Part 5

The next morning did not smile upon anyone’s undertakings; rather, it might be said to survey them unsympathetically through a blank, expressionless mask. For Letterglas and all its neighbouring glens were full of a white fog. It was not merely the soft mist that clings about distant tree-clumps and cabin-clusters when the sun is still low, and uncurls slowly, peeling off from round them, while he climbs, giving one an impression that the landscape is a fragile work of art, not yet quite finished careful unpacking out of delicate cotton-wool wrappings. All the night through a vast white cloud had been adrift thither from the westward, over seas, hanging low always, and sometimes trailing on the very face of the water like a huge disabled pinion. Beneath it the dim blue tide had crept to the limitary foot of the cliffs, furtively, as if from an ambush; but the wavering ribbon of weed and froth set no boundary for the thronging vapour-masses, which passed on wafted inland through rifts and over crests, till at length the escorting breeze dropped and left them halted motionless, a crowd checked by invisible barriers. Round about Glendoula they made all the valleys into one, spanning the ravines with ghostly causeways and bridges, and levelling the peaks, lost among aërial snowfields. The curd-white impenetrable wall looked at a few yards’ distance so dense and solid that the thought of walking through it almost took away one’s breath, and people about to emerge from it loomed along with such dim, unsubstantial shapes that their voices sounded startlingly loud and near.

Yet, notwithstanding these obstructive conditions, work was going on in Letterglas valley, where wheel-barrows trundled to and fro invisibly, tilting out clattering loads, and picks swung unseen till one stood close to the wielder’s elbow. Pierce, the inspector, had made his way thither, gropingly, at an early hour, having a special job in view, which he was anxious to get done as soon as might be. But since a field of vision wider than the present was desirable for his operations, he consulted the weather-wise among his men as to the probability of the fog clearing off. In old Murtagh Reilly’s opinion, which was highly esteemed upon such points, this might be expected to take place before they were much older.

“I wouldn’t wonder if it was very apt to be givin’ itself a heft agin we’re done breakfast, your honour,” he said; “and once it fairly gits a rise on it, it won’t be long streelin’ itself off out of your way. It’s quare somewhiles to see the rate them mists ’ill be skytin’ up the hillside at, and not a breath of win’ stirrin’ that ’ud thrimble the feather of steam whiffin’ out of an ould kettle’s spout, let alone liftin’ a big cloud fit to thatch a townland.”

“Sure it’s the sun shinin’ on the wrong side of them does be drawin’ them up,” said Christy Martin instructively, “like as if they was a wet shirt shrinkin’ in front of the fire. The flannen’s a terror for cocklin’ up into nothin’ if the hate’s too strong for it.”

“I dunno where the great likeness is then,” said old Reilly, who had not a taste for instruction.

“Maybe there’s not, Christy,” said Christy’s brother Willy; “very belike there is not. But all the same, you and me’d be glad enough of a pinny for ivery time we’ve seen the sun comin’ out red on this side, lookin’ the livin’ moral of a hot cinder burnin’ through a blanket.”

“Have it your own way, lads,” said old Reilly, sublimely abandoning the whole expanse of the heavens to them with a comprehensive flourish of his hand. “Howsomiver, your honour, if you was axin’ me, I’d say this day’s apter than not to be takin’ up prisintly, or next door to it, as thick as it is this instiant minyit.”

Old Reilly seemed to have said truly, for by the time that everybody rose from the sodded bank, on which some of them had been eating slices of bread as they sat—others were in the same plight as John O’Mahony, who remarked humorously that it saved a dale of throuble to have your breakfast yisterday or else to-morra—there was a perceptible curtailment in the flowing drapery of the hill-slopes, and a thinning of its texture, paler shimmering brightness running through it here and there, to show that the opaque folds might shake out into diaphanous tissues of pearl and silver.

Accordingly, a small knot of men by-and-by detached themselves from the rest, and began to ascend towards the Nick of Time, whose gap was still hidden by an ample curtain. Pierce was one of the party, which carried up with it a supply of gritty black grains and sundry coercive-looking tools. He invited Murtagh Reilly to accompany them, but the old man cried off the expedition. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll stop where I am,” he said, “for these times when there does be a notorious curse on the counthry, and the hungry-grass growin’ over ivery inch of it, troth it’s as much as a man’s life’s worth—and if that’s no great things, it’s the most he has—to be settin’ his misfortnit fut e’er a step further than he’s bound. But you’ve a plinty of the lads along widout me, your honour.”

