Chapter III: Part 3

But as she sang, in a voice small and sweet, of this heart sorrow, she looked on before her with shining eyes, very sure of seeing all she wanted to crown the moment’s gladness come presently to meet her from among the shrouding white mists.

* * * * *

Hidden among them just then, not many yards away, half-a-dozen people were at work around the big boulder, digging and boring, with frequent mention in their discourse of needles and trains and matches. Their operations were by this time, however, nearly finished, and after the last of them, which was the kindling of a lacklustre red flare with a sheet of grease-stained brown paper, the whole party withdrew hastily through the Nick of Time, and retreating some little distance down the slope on the other side, stood still in apparent expectation of an event. It happened very soon. First a fierce sharp-edged clatter, that crashed into a booming roar, followed by a duller sound of rushing thuds, as if a scattered flock of unwieldy birds had swooped down close at hand in headlong flight. An abrupt silence succeeded, for few echoes gossip among the Letterglas hills. It must have lasted unbroken for a long minute at least. For the men had re-entered through the gap, where they found the fog thickened by a sulphurous reek, and Pierce, making out amid it the expected new vacant place, was considering how he would now hurry home and fetch Eileen hither as soon as possible, that there might be no further delay in the clearance of their pleasant path—“my sweetheart,” he was saying to himself with a remorseful remembrance of her sad eyes yesterday—when the air filled, the wide world filled as if it could never empty again, with a shriek and a shriek reiterated, shrill and wild, you could not have told whether man’s or woman’s, hardly whether a human being’s, it was a skirl of such sheer despair. Yet Pierce thought he recognised in it a name that snatched away his breath.

“What was that, man? What is it?” he said, pulling the sleeve of Paddy Murray, who was nearest to him.

“Somebody’s hurted for sartin,” declared Paddy.

But this was probably a mistake. The fragment of the big stone that had struck Eileen on the temple, seemingly had thereby opened for her and shut the dark door, whose threshold the senses may not cross, all in an instant, before the happiness could fade out of her face, or the little bunch of carefully-gathered weeds drop from her hand. It might, by the way, be feared that poor Polly would enjoy no more such feasts henceforward to the end of his tedious days.

Larry M‘Farlane it was, arrived with his belated warning, who had raised the outcry on beholding this proof that his panic-stricken hurry had been all bootless, and that the evil dream which had possessed him ever since he casually overheard talk of Mr Pierce’s project was come most terribly true. Some of the others now bade him whisht and run for Dr Blake and Father O’Connor, who might both of them very belike be below at Denroche’s cottages, where the Maddens and young Joe Hanlon were mortal bad last night; though, for the matther of that, it was aisy enough to see there’d be little anybody could do here—goodness pity them all. But as there was nothing else whatever that Pierce could do—he who used to be so ready with resources—he fixed his mind upon their coming with a desperate grip, while he stood by and waited idly.

* * * * *

He felt bewildered, chiefly by the sameness of most things, which were unaccountably going on much as they had been doing a minute before, when Eileen could have spoken to him. The white mists were still curtseying to one another across wider spaces in the valley, and the dim light behind them grew slowly stronger. There was a scent of turf-smoke on the air from a fire which someone had lit under a bank a little way down the hill. The very strokes of old Dan Heron’s hammer continued to come up in a faint rap-tap from the roadside, where he was breaking lumps of reddish sandstone; for Dan was so deaf that he applied himself to his tasks with abstracted concentration, and could not easily be interrupted. Evidently the news had not penetrated to him. A murmur of voices was passing to and fro in a knot of men gathered at a short distance. Pierce might have caught a sentence now and then.

“You’d a right to ha’ sent them word to keep out of it—you had so—the way she’d niver ha’ come widin raich of harm.”

“Sure, we was intendin’ to get it done that arly there’d ha’ been no fear of e’er a sowl about; ’twas the fau’t of the divil of an ould fog delayin’ us.”

“Ah, now, but it’s the woful thing, however it come to happen. And she the on’y one her poor mother has. Is anybody runnin’ down to tell them?”

“Och you may depind—half-a-dozen.”

“Well, it’s a quare ugly world she’s took out of any way, the crathur, God knows. ’Deed now, I do be wonderin’ somewhiles what He’s at wid bringin’ the likes of her into such a place at all.”

“And small blame to you to be wonderin’ that same, Jim, if it’s for nothin’ betther than to take and knock the bit of life out of her, as if it was a gossoon slingin’ stones at a little wran hoppin’ along in the hedges.”

“That’s no sort of talk. God be good to the crathur, she looks as if no great harm was after happenin’ her any way.”

“It’s not kilt at all she is, I’m thinkin’. The Docther’s apt to say she’ll be finely agin prisently.”

“Bedad now, you might ha’ more wit, man—Och, it’s on’y poor Crazy Christy.”

The sound, but not the sense, of this discussion reached Pierce, and vaguely irritated him, because he thought it might prevent him from hearing the approach of what he forced himself to imagine possible assistance. But when Father O’Connor, not long afterwards, did come up to him, it was with no more practical suggestion than: “God help you.”

“_God?_” said Pierce. “What on earth can God do? I think it has killed her.” He put his question like one assuming some self-evident proposition, and the kindly old man turned away from him with a shake of the head, and no attempt to gainsay.

