"And he so continted," said Mrs. Quin, "until he took his fantigue. Rael quare it is."

"Most things do be quare and ugly these times," said Mrs. Ahern, "Goodness help us all. There's poor Mrs. Duff thravellin' off to-morra, to go stay wid her brother at Gortnakil. Very belike she'd take him along; and he'd be aisy landed home, once he'd got that far."

And on the morrow Con did actually set off with Mrs. Duff, feeling half appeased and half compunctious, as people do when they get what they have clamoured for; sorry a little to lose sight of Bran, staring open-mouthed after him down the lane; and relieved through all by a vague sense that he was going whither his heart-strings pulled. If he had been a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but nobody was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured, speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were deserted too. For miles nobody would be met, and then a small stationary crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they, not giving so much as a "fine mornin'" to the passer-by. Other crowds they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes women keening. Once the car-horse shied violently at some dark, long thing, that was stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said, "God be good to us," and the driver said without looking off his reins: "He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'."

Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children, surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul on the horse, and keep between the cart and the crowd, whose shout generally sounded like: "Divil a fut its to quit—divil a fut." It was a crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of glittering eyes—in mistake, apparently, for other things.

As the cart came crawling past where Mrs. Duff and Con stood, a furious rush so tilted it over that the horse fell, breaking a shaft, and some of the topmost sacks tumbled off, dropping with dull thuds, like dead bodies, upon the damp cobblestone pavement. Con saw a little cloud of white dust rise up over each as it dumped down, and melt away on the air, making him wonder to himself: "Is it smokin' hot they are?" But in another moment they were hidden for a while by a wild wave of the crowd, which threw itself tumultuously upon them. One of the sacks burst, spilling the soft flour in flakes, and round it the jostling and writhing grew fiercest. The faces that got nearest to it looked hardly the whiter for their smears and powdering.

A young woman, all black eyes and elf locks, with a baby wrapped in her shawl, crouching low and making a desperate long arm, grasped a covetous handful, which spirted away wastefully between her clenched fingers. She moistened some of this in a puddle as she knelt, and held the paste to her baby's mouth. But its head was drooping wearily aside, and its lips did not move when she touched them. "Ait it up, me heart's jewel," she said; "ait it up, mother's little bird. 'Deed, then, but you're the conthrary little toad. It's breakin' me heart you'll be roarin' when I've ne'er a bit to give you, and sleepin' dead, when I've the chance to feed you." She was beginning to shake it, but a young man who stood behind her put his hand on her shoulder, saying: "Whisht, whisht, you crathur, for God's sake. It's done wid wantin' and cryin', and a good job for it too, the Lord knows." Then the girl shrieked again and again, and the people about her said from one to the other: "It's her child's starved on her." And an old man caught up the little body, and held it high over his head, shouting, "Boys, boys—look yous at that. There's the way Henderson's cartin' off the childer's bit of food to make his fine fortin in England." And the crowd shouted back through a surge of curses: "Divil a fut will he this day."

A very little old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple leaner than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, "Och, good luck to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More power to your elbow." And the crowd yelled with laughter too.

At this moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones, and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr. Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused onset, for somebody snatched him up and hurried him into a dark passage. The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and thought to himself, "He's been grabbin' the flour too." And the women about him said, "Och, murdher, the baste—the man's apt to be kilt!"

When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street—two or three women had even stolen back, and were scraping up the white patches—and he was driven away on a car for what seemed to him a vast length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other passengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar. It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the grass while the car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were less elated, lifted him down and handed him his bundle, and bade him run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.

He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room looked very dusk to him coming in from the mellow afternoon sunshine, and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, "Och, mammy darlint, I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise. Vainly the neighbours averred that "the crathur was starvin' herself this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day." Con's mind was shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more varied dreams.

And when he had struggled through this illness, nobody well knew how or why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief, the more readily, perhaps, because nobody remained for whom such a fact would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped away out of her lonesomeness before his recovery. It would not be easy to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and disfranchised person who is spoken of as "a crathur," and whose proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of him that he had plenty of sense of his own, and the remark was to some extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him that he should accompany them, but he sat looking meditative for a while, and then said, "How far might it be from this to the States?"

"I dunno rightly," said his informant, "but a goodish step it's apt to be, for people's better than a couple of weeks sailin' there, I'm tould."

Con meditated a little more before he put another question. "Would you be widin hearin' out there of the folk talkin' foolish?" he inquired.

