“This case,” announced Mr. Heraty judicially yet not without a glance at the visitors, “is a demand for compensation in the matter of a sheep that was drowned. William”—this to the interpreter—“ask Darcy what he has to say for himself?”
Darcy hitched himself round, still with a shoulder propped against the partition, and uttered, without any enthusiasm, a few nasal and guttural sentences.
“He says, yer worship,” said William, with unctuous propriety, “that Sweeny’s gorsoons were ever and always hunting his sheep, and settin’ on their dog to hunt her, and that last week they dhrove her into the lake and dhrownded her altogether.”
“Now,” said Mr. Heraty, in a conversational tone, “William, when ye employ the word ‘gorsoon,’ do ye mean children of the male or female sex?”
“Well, yer worship,” replied William, who, it may incidentally be mentioned, was himself in need of either an interpreter or of a new and complete set of teeth, “I should considher he meant ayther the one or the other.”
“They’re usually one or the other,” said Doctor Lyden solemnly, and in a stupendous brogue. It was the first time he had spoken; he leaned back, with his hands in his pockets, and surveyed with quiet but very bright eyes the instant grin that illumined the faces of the tapestry.
“Sure William himself is no bad judge of gorsoons,” said Mr. Heraty. “Hadn’t he a christening in his own house three weeks ago?”
At this excursion into the family affairs of the interpreter the grin broke into a roar.
“See now, we’ll ask Mr. Byrne, the schoolmaster,” went on Mr. Heraty with owl-like gravity. “Isn’t that Mr. Byrne that I see back there in the coort? Come forward, Mr. Byrne!”
Thus adjured, a tall, spectacled man emerged from the crowd, and, beaming with a pleasing elderly bashfulness through his spectacles, gave it as his opinion that though gorsoon was a term usually applied to the male child, it was equally applicable to the female. “But, indeed,” he concluded, “the Bench has as good Irish as I have myself, and better.”
“The law requires that the thransactions of this coort shall take place in English,” the Chairman responded, “and we have also the public to consider.”
As it was pretty certain that we were the only persons in the court who did not understand Irish, it was borne in upon us that we were the public, and we appreciated the consideration.
“We may assume, then, that the children that set on the dog wor’ of both sexes,” proceeded Mr. Heraty. “Well, now, as to the dog— William, ask Darcy what sort of dog was it.”
The monotonous and quiet Irish sentences followed one another again.
“That’ll do. Now, William—”
“He says, yer worship, that he was a big lump of a yalla dog, an’ very cross, by reason of he r’arin’ a pup.”
“And ’twas to make mutton-broth for the pup she dhrove Darcy’s sheep in the lake, I suppose?”
A contemptuous smile passed over Darcy’s face as the Chairman’s sally was duly translated to him, and he made a rapid reply.
“He says there isn’t one of the neighbours but got great annoyance by the same dog, yer worship, and that when the dog’d be out by night hunting, there wouldn’t be a yard o’ wather in the lakes but he’d have it barked over.”
“It appears,” observed Dr. Lyden serenely, “that the dog, like the gorsoons, was of both sexes.”
“Well, well, no matther now; we’ll hear what the defendant has to say. Swear Sweeny!” said Mr. Heraty, smoothing his long grey beard, with suddenly remembered judicial severity and looking menacingly over his spectacles at Sweeny. “Here, now! you don’t want an interpreter! You that has a sisther married to a stationmaster and a brother in the Connaught Rangers!”
“I have as good English as anny man in this coort,” said Sweeny morosely.
“Well, show it off man! What defence have ye?”
“I say that the sheep wasn’t Darcy’s at all,” said Sweeny firmly, standing as straight as a ramrod, with his hands behind his back, a picture of surly, wronged integrity. “And there’s no man livin’ can prove she was. Ask him now what way did he know her?”
The question evidently touched Darcy on a tender point. He squared his big shoulders in his white flannel jacket, and turning his face for the first time towards the magistrates delivered a flood of Irish, in which we heard a word that sounded like ullán often repeated.
“He says, yer worships,” translated William, “why wouldn’t he know her! Hadn’t she the ullán on her! He says a poor man like him would know one of the few sheep he has as well as yer worship’d know one o’ yer own gowns if it had sthrayed from ye.”
It is probable that we looked some of the stupefaction that we felt at this remarkable reference to Mr. Heraty’s wardrobe.
“For the benefit of the general public,” said Dr. Lyden, in his languid, subtle brogue, with a side-glance at that body, “it may be no harm to mention that the plaintiff is alluding to the Chairman’s yearling calves and not to his costume.”
“Order now!” said Mr. Heraty severely.
“An’ he says,” continued William, warily purging his frog-countenance of any hint of appreciation, “that Sweeny knew the ullán that was on her as well as himself did.”
“Ullán! What sort of English is that for an interpreter to be using! Do ye suppose the general public knows what is an ullán?” interrupted Mr. Heraty with lightning rapidity. “Explain that now!”