The next voice to arouse Pierce’s attention was that of a youngish woman, worn and weather-beaten, whose grey ragged shawl hooded black wings of hair, and the dark eyes that often look out so full of cares from such surroundings. He recognised her as Norah O’Neil, by birth Kinsella, and she was saying: “So I thought maybe the Docther might be up here, Mr Pierce—but sure it’s all one. There’s nobody can do a hand’s turn for him or any of us now, on’y God. For himself’s lyin’ dead too, sir, be the roadside down beyant the bridge. And, truth to tell you, it’s quare set agin stirrin’ out he was this mornin’, wishful he was to be lyin’ in his bed, for he said he felt cruel wakely in himself altogether. But it’s losin’ the day’s wages I was thinkin’ of, and settlin’ to call him all the lazy hounds I could lay me tongue to—poor Mick, that was good to us ever—for ’fraid we’d be starvin’ to-morra. So he went off wid himself. And the God that’s above me knows well, on’y for the childer I wouldn’t ha’ said a word. But, Mr Pierce, the faces of thim is gone to nothin’; there isn’t a one of thim the width of the palm of your hand. And on’y for the childer, to be lavin’ thim, God knows I’d liefer be lyin’ the way Miss Eileen is this minyit, instead of her, the Saints in Heaven be good to her, that’s the young crathur. Many’s the time I’ve carried her up half-ways to this very place, when I wasn’t so much oulder meself. For what else will I be doin’ all the rest of me life, but remimberin’ the day I dhruv poor Mick out of the warm house to get his death on the roadside, when all the while I knew in me heart he wasn’t rightly able to stand on his feet. And he——”

But Norah’s story was here jostled aside by Con Furlong, the foreman, a stolid, business-like person, who wished to mention that the men were all quitting their work, and to receive instructions about paying for a couple of loads of stones that were just after coming over from Smith’s place beyond Clonmoragh, where _he_ had never ordered them. These details somehow helped Pierce to realise more fully that he was to be still alive. Meanwhile the sun had found a clear path earthward among the mists, and shone out through them with all the glamour of dawn and splendour of high-noon, so that swift lights strode hither and thither upon the hills, and the haze melted into the deepening blue as fast as foam on a summer sea, until the spring-day was golden over the whole countryside. It was just the world and the weather for those grand times which, as Pierce now suddenly remembered, he had promised that Eileen should have when he came with the key.

A DESERTED CHILD

A DESERTED CHILD

The Round Lodge at Kilrath is so ornate a little structure, with its pillared portico and fantastic pagoda-like roof, that it looks as incongruous in the lonesome grass-lands, amongst which it is solitarily set, as a single pelargonium or calceolaria would look among their ragweed and thistles. Only the old people recollect how it was built by way of being a gate-lodge on one of the new roads which there was talk of young Mr Hall making at the time he came into the property, but which, like many more of his schemes, were never carried out. None of them, in fact, ever took a substantial form except the Round Lodge, his promptness in this matter being caused by a long-standing promise to his old nurse that if he succeeded to the Kilrath estate she should have “a little house of her own.” As his regard for the old woman was one of the few interests he had left unshrivelled by the gambling fever that had fastened on him, he found an eager pleasure in keeping his word to her, and travelled all the way down from Dublin that he might be present at her induction into her new abode.

It was a moteless morning in early summer, when the curved masses of the wood still had a misty softness of hue, and the green of the fresh lawns looked as unwitherable as the domed blue above them. The Round Lodge gleamed most spick and span within and without, its brilliant tiles glowing, and the violet and amber panes in its glass door richly staining the sunbeams that crowded into the little porch. Mrs Moran, glancing round the cosy sitting-room with bright quick eyes like a bird’s, felt herself happy indeed, though she only _said_ she dared say she might make a shift to manage well enough, once she had the things set to rights a bit herself in her own way; which would have sounded faint praise to anybody who did not know her. But when she was left there to her own devices, she became subject to fits of forlorn “lonesomeness,” at intervals which grew shorter day by day as the first gloss of ownership wore off. It did so the more rapidly because the Round Lodge was so far out of the way that she seldom had a visitor to whom she could exhibit her possessions with proud disparagement. We all like to look at our own happiness through other men’s eyes, a process by which it seems to gain a sort of stereoscopic solidity. Her nearest acquaintances were the old coachman and cook couple who lived as caretakers in the gaunt, empty mansion two miles away; for though the village is considerably closer by, a bit down the road after you turn out of the boreen, anybody who supposes that Mrs Moran could have associated on terms of intimacy with its inhabitants must be sadly to seek in a knowledge of our finely shaded social distinctions. Mrs Dowling alone, who was mistress of the post-office and shop, and who wore a bonnet at Mass, might have been an appropriate crony, but she was at this time “mortal bad wid the janders.” Hence the clear summer noons and nights often strung themselves into a whole week without giving Mrs Moran an opportunity of saying anything more to the purpose than the occasional “Fine day, ma’am,” which even neighbours who are not acquaintances must exchange when they meet. This was a dull state of things, and made the hours wagged out by the bland-faced clock lag and loiter strangely. Sometimes, if she had not recollected that she was at last in the long-desired little house of her own, she would have almost thought she had been in better places; and satisfaction that has to be conjured up by an effort of memory comes cold and flat.

