Part 8

Grace was right in her facts. One of the low-lying cloud-banks that wander more perilously than the ancient Jostling Rocks upon the plains of ocean had drifted shoreward by some caprice of the wind, and was now crowding into half a hundred inlets, among them the M‘Evoys’ creek. She was wrong, however, in the conclusion to which she had so happily hurried, and she speedily learned her mistake.

“Well now,” old Isaac said deliberately, looking round the shrunken horizon, “all I can say is that if there was five fogs in it, or fifty fogs, or five hundred for the matter of that, every one of them on the top of the other, niver a bit I’d be at a loss of me day’s fishin’ for the likes of them--or anybody else,” and he stepped on board with a determined stride.

“And the boys ’ill go to loss in it too, belike,” Grace said, standing by in her woe; “ne’er a one of yous ’ill ever be comin’ home to me again, and I haven’t a sowl in the width of the world. I wisht to God I was away in the ould buryin’-ground there at Lisannagh, along wid Herself, and then me heart wouldn’t be broke among yous all.”

Her father, now in the very act of pushing off, gave no signs of hearing, and she sat down upon the pier, oppressed by utter despondency. If she had any motive at all for lingering there it must have been supplied by her last flicker of hope. The boys, she thought, might possibly soon return, to be instantly despatched in quest of the mistrusted _Granuaile_.

How long Grace sat, crouched on the stones with her head in her hands, she could not have guessed. All her thoughts were out at sea, whence it seemed to her that news, good or bad, must soonest come. But it was a sound of steps clattering on the loose shingle behind her that first caused her to start up expectant. And what she saw made her stand gazing in wide-eyed terror. For the newcomer was young Farrelly, the boys’ comrade, alone, bare-headed and wet-haired, with drops glistening and falling as he moved.

“Is it you then, Con Farrelly?” she said. “And what’s gone wid the rest of them?”

“Och, Grace, mavrone--the Headstones!” said Con Farrelly.

Now the Headstones is a name of fear round about Kilavawn. It has been bestowed on a small square-shaped bay which bears an evil reputation. The salt water has there flowed over the grey crested ridges of a sea-sunken hill, and these rocks emerge in such numbers that they give it somewhat the aspect of a burial-ground. Jagged reefs and sandy bars help to make the place a very difficult passage to thread safely, even in fair weather; storms, and especially fogs, convert it into a mazy labyrinth of perils. Many a luckless keel has missed the clue and come to fatal grief among them. Con’s brief answer, therefore, conjured up a clear and cruel picture in Grace’s imagination.

“Is it dhrownded all of them was, and you comin’ away?” she asked calmly.

“Look you, Grace, you crathur, this was the way of it,” Con said in a breathless hurry. “Takin’ the short cut through the Headstones we were, intendin’ to thry off Malinish, when up come the fog like a wing clappin’ down on us, and we in among the thick of them snaggy rocks--you could see as far through a feather pillow--and a win’ whistlin’ up along wid it. So the first thing we knew, on agin a one we druv, and knocked a big houle in her--she wouldn’t keep afloat while you would be shippin’ an oar, that’s sartin, and sure you know ne’er a one of them swims a stroke, only meself. So they bid me get to shore, if I could at all, and they’d make a shift to hould on to the rock--but, telling you the truth, I misdoubt could they. I heard them lettin’ a woeful shout just afore I come to land, that was the most I could do,” he confessed. “But I run round along this strand, thinkin’ I’d borry the loan of your other ould boat, and thry would there be e’er a chance of raichin’ to them in her--she’d be apt to keep afloat that far--and the fog’s liftin’ a bit. I might maybe find them right enough yet, if I had no delayin’. Where have you her lyin’ now?”

“Sure me father’s took and dhrownded himself in her this mornin’, Con,” Grace said, quietly still. “He wouldn’t take me along wid him, sorra a bit would he, or else ’twould ha’ all happint very handy like. But the ould boat’s gone.”

“The Lord be good to us, Grace, is it romancin’ you are?” asked Con. “Why, what would bewitch the man to do such a thing all of a suddint? Ne’er a word the lads told me of his comin’ out this day. True for you, though--the boat’s away; and what am I to be at next?”

“Why wouldn’t you go look for another one, then, this minyit?” Grace said with a flash of vehemence. “Wasn’t you sayin’ there might be a chance yet? And is it standin’ there you are and talkin’ foolish, instead of runnin’ for your life?”

“Runnin’ I could be fast enough,” said Con, “but where to thry for a boat’s more than I can tell. Divil a one have I in me mind that I could be layin’ me hand on. Howane’er, I’ll do me endeavours, Grace M‘Evoy, troth will I so.”

