Part 7 (2/2)
up to be talkin' raisonable for any differ they could see.”
Barney cleared his throat disconcertedly, and the old man, recalling his responsibilities as a host, and perhaps not admiring his sarcasm thus elaborated, said conciliatingly, ”Och, he'll do right enough if he niver raves any worse than Mr. Polymathers. All that ails him is that we want to git a bit used to his manner of spakin'.”
”Polymathers?” said Peter.
”To be sure, Polymathers. Did you say it any better than I?”
”Well, I nivir heard tell of anybody called that way before. It's a quare she-he soundin' sort of name,” said Peter.
”Faix, then, there may be plinty quarer in it, we niver heard tell of, if that was all,” said Felix. ”Anyhow, it's his name, and his people's afore him. Himself tould me his father was the ouldest of all the Polymatherses there was in the counthry he came out of--somewheres down south, I think he said--and the head of the whole of thim forby.”
”Ay, he did so,” said Dan. ”Sez you to him, there was a dale of water run down hill since the time there was...o...b..irnes blacksmiths in this part of the counthry; and your father was a one, sez you. And sez he to you, he couldn't be any manner of manes purtind to be the aquil to what _his_ father was. And sez you to him, what was he? And sez he, it was one of the Polymatherses he was, and well known for his larnin' through the len'th and breadth of the county Sligo. And a name it was, he sez, any man might be proud of ownin'.”
”Be jabers, himself has the great consait of it, at all ivents,” said Peter. ”But he might find people could be tellin' him there's Keoghs as good as any Polymatherses iver was in it--ivery hair.”
The stranger's patronymic having thus been ascertained, it was desirable to fix his calling, and, despite his disclaimer of inherited erudition, several circ.u.mstances bespoke him a schoolmaster, even before the question seemed settled by the first act of his convalescence being an inquiry into the amount of book-learning which Dan and Nicholas had ama.s.sed during their sixteen and fourteen years. This was not large, though as much as could be expected, considering that in all Lisconnel there were not just then, I believe, more than four volumes, one of which being merely the index to a non-existent _Encyclopaedia_, can scarcely rank as literature. The boys themselves, and their grandfather, were deeply interested in the examination, and very anxious that it should have a creditable result. For learning and the learned have at all times been held in profound respect among us away on our bogland, where the devotion to something afar springs perhaps the more abundantly because so many things are remote. On this occasion Mr. Polymathers opened his most sizable bundle, and it was seen to be filled with books, not fewer, doubtless, than a score, in leather bindings, ragged and battered, and brownly time-stained all over their margins, as if the river of years had for them run no metaphor, but a russet bog-stream.
They comprised _Homer_, _Virgil_, _Livy_, and other ancients; likewise two Latin lexicons, which looked extravagant until you observed how each did but supplement the other's deficiencies, and this so imperfectly that their owner was still liable to search in vain for words between MO and NA.
These, however, were evidently not the most prized portion of Mr.
Polymathers's library, though he displayed them with some complacency, reading out here and there a sonorous ”furrin” phrase, at which his audience said, ”More power,” and ”Your sowl to glory,” and the like. It was when he handled the shabbiest of the volumes, with broken backs and edges all curling tatters, that his touch grew caressing. The lookers-on, contrariwise, thought but poorly of them because they set up, seemingly, to be ill.u.s.trated works, and their pictures, mostly of uninteresting round and three-cornered objects, struck Lisconnel art critics as very feeble efforts. To be sure Mr. Polymathers called them _dygrims_, but that was no help to the overtaxed imagination. Only young Nicholas...o...b..irne listened intently to the explanation which he gave of one of them. Nicholas was a long, thin lad, with melancholy grey eyes and a square forehead, whose capacity his grandfather had held in some esteem, since it had been discovered, years ago, that ”the spalpeen could make out an account for four sets of shoes, and half a stone of three-inch holdfasts, and a dozen of staples, and two gallon of the crathur, and allow for a hundredweight of ould iron, all in his head, and right to a farthin'.” Now the melancholy eyes darkened and brightened with excitement as Mr. Polymathers discoursed of right lines and angles and circles, and expounded the mysterious signification of certain Ah Bay Says. And he had thenceforward an unweariable pupil in Nicholas, companied, albeit with less ardent zeal, and at a slower rate of progress, by his elder brother, Dan.
More general interest, however, continued to be taken in the stranger's cla.s.sical attainments. Everybody--the O'Beirnes themselves, their neighbours in the cabin-row close by, now long since an untraceable ruin, and the people of Lisconnel proper, a couple of miles further on--felt uplifted by the residence among them of a man, who they boasted would talk Latin to you as soon as look at you. But as we never enjoy our own happiness fully until it has been looked at through other men's envious eyes, they could not here remain content with simply possessing this privilege, or even with dilating upon it to their less favoured friends down below and down beyant. They longed to make a parade of it, to give a demonstration of it. And the method of doing so which they came to consider most desirable was the bringing about of a conversation in Latin between Mr. Polymathers and Father Rooney, the Parish Priest.
