Part 13

As bedtime drew near they began to quarrel. She said that he had taken his finger off a piece before altering his mind, and moving it back; he denied it, and they quarrelled. The same quarrel had occurred every night in all those years. They loved each other dearly, but the game wouldn't have been a game without its quarrel. She swept the pieces off the board in a passion, and he wandered gently off into the night to see that all the gates about the farm were locked and the house securely barred.

To-night he was not quite in his usual mood. Perhaps the quarrel had been a little more real than usual, and had jarred upon his nerves. The subtle seduction of the moonlight moved him. He felt a void in his life, a vague craving for sympathy, for something which he had never known. After a time he identified the feeling as one which had occurred periodically to him before. It was a yearning for one sip of the wine of life before it was too late, a sense of weariness, of discouragement at the thought that he had never known that joy which is every man's birthright once in his lifetime, the joy of knowing the full meaning of a woman's love.

Now he remembered the incident that had started the train of thought. He had been making a move, and his eyes fell upon his hand, and he had recognized with a strange outwardness for the first time that it was the hand of an old man, the fingers bent and gnarled, the nails dull, the muscles corrugated, and the veins dried up and withered. If he was ever to know more about women than he knew now, it behoved him to act quickly ere his manhood had quite died within him.

Once or twice before he had awakened to the same fact, but never with such urgency as now. Even still he was the wreck of a fine man, and there had been a time when he might easily have found favor with women, but he had let his chances slip. A bookworm and a dreamer, he had let his youth slide by before he knew that it was gone. His manhood he had spent beneath the rule of his elder brother. Once he had asserted his right to an individual soul, and fallen in love with a woman, and she was ready to reciprocate his love. But when he went and t told his brother, the elder replied: 'You can marry if you like, but as sure as you do, out you go out of my house. There's not enough on the farm to keep more than the three of us. I've never married, and I don't see why you should.'

For the moment his manhood rose in arms, and he determined to go out into the world and make a place for himself; but he put it off and put it off, and his brother was twenty years older than himself, and it seemed a pity to lose his chance of the farm, so the time never came, and he grew old waiting for his brother's death, and the woman that he loved grew old too.

At last his brother died, and he went to her and asked her to marry him, but she said: 'I loved you well once, and would have stood by your side if you had had the heart to make a fight for me. I've waited for you all these years, but now it's too late. I'm too old to change,' and she died also, and they were never married.

After her death he was numbed for a time, for he had so little that the loss of even the placid affection of their later years made a great gap in his life. Then the farm began to go wrong; he had not the practical head to manage it as his brother had managed it; and though he worked as hard as ever, what had formerly sufficed to keep the three in comfort could now barely support the remaining two. In truth, weakness of character had been his bane all his life, and would be to the end. He had not the strength to carry any purpose to its appointed goal. He was strong neither for good nor for evil. He was cursed with the curse of Reuben, 'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.' But he knew that he was weak, and it was very pitiful.

To-night, after shutting up the house, he went to his bed; and as he lay awake there through the watches of the night, his desolation came home to him and ate into his heart, and he pitied himself exceedingly.

About three o'clock, the darkest part of the night, he rose and wandered restlessly out into the garden, and sat alone there with the 'night of the large few stars, the mad naked summer night,' till its fascination entered into his marrow and stirred his placid soul with a strange disturbance.

As he sat there in the darkness, suddenly there was a movement in the hedgerows and all the trees around him, and a twittering burst forth on every side; it was the birds rousing themselves from their night's slumber. For five minutes the matin song lasted, and then as suddenly ceased, and a great stillness reigned over the world, waiting for the birth of another day. Five minutes later the first ray of dawn tinged the eastern horizon, and the birds burst into song a second time to hail the new-born day.

Often before he had noticed that sudden outburst and sudden hush before the dawn, and vaguely wondered what it meant. But the sound of cocks crowing and the wakened life of a farmyard came to his ears, and reminded him of the thread of his daily duties that had to be taken up.

When he entered the house one of the maids was already down, and was cleaning the kitchen window, kneeling upon the table, with her back to him. He went up to her, and to attract her attention laid his hand upon her ankle. He felt a sudden tremor run through her, and at the contact a flood of fire pulsed through his own veins, for the glamour of the night was still over all his senses.