Con darted off again along the beach, and was quickly out of sight. He left Grace in an infinite solitude. She had spoken truly when declaring that her father and brothers were all she possessed, for outside the little circle gathered round yonder central hearth-fire she could count no kinsfolk and few neighbours. Daddy and Joe and Thady and Tim, she felt certain that she was never to behold one of them more.

Under stress of that appalling belief she could only cower down among the boulders, closing eyes and ears to the outer world with a fold of her grey shawl, as if she might thus exclude also the inward desolation. She was holding back her thoughts much as she would have held her breath, drowning under deep water, conscious all the while that the terrible moment could not be long deferred.

“Grace, you big gawk! Is it asleep or wool-gatherin’ you are? Sittin’ crooched there like an ould wet hin. Grace, you great _stronsach_ you--instead of catchin’ a holt of the rope, and us bawlin’ to you this last half-hour.”

Her father’s voice thus loudly accosting her broke roughly on her muffled ears. But seraphic strains could not have sounded to Grace more bewilderingly sweet. Up she started out of her black dream. The white fog had lifted and lightened wonderfully, so that there were golden gleams shining about its farthest silvery edges; but this was not what she saw. For close by bobbed up and down the old _Granuaile_, with her father standing in the bow, just striking the sail, and with all the three boys sitting in the stern, safe and sound, albeit rather sheepish and disconcerted of demeanour. Grace seized the tossed rope, and in another minute the whole party were tramping on the noisy stones. They had no fish to unload--not so much as a herring.

“Well, Grace, it’s the quare fine haul I’m after bringin’ home this day at all evints,” said old Isaac, “the biggest ever I took--if it was good for much, which it may be, or maybe it mayn’t. Where am I after findin’ them? Sure now, tellin’ you the truth, ’twas more be good luck than good guidance I happint on them, for the fog was that thick you couldn’t sort your fingers from your thumbs, when I come where I heard the bawls. But says I to meself: ‘That’s Thady,’ says I, ‘be the powers, it is himself.’ For he was a great hand at the roarin’ if anythin’ wint agin him, ever since he was the len’th of a sizeable mackerel. And, be the same token,” he continued, “very prisently I come widin a knife’s edge of scrapin’ desthruction into the ould boat off the lump of a rock me three hayroes there was sittin’ gathered up atop of. And bedad now, accordin’ to the look of them, for all the pleasure they were gettin’ out of it they needn’t ha’ throubled themselves to be flouncin’ off that outragious early--and bad manners to them--before other people had got rightly asleep. They might be none the worser if they waited till their hurry was over.”

“Och wirrasthrew, dad, you’ve got the laugh agin us this time, and no mistake,” Joe said with his wonted good-humoured grin, “and we’re very apt to not hear the last of it this saison anyway.”

Joe’s forebodings proved to be well founded. But the morning’s event had another result which nobody would have predicted. Old Isaac has never gone fishing again. Many a time--such is the contrariness of the human mind--have Joe and Thady and Tim come talking to him persuasively and wistfully about the grandeur of the weather, but his answer is always the same. “I’m after takin’ me’ biggest haul,” he says, “and nothin’ less ’ud satisfy me now. Stoppin’ at home I’ll be and contintin’ meself wid that.”

THE WRONG TURNING

I

Dwellers at and around Beltranagh assert that a man who can find his way about their shore by daylight “won’t be bothered anywhere else in the dark,” and the saying is tinctured with truth. For those high cliffs, which show to the waves and west winds a long front seldom broken, seem to have been left with the _débris_ of their building materials littered at their base so profusely that it crops up perpetually above the water-pavement, or, still more perilously, lurks unseen just below the surface. The sea is thick with rocks and reefs, shoals and bars, which so vary in aspect and obstructiveness from tide to tide that to thread the shifting labyrinth is a difficult feat even for a mariner holding the clue of maturest experience. It is perhaps most intricate just outside Carrickawn Bank, a long shingly isthmus lying stretched across the mouth of one of the few gaps in that great cliff-wall which here abruptly swerves inland to form a deep embrasure filled with a hill-girt lough. Such a mere thread is the isthmus in breadth that only its extremely tenacious stuff could have refused to snap ages since under the stress of thundering seas. A piled-up glacis of smooth oval granite stones, like an ogre’s sugar-almonds, each one a heavy two-handsful, slopes seaward almost its whole length, and so far has clattered defiance when the clutching foam leaps highest to snatch it down. But near the northern end is one weak point, where the gigantic pebbles are scattered sparsely with silvery sand showing between them; and it seems probable that, in the course of some thousand centuries, the Atlantic will there break through into Lough Orren. Meanwhile, not many years back, the inhabitants of Beltranagh Farmhouse used the slight depression in the shingle-bank as a sheltered berth for their couple of boats.

