Strangers at Lisconnel Part 14

"Whethen now but yourself's the quare man, Con," said Ody Rafferty's aunt, "to be takin' up wid that notion these times, when ne'er a differ it'ill make to her. There might ha' been some sinse in it, if you'd done it to plase her, but now you're more than a trifle too late wid that. A day after the fair you are. Sure she'll never set eyes on you or your old caubeen agin," she said, as if announcing some unthought-of discovery of her own, "no matter what ould thrash you might take and stick in it. You might be wearin' a young haystack on your head for anythin' she could tell."

"That may be or mayn't be," said Con. "But at all evints the next body that goes there out of this countryside 'ill be very apt to bring her word. Discoorsin' together they'll be of all the news, and as like as not he--or it might be she--'ill say to her--'I seen Con the Quare One goin' the road a while back, and he wid ne'er a thraneen of anythin' in his hat, good or bad; the same way the other boys are; lookin' rael dacint and sinsible.' Belike she might be axin' after me herself, and that 'ud put it in the other body's head. Yourself it may be, Moggy.

Faix now, I wouldn't won'er a bit if it was, for there must be a terrible great age on you these times. Sure you looked to be an ould, ould woman the first day I ever beheld you, and that's better than a dozen year ago."

"Troth then there's plinty of oulder ould people than me, let me tell you," protested Moggy, who was about ninety, "that you need be settlin'

I'm goin' anywheres next. Musha c.o.c.k you up. And your own hair turned as white as sheep's wool on a blackthorn bush."

She seemed so much put out by Con's statement and inference that young Thady Kilfoyle, always a good-natured lad, sought to soothe her.

"Sure there's no settlin' any such a thing, and for the matter of goin', the young people often enough get their turn as fast as anybody else.

It's meself," he said, "might be sooner than you bringin' news of yous all, and Con's ould caubeen, and everythin' else to Heaven the way he sez."

"I dunno if you've any call to be talkin' that fashion," said the Widdy M'Gurk, disapprovingly, "as if you could be walkin' permisc-yis into Heaven widout wid your lave or by your lave. Maybe it isn't there any of us'ill be bringin' our news."

"Might you know of e'er a better place then, ma'am?" said Con.

"Heard you ever the like of that?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt, not unwillingly scandalised, "I should suppose n.o.body, unless it was a born haythen, 'ud know of any place better than Heaven."

"That's where she is then," said Con, stroking his feather. "For the best place ever was is none too good for her, G.o.d knows well."

"And thrue for you, man," said the Widdy M'Gurk. "But she's one thing, and we're another. It's not settin' ourselves up we should be to have the same chances."

"Ah, well, sure maybe we're none of us too outrageous altogether," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, looking hopefully round at her company. "And if they can put up wid us at all at all, they will. We'll get there yet, plase G.o.d.

And anyway I'll be takin' good care of your feather, Con. Ay will I so; same as if it was dropped out of an angel's wing."

"So good-night to you kindly, ma'am," said he. "I'll be steppin' back to Laraghmena. I on'y looked in on you to bring you that, and give you news of Theresa. And I question will I ever set fut agin in Lisconnel."

He did not, however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him sitting on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in a bank. Con sat with his back turned to it until the dusk had m.u.f.fled up everything in dimness, and then he stole an armful of turf-sods from the nearest stack, and groped his way in through the deserted door. The shadows within were folded so heavily that he could scarcely more than guess where the hearth had been. One of Con's peculiarities was a strange horror of a fireless hearth. At the sight of its h.o.a.rily sprinkled blackness he always felt as if he were standing on the verge of some frightful revelation; a vague reminiscence, no doubt, from the scene of his life's tragedy, all distinct memory of which had been blurred away by his illness. Now he piled and crumbled his sods with practised skill, and set them alight in well-chosen places. But he stayed only for a minute or so, till the little fluttering flames had fairly taken a hold, and were sending golden threads running along the netted fibres. Then he groped his way out again, and returned to his seat on the bank. Presently, as he watched, he saw a red light beginning to flicker through window and door, and growing steadier and stronger. When it was at its brightest, he got up and turned away.

"That's the very way it would be shinin'," he said, "and I comin' along the road to see Herself and Himself and the childer--G.o.d be good to them all, wherever they may be. And that's the notion of it I'll keep in me mind."

And Con the Quare One came no more to Lisconnel.

CHAPTER XI

MAD BELL

Not so very long before the sound of Con the Quare One's fiddle ceased to enliven Lisconnel any more, Mad Bell's singing had begun to be heard there occasionally, as it has been at intervals ever since she arrived with her two housemates, Big Anne and the Dummy, and took up her abode in the last of the cabins that you pa.s.s on the left hand, going towards Sallinbeg. Perhaps Lisconnel should not reckon her among its residents, so much of her time is spent on the tramp as an absentee. Still, she sometimes has tarried with us for a long while, and she is understood to have some property in the house-furniture, so it seems natural to consider the place her home.