* * * * *

Just at the same time, Larry M‘Farlane also set off up the slope, by a different route from the others, however, and with a different goal. He was taking the shortest way to the Big House down at the bottom of Glendoula. The fog there had begun to recede a little earlier than in Letterglas, but still muffled things very closely, making mysteries of the most familiar objects, and Larry, who, to judge by his headlong bounds and plunges all the way, might have been racing for at least his life, collided more than once with a tree-trunk when he came among the plantations. And he reached the house panting, only to run up against more hampering blocks of delay. For in the kitchen was nobody except Mrs Dunlop, the cook, busied with frizzling preparations for the breakfast, and all she could be got to say was, “Aw, ax Mr Gabbett, Larry man; he’ll be apt to know if she’s after goin’ out, and if she isn’t, she might be indures yit.” And when he rushed on to the pantry, old Timothy, who had overheard the voice of an unfavoured visitor, shot the bolt of the door, and was long deaf to all thumps and calls. In fact, Larry, the urgency of whose errand divided every minute infinitely, was turning away in despair, when the old man shouted a surly, “What’s a-wantin?” and he had to waste another tormenting interval before a churlish chink opened.

“Wantin’ to spake to Miss Eileen?” said old Timothy. “Then want’ll be your master, me hayro of war, for I seen her goin’ out a while back. So if that’s what all you had the prancin’ in the passage for, like a cross-tempered carriage-horse kep’ standin’ in a could win’——”

“Murther alive and wirrasthrew and bad luck to it,” Larry said, “what’ll I do at all now? And which way did she go, Mr Gabbett? Was it up Slieve Ardgreine she wint, do you suppose? For it’s biddin’ her keep off goin’ up it I’d be.”

“Well to be sure, and set you up. Yourself’s the great one to be givin’ your orders. And how the mischief could I be tellin’ you where she’s went, except be the sound of the hall-door clappin’? But I dunno what’d take her sthreelin’ very far up the hill, unless she was wishful to lose herself body and bones in the thick of the fog that you might take and cut like the side of a rick. And if you’re from the place where they’re workin’, sure you’d ha’ met her comin’ along, supposin’ she’s gone that way.”

“I might ha’ passed her by twinty times over unbeknownst, up about the top of the fields, where you couldn’t see a goat’s horns and tail together,” said Larry; “nor I wasn’t keepin’ along be the path the most part of the way; I just slapped down the shortest I could. But if I’d had the wit of an ould blind crow, I would ha’ sted on her own path, and then I might ha’ stopped her. But I’ll be hard set now to git a chance of findin’ her at all.”

With that, Larry bolted away too hurriedly for any further questions, thus frustrating the curiosity of old Timothy, left wondering “What for in the nation the bosthoon would be warnin’ Miss Eileen off the hill,” a riddle for which he could invent himself no plausible answer.

* * * * *

Larry’s surmise was partly right, Eileen having in reality been on her leisurely way up Slieve Ardgreine while he sped hot-foot down it. She had slept little in the night, and would have almost grudged that little, had it not been for the pleasantness of waking to the recollection that she was not only dreaming. The last time she did so, the silvery lines framing the shuttered window, though but faint as yet, convinced her that it could not be too early to get up. Rising, she was fascinated by the spectacle of one of the snow-whitest and stillest fogs she had ever seen in the dozen years or so during which she had been capable of meteorological observations; and she stood looking on at it for some time. But when the fabric of the spacious pavilion began to give ground a little and sway to and fro, restoring glimpses of a substantial world and shifting them away again, no longer contented with her watch from the window, she determined to run out and survey more thoroughly this rare aspect of things. On the way downstairs she stopped to tap at her mother’s door, very softly—a velvet-suited bee would have made more noise flying against it—hoping to be let in, and fearing to rouse a sleeper. An answer did set out to her, but the feeble drowsy voice failed to reach her, so she stole on cautiously, a little sorry that she must put off her good morning until she should return. Eileen was wearing a favourite blue and white mousseline-de-laine, and had not forgotten to fasten its collar with her silver key. Over her head she had thrown a grey woollen shawl, because the April morning air was soft rather than warm. It was a somewhat shabby old shawl, and Eileen vainly reflected that if she met anybody she could just slip it off and be carrying it on her arm.

Anybody might be coming down the hill home to his breakfast about this time, and the long aisle of the elm-walk, where the straight trunk columns showed themselves momentarily and vanished as the mist-wreaths floated and melted through them, was weirdly alluring. When Eileen had followed it to its end, she found another vista opening before her out on the green slope, closed ever and anon, and temptingly cleared again by capricious wafts of dimness. For as she went there was setting in a general movement among all that great gathering of vapours; their assembly was lingeringly breaking up; a spectral city going to wrack. Vast cloaked and hooded shapes seemed curtseying ceremoniously to one another from opposite sides of the glens, while here and there some loftily towering pile might be seen to betray the frailness of its structure by a shivering from top to base like that of a sail in a veering wind. But hardly a breath was stirring in Glendoula, so that the dispersion proceeded by very slow degrees, with many fitful pauses.