The Beltranagh Farm seems a curiously situated little homestead even for that countryside, where tillage is carried on in unlikely places, and holdings have not uncommonly a more or less amphibious character. Its existence is due to a small triangle of “land,” as opposed to “strand” wedged in between the foot of the cliffs and one end of the stony isthmus. A jut of the towering rock-wall screens a few precious stacks and sheds from the full sweep of the west wind, but the dwelling-house itself stands aloof from this protection, and faces the sea across only a meagre dryish strip, even at low water. It has two windows and a door below, and three windows above, and is washed with a livid silurian blue, which seems to parody the colour of its surroundings. About it are shredded the short-furrowed patches, with soil dwindling towards their dykes from mitigated to unmitigated sand and shingle. Potatoes struggle there sometimes into fairly vigorous existence; and old John Moriarty’s whim was always to have a scrap “down in oats,” which kept him “heart-scalded” half the year. He was a proud man if his grain-crop loaded “the little ass” or the slug-shaped curragh. This scantiness of the farm produce certainly saved some trouble, as all that went to market had to be conveyed painfully along the rough natural causeway, or at the owner’s greater risk by the lapping water, which in wild weather can rage fiercely even on the landward side of the barrier. Up the steeps behind the house nothing less primitive than a goat-and-gossoon path leads to nothing more civilised than a wet bog, while at the further end of the isthmus you come upon only one road that deserves the name, blustery, sea-skirting, three lonesome miles long before it begins to be fringed with the outlying cabins of Haganstown. As for the boreen that turns off to the left and runs along the lough shore, it very soon degenerates into the rudest of cart-tracks, and except for the name of the thing you might as well take your own way across the grassy-ledged hill-slopes, girdled with sheep-walks and seamed with water-courses.

When Jim Moriarty came back to Beltranagh Farm, after an absence of more than a dozen years, there were circumstances that threatened to make a peace-lover’s course as troublesome steering as if it had literally lain among the adjacent reefs and shoals. He was the eldest son of old John Moriarty, whose death had been the cause of his return to a home from which a falling out with his stepmother in early youth had banished him to employment in a woollen manufactory at Mallow. The joining of threads so long severed always calls for considerable tact and adroitness, but Jim brought to his job, which was unusually complicated, rather less than an average equipment of these qualities. He found the household now consisting of his brother and sister, Andy and Biddy, whom he had parted from as children, and his much younger half-brother, Jack, whom he had never met at all, so that he must needs make three new acquaintances, a thing he was slow to do. But he had not simply to deal with the inevitable estrangement of absence; there was also his father’s will. By this document John Moriarty, to the surprise of all parties concerned, divided his property, comprising several acres, into six equal shares, three of which he left to his son Jim, and one apiece to his other children. Furthermore, Jim had power to buy out his brethren compulsorily, if he pleased, or sell the farm to somebody else; so that his position was one of very commanding superiority.

The fact was that these dispositions had been made not many months back by old John in a spleenful mood, which caused the absent--who are not quite always unduly blamed--to appear less distasteful than the perpetually and irritatingly present. “The little gossoon’s an ass,” their father had grumbled to himself. “And the other two’s as headstrong as a couple of pigs--done the very thing I bid them to not do wid the Kerry heifer. It’s my belief Jim ’ud make a better offer at lookin’ after the place, if he got the chance.” And acting upon these views he instructed Councillor Dowdall that Jim’s the chance was to be. But Jim’s brother and sister were vastly aggrieved, the more so because for the last year or two they had managed domestic affairs much as they would; and they immediately formed the opinion that this arrangement had been designedly brought about by his “slutherin” letters to their father. Jim’s letters had been in reality few and brief, and entirely free from sentiment. Andy and Biddy, however, were guided less by probabilities than by a natural desire for an object of resentment still accessible. Jim would have borne the whole brunt of theirs had they not been constrained by other considerations to manifest it in modified forms. They dared not quarrel utterly with a person who could no doubt oust them from the old home in which their affections were rooted. Accordingly their behaviour was a series of compromises between wrath and prudence. They stopped short at direct accusations and confined themselves to innuendoes. Andy never “up and tould him to his face that he was a schemin’ villin, and had as good as grabbed the bit of land off them behind their backs.” He only muttered, with the vague allusiveness of Greek tragedy, about “some he could name that had been a great hand at featherin’ their nest with the scrawm of a pen now and agin and the price of a penny stamp.” And if Biddy at dinner-time wore the aspect of a Gorgon who had tasted something bitterly unpalatable, or if she flounced ostentatiously out of the room upon Jim’s entrance, she would afterwards apologise through the medium of hot cake for supper, or an offer to do a bit of mending. More overt demonstrations must, they felt, be deferred until their present precarious position became assured one way or the other.

