By beach and bog-land

I

When people go away from Clonmalroan, they go away, as a rule, very thoroughly. Their absence is an absence more complete than that of other persons from other places less out of the world and behind the times. Once any traveller’s departing form has been beheld pass round the turn in the deep-banked boreen, or watched dwindle into a speck on the straight road streaking the wide bog-land, the chances are that little news of him will reach his former neighbours, till some day that same speck is espied growing into human shape again along that same road, and acquaintances remark to each other in the course of conversation: “And so big Pat Byrne”—to put case—“is afther comin’ home wid himself.”

For Clonmalroan is but meagrely provided with the means of communication, and its inhabitants are mostly ill able to make use even of those which it possesses. It is as yet untouched by the wonderful thread of wire, which has put a running-string through the web of human lives—puckered up in a moment from Hong Kong to Cambridge—and the shining metals with their rush and roar, still halting many miles short of it, are lamely prolonged by the wheel tracks of the jiggeting side-car with a slenderly filled mail-bag on the well. The letters it brings are commonly brief and obscure, the difficult product of certainly no excessive ease in composition. They convey little more than an intimation of continued existence led among surroundings only mistily imagined by readers whose own journeying has lain within the radius of a day’s tramp. Beyond that limit everything is vague and dim, a mysterious region from whence the absentee seems not so very much more likely to reappear than do those who have been seen off with a wake and a keen. Not that such returns even as these are by any means unheard of at Clonmalroan. Would the friends of Michael Larissy, who duly waked and buried him three years ago, aver that they have never set eyes on him since? Or ask anybody, almost, in the parish, why he wouldn’t take half a crown to be crossing after nightfall that bridge over the Rosbride River near Sallinbeg, where a poor tinker-woman was swept away and drowned in a flood some few autumns back. Then, everybody knows that several of the Denny family have “walked.” Therefore the assertion: “It was himself or his ghost,” is not regarded as containing a very unequally balanced hypothesis, especially if “himself” has been supposed away sojourning in those unknown and imperfectly reported lands.

But there came one autumn when far and far away from Clonmalroan began to happen events which had such a heart-burning interest for many of its people that some news of them did penetrate the densest barriers of ignorant resourcelessness. Mere sparks, perhaps, as it were blown from some huge conflagration, whose distant flames make only a sullen glare behind a smothering smoke-fog. Yet a spark may blacken a body’s home over her head, or sear the sight out of her eyes. A great war was thundering and lightening across wide seas, under alien skies: a war which in no way behoved Clonmalroan, and which might have stormed itself out, little heeded there, had it not been for the circumstance that Pat and Micky and their brethren are “terrible lads for goin’ an’ listin’,” and that the regiment they had for the most part joined was understood to be “up at the forefront of everythin’.”

After a while, moreover, it was not those wild, irresponsible boys alone that this lurid cloud engulfed in threatening glooms. The reserves were called out, people said, at first without any clear notion of what the phrase might signify, but soon perceiving too plainly how it meant that men whose soldiering days were long past and nearly forgotten, except just the little pension, must now break the ties they had peaceably formed and once more set forth campaigning. Murtagh O’Connor, of Naracor, had to leave a wife and five children on his bit of a holding “in a quare distraction,” his friends reported, “for when he was killed, what could happen them but the Union?” And many another household on that countryside had to consider the same woeful question.

