Held Fast For England Part 28

"No, I wouldn't grow cabbages. I would just grow mustard, and cress, and radishes. If you eat plenty of them, they will keep off scurvy; and all you don't want for yourselves, I will guarantee you will be able to sell at any price you like to ask for them and, if n.o.body else will buy them, the hospitals will. They would be the saving of many a man's life."

"But they would want watering," Captain O'Halloran said, more seriously, for he saw how much the doctor was in earnest.

"They will that. You will have no difficulty in hiring a man to bring up water, and to tend to them and to look after the fowls.

Men will be glad enough to work for next to nothing.

"I tell you, Gerald, if I wasn't in the service, I should hire every bit of land I could lay hands on, and employ as many labourers as it required; and I should look to be a rich man, before the end of the siege. I was speaking to the chief surgeon today about it; and he is going to put the convalescents to work, on a bit of spare ground there is at the back of the hospital, and to plant vegetables.

"I was asking down the town yesterday and I found that, at Blount's store, you can get as much vegetable seed as you like. You lay in a stock, today, of mustard and cress and radish. Don't be afraid of the expense--get twenty pounds of each of them. You will be always able to sell what you don't want, at ten times the price you give for it now. If you can get a piece more garden ground, take it at any price and raise other vegetables; but keep the top of the house here for what I tell you.

"Well, I said nine inches deep of earth; that is more than necessary. Four and a half will do for the radishes, and two is enough for the mustard and cress. That will grow on a blanket--it is really only water that it wants."

"What do you think, Carrie?" Captain O'Halloran asked.

"Well, Gerald, if you really believe the siege is going to last like that, I should think that it would be really worth while to do what Teddy Burke advises. Of course, you will be too busy to look after things, but Bob might do so."

"Of course I would," Bob broke in. "It will give me something to do."

"Well, we will set about it at once, then. I will speak to the man downstairs. You know he has got two or three horses and traps down in the town, and lets them to people driving out across the lines; but of course he has nothing to do, now, and I should think that he would be glad enough to arrange to look after the fowls and the things up here.

"The garden is a good size. I don't think anything could get out through that p.r.i.c.kly pear hedge but, anyhow, any gaps there are can be stopped up with stakes. I think it is a really good idea and, if I can get a couple of hundred fowls, I will. I should think there was plenty of room for them, in the garden. I will set up as a poultry merchant."

"You might do worse, Gerald. I will bet you a gallon of whisky they will be selling at ten shillings a couple, before this business is over; and there is no reason in the world why you should not turn an honest penny--it will be a novelty to you."

"Well, I will go down the town, at once," Gerald said, "and get the seeds and the extra stores you advise, Teddy; and tomorrow I will go to the commissariat sale, and buy a ton or two of those damaged biscuits. We will take another room from them, downstairs, as a storeroom for that and the eggs; and I will get a carpenter to come up and put a fence, and make some runs and a bit of a shelter for the sitting hens, and the chickens. Bob shall do the purchasing.

"You had better get a boy with a big basket to go with you, Bob; and go round to the cottages, to buy up fowls. Mind, don't let them sell you nothing but c.o.c.ks--one to every seven or eight hens is quite enough; and don't let them foist off old hens on you--the younger they are, the better. I should say that, at first, you had better take Manola with you, if Carrie can spare her; then you won't get taken in, and you will soon learn to tell the difference between an old hen and a young chicken."

"When you are buying the seed, O'Halloran," said Dr. Burke, "you would do well to get a few cuc.u.mbers, and melons, and pumpkins.

They will grow on the roof, splendidly. And you can plant them near the parapet, where they will grow down over the sides, so they won't take up much room; and you can pick them with a ladder. The pumpkin is a good vegetable, and the fowls will thank you for a bit to pick, when you can spare one. They will all want manure, but you get plenty of that, from the fowl yard."

"Why, Teddy, there seems no end to your knowledge," Mrs. O'Halloran said. "First of all, you turn out to be a schoolmaster; and now you are a gardener, and poultry raiser. And to think I never gave you credit for knowing anything, except medicine."

"You haven't got to the bottom of it yet, Mrs. O'Halloran. My head is just stored with knowledge, only it isn't always that I have a chance of making it useful. I would be just the fellow to be cast on a desert island. There is no saying what I wouldn't do towards making myself comfortable there.

"But I do know about scurvy, for I made a voyage in a whaler, before I got His Majesty's commission to kill and slay in the army; and I know how necessary vegetables are. I only wish we had known what the Spaniards were up to, a month since. We would have got a cargo of oranges and lemons. They would have been worth their weight in silver."

"But they wouldn't have kept, Teddy."

"No, not for long; but we would have squeezed them, and put sugar into the juice, and bottled it off. If the general had consulted me, that is what he would have been after, instead of seeing about salt meat and biscuits. We shall get plenty of them, from ships that run in--I have no fear of that--but it is the acids will be wanting."

As soon as dinner was over, Captain O'Halloran went downstairs; and had no difficulty in arranging, with the man below, for the entire use of his garden. An inspection was made of the hedge, and the man agreed to close up all gaps that fowls could possibly creep through. He was also quite willing to let off a room for storage, and his wife undertook to superintend the management of the young broods, and sitting hens. Having arranged this, Captain O'Halloran went down into the town to make his purchases.