From the first it appeared obvious to all that the dementedness which characterised the little wizened yellow-faced woman was of a much more p.r.o.nounced type than Con the Quare One's. Any attempt to spare people's feelings by ignoring the fact would have been very futile, and it was therefore lucky that the three new-comers, Mad Bell herself included, were quite content to accept the situation. The neighbours were at first inclined to commiserate Big Anne, who was p.r.o.nounced to be "a dacint, sinsible, poor woman," for the oddities of her household, the incalculable flightiness of Mad Bell, and the impenetrable silence of the Dummy. But to their condoling remarks she was wont to reply in effect--"Ah sure, ma'am, that's the way I'm used to them, the crathurs.

Why, if Mad Bell said anythin' over-sinsible, or poor Winnie said anythin' at all, it's wond'rin' I'd be what was goin' to happin us next." And Big Anne evidently looked upon this as an uncomfortable frame of mind. At first, too, they speculated much about the circ.u.mstances which had brought the curious trio together beneath one thatch, and found it especially hard to conjecture how the daft little vagrant had come into possession of sundry tables and chairs. All its members, however, being incommunicative persons, no satisfactory elucidation of these points was arrived at in Lisconnel.

The coalescence of Big Anne's and the Dummy's fortunes is a simple history enough. Anne Fannin, while yet a youngish woman, was left alone in the world to do for herself in her little wayside cabin. Without a dowry to recommend her rough-hewn features and large-boned ungainliness, she never had any suitors, and she found it as much as she could contrive to make out her single living by means of her "bit of poultry"

and her pig. Nevertheless, when her nearest neighbours--the Golighers--died, leaving their daughter Winnie, "who had niver got her speech, the crathur," to live on charity or the rates, what else was a body to do except take her in? Anne would have put this question to you with a sincere want of resource. So Winnie Goligher transferred to Anne Fannin's house, herself and all her worldly goods, which consisted of the clothes she had on, and a prayer-book, and a lame duck, and thenceforward the two "got along the best way they could."

Mad Bell's history has more complications in it. They began one pleasant April day when she was only a slip of a la.s.s, who had taken a little place at the Hunts' farm near her home, for the purpose of saving up a few pounds against her marriage with Richard McBirney. She had been given an unexpected holiday, and was running home across the fresh, spring-green gra.s.s-fields, thinking to take her people by surprise, when she came to a hedge-gap whence you look down into a steep-banked lane.

And at the foot of the bank Richard McBirney was sitting with his arm round her sister Lizzie's waist.

To a dispa.s.sionate observer this transference of his attentions might have seemed a matter of small moment. Most of their acquaintances, for example, were just as well satisfied that he should court Eliza as Isabella. But the sight turned all the current of her life awry. For it set her off rushing away from it across the same sunny green fields, and she never came home again. Nor ever again would she settle down quietly anywhere. She had a strong, clear voice and a taste for music, and this led her to take to singing ballads about the country at markets and fairs. The harder she was thinking about fickle Richard McBirney, the louder and shriller she sang. A very few years of such wandering shrivelled up her plump "pig-beauty," so that in her little sallow, weather-beaten face her own mother would scarcely have recognised pretty Isabella Reid. Then, after a long spell of illness in a Union infirmary, she began to grow noticeably odder and stranger in her looks and ways; until at length the children shouted "Mad Bell" as she pa.s.sed, and that became her recognised style and t.i.tle.

Such, briefly, had been her experience of life, when one September evening she came by chance to Big Anne and the Dummy's door. She had got a very bad cold, and felt hardly able to drag herself along between the berried hedges, and was so hoa.r.s.e that she could with difficulty ask for the night's lodging, which they granted without demur. Their times had been unusually bad of late. In fact, their room was looking several sizes larger than they were accustomed to see it, because they had sold any articles of furniture for which "e'er a price at all" could be obtained. But to whatever accommodation this bareness permitted they made Mad Bell kindly welcome, the crathur being sick and crazy, and she stayed with them for three or four days. By that time, finding herself recovered, she resumed her journey, setting off early in the morning with the abruptness and absence of circ.u.mlocution which, as a rule, distinguished her proceedings. A friendly nod and grimace she made serve for announcement of departure and leavetaking all in one. As her hostesses watched her out of sight down the road, Big Anne said--

"Well, now, I never seen that quare little body in this counthry before, and we're very apt to not set eyes on her agin. G.o.d be good to us all, but the likes of her is to be pitied. She's worse off than the two of us. But bedad, Winnie, if thim hins there don't prisintly take to layin'

a thrifle, it's in a tight houle we'll be ourselves. I dunno what's bewitchin' them. And the sorra an ould stick have we left in it that man or mortal 'ud give us the price of a pullet's egg for--and small blame to him, unless he was as deminted as herself that's quittin'."