So all round and about Clonmalroan there came to be an intense craving for the latest war intelligence. Never had newspapers been in such request. At Donnelly’s bar the Freeman and the Independent were as badly tattered as strips of ill-preserved papyri by the end of an evening’s reading. The Widdy Gallaher “would be walkin’ wild about the country the len’th of the day,” folk said, “for the sight of a one. Be raison,” they added, “of her two sons.” And another illiterate and sceptical old Mrs Linders for similar reasons “was tormintin’ everybody to read her out every word there would be on the paper, even if they tould her ’twas only the market prices.” The elders, indeed, were often at a disadvantage in this way, owing to the inferior educational arrangements under which their generation had risen. Big Brian O’Flaherty, who had an independent and ambitious spirit, demeaned himself to set about learning the alphabet from that little spalpeen, Larry M‘Crilly, in hopes of subsequently reading his news “and no thanks to anybody.” But Larry was impatient and sarcastic, and Big Brian slow-witted and irascible, so the course of lessons one day ended abruptly with “a clout on the head” to the taunting teacher. With more modest aspirations old John Connellan got the schoolmaster to print for him, “the way it would be on the paper,” the name of Private Patrick Connellan; and he might be seen on many a cold day sitting out on the rimy grass bank before his dark door, for the sake of the light, and comparing with this scrap the unintelligible lines of the Independent. It was very slow, puzzling work, since the columns were many and lengthy, and his eyes none of the best. Old John seldom could retain the loan of the wide sheets long enough to assure himself completely that his grandson’s name was happily absent from them. For no news was certainly the best that could be looked for from the papers. What, indeed, was likely to happen a lad save one of those casualties which were so briefly recorded. “Och, woman dear, they’re sayin’ at Donnelly’s that there’s a terrible sight of officers kilt on the Freeman to-day, so there’ll prisently be a cruel big list of the rank and file. God be good to us all, woman dear—and poor Micky and the rest. I’m wonderin’ will they be apt to print it to-morra.”

Thus the winter, always at Clonmalroan a season when cares and losses are rife, was beyond its wont harassed and haunted by fear and sorrow. The calling away on active service of the Captain from the Big House was one of its incidents that tended to deepen the general depression. His stalwart form and sturdy stride and off-hand greeting were missed going to and fro, and much commiseration was directed to “poor Lady Winifred, and she not so long married, the crathur, left all alone by herself up at the Big House.”

II

It was only comparatively speaking a big house at all, though it made some architectural pretensions with its pillared front and porch and balustraded roof. Its lower windows looked out of a spacious hall, and a few ill-proportioned sitting-rooms; upstairs rambling passages and wide-floored lobbies cramped the uncomfortable bedchambers. Disrepair prevailed within and without, ranging from the rough work of wind and weather to the minuter operations of mouse and moth. Even at its best, all had been ugly and inconvenient enough. Nevertheless to become mistress thereof Lady Winifred had not merely left a far statelier and more luxurious establishment, but had quitted it under a cloud of disapproval, with an assurance that she was taking a long step down in the world. For her Captain was a person so impecunious and impossible, with such an unsuccessful past career, and such unsatisfactory future prospects, that nobody could imagine what she saw in him, and everybody thought the worse of her for seeing it, whatever it might be. The marriage was just not discountenanced and forbidden outright, but most austere visages were turned upon it, and the wedding, Lady Astermount’s maid declared, “couldn’t have been quieter if an affliction had occurred in the family only the previous week.”

Notwithstanding that inauspicious send-off, however, Captain and Lady Winifred O’Reilly passed a surprisingly pleasant year at this shabby old house of his among the bog-lands. Lonesome and monotonous are the bog-lands, and creep up very close to the Big House; but it stands set in a miniature glen of its own, with a wreath of shrubberies around it, and during the months after they arrived the O’Reillys busied themselves much about additional trees and evergreens, wherewith to screen their domain more effectually from the dreary outlook and roughly sweeping winds in the years that were to come. Many improvements, too, had to be made in neglected plots of garden ground, where the Captain looked at geraniums and pansies and carnations through another person’s eyes, until at last he saw something in them himself, and learned with extreme pride to call them by their proper names. This lore gave him more pleasure on the whole than he had ever derived from his familiarity with the colours worn by jockeys or stamped on playing cards, studies which had hitherto engrossed a larger share of his attention. His wife and he diversified their gardening with long rides together on steeds not expensively high bred. Clonmalroan opinion waxed somewhat critical when the pair came trotting by. Her ladyship, they said, didn’t look the size of a wren perched on that big, rawny baste of a chestnut, with an ugly, coarse gob of a head on him too, and the brown mare was something slight for his Honour, who must ride well up to fourteen stone. But the riders themselves were satisfied with their mounts.