Eileen’s little footpath led her so closely in the wake of a receding cloud-wave that she could watch the bracken-plumes emerge frond by frond from its filmy borders, and descry the gold of the furze-blossom glimmering through the white, before the sombre branches became visible. On either hand, low trailing fleeces were caught and carded into filaments on tussocks and bents and briers. Farther up it seemed as if a spectral net cast over the hills were being hauled in with torn meshes teased and tangled. And behind all this shadowy shifting drifting there were vague motions of light, hinted at by sudden wan shimmerings of the canopy that screened it.

Eileen was always half intending to turn back, yet she went on and on, sometimes noticing these things, and occasionally stopping to gather a shrivelled dandelion bud, or a russet plantain head for the old moping parrot in the parlour at home, until at last she knew that she must have come near the stone chest. It had no bitter associations for her now. Rather she would have looked upon it as the auspicious starting-point whence she had fared to the highest fortune. Even the failure of her scheme for producing a relief fund did not any longer grieve her, for Pierce had undertaken that help would be forthcoming, and to Pierce’s keeping she had transferred herself, responsibilities and all, which she found a wonderful ease to her mind. So light of heart, indeed, it made her that she now began softly to sing a sorrowful little ditty, which she used long ago to hear crooned by her poor old nurse, who had a turn for sentiment:

“_Oh sunny blooms Slieve Cryan, where the gold boughs creep together, With honey on the high cliff in ten thousand bells of heather. For the morn that fears no morrow is there bliss in flower and bee, And in one heart sorrow, sorrow, for the hope that wafts to sea._”

But as she sang, in a voice small and sweet, of this heart sorrow, she looked on before her with shining eyes, very sure of seeing all she wanted to crown the moment’s gladness come presently to meet her from among the shrouding white mists.

* * * * *

Hidden among them just then, not many yards away, half-a-dozen people were at work around the big boulder, digging and boring, with frequent mention in their discourse of needles and trains and matches. Their operations were by this time, however, nearly finished, and after the last of them, which was the kindling of a lacklustre red flare with a sheet of grease-stained brown paper, the whole party withdrew hastily through the Nick of Time, and retreating some little distance down the slope on the other side, stood still in apparent expectation of an event. It happened very soon. First a fierce sharp-edged clatter, that crashed into a booming roar, followed by a duller sound of rushing thuds, as if a scattered flock of unwieldy birds had swooped down close at hand in headlong flight. An abrupt silence succeeded, for few echoes gossip among the Letterglas hills. It must have lasted unbroken for a long minute at least. For the men had re-entered through the gap, where they found the fog thickened by a sulphurous reek, and Pierce, making out amid it the expected new vacant place, was considering how he would now hurry home and fetch Eileen hither as soon as possible, that there might be no further delay in the clearance of their pleasant path—“my sweetheart,” he was saying to himself with a remorseful remembrance of her sad eyes yesterday—when the air filled, the wide world filled as if it could never empty again, with a shriek and a shriek reiterated, shrill and wild, you could not have told whether man’s or woman’s, hardly whether a human being’s, it was a skirl of such sheer despair. Yet Pierce thought he recognised in it a name that snatched away his breath.

“What was that, man? What is it?” he said, pulling the sleeve of Paddy Murray, who was nearest to him.

“Somebody’s hurted for sartin,” declared Paddy.

But this was probably a mistake. The fragment of the big stone that had struck Eileen on the temple, seemingly had thereby opened for her and shut the dark door, whose threshold the senses may not cross, all in an instant, before the happiness could fade out of her face, or the little bunch of carefully-gathered weeds drop from her hand. It might, by the way, be feared that poor Polly would enjoy no more such feasts henceforward to the end of his tedious days.

Larry M‘Farlane it was, arrived with his belated warning, who had raised the outcry on beholding this proof that his panic-stricken hurry had been all bootless, and that the evil dream which had possessed him ever since he casually overheard talk of Mr Pierce’s project was come most terribly true. Some of the others now bade him whisht and run for Dr Blake and Father O’Connor, who might both of them very belike be below at Denroche’s cottages, where the Maddens and young Joe Hanlon were mortal bad last night; though, for the matther of that, it was aisy enough to see there’d be little anybody could do here—goodness pity them all. But as there was nothing else whatever that Pierce could do—he who used to be so ready with resources—he fixed his mind upon their coming with a desperate grip, while he stood by and waited idly.

