at the
Farm--throwin’ all Mrs Conroy’s grand crame to the pigs?” said Rosanne,
the recollection of this disaster now beginning to emerge from the chaos
of troubles which had overwhelmed and obliterated it. But Dan replied
unappalled: “Why to be sure. And was that any raison for you to be
throwin’ yourself after it, so to spake? Not if every sup of crame in
Ireland was spilt, and all the pigs in the country swimmin’ in the
middle of it--ay, and your stepmother, and her daughter, and Martha
Reilly, that can’t be aisy unless she’s gabbin’, along wid the lot of
them.”
So a few Sundays later Rosanne Tierney was married in her gay buff and
crimson wreathed hat. It was slightly battered and the worse for its
travels, but it would have been ungrateful of her to discard it, as only
for its timely turning up on a former critical occasion, it might
probably enough at that moment have been worn by a forlorn little
distracted vagrant, instead of adorning the proud and happy head of Mrs
Daniel McClean.
THE END.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
slope in Kilbeggan corner=> slope in Killenbeg Corner {pg 159}
its self-confidenee=> its self-confidence {pg 187}