Part 16 (1/2)
Except as a fresh topic of conversation, however, the strangers gave small promise of proving an acquisition to the community. Lisconnel did not like their appearance by any means, and further acquaintance failed to modify unfavourable first impressions. These were mainly received in the course of the day after their arrival, which took place on a night too black for anything beyond a shadowy counting of heads, and a perception that the bulk of the new-comers' household stuff had jogged up on one donkey, and must therefore be small. A portion of Big Anne's furniture had remained behind her in the cabin, owing to certain arrears of rent. Her heart was scalded, she said, wid the prices she'd only get for her early chuckens, and they the weight of the world, if you'd feel them in your hand; and poor Mad Bell, that 'ud mostly bring home a few odd s.h.i.+llin's wid her, was away since afore last Christmas, and might never show her face there agin, the crathur; and the poor Dummy gone, that was great at the knittin' if she got the chance--a bit of narration which would look funny enough in anybody's rental. Mrs. Quigley, who went to the door with the offer of a seed of fire, found it shut, and a voice inside called, ”as onmannerly as you plase,” ”No, we've got matches;” whereupon another voice, further in the interior, quavered, ”Thank'ee kindly, ma'am.” So she departed little wiser than she had come. But daylight showed that the party consisted of an old man, and his son, and his son's wife, and her sister, and three small children, besides some cochin-china fowl, and a black cat with vividly green eyes.
This much was apparent on the surface. Also that the old man was frail, bent, shrivelled, and civil spoken, that the son was ”a big soft gomeral of a fellow,” that both the women were sandily flaxen-haired, with broad, flat cheeks and light eyes, and that two of the children resembled them, while the third--a girl a trifle older--was a dark-haired, disconsolate-looking little thing, ”wid her face,” Mrs.
Brian said, ”not the width of the palm of your hand, and the eyes of her sunk in her head.” As for the fowl, there could be no doubt that their ”onnathural, long, fluffety legs were fit to make a body's flesh creep,” and the cat looked ”as like an ould divil as anythin' you ever witnessed, sittin' blinkin' atop of the turf-stack.”
Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees--more slowly than might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not prospered--in fact, they had been ”sold up and put out of it,” as the young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle. They were a somewhat intricately connected family, by the name, predominantly, of Patman. The sister-in-law was Tishy M'Crum, which seemed simple enough, but the two light-haired boys were Greens, Mrs. Patman having been a widow, while the little girl was the child of a wife whom Tom Patman had already buried; for though he looked full young to have embarked upon matrimony at all, this was his second venture. ”And it's a quare comether she must ha' been after puttin' on him,” quoth Mrs. Quigley, ”afore he took up wid herself, that's as ugly as if she was bespoke, and half a dozen year oulder than the young bosthoon, if she's a minyit.” It is true that at the time when Mrs. Quigley expressed this unflattering opinion she and her neighbours had been exasperated by an impolite speech of Mrs.
Patman, who had said loudly in their hearing, ”Well, for sartin if I'd had a notion of the blamed little dog-hole he was bringin' us into, sorra the sole of a fut 'ud I ha' set inside it;” and had then proceeded to congratulate herself upon having prudently left ”all her dacint bits of furniture up above at her mother's, so that she needn't be bothered wid cartin' them away out of a place that didn't look to have had ever e'er a thing in it worth the throuble of movin', not if it stood there until it dropped to pieces wid dirt.” Mrs. Quigley rejoined (to Judy Ryan) that ”it would be a great pity if any people sted in a place that wasn't good enough for them, supposin' all the while they was used to anythin' a thraneen better--maybe they might, in coorse, and maybe they mightn't. It was won'erful to hear the talk some folks had, and they wid every ould stick they owned an aisy loadin' for Reilly's little a.s.s.”
But Judy Ryan, with a flight of sarcastic fancy, hoped that Mrs. Patman and her family ”were about goin' on a visit prisintly to the Lady Lifftinant, because it was much if they'd find any place else where there'd be grandeur accordin' to their high-up notions.”
