Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES

“Ὅσσ’ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθ’· ὅσα δ’ οὐχ ἕλομεν, φερόμεσθα.”

A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES

BY JANE BARLOW AUTHOR OF “IRISH IDYLLS”

METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. LONDON 1897

PRINTED BY W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD RIVERSIDE PRESS EDINBURGH

TO

J. W. B.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST 1

A DESERTED CHILD 97

AN ACCOUNT SETTLED 125

M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP 155

THE SNAKES AND NORAH 185

THREE PINT MEASURES 211

THE SURREE AT MAHON’S 231

THE SHORTEST WAY 253

THE STAY-AT-HOMES 271

A PROUD WOMAN 299

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST

The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden. It runs westward—that is, towards the ocean—but never reaches the shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at one point—about midway on the right hand looking westward—it is suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybody _the Nick of Time_. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me over the opposite hills, but he replied: “Sure, what else would they be callin’ it?” Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory explanation.

The effect of Letterglas’s solitude and verdure somehow seems to be heightened if one notices its single visible sign of human handiwork. This is a road-track, now all but quite grassed over, leading into the valley from its open end, where the Clonmoragh highway passes, and stopping aimlessly at the slope immediately below the Nick, having first flung two or three zig-zag loops up the hillside. A rust-eaten, handleless shovel, and the wreck of an overturned wheelbarrow, still mark the point where the work was abandoned on a misty morning in April, more than fifty springs ago; but the track itself is now merely a most faint difference of shade in the sward, which has crept back again indefatigably, even where the austere road-metal had been thrown clattering down.

A day before that misty morning, if anybody had climbed up and had passed through the Nick of Time, in at which the new road was to go, he would have found himself on a long level of fine-bladed turf, stretching like a lofty causeway laid down atop of the hill-embankment Everything else up there looked so softly smooth and flecklessly green that the eye was at once caught by a big block of stone, which stood just opposite the gap, at a few yards’ distance. It was an oblong mass of blackish limestone, perhaps seven feet by four, with a shape curiously symmetrical for a piece of Nature’s rough-hewing; plumb-and-rule guided chisel could scarcely have made its lines truer. That, and its solitariness, uncompanioned as far as could be seen by so much as a single pebble, gave its aspect an incongruity which prompted the question how it had come there; for whose answer we must revert through unimaginable wastes of years to the time when our last huge ice-sheet was scoring and grinding all the country’s face on its slithering way to the western ocean. Then it was that this big boulder dropped fortuitously through a small rent in the isle-wide coverlid, and so being left behind did not share in the final weltering plunge a few miles farther on, where the stark folds slipped over the sea-cliffs like the counterpane off a restless sleeper’s bed. Ever since that catastrophe it had sat there looking rather like a rude unwieldy coffer or chest, a portion—as in fact it had been—of the impedimenta carried and lost by some Titanic traveller. The resemblance was increased by a clean-cut horizontal crack, no doubt sustained when the mass came _sogging_ heavily to earth, which ran all round it, a few inches from the top, counterfeiting a lid. All the old ages that had passed over it afterwards had wrought only slight changes in its aspect. As the years went on, the dark peaty mould deepened a little about its base, and dull golden and silvery lichen-circlets crept out here and there like wraiths of the sun and moon beams that had touched it. Otherwise it was unaltered, and for many a long century so were its surroundings.

But at last a new feature appeared among them; a very inobtrusive one. Fifty years ago, anybody approaching the big stone from the Nick of Time might have observed that a little footpath led up to it from the contrary direction, and went no farther. A more inartificial path could not well be: a simple product of steps going to and fro. You might have supposed a sheep-walk, only that there were no fleeces nibbling over Letterglas. Indeed, its most frequent passers-by being such promiscuous wayfarers as the shadows of wings and clouds, it was not easy to conjecture any plausible _raison d’être_ for this track, which ran distinctly defined, though faintly, merely a crease in the flowing sward mantle, not a seam worn threadbare, so to speak, through to the brown earth. Certainly the rather gloomy-looking block had no apparent attractions wherewith to invite resort, not even a view, as it stood at the bottom of a very shallow dent in the green. Yet there the path ended; and if you took a dozen steps to the brow of the hill, you could trace the course of that pale thin line far down the slopes; through the fenceless “mountainy land” first, and then into two or three steep, dyke-girdled fields, before it was lost among the round-topped trees which gathered about a rambling old mansion-house. Whoever visited the big stone evidently thought it worth while to come a long way.

