Part 11

The young people were not, however, with one exception, in the mood for dwelling upon the dark side of things. Their depression caused by the collapse of the Christmas box was superficial, and soon passed away. When in course of the evening the two young men went out to feed the pigs, Rose and Mary accompanied them to the back door, where they all loitered so long that the patience waiting round the empty trough must have been sorely tried. Sounds of their talking and laughing came down the passage and were heard plainly in the kitchen, whence Mrs Kenny had slipped up her ladder stairs to say her rosary, so that Norah was for the time left quite alone. She was decidedly out of humour, albeit by no means on account of the others’ rapid reverse of fortune. Rather, we may apprehend, she had viewed that incident as a not regrettable check to a tide of affairs which was unduly sweeping all manner of good luck her neighbours’ way, and unjustly leaving her high and dry. This grudging spirit had forbidden her to appear interested in the examination of the box, but now she could satisfy without betraying her curiosity. As she drew her fingers aimlessly round its smooth inner surface, there was a sudden snap and jerk, and out slid a secret drawer, which had been concealed by a false bottom. It was filled with rose-pink wadding, amongst which lay the coils of a long gold snake necklace. She lifted it out amazedly, and held it up in the firelight, with jewelled head gleaming and enamelled scales, a far finer piece of workmanship than she knew, though the flash of brilliants and rubies assured even her uninstructed eyes that she had come on something of much value.

While she was still looking at it she heard steps returning up the passage, and forthwith tried hastily to replace it in the box. But at a clumsy touch the drawer flew back into its former invisibility, and her flurried fumbling failed to press the lurking spring. Then, as the steps came very near, she thrust her ornament into her pocket, and moved away from the table on which the box stood. In doing so, she was conscious only of a proud perversity which made her loth to be found meddling with what she sullenly called “no consarn of mine.” Presently, however, other motives for concealment grew clearer and stronger. Of course, the longer she retained it the more difficult would the restoring of it be. Her crossness made it impossible for her to imagine a joke as a natural explanation of her conduct. Moreover, a covetous wish to keep the beautiful thing for its own sake sprang up, and had a swift growth. She said to herself that “she didn’t see why she need have any call to be givin’ it up, after all. Wasn’t she after findin’ it in the quare little slitherin’ tray, and the rest of them wid no more notion of it bein’ there at all than ould Sally the goat had? It might be lyin’ where it was till the world’s end on’y for her? And sure, for the matter of that, the ould box itself was no more a belongin’ of the lads to give away than of any other body that might ha’ happened on it tossin’ about the shore. So if it wasn’t theirs be rights, she thought she’d be a fine fool to not keep what she’d got.” Sophistical arguments such as these convinced her reason easily enough, but her conscience was less amenable to them. They were reinforced by some further considerations which possessed no ethical value at all, and which she had the grace to be ashamed of putting into clearly outlined thoughts. She allowed herself to have only a vague sense of grievance at the fact that Rose and Mary had “presents, and people to be makin’ fools of them, and all manner,” whereas none of these desirable things were bestowed on her. Yet it formed a mental atmosphere which made the prospect of yielding up her discovery seem incongruous and odious, in the same way that a bitter wind blowing makes us loth to throw open our doors and windows.

“Cock them up to be gettin’ everythin’,” she said to herself, as she sat in a corner with her hand in her pocket, and drew through her fingers the cold, smooth coils, remembering how the gem-encrusted head had blazed in the firelight. She wished that she could venture to take it out and proudly display it as her property; but she was far from daring to do so. On the contrary, she felt herself laden with a guilty secret, and was presently beset by all the misgivings, suspicions, and surmises which infest people who carry about such a burden. Whenever anyone went near the box her heart thumped with terror lest the drawer should be detected, and its rifled condition somehow traced to her. Then she trembled to think that the lads perhaps knew all the time of the necklace’s existence, and were just reserving it for a grand surprise; or she imagined herself letting it drop accidentally and being unable to account for her possession of it. These speculations so pre-occupied her that she was obliged to explain her absent-mindedness by declaring herself “intirely disthracted wid the toothache”; upon which the condolences and sympathy of the others aggravated her uneasiness with remorseful gratitude. Her conscience nipped her shrewdly when Rose said, “Ah, the crathur, I’ll run over to-morra early and bring you the bottle ould Matt Farren gev me mother; it’s the grandest stuff at all for the toothache,”—Rose whom she was defrauding of a share in that golden marvel! At length she had resource to a plan which promised her temporary relief from urgent fears and self-reproaches. This was to hide away the necklace in some cranny of the rocks on the shore, where, if it should be rediscovered, nothing would implicate her in the matter. She said to herself, indeed, that they would have just as much chance of finding it there as in the mysterious drawer; but beneath that soothing reflection lay a resolve to minimise the chance by choosing the most unlikely chink possible. Since the evening was by this time far spent, and the O’Mearas had already taken leave, she knew that she must hurry to execute her design before Joe came in from seeing after the cattle, when the house would be shut up. So she slipped quietly out of doors.