Skirmishes such as this, however, were a symptom rather than a cause of the Patmans' unpopularity. That sprang from several roots. For one thing, both the women had harsh, scolding voices, and it was even chances that if you pa.s.sed within earshot of their cabin you would hear them giving tongue. Their objurgations were, as a rule, addressed to the young man or the old, the latter of whom soon grew into an object of local compa.s.sion as ”a harmless, dacint, poor crathur,” while his son came in for the frank-eyed looking-down-upon which is the portion of an able-bodied man, shrew-ridden through sheer supineness and ”polthroonery.” But what Lisconnel often said that it ”thought badder of” was the stepmotherly treatment which seemed to be the lot of the little girl Katty. Of course the situation was one which, under the circ.u.mstances, would have made people believe in such a state of things upon the slenderest evidence. Still, even to unprejudiced eyes, it was clear that Katty's rags were raggeder than those of her small step-brothers, and that she crept about with the mien of a creature which has conceived reasonable doubts respecting the reception it is likely to meet in society. When the autumn weather began to grow wintry, little Katty Patman, ”peris.h.i.+n' about out there in the freezin' win',”
became a spectacle which was viewed with indignant sympathy from dark doorways whence she received many an invitation to step in and be warmin' herself. Her hostesses opined that she was fairly starved just for a taste of the fire, and didn't believe she was ever let next or nigh it in her own place. Often, too, the consideration that she had no more flesh on her bones than a March chucken led to the bestowal of a steaming potato or a piece of griddle-bread; but the result of this was sometimes unsatisfactory to the giver, Katty being apt to dart away with her refreshments, which she might presently be seen sharing among Bobby and Stevie, for whom she entertained a strong and apparently unreciprocated regard.
”I wouldn't go for to be sayin' anythin' to set her agin them,” Mrs.
Brian Kilfoyle remarked on some such occasion. ”But, goodness forgive me! I've no likin' for them two little brats. I'd misthrust them.”
”Ah, sure they've no sinse,” said Biddy Ryan. ”Where'd they git it? And the biggest of them, I'd suppose, under four year ould.”
”Sinse!” said Mrs. Quigley. ”Bedad, then, if sinse was all that ailed them, the pair of them is as 'cute as a couple of young foxes. I mind on'y a day or so after they'd been in it, I met the laste one on the road, and I comin' home wid be chance a sugarstick in me basket. So, just to be makin' friends like, I gave it a bit for itself, and a bit for the other that I seen comin' along. Well, now, ma'am, if it had took and ate up the both of the bits, I'd ha' thought ne'er a pin's point of harm--'twould ha' been nathural enough to the size of it. But I give you me word, when it seen it couldn't get the two of them swallied down afore its brother come by, what did it go do but clap the one of them into a crevice in the wall, and cover it under a blackberry laif. And wid that down it squats, and begins sayin', 'Creely-crawly snail--where's the creely-crawly snail I'm after huntin' out of its houle?'--lettin' on to be lookin' for somethin' creepin' in the gra.s.s.
And a while after it come slinkin' back, when it thought n.o.body was mindin', to poke the bit out of the wall where I was gatherin'
dandelions under the bank. So while it was fumblin' about, missin' the right crevice, sez I, poppin' up, thinkin' to shame it, 'Maybe the crawly snail's after aitin' it on you,' sez I. 'Och, yis; I seen it,'
sez the spalpeen, as brazen as bra.s.s. 'Gimme 'noder bit instid.' There's a schemin' young rapscallion for you!”
”They're too like their mother altogether to plase me,” said Judy Ryan.
”The corners of their eyes do be as sharp as if they were cut out wid a pair of scissors. Not that I'd mind if they'd e'er a sthrake of good-nathur in them; but I mis...o...b.. they have. The little girl, now, is as diff'rint as day and night.”