She turned and looked at him with a wanton twinkle in her eye; they were bold, black eyes in a gypsy face, and he wondered he had never noticed before how pretty she was. Something in her gaze struck him. He looked at her shiftily. He wanted to take her in his arms, to ask her to kiss him, and he opened his mouth to do so; but, after all those years, the hinges of his tongue worked creakingly, the thought of taking decided action of any kind out of his ordinary groove daunted him, from long disuse his executive faculties were no longer under the control of his will, and the words that issued from his mouth were quite different from what he had intended, they were dictated by habit; he jerked out with parched lips,--

'Where's the key of the byre, Cassy?'

'Troth, sir, you have it hangin' on yer little fing-er,' she replied, with a glance that showed understanding and a spice of contempt for his weakness of purpose.

'Oh, ay, so it is,' he answered, and turning, shuffled hastily out in confusion.

But he couldn't settle down to his work, and soon gave it up, and started for a walk in the cool morning air, hoping thus to allay the fever of his blood. All the way he was arguing with himself, despising himself for the failure of his overtures, and yet frightened at the idea of their succeeding. He tried to persuade himself that it was respect for his sister that had withheld him, but even he could not sink to such self-deception as that.

It was haytime, most of the mowing was already over, and nothing further could be done with the grass until the sun and wind had had time to dry the dew of the night. Few people, therefore, were yet stirring, no smoke rose out of the cottage chimneys, not a sound was to be heard but the croak of the corn-crake running before him in the meadow, the juicy swish of a distant scythe through the wet grass, or the strident sound of the whetstone upon the blade. Crossing a field, he met the daughter of one of his tenants carrying two pails of foaming milk--a pretty, fair girl with a sun-tanned face. She was not the least like the other, but again the same mad longing came over him, checked by the same infirmity. He wanted to ask her to put down her pails and to give him a kiss, but, unready as ever, all he could force his lips to stammer out was,--

'Good-morning, Mary.'

'Good-morning, surr,' she answered, with a courtesy, and passed on to tell her mother that 'big Misther Vaughan' knew her Christian name--a depth of interest of which she had never suspected him before.

For some days afterwards every time he met Cassy about the house she looked at him, and every time she looked at him he made up his mind to kiss her the next. At last he met her on the stairs early one morning, and did kiss her. She made a slight scuffle, and, more from his nervousness than her resistance, the kiss only fell on the tip of her ear, and she scuttled downstairs laughing. But nevertheless he felt uplifted in his own esteem all that day; he actually had achieved the task he had set himself.

The next day Cassy was missing, and never returned. For a time there were some queer rumors about her, which at last were confirmed by the birth of her child. And soon afterwards, to his great dismay, he was served with an order for maintenance as the father.

Of course he went to law about it; but, as he afterwards told himself bitterly, he was fool enough to admit that he had kissed her once, and in the light of that admission the jury found against him with £100 damages.

Not long afterwards Cassy was married, and it began to be whispered about that her husband was the real father of the child, and the pair had taken advantage of Vaughan's simplicity to saddle him with the responsibility.

Mingled with their disapprobation before there had been a certain respect in people's attitude to him; they were surprised, and said, 'They didn't think Charlie Vaughan had it in him.' But now all this was changed to amusement and contempt.

But that did not affect 'old Vaughan,' as he now began to be called. He was too much taken up with his own disillusionment to mind other people's conduct. From Cassy's manner he had thought that he had at last attained the wish of his life, but he now recognized the meaning of her regard for what it really was, the mere ephemeral desire of a pregnant woman; and he had let her see through his weakness, and himself suggested to her the means of his own undoing.

His old sense of weariness and discouragement returned upon him and settled down over his life. He saw that with the ridicule in which he was held what had now become his consuming desire, the only means of renewing his self-respect, had become utterly hopeless. His thirst for the wine of life had come to him too late to be ever quenched. He lost heart. The sap went out of him. The neighbors noticed that he failed visibly, and grew rapidly gray. Within the year he was dead, and no woman had ever loved him.

A DIVIDED FAITH

Maggie Paterson stood on the edge of the frozen surface of Lough Legaltian and looked about her with a dreary sense of loneliness. Round her were several groups of chattering girls; they glanced at her furtively from time to time, and she felt that they were talking of her; she wished to speak to them, but the reputation of her father's sternness, the life apart that she had led, and the barriers of custom, which are so strong in country life, stood between them. Some of them she knew by name, nearly all by sight; but though they were of her own age and station, she had never played with them; she had never gone to school like other children; she had always lived at home with her silent, gloomy father, who thought of nothing but his religion.

