Part 6

The Round Lodge at Kilrath is so ornate a little structure, with its pillared portico and fantastic pagoda-like roof, that it looks as incongruous in the lonesome grass-lands, amongst which it is solitarily set, as a single pelargonium or calceolaria would look among their ragweed and thistles. Only the old people recollect how it was built by way of being a gate-lodge on one of the new roads which there was talk of young Mr Hall making at the time he came into the property, but which, like many more of his schemes, were never carried out. None of them, in fact, ever took a substantial form except the Round Lodge, his promptness in this matter being caused by a long-standing promise to his old nurse that if he succeeded to the Kilrath estate she should have “a little house of her own.” As his regard for the old woman was one of the few interests he had left unshrivelled by the gambling fever that had fastened on him, he found an eager pleasure in keeping his word to her, and travelled all the way down from Dublin that he might be present at her induction into her new abode.

It was a moteless morning in early summer, when the curved masses of the wood still had a misty softness of hue, and the green of the fresh lawns looked as unwitherable as the domed blue above them. The Round Lodge gleamed most spick and span within and without, its brilliant tiles glowing, and the violet and amber panes in its glass door richly staining the sunbeams that crowded into the little porch. Mrs Moran, glancing round the cosy sitting-room with bright quick eyes like a bird’s, felt herself happy indeed, though she only _said_ she dared say she might make a shift to manage well enough, once she had the things set to rights a bit herself in her own way; which would have sounded faint praise to anybody who did not know her. But when she was left there to her own devices, she became subject to fits of forlorn “lonesomeness,” at intervals which grew shorter day by day as the first gloss of ownership wore off. It did so the more rapidly because the Round Lodge was so far out of the way that she seldom had a visitor to whom she could exhibit her possessions with proud disparagement. We all like to look at our own happiness through other men’s eyes, a process by which it seems to gain a sort of stereoscopic solidity. Her nearest acquaintances were the old coachman and cook couple who lived as caretakers in the gaunt, empty mansion two miles away; for though the village is considerably closer by, a bit down the road after you turn out of the boreen, anybody who supposes that Mrs Moran could have associated on terms of intimacy with its inhabitants must be sadly to seek in a knowledge of our finely shaded social distinctions. Mrs Dowling alone, who was mistress of the post-office and shop, and who wore a bonnet at Mass, might have been an appropriate crony, but she was at this time “mortal bad wid the janders.” Hence the clear summer noons and nights often strung themselves into a whole week without giving Mrs Moran an opportunity of saying anything more to the purpose than the occasional “Fine day, ma’am,” which even neighbours who are not acquaintances must exchange when they meet. This was a dull state of things, and made the hours wagged out by the bland-faced clock lag and loiter strangely. Sometimes, if she had not recollected that she was at last in the long-desired little house of her own, she would have almost thought she had been in better places; and satisfaction that has to be conjured up by an effort of memory comes cold and flat.

A few perches to the westward of the Round Lodge a belt of timber breaks the smooth sweep of the broad pastures that encircle it. If you thread the narrow footpath between the delicate grey beech-trunks for quite a long distance, you come to the edge of a high bank, which overhangs a deep-sunken lane, a mere boreen joining two more important thoroughfares. Thence the trees turn at right angles to fringe the brink of this lane. Across it you look into a wild country. The great Shangowragh bog rolls from the horizon almost to your feet, and on the right hand, towards Lisconnel, spreads far away, a spacious level that seems brown until you have called it so, and then you see many other colours struggling duskily through, olive and purple and red. To the left there is rougher ground, mottled with grey-gleaming boulders and clumps of furze, and lifting itself up lazily to a stony ridge. Beyond that rise darkly a pair of domed mountain summits, the same that are seen more dimly from Lisconnel. Here they have the aspect of two huge hooded heads, bowed over a mysteriously folded hollow. When Mrs Moran came within view of this landscape, she generally shrank back among the sheltering trunks, and went home the way she had come. She said it made the flesh creep upon her bones, and she wouldn’t stop where she’d have one of those ugly black-lookin’ blocks of hills grimacin’ at her from mornin’ till night, not if she was paid for it by the hour. The fact was that she had lived all her life in the corner of a softly contoured up-and-down county, where the little rounded grass hillocks and frequent hedges make the countryside look as if it had been crumpled into green bunches, and where the prospect seldom extends over more than a few hawthorn-bounded fields at a time. So that these vast stretches of wilderness were for her a new and startling revelation of possibilities in Nature, which she was somewhat disposed to resent. On the whole, though she would by no means have allowed it, even to herself, the little house of her own was more or less a disappointment, and disappointments that occur when one is verging on threescore-and-ten have a discouraging air of finality.