Such an humble and artless path has always a certain element of romance about it, lacking in more pretentious thoroughfares contracted for at so much a mile. They differ as does a brook from a canal. Like the brook, which has wrought itself as it went along, with and by its own purpose, the little footpath has some special meaning and object, albeit perhaps a less obvious one. It is the visible trail of a want or wish, though of what kind we may be unaware, and with want or wish it will cease to exist, or soon after. For the living green things will creep back and efface it speedily. But meanwhile it seems half to keep and half to betray a secret: you can only guess what has brought feet thither day by day to tread it out.

* * * * *

Fifty years ago or more, you would have been likely enough any fine morning to catch the chief maker of this particular path in the act. If the years were, say, ten more, it would have proved to be a very little little-girl, whose brown hair held both sunshine and shadow, and whose hazel-green eyes were softly lit, and who in those early days of hers always wore an ugly reddish checked pelisse, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with velvet rosettes to match. This was little Eileen Fitzmaurice, six or seven years old, who, ever since she could recollect anything, and maybe some twelve months longer, had lived with her mother and aunt at the Big House in Glendoula. As you would, no doubt, never guess her errand up the side of Slieve Ardgreine, I will at once explain that she was seeing after the safety of her family plate.

Although Eileen had herself no recollection of anywhere else than this Glendoula, a valley much resembling its neighbour Letterglas, but with its green dotted and chequered by a few cabins and fields, she knew by hearsay that there was another place in the world, a most wonderful place called Drumlough Castle or At Home, where “there wouldn’t be as much as a wing of a cold chicken served in the parlour without its silver dish under it, and as for the ould black sideboard of an evenin’ there would be company in it, that now was somethin’ worth lookin’ at; the full moon on a dark night was a joke to the big salvers.” To be sure there were there other fine things innumerable, which would have appealed quite as strongly to her imagination, if they had had equal justice done to them; however, it was upon these that Eileen’s informant always laid most stress, for she looked back to her ancient home through the eyes of old Timothy Gabbett, the lame butler, whose pride and affection had dwelt in his pantry and plate-chest, enjoying their supreme moments before a gala-night spectacle of snowy and crystal and lustrous argent gleams.

Yet this paradise, of which old Timothy used to say mournfully, “Ah, Miss Eileen, them was the rael times,” was haunted by lurking shadows. Eileen never learned the true reason of their exile: how wild Sir Gerald, her father, had been found one summer morning entangled among the serpentine coils of the water-weeds at the end of the lake, with his only son and heir dead in his arms, three-year-old Jack, who, when told by the garden-boy Mick that the master was looking for him high ways and low ways, had stumped off greatly elated, with no foreboding of the method in which Sir Gerald had resolved to settle his grievously involved affairs. She had been too small a baby then to be conscious of her mother’s flight from the memories of Drumlough, and the circumstances of their coming to Glendoula remained for her in their original obscurity. But she very quickly perceived that it was worse than useless to ask questions on such subjects of anybody except old Timothy, and that any allusion to his stories in the presence of her elders was a grave misdemeanour, which made her invalid mother cry, and her melancholy aunt scold; and Eileen would have desisted at a subtler hint. She did not often wonder why this should be, because her world was so full of mysteries that she generally accepted their existence as a matter of course. There was just one of them, however, that exercised her mind not a little, and that she sometimes vainly tried to get cleared up. She wanted to know what had become of all those most beautiful silver things that Timothy talked about—the great shining salvers, the claret-jugs, the tankards and flagons, the piles “as high as your head, Miss Eileen,” of plates with a polish on them “the stars in the sky might be the betther of gettin’,” and the grand potato-rings, and the frosted cake-baskets, and the tall _up-urny_, which seemed to be a marvellous composition of lights and flowers. Of all these resplendent objects, the only one, a few uninteresting spoons and forks excepted, that apparently had moved with the family to Glendoula, was an antique teapot of fantastic shape. It could no longer be used for its proper purpose, owing to the infirmity of its dragon-tail handle, but old Timothy turned it to account in his own way. You would always have been warned that it was Quality—and Quality was almost invariably either Dr M‘Clintock or Canon Roche—who had called at Glendoula House had you seen Timothy hobbling to answer the bell. For, having reconnoitred through the half-glass back hall-door, it was his practice in such cases to equip himself with the old teapot and a bit of “shammy,” that he might appear rubbing up ostentatiously, and muttering a stereotyped apology: “Beg your pardon, sir, but there does be such a terrible sight of silver clanin’ in this house that I scarce git time to lay a bit out of me hand.” All the while he felt more than half-conscious that it was a poor and rather unseemly pretence; but he had not much invention, and could devise no better expedient for the magnifying of his diminished office and the upholding of the family’s fallen fortune. Nor was he ready with any very satisfactory answers when Eileen questioned him about the present bestowal of his treasures. Full well he knew that they had long since gone to the Jews and other hopeless destinations, and were by this time irrecognisably melted down, or, more intolerable still, adorning alien boards, and subject to alien powder and brushes. This knowledge gave him acute pangs, which made his replies curt and vague. “Where are they now, Miss Eily? Ah, sure, just put away somewheres safe; they’re not wanted these times, when the poor misthress is seein’ no company; but it won’t be so one of these days.... Ah no, Miss Eily darlint, I couldn’t be showin’ them to you—sure, they’re not in this house at all.” And once he added: “They’re just stored up handy, Miss Eily, waitin’ till you’re grown a big enough lady to be ownin’ of them.”

