Part 9
On this particular day, however, owing to some remissness of the young M‘Neills and their shrewd-visaged dog, who were all led away by the excitement of a rabbit-hunt, one of the sheep under their charge successfully eluded observation, and broke through the line, with two comrades presently pattering after her. With a wiliness well masked by her expression of meek fatuity, she slunk along unseen in furzy folds of the broken ground, and late in the afternoon had arrived near the forbidden pastures. There she lurked furtively for a while, fully determined to hop over the fence of Timothy O’Farrell’s oatfield, the very first moment that nobody seemed to be about. This opportunity soon occurred, as the O’Farrells’ holding lies somewhat apart in a slight hollow, which secludes it from the little cabin-cluster standing a bit higher round a curve in the long green glacis-like foot-slope of Slieve Gowran.
Thus it came to pass that when Timothy O’Farrell returned from turf-cutting on the bog with his sister Margaret and his brothers Hugh and Patrick, the first thing they noticed was an object like a movable grey boulder cropping up on the delicate sheeny surface of their oat-patch. Whereupon: “Be the powers of smoke,” said Timothy, “if there isn’t them bastes in it agin.”
“Three of them, no less,” said Margaret.
“M‘Neills’, you may bet your brogues,” said Hugh.
“The divil doubt it,” said Timothy. Patrick, who was a youth of action rather than speech, had already plunged head-foremost towards the scene of the trespass.
There were several reasons why doubts of the M‘Neills’ responsibility in the matter should be relegated to the divil. In the first place, the M‘Neills owned more sheep than anybody else at Meenaclure, whereas the O’Farrells owned none; and secondly, the O’Farrells had sown an unusually extensive patch of oats, while the M‘Neills had planted potatoes only. The tendencies of this situation are obvious. Again, the O’Farrells had more than once before undergone the like inroads, and on these occasions Neil M‘Neill had not, Timothy considered, shown by any means an adequate amount of penitence. “Bedad, now,” Timothy reported to his family, “he was cool enough over it. Maybe it’s _his_ notion of fine farmin’ to graze his bastes on other people’s growin’ crops.” A deep-rooted sentiment of respect, however, restrained him from uttering these sarcasms in public. For Timothy, though the head and father of a family, had seen not many more than a score of harvests; and Neil, a dozen years his senior, enjoyed a high reputation among the neighbours as a very knowledgable man altogether. After the second incursion, it is true, Timothy’s wrath had so far overcrowed his awe as to make him “up and tell” Neil M‘Neill that “if he didn’t mind his ould shows of sheep himself, he’d be apt to find somebody that’d do it in a way he mightn’t like.” Still, the affair went no farther, and Timothy had soon reverted to his customary attitude of amicable veneration. But at this third repetition of the offence his anger could not be expected to subside so harmlessly.
Pat’s shouts and flourishing gallop speedily routed the conscious-stricken sheep, and two of them whisked up the hillside like thistledown on a brisk breeze; but the third, who was the ringleader, leaped the fence with so little judgment that she came floundering against Timothy, who grasped her dexterously by the hind-legs.
Now, to catch a Slieve Gowran sheep alive in the open is a rare and difficult feat—proverbially impossible, indeed, at Meenaclure; but Timothy and his brethren were at a loss how they should best turn this achievement of it to account. They felt that simply to let the creature go again would be a flat and unprofitable result, yet what else could they do with it? While they pondered, and their captive impotently wriggled, Hugh suddenly had an inspiration. It came to him at the sight of two large black pots, which stood beside a smouldering fire against the white end-wall of their little house. To an unenlightened observer, they might have suggested some gipsy encampment, but Hugh knew they betokened that his mother had been dyeing her yarn. The Widow O’Farrell was a great spinner, and a large part of the wool shorn in the parish travelled over her whirring wheel on its way to Fergus the weaver’s loom. A few old sacks lying near the fire had contained the ingredients which she used according to an immemorial recipe. From the mottled grey lichen, _crottal_, which clothes our boulders with hues strangely like those of the fleeces browsing among them, she extracted a warm tawny brown; a flaky mass of the rusty black turf-soot supplied her with a strong yellow, and the dull-red bog-ore boiled paradoxically into black.