But with that first long summer at the Round Lodge, Mrs Moran’s solitude was ended by the arrival there of her daughter-in-law, Mrs Peter, and of her three grandchildren, Nannie and Biddy and Con. Their coming was caused by a very tragical occurrence, and apart from the melancholy circumstances, I doubt that it added to the old woman’s contentment. She had long since made up her mind that she would not like a bone in her son’s wife’s skin, and the prejudice did not melt away upon acquaintance, while the children were rather oppressive to her after her long holiday from such society. Since the infancy of Mr George, now in the Lancers, she had scarcely seen a child to speak to, in the grown-up Halls’ deserted nursery; and she said aggrievedly that they _moidhered_ her, and that ne’er a one of them featured their poor father. Nannie and Biddy, good-natured, hot-tempered little girls, shocked her by their romps and quarrels; and four-year-old Con, a small, melancholy child with a turn for metaphysics, caused her some chagrin by his unthriving aspect; she said that he looked like a hap’orth of soap after a week’s washin’, wid the face on him no broader than a farthin’ herrin’. With all their shortcomings, however, the young Morans were presently the means of bringing a still less promising inmate to the Round Lodge.

About this time Kilrath happened to be suffering from a visitation of the Tinkers, who had established themselves as usual in the row of deserted cottages at the end of the boreen. The Tinkers were people who spent all the tolerably warm part of the year among the benettled wall-rims of deserted cabins, and under the arches of bridges, and in the hollows of old quarries, making progresses to and from these quarters with the help of two donkey-carts. Most of the party passed the heart of the winter in the less primitive shelter of whatever Union workhouse was nearest when the first unbearably cold night overtook them. Now and then a member of their confraternity disappeared for a space into the more rigorous seclusion of some county jail, but that was an accident of occurrence less common than their temporary neighbours could have wished. For the Tinkers, it is said, stole all before them. Middle-aged inhabitants of Kilrath remembered when the band had filled only one cart; but of late years they had over-flowed into a second, the owners of which were known as the Young Tinkers. It was considered that the Young Tinkers were collectively greater thieves of the world than the Ould, but that no single individual could hold a candle for villainy to Luke Maguire, the very ancient commander of the original vehicle. People wondered sometimes that the Young and Ould Tinkers did not part company, and take different routes, as their joint arrival at any camping-ground was generally the signal for a frantic fight between the two sections. However, they continued to stick together, which, as a Kilrath housewife remarked, was “a rael charity, for if they took to scatterin’ themselves over the whole countryside, like a flock of turkeys in a stubble-field, she should suppose there wouldn’t be a him or an egg to be had in it from one year’s end to the other.”

So not long after the Peter Morans’ establishment at the Round Lodge, the Tinkers sent to the door a deputation composed of a woman and two children, all wildly ragged, and hung about with samples of their flashing tinware in such profuse festoons that their approach sounded, one may suppose, somewhat like the onset of a mail-clad knight of old romance. Their call was but brief, for their appearance did not favourably impress the two Mrs Morans, who were afterwards careful to exhort Nannie and Biddy and Con that they must on no account have anything to say to “them young rapscallions,” if met with on their walks abroad. The little Morans, who had been staring with all their eyes full of envious admiration at their two contemporaries permitted freely to handle and clink those resplendent and resonant cans, felt vaguely the existence of compensations and complications in the scheme of things, when they learned that these privileged persons were nevertheless to be shunned as somehow inferior and reprehensible, and “not anyways fit company for respectable people’s childer.”

But on the next Saturday their mother went to shop in the village, and up at the Round Lodge the children found the morning as long as mornings can be when one is under seven, and the end of an hour is out of sight. By the time that Nannie and Biddy and Con had finished their midday dinner, they felt quite convinced that if their mother meant ever to come back to them at all, she must now be somewhere near at hand; and while their grandmother was busy washing up, they slipped away to meet her along the path among the beeches. It was a pleasant autumn day, with crisp leaf-drifts to scuffle underfoot, and here and there a more or less ripe blackberry attainable, amusements which drew them on until they reached the brink of the abrupt descent into the boreen. They saw no sign of their mother coming, and the bank looked so very high and steep that they could not even think of climbing it. But while they strayed desultorily on the top, somebody, swinging from clumps of weeds to handles of looped roots in monkey-like fashion, came suddenly scrambling up it, and then squatted down cross-legged under a sloe-bush. The new-comer seemed to the children a very large person, being a well-grown girl of ten or eleven. Her dress consisted of a brown skirt, which looked as if it had once been a sack, with a man’s old jacket for a bodice, eked out by a screed of greenish shawl. She was barefooted and bareheaded, with a great shock of black hair making thick eaves over her brows, under which her light-grey eyes shone like the gleam of pools caught through dark-fledged boughs. This was Judy Flower, eldest daughter of Jack Flower, head of the family of the Young Tinkers. Strictly speaking, Jack’s surname was Murphy, but Jack’s father, who had enjoyed some local renown as a wrestler, had been styled by his admiring neighbours “The Flower of Clonmoyle,” and his children had been spoken of as the Young Flowers, until the nickname hardened into a patronymic, which Jack took with him when he sank into the tinkering line. Judy’s mother, on the other hand, had real gipsies among her ancestry, which was, perhaps, the reason why Judy sat cross-legged, and had something weirdly Oriental in her aspect.