Mad Bell's tramp that day was all along a sequence of lonesome winding lanes, where few dwellings were dotted among the green and gold of the fields. The bustle of the harvest, its reaping and binding, was over in them, and they lay without stir or sound. In some of them the stooks were still encamped, but some were smooth stubble, empty, except where a flock of turkeys filled it with dark, bunchy shapes. She walked steadily on the whole day without any adventure, but when the dew was beginning to fall through the twilight she came to a short, shady reach of lane, at the end of which stood, in a green nook, a small, prim white cottage with two peaked windows and a door to match. That, at least, is how it would under ordinary circ.u.mstances have presented itself to a pa.s.ser-by.

Just then, however, n.o.body would have noticed anything about it except the fact that out of the open door thick coils of woolly black smoke were rolling and rolling, stabbed through every now and again by thrusts of flame, which even in the lingering daylight gleamed strongly fierce and red. The house was evidently on fire. As Mad Bell drew nearer, she became aware of a wheaten-coloured terrier standing in front of it; and when he saw her he began to bark vehemently. She was used to being barked at, though not in this way, for howls were interspersed, and it was clearly meant not for a menace but an appeal. No other live creature was visible about the place, until she had come quite close to the surging door, when a small gossoon jumped up out of the ditch on the opposite side of the road and rushed across to her.

"What 'ill I do at all, then?" he said, whimperingly, catching hold of her shawl. "If them childer's burnt up widin there, Mr. Wogan 'ill be in a fine way. It's for killin' the whole of us he'll be. And it wasn't me set it afire. Sorra the match was I meddlin' wid, I could swear it. I wasn't out of it any time, gettin' a few ripe berries to pacify them childer, agin they would be wakin' and roarin', and when I come back, there it is all a smother of smoke. Divil a thing else was I doin' on'y mindin' them childer, and not meddlin' wid the matches, and goin' after a couple of blackberries. And Mr. Wogan himself's away to Ballymacartrican wid his boxes in the a.s.s-cart. And all of them goin' to quit out of it to-morra, if it wasn't for them childer bein' burnt up inside--or maybe it's smothered they are. It's as unhandy as anythin'.

It went afire of itself. And he'll be ragin'."

He bawled all this louder and louder in compet.i.tion with the clamour of the dog, who kept on jumping up at each alternately, and evidently considered his remarks better ent.i.tled to a hearing. But Mad Bell merely replied, "Whisht gabbin', and hould that," thrusting, as she spoke, her little handkerchief bundle into his arms. And thereupon, making a sudden dive, she vanished among the flame-sheathing smoke.

Scarcely had she disappeared when an empty donkey-cart came round the turn of the lane, led by a rather dejected-looking middle-aged man, whose countenance, nevertheless, had for some time back been gradually clearing up at every wind of the way that brought him nearer to this particular point of view. But as he caught sight of the black smoke drifting and rolling, his aspect of reasonable melancholy changed to one of a despair that could not have been wilder if the reek of h.e.l.l-mouth had blown into his face. He dropped the bridle, and hurled himself down the road like the distracted body that he well might be. For a twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that betides a c.u.mbrous load s.n.a.t.c.hed up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped by the back door.

If the most radiant of guardian angels, in snowy plumes and golden tresses, had restored his children to him with a befitting speech, poor Matthew Wogan could not well have been more joyfully relieved from his terror than he was when this odd little yellow-faced woman, with a red handkerchief wisped round her head, and a singed grimness generally pervading her, handed over to him Minnie and Tom, casually remarking, "Bedad, it's the big heavy lumps they are." Minnie and Tom both were crying and coughing loudly, because the smoke had got into their eyes and throats, which they resented; and when their father returned with them to the front of the house, this noise was swelled by the gleeful yap-yapping of the terrier and the voices of a few other people who had appeared upon the scene--a matronly looking woman and two or three sun-burnt harvestmen. From Mrs. Ma.s.sey's observations it could be gathered that she had been minding the Wogan twins by deputy, and further that she entertained the gloomiest views about the mental and moral qualities of her son little Larry, who replied to her animadversions with over-reaching protestations about matches and theories of spontaneous combustion. While they wrangled in the background, the young men inspected the conflagration, which proved to be less extensive than it looked, though undoubtedly serious enough to have soon put the sleeping children past waking, if rescue had not come.