A quarter of an hour later Bob started with Manola, carrying a large basket, and both were much amused at their errand. Going among the cottages scattered over the hill above the town, they had no difficulty in obtaining chickens and fowls--the former at about five pence apiece, the latter at seven pence--such prices being more than double the usual rates. Manola's basket was soon full and, while she was taking her purchases back to the house, Bob hired two boys with baskets and, before evening, nearly a hundred fowls were running in the garden.

The next day Bob was considered sufficiently experienced to undertake the business alone and, in two more days, the entire number of two hundred had been made up. Three of the natives had been engaged in collecting baskets of earth among the rocks and, in a week, the terrace was converted into a garden ready for the seeds. As yet vegetables, although very dear, had not risen to famine prices; for although the town had depended chiefly upon the produce of the mainland, many of the natives had grown small patches of vegetables in their gardens for their own use, and these they now disposed of at prices that were highly satisfactory to themselves.

O'Halloran's farm--as they called it, as soon as they heard, from him, what he was doing--became quite a joke in the regiment; but several of the other married officers, who had similar facilities for keeping fowls, adopted the idea to some extent, and started with a score or so of fowls.

"I wonder you didn't think of pigs, O'Halloran," one of the captains said, laughing, as they were talking over the farm in the mess anteroom; "pigs and potatoes. The idea of you and Burke, both from the sod, starting a farm; and not thinking, first, of the two chief national products."

"There is not room for praties, Sinclair; and as for pigs, there are many reasons against it. In the first place, I doubt whether I could buy any. In the second, there isn't room for them. In the third, what should I give them to keep them alive? In the fourth, pigs are illigant bastes but, in a hot country like this, I should not care for a stye of them under my drawing room window. In the fifth--"

"That will do, that will do, O'Halloran. We give way. We allow that you could not keep pigs, but it is a pity."

"It is that, Sinclair. There is nothing would please me better than to see a score of nice little pigs, with a nate stye, and a magazine of food big enough to keep them, say, for a year."

"Three months, O'Halloran, would be ample."

"Well, we shall see, Sinclair. Teddy Burke says three years, but I do hope it is not going to be as long as that."

"Begorra!" another Irish officer, Captain O'Moore, exclaimed; "if it is three years we are going to be here, we had best be killed and buried at once. I have been all the morning in the Queen's Battery, where my company has been slaving like haythens, with the sun coming down as if it would fry your brain in your skull pan; and if that is to go on, day after day, for three years, I should be dead in a month!"

"That is nothing, O'Moore. If the siege goes on, they say the officers will have to help at the work."

"I shall protest against it. There is not a word in the articles of war about officers working. I am willing enough to be shot by the Spaniards, but not to be killed by inches. No, sir, there is not an O'Moore ever did a stroke of work, since the flood; and I am not going to demean myself by beginning.

"What are you laughing at, young Repton?"

"I was only wondering, Captain O'Moore, how your ancestors got through the flood. Unless, indeed, Noah was an O'Moore."

"There is reason to believe that he was," the captain said, seriously. "It must have been that, if he hadn't a boat of his own, or found a mountain that the water didn't cover. I have got the tree of the family at home; and an old gentleman who was learned in these things came to the house, when I was a boy; and I remember right well that he said to my father, after reckoning them up, that the first of the house must have had a place there in Ireland well-nigh a thousand years before Adam.

"I don't think my father quite liked it but, for the life of me, I couldn't see why. It was just what I should expect from the O'Moores. Didn't they give kings to Ireland, for generations? And what should they want to be doing, out among those rivers in the East, when there was Ireland, ready to receive them?"

Captain O'Moore spoke so seriously that Bob did not venture to laugh, but listened with an air of gravity equal to that of the officer.

"You will kill me altogether, Phelim!" Captain O'Halloran exclaimed; amid a great shout of laughter, in which all the others joined.

The O'Moore looked round, speechless with indignation.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I shall expect satisfaction for this insult.

The word of an O'Moore has never been doubted.

"Captain O'Halloran, my friend will call upon you, first."

"He may call as often as he likes, O'Moore, and I shall be happy to converse with any friend of yours but, at present, that is all the satisfaction you will get out of me. Duelling is strictly forbidden on the Rock, and there is no getting across the Spanish lines to fight--unless, indeed, you can persuade the governor to send out a flag of truce with us. So we must let the matter rest, till the siege is over; and then, if both of us are alive, and you have the same mind, we will talk about it."

"I think, O'Moore," Dr. Burke, who had entered the room two or three minutes before, said persuasively, "you will see that you are the last man who ought to maintain that the first of your race lived here, as far back as Adam. You see, we are all direct descendants of Adam--I mean, all the rest of us."

"No doubt you are," Captain O'Moore said, stiffly.

"And one has just as much right as another to claim that he is the heir, in a direct line."

"I suppose so, Burke," the officer said, "though, for the life of me, I can't see what you are driving at."

"What I mean is this. Suppose Adam and the O'Moore started at the same time, one in Ireland and the other in Eden; and they had an equal number of children, as was likely enough. Half the people in the world would be descendants of Adam, and the other half of the O'Moore and, you see, instead of your being the O'Moore--the genuine descendant, in the direct line, from the first of the family--half the world would have an equal claim to the t.i.tle."

Captain O'Moore reflected for a minute or two.