Stories by English Authors: Ireland Part 8

"You'd not thravel from this to Athlone in the inside of a week, if it was iver so handy," said Mrs. Doherty.

"Is it a week? Och! blathershins, Mrs. Doherty, ma'am, you're mistook intirely. Sure, onst you've stepped into the town yonder, the train'll take you there in a flash. And the trains do be oncommon convenient."

"Free pa.s.ses!" prompted Mick.

"Ay, bedad, and free pa.s.ses they'll give to any souldier takin'

his furlough; so sorra the expense 't would be supposin' Mick here had a notion to slip home of an odd day and see you."

"MICK!" said Mrs. Doherty.

"Och well, I was just supposin'. But I'm tould" --the many remarkable facts which Paddy had been tould lost nothing in repet.i.tion--"that they'll sometimes have out a special train for a man in the army, if he wants to go anywhere partic'lar in a hurry; there's iligance for you. And as for promotion, it's that plinty you'll scarce git time to remimber your rank from one day to the next, whether it's a full private you are, or a lance-corporal, or maybe somethin'

greater. Troth, there's nothin' a man mayn't rise to. And then, Mrs. Doherty, it's the proud woman you'd be--ANYBODY'D be--that they hadn't stood in the way of it. And pensions--he might be pensioned off wid as much as a couple of shillin's a day."

"Not this long while yet, plase the pigs," broke out Mick, squaring his shoulders, as if Time were a visible antagonist, and momentarily forgetting the matter immediately in hand. "But there's chances in it--splendid--och, it's somethin' you may call livin'."

"And," said his friend, "the rations, I'm tould, is surprisin' these times. The top of everythin' that's to be got, uncooked, widout bone."

Paddy and Mick discoursed for a good while in this strain about the dignities and amenities of a military life, and Mrs. Doherty had not much to say on the subject. During the conversation, however, she continued to rinse one of her ap.r.o.ns, and wring it dry very carefully, and drop it back into the water, like a machine slightly out of gear, which goes on repeating some process ineffectually. The two friends read in her silence an omen of acquiescent conviction, and congratulated each other upon it with furtive nods and winks.

Mick went off to the bog in high feather, believing that the interview had been a great success, and that his mother was, as Paddy put it, "comin' round to the notion gradual, like an ould goat grazin' round its tetherin' stump." His hopes, indeed, were so completely in the ascendant that he summed up his most serious uneasiness when he said to himself: "She'll do right enough, no fear, or I'd niver think of it, if Thady was just somethin'

steadier. But sure he might happen to git a thrifle more wit yet; he's no great age to spake of."

But when he came home about sunsetting, his mother was feeding her few hens outside their cabin, the end one of a mossy-roofed row, with its door turned at right angles to the others, looking out across the purple brown of the bog-land to the far-off hills, faint, like a blue mist with a waved pattern in it, against the horizon.

Mick, brought up short by the group, woke out of his walking dream, in which he had been performing acts of valour to the tune of the "Soldier's Chorus" in Gounod's Faust, the last thing the band had played yesterday; and he noticed a diminution in the select circle of fowls, who crooned and crawked and pecked round the broken dish of sc.r.a.ps.

"I see the specklety pullet's after strayin' on you agin," he said; "herself's the conthrary little bein'; I must take a look about for her prisintly."

"Ah, sure she's sold," said his mother; "it's too many I had altogether. I was torminted thryin' to git feedin' for them. So I sold her this mornin' to Mrs. Dunne at Loughmore, that gave me a fine price for her. 'Deed she'd have took her off of me this while back, on'y I'd just a sort of notion agin' partin' from the crathur.

But be comin' in to your supper, child alive; it's ready waitin'

this good while. Molly's below at her sister's, and I dunno were Thady's off to, so there's on'y you and me in it to-night."

In the room the more familiar odour of turf-smoke was overborne by a crisp smell of baking, and Mrs. Doherty picked up a steaming plate which had been keeping warm on the hearth. "Isn't that somethin'

like, now?" she said, setting it on the table triumphantly. "Rale grand they turned out this time, niver a scorch on the whole of them. I was afeard me hand might maybe ha' got out o' mixin' them,'t is so long since I had e'er a one for you; but sure I bought a half-stone of seconds wid the price of the little hin, and that'll make a good few, so it will, jewel avic, and then we must see after some more. Take one of the thick bits, honey."