“Why, yer worship, sure anny one in the world’d know what the ullán on a sheep’s back is!” said William, staggered by this sudden onslaught, “though there’s some might call it the rebugh.”
“God help the Government that’s payin’ you wages!” said Mr. Heraty with sudden and bitter ferocity (but did we intercept a wink at his colleague?). “If it wasn’t for the young family you’re r’arin’ in yer old age, I’d commit ye for contempt of coort!”
A frank shout of laughter, from every one in court but the victim, greeted this sally, the chorus being, as it were, barbed by a shrill crow of whooping-cough.
“Mr. Byrne!” continued Mr. Heraty without a smile, “we must call upon you again!”
Mr. Byrne’s meek scholastic face once more appeared at the rood-screen.
“Well, I should say,” he ventured decorously, “that the expression is locally applied to what I may call a plume or a feather that is worn on various parts of the sheep’s back, for a mark, as I might say, of distinction.”
“Thank you, Mr. Byrne, thank you,” said Mr. Heraty, to whose imagination a vision of a plumed or feathered sheep seemed to offer nothing unusual, “remember that now, William!”
Dr. Lyden looked at his watch.
“Don’t you think Sweeny might go on with his defence?” he remarked. “About the children, Sweeny—how many have ye?”
“I have four.”
“And how old are they?”
“There’s one o’ thim is six years an another o’ thim is seven—”
“Yes, and the other two eight and nine, I suppose?” commented Dr. Lyden.
The defendant remained silent.
“Do ye see now how well he began with the youngest—the way we’d think ’twas the eldest!” resumed Dr. Lyden. “I think we may assume that a gorsoon—male or female—of eight or nine years is capable of setting a dog on the sheep.”
Here Darcy spoke again.
“He says,” interpreted William, “there isn’t pig nor ass, sheep nor duck, belongin’ to him that isn’t heart-scalded with the same childhren an’ their dog.”
“Well, I say now, an’ I swear it,” said Sweeny, his eye kindling like a coal, and his voice rising as the core of what was probably an old neighbourly grudge was neared, “my land is bare from his bastes threspassing on it, and my childhren are in dread to pass his house itself with the kicks an’ the sthrokes himself an’ his mother dhraws on them! The Lord Almighty knows—”
“Stop now!” said Mr. Heraty, holding up his hand. “Stop! The Lord’s not intherferin’ in this case at all! It’s me an’ Doctor Lyden has it to settle.”
No one seemed to find anything surprising in this pronouncement; it was accepted as seriously as any similar statement of the Prophet Samuel to the Children of Israel, and was evidently meant to imply that abstract justice might be expected.
“We may assume, then,” said Dr. Lyden amiably, “that the sheep walked out into Sweeny’s end of the lake and drowned herself there on account of the spite there was between the two families.”
The court tittered. A dingy red showed itself among the grizzled hairs and wrinkles on Sweeny’s cheek. In Ireland a point can often be better carried by sarcasm than by logic.
“She was blind enough to dhrown herself, or two like her!” he said angrily; “she was that owld and blind it was ayqual to her where she’d go!”
“How d’ye know she was blind?” said Mr. Heraty quickly.
“I thought the defence opened with the statement that it wasn’t Darcy’s sheep at all,” put in Dr. Lyden, leaning back in his chair with his eyes fixed on the rafters.
Sweeny firmly regarded Mr. Heraty.
“How would I know she was blind?” he repeated. “Many’s the time when she’d be takin’ a sthroll in on my land I’d see her fallin’ down in the rocks, she was that blind! An’ didn’t I see Darcy’s mother one time, an’ she puttin’ something on her eyes.”
“Was it glasses she was putting on the sheep’s eyes?” suggested the Chairman, with a glance that admitted the court to the joke.
“No, but an ointment,” said Sweeny stubbornly. “I seen her rubbing it to the eyes, an’ she no more than thirty yards from me.”
“Will ye swear that?” thundered Mr. Heraty; “will you swear that at a distance of thirty yards you could tell what was between Darcy’s mother’s fingers and the sheep’s eyes? No you will not! Nor no man could! William, is Darcy’s mother in the coort? We’ll have to take evidence from her as to the condition of the sheep’s eyes!”
“Darcy says, yer worship, that his mother would lose her life if she was to be brought into coort,” explained William, after an interlude in Irish, to which both magistrates listened with evident interest; “that ere last night a frog jumped into the bed to her in the night, and she got out of the bed to light the Blessed Candle, and when she got back to the bed again she was in it always between herself and the wall, an’ she got a wakeness out of it, and great cold—”
“Are ye sure it wasn’t the frog got the wakeness?” asked Dr. Lyden.
A gale of laughter swept round the court.
“Come, come!” said Mr. Heraty; “have done with this baldherdash! William, tell Darcy some one must go fetch his mother, for as wake as she is she could walk half a mile!” Mr. Heraty here drew forth an enormous white pocket-handkerchief and trumpeted angrily in its depths.
Darcy raised his small blue eyes with their thick lashes, and took a look at his judge. There was a gabbled interchange of Irish between him and the interpreter.