“Be aisy, will you, you little thief of the mischief,” Hugh said to the sheep. “M‘Neills’ she is, sure enough; there’s the mark. Musha, lads, let’s give her a dab or so of what’s left in the ould pots. ’Twould improve her apparance finely.”
“Ay would it,” said Timothy. “She’s an unnathural ugly objic’ of a crathur the way she is now. Bedad, they’ve a couple of barrels desthroyed on us.”
“A few odd sthrakes of the black and yella’d make her look iligant,” said Hugh. “Do you take a hould of her, Tim. Och, man, don’t let her away, but lift her aisy. Maggie, did you see e’er a sign of the stick they had stirring the stuff wid? But it’s apt to be cool enough agin now.”
“Ah, boys dear, but it’s ragin’ mad M‘Neills ’ll be if you go for to do such a thing,” Margaret said, half-scared, and blundering in her flurry on a wrong note, as she at once perceived. For her brothers promptly responded in a sort of fugal movement—
“And sure who’s purvintin’ of them? They’re welcome, bedad, them, or the likes of them. Is it ragin’? Maybe it’s raison they’ll have before they’re a great while oulder, musha Moyah.” And they proceeded with all the greater enthusiasm to carry out their design, which became more ambitiously elaborate in the course of execution.
Early next morning, while the mountain-shadow still threw a purple cloak over the steep fields of Meenaclure, where all the dewdrops were ready to twinkle as soon as a ray reached them, and when Mrs Neil M‘Neill was preparing breakfast, which at this short-coming summer season consisted chiefly of Indian meal, her eldest daughter ran in to her with news. There was somethin’, Molly said, leppin’ about in the pigstye. Now, the M‘Neills’ stye just then stood empty, in the interval between the despatch of their last lean fat pig to Letterkenny fair and the hoped-for fall in the market-price of the wee springy which was to replace him. So Mrs Neil said, “Och, blathers, child alive, what would there be in it at all?”
“But it’s rustlin’ in the straw,—I heard it,—and duntin’ the door wid its head like,” Molly persisted.
“Sure then, run and see what it is, honey,” said her mother, who was pre-occupied with a critical stage of her porridge; and a piece of practical business on hand generally disposes us to adopt a sceptical attitude towards marvels. “Maybe one of the hins might have fluttered into it; but there’s apter to not be anythin’.”
Molly, whose mood was not enterprising, reinforced her courage with the company of Judy and Thady before she went to investigate; and a minute afterwards she came rushing back uttering terrified lamentations, whereof the burden seemed to be, “It’s a tiger-sheep.” Her report could no longer be disregarded, and the rest of the family were presently grouped round the low wall of the little lean-to shed, which did really contain an inmate of extraordinary aspect. Its form was that of a newly-shorn sheep, long-legged and lank-bodied like others of its race, but in colouring altogether exceptional. Boldly marked stripes of black and tawny yellow alternated all over it, with a brilliant symmetry not surpassed by the natural history chromograph which flamed on the wall of Rathflesk National School, and which now recurred to little Molly’s mind in conjunction with the fact that the wearer of the striated skin “was a cruel, savage, wicked baste, that would be swallyin’ all before it,” whereupon she had shrieked “Tiger-sheep!” and fled from ravening jaws.
Her parents and grandparents, on the contrary, stood and surveyed the phenomenon with almost unutterable wrath. Traces of a human hand in its production were plain enough, for the beast had been fastened into the stye by a rope round her neck, which was further ornamented with long bracken-fronds and tufts of curiously-coloured wool, studiously grotesque. In fact, had she been mercilessly endowed with “the giftie,” she would no doubt have suffered from a mortification as acute as was that of her owners, instead of trotting off quite satisfied, when once she was released and at liberty to resume her fastidious nibbling among the dewy tussocks.