Their contentment had showed no signs of waning in that mild November weather, with its pearl-white mists and wafted odour of burning weeds, when the likelihood of his going out loomed up suddenly on their horizon. The certain news came one morning, while they were working away near the back gate, where their small bog stream flows under steep banks, on which they had designed a plantation of rhododendrons. In the black peat soil these thrive amain, and by next June would have lit a many-hued glow in the shadowy little glen. Lady Winifred tried hard not to see that this interruption of their labours was to the Captain scarcely such an unmitigated calamity as to herself. Her recognition of the fact made her feel doubly desolate; not that there was more difference in their sentiments than had to be in the nature of things, or than left him otherwise than miserable at their parting. She tried further to go on with the plantation, as he would no doubt return in time to see it in blossom; but she was relieved when a spell of bad weather presently set in and let her stay indoors. Yet indoors it seemed as if the whole solitude of the great bog had pressed into the empty house. All day it said, wherever she went, upstairs or downstairs, one word to vex her: Gone. But at night she had various fortunes in dreams good and evil.

And every morning at breakfast, in the low, broad-windowed bookroom, she sat opposite to the Captain’s place, just as usual, except that the place was empty. She chose that seat because from it she could watch for old Christy Denny coming by from Salinbeg post-office with the mail-bag. That window looked out on a small lawn, bounded by a shrubbery through which a path ran leading round a corner of the house to the front door. The laurel bushes straggled into frequent gaps, so that between them the approach of a passer-by could be fitfully descried. And any morning might bring the letter for her, the foreign letter. To think of how it was perhaps in those very moments journeying towards her in the battered old brown bag made her so hungry and thirsty that she sometimes forgot to pour out her tea, or cut the over-large loaf. Nor was she always disappointed. Every now and then a letter did come, and in its re-reading she would find a refuge through the terrors of the day, as in a flattering dream by night. All the while, indeed, she knew that she was in a fool’s paradise: that, being so many weeks old, it could give her no assurance of its writer’s safety. The hands that had folded its sheets might ere now have grown cold beside some far-off stream, where geysers of deadly hail broke out rattling on the hills, and the wide air was as full of murderous stings as a swamp of sweltering venom. She might more rationally rely upon the newspapers with their flashed tidings. But these she never dared open herself, and she could not forbear to hang her hopes upon that delusive correspondence.

One midwinter morning she came down to breakfast with her heart set more than ever eagerly upon the arrival of old Christy. Partly because she had not had a letter for longer than usual, and partly because it was Saturday, and on Sunday no mail comes in Salinbeg. This last was of course no reason at all for expecting a letter; but it did seem to her almost improbable that Fate could intend such harshness as to make her wait two whole days and nights before she could begin hoping again. So she looked out of the window with shining eyes, and set about crumbling the bread on her plate before she had tasted a bit, and thought Christy was late before he had well started on his two-mile trudge. It was hard weather, and on the corner of lawn she looked into lay a sprinkling of frozen snow; only a sprinkling; she had seen it whiter last June with daisies spread to the sun. But the frost was keen, as she would have felt by the air blowing through the open window if she had been at leisure to consider anything except the possibility of their bringing the sound of footsteps on the hardened path.

Old Christy was late really, and she listened in vain. When at length he did come, she saw him first, a shadow moving along within the still shadow of the laurels. Just opposite to the window a gap in them made a ragged arch, and Lady Winifred knew that if Christy had anything special for her he would come through the opening and straight across the grass to her, instead of following the path round the house to the hall door. For a minute, a half-happy minute of doubt, she watched him nearing the fateful place, fearful, hopeful, blindly impatient, and then—stunned. Old Christy had gone past the gap, hurrying a little it seemed, as if he wished to get out of sight. This in fact he did. “Sure now, the mistress’s face is all eyes these times,” he said to Mrs Keogh in the kitchen, “and lookin’ at me they do be like as if she thought bad of me not bringin’ her aught. But bedad if she could see to the bottom of me heart, she’d know it’s sorry I am I haven’t got somethin’ for her at the bottom of th’ ould bag. Troth would she so;” and Mrs Keogh replied: “Ah, sure it’s frettin’ she is; goodness may pity the crathur, she’s frettin’. And doesn’t ait what would fatten a sparrow. It’s my belief she’ll do no good.”