The Moran children sidled away a few paces, eyeing her doubtfully; but she took no notice of them, and began to eat a bunch of remarkably large and ripe blackberries, evidently the remains of much similar spoil, for her hands and lips were blue with juice-stains. When she had finished them all but the last, which was also the biggest and blackest, she suddenly held it out to Con, saying, “There’s for you, young feller, and a grand one it is—a dewberry. Stuff it in your mouth, and no more talk out of you.” She spoke in a high-pitched gabble, and with a peremptoriness of manner modelled upon that used by her elders to herself. Con was half-scared, and Biddy plucked Nannie by the sleeve, whispering dismally, “Let’s go home, she’s ugly-lookin’.” However, the plump-seeded, glossy berry proved irresistible, and Con’s hesitation ended in a furtive grab. Nannie, emboldened by this mark of confidence, came a step nearer to Judy, and said, peering down the bank wistfully, for her gleanings by the way had only served to whet her appetite, “There would be a dale of berries in it over yonder?” Judy craned her neck round the bush, and looked down the bank too, and then at the three small children, who stood in a row. “Is it berries you’re after?” she said, “and is it over there you’d be goin’? Whethen now, if you knew what all was in it over there, ’tisn’t about berries you’d be talkin. Och no, murdher alive, not indeed, bedad.”

“Over where is it?” said Nannie, impressed and alarmed by the redundancy of Judy’s asseverations.

Judy pointed up the boreen, which just there turned sharply, and under a roof of reddening boughs formed a vista, ended by the dark mountain-wall. “Och if you was after seein’ the laste taste of a sight of a one of them”—she said, with appalling vagueness. “Och mercy on us all and more too, if you on’y was.”

“What sort seein’?” said Nannie, with increasing anxiety. The row had shortened itself considerably, the children had shrunk so close together.

“Crathurs,” said Judy. “Och my goodness the crathurs. Tiger-bastes, and camel-horses, and mambolethses—rael frykful. I cudn’t tell you the half-quarter of them. But the crathur of all the crathurs is the big red snake that’s in it. Awful _he_ is. Och the dear help us, I hope he’ll bide contint where he is, I hope he will. Wirrasthrew, if he was to get hearin’ any sort of noise that ’ud wake of him out of his sleep—whoo-oo, that’d be the bad job for us all.”

The children stared at her round-eyed like a bunch of fascinated little birds.

“Well now, but it’s the terrible big red snake _he_ is,” Judy went on contemplatively, “and the great hijjis lump of a black head he has on him; it wouldn’t scarce fit in between them two bushes; and the long len’th he is, that’d raich aisy to the far end of the boreen—and he asleep up yonder, ready to wake every instant minute of time that happens—and bould little children talkin’ of leppin’ down the high banks after blackberries.”

“We worn’t,” said Biddy, with a howl.

“Where is he asleep at all?” said Nannie in a hoarse whisper.

“Sure, up there in his black hole,” said Judy, pointing through the trees, “wound himself up he has—round and round and round-an’-round-an’-round”—she described a rapid eddy in the air with her forefinger—“wid his big ugly head cocked in the middle, listenin’ till he hears somethin’ to wake him up—and then, good gracious, is it what’ll he do?” she said, replying to an interrogative gasp from Nannie, “Murdher alive!” She ducked down until her shock-head nearly touched the ground, and recoiled immediately to an erect sitting posture with a jack-in-the-box-like spring. Then she elongated her neck preternaturally, and twisting it from side to side, glared about her with a ferocious goggle and grin. “That’s what he’ll do first,” she said, “to find out what way the noise was comin’ wakenin’ of him. And after that, he lets a couple of roars out of him, and he begins to unrowl himself—round and round an’ round-an’-round—the wrong way. And as soon as he’s stretched his len’th, out he’ll take wid himself slitherin’ down the hill to us, and through the trees there he’ll come smashin’ desthruction off of all before him. Ragin’ mad he’ll be for bein’ woke up. Och the creels of him and the crawls of him,” said Miss Judy, rocking herself to and fro, so that the withered leaves on the thorny bush behind her fell over her like a shower of little golden coins, “och the creels of him and the crawls of him, and the roars of him and the bawls of him—there was never anything aquil to it. ’Twould terrify the clouds out of the sky.... And mercy be among us, what was that at all now? Was it him beginnin’? I dunno but I heard him over yonder, like as if he was sayin’ _cruel_ to himsel, ‘Whoo-oo-o, let me be comin’ at them.’”