It was a dark, gusty night, and the waves, still turbulent after their late uproar, were clattering noisily up the shingly ridges of the beach. As Norah ran along she could barely discern the glimmering of pale grey stones and white foam-crests. She kept on by the lough side of the isthmus, because the walking there was smoother, but when she thought she had come a safe distance she stopped, intending to cross over and seek a hiding-place for her spoil among a small chaos of weeded boulders. Looking for a moment athwart the black water, she saw a dim streak of light in the sky above it. The moon was glimpsing out of an eastern cloud-rift, and throwing down a meagre web of rays, which the unquiet dark surface caught fitfully and shredded into the broken coils of a writhing silver serpent. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps the golden snake-chain in her hands, that suggested the thing, but at any rate Norah suddenly bethought her of the _Piast_. For Lough Fintragh is haunted by the terror of one of these monsters, a huge and grisly worm, dwelling down in the shadowy end of the lake, where the water is said to have no bottom, and to wander in labyrinthine caverns about the roots of the mountains. The creature had not been very often seen, but Norah well knew what a direful fate had overtaken every soul to whom its shag-maned, lurid-eyed head and rood-length of livid scales had disastrously appeared. One of its least appalling habits, ran report, was to glare fixedly at its victim, until fascinated and distraught he leaped wildly into the jaws gaping for their prey. In the lonesome, murmurous dimness by the shore, Norah did not care to linger over such incidents, and she was turning away quickly, when a shock of fright almost paralysed her. Within a few yards of her feet she saw two reddish amber eyes glowing through the gloom, and from the same place came a sound of something in rustling, flapping motion.

It was, in fact, only a harmless and rather bewildered seal, who, during the past night’s turmoil, had somehow got into the lough, and who now, instinctively aware of the rising tide, had set out eager to quit the insipid fresh water for his strong-flavoured Atlantic brine. But Norah naturally jumped to the conclusion that nothing less fearsome than the _Piast_ itself was flopping towards her, and she fled away before it in a headlong panic, which culminated a moment afterwards when she ran against some large moving body. This, again, was simply her brother Joe, returned from setting his friends on their way; but Norah, with a wild shriek, gave herself up for lost, and did actually come near putting an end to herself by tumbling in frantic career over one stone, and striking her head violently on another. She had to be carried home insensible, and Christmas Day had come and gone before she found her way back gropingly to consciousness.

Meanwhile conjectures, of course, were rife as to the origin of her mishap, and the antecedents of the “iligant gold snaky chain” that she was grasping. “Sclutched that tight she had it in her sclenched fist, we were hard set to wrench it out of her hand,” Mrs Kenny volubly told her neighbours. The favourite theory held that she “was after pickin’ it up on the shore, and would be skytin’ home wid it in a hurry, not mindin’ where she was goin’, and that was the way she got the ugly toss.” And when Norah had recovered from the effects of it sufficiently to be asked for her own account of the matter, she could throw but little light thereon. Her accident had left, as so often happens, a strange misty gap in her memory, which it was vain to scan. The space between her first sight of the box and her blinding crash down on the shingle was all a confused blank. However, two results of the affair emerged, and, though their cause remained untraceable, had a distinct influence upon her future. One of them was, that she would on no account permit the snake necklace to be regarded as her property. She persistently asserted that it belonged to Mary and Rose; and when Dr Mason, who had undertaken to dispose of it in Dublin, remitted an incredible number of pounds, she would hear of no arrangement save dividing them between her sister and sister-in-law elect. The other had more important consequences to the whole course of her life. It was an abiding dread of their connecting isthmus, which had become so horrible a place to her that never again would she cross over it, even when promised the protection of the most stalwart escort. Now, as the isthmus is very much the nearest way from the Kennys’ farm to any other habitations, this peculiarity of Norah’s cut her off greatly from whatever society the neighbourhood afforded, besides gaining her a reputation for “quareness” not likely to increase her popularity. Probably, therefore, it may have been part of the reason why the years as they came and went that way found her rooted fast and growing into a settled old maid.