The mistress did not appear to be fretting as she sat without motion, and still gazed out over the lawn. Though its aspect was quite unchanged, it had become a grave wherein her hope, newly slain, must lie buried until the sun had set and risen, and again set and risen. Even by the uncertain measure of years, the mistress was very young yet, and otherwise younger still, so that the edges of the experiences which make up life had not been worn smooth for her, to expedite their slipping past. A whole day looked nearly as interminable to her as to a small child, who gets out of bed with no clear prospect of ever getting into it again. And now her own bedtime lay beyond more than twelve leaden-footed hours, so early was this desolate, sunny morning. It seemed late, however, to some of her neighbours, who were keeping round eyes on her movements, and considered her as tardy as she had been thinking Christy. Perhaps a chirp or a rustle may have reached and prompted her unawares, or perhaps she merely acted from habit, but by-and-by she got up and scattered her plateful of crumbs upon the rimy window ledge, where they lay like a little drift of discoloured snow. As she strewed them she said to herself bitterly towards Fate, and ruthfully towards fellow-victims: “Why should the birds go hungry because I have no letter?” and she was careful to shut down the window sash, lest the sleek black cat should, according to custom, lurk ambushed within to pounce upon a preoccupied prey. Then she stood aside, half hidden by the faded crimson curtain, and looked out at nothing with a cold ache in her heart.

The small birds arrived in headlong haste. Some of them were almost pecking before the window closed. For the frost’s tyranny had made of not a few among them desperate characters, fluttering with reckless enterprise. Even a scutty wren ventured out of cover, and advanced along the ledge in a dotted line of tiny hops, scarcely less smooth than a mouse’s run. A robin redbreast alighting brought a gleam of colour something brighter than a withered beech leaf and duller than a poppy petal. Two tomtits in comic motley suits disputed with tragic audacity the claims of all their biggers—thrushes, blackbirds, finches and sparrows. The whole party twittered and fluttered and wrangled together, blithe and pugnacious, but the spreader of the feast gave no heed to any of its incidents. She smiled neither at the abrupt gobblings of the large golden bill, nor at the absurd defiances of the blue-and-yellow dwarfs. Her act of charity seemed to have gained her nothing. Then all at once, at some caprice of panic, the assembled birds whisked themselves down from the window-stool into the gravel walk below. Each one of them bore off in his beak a breadcrumb which looked like a little white envelope, and gave him the appearance of a letter-carrier. The sudden movement caught Lady Winifred’s attention, and she was struck by the fantastic resemblance. But at the same moment she remembered keenly how she had been reft of her hope for that day and the next; and immediately, as if the frost at her heart were broken up, she saw the mock letters through a rain of tears. She had not foregone her recompense after all.

III

Near the back gates of Lady Winifred’s Big House, the Widdy Connor’s very little one makes a white dot on the edge of the black bog-land that winds away towards Lisconnel. She lived in it quite alone after her son Terence had listed on her, which he did one winter when times were hard and work was scarce. Everybody almost concurred in the opinion that there “wasn’t apt to be such another grand-lookin’ soldier in the regiment as young Terry Connor, or in an army of regiments bedad.” For Terry’s good looks and good nature and athletic prowess were celebrated round and about Clonmalroan. Six foot three in his stockings, and not a lad to stand up to him at the wrestling; there wasn’t another as big a man in the parish, unless it might be the Captain.

But, of course, it was not in the nature of things that anyone else should equal the extravagant pride and pleasure in those pre-eminent qualities evinced by Terry’s mother. She made a show of herself over him, according to the view entertained by some matrons with smaller sons; and now and then, when the widow had exceeded unusually in vaingloriousness, one of them might be heard to predict that, “she’d find she’d get none the better thratement from him for cockin’ him up wid consait; little enough he’d be thinkin’ of her, or mindin’ what she bid him.” The widow for her part always declared that “the only thing he’d ever done agin her in his life was listin’; and that he’d never ha’ thought of if the both of them hadn’t been widin to-morra mornin’ of starvation.” And perhaps the affliction which that step caused her was not so very far from being made amends for by her exulting delight in the splendour of his martial aspect when he came over to visit her on furlough in his scarlet with green facings beautiful to behold. One of those carping critics declared to goodness after Mass, that she had come into chapel with him “lookin’ as sot up as if she was after catchin’ some sort of glittery angel flyin’ about wild, and had a hold of him by the wing.”

But then at that time the regiment was safely quartered at Athlone, a place no such terribly long way off, and known to have been actually visited by ordinary people. It was a woefully different matter when the Connemaras were sent off on active service to strange lands about which all one’s knowledge could be summed up in the words “furrin” and “fightin’”—words of limitless fear. Then it was that retribution might be deemed to have lighted upon her inordinate vanity about her son’s conspicuous stature. For this now became a source of special torment, as threatening to make him the better mark, singling him out for peculiar peril.

