Part 14

“Alive is it?” said Hugh. “Sure the wooden bridge is a good bit higher than this one; but if I tuk a standin’ lep off of the ledge here, it’s breakin’ me neck I’d be afore I knew where I was. And the jagged lumps of big stones is terrible; he might be wedged in between two of them. Och, no! for all the life’s left in him, poor Dan’ll ha’ had a paicibler night of it up there than meself had here, considherin’ quare things in the dark this long while. Ay will he, for the sort of moanin’ and screeches there was in it now and again was nothin’ on’y the win’, and the rain polthoguin’, I very well know.”

“And are you certain that the bridge hadn’t been mended?” said the District-Inspector.

“How could I help bein’ sartin sure? And I goin’ by it on’y a while before, in the grey of the light, and Mrs Duggan herself bawlin’ across to me that they were kilt thrampin’ half-a-mile or so afore they could git over anywheres.”

“But if you didn’t wait, how do you know that he mayn’t have turned back?”

“Wait? Bedad no, it’s runnin’ away down here I was, as fast as I could pelt. But what was to turn him back, and he flourishin’ off wid himself in the greatest hurry at all? You might ha’ thought it was ten fine fortin’s he was goin’ after; and not a stim to see a step before him wid. So if it isn’t a murdher, get me one. And that’s the raison I was thinkin’ I’d a right to be mentionin’ it to yourself, sir, or the Sargint.”

“It’s a very curious case,” said the District-Inspector, beginning instinctively to grope about for precedents, and finding none.

“But murdher or no,” said Hugh, “I do be thinkin’ diff’rent ways of it, and some of them’s bad. For I sez to meself, ‘In a fine disthraction poor Dan’d ha’ been, when he heard tell of th’ ould crathur breakin’ her heart in the House.’ And then again I sez to meself, ‘And supposin’? Many’s the fine disthraction you’ve been in yourself, me man, and niver tuk a lep into the river out of it.’ And arter that agin sez I to meself, ‘But sure, if some one’d ha’ up and shoved me over unbeknownst, so to spake, sorra the blame I’d ha’ blamed him.’ However, since the day’s light’nin’ overhead, little doubt I’ve had in me mind but that I’d liefer see him comin’ along the road on his feet, disthracted or not disthracted; and that’s what I’ll niver behould, if it was twyste as clear. Terrible clear it is gettin’,” he said, glancing furtively up.

The sky was all one floating, drifting greyness, dim and impenetrable even in a place rather low on the east, where many invisible hands seemed to be straining the vast web in devious directions, so that it thinned and paled. But at this moment it rent there right through, leaving a rift filled strangely with a liquid radiance of silver light glowing into amber, which suddenly darted into the eyes of the two men, and threw their shadows across the wet road, and set the puddles on fire.

“Look,” said Hugh excitedly, standing up straight and pointing towards the water.

A wave wider and wilder than the others was coming down the river, with something lapt round in it that made a dark core to its turbid brown. But this was borne along no farther than to the first ridged step in the fleeting rapids. There it halted and lay still, while the turmoil of water and foam fell away from about it in a flurry, draining off through the interstices of the boulders, or pouring over their veiled crests. It was the body of a man. One arm hung down against the straight rock-ledge, and the face looked up to the sun-gleam so naturally that when the next wave rushed by, weltering on and on and on interminably over it, the District-Inspector gave a gasp as if something had been taking his own breath.

“There he is, the very way I tould you,” said Hugh. At the sound of his voice the District-Inspector turned quickly, and, seeing that he had stepped up on to the low, ivied parapet, made a grasp at him, but was not in time to reach him. “Stop where you are, Dan, one instiant yet,” Hugh shouted: “for here I am, too!”