For if that took place they could easily imagine his Reverence riding home to report in the Town what a wonderful great scholar entirely they had stopping above at Lisconnel. Moreover, the conversation itself would be a rael fine thing to have the hearing of. Terence Kilfoyle, for instance, said that it would be as good as a Play, which, as he had never seen one, was to entertain unbounded expectations. And at last, after they had wished the wish for some weeks, a prospect of its fulfilment came into sight together with Father Rooney's cream-coloured pony jogging along through the light of a fiery-zoned July sunset, in which Mr. Polymathers was basking by the O'Beirnes' door. In those days his Reverence was a youngish man, ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance, a substantial load for his st.u.r.dy nag, and altogether, in his glossy black cloth, a figure very different from their gaunt, sad-visaged, s.h.a.ggily-garbed old guest. He was at the time of Father Rooney's approach seated on a two-legged, three-legged stool, propped precariously against the ray-rosed cabin wall, and was teaching Dan and Nicholas the twelfth proposition of the second book of Euclid. Dan had not yet grasped it, but it all lay as clear as a sunbeam athwart Nicholas's brain, and he was fidgeting like an impatient horse at the slowness of his fellow.
Several of the neighbours chanced to be about, for the forge saw a good deal of company in those long empty days before the potato-digging could begin. They all drew together into a small crowd, and closed in step by step to watch the first meeting between these two notable persons, much admiring the deftness with which old O'Beirne secured it by p.r.o.nouncing one of the pony's shoes in need of tightening, and the felicitous opening he made by a.s.suring his Reverence that ”divil a bit need he be mindin' the delay, because Mr. Polymathers there had enough _furrin languages_ to keep thim all divarted, if the baste owned as many feet as a forty-legs, wid the shoes droppin' off ivery pair of thim. That was to say, in coorse, supposin' he got the chance of convarsin' a bit wid somebody aquil to answerin' him back iligant, the way there wasn't e'er a one of thim could make an offer at doin' no more than thim little weevils of chirpin' chuckens.”
Yet the interview turned out disappointingly after all. If such a thing had not been, of course, exceedingly improbable, one might have fancied that each scholar stood in awe of the other's reputation, they steered so clear of all recondite subjects; keeping to the merest commonplaces about rain and potatoes and turf--which anybody else could have discussed quite as knowledgably. In vain, whenever there was a promising pause would the bystanders nudge one another, whispering, hopefully, ”Whist, boys--they'll be sayin' somethin' now.” Only the plainest English followed, and at last, when Father Rooney rode on, his parting joke, which referred to the difficulty his pony would now find in the way of becoming a barefooted pilgrim, left for a wonder solemnly irresponsive faces behind it.
Michael Ryan said, with a touch of resentment, ”Ah, well, one couldn't maybe expec' it of thim to be throublin' thimselves talkin' fine for the pack of us, as ignorant as dirt, in the middle of th'ould bog.”
And his wife said, ”'Deed, now, I wouldn't won'er meself if the raison was his Riverence 'ud think bad of usin' his Latin words for anythin'
else on'y prayers and such. It might be somethin' the same as if he went and took his grand vistments to go dig pitaties in; and that 'ud be a great sin, G.o.d knows.”
But old Felix, who was, as we have seen, a rather touchy person, construed this suggestion into an implied censure on his own wishes in the matter, and he said, huffily--
”Sorra the talk of sin I see in it at all, ma'am. 'Tis a dale liker they just couldn't get out wid it convanient offhand. The same way that I'd aisy enough bate out a shoe on me anvil there, when it's bothered I'd be if you axed me to make a one promiscuous here of a suddint on the roadside.”
Mr. Polymathers himself meanwhile was perhaps dimly conscious that he had disappointed hopes, and failed to rise duly to the occasion; and this may have been why he slipped indoors, and fetched out a small book he had never produced before, bound in a dingy greenish blue, with a white paper label.
”D'you know what that is, sir?” he questioned, rhetorically, handing it to Felix O'Beirne. ”It's the Calendar, let me tell you, of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, _juxta_ Dublin. There's a print of the Front of the Buildings attached to the fly-leaf. I'm after pickin'
it up this spring at Moynalone. 'Twas new the year before last, and comprises a dale of information relative to terms, examinations, fees, and so forth.”
”Begor, then, it looks to be a wide house,” said Felix, confining himself to the picture as a comprehensible point. ”It's apt to be an oncommon fine place, sir, I should suppose.”
”You may say that, me man,” said Mr. Polymathers, emphatically. ”Not its match in the kingdom of Ireland. The home of literature and the haunt of science. And it's there I'll be, plase G.o.d, next October.”
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