A few perches to the westward of the Round Lodge a belt of timber breaks the smooth sweep of the broad pastures that encircle it. If you thread the narrow footpath between the delicate grey beech-trunks for quite a long distance, you come to the edge of a high bank, which overhangs a deep-sunken lane, a mere boreen joining two more important thoroughfares. Thence the trees turn at right angles to fringe the brink of this lane. Across it you look into a wild country. The great Shangowragh bog rolls from the horizon almost to your feet, and on the right hand, towards Lisconnel, spreads far away, a spacious level that seems brown until you have called it so, and then you see many other colours struggling duskily through, olive and purple and red. To the left there is rougher ground, mottled with grey-gleaming boulders and clumps of furze, and lifting itself up lazily to a stony ridge. Beyond that rise darkly a pair of domed mountain summits, the same that are seen more dimly from Lisconnel. Here they have the aspect of two huge hooded heads, bowed over a mysteriously folded hollow. When Mrs Moran came within view of this landscape, she generally shrank back among the sheltering trunks, and went home the way she had come. She said it made the flesh creep upon her bones, and she wouldn’t stop where she’d have one of those ugly black-lookin’ blocks of hills grimacin’ at her from mornin’ till night, not if she was paid for it by the hour. The fact was that she had lived all her life in the corner of a softly contoured up-and-down county, where the little rounded grass hillocks and frequent hedges make the countryside look as if it had been crumpled into green bunches, and where the prospect seldom extends over more than a few hawthorn-bounded fields at a time. So that these vast stretches of wilderness were for her a new and startling revelation of possibilities in Nature, which she was somewhat disposed to resent. On the whole, though she would by no means have allowed it, even to herself, the little house of her own was more or less a disappointment, and disappointments that occur when one is verging on threescore-and-ten have a discouraging air of finality.

But with that first long summer at the Round Lodge, Mrs Moran’s solitude was ended by the arrival there of her daughter-in-law, Mrs Peter, and of her three grandchildren, Nannie and Biddy and Con. Their coming was caused by a very tragical occurrence, and apart from the melancholy circumstances, I doubt that it added to the old woman’s contentment. She had long since made up her mind that she would not like a bone in her son’s wife’s skin, and the prejudice did not melt away upon acquaintance, while the children were rather oppressive to her after her long holiday from such society. Since the infancy of Mr George, now in the Lancers, she had scarcely seen a child to speak to, in the grown-up Halls’ deserted nursery; and she said aggrievedly that they _moidhered_ her, and that ne’er a one of them featured their poor father. Nannie and Biddy, good-natured, hot-tempered little girls, shocked her by their romps and quarrels; and four-year-old Con, a small, melancholy child with a turn for metaphysics, caused her some chagrin by his unthriving aspect; she said that he looked like a hap’orth of soap after a week’s washin’, wid the face on him no broader than a farthin’ herrin’. With all their shortcomings, however, the young Morans were presently the means of bringing a still less promising inmate to the Round Lodge.

About this time Kilrath happened to be suffering from a visitation of the Tinkers, who had established themselves as usual in the row of deserted cottages at the end of the boreen. The Tinkers were people who spent all the tolerably warm part of the year among the benettled wall-rims of deserted cabins, and under the arches of bridges, and in the hollows of old quarries, making progresses to and from these quarters with the help of two donkey-carts. Most of the party passed the heart of the winter in the less primitive shelter of whatever Union workhouse was nearest when the first unbearably cold night overtook them. Now and then a member of their confraternity disappeared for a space into the more rigorous seclusion of some county jail, but that was an accident of occurrence less common than their temporary neighbours could have wished. For the Tinkers, it is said, stole all before them. Middle-aged inhabitants of Kilrath remembered when the band had filled only one cart; but of late years they had over-flowed into a second, the owners of which were known as the Young Tinkers. It was considered that the Young Tinkers were collectively greater thieves of the world than the Ould, but that no single individual could hold a candle for villainy to Luke Maguire, the very ancient commander of the original vehicle. People wondered sometimes that the Young and Ould Tinkers did not part company, and take different routes, as their joint arrival at any camping-ground was generally the signal for a frantic fight between the two sections. However, they continued to stick together, which, as a Kilrath housewife remarked, was “a rael charity, for if they took to scatterin’ themselves over the whole countryside, like a flock of turkeys in a stubble-field, she should suppose there wouldn’t be a him or an egg to be had in it from one year’s end to the other.”

So not long after the Peter Morans’ establishment at the Round Lodge, the Tinkers sent to the door a deputation composed of a woman and two children, all wildly ragged, and hung about with samples of their flashing tinware in such profuse festoons that their approach sounded, one may suppose, somewhat like the onset of a mail-clad knight of old romance. Their call was but brief, for their appearance did not favourably impress the two Mrs Morans, who were afterwards careful to exhort Nannie and Biddy and Con that they must on no account have anything to say to “them young rapscallions,” if met with on their walks abroad. The little Morans, who had been staring with all their eyes full of envious admiration at their two contemporaries permitted freely to handle and clink those resplendent and resonant cans, felt vaguely the existence of compensations and complications in the scheme of things, when they learned that these privileged persons were nevertheless to be shunned as somehow inferior and reprehensible, and “not anyways fit company for respectable people’s childer.”