"Why, tub-be sure, man, what 'ud hinder you that you wouldn't hear them talkin' same as anywheres else?"

"Bedad, then," said Con, "it seems a long way to be thravellin' to a counthry as close as that. Sure, if you take out for a stravade over the bog here, you'll be throubled wid nothin' the len'th of the day on'y the curlew, or maybe a couple of saygulls skirlin'—raisonable enough. I'll be apt to stay where I am."

Con, who was a person of many moods, happened to be in an unusually cynical one just then; however, he adhered to his resolution, and when his sister had gone he adopted a life of long tramps. Somebody had given him an old fiddle, and this he carried with him, though chiefly as a sort of badge, as his performances were but feeble, and he could turn his hand to many other things when he found it necessary to do so. His rovings had gone on for several years before they led him to Lisconnel. In those days he was a strange, small figure, who wore a coat too large for him, and a hat set so far back on his head that its brim made a sort of halo to frame his face, which had a curious way of looking fitfully young and old, with a shining of violet blue eyes and a puckering of fine-drawn wrinkles. A small boy and a little old ancient man would seem to change places half a dozen times in the course of a single conversation. Even his hair was a puzzle, regarded as an indication of age, because its black had become streaked with white in such a fashion that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be likely to bear out this statement.

The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white mushrooms, which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted buttons, all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a different channel by suddenly saying, "What was there in it before the beginnin' of everythin'?"

Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's washing. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His tone was now rather peremptory as he repeated, "What was there in it before the beginnin' of everythin'?"

"Sure, nothin' at all," said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.

"Then what was there before the beginnin' of nothin'?" pursued Thady.

"Dunno," said Peter, indifferently, "unless it was more nothin'."

"Sure not at all; that wouldn't be the way of it," Johanna said, dreamily, yet with decision. "If there was nothin' but nothin' in it, there'd ha' been apt to not be e'er an anythin' ever. Where'd it ha' come from? Don't be tellin' the child lies, Peter. Why, for one thing," she said, her tone sharpening polemically and taking a touch of triumph, "there was always God Almighty in it, and the Divil. Maybe that's what you call nothin'."

Peter evaded this point, saying, "Well, anyway, those times, if there was just the two of them in it, and no harm to be doin', let alone any good people to know the differ, it's on'y a quare sort of Divil he'd get the chance of bein'. I wouldn't call him anythin' much."

"He wouldn't be so very long, you may depind," Johanna pronounced. "Musha, sure the Divil couldn't stay contint anywhile at all till he'd take to some manner of ould mischief 'ud soon show you the sort of crathur he was—it's his nathur. I should suppose the first thing he'd go do 'ud be makin' all the sorts of hijjis roarin' great bastes and snakes and riptiles that he could think of, and the disolit black wet bogs wid the could win' over them fit to cut you in two when you're sleepin' out at night," said Johanna, whose ten years of life had brought her into some rough places before her adoption by her Aunt Lizzie Ryan, "and the workhouses—bad luck to the whole of them—where there's rats in the cocoa, and mad people frightenin' you, and the cross matrons, and the polis, and the say to dhrownd the fishin'-boats in, and dirty ould naygurs that put dacint people out of their little places——"

"If it had been me," said Peter, "I'd ha' been very apt to just hit him a crack on the head when I noticed what he was at, and bid him lave thim sort of consthructions alone."

"I dunno the rights of it entirely," Johanna admitted, "but it's a cruel pity he ever got the chance to be carryin' on the way he's done."

"Ah, sure it can't be helped now at all events," said Peter, who was for the time being not inclined to quarrel seriously with the scheme of things, as he basked on the warm grassy bank, where the wild bees were humming in the thyme, happily remote from the grim House and the hungry sea.

"Belike it can't," said Johanna; "but 'twould be real grand if it could. Suppose I was out on the hill there some fine evenin', and I not thinkin' of anythin' in partic'lar, and all of a suddint I'd see a great, big, ugly, black-lookin' baste of a feller, the size of forty, skytin' away wid himself along the light of the sky over yonder, where the sun was about goin' down, and his shadder the len'th of an awful tall tree slippin' streelin' after him, till it was off over the edge of the world like, and that same 'ud be just the Divil, that they were after bundlin' out of it body and bones, the way he wouldn't get meddlin' and makin' and annoyin' people any more. So wid that I'd take a race home and be tellin' you all the iligant thing was after happenin'. And in the middle of it who'd come landin' in but me father and mother, and little Dan. And then, if it isn't the grand cup of tay I'd be makin' her, ay begorra would I, and a sugarstick to stir it wid."