Those glowering yellow eyes being blurred out of her recollection, the _Piast_ did not occur to her as the object of her fear. But some people were not slow to connect it with the uncanny inhabitant of the lough, and in process of time their various imaginations hardened into a circumstantial narrative of an especially terrific appearance of the monster. To this day, indeed, so current is the story, that many a wayfarer along the bleak shingle strip goes the faster for a doubt whether such an awful experience as befell Norah Kenny may not be writhing towards him beneath the sunless waters of Lough Fintragh.

THREE PINT MEASURES

THREE PINT MEASURES

The little stream which flows southward through Ballyhoy must be one of the smallest contributions accepted anywhere by the sea, so insignificant in quantity is the water trickling over the smoothed stone step under the low arch on the shore. Yet the course of its channel can be traced, when the tide is out, in gleaming sky-coloured loops far across the mud-flats. As a rule the tide there _is_ out: some of the neighbours indeed, have a theory, no doubt scientifically untenable, that it comes in only about once a week. For this narrow creek, cut off from the Bay by the great grassy sandbank of the North Bull, is steadily silting up, so that its soundings grow shallower every year, and rarer the occasions when we see a plain of sapphire or mother-o’-pearl, threaded with paths of silver rippling, spread all the way between us and the cliffs at purple Howth. It looks as if the Bull would ultimately join the mainland without intermission. Even now, at low water, the passage to and fro can be effected fairly dry-shod by well-chosen routes. These are known to the cattle who graze on the salt herbage among the bent-grown sandhills; and at the fitting time and place, a procession red and white and black may be watched making its way thence in single file towards the strip of common-like pasture beside the sea-road. But the transit, if undertaken by the unwary or ignorant, is beset with serious peril, owing to sundry treacherous mud-holes, which lurk around. Their smothering toils have in time past engulfed much vainly floundering prey, both man and beast, and at the present day several of them are called by the names of their respective victims—Byrne’s Hole, Clancy’s Hole—obscurely commemorating tragedies not less piteous perhaps than those of the Kelpie’s Flow and the Sands of Dee.

I have never heard of any such disaster befalling a class of people who might be supposed peculiarly liable to it, since so much of their time is spent on the dangerous ground. All the shore from Ballyhoy to Portbrendan is haunted by cockle-pickers, who come out from Dublin, where they lodge among the Liberties or other purlieus, climbing down into subterranean cellars, or perhaps mounting wide oaken stairs to spacious upper chambers with the carven panels and mantelpieces and ceilings of the past commenting ironically on the inartistic rags and squalor and famine of to-day. They time their arrival to correspond with low water, so that when you meet a batch of them jogging along the road, you can infer the state of the tide from the contents of the baskets they shoulder, according as these include a heap of grey-fluted shells and a trail of brown seaweed, or nothing except a dull tin measure and a grimy little pipe. Nobody ever sees a cockle-picker apart from his or her basket, yet one of them would be recognised without it, so constant is the type in the species. All are neither young nor old, all are wind and weather-beaten, all are short of stature, any original excess in height being compensated for by a more pronounced stoop, and the garments of all reproduce the tints of blackish mud and greenish slime as accurately as if the wearers were animals whose existence depended upon the power of going invisible. This is not the case, however. Unaggressive and inoffensive in their habits, the cockle-pickers have no especial enemies save the seasons’ difference, and the dwellers by the shore regard their proceedings with hardly more suspicion than those of the white sea-gull flocks which sprinkle the neighbouring dark fields, when the lea is broken up and disturbed grubs abound. A favourite fishery is the strand along by the Black Banks, a little to the eastward of the Ballyhoy river; and on most days of the year sombre figures are to be seen there, paddling and poking, barefooted, in the mud, even when the pools have ice at the rim, and the green weed is stiff instead of slimy.

Very differently does the little Black Banks settlement view the coming of some other visitors, who put in an appearance more seldom. But the tinkers are quite used to cool receptions, and if they went only where they were welcome, would find their journeys much restricted. So as this nook offers them a camping-ground conveniently accessible from the high road, they occasionally guide their jolting donkey-cart down the shingly track, undeterred by the disapproving eyes that watch them from the adjacent cabin-cluster. One row of these has for some time past been standing roofless, a circumstance which points it out as appropriate quarters for all manner of vagrants, who have forfeited, if indeed they ever possessed, the right to expect the luxury of thatch overhead. And here the tinkers are wont to spend a few weeks every summer, seriously to the discomfort of their temporary neighbours. It must be allowed that they have righteously earned the evil repute which dogs them. Seven ordinarily ingenious magpies would be less grievous to the owners of hen-roosts and other portable property than a single tinker. On many a night odours of savoury cooking, wafted from within the ruined mud walls, have roused rueful suspicions in the proprietor of some “grand young pullet” or “iligant fat duck,” which has been mysteriously absent at the last feeding-time; and the stealthiness wherewith a youthful tinker will creep in the small hours of the morning, tin-mug in hand, to milk somebody else’s goat tethered behind a rickety-boarded fence, would discredit no Blackfoot on the hunting-trail. Also the tinker men drink and brawl, and the women storm and screech, and the children interminably romp and quarrel, while the whole confraternity use language so wildly bad that it is “fit to rise the hair up off of your head,” as scandalised matrons observe standing at their doors, and calling Biddy and Pat and Larry and Rose to “come in out of that and not be listening to such ungovernable talk.” And to atone for these causes of offence the tinkers bring no social advantages, if you except now and then the excitement of a stand-up fight between a couple of the men, who have grown pugnacious over their whisky, or the thrilling spectacle of an arrest, which sometimes occurs when the proceedings of the band have come under the consideration of the constabulary in the whitewashed barracks above at Ballyhoy. Dramatic incidents are, be it said, very highly valued hereabouts; but the price of the tinker’s performance is more than can be paid without repining.