“Me?” said Eileen, startled.

“Why, in coorse, Miss Eileen. Who else has anythin’ else to say to thim after poor little Master Jack, that had a right to ha’ been Sir John, gettin’ dhrown—bein’ took suddint, I mane, that way? Hiven be good to the both of them. Ay, to be sure, honey, it’s all in a very safe place waitin’ for you. And thank ’ee kindly for bringin’ me in the grand little bunch of daisies—they smell iligant.”

After learning this fact about her far-off proprietorship in the hoarded plate, Eileen thought about it oftener than ever, though from motives of delicacy she spoke about it seldomer, lest she should appear unduly prying and eager on her own behalf. And for a long time the more she pondered the matter, the less possible she found it to excogitate any possible hiding-place. But at last she made a fateful discovery.

* * * * *

It was one fine May morning when she went for an unusually long ramble with Norah Kinsella, the housemaid. Norah—a tall, strong, cheerful lass, far more active than rheumatic old nurse—thought nothing of carrying her pet, little Miss Eileen, who at six years old was still only “a light fairy of a crathur,” up and down steep places, so that they could go all the farther. On this occasion they climbed right up to the top of the hill behind the house, higher than Eileen had ever been before; and one of the first things she noticed was the great boulder-block. She never had seen a stone of nearly so large a size, nor imagined one; and she did not now class it with the small unshapely fragments and insignificant pebbles with which she was familiar. Rather, it reminded her of the turf-stacks that she had watched people building up carefully in the yard. Yet a turf-stack it certainly was not.

“Doesn’t it look like a great big box, Norah?” she said.

“Ay, indeed does it, Miss Eily,” Norah said; “and a fine power of things it ’ud hould inside of itself, too. Sure now, you could be puttin’ away a one of them little houses down below there in it, or very nearly.”

“It must be extrornarly heavy, Norah,” Eileen said, patting the sun-warmed side of the stone with her hand. “If that’s its lid, I couldn’t lift it.”

“Sorra a bit of you, honey, nor ten like you. Troth, ’twould take ten strong men to give that a heft,” said Norah, making as if she would prise it up with the flat of her hand. “Whativer was inside it ’ud have to stay there for you or for me, if it was silver or gould itself—we’d ha’ ne’er a chance.”

Her random words gave Eileen the shock of a new idea. Perhaps there really might be silver, quantities of silver, in it. For why should not this be the handy safe place that old Timothy meant? A safer there could not well be, since it was so far removed from all meddlers; and she almost thought that she did espy a bright twinkle as she stared hard at the lid-like crack, which was just on a level with her eyes. She discreetly said nothing about it to Norah, and her pre-occupation with the subject made her so abstractedly silent on their way home that Norah feared the walk must have been too long. But, in fact, she was considering whether or no she should mention her discovery to old Timothy. He might be vexed, she thought, at her finding out what he had refused to tell her: still, she would have liked to ask him whether her guess were right. The point needed much deliberation, and remained undecided for many days.