”If _she_ takes after her father, she's a right to want the wit powerful, misfort'nit little imp,” said Mrs. Brian. ”For if he isn't a great stupid gomeral and an a.s.s, just get me one. Why, if he was worth the dust blowin' along the road, he'd purvint of his own child bein' put upon.”
”Och, they have him _frighted_,” said Mrs. Quigley, with scornful emphasis. ”They won't let him take an atom of notice of her, they're that jealous. Sure, if he gets talkin' to her outside the house there, one of them 'ill let a bawl and send him off to be carryin' in turf or wather. I've seen it times and agin.”
”If he'd take and sling it about their ears some fine day he'd be doin'
right, and it might larn them to behave themselves,” said Judy.
”But the ould man would disgust you,” pursued Mrs. Quigley, ”wid the romancin' he has out of him about his son Tom. You'd suppose, to listen to him, that the omadhawn's aquil never stepped. He'll deive you wid it till you're fairly bothered. Troth, he thinks the young fellow's doin'
somethin' out of the way if he just walks down the street, and expec's everybody to stand watchin' him goin' along. It's surprisin' the foolery there does be in people.”
”Och, murdher, women alive!” said Ody Rafferty, whose pipe went out at this moment, ”there's no contintin' yous at all. It's too cute they are, and too foolish they are. Musha, very belike they're not so much off the common if you'd a thrifle more exparience of them; there's nothin' to match that for evenin' people. Bedad, now, there's some people _I_ know so well that I can scarce tell the one from the other.”
Lisconnel, however, generally declined to fall in with Ody's philosophical views, and the Patmans, whether suspected of excessive cuteness or folly, remained persistently unpopular. There was only one exception to this rule. The widow M'Gurk has a certain fibre of perversity in her which sometimes twists itself round unlikely objects, for no apparent reason save that they are left clear by her neighbours, and this peculiarity renders her p.r.o.ne upon occasion to undertake the part of Devil's Advocate. When, therefore, she had once delivered herself of the opinion that the newcomers were ”very dacint folks,” she did not feel called upon to abandon it because it stood alone. As grounds for it she commonly alleged that they were ”rael hard-workin'
and industhrious,” which was obviously true enough, since Mrs. Patman and her sister might constantly be seen tilling their little field with an energy far beyond the capacity of its late tenant. Her neighbours'
unimpressed rejoinder, ”Well, and supposin' they are itself?” did not in the least disconcert the widdy, nor yet their absence of enthusiasm when she stated that it was ”a sight to behould Tishy M'Crum diggin' over a bit of ground; she'd lift as much on her spade as any two strong men.”
As for little Katty, ”she'd never seen anybody doin' anythin' agin the child; it might happen by nature to be one of those little _crowls_ of childer that 'ud always look hungry-like and pinin', the crathurs, if you were able to keep feedin' them wid the best as long as the sun was in the sky.” In short, something more than talk was usually needed to put the widow M'Gurk out of conceit with any notion she had taken up.
Perhaps the comparative aloofness of her hillside cabin helped to maintain the Patmans at their original high level in her estimation. At any rate they had not sunk from it by the time that they had been nearly three months in Lisconnel, and when Mrs. Patman and her sister were on terms of the very glummest civility with all the other women in the place. Even towards the widow M'Gurk they were tolerant rather than expansive. She said ”they had done right enough to not be leppin' down people's throaths.”
One morning not long after Christmas, the widow, being bound on an errand down below, called in at the Patmans' with a view to possible commissions. Meal was wanted, and, while Tishy M'Crum st.i.tched up a rent in the bag, Mrs. M'Gurk noticed where little Katty, who had been ”took bad wid a could these three days,” rustled uncomfortably among wisps of rushes and rags in an obscure corner. Fever made her bold and self-a.s.sertive, for she was wis.h.i.+ng nothing less than that her daddy would get her an orange--”An or'nge wid yeller peel round it”--Katty laid stress upon this point--”like the one her mammy got her a long time ago. And daddy'd be a good daddy and get her another now. And she'd keep a bit for Bobby and Stevie and all of them--a big yeller or'nge.”