THE STAY-AT-HOMES

THE STAY-AT-HOMES

On the 1st of March, last year, it might have been noticed that people were continually going in and out of Letterowen Railway Station; yet the number of passengers who arrived and departed by train was certainly no larger than usual. The station is rather a new feature in the village, children of smallish growth remembering a time when its fine pink-washed gables, and brilliant flower-borders, and curious turnstile did not exist; still it had been there long enough for the charm of novelty to have been worn off, and that was not the _comether_ which on this dusty-grey, east-windy March Sunday drew thither so many visitors, who had no tickets to buy, nor other official business to transact. What they dropped in to look at was placarded upon the walls of the bare little waiting-rooms, where Jim Neligan, the porter, had been busy with a paste brush the evening before—so excessively so, indeed, being new to his post and zealous, that the station-master had inquired sarcastically whether he intended to paper the whole place over entirely, and if he didn’t think he might as well stick on another layer atop of the first. But the result of Jim’s lavishness was that wherever you turned there were the thick black letters announcing a special cheap excursion to Dublin on next Tuesday fortnight, which, as everybody well knew, would be St Patrick’s Day. Peter Carroll, who helped to clean lamps at the station, and his mother, who scrubbed floors there, had spread the report of the advertisement overnight, and it sounded so very remarkable that more people than not twirled the turnstile in the course of the morning and came down the zig-zag path to see for themselves.

The inhabitants of Letterowen are not great travellers. Their railway is only a branch of a branch line, and while most of them have not gone farther along it than Brockenbeg Junction, seven miles north, by no means few have never got even so far. It is a place where in soft weather the platform frequently takes a pattern of bare feet, and bare feet seldom set out on long journeys by rail. As for Dublin, that had hitherto seemed a goal which remoteness and magnitude made hardly accessible even to imagination. Letterowen folk considered vaguely that it would need a sight of money and a powerful length of time to bring you thither, and what might be expected to befall you there was so hard to say that your return seemed misty indeed. Yet here was a printed notice boldly promising—“To Dublin and back for two shillings,” and going into circumstantial details about a train departing at six in the morning and arriving at noon, and leaving again at midnight. “Twenty-four hours for twenty-four pence,” it ended epigrammatically, and some of its readers felt no manner of doubt that each one of them would be an hour of rapture unalloyed. Others were less confident. Old Dan Molloy had heard tell of there being such thick fogs in Dublin most whiles that people “were as apt to walk plump into the river as anywhere else, which was a terrible dangerous thing.” And the Widow Loughlin had been told that “thim quare excursion trains as often as not got shunted off into a siding before they came to any place, and the crathurs in them did be left there perishin’ for nobody knew how long.” Several of the neighbours also wondered whether the people would have to be sitting in their seats all the time she was stopping in Dublin station, for that wouldn’t be very gay at all. Mr Farrell, the station-master, was frequently called upon to clear up this or some similar perplexity, and he generally did so satisfactorily, pointing out at the same time that the terms were uncommonly reasonable. I do not think that they struck most of his hearers in just that light. The opinion rather inclined to be that they certainly offered a great deal for the money, but that the money, as certainly, was a great deal to pay. For pence are pennies at Letterowen. Thus the price specified for the four-and-twenty hours had in some cases an effect not intended by the company.

“Four-and-twinty pence—goodness guide us; sure I would be four days arnin’ meself that much at the weedin’ or stone-gatherin’ if I was on full woman’s wages itself,” said Anne Reilly, who in slack seasons often had to be content with half that amount; “and to go spind it away between one mornin’ and the next, as if you could pick it up handy along the side of the road. Musha, long life to them; I hope they’ll be gettin’ their health till I do.”

“And, mind you, the two shillin’s isn’t the whole of it—where’s your bit of food comin’ from? Or is it starvin’ you’d go there and back again?” said Anne’s niece, Katty M‘Grehan, meaning to discourage her sister Maggie, whom she suspected of harbouring extravagant ideas, which Maggie quite understood, and rejoined to, saying with some heat: “Then is it aitin’ nothin’ at all a body’d be, supposin’ they was sittin’ mopin’ at home? ’Twould be all the one thing to take it along in the ould can. For the matter of that there’s nothin’ aisier.”