“And you’ll be plased to tell him, Mr Mulcahy,” she dictated to the schoolmaster, who was also cobbler and scribe at Clonmalroan, “that whatever he does he’s not to be runnin’ into the forefront of the firin’, and he a head and shoulders higher than half of the lads. He’d be hit first thing. God be good to us. Bid him to be croochin’ down back of somethin’ handy. Or if there was ne’er a rock or a furze bush on the bit of bog, he might anyway keep stooped behind the others. But if he lets them get aimin’ straight at him, he’s lost.”

Mr Mulcahy, who was stirring up the sediment of his lately watered ink, received these suggestions about conduct in the field with decided disapproval. “Bedad now, Mrs Connor,” he said, “there’d be no sinse in tellin’ him any such things. For in the first place he wouldn’t mind a word of it, and in the next place—goodness may pity you, woman, but sure you wouldn’t be wishful to see him comin’ back to you after playin’ the poltroon, and behavin’ himself discreditable?”

“Troth and I would,” said Mrs Connor. “If he was twinty poltroons. All the behavin’ I want of him’s to be bringin’ himself home. Who’s any the betther for the killin’ and slaughterin’? The heart’s weary in me doubtin’ will I ever get a sight of him agin. That’s all I’m thinkin’ of, tellin’ you the truth, and if I said anythin’ diff’rint it ’ud be a lie.”

“He might bring home a trifle of honour and glory, and no harm done,” Mr Mulcahy urged. But Mrs Connor said: “Glory be bothered”; and in the end he only so far modified his instructions as to substitute for her more detailed injunctions a vague general order to “be takin’ care of himself.”

It may perhaps be considered another righteous judgment upon this most un-Spartan mother, that while these precautions of hers were entirely neglected, little of the honour and glory which she had flouted did attend the fate of her Terry. He was shot through the lungs by a rifle posted a mile or two distant from the dusty hillock on which he dropped, and where he lay gasping and choking for what seemed to him a vastly long time, before the night fell suddenly dark and cold, and not to pass away. As this particular casualty was not discovered till the next morning, his name did not appear on the list which Barny Keogh spelled over to the Widdy Connor a few days later, and at the end of which she said fervently: “Thanks be to the great God. There’s no sign of himself in it.” But on the very next evening, a half line in the Freeman ran: “Add to Killed: Private T. Connor;” and when Peter Egan down below at Donnell’s read it out by chance, the widdy, listening, felt as if she had just wakened up into a dim sort of nightmare. All the more she felt so, because everybody round her was saying: “May the Lord have mercy on his soul,” as if anybody could believe that Terry had really become to them a subject for such pious ejaculations. So she hurried back through the wide spaces of the bleak March gloaming to her little, silent house, where she shut herself in to sleep off her dream. But it woke up with her in the grey of the early dawning.

Lady Winifred’s Captain was killed about the same time as Terry Connor, and, like him, without anything specially glorious in the circumstances of his death. Rather the contrary. The occasion of it was a minor disaster to the arms of his side—a check, a reverse—over which it could not be but that someone had blundered. In point of fact a highly-distinguished General, dictating a draft report of the same to his discreet Secretary, had expressed an opinion that the regrettable incident had been brought about by want of judgment on the part of the commanding officer, the late Captain O’Reilly, when the younger man coughed significantly, and casually remarked: “Ah, O’Reilly—he married one of Lord Astermount’s daughters—the third, I think, Lady Winifred, a little fair girl. Her people didn’t like the match at all, I believe, but still—” His chief appeared scarcely to notice the observation: but Captain O’Reilly’s want of judgment was not mentioned in despatches.

