North, South and over the Sea Part 34

"He will, to be sure," agreed Mary, in rather doleful tones.

When Mrs. Kinsella had departed she sat cowering over the fire without heeding her unfinished cup of tea. The priest's words just quoted had touched her in a vulnerable point. True for his reverence. It wasn't living much longer they'd be over there, and when they came to die it would be a lonesome sort of thing to have a strange priest coming to see them instead of their own Father Taylor, who had been their friend, guide, and adviser for more than forty years! Mrs. Brophy's heart misgave her; his reverence would be apt to think bad of their going off that way, and him so good to them. Then Mrs. Kinsella's remarks rankled in her memory--"an ould pot" that Mrs. Larry would despise in her elegant kitchen; the cool scrutiny with which she had surveyed all poor Mary's treasured belongings was hard to be borne.

The dresser; like enough there would not be room for the dresser in the boat--Mary had no notion as to the size of the vessel that was to convey her and her belongings to America--and what about the bed then?

The bed, a valuable heirloom which had stood in its own particular corner of the cabin for nearly a century, which had been Mary's mother's bed, the pride and joy of Mary's heart, and the envy of the neighbours. What in the world was to be done with this priceless treasure? Good-natured as she was she felt that she could not bring herself to allow it to become the property of Mrs. Kinsella or any of the neighbours. Who would respect it as she did? At the bare thought of heedless "gossoons" or "slips of girls" tumbling in and out of the receptacle which she herself had always approached so reverently, Mary shivered.

"c.o.c.k them up, indeed!" she murmured wrathfully.

Then an idea struck her, an idea which became a fixed resolution when presently Father Taylor's kindly face nodded at her over the half-door. She would offer his reverence the bed; it would be honoured by such a rise in the world as a transfer to the priest's house; and at the same time Mary felt that this precious legacy would in some measure repay her good pastor for his long and affectionate care. She had hardly patience to listen to Father Taylor's greeting, or to answer his good-natured rallying queries anent their unexpected good fortune. When she did speak it was rather in a tone of lamentation than of rejoicing:--

"Aye, indeed, yer reverence, it's what we nayther of us looked for, an' it's a terrible change altogether. I'm wondering what in the world I'll do wid my bits o' things--my little sticks o' furniture, ye know, sir. Biddy Kinsella was up here a little while ago lookin' out for me pot--it's an elegant pot, an' I'm loth to part with it--but she says Bill tould her there's no such thing as a pot to be seen out there. So I'll have to lave it with her. But the bed, Father Taylor, it's the bed that's throublin' me the most. It's a beautiful bed, your reverence."

The priest glanced towards that valuable article of furniture, and responded heartily and admiringly:--

"It is, indeed, a wonderful bed."

"Sure there isn't its like in the place," resumed Mary. "It was me mother's bed, so it was--she looked very well when she was laid out on it," she added thoughtfully. "Very well, indeed, she looked! I always thought that Dan an' meself 'ud be waked in that bed, too. Well, well, the Lord knows best, doesn't he, yer reverence? But I'd think very bad of lettin' that bed out o' this to go anywhere on'y to yer reverence's house."

"Bless me!" cried Father Taylor, unable to restrain a surprised laugh; but he quickly composed his features.

"Aye, indeed, yer reverence, I'd be proud if ye'd let me make ye a present of it," said poor old Mary, trying to straighten her little bent back, and peering at him with anxious eyes. "Sure it's altogether too proud Dan an' meself 'ud be, an' ye wouldn't believe the beautiful nights' rests we do be gettin' out o' that bed."

"I'm quite sure you do," responded the priest warmly; "but upon my word, Mary, do you know I'm afraid the Bishop mightn't like it."

Mrs. Brophy was appalled at the magnitude of the idea. Father Taylor continued in a very solemn voice, but with a twinkle in his eye:--

"You see, Mary, we poor priests are not allowed luxuries, and if his lordship were to arrive unexpectedly and walk into my room and see that grand bed in the corner he might think it very queer."

"Would he now?" said Mary, in awestruck tones.

"You wouldn't like to get me into trouble, Mary, I'm sure," pursued Father Taylor. "The Bishop might think I was getting beyond myself altogether."

Mrs. Brophy heaved a deep sigh; she was depressed, but magnanimous. It would ill become her, she observed, to be gettin' his reverence into trouble, and who'd think his lordship was that wicked? Holy man! She would say no more; and Father Taylor was devoutly thankful for her forbearance. He would have done anything rather than hurt her feelings, but the mere sight of that ancient, venerable, and much-begrimed four-poster made him shudder; while he scarcely ventured to contemplate the att.i.tude likely to be a.s.sumed by his housekeeper--of whom he stood in some little awe--if the question were mooted of adding this piece of furniture to her well-polished and carefully-dusted stock.

