Part 19 (1/2)

To-day, something her niece had said about Donnybrook Fair--for Anna, too, was a child of the old sod--seemed to swell out with a fair wind the sails of her visionary bark. She closed her mind to all familiar shapes and strained back--way, way back, concentrating all her powers in an effort of will. For a bit she seemed to hover in populous s.p.a.ce. This did not disturb her; she had experienced the same thing before. It simply meant that she had mounted pretty well up to the fountain-head.

The figures, when they did come, would be the ones she most desired.

At last, they began to take shape, tenuously at first, then of fuller body, each bringing its own setting, its own atmospheric suggestion--whether of dove-feathered Irish cloud and fresh greensward, sudden downpour, or equally sudden clearing, with continual leafy drip, drip, drip, in the midst of brilliant suns.h.i.+ne.

For Margaret O'Brien, ardent summer sunlight seemed suddenly to pervade the cool, orderly little bed-chamber. Then, 'Here she is!' and a wee girl of four danced into view, wearing a dress of pink print, very tight at the top and very full at the bottom. She led the way to a tiny new house whence issued the cheery voice of hammers. Lumber and tools were lying round; from within came men's voices. The small girl stamped up the steps and looked in. Then she made for the narrow stair.

'Where's Margaret gone to?' said one of the men. 'The upper floor's not finished. It's falling through the young one will be.'

'Peggy!' called the older man. 'Come down here with you.'

There was a delighted squeal. The pink dress appeared at the head of the stairs. 'Oh, the funny little man, daddy! Such a funny little old man with a high hat! Come quick, let you, and see him.'

The two men ran to the stairs.

'Where is he?'

She turned back and pointed. Then her face fell. 'Gone! the little man is gone!'

Her father laughed and picked her up in his arms. 'How big was he, Peg?

As big as yourself, I wonder?'

'No, no! Small.'

'As big as the baby?'

She considered a moment. 'Yes, just as big as that. But a man, da.'

'Well, why aren't you after catching him and holding him for ransom?

'Tis pots and pots o' gold they've hidden away, the little people, and will be paying a body what he asks to let them go.'

She pouted, on the verge of tears. 'I want him to come back.'

'I mistrust he won't be doing that, the leprechaun. Once you take your eye away, it's off with him for good and all.'

Margaret O'Brien hugged herself with delight. _That_ was a new one; she had never got back that far before. Yet how well she remembered it all!

She seemed to smell the woody pungency of the lumber, the limey odor of white-wash from the field-stone cellar.

The old woman's dream went on. Out of the inexhaustible storehouse of the past, she summoned, one by one, her much-loved memories. There was a pig-tailed Margaret in bonnet and shawl, trudging to school one wintry day. She had seen many wintry school-days, but this one stood out by reason of the tears she had shed by the way. She saw the long benches, the slates, the charts, the tall teacher at his desk. With a swelling of the throat, she saw the little girl sob out her declaration: 'I'm not for coming no more, Mr. Wilde.'

'What's that, Margaret? And why not? Haven't I been good to you?'

Tears choked the child. 'Oh, Mr. Wilde, it's just because you're so terrible good to me. They say you are trying to make a Protestant out of me. So I'll not be coming no more.'

The tall man drew the little girl to his knee and rea.s.sured her.

Margaret O'Brien could review that scene with tender delight now. She had not been forced to give up her beloved school. Mr. Wilde had explained to her that her brothers were merely teasing her because she was so quick and such a favorite.

A little Margaret knelt on the cold stone floor at church and stared at the pictured saints or heard the budding branches rustle in the orchard outside. Another Margaret, a little taller, begged for a new sheet of ballads every time her father went to the fair.--There were the long flimsy sheets, with closely printed verses. These you must adapt to familiar tunes. This Margaret, then, swept the hearth and stacked the turf and sang from her bench in the chimney-corner. Sometimes it was something about 'the little old red coat me father wore,' which was 'All b.u.t.tons, b.u.t.tons, b.u.t.tons, b.u.t.tons; all b.u.t.tons down before'; or another beginning,--

'O, dear, what can the matter be?