“He says she could not, yer worship, nor as much as one perch.”
“Ah, what nonsense is this!” said Mr. Heraty testily; “didn’t I see the woman meself at Mass last Sunday?”
Darcy’s reply was garnished with a good deal more gesticulation than usual, and throughout his speech the ironic smile on Sweeny’s face was a masterpiece of quiet expression.
“He says,” said William, “that surely she was at Mass last Sunday, the same as your worship says, but ’twas on the way home that she was taking a wall, and a stone fell on her and hurted her finger and the boot preyed on it, and it has her desthroyed.”
At this culmination of the misadventures of Mrs. Darcy the countenances of the general public must again have expressed some of the bewilderment that they felt.
“Perhaps William will be good enough to explain,” said Dr. Lyden, permitting a faint smile to twitch the foxy moustache, “how Mrs. Darcy’s boot affected her finger?”
William’s skinny hand covered his frog mouth with all a deserving schoolboy’s embarrassment at being caught out in a bad translation.
“I beg yer worships’ pardon,” he said, in deep confusion, “but sure your worships know as well as meself that in Irish we have the one word for your finger or your toe.”
“There’s one thing I know very well anyhow,” said Dr. Lyden, turning to his colleague, “I’ve no more time to waste sitting here talking about old Kit Darcy’s fingers and toes! Let the two o’ them get arbitrators and settle it out of court. There’s nothing between them now only the value of the sheep.”
“Sure I was satisfied to leave it to arbithration, but Darcy wasn’t willin’.” This statement was Sweeny’s.
“So you were willin’ to have arbithration before you came into coort at all?” said Mr. Heraty, eyeing the tall defendant with ominous mildness. “William, ask Darcy is this the case.”
Darcy’s reply, delivered with a slow, sarcastic smile, provoked a laugh from the audience.
“Oh, ho! So that was the way, was it!” cried Mr. Heraty, forgetting to wait for the translation. “Ye had your wife’s cousin to arbithrate! Small blame to Darcy he wasn’t willin’! It’s a pity ye didn’t say your wife herself should arbithrate when ye went about it! You would hardly believe the high opinion Sweeny here has of his wife,” continued the Chairman in illuminative excursus to Dr. Lyden; “sure he had all the women wild below at my shop th’ other night sayin’ his wife was the finest woman in Ireland! Upon my soul he had!”
“If I said that,” growled the unfortunate Sweeny, “it was a lie for me.”
“Don’t ye think it might be a good thing now,” suggested the indefatigable doctor, in his mournful tuneful voice, “to call a few witnesses to give evidence as to whether Mrs. Michael Sweeny is the finest woman in Ireland or no?”
“God knows, gentlemen, it’s a pity ye haven’t more to do this day,” said Sweeny, turning at length upon his tormentors, “I’d sooner pay the price of the sheep than be losin’ me time here this way.”
“See, now, how we’re getting to the rights of it in the latter end,” commented Dr. Lyden imperturbably. “Sweeny began here by saying”—he checked off each successive point on his fingers—“that the sheep wasn’t Darcy’s at all. Then he said that his children of eight and nine years of age were too young to set the dog on the sheep. Then, that if the dog hunted her it was no more than she deserved for constant trespass. Then he said that the sheep was so old and blind that she committed suicide in his end of the lake in order to please herself and to spite him; and, last of all, he tells us that he offered to compensate Darcy for her before he came into court at all!”
“And on top of that,” Mr. Heraty actually rose in his seat in his exquisite appreciation of the position, “on top of that, mind you, after he has the whole machinery of the law and the entire population of Letterbeg attending on him for a matter o’ two hours, he informs us that we’re wasting his valuable time!”
Mr. Heraty fixed his eyes in admirable passion—whether genuine or not we are quite incapable of pronouncing—upon Sweeny, who returned the gaze with all the gloom of an unfortunate but invincibly respectable man.
Dr. Lyden once more pulled out his watch.
“It might be as well for us,” he said languidly, “to enter upon the inquiry as to the value of the sheep. That should take about another three-quarters of an hour. William, ask Darcy the price he puts on the sheep.”
Every emotion has its limits. We received with scarce a stirring of surprise the variations of sworn testimony as to the value of the sheep. Her price ranged from one pound, claimed by Darcy and his adherents, to sixpence, at which sum her skin was unhesitatingly valued by Sweeny. Her age swung like a pendulum between two years and fourteen, and, finally, in crowning proof of her worth and general attractiveness, it was stated that her own twin had been sold for fifteen shillings to the police at Dhulish, “ere last week”. At this re-entrance into the case of the personal element Mr. Heraty’s spirits obviously rose.
“I think we ought to have evidence about this,” he said, fixing the police officer with a dangerous eye. “Mr. Cox, have ye anny of the Dhulish police here?”
Mr. Cox, whose only official act up to the present had been the highly beneficial one of opening the window, admitted with a grin that two of the Dhulish men were in the court.