IV

When their world came to an end for the widow, Lady Winifred O’Reilly, and the widow, Katty Connor, the bog-land was just beginning to turn springwards, and everything on it stirred under the strengthening sunshine. Round about the Big House the birds, who now despised breadcrumbs because other food wriggled abundantly in the dewy grass, sang much and gleefully in the fresh mornings, and through the long golden light as it ebbed off the lawn. But Lady Winifred, looking out no more for letters, sought a refuge from it all in the bookroom, which was a dusky brown place in the brightest hours. There she sat on the floor in a corner before a far-stretching row of Annual Registers, and read them volume by volume. She had chosen this course of study just as she might have chosen the top of an adjacent rubbish heap in a suddenly surging flood. Steadily through she read them without skipping—History of Europe—Chronicle—State Papers—Characters—Useful Projects, even when they included the specification of Dr Higgen’s patent for a newly-invented water cement or stucco—Poetry, even when it was by the Laureate William Whitehead. That is to say, her eyes travelled down and down the double columns where the faded ink was less distinct than the damp stains which mottled the margin. It may be doubted whether they conveyed many thoughts to her brain, but they blocked the way to others. One of the most definite impressions she received was a feeling of resentment towards those persons who were recorded to have lived a hundred years and upwards in full possession of all their faculties.

One showery afternoon in the last days of May, Lady Winifred was interrupted in the middle of the events of the year 1783 by the entrance of Rose Ahern, the housemaid, who came to take leave of her. Rose, who was now summoned home to tend an invalided mother, had lived longer at the Big House than its mistress, and often remarked these times that “anybody’d be annoyed to see her mopin’, and the two of them that gay and plisant together only a half twelve-month back.” On this occasion, having repeatedly said: “So good-bye to you kindly, me lady, and may God lave your Ladyship your health,” she continued inconsistently to linger in her place, making small sounds and movements designed to attract attention. But Lady Winifred had reverted to her volume twenty-six, and was inaccessible to any save point-blank address. At last Rose went almost to the door, and turned round to say: “I beg your pardon, me lady—beggin’ your Ladyship’s pardon—but what colour might the Master’s uniform be, me lady? None of us ever seen his Honour wearin’ it, it so happens.”

“It was scarlet, I believe,” Lady Winifred said, continuing to look at the pages. “Oh, yes, scarlet.”

“There now, didn’t I tell Thady so?” said Rose. “And he standin’ me out ’twas blue it was, the way it couldn’t ha’ been him we seen; and declarin’ ’twas apter to be poor Terry Connor, thinkin’ of his mother. But sure it’s a good step to her house from where we seen him—whoever he was—last night.”

“Saw him last night,” Lady Winifred said, looking up (“And indeed now,” Rose averred afterwards, “’twas like openin’ a crack of a window—her eyes shinin’ out of the dark corner”). “Oh, Rose, what are you saying?”

“’Deed, then, maybe I’m talkin’ like a fool, me lady,” said Rose, “and you’ve no call to be mindin’ me. Only when I was seein’ me brother Thady down to the back gate last night, there was somebody in a red coat at the far end of the Windin’ Walk, there was so, and a big man too. And this mornin’ I heard several sayin’ there did be a soldier seen in it this while since of an evenin’. But sorra a one’s stoppin’ anywheres next or nigh Clonmalroan. It’s the quare long step he’s apt to have come—between us and harm. And I dunno what should be bringin’ poor Terry Connor there, instead of to his own little place; but the poor Master always had a great wish for the Windin’ Walk. Many a time have I seen him meself smokin’ up and down it, before ever he got married; and last year he was a dale in it along with yourself, me lady, lookin’ after the wee bushes plantin’—beggin’ your Ladyship’s pardon. And all the while very belike it might ha’ been just a shadow under the moonlight; only red it was, that’s sartin. But people do be talkin’ foolish, your Ladyship. And may God lave your Ladyship your health. It was as like as not to be nothin’ at all.”

“Oh, very likely,” Lady Winifred said, indifferently, “nothing at all.”

V

But that evening she left the house once more. She had intended to wait until dusk, but its slow oncoming wore out her patience, and there were still rich gleams and glows receding among the furthest tree trunks when she stole forth into the open air. It breathed freshly fragrant on her, after her many weeks in the mouldering mustiness of the bookroom, and the blackbirds were singing with notes clear as the gathering dews and mellow as the westering light. The season was now the late autumn of spring, when most blossoms are falling, though the young leaves are yet in their first luminous green. On the lawn the laburnums and thorn bushes stood with their outlines enamelled on the grass in gold and pearl and pink coral. Along the shaded avenue and shrubbery paths lay softly drifts of dimmer blossoms and blossom dust, in faint ambers and russets and crimsons. But the white plumes of the Guelder roses were still glimmering ghostly above her head as she went by, and some of the firs were studded all over with little pale-yellow tapers like wild Christmas trees.