But on the next Saturday their mother went to shop in the village, and up at the Round Lodge the children found the morning as long as mornings can be when one is under seven, and the end of an hour is out of sight. By the time that Nannie and Biddy and Con had finished their midday dinner, they felt quite convinced that if their mother meant ever to come back to them at all, she must now be somewhere near at hand; and while their grandmother was busy washing up, they slipped away to meet her along the path among the beeches. It was a pleasant autumn day, with crisp leaf-drifts to scuffle underfoot, and here and there a more or less ripe blackberry attainable, amusements which drew them on until they reached the brink of the abrupt descent into the boreen. They saw no sign of their mother coming, and the bank looked so very high and steep that they could not even think of climbing it. But while they strayed desultorily on the top, somebody, swinging from clumps of weeds to handles of looped roots in monkey-like fashion, came suddenly scrambling up it, and then squatted down cross-legged under a sloe-bush. The new-comer seemed to the children a very large person, being a well-grown girl of ten or eleven. Her dress consisted of a brown skirt, which looked as if it had once been a sack, with a man’s old jacket for a bodice, eked out by a screed of greenish shawl. She was barefooted and bareheaded, with a great shock of black hair making thick eaves over her brows, under which her light-grey eyes shone like the gleam of pools caught through dark-fledged boughs. This was Judy Flower, eldest daughter of Jack Flower, head of the family of the Young Tinkers. Strictly speaking, Jack’s surname was Murphy, but Jack’s father, who had enjoyed some local renown as a wrestler, had been styled by his admiring neighbours “The Flower of Clonmoyle,” and his children had been spoken of as the Young Flowers, until the nickname hardened into a patronymic, which Jack took with him when he sank into the tinkering line. Judy’s mother, on the other hand, had real gipsies among her ancestry, which was, perhaps, the reason why Judy sat cross-legged, and had something weirdly Oriental in her aspect.

The Moran children sidled away a few paces, eyeing her doubtfully; but she took no notice of them, and began to eat a bunch of remarkably large and ripe blackberries, evidently the remains of much similar spoil, for her hands and lips were blue with juice-stains. When she had finished them all but the last, which was also the biggest and blackest, she suddenly held it out to Con, saying, “There’s for you, young feller, and a grand one it is—a dewberry. Stuff it in your mouth, and no more talk out of you.” She spoke in a high-pitched gabble, and with a peremptoriness of manner modelled upon that used by her elders to herself. Con was half-scared, and Biddy plucked Nannie by the sleeve, whispering dismally, “Let’s go home, she’s ugly-lookin’.” However, the plump-seeded, glossy berry proved irresistible, and Con’s hesitation ended in a furtive grab. Nannie, emboldened by this mark of confidence, came a step nearer to Judy, and said, peering down the bank wistfully, for her gleanings by the way had only served to whet her appetite, “There would be a dale of berries in it over yonder?” Judy craned her neck round the bush, and looked down the bank too, and then at the three small children, who stood in a row. “Is it berries you’re after?” she said, “and is it over there you’d be goin’? Whethen now, if you knew what all was in it over there, ’tisn’t about berries you’d be talkin. Och no, murdher alive, not indeed, bedad.”

“Over where is it?” said Nannie, impressed and alarmed by the redundancy of Judy’s asseverations.

Judy pointed up the boreen, which just there turned sharply, and under a roof of reddening boughs formed a vista, ended by the dark mountain-wall. “Och if you was after seein’ the laste taste of a sight of a one of them”—she said, with appalling vagueness. “Och mercy on us all and more too, if you on’y was.”

“What sort seein’?” said Nannie, with increasing anxiety. The row had shortened itself considerably, the children had shrunk so close together.

“Crathurs,” said Judy. “Och my goodness the crathurs. Tiger-bastes, and camel-horses, and mambolethses—rael frykful. I cudn’t tell you the half-quarter of them. But the crathur of all the crathurs is the big red snake that’s in it. Awful _he_ is. Och the dear help us, I hope he’ll bide contint where he is, I hope he will. Wirrasthrew, if he was to get hearin’ any sort of noise that ’ud wake of him out of his sleep—whoo-oo, that’d be the bad job for us all.”

The children stared at her round-eyed like a bunch of fascinated little birds.

“Well now, but it’s the terrible big red snake _he_ is,” Judy went on contemplatively, “and the great hijjis lump of a black head he has on him; it wouldn’t scarce fit in between them two bushes; and the long len’th he is, that’d raich aisy to the far end of the boreen—and he asleep up yonder, ready to wake every instant minute of time that happens—and bould little children talkin’ of leppin’ down the high banks after blackberries.”

“We worn’t,” said Biddy, with a howl.

“Where is he asleep at all?” said Nannie in a hoarse whisper.

“Sure, up there in his black hole,” said Judy, pointing through the trees, “wound himself up he has—round and round and round-an’-round-an’-round”—she described a rapid eddy in the air with her forefinger—“wid his big ugly head cocked in the middle, listenin’ till he hears somethin’ to wake him up—and then, good gracious, is it what’ll he do?” she said, replying to an interrogative gasp from Nannie, “Murdher alive!” She ducked down until her shock-head nearly touched the ground, and recoiled immediately to an erect sitting posture with a jack-in-the-box-like spring. Then she elongated her neck preternaturally, and twisting it from side to side, glared about her with a ferocious goggle and grin. “That’s what he’ll do first,” she said, “to find out what way the noise was comin’ wakenin’ of him. And after that, he lets a couple of roars out of him, and he begins to unrowl himself—round and round an’ round-an’-round—the wrong way. And as soon as he’s stretched his len’th, out he’ll take wid himself slitherin’ down the hill to us, and through the trees there he’ll come smashin’ desthruction off of all before him. Ragin’ mad he’ll be for bein’ woke up. Och the creels of him and the crawls of him,” said Miss Judy, rocking herself to and fro, so that the withered leaves on the thorny bush behind her fell over her like a shower of little golden coins, “och the creels of him and the crawls of him, and the roars of him and the bawls of him—there was never anything aquil to it. ’Twould terrify the clouds out of the sky.... And mercy be among us, what was that at all now? Was it him beginnin’? I dunno but I heard him over yonder, like as if he was sayin’ _cruel_ to himsel, ‘Whoo-oo-o, let me be comin’ at them.’”