“Well, then!” continued the Chairman, “Mr. Cox, maybe ye’d kindly desire them to step forward in order that the court may be able to estimate from their appearance the nutritive qualities of the twin sisther of Darcy’s sheep.”
At this juncture we perceived, down near the crowded doorway, two tall and deeply embarrassed members of the R.I.C. hastily escaping into the street.
“Well, well; how easy it is to frighten the police!” remarked the Chairman, following them with a regretful eye. “I suppose, afther all, we’d betther put a price on the sheep and have done with it. In my opinion, when there’s a difficulty like this—what I might call an accident—between decent men like these (for they’re both decent men, and I’ve known them these years), I’d say both parties should share what hardship is in it. Now, doctor, what shall we give Darcy? I suppose if we gave him 8s. compensation and 2s. costs we’d not be far out?”
Dr. Lyden, already in the act of charging his pipe, nodded his head.
Sweeny began to fumble in his pockets, and draw ing out a brownish rag, possibly a handkerchief, knotted in several places, proceeded to untie one of the knots. The doctor watched him without speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose attitude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book with an aggressively business-like air.
“Well, that’s all right,” remarked Dr. Lyden, getting lazily on his legs and looking round for his hat; “it’s a funny thing, but I notice that the defendant brought the exact sum required into court with him.”
“I did! And I’m able to bring more than it, thanks be to God!” said Sweeny fiercely, with all the offended pride of his race. “I have two pounds here this minute—”
“If that’s the way with ye, may be ye’d like us to put a bigger fine on ye!” broke in Mr. Heraty hotly, in instant response to Sweeny’s show of temper.
Dr. Lyden laughed for the first time.
“Mr. Heraty’s getting cross now, in the latter end,” he murmured explanatorily to the general public, while he put on an overcoat, from the pocket of which protruded the Medusa coils of a stethoscope.
Long before the arrival of the mail-car that was to take us away, the loafers and the litigants had alike been swallowed up, apparently by the brown, hungry hillsides; possibly also, some of them, by Mr. Heraty’s tap-room. Again we clambered to our places among the inevitable tourists and their inevitable bicycles, again the laden car lumbered heavily yet swiftly along the bog roads that quivered under its weight, while the water in the black ditches on either side quivered in sympathy. The tourists spoke of the vast loneliness, unconscious of the intricate network of social life that lay all around them, beyond their ken, far beyond their understanding. They spoke authoritatively of Irish affairs; mentioned that the Irish were “a bit ’ot tempered,” but added that “all they wanted was fair play”.
They had probably been in Ireland for a week or fortnight. They had come out of business centres in England, equipped with circular tickets, with feeling hearts, and with the belief that two and two inevitably make four; whereas in Ireland two and two are just as likely to make five, or three, and are still more likely to make nothing at all.
Never will it be given to them to understand the man of whom our friend Sweeny was no more than a type. How can they be expected to realise that a man who is decorous in family and village life, indisputably God-fearing, kind to the poor, and reasonably honest, will enmesh himself in a tissue of sworn lies before his fellows for the sake of half a sovereign and a family feud, and that his fellows will think none the worse of him for it.
These things lie somewhere near the heart of the Irish problem.
The story begins at the moment when my brother Robert and I had made our final arrangements for the expedition. These were considerable. Robert is a fisherman who takes himself seriously (which perhaps is fortunate, as he rarely seems to take anything else), and his paraphernalia does credit to his enthusiasm, if not to his judgment. For my part, being an amateur artist, I had strapped together a collection of painting materials that would enable me to record my inspiration in oil, watercolour, or pastel, as the spirit might move me. We had ordered a car from Coolahan’s public-house in the village; an early lunch was imminent.
The latter depended upon Julia; in fact it would be difficult to mention anything at Wavecrest Cottage that did not depend on Julia. We, who were but strangers and sojourners (the cottage with the beautiful name having been lent to us, with Julia, by an Aunt), felt that our very existence hung upon her clemency. How much more then luncheon, at the revolutionary hour of a quarter to one? Even courageous people are afraid of other people’s servants, and Robert and I were far from being courageous. Possibly this is why Julia treated us with compassion, even with kindness, especially Robert.
“Ah, poor Masther Robert!” I have heard her say to a friend in the kitchen, who was fortunately hard of hearing, “ye wouldn’t feel him in the house no more than a feather! An’ indeed, as for the two o’ thim, sich gallopers never ye seen! It’s hardly they’d come in the house to throw the wet boots off thim! Thim’d gallop the woods all night like the deer!”
At half-past twelve, all, as I have said, being in train, I went to the window to observe the weather, and saw a covered car with a black horse plodding along the road that separated Wavecrest Cottage from the seashore. At our modest entrance gates it drew up, and the coachman climbed from his perch with a dignity befitting his flowing grey beard and the silver band on his hat.
