Part 13 (1/2)

And on the morrow Con did actually set off with Mrs. Duff, feeling half appeased and half compunctious, as people do when they get what they have clamoured for; sorry a little to lose sight of Bran, staring open-mouthed after him down the lane; and relieved through all by a vague sense that he was going whither his heart-strings pulled. If he had been a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but n.o.body was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured, speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were deserted too. For miles n.o.body would be met, and then a small stationary crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they, not giving so much as a ”fine mornin'” to the pa.s.ser-by. Other crowds they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes women keening.

Once the car-horse s.h.i.+ed violently at some dark, long thing, that was stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said, ”G.o.d be good to us,” and the driver said without looking off his reins: ”He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'.”

Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children, surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul on the horse, and keep between the cart and the crowd, whose shout generally sounded like: ”Divil a fut its to quit--divil a fut.” It was a crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of glittering eyes--in mistake, apparently, for other things.

As the cart came crawling past where Mrs. Duff and Con stood, a furious rush so tilted it over that the horse fell, breaking a shaft, and some of the topmost sacks tumbled off, dropping with dull thuds, like dead bodies, upon the damp cobblestone pavement. Con saw a little cloud of white dust rise up over each as it dumped down, and melt away on the air, making him wonder to himself: ”Is it smokin' hot they are?” But in another moment they were hidden for a while by a wild wave of the crowd, which threw itself tumultuously upon them. One of the sacks burst, spilling the soft flour in flakes, and round it the jostling and writhing grew fiercest. The faces that got nearest to it looked hardly the whiter for their smears and powdering.

A young woman, all black eyes and elf locks, with a baby wrapped in her shawl, crouching low and making a desperate long arm, grasped a covetous handful, which spirted away wastefully between her clenched fingers. She moistened some of this in a puddle as she knelt, and held the paste to her baby's mouth. But its head was drooping wearily aside, and its lips did not move when she touched them. ”Ait it up, me heart's jewel,” she said; ”ait it up, mother's little bird. 'Deed, then, but you're the conthrary little toad. It's breakin' me heart you'll be roarin' when I've ne'er a bit to give you, and sleepin' dead, when I've the chance to feed you.” She was beginning to shake it, but a young man who stood behind her put his hand on her shoulder, saying: ”Whisht, whisht, you crathur, for G.o.d's sake. It's done wid wantin' and cryin', and a good job for it too, the Lord knows.” Then the girl shrieked again and again, and the people about her said from one to the other: ”It's her child's starved on her.” And an old man caught up the little body, and held it high over his head, shouting, ”Boys, boys--look yous at that. There's the way Henderson's cartin' off the childer's bit of food to make his fine fortin in England.” And the crowd shouted back through a surge of curses: ”Divil a fut will he this day.”

A very little old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple leaner than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, ”Och, good luck to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More power to your elbow.” And the crowd yelled with laughter too.

At this moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones, and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr.

Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused onset, for somebody s.n.a.t.c.hed him up and hurried him into a dark pa.s.sage.

The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and thought to himself, ”He's been grabbin' the flour too.” And the women about him said, ”Och, murdher, the baste--the man's apt to be kilt!”

When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street--two or three women had even stolen back, and were sc.r.a.ping up the white patches--and he was driven away on a car for what seemed to him a vast length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other pa.s.sengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar.

It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the gra.s.s while the car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were less elated, lifted him down and handed him his bundle, and bade him run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.

He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room looked very dusk to him coming in from the mellow afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, ”Och, mammy darlint, I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?” He pulled her shawl because she did not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down p.r.o.ne on the floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise.

Vainly the neighbours averred that ”the crathur was starvin' herself this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day.” Con's mind was shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more varied dreams.

And when he had struggled through this illness, n.o.body well knew how or why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief, the more readily, perhaps, because n.o.body remained for whom such a fact would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped away out of her lonesomeness before his recovery. It would not be easy to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and disfranchised person who is spoken of as ”a crathur,” and whose proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of him that he had plenty of sense _of his own_, and the remark was to some extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him that he should accompany them, but he sat looking meditative for a while, and then said, ”How far might it be from this to the States?”

”I dunno rightly,” said his informant, ”but a goodish step it's apt to be, for people's better than a couple of weeks sailin' there, I'm tould.”

Con meditated a little more before he put another question. ”Would you be widin hearin' out there of the folk talkin' foolish?” he inquired.

”Why, tub-be sure, man, what 'ud hinder you that you wouldn't hear them talkin' same as anywheres else?”

”Bedad, then,” said Con, ”it seems a long way to be thravellin' to a counthry as close as that. Sure, if you take out for a stravade over the bog here, you'll be throubled wid nothin' the len'th of the day on'y the curlew, or maybe a couple of saygulls skirlin'--raisonable enough. I'll be apt to stay where I am.”

Con, who was a person of many moods, happened to be in an unusually cynical one just then; however, he adhered to his resolution, and when his sister had gone he adopted a life of long tramps. Somebody had given him an old fiddle, and this he carried with him, though chiefly as a sort of badge, as his performances were but feeble, and he could turn his hand to many other things when he found it necessary to do so. His rovings had gone on for several years before they led him to Lisconnel.

In those days he was a strange, small figure, who wore a coat too large for him, and a hat set so far back on his head that its brim made a sort of halo to frame his face, which had a curious way of looking fitfully young and old, with a s.h.i.+ning of violet blue eyes and a puckering of fine-drawn wrinkles. A small boy and a little old ancient man would seem to change places half a dozen times in the course of a single conversation. Even his hair was a puzzle, regarded as an indication of age, because its black had become streaked with white in such a fas.h.i.+on that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be likely to bear out this statement.

The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white mushrooms, which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted b.u.t.tons, all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a different channel by suddenly saying, ”What was there in it before the beginnin' of everythin'?”

Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's was.h.i.+ng. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His tone was now rather peremptory as he repeated, ”What was there in it before the beginnin' of everythin'?”

”Sure, nothin' at all,” said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.

”Then what was there before the beginnin' of nothin'?” pursued Thady.

”Dunno,” said Peter, indifferently, ”unless it was more nothin'.”

”Sure not at all; that wouldn't be the way of it,” Johanna said, dreamily, yet with decision. ”If there was nothin' but nothin' in it, there'd ha' been apt to not be e'er an anythin' ever. Where'd it ha'

come from? Don't be tellin' the child lies, Peter. Why, for one thing,”

she said, her tone sharpening polemically and taking a touch of triumph, ”there was always G.o.d Almighty in it, and the Divil. Maybe that's what you call nothin'.”

Peter evaded this point, saying, ”Well, anyway, those times, if there was just the two of them in it, and no harm to be doin', let alone any good people to know the differ, it's on'y a quare sort of Divil he'd get the chance of bein'. I wouldn't call him anythin' _much_.”

”He wouldn't be so very long, you may depind,” Johanna p.r.o.nounced.