Wishing to change the subject, he remarked that Mary's beautiful cup of tea had been scarcely tasted. "Why, I thought every drop was precious," he added, laughing; "but I suppose you will not be counting the grains now as you used to do."

"I don't seem to fancy it this mornin' the way I used to do sometimes," responded Mrs. Brophy plaintively.

"Ah," said the priest, half-sadly, "you will have plenty of everything over there, Mary, but I doubt if you will relish anything as much as what you and Dan used to buy out of the price of your chickens.

Nothing is so sweet as what we earn for ourselves, woman dear. I fancy the potatoes grown in your little bit of ground, and boiled in your own black pot, taste sweeter, somehow, than all the fine dinners that Mrs. Larry will be giving you."

"Thrue for ye, yer reverence," put in Dan, suddenly appearing in the doorway. "'Pon me word, I wish that ould letther an' all that was in it had stopped where it was, before it came upsettin' us that way. I'd sooner stop where I am, so I would--I would so--there now ye have it!"

turning defiantly to his wife. "Sure it'll be the death of the two of us lavin' the ould place, an' thravellin' off across the say among strangers. An' what good will it do us, as I do be sayin' to herself here, for Larry to be puttin' up a monyement for us over beyant there, where there's ne'er a one at all that knows us?"

"To be sure, I was forgetting the monument," said Father Taylor, laughing again. "I was to have the choosing of it, too, wasn't I? Let me look at the letter again, Mary. Yes, here it is. 'The reverend gentleman, whoever he is, that's parish priest in Clonkeen now'--It's the very same reverend gentleman that used to give Master Larry many a good box on the ear long ago when he was a little rascally lad; but I suppose he thought I was dead and buried by this time--he wants to have us all underground. Well, well, it's a pity I'm not to have the choosing of that monument--I'd have picked out the finest that money could buy."

He intended this as a joke, and Dan and Mary uttered a somewhat melancholy, but complimentary laugh; then they looked at each other wistfully, as though regretting that they were not in a position to enable their pastor to gratify his artistic tastes.

Dan presently confided his troubles and difficulties anent the changing of the order, and was desired by the priest to call in the afternoon, when he would himself go with him to the post-office. Then Father Taylor withdrew, feeling a little sad at the thought of losing two such old parishioners, and a little impatient with the over-affectionate nephew, who had so late in the day insisted on their uprootal.

"How much more sensible it would have been," he said to himself, "how much more truly kind, if Larry, instead of transplanting the poor old couple in their old age, had sent them a small sum of money every month to enable them to end their days in comfort at home." But there was apparently nothing for it now but to take what steps he could to help them over the difficulties of their flitting.

About five o'clock Dan duly made his appearance, wearing a much more jubilant aspect than when his pastor had taken leave of him. With a comical and somewhat sheepish grin he produced the "ordher" in a crumpled condition from his tattered pocket, and handed it over to the priest, remarking, as he did so, that "it was a quare thing to think what a power o' money did be in a little or'nary thing like that."

"Yes, indeed," said Father Taylor, with a sigh, "that little bit of paper will carry you and Mary all the way over the sea, and across a State as big as Ireland."

"Would it now?" inquired Dan, eyeing it curiously. "Well now, to tell you the truth, yer reverence, herself an' me has been havin' a bit of a chat. She thinks bad, the cratur', of lavin' the bed, an' the ould pot, an' all our little sticks o' things behind, ye know, sir, an' I do be thinkin' I'd never get my health at all out of ould Ireland; an'

any way the two of us is too ould to be thravellin' off that way. An'

so herself says to me--she says:--'Dan,' says she, 'I think the best way would be for ye to step down to his reverence's,' says she, 'an'

give him the ordher,' she says, 'an' ax him,' says she, 'if he'll just write a line to poor Larry, an' let him know that we haven't the heart nor the strength to be lavin' our own little place. An' bid him,' says she, "ax Larry if it 'ud be all the same to him if his reverence was to keep the money for us agin we want it.'"

"To be sure, to be sure," cried Father Taylor, delighted. "You show your good sense, Dan, and so does Mary. I'll just go with you now, and change the order; and I'll let Larry know that I'll keep the money for you, and pay it out little by little as long as it lasts."

"Not at all, not at _all_," interrupted Dan, hastily and indignantly.

"Bedad, it isn't that we want yer reverence to do for us. Sure the raison I'm afther givin' ye the ordher is for you to keep it safe, the way we'll have it for the monyement."