* * * * *

He felt bewildered, chiefly by the sameness of most things, which were unaccountably going on much as they had been doing a minute before, when Eileen could have spoken to him. The white mists were still curtseying to one another across wider spaces in the valley, and the dim light behind them grew slowly stronger. There was a scent of turf-smoke on the air from a fire which someone had lit under a bank a little way down the hill. The very strokes of old Dan Heron’s hammer continued to come up in a faint rap-tap from the roadside, where he was breaking lumps of reddish sandstone; for Dan was so deaf that he applied himself to his tasks with abstracted concentration, and could not easily be interrupted. Evidently the news had not penetrated to him. A murmur of voices was passing to and fro in a knot of men gathered at a short distance. Pierce might have caught a sentence now and then.

“You’d a right to ha’ sent them word to keep out of it—you had so—the way she’d niver ha’ come widin raich of harm.”

“Sure, we was intendin’ to get it done that arly there’d ha’ been no fear of e’er a sowl about; ’twas the fau’t of the divil of an ould fog delayin’ us.”

“Ah, now, but it’s the woful thing, however it come to happen. And she the on’y one her poor mother has. Is anybody runnin’ down to tell them?”

“Och you may depind—half-a-dozen.”

“Well, it’s a quare ugly world she’s took out of any way, the crathur, God knows. ’Deed now, I do be wonderin’ somewhiles what He’s at wid bringin’ the likes of her into such a place at all.”

“And small blame to you to be wonderin’ that same, Jim, if it’s for nothin’ betther than to take and knock the bit of life out of her, as if it was a gossoon slingin’ stones at a little wran hoppin’ along in the hedges.”

“That’s no sort of talk. God be good to the crathur, she looks as if no great harm was after happenin’ her any way.”

“It’s not kilt at all she is, I’m thinkin’. The Docther’s apt to say she’ll be finely agin prisently.”

“Bedad now, you might ha’ more wit, man—Och, it’s on’y poor Crazy Christy.”

The sound, but not the sense, of this discussion reached Pierce, and vaguely irritated him, because he thought it might prevent him from hearing the approach of what he forced himself to imagine possible assistance. But when Father O’Connor, not long afterwards, did come up to him, it was with no more practical suggestion than: “God help you.”

“_God?_” said Pierce. “What on earth can God do? I think it has killed her.” He put his question like one assuming some self-evident proposition, and the kindly old man turned away from him with a shake of the head, and no attempt to gainsay.

The next voice to arouse Pierce’s attention was that of a youngish woman, worn and weather-beaten, whose grey ragged shawl hooded black wings of hair, and the dark eyes that often look out so full of cares from such surroundings. He recognised her as Norah O’Neil, by birth Kinsella, and she was saying: “So I thought maybe the Docther might be up here, Mr Pierce—but sure it’s all one. There’s nobody can do a hand’s turn for him or any of us now, on’y God. For himself’s lyin’ dead too, sir, be the roadside down beyant the bridge. And, truth to tell you, it’s quare set agin stirrin’ out he was this mornin’, wishful he was to be lyin’ in his bed, for he said he felt cruel wakely in himself altogether. But it’s losin’ the day’s wages I was thinkin’ of, and settlin’ to call him all the lazy hounds I could lay me tongue to—poor Mick, that was good to us ever—for ’fraid we’d be starvin’ to-morra. So he went off wid himself. And the God that’s above me knows well, on’y for the childer I wouldn’t ha’ said a word. But, Mr Pierce, the faces of thim is gone to nothin’; there isn’t a one of thim the width of the palm of your hand. And on’y for the childer, to be lavin’ thim, God knows I’d liefer be lyin’ the way Miss Eileen is this minyit, instead of her, the Saints in Heaven be good to her, that’s the young crathur. Many’s the time I’ve carried her up half-ways to this very place, when I wasn’t so much oulder meself. For what else will I be doin’ all the rest of me life, but remimberin’ the day I dhruv poor Mick out of the warm house to get his death on the roadside, when all the while I knew in me heart he wasn’t rightly able to stand on his feet. And he——”

But Norah’s story was here jostled aside by Con Furlong, the foreman, a stolid, business-like person, who wished to mention that the men were all quitting their work, and to receive instructions about paying for a couple of loads of stones that were just after coming over from Smith’s place beyond Clonmoragh, where _he_ had never ordered them. These details somehow helped Pierce to realise more fully that he was to be still alive. Meanwhile the sun had found a clear path earthward among the mists, and shone out through them with all the glamour of dawn and splendour of high-noon, so that swift lights strode hither and thither upon the hills, and the haze melted into the deepening blue as fast as foam on a summer sea, until the spring-day was golden over the whole countryside. It was just the world and the weather for those grand times which, as Pierce now suddenly remembered, he had promised that Eileen should have when he came with the key.

A DESERTED CHILD

A DESERTED CHILD