“That’s some divilment of the O’Farrells, and the back of me hand to the whole of them!” said Neil M‘Neill, with clenched eyebrows. “Themselves and their blamed impidence, and their stinkin’ brashes! The ould woman’s niver done boilin’ them up for her wool. It’s slung about her head I wish they were, sooner than to be used for misthratin’ other people’s dacint bastes.”
“’Deed now, thrue for you,” said his mother. “Sure wasn’t she tellin’ me herself yesterday evenin’ she’d been busy all day gettin’ her yarn dyed, agin she would be knittin’ the boys their socks? Gad’rin’ the sut she said she was this good while. That’s the way they done it—och, the vagabones!”
“It’s a bad job,” said old Joe M‘Neill, shaking his despondent white head.
“I wouldn’t ever ha’ thought it of them,” said Mrs Neil. “On’y them boys is that terrible wild; goodness forgive them, there’s no demented notion they mayn’t take into their heads. But what at all could we do for the misfort’nit crather? Sure it’s distressful to see her goin’ about that scandalous figure. I can’t abide the sight of her.”
Our bogland dyes, however, are very fast, and for many a day that summer Mrs Neil had to endure the apparition of the O’Farrells’ victim, who of course became a painfully conspicuous object on the hillside, where she roamed blissfully unaware of how her owners’ eyes followed her with gloomy resentment, and of how their neighbours’ children, catching up Molly’s cry, shouted one to another derisively, “Och, look at M‘Neills’ tiger-sheep!” But long and long after the parti-coloured fleece had vanished for good and all, the effects of the outrage continued to make themselves felt in the social life of Meenaclure, where it must be owned that the inhabitants are rather prone to keep their grudges in the same time-proof wallet with their gratitudes. And the grudges, somehow, often seem to lie atop. In this case, moreover, the injury had an especial bitterness, because the M‘Neills came of an old sheep-keeping class, whose little flock was an inheritance handed down, dwindling, through many generations, and whose main interests and activities had time out of mind turned upon wool, so that everything connected with it had acquired in their eyes the peculiar sanctity with which we often invest the materials and implements belonging to our own craft. A chimney-sweep has probably some feeling of disinterested regard for his bags and brushes. Accordingly, sheep were to them a serious, almost solemn subject, altogether unsuitable for a practical joke; and an insult offered to them was felt to strike at the honour of the family. Small blame to them, therefore, if, as the neighbours said, they were ragin’ mad entirely, and turned a deaf ear to all pacific overtures.
The O’Farrells, to do them justice, admitted upon reflection that they had maybe gone a little beyond the beyonds, and were disposed to be apologetic and conciliatory. But when old Mrs O’Farrell, one day meeting the two smallest M‘Neills on the road, presented each of them with a pale brown egg, which she had just found in the nest of her speckled hen away down beside the river, the result merely was that her gifts were smashed into an impromptu omelet before the M‘Neills’ door, by the direction of the master of the house, who only wished the ould sinner had been there herself to see the way he’d serve that, or anythin’ else she’d have the impidence to be sendin’ into his place. And later on, when the feathery gold of the O’Farrells’ oatfield had been bound in stooks, and the hobbledehoy Pat was despatched to inquire whether the M‘Neills might be wantin’ e’er a thrifle of straw after the thrashin’ for darnin’ their bit of thatch, the polite attention elicited nothing except a peremptory injunction to “quit out of that.”