This was too much for the fortitude of Biddy, a small fat child with no great force of character, and she broke into an uncontrollable roar, to the wrathful despair of Nannie, who shook her passionately, saying, “Whisht, whisht, you little madwoman! do you want to have us all destroyed?” Con, on the other hand, not less dismayed, flew frantically at Judy with a snatched-up stick, confusing the causer with the object of his terror. Judy herself rose to her feet, and resorted to precipitate flight, not by reason of Con’s assault, but because at this moment a voice called shrilly through the trees, “You young miscreant there, what at all are you doin’ wid the childer?” It was old Mrs Moran, who, alarmed by the stillness, had set out in quest of her grandchildren. Judy, who had no wish to explain the situation, sought to escape from it by a hasty retreat down the boreen bank, but her attempt was unlucky. For in her hurried swinging of herself over the edge, she trusted her weight to a tuft of ragweed, whose roots ripped faithlessly out of the crumbling soil, and let her drop amongst a scattering of earth and pebbles into the middle of the lane, where she lay stunned and incapable for the present of any further romancing.

It was in this way that Judy Flower became an inmate of the Round Lodge, being carried up there by Michael Kelly, a turf-cutter, who appeared opportunely on the scene. He then tramped off several miles to summon the doctor, observing as he started that there was likely to be an Inquist to-morrow. But when the doctor came, he pronounced the case one of merely slight concussion of the brain, and predicted a rapid recovery, if the child were properly cared for, which Mrs Moran resolved that she should be. “The crathur might stop where she was for a few days at any rate, till she came round a bit.”

The Tinkers themselves did not display much concern about the fate of their youthful comrade. On the evening of the accident, two of the women came to make inquiries at the Round Lodge, and their report seemingly satisfied Judy’s family, for next morning the whole party decamped, moving on in the direction of Castlebawn. But it had happened that just at this time Judy’s mother was absent, tramping the country on a professional tour, with a baby and a bunch of tinware, and so heard nothing of what had befallen her daughter until she rejoined the caravan at Castlebawn. They picked her up in a dreary little back lane, where she awaited their coming, seated on a broken-down mud wall. Her tin cans were nearly all slung about her still, but she had nothing in her arms, for the baby had died of bronchitis in the cold weather the week before, little to anybody else’s regret, perhaps not even its own. But the event had disposed Mrs Flower to take a tragical view of things, and therefore, when her family equipage creaked near enough to admit a counting of black and red heads, which showed that one was missing, she immediately formed the gloomiest conclusions about the fate of the absentee. Nor were the explanations she received particularly re-assuring. Little Jimmy, her eldest boy, reported that Judy had fell off of the top of somethin’, he didn’t rightly know what, and hadn’t come home since. And his aunt Mrs Massey’s account of the matter ran: “Och, sure she’s after givin’ herself a crack on the head, but the ould woman that picked her up off the road was a dacint body, and she’s took her in. She might get over it and do right enough yet. Anyway, the best chance was to lave her where she is. It’s late we are, for the roads is that heavy they’re nearly pullin’ the hoofs off of the misfort’nit asses’ ould feet. How did she get the crack? Sure the on’y wonder is she hasn’t broke her neck a dozen of times wid the way she climbs over all before her. And so the baby’s died on you? Ah the crathur, God be good to it! ’Deed now, it would be cruel knocked about in the perishin’ weather. Belike it’s better off. Did you sell anythin’ at all? Musha then, woman, you needn’t be frettin’ after Judy, for she’s apt to play plinty more fool’s thricks yit, if that’s all ails you.”

Mrs Flower was, however, bent on not only fretting, but going to see after and if possible repossess herself of Judy. She was ill and miserable, and had been looking forward to the close of her weariful, lonesome tramp, and a spell of easier days, jogging along on wheels among familiar faces. But Judy was the eldest of her children, and had perhaps never quite lost the glamour of a wonderful new possession, which her mother could not contemplate in another person’s keeping without a pang of jealousy. At any rate, she made up her mind to resume her solitary way, and she kept her resolve despite the disapproval of her family, of her gaunt-looking husband, who said she’d a dale better stop wid the childer and him and mind them a bit, and of the childer themselves, who, feeling mocked and defrauded by a glimpse of comfort so speedily withdrawn, howled dismally and drummed protests on the sides of their cart, as they saw the much-desired wisp of black shawl recede fluttering down the wet street.