“Nor wastefuller,” Katty said, sticking obdurately to her point, with her worst suspicions confirmed. She wanted to save those two shillings, having planned a treat for her crippled father, “the crathur.”

“Well, glory be to goodness, Jimmy,” old Mrs Walsh remarked to her contemporary, James M‘Evilly, who, like herself, had listened dispassionately to the little skirmish, “you and me is too ould and ancient altogether for to be botherin’ about goin’ or stayin’—the trees in the hedges is as apt to be thinkin’ of takin’ runs up the road, and it saves a power of throuble.”

This view of the situation prevailed more or less among the elders of Letterowen, but not universally. Here and there an old body held an alert and agile mind, which, according to circumstances, chafed at its restraints, or made a shift to get about in spite of them. Such was the case with Mrs Rea, whose age, never estimated at less than “rale ould entirely,” is by some people asserted to be “every day of ninety year.” She herself acquiesces cheerfully in any figure between that and threescore and ten. Certain it is, at all events, that she seems quite as active and vigorous as many of her much less venerable neighbours. Still they were surprised when, a few days later, she was amongst the first to announce that she intended to “thry her chance, and see what sort of a place Dublin might be at all at all.” Behind her back, they declared that it was “no thing for the ould crathur to take upon herself to be doin’,” and that “she might very aisy lose her life over it if she didn’t mind what she was at.” And some of them called upon her in her house at the end of the post-office row, fronting the railway embankment, for the express purpose of remonstrating with her in scarcely less outspoken terms. “Ah, woman dear,” they would say, “is it dotin’ you are, or what at all’s come over you to put such a notion in your head? Sure it’s losin’ yourself ten times you’ll be going that far, let alone breakin’ the ould bones of you clamberin’ in and out of them high carriages, and up and down them cruel steep stairs. Or else, ma’am, desthroyed you’ll surely be in the streets, where they say an ould person creepin’ about is as apt to get dhruv over as a weeny chucken that sets itself up to be runnin’ under the people’s feet, and they coming out from Mass.” But for all of these she had the same answer: “Well now, ma’am, if I amn’t ould enough to take care of meself at this time of day, I dunno when I’m likely to be.” To which piece of inconsequence they commonly replied, “that them that was wilful’d go their own way,” and took leave huffily, unconvincing and unconvinced.

Their axiom was truer in Mrs Rea’s case than might have been anticipated from her circumstances; for she was a solitary widow, and the way that such persons go is often determined by quite other considerations than their own wilfulness, especially if there be a question of as much as two shillings involved. Mrs Rea, however, had one son prospering in the States, and another long established as under-gardener to very high-up quality in the county Sligo, and both of them were “rale good lads to their mother,” which set her above anything she or her neighbours would have called want. Just now, moreover, her “odd few ould hens,” had been laying unusually well, so that her railway fare was forthcoming with little difficulty. The chief obstacle she encountered was public opinion, which, although she thought as lightly of it as might be, she could not completely disregard. It is impossible to set out on a great enterprise with an unperturbed mind in the face of unanimous prophecies that you will never come back alive; even if you do let on to consider them “all blathers and nonsense.” So Mrs Rea, while dealing summarily with the objections urged by her ordinary acquaintances, would condescend to argue the matter at much length with her especial crony, Julia Carroll.

Julia disapproved of the project rather decidedly for her, she being by no means an opinionated person. “’Deed, now, Joanna,” she said, in the course of their first discussion, “supposin’ I had the chance itself, which I havn’t, it’s long sorry I’d be to be settin’ off on any such a deminted sthravade. Sure, woman alive, them that has the age on them of you and me is bound to be travellin’ prisintly, whether or no, far enough to contint anybody, unless it was the Wanderin’ Jew. So where’s the sinse of tatterin’ about afore thin in them racketin’ smoky trains? I declare to you, I hate the noise and smell of them passin’ by there, goodness forgive me, and it only the nathur of them after all.”