Probably most of us have had experience of the unceremonious methods which Fate often chooses when communicating to us important arrangements. We have seen by what a little seeming triviality of an incident she may intimate that our cherished hope has been struck dead, or that the execution of some other decree has turned the current of our life away. It is sometimes as if she contemptuously sent us a grotesque and dwarfish messenger, who makes grimaces at us while telling us the bad news, which is ungenerous and scarcely dignified. So we need not wonder if Mick Doherty had to read the death-warrant of his darling ambition in a pile of three-cornered griddle-cakes. At any rate, he did read it there swiftly as clearly.

Most likely he knew it all before the plate was set on the table, and his heart had already gone down with a run when he replied to his mother's commendations that they looked first-rate. As he indorsed this praise with what appet.i.te he could, being, indeed, mechanically hungry, the uppermost thought in his mind was how he should at once let his mother understand that she had got the price she hoped for her pet hen; and after considering for a while, he said: "Did you ever notice the quare sort of lane-over the turf-stack out there's takin' on it? I question hadn't we done righter to have took a leveller bit of ground for under it. But I was thinkin' this mornin'"--of what a different subject he had been thinking!--"that next year I'd thry buildin' it agin' the back o' th' ould shed, where there does be ne'er a slant at all."

"Ay, sure that 'ud be grand," said Mrs. Doherty, much more elated than if she had heard of a large fortune; "you couldn't find an iliganter place for it in the width of this world." She felt quite satisfied that her craftily timed treat had dispelled the dreaded danger, which actually was the case in a way. But if Mick would stay at home with her, she was perfectly content to suppose that she came after a griddle-cake in his estimation. Her relief made her unusually talkative; but Mick was reflecting between his answers how he must now tell Paddy Joyce that they were never to be comrades after all.

He went out on this mission immediately after supper. The sun had gone down, and the cold clearness left showed things plainly, yet was not light. In front of the cabin-rows the small children of the place were screeching over their final romp and quarrel, as they did every evening; fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on the brown-hollowed gra.s.s-bank between Colgan's and O'Reilly's, old Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly sc.r.a.ping and tw.a.n.gling, according to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even the wisps of straw and sc.r.a.ps of paper blowing down the middle of the wide roadway seemed to have whirled over and over and caught in the rough patches of stone just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to the Joyces', Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A broad and burly man, who says "shoo-shoo" to a high-piping cl.u.s.ter of tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have seemed to p.r.i.c.k like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter's cheerful "Fine evenin'." What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be fine or foul? Altogether, it was a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in taking precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles which had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling than ever.

For the intervening months had not brought the desirable "thrifle more wit" to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the contrary, was developing into one of those people whose good-for-nothingness is taken as a matter of course even by themselves; and a bolt was thus, so to speak, drawn across Mick's locked door.

He set off betimes on his long ramble. It was a cloudless July morning--the noon of summer by air and light as well as by the calendar. Even the barest tracts of the bog-land, which vary their aspect as little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton, and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot.

Mick rather hurried over this stage of his "stravade," partly because he foresaw a blazing hot day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are sheltered hollows scooped in the "knockawns," and cool patches under their bushes and boulders.

He entered the region of these things before his shadow had shrunk to its briefest; for not so very far beyond Kilmacrone the smooth floor of the big bog crumples itself into crusts and ridges, as if it had caught the trick from its bounding ocean; and the nearer it comes to the sh.o.r.e the higher it heaves itself, until at last it is cut short by a sheer cliff wall, with storm-stunted brambles and furzes cowering along the edge, fathoms above a base-line of exuberant weed and foam. The long sea-frontage of this rock-rampart is fissured by only a few narrow clefts. On the left hand, facing oceanward, the coast is a labyrinth of mountain fiords, straits, and bays, where you may see great craggy shoulders and domed summits waver in their crystal calm at the flick of a gull's dipping wing, or add to the terror of the tempest as they start out black and unmoved behind rifts of swirling mists. On the right there is the same fretwork of land and water, but wrought in less high relief--a tract of lonely strands, where sh.e.l.ls and daisies whiten the gra.s.s, and pink-belled creepers trail, entangled with tawny-podded wrack, across the shingle. You are apt thereabouts to happen on clattering pebble-banks and curling foam when you are apparently deep among meadows and corn-land, or to come on st.u.r.dy green potato-drills round some corner where you had confidently supposed the unstable furrows of the sea. And the intricate ground-plan of the district must be long studied before you can always feel sure whether the low-shelving swarded edges by which you are walking frame salt or fresh water.