* * * * *

Meanwhile she chanced upon something that seemed to be an independent corroboration of her own theory. By nature Eileen had not particularly studious tastes, but solitariness had early driven her to seek for company on the shelves in the long low-windowed book-room. She did not find there much that was very congenial. Sixty years ago juvenile literature was, as a rule, a solemn and dreary thing; and Eileen’s meagre library was not even up to that date, having for the most part belonged to the preceding generation. The favourite authors of the day would appear to have been infested with a mole-like fancy, which commonly led them to linger among tombs and worms and epitaphs, seldom, indeed, stopping short at those grisly precincts, or forbearing to light them up with a lurid flare from the regions beyond, but, nevertheless, dwelling upon them with a fond elaboration of detail. Accordingly, a few days after her first ascent of Slieve Ardgreine, Eileen fished down from its shelf a small, old dusty, half-calf volume, which was composed of several short stories bound together. One of them, entitled _The Churchyard Prattler_, related the experiences of a child, aged four, who, as an appropriate and improving pastime, was sent out provided with a string of his own length, and instructed to ascertain by measurement how many of the graves in his cheerfully chosen playground were shorter than himself. He was pictorially represented as attired in a long bib and a broad-brimmed chimney-pot hat, and he moralised his lively researches into the strains of a brief rime-doggerel hymn:

“_Oft may be found A grassy mound By the yew-tree, Much less than me; It seems to cry: Prepare to die!_”

Another showed how a frivolous little girl, in a huge coal-scuttle bonnet, had her sinful hankering after toys and such vanities rebuked by being conducted past a series of attractive shop-windows, from each of which she was bidden to select herself a present, until she arrived at an undertaker’s establishment, where she was likewise required to place an order.

The last story in the volume, however, was of a very different type, and upon it Eileen now alighted, instinctively judicious in her skipping of its ghoulish companions. It was called _The Glittering Hoard in the Coffer of Stone_; and the passage that most profoundly impressed her ran as follows: “The flare of the scented torches fell upon the vast coffer of dark stone, which stood in one corner of the cavern. Its smooth sides were crusted here and there with patches of lichen and grey moss, and it looked as if no hand had touched it for many an age. But at a gesture from the Prince, six gigantic black slaves raised up the massive slab which formed its lid. As they did so, the foot of one of them slipped, and before he could recover himself, the unwieldy weight slid down with a crash, and was shattered into three fragments on the floor. Nobody heeded, however, for the light that broke out of the open chest drew all eyes thither. It was like a cistern filled with crystalline fire. “Empty it, my son,” said the old Sultaness, and the Prince began to lift out one by one the treasures it contained. Silver goblets there were and flagons, great gilt bowls and ewers, filigree caskets set with diamonds, chains of red gold, and ropes of milk-white pearls, diadems and necklaces, armlets and girdles, whose pendant gems dripped a many-coloured brilliance, as of flower-distained dew. At the bottom of the chest lay a round golden buckler, studded with knots of jewels, and a mighty sword in an ivory scabbard inlaid with pale coral and amber: the hilt was carved out of a single lump of apple-green chrysoprase. All these, strewn over the flagged floor, shimmered and bickered under the glancing torch-gleams, until it seemed as if a rippled and moon-lit sea lay there flashing around a murky rock. The beholder could hardly realise that its uncouth bulk had indeed been the receptacle of a treasure so richly wrought and exquisite.”

Eileen read and pored over this account with keen interest and pleasure. From the first she drew a parallel between the two great blocks of stone, so that the wealth disclosed by the one strengthened her most splendid conjectures about the other. As she read, she easily shifted the scene from the shadowy cavern to the sunny hill-top, and imagined the grass all scattered over with shining gear, which by some strange decree of fortune she was to look upon as her own property. Silver dishes and jewelled diadems, the _up-urny_ and the buckler, both these alike fascinatingly mysterious, sparkled for her in the clear light of day. The only objects in the picture that she shrank from reproducing were those six gigantic black men, whose presence she felt to be an ugly blot upon the brightness. But then she reflected that the lifters of the lid perhaps need not be either black or gigantic. Dan Donnelly, and Christy Shanahan, and Murtagh Reilly, would surely be strong and big enough to do it; and they were all pleasant familiar faces, who said “Good mornin’ to you kindly, Miss Eily,” or “The Lord love you,” with friendly smiles, whenever they met her, and were in no wise alarming. So she substituted them for the formidable figures, and could almost hear old Murtagh saying, “Hup boyos! or what for was yous aitin’ all them pitaties?” which was his usual exordium upon such strenuous occasions.

* * * * *

The next time that she went for a walk with Norah Kinsella, which happened soon after this, in the continuance of old nurse’s rheumatism, Eileen said, half-scared at her own temerity: “Let us go up again to the big box”; and she felt happy when Norah at once assented, tacitly accepting the fact that a box it was. Eileen wanted to see whether she were tall enough to look in, supposing the lid removed, and she found, to her gratification, that on tiptoe her stature sufficed.