“But bedad thin, Julia, that’s the very thing I was considherin’,” said Mrs Rea. “For if it’s stuck down in the one place we’re to be all the while till we’re took, we’ll get that disaccustomed to everythin’ out of the way we won’t know what to do wid ourselves anywheres else. So for that raison we’d a right to jaunt about now and agin to diff’rint places the way we’ll be a thrifle used to what we’re strange to, and not amazed and moidhered entirely wid the quareness of it.”

“Well, now, I’d never have that notion,” said Julia Carroll, “for it’s the quare quareness and the sthrange sthrangeness I’ll be throublin’ me head about when once I get the chance of goin’ the road after some of them that’s wint afore me. Sure as long as there was the ould people in it it might be the most outlandish place one could consaive and I’d niver notice it, I’d be that took up wid meetin’ them, nor you wouldn’t aither, Joanna. Morebetoken, I’m often thinkin’ these times that the old place is the sthrangest of all since they’re quit out of it—and no fear of gettin’ used to it, sorra a fear!”

“Maybe that’s very thrue for you,” said Mrs Rea. “But, talkin’ of the ould people, there’s another raison I have. Do you remimber Biddy Loughlin—thim that lived below the forge?”

“In a manner I remember her, but which of them was Biddy I couldn’t say for sure. They was only slips of girls the time they stopped here, and we never had much doin’s or dalin’s wid them.”

“Well, Biddy married a man of the name of Jackson that lives up there in Dublin. Her aunt was telling me she heard from her last Christmas. Keepin’ a fine little shop, they are, in some sthreet—I must ask her the name—convenient to the railway station. So I was thinkin’ I’d write her word when I was comin’, and maybe bid her meet me at the thrain. ’Twould be pleasant to see a body one knew.”

“Middlin’ pleasant it might be. But, saints above, woman, you needn’t tell _me_ that you’re takin’ off up to Dublin for a sight of Biddy Loughlin, that I believe you’d scarce know from her grandmother’s ninth cousin, as the sayin’ is, if she walked into the room this instiant minyit. For that is too onraisonable a raison altogether.”

Mrs Rea looked rather defiantly conscience-stricken. “To spake the moral thruth,” she said, “I wouldn’t wonder if all the while I wasn’t goin’ for e’er a thing else except a bit of divarsion; and I dunno if that’s any great sin.” “Sure not all,” Julia Carroll said, more from politeness than conviction, for she was an ascetic both by nature and training. “Only it’s the quare divarsion’d take me thravellin’ over the counthry if I had a grand little room of me own to be stoppin’ paiceable in.” She glanced covetously round her friend’s house, in which they were talking. For Julia, having lagged superfluously long behind her own generation, was wearing out the fag end of her days in a grand-nephew’s family, where the tolerance she met with, though good-natured enough, could not benumb her sense that only in this world she filled up a place which, albeit cold and comfortless, could with difficulty be spared to her. Therefore she looked wistfully round Mrs Rea’s domain and said, “Very paiceable I’d stop in it, ay would I.”

“There’ll be a good few out of this goin’ on it besides me, you may dipind,” said Mrs Rea, “Dinny Fitzpatrick is, for one, I know.”

“Ah, poor Dinny’s a young chap, the crathur; where’d he get a ha’porth of wit,” said Julia, this time with unintentional severity. “And be the same token, there was his head went by the windy. Gettin’ on for six o’clock it must be if he’s lavin’ work, and I’ve a right to be steppin’ along wid meself.”

“Is it wit?” said Mrs Rea; “the lad has plinty of that, according to aught I ever seen of him. If there’s anything ails him, it’s bein’ a thrifle ugly in his temper, as his father was before him. ’Deed, them Fitzpatricks have the name of bein’ cross-tempered people—dacint and cross-tempered. That’s the way he got quarrellin’ wid Norah M‘Grehan, she he was spaking to a long while, just about the time she took her situation in Dublin. And my belief is he has some notion now of makin’ it up wid her, and that’s what’s startin’ him on the excursion; for until he heard tell of it his mind was set on goin’ to the Malahogue Races. I’d be glad if the two of them got frinds ag’in; poor Norah’s a good-nathured little girl, the crathur, and all Dinny wants is a bit of humourin’ to keep him plisant, and whativer the raison may be, he’s mostly seemed as discontinted as an ould hin in a shower of sleet ever since Norah quit.”