Mick was bound eventually for one of those ravines which cleave the cliffs' precipitous wall and give access to the sh.o.r.e, generally by a deep-sunken sandy boreen. Here, under a tall bank, there are a couple of cabins, besides another which, having lost its roof, may be reckoned as a half; so that Tullykillagin is not a large place, even as places go in its neighbourhood. He knew, however, that he could count upon getting something to eat at either of the two cabins first mentioned, and, indeed, at the bare-raftered one also, if, as often chanced, it was occupied by Tim Fottrel, the gatheremup; and this prospect served for an incentive, feeble enough, though it strengthened a little as the hours wore on. So languid, in fact, was his resolution that at one moment he thought he would just sthreel home again without going any farther; if he went aisy everybody would have cleared out of Kilmacrone before he got back. But at this time he was sitting among some broom-bushes, under which last year's withered black pods were strewn, and he determined that if there were an odd number of seeds in the first one he opened he would go on to Tullykillagin. There were nine in it, and he logically continued to loiter seaward.

He dawdled so much that when he came to the cliff the sun already hung low over the water, and as he walked along the edge his shadow stretched away far inland across the dappled pale and dark green of the furze-fretted sward. The sea unrolled a ceaseless scroll of faint wild-hyacinth colour, on which invisible breeze-wafts inscribed and erased mysterious curves and strokes like hieroglyphics.

Here and there it showed deep purple stains; for a flight of little snowflake clouds were fluttering in from the Atlantic, followed at leisure by deep-folded, glistering drifts, now ma.s.sed on the horizon-rim to m.u.f.fle the descending sun. Yet that tide, with all its smoothness, showed a broad band of foam wherever it touched the pebbles, which lay dry before its sliding, for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff's foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked down on a small field of very green gra.s.s, set as an oasis between the waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes, and a clump of scarlet-ta.s.selled fuchsia. To heighten the incongruity of its aspect, this pasture was inhabited by a large strawberry cow, who seemed to be enjoying the alternate mouthfuls of seaweed and woodbine, which she munched off a thickly wreathed boulder, untroubled by the fact that the meal bade fair to be her last, since the rising spring tide had already all but cut off access on either hand, and would still flow for some hours.

"Musha, now I'll be skivered," said Mick, standing still, "if that's not Joe McEvoy's ould cow. You 'll be apt to experience a dampin', ould woman, if you don't quit out of there. Whethen, it's a quare man he is to lave the baste sthrayin' about permiscuous in the welther of the tide."

He peered over the edge of the cliff, evidently mistrusting its smooth face; and then he threw several stones and clods at the cow, with shouts of "Hi, out of that!" and "Shoo along!" But his missiles fell short of their mark, and if his voice reached her, she treated it with the placid disregard of which her kind are mistress on such occasions, and never raised her crumple-horned head.

"Have it your own way, then," said Mick, cynically; "it's nothin'

to me if you've a mind to thry a taste of swimmin' under wather."

He had not, however, strolled much farther when he met with somebody who was vastly more concerned about the animal's impending fate.

This was old Joe McEvoy himself, who, out of the mouth of a steep, sandy boreen, sprang up suddenly, like a jack-fn-the-box-one of the shock-wigged, saturnine-complexioned pattern. But no jack-in-the-box could have looked so flurriedly distracted, or have muttered to itself such queer execrations as he did, hobbling along.

"A year's loadin' of bad luck to the whoule of thim!" he was saying with gasps when Mick approached; "there's not a one of thim but 'ud do desthruction on herself sooner than lose a chanst to be annoyin' anybody, if she could conthrive it no other way."

"If it's th' ould cow you're cursin'," said Mick, "she's down below yonder."

"Och, tell me somethin' I dunno, you gomeral, not but what I'm nigh as big a one meself as can be, to go thrust her wid that little imp of mischief. Bad scran to it, I must give me stiff leg a rest, and she 'll be up here blatherin' after me before you can look round, you may bet your brogues she will."

"Gomeral yourself and save your penny," said Mick, whose temper was not at its best after his long day of hungry discontent. "And the divil a call you have to be onaisy about the crathur follyin'

you anywheres. Stayin' where she is she's apt to be, until she gets the chanst of goin' out to say wid the turn of the tide, and that's like enough to happen her."

"And who at all was talkin' of the cow follyin'? It's ould Biddy Duggan down below that nivir has her tongue off of me, nagglin' at me for lettin' the poor crathur pick her bit along the beach, and it a strip of the finest gra.s.s in the townland, when it's above wather, just goin' to loss. A couple of pints differ extry it does be makin' in the milkin' of a day she's grazed there. But it's threatenin' dhrowndin' and disthruction over it th' ould banshee is this great while; and plased she 'll be, rale plased and sot up. Sure, that's what goes agin' me, to be so far gratifyin' her, and herself as mischevious, harm-hopin' an ould toad as iver I hated the sight of--Och, bejabers, didn't I tell you so? It's herself comin' gabble-gobblin' up."