A covered car is a vehicle peculiar to the south of Ireland; it resembles a two-wheeled waggonette with a windowless black box on top of it. Its mouth is at the back, and it has the sinister quality of totally concealing its occupants until the irrevocable moment when it is turned and backed against your front door steps. For this moment my brother Robert and I did not wait. A short passage and a flight of steps separated us from the kitchen; beyond the steps, and facing the kitchen door, a door opened into the garden. Robert slipped up heavily in the passage as we fled, but gained the garden door undamaged. The hall door bell pealed at my ear; I caught a glimpse of Julia, pounding chops with the rolling pin.
“Say we’re out,” I hissed to her—“gone out for the day! We are going into the garden!”
“Sure ye needn’t give yerself that much trouble,” replied Julia affably, as she snatched a grimy cap off a nail.
Nevertheless, in spite of the elasticity of Julia’s conscience, the garden seemed safer.
In the garden, a plot of dense and various vegetation, decorated with Julia’s lingerie, we awaited the sound of the departing wheels. But nothing departed. The breathless minutes passed, and then, through the open drawing-room window, we were aware of strange voices. The drawing-room window overlooked the garden thoroughly and commandingly. There was not a moment to lose. We plunged into the raspberry canes, and crouched beneath their embowered arches, and the fulness of the situation began to sink into our souls.
Through the window we caught a glimpse of a white beard and a portly black suit, of a black bonnet and a dolman that glittered with jet, of yet another black bonnet.
With Aunt Dora’s house we had taken on, as it were, her practice, and the goodwill of her acquaintance. The Dean of Glengad and Mrs. Doherty were the very apex and flower of the latter, and in the party now installed in Aunt Dora’s drawing-room I unhesitatingly recognised them, and Mrs. Doherty’s sister, Miss McEvoy. Miss McEvoy was an elderly lady of the class usually described as being “not all there”. The expression, I imagine, implies a regret that there should not be more. As, however, what there was of Miss McEvoy was chiefly remarkable for a monstrous appetite and a marked penchant for young men, it seems to me mainly to be regretted that there should be as much of her as there is.
A drive of nine miles in the heat of a June morning is not undertaken without a sustaining expectation of luncheon at the end of it. There were in the house three mutton chops to meet that expectation. I communicated all these facts to my brother. The consternation of his face, framed in raspberry boughs, was a picture not to be lightly forgotten. At such a moment, with everything depending on sheer nerve and resourcefulness, to consign Julia to perdition was mere self-indulgence on his part, but I suppose it was inevitable. Here the door into the garden opened and Julia came forth, with a spotless apron and a face of elaborate unconcern. She picked a handful of parsley, her black eyes questing for us among the bushes; they met mine, and a glance more alive with conspiracy it has not been my lot to receive. She moved desultorily towards us, gathering green gooseberries in her apron.
“I told them the two o’ ye were out,” she murmured to the gooseberry bushes. “They axed when would ye be back. I said ye went to town on the early thrain and wouldn’t be back till night.”
Decidedly Julia’s conscience could stand alone.
“With that then,” she continued, “Miss McEvoy lands into the hall, an’ ‘O Letitia,’ says she, ‘those must be the gentleman’s fishing rods!’ and then ‘Julia!’ says she, ‘could ye give us a bit o’ lunch?’ That one’s the imp!”
“Look here!” said Robert hoarsely, and with the swiftness of panic, “I’m off! I’ll get out over the back wall.”
At this moment Miss McEvoy put her head out of the drawing-room window and scanned the garden searchingly. Without another word we glided through the raspberry arches like departing fairies in a pantomine. The kindly lilac and laurestina bushes grew tall and thick at the end of the garden; the wall was high, but, as is usual with fruit-garden walls, it had a well-worn feasible corner that gave on to the lane leading to the village. We flung ourselves over it, and landed breathless and dishevelled, but safe, in the heart of the bed of nettles that plumed the common village ash-heap. Now that we were able, temporarily at all events, to call our souls our own, we (or rather I) took further stock of the situation. Its horrors continued to sink in. Driven from home without so much as a hat to lay our heads in, separated from those we loved most (the mutton chops, the painting materials, the fishing tackle), a promising expedition of unusual charm cut off, so to speak, in the flower of its youth—these were the more immediately obvious of the calamities which we now confronted. I preached upon them, with Cassandra eloquence, while we stood, indeterminate, among the nettles.
“And what, I ask you,” I said perorating, “what on the face of the earth are we to do now?”
“Oh, it’ll be all right, my dear girl,” said Robert easily. Gratitude for his escape from the addresses of Miss McEvoy had apparently blinded him to the difficulties of the future. “There’s Coolahan’s pub. We’ll get something to eat there—you’ll see it’ll be all right.”
“But,” I said, picking my way after him among the rusty tins and the broken crockery, “the Coolahans will think we’re mad! We’ve no hats, and we can’t tell them about the Dohertys.”
“I don’t care what they think,” said Robert.
What Mrs. Coolahan may have thought, as we dived from the sunlight into her dark and porter-sodden shop, did not appear; what she looked was consternation.
“Luncheon!” she repeated with stupefaction, “luncheon! The dear help us, I have no luncheon for the like o’ ye!”
“Oh, anything will do,” said Robert cheerfully. His experiences at the London bar had not instructed him in the commissariat of his country.