Now, as she stood there, a spectator of the life in which she should have shared, and the joyous shouts of her compeers rang in her ears, blended with the metallic whir of the skates upon the ice, a bitter feeling of rebellion welled slowly up in her young heart. All the joys of childhood and of youth, which she had never known, all the repressed instincts of her vigorous young life, called aloud in her for outlet, and a slowly gathering wave of restlessness, of resentment against all the forms of her narrowed life, swept over her.

Her eyes, bent inward upon herself, no longer saw anything of what was happening around her. A young man, clashing his skates together, came up and sat down near her to put them on; he was one of many now hurrying from their work in the winter twilight, to make use of a spell of frost which comes but seldom in the moist climate of Donegal. He looked at her hesitatingly, got up, and sat down again nervously; but she noted nothing. She saw a vision of herself learning to know the inward meaning of life; she felt a craving for some being outside herself to whom she might be necessary, for whom she might experience some feeling other than the merely dutiful affection which she bore to her father as a matter of habit. And with that vision before her fixed gaze, she moved out slowly over the lake.

When she came to herself she found herself standing in the middle of the ice, while a figure on skates was hovering distractedly about her. She looked at him, and as soon as he caught her eye, he dashed boldly up and said,--

'Good-evening, Miss; can I help you on with your skates?'

She remembered him now; she had seen his face on the rare occasions when she passed through her father's shop; he was the manager of the drapery department. His name was Johnny Daly.

'I can't skate,' she said pathetically, feeling that this was the last drop in her cup of bitterness.

'I can teach you, if you like,' he replied diffidently.

'Father doesn't like me to be out alone. I oughtn't to be here now. He would be right mad if he knew it,' she answered, with an exaggerated gratitude that she had at last found some one who appeared to take an interest in her.

'Perhaps you would like me to see you home then?'

'Thanks, I should like it very much later on. But I am not going home just yet. Now I am here, I intend to enjoy myself.'

The defiance of her tone was so very much out of proportion to the mild manner in which she was taking her enjoyment, that the young man felt inclined to laugh. To cover his embarrassment, and at the same time to display his skill, he began gravely to execute figures round her. Unaccustomed to outdoor exercises, the girl looked with wide eyes of admiration at his process of 'showing off.' But by this time they had worked out into the centre of the lough, where the spring which fed it bubbled up in a clear open space. In doing a backward roll he approached dangerously near the edge; she opened her mouth to cry out; at that moment his skate caught in a roughness of the ice; he fell backwards with a crash, and broke through the thin ice into the black water beyond.

Maggie screamed for help, and dark figures came flitting along the ice towards her. But they were a long way off, and she saw she must depend upon herself if the young man's life was to be saved. He came up and clutched at the edge of the ice, which broke off in his fingers, and he disappeared again; it was evident that he could not swim.

Rapidly the girl unwound her long knitted scarf from about her neck, knotted her purse in the end of it, and flung it to him as he rose the second time.

He seized it eagerly, and gasping from the chill of his sudden immersion, said,--

'Shure you're an angel, Miss Maggie; hold on a bit, don't pull till I tell you.'

Then he gradually broke his way through the thin ice till he came to a thickness sufficient to bear his weight.

'Now pull,' he said, and when the rescuers arrived on the spot they found their work already done, and Daly trying to persuade his master's daughter that she oughtn't to shake hands with him while he was so wet.

Before the others arrived within earshot, she said to him with a motherly air, 'Now run away home and get your wet things changed, or you'll catch cold. To-morrow is Sunday, and I'll see you at church.'

At the church porch the next morning, at twelve o'clock, Maggie found the usual assemblage of young men sitting upon tombstones and lounging against the headstones of graves, as they watched the congregation enter. This particular morning they were massed together like a herd of bullocks eying a strange dog, and all gazed steadfastly at Johnny Daly, who was sitting on a large tombstone by himself swinging his legs disconsolately. Behind them the bare barnlike church was squatly silhouetted against the sky. When he saw her his face brightened, and he came up to her with an air of relief.

'Good-morning,' she said; 'are you coming into church with me?'

'If I may,' he replied, looking at her curiously.

'Of course,' she said promptly, and they passed into church and entered a pew together.