A heap of blankets and other bedding, that smouldered and blazed near the front door, was the source of the most stiffling smoke; and when it had been subdued by many buckets of water, everybody began to drag what bits of the furniture they could out of harm's way. There was not much, because, as Wogan explained, he had sent "the marrow of it" to his sister at Ballymacartrican; and the legs of the largest table were charred so badly that it collapsed with a crash "the instiant minyit it set its four feet on the ground," as Mrs. Ma.s.sey said. However, there were two smaller ones not much the worse, and three or four chairs, and a couple of stools, and some pots and pans, and a small clothes-horse, and a wagging clock, whose round white face glimmered through the dusk like a fallen moon as it lay flat on the gra.s.s. All these things made a little crowd on the plot of sward by the door.

"And what will you be doin' wid them now?" said Mrs. Ma.s.sey. "There's my place below you'd be welcome to stand them in as long as you plase.

'Deed would you, sir. The dear knows I'm not throubled wid too many sticks of furnitur'. That's a very handy-sized washin'-tub Larry's after carryin' out for you. I was noticin' to-day ours has a lake in it this long while back that dhrips over everythin'. I must get himself to thry mend it."

"That's a _lovely_ table," suddenly said Mad Bell, who had hitherto made no remarks. "A rael grand one it is," she repeated, in a wistful sort of way, smoothing the leaf fondly with her hand.

"And very welcome you'd be to have it in a prisint, ma'am, if you've e'er a fancy for it; ay, or for the matter of that to the whole lot of them altogether," said Matthew Wogan, who, with his arms full of the smoky twins, felt a weight of grat.i.tude which he would gladly have expressed in deeds. "Little vally there is on them--it's a small thing after what you're after doin' for us. I wouldn't like to be payin' away me bit of money from the childer, or else--But if I auctioned them things off the way I was intindin' it's on'y a thrifle of a few shillin's they'd be bringin' me. Welcome you are to them, ma'am."

"Sure what use at all 'ud such a thing be to the likes of her?" put in Mrs. Ma.s.sey. "It's on'y annoyed you'd be, woman, wid tables and chairs.

And she thrampin' about, you may depind, wid ne'er a place to be bringin' them to, if she had them twyste over, let alone any way of movin' them. It's very convanient we are, just round the turn of the road."

"She might take the little cart and the ould a.s.s along," said Matthew Wogan, looking at his equipage, which was straying towards them intermittently as the beast grazed the green border of the lane.

"They're no use to me now. Then there'd be nothin' delayin' her that she couldn't be cleanin' out of it wid them right away--You needn't throuble yourself to be liftin' the little stool, Mrs. Ma.s.sey. What wid fire and water, that'll be no place to sleep in," he said, pointing to the still smoking door. "The Mahonys 'ud take us in for to-night, and to-morra early we're off to me sister's and next day to Queenstown. 'Twill be a grand thing for the childer to be settled near their uncle Tom, that's doin' right well in New Jersey, in case anythin' happint me. So I'd as lief be shut of all that collection, supposin' they'd be any benefit to this crathur."

"Saints bless us, but you're givin' away all before you, Mr. Wogan,"

said Mrs. Ma.s.sey, with a discomfited laugh.

"Have you e'er a house you could be puttin' them in?" one of the harvestmen asked of Mad Bell.

"Ay, bedad," she said. And with that she picked up a chair, and dumped it down into the cart, which had come to a halt at the door.

This prompt.i.tude on her part seemed to settle the question. Without more ado the rest of the salvage was loaded in, all except the handy-sized washing-tub, which by means of an adroitly taken up position Mrs. Ma.s.sey contrived to have overlooked and left behind, when Mad Bell drove away with her newly acquired property.

On through the gloaming she drove, till the white dust flakes gathered up by the wheels grew damp and fragrant with dew, and till the moonlight was glimmering among the golden sheaves silverly, and till live embers were fanned out of the ashes low in the east. The small hours had a frosty chill, and old Ned's short steps were leisurely, and his halts for refreshment frequent; still Mad Bell continued to sit with serene patience. She was retracing her route of the day before, but at so much slower a rate of progress that the sun had been up for more than an hour when she stopped in front of Big Anne and the Dummy's little house. They were disturbed at their breakfast by the sound of the arrival, and when they came to the door, saw their visitor in the act of depositing a second chair upon the ground beside the cart.

"Whethen now and is it yourself back agin?" said Big Anne. "And what at all have you got there?"

"Inside they're goin'," said Mad Bell, pointing to the cart-load with an elated air. "It's a dale handier to have some chairs and tables."