This was too much for the fortitude of Biddy, a small fat child with no great force of character, and she broke into an uncontrollable roar, to the wrathful despair of Nannie, who shook her passionately, saying, “Whisht, whisht, you little madwoman! do you want to have us all destroyed?” Con, on the other hand, not less dismayed, flew frantically at Judy with a snatched-up stick, confusing the causer with the object of his terror. Judy herself rose to her feet, and resorted to precipitate flight, not by reason of Con’s assault, but because at this moment a voice called shrilly through the trees, “You young miscreant there, what at all are you doin’ wid the childer?” It was old Mrs Moran, who, alarmed by the stillness, had set out in quest of her grandchildren. Judy, who had no wish to explain the situation, sought to escape from it by a hasty retreat down the boreen bank, but her attempt was unlucky. For in her hurried swinging of herself over the edge, she trusted her weight to a tuft of ragweed, whose roots ripped faithlessly out of the crumbling soil, and let her drop amongst a scattering of earth and pebbles into the middle of the lane, where she lay stunned and incapable for the present of any further romancing.

It was in this way that Judy Flower became an inmate of the Round Lodge, being carried up there by Michael Kelly, a turf-cutter, who appeared opportunely on the scene. He then tramped off several miles to summon the doctor, observing as he started that there was likely to be an Inquist to-morrow. But when the doctor came, he pronounced the case one of merely slight concussion of the brain, and predicted a rapid recovery, if the child were properly cared for, which Mrs Moran resolved that she should be. “The crathur might stop where she was for a few days at any rate, till she came round a bit.”

The Tinkers themselves did not display much concern about the fate of their youthful comrade. On the evening of the accident, two of the women came to make inquiries at the Round Lodge, and their report seemingly satisfied Judy’s family, for next morning the whole party decamped, moving on in the direction of Castlebawn. But it had happened that just at this time Judy’s mother was absent, tramping the country on a professional tour, with a baby and a bunch of tinware, and so heard nothing of what had befallen her daughter until she rejoined the caravan at Castlebawn. They picked her up in a dreary little back lane, where she awaited their coming, seated on a broken-down mud wall. Her tin cans were nearly all slung about her still, but she had nothing in her arms, for the baby had died of bronchitis in the cold weather the week before, little to anybody else’s regret, perhaps not even its own. But the event had disposed Mrs Flower to take a tragical view of things, and therefore, when her family equipage creaked near enough to admit a counting of black and red heads, which showed that one was missing, she immediately formed the gloomiest conclusions about the fate of the absentee. Nor were the explanations she received particularly re-assuring. Little Jimmy, her eldest boy, reported that Judy had fell off of the top of somethin’, he didn’t rightly know what, and hadn’t come home since. And his aunt Mrs Massey’s account of the matter ran: “Och, sure she’s after givin’ herself a crack on the head, but the ould woman that picked her up off the road was a dacint body, and she’s took her in. She might get over it and do right enough yet. Anyway, the best chance was to lave her where she is. It’s late we are, for the roads is that heavy they’re nearly pullin’ the hoofs off of the misfort’nit asses’ ould feet. How did she get the crack? Sure the on’y wonder is she hasn’t broke her neck a dozen of times wid the way she climbs over all before her. And so the baby’s died on you? Ah the crathur, God be good to it! ’Deed now, it would be cruel knocked about in the perishin’ weather. Belike it’s better off. Did you sell anythin’ at all? Musha then, woman, you needn’t be frettin’ after Judy, for she’s apt to play plinty more fool’s thricks yit, if that’s all ails you.”

Mrs Flower was, however, bent on not only fretting, but going to see after and if possible repossess herself of Judy. She was ill and miserable, and had been looking forward to the close of her weariful, lonesome tramp, and a spell of easier days, jogging along on wheels among familiar faces. But Judy was the eldest of her children, and had perhaps never quite lost the glamour of a wonderful new possession, which her mother could not contemplate in another person’s keeping without a pang of jealousy. At any rate, she made up her mind to resume her solitary way, and she kept her resolve despite the disapproval of her family, of her gaunt-looking husband, who said she’d a dale better stop wid the childer and him and mind them a bit, and of the childer themselves, who, feeling mocked and defrauded by a glimpse of comfort so speedily withdrawn, howled dismally and drummed protests on the sides of their cart, as they saw the much-desired wisp of black shawl recede fluttering down the wet street.