Lady Winifred was going towards the back gate, and presently came where the Winding Walk, under a dense canopy of evergreens, runs parallel with the avenue, on the right hand, and on the left within hearing of the fretted, rocky stream in the bit of a glen below. Once between the screening laurels and junipers, you could see, however, only up and down short curves of the waving path. About midway in it was a rustic wooden seat, niched in a recess of the shrubs, and Lady Winifred intended to sit down there and wait and watch. But when she reached it, she found it already occupied by someone who had also been watching, as was clearly seen in the look that leaped forward to meet the newcomer, and at sight recoiled again. In this tall woman, with a black shawl over frosted dark hair, Lady Winifred recognised the Widow Connor concerning whom, ages ago, before the days of the Annual Registers, she half remembered to have heard about the loss of a soldier son. The older widow was rising up with many apologies for the boldness of slipping in there, never thinking any of the family would be coming out; and she would have gone away, but the other hastened to sit down beside her, and kept a hand on her shawl. “I won’t stay myself unless you do,” said Lady Winifred. “I only came out because it was so warm,” she explained, as she had been explaining to herself, “and such a fine evening.”

“Tellin’ you the truth, me lady,” said the Widdy Connor, “me poor Terry himself would sometimes be smokin’ a pipe in here of an evenin’ when there was nobody about. I was tellin’ him he’d a right to not be makin’ so free—but sure, after all, he done no harm. There’s great shelter under the shrubberies when the weather does be soft—and be the same token, we do be gettin’ a little shower this minyit, me lady; that’s what’s rustlin’ in the laves. So ’twould be nathural enough if Terry was mindin’ the place. But trespassin’ or annoyin’ the family now, he’d never be intendin’. Just comin’ of an odd evenin’ he might be, the way he used. Anyhow Paudeen Nolan and Jim M‘Kenna was positive ’twas him they seen, and they all goin’ home from the hurley match. The other lads said diff’rint; but that Anthony Martin’s a big stookawn, and his brother’s as blind as the owls. Nor I wouldn’t go be what Rose Ahern says—”

“Rose has very good sight,” said Lady Winifred.

“Ah, then you’re after hearin’ the talk, me lady?” said the widow. “Faix now, they’d no call to be tellin’ you wrong, and bringin’ you out under the wet for nothin’, to get your death of cold. Because Terry it was, whatever they may say. But there’s wonderful foolishness in people. For some of them says they wouldn’t believe any such a thing; so what woula they believe at all? And more of them says it’s a bad sign for anybody to be walkin’ that way. And what badness is there in it, if a lad would be takin’ a look at a place he had a likin’ for, and where he might get a chance of seein’ his frinds? And it’s the quare sort of unluckiness ’twould be for one of them to git a sight of him, if ’twas only goin’ by, and ne’er a word out of him. That’s what I was sayin’ this mornin’ to ould Theresa Joyce. For says she to me: ‘It’s unlucky,’ says she. ‘And you’d do betther to be wishin’ he’d bide paiceable wherever he is, till yourself comes along to him,’ says she. But it’s aisy for Theresa Joyce to be talkin’, and she as ould as a crow. She can’t be livin’ any great while longer, so I was sayin’ to her; and it’s somethin’ else she’d be wishin’ if she’d no more age on her than meself. Sure I was reckonin’ up, me lady, accordin’ to things that happint, and at the most I can make it I’m short of fifty years. That’s lavin’ a terrible long time to be contintin’ oneself in.”

“And I’m twenty,” said Lady Winifred.

“Well, now the Lord may pity you, and may goodness forgive me,” the widow said compunctiously as if she had somehow been an accomplice of this cruel fate, and were all at once smitten with remorse. She seemed to ponder for a while deeply, and at last said: “If be any odd chance it isn’t Terry after all, and only the Captain—I won’t be grudgin’ it to her; no, the crathur, I will not.”

Thereupon silence continued long between the two watchers, and nothing befell them except that their blackness was gradually softened into the shadows as cobweb-coloured dusk enmeshed them.