“A bit of cold beef, or just some bread and cheese.”
Mrs. Coolahan’s bleared eyes rolled wildly to mine, as seeking sympathy and sanity.
“With the will o’ Pether!” she exclaimed, “how would I have cold beef? And as for cheese—!” She paused, and then, curiosity over-powering all other emotions. “What ails Julia Cronelly at all that your honour’s ladyship is comin’ to the like o’ this dirty place for your dinner?”
“Oh, Julia’s run away with a soldier!” struck in Robert brilliantly.
“Small blame to her if she did itself!” said Mrs. Coolahan, gallantly accepting the jest without a change of her enormous countenance, “she’s a long time waiting for the chance! Maybe ourselves’d go if we were axed! I have a nice bit of salt pork in the house,” she continued, “would I give your honours a rasher of it?”
Mrs. Coolahan had probably assumed that either Julia was incapably drunk, or had been dismissed without benefit of clergy; at all events she had recognised that diplomatically it was correct to change the conversation.
We adventured ourselves into the unknown recesses of the house, and sat gingerly on greasy horsehair-seated chairs, in the parlour, while the bubbling cry of the rasher and eggs arose to heaven from the frying-pan, and the reek filled the house as with a grey fog. Potent as it was, it but faintly foreshadowed the flavour of the massive slices that presently swam in briny oil on our plates. But we had breakfasted at eight; we tackled them with determination, and without too nice inspection of the three-pronged forks. We drank porter, we achieved a certain sense of satiety, that on very slight provocation would have broadened into nausea or worse. All the while the question remained in the balance as to what we were to do for our hats, and for the myriad baggage involved in the expedition.
We finally decided to write a minute inventory of what was indispensable, and to send it to Julia by the faithful hand of Mrs. Coolahan’s car-driver, one Croppy, with whom previous expeditions had placed us upon intimate terms. It would be necessary to confide the position to Croppy, but this we felt, could be done without a moment’s uneasiness.
By the malignity that governed all things on that troublous day, neither of us had a pencil, and Mrs. Coolahan had to be appealed to. That she had by this time properly grasped the position was apparent in the hoarse whisper in which she said, carefully closing the door after her:—
“The Dane’s coachman is inside!”
Simultaneously Robert and I removed ourselves from the purview of the door.
“Don’t be afraid,” said our hostess reassuringly, “he’ll never see ye—sure I have him safe back in the snug! Is it a writing pin ye want, Miss?” she continued, moving to the door. “Katty Ann! Bring me in the pin out o’ the office!”
The Post Office was, it may be mentioned, a department of the Coolahan public-house, and was managed by a committee of the younger members of the Coolahan family. These things are all, I believe, illegal, but they happen in Ireland. The committee was at present, apparently, in full session, judging by the flood of conversation that flowed in to us through the open door. The request for the pen caused an instant hush, followed at an interval by the slamming of drawers and other sounds of search.
“Ah, what’s on ye delaying this way?” said Mrs. Coolahan irritably, advancing into the shop. “Sure I seen the pin with Helayna this morning.”
At the moment all that we could see of the junior postmistress was her long bare shins, framed by the low-browed doorway, as she stood on the counter to further her researches on a top shelf.
“The Lord look down in pity on me this day!” said Mrs. Coolahan, in exalted and bitter indignation, “or on any poor creature that’s striving to earn her living and has the likes o’ ye to be thrusting to!”
We here attached ourselves to the outskirts of the search, which had by this time drawn into its vortex a couple of countrywomen with shawls over their heads, who had hitherto sat in decorous but observant stillness in the background. Katty Ann was rapidly examining tall bottles of sugar-stick, accustomed receptacles apparently for the pen. Helayna’s raven fringe showed traces of a dive into the flour-bin. Mrs. Coolahan remained motionless in the midst, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, an exposition of suffering and of eternal remoteness from the ungodly.
We were now aware for the first time of the presence of Mr. Coolahan, a taciturn person, with a blue-black chin and a gloomy demeanour.
“Where had ye it last?” he demanded.
“I seen Katty Ann with it in the cow-house, sir,” volunteered a small female Coolahan from beneath the flap of the counter.
Katty Ann, with a vindictive eye at the tell-tale, vanished.
“That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!” chanted Mrs. Coolahan. “Such a mee-aw! Such a thing to happen to me—the pure, decent woman! G’wout!” This, the imperative of the verb to retire, was hurtled at the tell-tale, who, presuming on her services, had incautiously left the covert of the counter, and had laid a sticky hand on her mother’s skirts.
“Only that some was praying for me,” pursued Mrs. Coolahan, “it might as well be the Inspector that came in the office, asking for the pin, an’ if that was the way we might all go under the sod! Sich a mee-aw!”
“Musha! Musha!” breathed, prayerfully, one of the shawled women.
At this juncture I mounted on an up-ended barrel to investigate a promising lair above my head, and from this altitude was unexpectedly presented with a bird’s-eye view of a hat with a silver band inside the railed and curtained “snug”. I descended swiftly, not without an impression of black bottles on the snug table, and Katty Ann here slid in from the search in the cow-house.