Jim himself was both more and less alive than they supposed to the state of their feeling. Under a somewhat stolid demeanour he concealed no small chagrin at the discovery that “them two weren’t anyways disposed to be over-friendly.” But his wits were not quick, and his conscience was clear of anything except a regret that he had kept aloof from Beltranagh all those years nor sought to restore amicable relations with his father more effectually than by intermittent letters; and this made him slow to guess the true cause of their animosity. Thus the sallies which they themselves feared might have gone too far failed to reach him with explanatory effect; he merely perceived that they were meant to be somehow disagreeable.

Yet even if Andy and Biddy had been “a bit pleasanter in themselves,” Jim would have found Beltranagh a dreary abode, comfortless within as without, and remote from familiar friends and occupations. His stay there would most likely have been brief only for the special circumstance that at this time his right arm was still partially crippled by an accident, which hindered him from attending to his business, and made him think it advisable to spend his enforced leisure rent free on his property. So while he waited for the tardy re-knitting of injured ligaments and sinews, the season slid on from autumn into winter. His chief resource at first against the monotony of those empty hours, and his hankering after the meadow and woodlands about Mallow, lay in the companionship of his young half-brother Jack. Rather dull and backward for his nine years was Jack, partly by nature, and partly owing to a life of singular isolation and insipidity, flavoured only with acids and bitters infused at the discretion of elders’ uncertain humours. It was a strange joy for him to associate with a person whose temper seemed to be uniformly unruffled, and whose dexterity, even though one-handed, appeared quite marvellous. By the time that Jim had constructed a fascinating miniature lake and canal with loughs on it among the boulders, Jack had become his faithfully attached ally. Whereupon Biddy expressed to Andy some gloomy expressions: “Mark my words,” she would say, “it’s makin’ a fool of the little ape he is, the way he’ll have him aisy persuaded to stop along wid himself here whenever he throws the two of us out of it, as he’s apt to take and do one of these days. And then ’twill be mighty convanient for me fine gentleman to keep the poor child growin’ up big and strong to be doin’ him a man’s work about the place for nothin’. That’s what he’s up to, you may depind.” However, as weeks passed and he betrayed no disposition to encroach or interfere, much less evict, matters were, on the whole, tending towards improvement at the time of his first call upon the MacNees.

II

The voyager up Lough Orren, having passed through the straits where it is cut nearly in two by the shears of opposing hills, will see on ahead a snowy gleam, which grows on his sight from what might be a floating lily, a gull’s wing, a skiff’s sail, into the white front of the MacNees’ little house. It stands on a steep bank overlooking the lough, whence its reflection often strikes back sharp and clear, for this green-rimmed bowl of fair water is seldom a flawed mirror. Jim Moriarty had not been long at Beltranagh before he learned to welcome the white fleck when it came into view as he made his way towards it by boat or on foot. These MacNees were distant cousins of the Moriartys, and for all an intervening league, their nearest neighbours, so lopsided visiting terms were maintained between the two families. That is to say, the Moriartys occasionally called upon the MacNees, who did not return their visits. It had long been a joke among them to apologise and account for this by declaring that the lough was double the length going backwards. Andy had more recently begun to add, with significance, to his versions of the jest: “Sure it knows who it does be separatin’ us from, isn’t that the raison, Lizzie?” But Lizzie had never yet “let on” that she heard him. It was true enough that the MacNees’s situation seemed almost more out-of-the-way than their friends’, considering the disabilities of the household: Mrs MacNee, an elderly little widow woman, with her two daughters, Maria an invalid, and Lizzie, whom her sister half wistfully called “as cogglesome about settin’ out to go anywheres when she got the chance as if every fut she put down would be treadin’ on red-hot pitaties.” Accordingly they were rarely to be met abroad. Andy and Biddy were rowing over to them one fine Sunday afternoon when Biddy invited Jim to join the party, mainly that it might be graced by his fine Mallow tweed suit, but also to disoblige Andy, with whom she was temporarily affronted, and who she well knew would have preferred his brother’s room. Jim, on his part, regretfully consented, lest they should “think too bad” of his refusal. But the expedition after all proved more agreeable than he could have by any means expected; he was afflicted much less than usual with gawky dumbness, and in fact found it so possible to converse with Mrs MacNee that he regarded the visit as a rare social success. This encouraged him to repeat it, and he presently acquired a habit of doing so at short intervals. Sometimes he went with Andy and Biddy, but more often with Jack to supplement his one-armed rowing; or he tramped alone round by the lough side, a longer and slower route. Soon, as he grew quite at his ease in the society of the quiet, good-natured sisters, their kitchen, being warm and weather tight, with a transfiguring illumination of fire-light shaken over it, seemed to him a far pleasanter living-room than his own at Beltranagh, which had several of the features of a sea-cave. Still, his original and permanent attraction was old Mrs MacNee in her frilled white cap and large-plaided little shawl, with her last-generation reminiscences, and her assumption, not displeasing to his consciousness of approaching thirty, that he had not yet ceased to be merely a youth.