All through the service she noticed that he watched her closely, and copied her every movement. The rest of the congregation stared at the pew in a manner that made her feel very uncomfortable, and seemed greatly in excess of the occasion.

As they were going out together, she said to him,--

'How is it I've never seen you in church before?'

'Don't you know I'm a Roman?' he replied wonderingly.

Then the demeanor of her neighbors was made plain to her, and she blushed to think of what she had done.

'No, I didn't know; why didn't you tell me?' she stammered. 'Why did you come in if you didn't like it?'

'But I did like it,' he replied in a vibrant voice. 'I'd do more than that to sit along of you. Didn't you save my life last night?'

Maggie blushed and kept silence, but a gentle glow of satisfaction thrilled through her.

Presently they came to the cross roads, one arm of which led homeward, the other to the shore.

'I'm going this way,' she said, motioning towards the beach.

'May I come too?'

'Of course you may,' she laughed, with a coquettish glance at him from under her long eyelashes; 'do you think I'd have mentioned it, if I hadn't meant you to come?

'Does father know you're a Roman?' she inquired suddenly, after a pause.

'Of course.'

'Then how is it he keeps you in the shop? I thought he was so bitter against your folks.'

'So he is; but there's no one else in the town as can hold a candle to me at the feel of the stuff. And old Paterson--I mean, Mr. Paterson, Miss--doesn't mix up his business with his religion, or he wouldn't be the smartest trader in the town, as he is now.'

Every Sunday after that they went to church together, and for their half-hour's stroll afterwards. She looked forward to the meeting as the one bright spot in her dull existence. Her starved heart was ripe for love; and soon her whole life became centred round the glow in this one young man's eyes. Her father knew nothing of what was happening. He attended the Wesleyan Chapel, where the service was half an hour longer, and always found his daughter at home when he arrived.

Old Paterson was a queer character in his way. His hard-featured face showed the Scotch blood that is so prevalent among the middle classes in the North of Ireland. His was a nature that had been warped by adversity. Somewhat late in life he married a wife whom he tenderly loved. After one short year of wedded happiness, she died in giving birth to Maggie. Up to the date of that crowning sorrow of his life, Paterson had been an ordinary church-goer, somewhat Low Church like the rest of his class. But from that moment onward his religion flowed in an ever bitterer and narrower stream. The emotional side of his nature, thwarted in one direction, expended itself fiercely in another. He became noted in the parish for his intolerance and rabid sectarianism. In him all the forces of Orangism, its opposition in race, class, and religion to the surrounding Papists, reached their fullest development.

Gradually his bigotry became too intense for the orthodox Church to hold him. He got himself elected a churchwarden for the mere purpose of thwarting the vicar at every turn. At last, when the harassed clergyman was nearly persecuted to death, that lack of humor which was an inherent element of Paterson's severely practical mind, delivered him from his enemy. Paterson's eye fell upon the church notice-board, and perceived that it was held in an Oxford frame, which was in the form of a cross. This was rank Popery, and not to be borne in a Protestant establishment. In all haste he summoned a vestry meeting, and proposed that the Oxford frame should have its ends sawn off and all resemblance to the accursed symbol removed. The vestry-meeting, composed chiefly of his friends, and Scotch like himself, gravely carried his proposal into effect. But the ridicule of the town descended upon the idea, and the mutilated notice-board remained for a testimony against him.

Paterson shook the dust of an ungrateful sect from off his feet, and joined the Wesleyans; he built them a tin church, and raised them into prominence. His position of patron gratified his lust for power, and for ten years now he had set the tone to the narrowest clique of the community.

All this time, however, he kept his business apart from his religion, and prospered greatly. His shop was the one place where he made no difference between a Catholic and a Protestant. But all his energies flowed in these two main streams--his business life and his religious life--and left no particle of the rich emotion, which was their source, for the unfortunate daughter, who was growing up with a heart starved by the lack of nourishment.

Lisnamore is a hotbed of gossip--that vice of small towns and small minds--and soon everybody in the place was discussing Maggie's affair with Johnny Daly. Old Paterson himself alone remained in ignorance of it; he inspired too healthy a respect in the breasts of his neighbors for any one to approach him on the subject.

The priest, Father O'Flaherty, was one of the first to hear of the grievous lapse of Johnny Daly into church-going, and immediately seized an opportunity of speaking to that unruly member of his flock.