Johanna's vision of the millennium was broken in upon querulously by Thady. "Sure I know all about God Almighty and the Divil," he said comprehensively, "I was on'y axin' what was in it before the beginnin' of everythin', and you're not tellin' me that."

"There's a dale of things little spalpeens like you wouldn't be tould the rights of at all," said Peter, loftily, being rather annoyed at the interruption. He would have liked to hear some further details about the felicity to be inaugurated by that exquisite cup of tea. "Go on romancin', Han."

But Johanna, who felt that this assumption of superior knowledge was an uncandid subterfuge, and yet had not magnanimity enough to disclaim it on her own part, remained uneasily silent for a moment, and then only said: "Sure it's time we was gettin' home." This they accordingly proceeded to do, and had gone most of the distance before it occurred to anybody that little Terence O'Driscoll was not with them. Then, after a superficial and unproductive search among the scattered stones and bushes, they thought it expedient to run back in a fright, and report that the child had gone and got lost, unless by any odd chance he'd come home along wid himself.

Thus it was that when Terence wakened from his nap, he found himself deserted, and thrown completely upon his own resources. As he had not been quite three years in amassing these, they were on the whole but scanty. In fact, he was helplessly unable to realise a world with nothing in it except endlessly swelling up slopes of furzy grass, no Molly nor Micky for him to trot after, and to carry him wherever they were going, whenever he intimated the desirability of that step by abruptly plumping down on the way. So he set off in a great hurry to escape from such a wilderness. He still walked with a wobbling stagger, and his long frock of whity-brown homespun kept on tripping him up, which retarded his progress. But he was not at all long in mentally reaching the precincts of a wild panic which rose up and seized him in a grip never to be quite forgotten, though only a few desperate minutes ensued before he stumped blindly against Con's legs. It was so unutterable a relief to have come on somebody who could hear him roar, that Terence ceased roaring immediately, and let Con pick him up without demur. The appearance of Molly or Micky would, no doubt, have been more satisfactory, but this stranger man might serve well enough at a pinch to carry him home, which it was inconceivable that anybody of such a size could be unable or unwilling to do. As for Con, the inference he drew from Terence's dimensions was that his family and friends were probably not far to seek; and he recognised the shrewdness of the conjecture when he presently espied a shawled figure coming swiftly towards him over the edge of a slope, with the amber of the sunset glowing behind her, and her long shadow sliding on far below her, as if it were in an even greater hurry than herself.

Mrs. O'Driscoll's head was among the golden sunbeams, but her heart had gone down to the very bottom of the blackest and deepest hole in the bog. For towards that dreadful goal she had seen a small form toddling ever since the other children came home alarmingly late with the news that Terence had got lost on them, and they couldn't find a bit of him, high ways or low ways. She was so overjoyed at her rescue that her delighted gratitude cast a sort of glamour around Con, which never wholly faded away. Ever after the appearance of his queer figure called up in her mind a dim reminiscence of the moment when she had seen it for the first time come into view, laden with what she well knew was Terence sitting bolt upright in a manner that betokened him to have experienced neither drowning nor any other disaster.

As Con put the child into her arms, where it seemed to fit into a niche specially designed for it, he said: "Sure now, ma'am, when I seen him stumpin' along his lone, and he about the heighth of a sizable boholawn (ragweed), sez I to meself there was apt to be somebody lookin' after him. For bedad it seems to me mostwhiles the littler a thing is the more people there'll be consaitin' they can't get on widout it; and that's lucky, belike, or else it might aisy get lost entirely, like a threepenny bit rowled away into a crack. But if you come to considher," Con said, hurrying on lest his allusion to the coin should be construed as a hint that he thought of payment for his services, "most people's lookin' out for somebody, or else somebody's lookin' out for them. It's on'y a few odd ones like meself that makes no differ here or there. I won'er now is the raison that it's after losin' ourselves we are in a manner—I've I've me notions about that. For first I think I dunno if anythin's rightly lost that nobody's lookin' to find, and then I think I dunno but you might as well say you couldn't find anythin' you weren't after losin' and lookin' for, and that's not the truth be no manner of manes."

"And you after findin' the child," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.