In taking up this attitude, the M‘Neills had at first the support of their neighbours’ sympathy, public opinion being that it was no thing for the O’Farrells to go do. But as time went on, people began to add occasionally that sure maybe they didn’t mean any such great harm after all, and that they were only young boyoes, without as much sense among the whole of them as would keep a duck waddling straight. What was the use of being so stiff over a trifle? These magnanimous sentiments were, no doubt, strengthened by the fact that in so small a community as Meenaclure a permanent breach between any two families could not but entail some inconveniences upon all the rest. It was irksome, for instance, to bear in mind throughout a friendly chat that at the casual mention of a neighbour’s name the person you were talking to would look “as bitter as sut” and freeze into grim dumbness; or to have to consider, should you wish for a loan of Widdy O’Farrell’s market-basket, that you must by no means “let on” to her your intention of carrying home in it Mrs M‘Neill’s grain of tea; or to be called upon to choose between the company of Neil M‘Neill and Hugh O’Farrell on the way home from the fair, because neither of them, as the saying is, would look the same side of the road as the other. Such obligations lay stumbling-blocks in our daily path, and nip growths of good fellowship, and are generally embarrassing and vexatious. However, Meenaclure had to put up with this state of things for so many a long day that people learned to include it unprotestingly among their necessary evils.
Under these circumstances, it was of course only in the nature of things that the little M‘Neills and O’Farrells, the smallest of whom had not been born at the time of the quarrel, should always put out their tongues at one another whenever they met. They regarded the salutation, indeed, as a sort of ceremonial observance, which could not be omitted without a sense of indecorum. Thus, one inclement autumn, when Patrick O’Farrell was no longer a hobbledehoy, but “as big a man as you’d meet goin’ most roads,” he went off to a _rabble_, that is, a hiring-fair, at Letterkenny, and took service for six months with a farmer away at Raphoe. On the day that he left Meenaclure, he happened, just as he was setting out, to meet Molly M‘Neill, who had by this time grown into “a tall slip of a girl going on for sixteen,” and they duly exchanged the customary greeting, Pat getting the better of her by at least half-an-inch of insult. But when he returned on a soft April evening, it chanced again that one of the first persons he fell in with was Molly. She was coming along between the newly-clad hedges of a narrow lane, and when he caught sight of her first he mistook her for his cousin, Norah O’Farrell, she looked so much taller than his recollections. But, on perceiving his error, he merely gave up his intention of saying, “Well, Norah, and how’s yourself this great while?” and slunk past without making any demonstration whatever. Molly would hardly have noticed it, indeed, as when she saw him coming she began to minutely examine the buds on the thorn-bushes, and did not lift an eyelash while they were passing. Yet, as they went their several ways, Pat felt that he had somehow shirked a duty; and Molly, for her part, could not shake off a sense of having failed in loyalty to her family until she had relieved her conscience by announcing at home that she was “just after meetin’ that great _ugly_-lookin’ gomeral, Pat O’Farrell, slingein’ down the road below Widdy Byrne’s.”
The year which followed this spring was one of bad seasons and hard fare at Meenaclure, and towards the end of it Pat O’Farrell came reluctantly to perceive that he could best mend his own and his family’s tattered fortunes by emigrating to the States. His resolve, though regretted by all his neighbours, except of course the M‘Neills, was considered sensible enough; and at the “convoy” which assembled according to custom to see him off on his long journey the general purport of conversation was to the effect that, bedad, everybody’d be missing poor Pat, but sure himself was the fine clever boy wouldn’t be any time gettin’ together the price of a little place back again in the ould country. The M‘Neills alone were of the opinion, expressed by Neil’s mother, that “the only pity was the rest of the pack weren’t goin’ along wid Pat; unless, like enough, they’d be more than the people out in those parts could put up wid all at onst, the way they’d be landin’ them back on us like a bundle of ould rubbish washin’ up agin wid the tide.”
But surprise was the universal feeling when, about six months later, it became known that Neil M‘Neill’s eldest child Molly had also made up her mind to cross over the water. Her own family were foremost among the wonderers; for Molly had always been considered rather excessively timid and quiet—certainly the very last girl in the parish whom one would have thought likely to make such a venture. They half-believed that when it came to the point, “sorra a fut of her would go”; and they much more than half hoped so, notwithstanding that their rent had fallen into alarming arrears, and none of her brethren were old enough to help. Molly, however, actually went, amid lamentations and forebodings, both of her own and other people’s, all alike unavailing to stop her. Mrs Timothy O’Farrell said she’d be long sorry to have a daughter of hers streeling off to the ends of the earth. And I think that Molly’s mother _was_ long sorry, poor soul, through many a lonesome day and anxious night.