Under these discouraging circumstances, aggravated by wild wind and rain, Mrs Flower started on her doubtful quest. Four days she had to trudge in solitude, and three nights she had to shelter as best she could, the best being on two occasions no better than the lee-side of a dyke and a clump of rustling furze-bushes. Such wide tracts of bogland intervened between cabins where a night’s lodging may generally be had for the asking, because the indwellers have little else to bestow. But she consoled herself with the hope that on the way back she should have her daughter’s company. She durst not now face the possibility of “anythin’ havin’ happint Judy,” so that she would after all return alone. That would have been to look recklessly down a gulf of despair. So she allowed herself to doubt of nothing except her chances of reaching her goal before she was perished outright, or “took rael bad intirely.” When she came to the village of Kilrath, a wannish gleam of prosperity flickered out on her, for she succeeded in persuading Mrs Nally, the owner of a stray spare penny, to buy a tin-mug, which was described as being “that iligant and polished up, ’twould be a pleasure to drink anythin’ out of it, if ’twas on’y a sup of ditch-water, and strong? Och goodness preserve us, ma’am dear, you might take and batter it agin that wall there the len’th of the day, and sorra a dint there’d be in it when you’d done.” As she knew that the Round Lodge could not be very far off, she expended the proceeds of this sale in purchasing a little flour cake for Judy at the shop. It was richly yellowed with soda, and showed three currants on its surface, which could not fail to tempt the most delicate appetite. “And sure the bit of a crathur would be finely agin now.”

By the time that Mrs Flower came to the Round Lodge, the wintry dusk had thickened so that the driving sleet-sheets were more felt than seen. The leafless beech-grove was roaring in the wind with the voice of a foam-fretted shore, and straining and swaying to the stress of the blasts until it looked like an anchored cloud. She groped baffled among the dripping trunks for a long while before she found a clue in a line of red light to guide her across the dim grass-field, until she stood under the porch of the Round Lodge. It was the Tinkers’ habit to be stealthy in their movements, and she passed through the coloured glass door unheard, and down the short passage to where another door stood rather widely ajar, revealing an interior of ruddily lit warmth, paradisiacal to anybody peering in very cold and wet and hungry. Only Mrs Moran and Judy were in the kitchen, which glowed all round its curved walls so that the room looked like a cupful of light filched from the ebbing day. Judy, now convalescent, installed in one of the fine new arm-chairs by the fire, with locks clipped and combed, and wearing a neat lilac print frock and little plaid shoulder-shawl, was wonderfully transformed in aspect. She was eating a broad slice of buttered griddle-cake, and listening to a long story, which Mrs Moran had drawn from her store of reminiscences about the Quality she had lived with. While Mrs Flower watched, the old woman got up and brought the girl something in a large mug. “It’s a nice sup of buttermilk for you,” she said; “sup it up, honey, along wid your cake. I declare now, you and I are great company together intirely.”

“Ay are we,” said Judy complacently; “and if I had me strip of knittin’, I might be tryin’ did I remember the stitch you was showin’ me. Sure none of them at home could do knittin’ no more than the crows in the field. And what become of Miss Lily’s grey horse? They’d be apt to put it out of that, after it doin’ such a thing.”

Judy’s mother never heard the answer to that question, for she was pre-occupied by a struggle towards a difficult resolve. When it was formed at last, she turned to slip noiselessly away. “Sure she has her chance there, me jewel,” she said to herself. “I’ll let her be.” But she was not destined to depart uninterrupted. As she turned to go, one of her cans swung, clanking against the door-edge, and Judy had espied her before she could retreat.

“Why, there’s me mammy!” Judy said. “It’s comin’ she’ll be to take me home.” Her exclamation began jubilantly but ended in a minor cadence, for her present quarters were in most ways very much to her mind, and being still less vigorous than usual, made her feel all the more loth to resume the rough faring upon which she looked back across this brief novel experience of cosy chimney-corners and ample meals. It struck her that her mammy might have arrived more appropriately some other time; _some_ time, of course, but _other_ certainly; and the opinion betrayed itself on her countenance.

“Well, and what way are you, Judy?” said Mrs Flower, pausing as she found herself observed; “grandly you look to be set up in there, bedad.”

“Oh, she’s doin’ finely?” said Mrs Moran. “You’d better step inside, ma’am—if you’re Judy’s mother,” she added, though she could not forbear a mistrustful glance from her visitor’s bedraggled rags to her own clean boards and good bit of carpet. “It’s wet walkin’ to-night.”

“I dunno but I’d a right to stop where I am,” said Mrs Flower, standing still. “Drippin’ I am, sure enough; the showers this day’d drinch a water-eel. I was on’y trampin’ round wid the things; and as for takin’ you along, Judy, ’deed for the matter of that, sorra the hurry I’m in at all, unless them that have got you so be.”

“There’s no hurry whatsomever,” said Mrs Moran rather stiffly. “Let alone that the child’s noways fit to be streelin’ about the counthry.”

“The saints above know I’ve no wish to be saddlin’ meself wid her,” said Mrs Flower defiantly. “It’s just a livin’ torment she’d be to me, and divil a hap’orth else.”

“Well, to be sure, one’d ha’ thought you might ha’ found somethin’ more agreeable to say of your own child,” said Mrs Moran, “even supposin’ it isn’t convenient to have her along wid you these times.”

“Convenient, is it?” said Mrs Flower. “Be jabers, it’s them that has the rarin’ of the likes of her knows the throuble of it. Troth, you might be tired bangin’ her about and givin’ her abuse from one day’s end to the other, and get no good of her at the heel of the hunt.”

“’Deed then, if you can conthrive nothin’ better to do wid her than that, I’d a dale sooner she sted where she is,” said Mrs Moran, with increasing sternness, and a change of mind about the propriety of offering Mrs Flower a cup of tea. “She’s an unnatural crathur,” she said to herself, “and all she cares for is to be shut of the child.”