Denis Fitzpatrick, whose clear-cut profile and rough tweed cap had just crossed Mrs Rea’s greenish pane on his way up the dusk-dimmed street, was a good-looking sturdy young fellow, with a countenance which bore out her assertion that he had plenty of wit. She was right, too, in her conjectures about the motive which lay at the bottom of his plans for St Patrick’s Day. At that very moment, in fact, he was considering how he might best ascertain Norah M‘Grehan’s Dublin address without compromising his dignity by any direct inquiries from her family, who had been stiff enough for some months past. He thought he would ask ould Mrs Rea, who was likely to know, and, failing her, Norah’s sister Maggie, as she looked several degrees less forbiddingly upon him than Katty had done since the falling out.

But after all he need not have troubled himself with these arrangements. On the afternoon of the Sunday before the holiday Mrs Rea was happily busy over her fire when a long shadow fell in at her door and ran up the wall.

“Well, Dinny,” she said, recognising it without turning her head, “and what’s the best good news wid you?”

“Och nothin’ at all, ma’am,” said Dinny.

“There couldn’t be less,” Mrs Rea said cheerfully; “I’m makin’ meself a bit of griddle bread to take along in the thrain, and I’ll ha’ plinty for you in it too, Dinny.”

“Thank’ee kindly, ma’am,” Dinny said, gloomily, “but divil a thrain I’ll be thravellin’ in.”

“Mercy on us all—what’s after happ’nin’ you, man?” she said, whirling round in consternation.

“Sure because I’m claned out—stone broke,” said Dinny. “Didn’t I put me half-crown on Black Knot, that was runnin’ yesterday for the Balmarina Cup, and what’d suit the baste but to go break his ugly neck at the first lep? It was Sargint Duffy himself bid me put every penny I could on him, and he knows people that knows all manner. Two pounds he had on him himself. The divil’s in it.”

“You great, big, stupid ass, you,” said Mrs Rea. “Och, well now, wouldn’t anybody think an infant child might have the sinse to keep out of them ould barracks, where it’s bettin’ and foolery the len’th of the day? And small blame, maybe, to the polis, that’s nothin’ betther to do, and plinty of money to be pitchin’ under the horses’ feet; but for the likes of you to go settin’ up to ruinate yourself! Faix but you’re the quare fool.” Her genuine vexation at his mishap came to the surface in a bubbling of wrath, while her plain speaking was made all the more natural by the fact that it seemed to her only the other day since six-foot Dinny stood scarcely as high as her table, and that in Dinny’s recollections Mrs Rea had always been a rather comical old personage, from whom desirable sugar-sticks and cakes and negligible threats and reproaches were occasionally forthcoming. “The grandest chance at all,” she said, “and everythin’ settled—and Norah, the crathur. Och, now, Dinny Fitzpatrick, if yourself’s not the most unchancy stookawn of a gomeral on the townland, just get me him that is?”

“I’ve raison to be greatly obligated to you, ma’am,” said Dinny; “and the next time I want somebody to gab the hind leg off a dog, I know where to be comin’ to.” So he went away in high indignation. Whereupon Mrs Rea thought ruefully to herself, “Sure, maybe I’d no right to be annoyin’ him, and he disappointed wid losin’ his holiday and all, the mislucky bosthoon.”

Annoyed him she had, however, so seriously, that next evening he had twenty minds at least to make as if he did not hear her calling him across the street, when he was going by from his work. Only that there seemed to be a hoarse sort of despair in her “Dinny, man, Dinny,” resentment would undoubtedly have got the better of him; but as it was, he came over and asked what ailed her.