Then there came a moment when the older woman saw the younger start, and, quivering like a bough after it has bent to a waft of wind, look fixedly in one direction. “In the name of God, do you see anythin’, me lady?” Widdy Connor whispered, and as she spoke she saw too. For a small rent in the straggling laurel on their right made a spy-hole, which brought within view a curve of the Winding Walk near its gate end, many yards away, and there, moving and glimpsing in the twilight, from which it seemed to have absorbed the last lingering brightness, went a gleam of scarlet. It was coming towards the seat, and the faces turned that way looked as if a white moonbeam had fallen across them. Almost immediately branches rustled close by, and out into the path a girl hooded with a fawn-coloured shawl stepped warily on the left hand, and stood poising herself for a swift dart past the recess, unintercepted if not unobserved. Lady Winifred could not have noticed the leap of an ambushed tiger; but her companion sprang up and caught the girl by the wrist. “Norah Grehan,” said the widow. “And who at all are you watching for this night? Me son Terry was spakin’ to ne’er a girl, I well know. He’d have told me, so he would. Who are you lookin’ to see?”

“Och, Mrs Connor, ma’am, lave go of me,” the girl said, twisting her arm and struggling. “And don’t let on to anybody that you seen me, or there’ll be murdher. It’s Jack M‘Donnell that’s waitin’ for me below there. He that listed about Christmas, and now they’re sendin’ him to the war. He and me are spakin’ this good while back, unbeknownst, be raison of me father makin’ up a match for me wid some other man; I dunno who he is, but I won’t have him, not if he owned all the bastes that ever ran on four legs. So I do be slippin’ across the steppin’-stones of an evenin’ for to get a word with Jack, that comes over the bog from the dear knows how far beyant Lisconnel. And if they knew up at the farm I’d be kilt.”

“And maybe the best thing could happen you,” said the widow.

“Ah, don’t say so, woman dear. He’ll be comin’ back one of these days for sure, a corporal maybe, or a sargint, with lave to marry. And he’s plannin’ to conthrive for me to be livin’ wid his mother’s sisther in Sligo till then, the way they won’t get me married on him while he’s gone—no fear. He’ll be tellin’ me about it to-night—and bedad there he is whistlin’ to me. Ah, let me go, Mrs Connor; but whisht, like a good woman,” said the girl, wrenching herself free, and speeding away between the half visible dark foliage.

Then Lady Winifred, who had heard the last part of this colloquy, got up also and said: “I think I’ll go home now. It’s a very pleasant evening, but the air feels rather cold.”

“’Deed now you’d a right to not be out under the rain, wid nothin’ on the head of you, me lady, but the little muslin cap,” said the widow, and added as Lady Winifred went: “And, troth, it’s the cruel pity to see the likes of her wearin’ any such a thing, ay indeed is it. Nora Grehan and Jack M‘Donnell, sure now the two of them’s at the beginnin’, and she’s at the endin’. But there’s an endin’ in every beginnin’, and maybe, plase God, there’s a beginnin’ in every endin’.”

Lady Winifred, meanwhile, was not pitying herself. As she walked slowly back to her empty Big House, along paths odorous with the rain whose drops began to pierce their leafiest roofs, she felt again a stunned disappointment, only vaguer and more chilling than the overdue letter had caused her. And there were no little birds about now to mock her into keener consciousness. After all, things were just as they had been when she set out, no worse surely, and how could they be better, except in a dream? But a dream she might have before to-morrow came, and brought back her long day in the brown bookroom with the companionship of the Annual Registers. There were still so many unread of the dusty volumes, clasped with blackish cob-webs, made ghastly now and then by the shrivelled skeleton of the dead spinster. She need not yet consider what she should do when they were all finished.

As the Widdy Connor went towards her little silent house, she was saying to herself: “Jack M‘Donnell bedad! Sure the height of him isn’t widin the breadth of me hand of Terry; everybody knows that. It’s my belief ’twasn’t Jack they seen that time at all. They couldn’t ha’ mistook him for Terry, the tallest lad in this counthryside.... And says I to Theresa Joyce: ‘The heart of me did be leppin’ up wid pride every time I’d see him have to stoop his head, comin’ in to me at our little low door. But it’s lower his head’s lyin’ now,’ says I, ‘low enough it’s lyin’,’ And says she to me: ‘If ’twas ever so low, the heart of you’ll be leppin’ up twice as high wid joy and plisure,’ says she, ‘the next time you behould him.’ But, ah sure, it’s aisy talkin’. I’ll see him come stoopin’ in at it no more.”