“Well, good-bye to you, Judy,” said her mother. “I’ll not come near you, I’m that muddy and wet.”

“But you’ll be comin’ back some time soon, mammy?” said Judy, who had hitherto kept silence, somewhat shocked and affronted at her mother’s disparagement, which was a new experience to her, as at home Mrs Flower had been always wont to defend Judy’s character and extol her, without much cause, “for lendin’ a great hand wid the childer,” and other domestic virtues. Now, however, Judy was stricken with remorse as she saw the familiar black shawl and weather-worn face disappearing into a darkness which led towards the dreary noises of the wild night. She got out of her arm-chair, and despite Mrs Moran’s remonstrance, ran across the room and down the passage, hobblingly, because she was still lame from her fall. When she reached the porch, her mother, though close by, was almost swallowed up in the gloom, which had superseded the last glimmers of twilight. Only in the farthest west lingered a dull-red band, hardly more luminous than a drift of the dead beech-leaves. Judy stood on the steps peering out, with the hearth-glow behind her. “Stop a minute, mammy,” she called; “I’m after forgettin’ to bid you good-bye or anythin’. And I’ll ax herself inside to be wettin’ the tay——”

Mrs Flower looked round, and halted for a moment. Then she shook her fist menacingly at her daughter. “Be off and run in wid you out of that, you young divil!” she shouted hoarsely. A gust of wind intercepted and bore away the words, but her threatening gesture was plain enough against the fading wraith of the sunset. And it was the last that Judy ever saw of her unnatural mother.

AN ACCOUNT SETTLED

AN ACCOUNT SETTLED

One wet autumn evening, Mr Natty Grogan was taking stock and making up his books with the assistance of his family. When thus occupied, the young Grogans were wont to complain that he would be trotting after them with dogs’ abuse from Billy to Jock, till you couldn’t tell where to have him; while he used to declare that the lot of them all together were more different kinds of fools than you’d find anywhere else in the breadth of Ireland, and so was their mother before them. She had died many years since and her husband was reported to have remarked that the event would save him a couple of shillings a week, anyway, for milk and chicken-broth. But it is fair to observe that unfeeling speeches were likely enough to be put into his mouth on this occasion—such was his character among his neighbours. They said that his wife had been “a very dacint poor woman, and a dale too good for any such an ould slieveen, and it was a pity all the childer, except, maybe, Andy, took after himself.”

For the present, however, popular disapproval of the Grogans was in abeyance, as almost everybody else had gone to bed and to sleep, so that Athcrum’s one wide street lay deserted and blank. It was a very wet evening, and the whitewashed house-fronts had an ample dado of mud splashes about their doors and lower windows, but they were all now muffled up in darkness. The Grogans’ late sitting threw no light on the outer gloom, for the battered shop-shutters were up, and business proceeded in the little back room, whence old Natty lit himself every now and then with a sweeling dip, to grope among his stock-in-trade in the adjoining shop. He accompanied these researches with dissatisfied grunts, rising occasionally into requests wrathfully shouted to his family, for an explanation of what he found or missed. They grimaced at one another, and sometimes whispered together before they complied with his demands—Nannie and Tom and Stevie, seated round the table, where the strong lamp-light flared in their faces. Their father, peering in at them from murky recesses behind the counter, half saw and half surmised these signals, which did not soothe his irritation.

“What at all’s gone wid the rest of the ten-pound tin of arrowroot biscuits?” he called suddenly. “It was better than three parts full last time I seen it, and, accordin’ to the accounts, there’s no right to be anythin’ out of it since then, but ne’er an atom have you left in it, on’y a dust of crumbs.”

“Belike _they_ niver put down the last person had some,” suggested Tom, disassociating himself from the transaction with prompt presence of mind.

“And why the mischief didn’t you? Am I keepin’ the pack of yous foolin’ here to be slingin’ me goods about the parish, and not so much as take the trouble to scrawm it down? There’s not an infant child goin’ to school but ’d make a better offer at doin’ business.”

“It’s very apt to ha’ been Mrs Moriarty,” said Nannie, choosing to ignore this aspect of the matter; “she did be gettin’ them kind of things the time the childer was sick. We can aisy charge them to her.”

“Mrs Moriarty’s great-grandmother’s cat!” said her father. “You might as well save yourself the trouble—and there’s none readier—of chargin’ anythin’ to her these times. The people at the post-office was tellin’ me this mornin’ that the last American letter come for her, sorra the money-order was in it at all, except word of the daughter bein’ in hospital, and the husband out of work. It’s one while before she’ll be settlin her account. Howsome’er, charge the biscuits to her, and don’t be makin’ too free wid allowin’ her anythin’ else on credit. Whose bill’s that you’re makin’ out there, Stevie?”

“Yourself’s after biddin’ me get Dan Farrell’s,” Stevie replied.

“Ay, did I? It’s the best chance we have to be gettin’ anythin’ out of the man, and he wid his couple of bastes in at Kenmare fair yisterday. If we don’t look out sharp, his story’ll be that the agent took the price off him for rint. The divil mend the both of them for a pair of thievin’ villins! Sure Widdy Rourke below was tellin’ me she seen Dan diff’rint times comin’ out of Carmody’s as hearty as anythin’; and when’s he had a glass from us at all? Ah, musha! long life to him. A great notion he has to be spendin’ his ready money at Carmody’s, and we to be givin’ him credit for everythin’ else he happens to fancy. Plase the pigs, I’ll learn him the differ! What’s the amount he’s owin’? Eighteen shillin’? Then just set him down a couple of pound of them biscuits, or anythin’—the way there’ll be no bother wid change comin’ out of his note.”