“’Twasn’t in it,” she whined, “nor I didn’t put it in it.”
“For a pinny I’d give ye a slap in the jaw!” said Mr. Coolahan with sudden and startling ferocity.
“That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!” reiterated Mrs. Coolahan, while the search spread upwards through the house.
“Look here!” said Robert abruptly, “this business is going on for a week. I’m going for the things myself.”
Neither I nor my remonstrances overtook him till he was well out into the street. There, outside the Coolahan door, was the Dean’s inside car, resting on its shafts; while the black horse, like his driver, restored himself elsewhere beneath the Coolahan roof. Robert paid no heed to its silent warning.
“I must go myself. If I had forty pencils I couldn’t explain to Julia the flies that I want!”
There comes, with the most biddable of men, a moment when argument fails, the moment of dead pull, when the creature perceives his own strength, and the astute will give in, early and imperceptibly, in order that he may not learn it beyond forgetting.
The only thing left to be done now was to accompany Robert, to avert what might be irretrievable disaster. It was now half-past one, and the three mutton chops and the stewed gooseberries must have long since yielded their uttermost to our guests. The latter would therefore have returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen. There remained between us and the house an open space of about fifteen yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which, however, the lace curtains met in reassuring stillness. We rushed the interval, and entered the house softly. Here we were instantly met by Julia, with her mouth full, and a cup of tea in her hand. She drew us into the kitchen.
“Where are they, Julia?” I whispered. “Have they had lunch?”
“Is it lunch?” replied Julia, through bread and butter; “there isn’t a bit in the house but they have it ate! And the eggs I had for the fast-day for myself, didn’t That One”—I knew this to indicate Miss McEvoy—“ax an omelette from me when she seen she had no more to get!”
“Are they out of the dining-room?” broke in Robert.
“Faith, they are. ’Twas no good for them to stay in it! That One’s lying up on the sofa in the dhrawing-room like any owld dog, and the Dane and Mrs. Doherty’s dhrinking hot water—they have bad shtomachs, the craytures.”
Robert opened the kitchen door and crept towards the dining-room, wherein, not long before the alarm, had been gathered all the essentials of the expedition. I followed him. I have never committed a burglary, but since the moment when I creaked past the drawing-room door, foretasting the instant when it would open, my sympathies are dedicated to burglars.
In two palpitating journeys we removed from the dining-room our belongings, and placed them in the kitchen; silence, fraught with dire possibilities, still brooded over the drawing-room. Could they all be asleep, or was Miss McEvoy watching us through the keyhole? There remained only my hat, which was upstairs, and at this, the last moment, Robert remembered his fly-book, left under the clock in the dining-room. I again passed the drawing-room in safety, and got upstairs, Robert effecting at the same moment his third entry into the dining-room. I was in the act of thrusting in the second hat pin when I heard the drawing-room door open. I admit that, obeying the primary instinct of self-preservation, my first impulse was to lock myself in; it passed, aided by the recollection that there was no key. I made for the landing, and from thence viewed, in a species of trance, Miss McEvoy crossing the hall and entering the dining-room. A long and deathly pause followed. She was a small woman; had Robert strangled her? After two or three horrible minutes a sound reached me, the well-known rattle of the side-board drawer. All then was well—Miss McEvoy was probably looking for the biscuits, and Robert must have escaped in time through the window. I took my courage in both hands and glided downstairs. As I placed my foot on the oilcloth of the hall, I was confronted by the nightmare spectacle of my brother creeping towards me on all-fours through the open door of the dining-room, and then, crowning this already over-loaded moment, there arose a series of yells from Miss McEvoy as blood-curdling as they were excusable, yet, as even in my maniac flight to the kitchen I recognised, something muffled by Marie biscuit.
It seems to me that the next incident was the composite and shattering collision of Robert, Julia and myself in the scullery doorway, followed by the swift closing of the scullery-door upon us by Julia; then the voice of the Dean of Glengad, demanding from the house at large an explanation, in a voice of cathedral severity. Miss McEvoy’s reply was to us about as coherent as the shrieks of a parrot, but we plainly heard Julia murmur in the kitchen:—
“May the devil choke ye!”
Then again the Dean, this time near the kitchen door. “Julia! Where is the man who was secreted under the dinner-table?”
I gripped Robert’s arm. The issues of life and death were now in Julia’s hands.
“Is it who was in the dining-room, your Reverence?” asked Julia, in tones of respectful honey; “sure that was the carpenter’s boy, that came to quinch a rat-hole. Sure we’re destroyed with rats.”
“But,” pursued the Dean, raising his voice to overcome Miss McEvoy’s continuous screams of explanation to Mrs. Doherty, “I understand that he left the room on his hands and knees. He must have been drunk!”
“Ah, not at all, your Reverence,” replied Julia, with almost compassionate superiority, “sure that poor boy is the gentlest crayture ever came into a house. I suppose ’tis what it was he was ashamed like when Miss McEvoy comminced to screech, and faith he never stopped nor stayed till he ran out of the house like a wild goose!”
