Part 1

BY BEACH AND BOG-LAND

SOME IRISH NOVELS

Crown 8vo, Cloth, 6s.

THE WIZARD’S KNOT. By WILLIAM BARRY.

THE LOST LAND. By JULIA M. CROTTIE.

NEIGHBOURS: Being Annals of a Dull Town. By JULIA M. CROTTIE.

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.

[Illustration]

BY BEACH AND BOG-LAND

_SOME IRISH STORIES_

BY

JANE BARLOW

_With a Frontispiece by_ PAUL HENRY

[Illustration]

LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN Paternoster Square MCMV

_All Rights Reserved_

“Westward on the low sweet strand Where songs are sung of the old green Irish land, And the sky loves it, and the sea loves best, And as a bird is taken to man’s breast The sweet-souled land where sorrow sweetest sings Is wrapt round with them as with hands and wings And taken to the sea’s heart as a flower”

SWINBURNE.

CONTENTS

PAGE

IN THE WINDING WALK 1

A MONEY-CROP AT LISCONNEL 31

THE HIGH TIDE AND THE MAN-TRAPPERS 55

THE FOOT-STICKS OF SLUGHNATRAIGH 73

OLD ISAAC’S BIGGEST HAUL 101

THE WRONG TURNING 117

CRAZY MICK 141

WIDOW FARRELL’S WONDERFUL AGE 149

THE HINS’ HOUSEKEEPER 175

TWO PAIR OF TRUANTS 189

THEIR NEW UMBRELLAS 209

A SMALL PRACTICE 225

A LINGERING GUEST 247

LOUGHNAGLEE 261

MORIARTY’S MEADOW 269

DELAYED IN TRANSMISSION 285

FOR COMPANY 295

By Beach and Bog-land

IN THE WINDING WALK

I

When people go away from Clonmalroan, they go away, as a rule, very thoroughly. Their absence is an absence more complete than that of other persons from other places less out of the world and behind the times. Once any traveller’s departing form has been beheld pass round the turn in the deep-banked boreen, or watched dwindle into a speck on the straight road streaking the wide bog-land, the chances are that little news of him will reach his former neighbours, till some day that same speck is espied growing into human shape again along that same road, and acquaintances remark to each other in the course of conversation: “And so big Pat Byrne”--to put case--“is afther comin’ home wid himself.”

For Clonmalroan is but meagrely provided with the means of communication, and its inhabitants are mostly ill able to make use even of those which it possesses. It is as yet untouched by the wonderful thread of wire, which has put a running-string through the web of human lives--puckered up in a moment from Hong Kong to Cambridge--and the shining metals with their rush and roar, still halting many miles short of it, are lamely prolonged by the wheel tracks of the jiggeting side-car with a slenderly filled mail-bag on the well. The letters it brings are commonly brief and obscure, the difficult product of certainly no excessive ease in composition. They convey little more than an intimation of continued existence led among surroundings only mistily imagined by readers whose own journeying has lain within the radius of a day’s tramp. Beyond that limit everything is vague and dim, a mysterious region from whence the absentee seems not so very much more likely to reappear than do those who have been seen off with a wake and a keen. Not that such returns even as these are by any means unheard of at Clonmalroan. Would the friends of Michael Larissy, who duly waked and buried him three years ago, aver that they have never set eyes on him since? Or ask anybody, almost, in the parish, why he wouldn’t take half a crown to be crossing after nightfall that bridge over the Rosbride River near Sallinbeg, where a poor tinker-woman was swept away and drowned in a flood some few autumns back. Then, everybody knows that several of the Denny family have “walked.” Therefore the assertion: “It was himself or his ghost,” is not regarded as containing a very unequally balanced hypothesis, especially if “himself” has been supposed away sojourning in those unknown and imperfectly reported lands.

But there came one autumn when far and far away from Clonmalroan began to happen events which had such a heart-burning interest for many of its people that some news of them did penetrate the densest barriers of ignorant resourcelessness. Mere sparks, perhaps, as it were blown from some huge conflagration, whose distant flames make only a sullen glare behind a smothering smoke-fog. Yet a spark may blacken a body’s home over her head, or sear the sight out of her eyes. A great war was thundering and lightening across wide seas, under alien skies: a war which in no way behoved Clonmalroan, and which might have stormed itself out, little heeded there, had it not been for the circumstance that Pat and Micky and their brethren are “terrible lads for goin’ an’ listin’,” and that the regiment they had for the most part joined was understood to be “up at the forefront of everythin’.”