“Biscuits he didn’t get, I’ll take me living oath,” said Stevie confidently.

“Keep your oaths till they’re axed for. ’Twas as apt to be biscuits as anythin’. And I’ll tell you what it is, me young shaver, _you_’ll step over to Farrell’s to-morra mornin’ and get the bill ped.” Old Natty gave these commands in a triumphant tone, meaning them to be a penalty for his son’s contumacious contradiction; and Stevie did say grumblingly—

“Troth and bedad, it’s nicely bogged a man’ll be thrampin’ them roads after these polthogues.”

But the young Grogans had a way of posing in aggrieved attitudes from motives of policy, and the commission was really much to Stevie’s mind, the office of collector being always in request among them, because it was endowed with what they called their chances. These consisted in a private lengthening of the bill by addition of sundry fictitious items, the price of which the inventor pocketed. Thus, on the present occasion, before Stevie went to bed he was careful to supplement Dan Farrell’s account with the following entries, which were purely efforts of imagination—

_s._ _d._

Extry male 2 3
Shuger 1 0
Other extrys 1 9

Five shillings was an unusually large toll to levy in this way, but Stevie knew his man, and had little fear of failing to extract it; easy-going Dan would so certainly be loth to “get argufyin’ and risin’ ructions.”

Next morning, Stevie started betimes on his two-mile walk. The raindrops had only just ceased pricking the wide, continuous puddle, which lent a Venetian aspect to the main street, and sounds of gurgling and dripping were audible all around, as if everything were talking over the late downpour. When Stevie faced towards the purple mountain range, in the direction of which lay Dan Farrell’s, he saw the pale mists creeping along the ridges, and writhing up the ravines, and swirling in the curved hollows, and the air had the breath of autumnal chill that comes with rain in harvest time. Water gleamed greyly from the furrows of every little field that he passed, and he passed scores of them before he reached the river bridge, where he was within a few perches of his goal. He might have taken a shorter route, but it included a swampy patch and the passage of some stepping-stones, for which he considered the state of affairs “too soft altogether”; and he therefore kept upon comparatively dry land. The dryness was very comparative indeed all over Dan Farrell’s little holding, which occupied the entrance to a winding green glen, where both stream and hillside curved suddenly, leaving a triangular bit of level ground. During the past night, however, this had undergone an abrupt change of contour, as the swollen river had flung an impetuous arm across it, islanding its apex and rejoining the main stream, turbid with melted clods and tangled with wisps of drowned green oats.

When Stevie came to the bridge, Dan Farrell himself was standing up to his knees in the soaked grain by the water’s edge and thinking of his bad luck, without any presentiment that more was on its way. He was a tall, black-bearded man, and had been a gaunt and grizzled one ever since a virulent attack of rheumatism last spring had changed him from middle-aged to elderly in a few racking weeks. This illness had brought Sarah Tighe, his sister’s daughter, from her home in Athcrum to nurse him and manage his forlorn household, for Dan had lately been left a widower, and his four children were incapably small. Sarah was now calling to him from the door to the effect that he hadn’t as much sense as little Bobby, or else he’d come in out of streeling through them oats, and they as wet as the waves of the say, unless maybe he’d a mind to have himself bawling for the next month with the pains in his bones. But Dan turned a bothered ear to her warnings, until she added—

“And if here isn’t one of the young Grogans slingein’ along over the bridge.”

Then the recollection of his growing account at the shop started out from the misty background of his troubles, and took up a commanding position in the forefront. He cast a glance of listless despondency on the flooded field and turbulent river, and began to walk slowly up the plashy furrow towards his house, set in motion by a vague sense that it was more fitting for him than for his niece to receive young Grogan. By the time he reached the door, Stevie was already there talking to Sarah, a plump young woman, whose colouring suggested an autumn hedgerow, with gleams of ruddy berries and black, and warm brown leaves. She was naturally conversational and vivacious, but it may be feared that her consciousness of Brian Mahony inside there disapproving of the colloquy led her to carry it on with increased animation. Had nobody been by to mind, Mr Stephen Grogan might have received a welcome more in accordance with Sarah’s own private opinion of him, which was low. When her uncle came up, she stood demurely aside, and waited while his health was inquired after and the weather bewailed. Then Stevie asked—

“And what way was the fair a’ Tuesday?”

“As bad as anythin’ at all,” said Dan, “onless you was to be payin’ the dalers to take your bastes off you for a complimint.”

“But you’re after selling a couple?” said Stevie.

“Och, did I—and what’s four pound ten to git for a grand little heifer, and she a rael dexter, if you was to be tired swearin’ agin it? Worth three times the money she’d ha’ been to me, if I could ha’ held on to her a sixmonth longer.”

“Sure, now, it’s you farmers that are the rich people, makin’ nothin’ of pound notes at that rate,” said Stevie, laughing with a sort of uneasy jocularity. Dan knew quite well what was coming, before the other went on, “So as I was passin’ this way, I just looked in wid our bit of account, Misther Farrell; it’s been runnin’ this good while now.”

“Ay, bedad,” Dan assented dejectedly, “will you be steppin’ inside?”