"THE SPIDER AND THE GOUT"

Old Pat Clancy lived in a small cabin immediately beneath the Rock of Donoughmor, and looked upon the ruined castle on the top as his especial property, the legends concerning them being treasured by him as jealously as though they were traditions of his own ancestors. A proud man was Pat when piloting the occasional strangers who wished to inspect the keep up the steep and slippery path which led to the ancient portcullis, and conducting them thence to the banqueting-hall, sparing the luckless pilgrim, in fact, no corner of the edifice or its surroundings, and pausing only on the mossy slope to the rear, where, his charge having duly admired "the view over three counties," he would proudly point out the precise spots where Fin-ma-coul had "wrastled" with and overthrown another "monsthrous joynt" of name unknown, the traces of the encounter being yet visible in the short turf.

"Ne'er a blade o' gra.s.s at all 'ud grow on them," Pat would cry, pointing triumphantly to the irregular hollows in the soil supposed to be the traces of the giant's mighty feet. These, by the way, occasionally varied oddly in extent; during the summertime, when most visitors were to be expected, being noticeably large, and much deeper than at other seasons.

Poor Pat's devotion to his beloved ruins was the cause of his undoing.

One spring morning, when a late frost had made the gra.s.s unusually slippery, just as he was expounding to an interested audience how the Danes used to shoot "arrers through them little slits of windies in the wall beyant," his foot slipped, and after rolling for a little distance down the steep incline, he went over the precipitous side of the crag, and fell some twenty feet on to the stones below. Many bones were broken, and as surgical aid was difficult to obtain, and but of poor quality when at last secured, most of them were badly set, and the poor old fellow remained to the end of his days a cripple. How he and his wife and their last remaining child, a son born to them when Pat was already old, managed thenceforth to eke out a living would have been a marvel to their neighbours, if similar problems of existence had not been so common in the countryside. There was the pig, of course, and a few chickens, and "herself" did a day's work now and then in the fields, and escorted the visitors over the ruins, well primed and prompted by Patrick as to the "laygends and tragedies"

(traditions) of those sacred precincts; and little Mike minded the sheep, and frightened crows and picked turnips for their landlord, "ould Pether Rorke beyant at Monavoe," but "Goodness knows," as the neighbours would say, shaking their heads at each other, "it was not much of a livin' the poor child 'ud make out of him--the ould villain!

Didn't he let his own flesh and blood go cold and hungry--'twasn't to be expected he'd do more nor he could help for a stranger. Aye indeed, he was a great ould villain! To think of him with lashin's and lavin's of everything an' money untold laid by, an' his only son's widdy livin' down there with a half-witted lodger in a little black hole of a place that was not fit for a pig, let alone a Christian, an' the beautiful little cratur', his grandchild, Roseen, runnin' about barefut, with her dotey little hands an' feet black an' blue wid the cowld--sure what sort of a heart had the man at all?"

Old Pat was sitting alone one summer's afternoon, "herself" having gone up to Donoughmor with some Quality, and Mike not having yet returned from work, when little Roseen Rorke poked her sunny face in at the door.

"Is that yourself?" said Pat pleasantly. He was fond of the child, as was every one in the neighbourhood, and being a fellow-sufferer from the hard-heartedness of her grandfather, who was, as has been said, his landlord, was perhaps the most violent of her champions.

Roseen's blue eyes, peering through her tangled sheaf of golden-brown curls, took a hasty and discontented survey of the small kitchen.

"Isn't Mike here?" she inquired.

"He's not, asth.o.r.e, an' won't be home this hour most likely; but come in out o' the scorching sun, an' sit down on the little creepy stool.

Herself will be in in a few minutes, an' maybe she'll give ye a bit o'

griddle cake."

Roseen unfastened the half-door and came in, her little bare brown feet making no sound on the mud floor. She was a pretty child for all her sunburnt face and scanty unkempt attire. Poor Widow Rorke has long ceased to take pride in the fact that her husband had been the son of the richest farmer in all the countryside, and did not care to keep up appearances, all her energies being devoted to the struggle for daily bread; nevertheless, the short red flannel frock was as becoming to Roseen as any more elegant garment could have been, and when she approached the hearth and sat down on the three-legged stool by Pat's side, he breathed a blessing on her pretty face that was as admiring as it was fervent.

Crossing one shapely sunburnt leg over the other, and gazing pensively at the smouldering turf sods, she heaved a deep sigh.

"They're afther goin' out an' lavin' me," she lamented.

"Did they, asth.o.r.e? Sure they had a right to have taken ye along wid them. Where are they gone to at all, alanna?"