One day in the course of their last visit, it did seem as if they were going to produce a satisfyingly strong sensation. It came about in this way. Foxy Cullen, their recognised chief, had returned late in the warm afternoon to the Black Banks from a tramp round the district with a basket of tinware. He had not invidiously omitted to call at the various “publics” which he passed, and the consequence was that he now “had drink taken,” a state more perilously conducive to rash and reprehensible acts than downright drunkenness. On the present occasion, however, nothing more erratic suggested itself to Foxy than an idea that he would before he went home “just step across to the Bull and see what sort of a place at all it was over there.” He had often wished to do that, and as the tide had gone black out, leaving no water visibly intervening, save the river’s fine-drawn thread, the opportunity appeared favourable. So he set down his basket on the wayside sward, kept close-shaven by the goats, and he called to his daughter Peg, whom he saw at hand, to come along with him. Peg, a queer, monkey-like little figure in a scarlet print frock, wore gleeful grins as she obeyed, for her ragged red-bearded father was to her the flower and sum of things; and the pair walked on over the grass until its daisies turned into sea-pinks, and until the seaweedy shingle which succeeded them gave place to a breadth of glistening mud.

By the time they had got so far, Bill Duffy came round the turn of the road, faring homewards with his load of cockles. Bill had had good luck with his fishing that day, and had filled his basket almost before the tide was at its lowest ebb, and it should perhaps be accounted a prolongation of his luckiness that the shimmering tin things in Foxy’s basket now beckoned to him from the sunny bank. He concluded that some of the tinkers were about, but he saw nobody near. The tinkers were slight acquaintances of his, and he had in fact just been trying to negotiate the sale of some of his stock with Mrs Foxy up at the roofless cabin. Unsuccessfully, for she told him with regret that she was “stone broke, and until himself come home, you might all as well be lookin’ to find a penny in a cockle-shell as in her ould pocket.” To which Bill replied, “Och sure you don’t get that on’y in an odd one or so,” and departed acquiescent. But this derelict basketful of tinware proved to be a matter less easily dealt with. At first indeed he seemed about to pass it by with merely a casual glance, which, however, suddenly took on fixity and meaning, as he stopped short and stood looking earnestly at the contents. These were mostly tin pint measures, a dozen of them, maybe, all very new and clean and shiny.

Now it so happened that at this time Bill badly wanted such an article. Anybody might have inferred as much from the dingy, battered aspect of the little vessel lying atop of his blackish-grey cockle-heap. In truth, ever since an accident which it had sustained a good while ago, it could only by sheer courtesy be described as a measure at all. For a dray-horse in Capel Street had set his shaggy foot upon it, treatment which no bit of white metal could be expected to endure, and it had accordingly collapsed into a great dinge, rendering its capacity henceforth a question of intricate calculations, far beyond the tether of Bill or his clients. This unchancy distortion had only the night before lost him a customer, a housewife who had “priced” his wares as he passed her half-door, and showed every symptom of coming to terms, when an over-officious friend nudged her elbow, observing “Laws bless us, woman, look at what he’s be way of measurin’ them wid. Sure it wouldn’t hold a skimpy handful, let alone a pint.” Bill protested that it held the biggest pint in the County Dublin, and that he, inconsistently, always allowed the half full of it over and above, to make up for any possible deficiency; nevertheless the prudent matron transferred her patronage to Mary Cassidy, who just then came by, and he was left in the lurch with his damaged mug. But now, when he felt keenly alive both to its shortcomings and to the difficulties of mustering the few pence needed to replace it, here he was all at once confronted with an assortment ready to his hand, nothing apparently interposing to hinder him from acting on the principle that Heaven helps those who help themselves.