We heard the Dean reascend the kitchen steps, and make a statement of which the words “drink” and “Dora” alone reached us. The drawing-room door closed, and in the release from tension I sank heavily down upon a heap of potatoes. The wolf of laughter that had been gnawing at my vitals broke loose.
“Why did you go out of the room on your hands and knees?” I moaned, rolling in anguish on the potatoes.
“ I got under the table when I heard the brute coming,” said Robert, with the crossness of reaction from terror, “then she settled down to eat biscuits, and I thought I could crawl out without her seeing me”
“Ye can come out!” said Julia’s mouth, appearing at a crack of the scullery door, “I have as many lies told for ye—God forgive me!—as’d bog a noddy!”
This mysterious contingency might have impressed us more had the artist been able to conceal her legitimate pride in her handiwork. We emerged from the chill and varied smells of the scullery, retaining just sufficient social self-control to keep us from flinging ourselves with grateful tears upon Julia’s neck. Shaken as we were, the expedition still lay open before us; the game was in our hands. We were winning by tricks, and Julia held all the honours.
Perhaps it was the clinging memory of the fried pork, perhaps it was because all my favourite brushes were standing in a mug of soft soap on my washing stand, or because Robert had in his flight forgotten to replenish his cigarette case, but there was no doubt but that the expedition languished.
There was no fault to be found with the setting. The pool in which the river coiled itself under the pine-trees was black and brimming, the fish were rising at the flies that wrought above it, like a spotted net veil in hysterics, the distant hills lay in sleepy undulations of every shade of blue, the grass was warm, and not unduly peopled with ants. But some impalpable blight was upon us. I ranged like a lost soul along the banks of the river—a lost soul that is condemned to bear a burden of some two stone of sketching materials, and a sketching umbrella with a defective joint—in search of a point of view that for ever eluded me. Robert cast his choicest flies, with delicate quiverings, with coquettish withdrawals; had they been cannon-balls they could hardly have had a more intimidating effect upon the trout. Where Robert fished a Sabbath stillness reigned, beyond that charmed area they rose like notes of exclamation in a French novel. I was on the whole inclined to trace these things back to the influence of the pork, working on systems weakened by shock; but Robert was not in the mood to trace them to anything. Unsuccessful fishermen are not fond of introspective suggestions. The member of the expedition who enjoyed himself beyond any question was Mrs. Coolahan’s car-horse. Having been taken out of the shafts on the road above the river, he had with his harness on his back, like Horatius, unhesitatingly lumbered over a respectable bank and ditch in the wake of Croppy, who had preceded him with the reins. He was now grazing luxuriously along the river’s edge, while his driver smoked, no less luxuriously, in the background.
“Will I carry the box for ye, Miss?” Croppy inquired compassionately, stuffing his lighted pipe into his pocket, as I drifted desolately past him. “Sure you’re killed with the load you have! This is a rough owld place for a lady to be walkin’. Sit down, Miss. God knows you have a right to be tired.”
It seemed that with Croppy also the day was dragging, doubtless he too had lunched on Mrs. Coolahan’s pork. He planted my camp-stool and I sank upon it.
“Well, now, for all it’s so throublesome,” he resumed, “I’d say painting was a nice thrade. There was a gintleman here one time that was a painther—I used to be dhrivin’ him. Faith! there wasn’t a place in the counthry but he had it pathrolled. He seen me mother one day—cleaning fish, I b’lieve she was, below on the quay—an’ nothing would howld him but he should dhraw out her picture!” Croppy laughed unfilially. “Well, me mother was mad. ‘To the divil I pitch him!’ says she; ‘if I wants me photograph drew out I’m liable to pay for it,’ says she, ‘an’ not to be stuck up before the ginthry to be ped for the like o’ that!’ ’Tis for; you bein’ so handsome!’ says I to her. She was black mad altogether then. ‘If that’s the way,’ says she, ‘it’s a wondher he wouldn’t ax yerself, ye rotten little rat,’ says she, ‘in place of thrying could he make a show of yer poor little ugly little cock-nosed mother!’ ‘Faith!’ says I to her, ‘I wouldn’t care if the divil himself axed it, if he give me a half-crown and nothing to do but to be sittin’ down!’”
The tale may or may not have been intended to have a personal application, but Croppy’s fat scarlet face and yellow moustache, bristling beneath a nose which he must have inherited from his mother, did not lend themselves to a landscape background, and I fell to fugitive pencil sketches of the old white car-horse as he grazed round us. It was thus that I first came to notice a fact whose bearing upon our fortunes I was far from suspecting. The old horse’s harness was of dingy brown leather, with dingier brass mountings; it had been frequently mended, in varying shades of brown, and, in remarkable contrast to the rest of the outfit, the breeching was of solid and well-polished black leather, with silver buckles. It was not so much the discrepancy of the breeching as its respectability that jarred upon me; finally I commented upon it to Croppy.