After a while, moreover, it was not those wild, irresponsible boys alone that this lurid cloud engulfed in threatening glooms. The reserves were called out, people said, at first without any clear notion of what the phrase might signify, but soon perceiving too plainly how it meant that men whose soldiering days were long past and nearly forgotten, except just the little pension, must now break the ties they had peaceably formed and once more set forth campaigning. Murtagh O’Connor, of Naracor, had to leave a wife and five children on his bit of a holding “in a quare distraction,” his friends reported, “for when he was killed, what could happen them but the Union?” And many another household on that countryside had to consider the same woeful question.

So all round and about Clonmalroan there came to be an intense craving for the latest war intelligence. Never had newspapers been in such request. At Donnelly’s bar the _Freeman_ and the _Independent_ were as badly tattered as strips of ill-preserved papyri by the end of an evening’s reading. The Widdy Gallaher “would be walkin’ wild about the country the len’th of the day,” folk said, “for the sight of a one. Be raison,” they added, “of her two sons.” And another illiterate and sceptical old Mrs Linders for similar reasons “was tormintin’ everybody to read her out every word there would be on the paper, even if they tould her ’twas only the market prices.” The elders, indeed, were often at a disadvantage in this way, owing to the inferior educational arrangements under which their generation had risen. Big Brian O’Flaherty, who had an independent and ambitious spirit, demeaned himself to set about learning the alphabet from that little spalpeen, Larry M‘Crilly, in hopes of subsequently reading his news “and no thanks to anybody.” But Larry was impatient and sarcastic, and Big Brian slow-witted and irascible, so the course of lessons one day ended abruptly with “a clout on the head” to the taunting teacher. With more modest aspirations old John Connellan got the schoolmaster to print for him, “the way it would be on the paper,” the name of Private Patrick Connellan; and he might be seen on many a cold day sitting out on the rimy grass bank before his dark door, for the sake of the light, and comparing with this scrap the unintelligible lines of the _Independent_. It was very slow, puzzling work, since the columns were many and lengthy, and his eyes none of the best. Old John seldom could retain the loan of the wide sheets long enough to assure himself completely that his grandson’s name was happily absent from them. For no news was certainly the best that could be looked for from the papers. What, indeed, was likely to happen a lad save one of those casualties which were so briefly recorded. “Och, woman dear, they’re sayin’ at Donnelly’s that there’s a terrible sight of officers kilt on the _Freeman_ to-day, so there’ll prisently be a cruel big list of the rank and file. God be good to us all, woman dear--and poor Micky and the rest. I’m wonderin’ will they be apt to print it to-morra.”

Thus the winter, always at Clonmalroan a season when cares and losses are rife, was beyond its wont harassed and haunted by fear and sorrow. The calling away on active service of the Captain from the Big House was one of its incidents that tended to deepen the general depression. His stalwart form and sturdy stride and off-hand greeting were missed going to and fro, and much commiseration was directed to “poor Lady Winifred, and she not so long married, the crathur, left all alone by herself up at the Big House.”

II

It was only comparatively speaking a big house at all, though it made some architectural pretensions with its pillared front and porch and balustraded roof. Its lower windows looked out of a spacious hall, and a few ill-proportioned sitting-rooms; upstairs rambling passages and wide-floored lobbies cramped the uncomfortable bedchambers. Disrepair prevailed within and without, ranging from the rough work of wind and weather to the minuter operations of mouse and moth. Even at its best, all had been ugly and inconvenient enough. Nevertheless to become mistress thereof Lady Winifred had not merely left a far statelier and more luxurious establishment, but had quitted it under a cloud of disapproval, with an assurance that she was taking a long step down in the world. For her Captain was a person so impecunious and impossible, with such an unsuccessful past career, and such unsatisfactory future prospects, that nobody could imagine what she saw in him, and everybody thought the worse of her for seeing it, whatever it might be. The marriage was just not discountenanced and forbidden outright, but most austere visages were turned upon it, and the wedding, Lady Astermount’s maid declared, “couldn’t have been quieter if an affliction had occurred in the family only the previous week.”

Notwithstanding that inauspicious send-off, however, Captain and Lady Winifred O’Reilly passed a surprisingly pleasant year at this shabby old house of his among the bog-lands. Lonesome and monotonous are the bog-lands, and creep up very close to the Big House; but it stands set in a miniature glen of its own, with a wreath of shrubberies around it, and during the months after they arrived the O’Reillys busied themselves much about additional trees and evergreens, wherewith to screen their domain more effectually from the dreary outlook and roughly sweeping winds in the years that were to come. Many improvements, too, had to be made in neglected plots of garden ground, where the Captain looked at geraniums and pansies and carnations through another person’s eyes, until at last he saw something in them himself, and learned with extreme pride to call them by their proper names. This lore gave him more pleasure on the whole than he had ever derived from his familiarity with the colours worn by jockeys or stamped on playing cards, studies which had hitherto engrossed a larger share of his attention. His wife and he diversified their gardening with long rides together on steeds not expensively high bred. Clonmalroan opinion waxed somewhat critical when the pair came trotting by. Her ladyship, they said, didn’t look the size of a wren perched on that big, rawny baste of a chestnut, with an ugly, coarse gob of a head on him too, and the brown mare was something slight for his Honour, who must ride well up to fourteen stone. But the riders themselves were satisfied with their mounts.