As he spoke, a very small, meagre, raggged old woman emerged swiftly from the lane, accompanied by one younger and stouter and less nimble of foot, her temporary neighbour, Mrs. Gatheremup.

Mrs. Duggan seemed to bear out Joe's character of her; for now, like Spenser's hag Occasion, "ever as she went her tongue did walk," and the path it took was not one of peace. "Maybe, after this happenin', some she could name might have the wit to believe what other people tould thim, who knew bitter than to be thinkin' to feed a misfortnit crathur of an ould cow on sand and sayweed as if she was a sayl or a saygull, and it a scandal to the place to behould her foostherin'

along down there wid the waves' edges slitherin' up to her nose, and she sthrivin' to graze, and the slippery stones fit to break her neck." Such was the purport of Mrs. Duggan's remarks, which were punctuated by Joe McEvoy's peremptory requests that she would lave gabbin' and givin' impidence, and his appeals to the others to inform him whether they weren't all to be pitied for havin' to put up wid the ould screech-owl's foolish talk.

"Sure, that's the way they do be keepin' it up continial, Micky lad," Mrs. Fottrel called to him, shrilly, as if athwart gusts of high wind. "I'll pa.s.s yon me word the two of thim 'll stand at their doors of an evenin" and give bad langwidge to aich other across the breadth of the road till they have us all fairly moidhered wid the bawls of thim, and I on'y wonder the thatch doesn't take and slip down on their ould heads."

"Belike it's lave of the likes of YOU I ought to be axin' where I'm to git grazin' for me own cattle?" a growl of sarcastic thunder was just then observing, to which flashed a scathing response: "And, bedad, then, it's lave you had a right to be axin' afore you sent off me poor son Hughey's bit of a Pat, to be wastin' his time mindin' your ould scarecrow and gettin' himself dhrownded in the tide. It's no thanks to you if the innicent child isn't as like as not lyin' this minute under six fut of could wather, instead of fetchin' me in the full of me kettle that I'm roarin' to him for this half-hour, and niver a livin' sinner widin sight or--"

"Saints above! is little Pat strayin' along wid the cow?" said Mrs.

Fottrel, much aghast. "I was noticin' I didn't see him anywheres this evenin'. What's to become of him down there, and it risin'

beyond the heighth of iverythin' as fast as it can flow? Sure, this mornin' 't was wallopin' itself agin' the wall, back of our place, fit to swally all before it."

"Why didn't you tell me the child was below?" said Mick. "I'd lep down there and fetch him up aisy enough; on'y there was no mortial use goin' after the cow, for niver a crathur that took its stand on four hoofs 'ud git its own len'th up the cliff, unless it might be some little divil of a goat. And the wather's dhrowndin'-deep alongside it afore now."

"Musha, good gracious! sure, all I done was to bid the spalpeen be keepin' an eye on her now and agin while he would be playin' about there," said Joe; "and it's twinty chances if ivir he did at all.

Trapesed off wid himself somewheres; he'll be right enough be this time. 'T is n't the likes of him to go to loss, it's the quare five-poun' note he'd fetch at Athenry fair."

"He might ha' broke his legs climbin' disp'rit on the rocks," said Mrs. Fottrel, unconvinced by the argument from unsaleability," and be lyin' there now waitin' for the say-waves to wash the life out of him. Heaven pity the crathur!"

"Sure, I 'll step down and see what's gone wid him," said Mick.

The descent of the cliff, though not riskless, was no great feat for an active youth, and Mick accomplished it safely, but to little purpose, he thought at first, since the irreclaimable cow appeared to be the sole denizen of the shrinking beach. However, when he had shouted and scrambled for some time without result, he came abruptly upon a nook among the piled-up rocks, where a very small black-headed boy in tattered petticoats was digging the sandy floor with a razor-sh.e.l.l.

"Och, it's there you are," said Mick, stepping down from a weedy ledge; "and what have you in it at all that you didn't hear me bawlin' to you?"

"Throops," said Pat, gloatingly, almost too absorbed t o glance off his work; "it's Ballyclavvy, the way it did be in the school readin'-book at Duffclane. There's the Roossian guns" (he pointed to a row of black-mouthed mussel-sh.e.l.ls, mounted on periwinkle carriages), "and here's the sides of the valley I'm makin'; long and narrer it was. Just step round and look at it from where I am, Micky, but don't be clumpin' your fut on the French cavalary."

"The divil's in it all," said Mick, with a sudden bitter vehemence, which he accounted for to himself by adding, as he pointed toward the seething white line: "D' you see where that's come to, you little bosthoon? And you sittin' grubbin' away here as if you were pitaty-diggin' a dozen mile inland."