After these two departures, things at Meenaclure took their wonted course, a little more sadly and dully perhaps than heretofore. Communications from abroad came rarely and scantily, for neither of the absentees had much scholarship. Their sheep-herding summers had greatly curtailed that, and it would have been difficult to say whether Pat’s or Molly’s scrawls were the briefer or obscurer. But not long after Molly M‘Neill had gone, one of Pat O’Farrell’s letters contained an important piece of news—nothing less than that he was “just about gettin’ married.” He did not go into particulars about the match, merely describing the future Mrs Pat as the “best little girl in or out of Ireland,” and opining that they mightn’t do too badly. His family were not overjoyed at the event, which might be considered to presage a falling off in remittances; and his mother was much cast down thereby, her thoughts going to the tune of “my son is my son till he gets him a wife.” Still, she was not so dispirited as to be past finding some solace in an innuendo; and she almost certainly designed one when she took occasion to remark just outside the chapel door, where she had been telling the neighbours her news: “But ah, sure, I don’t mind so long as he hasn’t took up wid one of them black-headed girls I never can abide the looks of. And ’deed now there’s no fear of that. Pat’s just the same notion as myself, I know very well.” For Mrs Neil M‘Neill was standing well within earshot, and, as everybody remembered, “there wasn’t a fair hair on the head of e’er a one of her childer.” However, Mrs Neil proved equal to the emergency, and remarked, addressing Katty Byrne, that “It was rael queer the sort of omadhawns she’d heard tell of some girls, who, belike, knew no better, bein’ content to take great lumberin’ louts of fellers, wid the ugly-coloured hair on their heads like nothin’ in the world except a bit of new thatch before it would be combed straight.”
She spoke without any presentiment that she would soon have to go through much the same experience as old Mrs O’Farrell; but so it was. For a week or two later came a letter from Molly stating that she was “just after gettin’ married.” Her husband, who she said was earning grand wages, bore the obnoxious name of O’Farrell, but there was nothing strange in the coincidence, as the district about Meenaclure abounds in Farrells and Neills, with and without prefixes of O and Mac; and it seemed only natural to suppose a similar state of things in New York. Nobody could deny that there were plenty of O’Farrells very dacint people. So Molly’s mother mourned in private over an event which seemed to set a seal upon the separation between her daughter and herself; and in public was well pleased and very proud, laying great stress upon the fact that Molly had sent the money-order just as usual,—“Sorra a fear of little Molly forgettin’ the ould people at all,”—and serenely scorning Mesdames O’Farrell’s opinion that “when a girl had to thravel off that far after a husband, it was the quare crooked stick of a one she’d be apt to pick up.”
After this Meenaclure received no very thrilling foreign news for about a twelve-month. Then one fine Sunday, the Widdy O’Farrell was to be seen sailing along Masswards, with her head held extremely high in its stiff-frilled cap and dark blue hood, and with a swinging sweep of her black homespun skirt, which betrayed an exultant stride. All her family, indeed, wore a somewhat elated and consequential air, which most of her neighbours allowed to be justifiable when she explained that she had become the happy grandmother of her Pat’s fine young son: the letter with the announcement had come last night. This was indeed promotion, for her son Tim’s children were all girls. With the congratulations upon so auspicious an event even old Mrs M‘Neill could mingle only subdued murmurs about brats taking after their fathers that weren’t good for much, the dear knows. However, she had not long to wait for as good or better a right to strut chin in air, since it was with a great-grandmother’s dignity that a few days later she could inform everybody of the arrival of Molly’s boy. She would, I believe, have found it very hard to forgive Molly if the child had been merely a daughter.