Their contentment had showed no signs of waning in that mild November weather, with its pearl-white mists and wafted odour of burning weeds, when the likelihood of his going out loomed up suddenly on their horizon. The certain news came one morning, while they were working away near the back gate, where their small bog stream flows under steep banks, on which they had designed a plantation of rhododendrons. In the black peat soil these thrive amain, and by next June would have lit a many-hued glow in the shadowy little glen. Lady Winifred tried hard not to see that this interruption of their labours was to the Captain scarcely such an unmitigated calamity as to herself. Her recognition of the fact made her feel doubly desolate; not that there was more difference in their sentiments than had to be in the nature of things, or than left him otherwise than miserable at their parting. She tried further to go on with the plantation, as he would no doubt return in time to see it in blossom; but she was relieved when a spell of bad weather presently set in and let her stay indoors. Yet indoors it seemed as if the whole solitude of the great bog had pressed into the empty house. All day it said, wherever she went, upstairs or downstairs, one word to vex her: _Gone_. But at night she had various fortunes in dreams good and evil.

And every morning at breakfast, in the low, broad-windowed bookroom, she sat opposite to the Captain’s place, just as usual, except that the place was empty. She chose that seat because from it she could watch for old Christy Denny coming by from Salinbeg post-office with the mail-bag. That window looked out on a small lawn, bounded by a shrubbery through which a path ran leading round a corner of the house to the front door. The laurel bushes straggled into frequent gaps, so that between them the approach of a passer-by could be fitfully descried. And any morning might bring the letter for her, the foreign letter. To think of how it was perhaps in those very moments journeying towards her in the battered old brown bag made her so hungry and thirsty that she sometimes forgot to pour out her tea, or cut the over-large loaf. Nor was she always disappointed. Every now and then a letter did come, and in its re-reading she would find a refuge through the terrors of the day, as in a flattering dream by night. All the while, indeed, she knew that she was in a fool’s paradise: that, being so many weeks old, it could give her no assurance of its writer’s safety. The hands that had folded its sheets might ere now have grown cold beside some far-off stream, where geysers of deadly hail broke out rattling on the hills, and the wide air was as full of murderous stings as a swamp of sweltering venom. She might more rationally rely upon the newspapers with their flashed tidings. But these she never dared open herself, and she could not forbear to hang her hopes upon that delusive correspondence.

One midwinter morning she came down to breakfast with her heart set more than ever eagerly upon the arrival of old Christy. Partly because she had not had a letter for longer than usual, and partly because it was Saturday, and on Sunday no mail comes in Salinbeg. This last was of course no reason at all for expecting a letter; but it did seem to her almost improbable that Fate could intend such harshness as to make her wait two whole days and nights before she could begin hoping again. So she looked out of the window with shining eyes, and set about crumbling the bread on her plate before she had tasted a bit, and thought Christy was late before he had well started on his two-mile trudge. It was hard weather, and on the corner of lawn she looked into lay a sprinkling of frozen snow; only a sprinkling; she had seen it whiter last June with daisies spread to the sun. But the frost was keen, as she would have felt by the air blowing through the open window if she had been at leisure to consider anything except the possibility of their bringing the sound of footsteps on the hardened path.

Old Christy was late really, and she listened in vain. When at length he did come, she saw him first, a shadow moving along within the still shadow of the laurels. Just opposite to the window a gap in them made a ragged arch, and Lady Winifred knew that if Christy had anything special for her he would come through the opening and straight across the grass to her, instead of following the path round the house to the hall door. For a minute, a half-happy minute of doubt, she watched him nearing the fateful place, fearful, hopeful, blindly impatient, and then--stunned. Old Christy had gone past the gap, hurrying a little it seemed, as if he wished to get out of sight. This in fact he did. “Sure now, the mistress’s face is all eyes these times,” he said to Mrs Keogh in the kitchen, “and lookin’ at me they do be like as if she thought bad of me not bringin’ her aught. But bedad if she could see to the bottom of me heart, she’d know it’s sorry I am I haven’t got somethin’ for her at the bottom of th’ ould bag. Troth would she so;” and Mrs Keogh replied: “Ah, sure it’s frettin’ she is; goodness may pity the crathur, she’s frettin’. And doesn’t ait what would fatten a sparrow. It’s my belief she’ll do no good.”

The mistress did not appear to be fretting as she sat without motion, and still gazed out over the lawn. Though its aspect was quite unchanged, it had become a grave wherein her hope, newly slain, must lie buried until the sun had set and risen, and again set and risen. Even by the uncertain measure of years, the mistress was very young yet, and otherwise younger still, so that the edges of the experiences which make up life had not been worn smooth for her, to expedite their slipping past. A whole day looked nearly as interminable to her as to a small child, who gets out of bed with no clear prospect of ever getting into it again. And now her own bedtime lay beyond more than twelve leaden-footed hours, so early was this desolate, sunny morning. It seemed late, however, to some of her neighbours, who were keeping round eyes on her movements, and considered her as tardy as she had been thinking Christy. Perhaps a chirp or a rustle may have reached and prompted her unawares, or perhaps she merely acted from habit, but by-and-by she got up and scattered her plateful of crumbs upon the rimy window ledge, where they lay like a little drift of discoloured snow. As she strewed them she said to herself bitterly towards Fate, and ruthfully towards fellow-victims: “Why should the birds go hungry because I have no letter?” and she was careful to shut down the window sash, lest the sleek black cat should, according to custom, lurk ambushed within to pounce upon a preoccupied prey. Then she stood aside, half hidden by the faded crimson curtain, and looked out at nothing with a cold ache in her heart.

The small birds arrived in headlong haste. Some of them were almost pecking before the window closed. For the frost’s tyranny had made of not a few among them desperate characters, fluttering with reckless enterprise. Even a scutty wren ventured out of cover, and advanced along the ledge in a dotted line of tiny hops, scarcely less smooth than a mouse’s run. A robin redbreast alighting brought a gleam of colour something brighter than a withered beech leaf and duller than a poppy petal. Two tomtits in comic motley suits disputed with tragic audacity the claims of all their _biggers_--thrushes, blackbirds, finches and sparrows. The whole party twittered and fluttered and wrangled together, blithe and pugnacious, but the spreader of the feast gave no heed to any of its incidents. She smiled neither at the abrupt gobblings of the large golden bill, nor at the absurd defiances of the blue-and-yellow dwarfs. Her act of charity seemed to have gained her nothing. Then all at once, at some caprice of panic, the assembled birds whisked themselves down from the window-stool into the gravel walk below. Each one of them bore off in his beak a breadcrumb which looked like a little white envelope, and gave him the appearance of a letter-carrier. The sudden movement caught Lady Winifred’s attention, and she was struck by the fantastic resemblance. But at the same moment she remembered keenly how she had been reft of her hope for that day and the next; and immediately, as if the frost at her heart were broken up, she saw the mock letters through a rain of tears. She had not foregone her recompense after all.

III

Near the back gates of Lady Winifred’s Big House, the Widdy Connor’s very little one makes a white dot on the edge of the black bog-land that winds away towards Lisconnel. She lived in it quite alone after her son Terence had listed on her, which he did one winter when times were hard and work was scarce. Everybody almost concurred in the opinion that there “wasn’t apt to be such another grand-lookin’ soldier in the regiment as young Terry Connor, or in an army of regiments bedad.” For Terry’s good looks and good nature and athletic prowess were celebrated round and about Clonmalroan. Six foot three in his stockings, and not a lad to stand up to him at the wrestling; there wasn’t another as big a man in the parish, unless it might be the Captain.

But, of course, it was not in the nature of things that anyone else should equal the extravagant pride and pleasure in those pre-eminent qualities evinced by Terry’s mother. She made a show of herself over him, according to the view entertained by some matrons with smaller sons; and now and then, when the widow had exceeded unusually in vaingloriousness, one of them might be heard to predict that, “she’d find she’d get none the better thratement from him for cockin’ him up wid consait; little enough he’d be thinkin’ of her, or mindin’ what she bid him.” The widow for her part always declared that “the only thing he’d ever done agin her in his life was listin’; and that he’d never ha’ thought of if the both of them hadn’t been widin to-morra mornin’ of starvation.” And perhaps the affliction which that step caused her was not so very far from being made amends for by her exulting delight in the splendour of his martial aspect when he came over to visit her on furlough in his scarlet with green facings beautiful to behold. One of those carping critics declared to goodness after Mass, that she had come into chapel with him “lookin’ as sot up as if she was after catchin’ some sort of glittery angel flyin’ about wild, and had a hold of him by the wing.”

But then at that time the regiment was safely quartered at Athlone, a place no such terribly long way off, and known to have been actually visited by ordinary people. It was a woefully different matter when the Connemaras were sent off on active service to strange lands about which all one’s knowledge could be summed up in the words “furrin” and “fightin’”--words of limitless fear. Then it was that retribution might be deemed to have lighted upon her inordinate vanity about her son’s conspicuous stature. For this now became a source of special torment, as threatening to make him the better mark, singling him out for peculiar peril.