"Sure not at all, ma'am," said Con, modestly, deprecating not the statement but the implied praise. "Small thanks to me for that, when the woful bawls of it you might have heard a mile o' ground. You could as aisy ha' missed a little clap of thunder, if a one was be chance comin' tatterin' along between the furzes, wid the head of it bobbin' up now and agin, and makin' all the noise it could conthrive. Troth it's the quare bawls I might be lettin' these times afore the rest of them 'ud hear me, for if it's lost I am, I'm strayin' a terrible long while; they're apt to disremimber they ever owned me. I do be thinkin', ma'am, that if you forgit what you've lost, 'tis maybe all the one thing as if you'd found it; and after that agin I do be thinkin' maybe 'twould be liker losin' it twyste over. It's quare the diff'rint notions there is about most things. And a good job too, or else what would you be considherin' in your mind, when you was thrampin' around? 'Deed now if you couldn't be supposin' they were this way and that way, and argufyin' over them wid yourself in your own mind, 'twould be like as if you took and swallied down a lump of 'baccy instead of chewin' it, and what sort of benefit or plisure 'ud you git out of that?"

This was Con's first bit of philosophising at Lisconnel, and it was not his last by many, as the place became one of his favourite resorts. His liking for it was perhaps partly due to the fact that its inhabitants received him on more equal terms than were generally accorded to him elsewhere; and this again may be largely attributed to the influence of Mrs. O'Driscoll. For her grateful feelings towards the restorer of Terence made her loth to recognise any deficiencies in him, and her neighbours, soon perceiving that she seemed vexed if Con was spoken of as cracked or crazy or "wantin' a corner," were ready enough to modify their language, and even their judgment, in accordance with her view. Still it was convenient to distinguish him from another resident Con, about whom there were no very striking features. Therefore her little Rose having been heard to say that she was "after seein' Con, not Con Ryan, but the quare one," they caught up and applied the epithet, which in Lisconnel is regarded as a safely colourless term, not likely to hurt the most sensitive feelings.

Con, on his part, formed the highest opinion of Mrs. O'Driscoll, and often took counsel with her about perplexing points which had presented themselves to him in the course of his meditations. In one practical matter, however, he showed an obstinacy that did not further her in her wish to uphold him on a footing with quite sensible people. This was his fancy for adorning the band of his broad-brimmed caubeen with a garnish of feathers and flowers. Mrs. O'Driscoll disapproved of the freak, rightly judging that it often created irrevocable first impressions, and fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff among her laborious days and scanty stores, and fashioned for him a round cloth cap of a severely plain design, which she thought would give no scope for any unseemly appendages. Upon being presented with this headgear, Con dutifully assumed it, and went about wearing it for a day or two in a depressed frame of mind. Then he appeared in the morning at the O'Driscolls', cheered, and crested with a remarkably long gannet's feather stuck upright in the crown of his cap, through which he had bored a hole to admit of the insertion. He was resolved to brazen out the matter, so he presently took off his cap, and twirling it round with an unconcerned air as he leaned against the door, said to Herself: "Well, ma'am, what do you think of that?"

"To tell you just the truth, Con," said Herself, whose countenance had fallen as she saw the failure of her little plot, "I was thinkin' it looked a dale better before you cocked that ould gazabo on top of it. 'Deed now it gives you the apparance of a head of cabbage that's sproutin' up and goin' to seed. Sure you niver see the other lads trapesin' about wid the like on them."

Con, who seemed rather cast down by this criticism, was about to reply, when young Ned Keogh took the cap out of his hand and affected to examine it closely, saying: "Glory be to goodness, what sort of thing is it at all at all? Bedad it's the won'erful conthrivance—ah, tub-be sure; I see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the O'Driscolls' again for some weeks.

The next time he came, however, Herself had espied him a bit down the road, and was standing at the door to receive him with his discarded caubeen in her hand. "You'd be better wearin' it, Con, after all," she said, "for the eyes are scorched out of your head under the sun widout e'er a scrap of brim." And as Con took it, he observed with glee that she had fastened into the band a dove-coloured kittiwake's wing-feather, a somewhat cherished possession of her own, which she used to keep over her best picture on the wall. Thus did she seek to make amends for the speech about the sprouting cabbage-head, which had been weighing heavily upon her conscience.

The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again, the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more—all her blackest days of childless widowhood—so that this was his first visit since the departure of his earliest friend.

"Could you be keepin' it somewheres safe for me, ma'am?" he said, showing the soft grey feather to Mrs. Kilfoyle, who was sitting by the fire with her sons and her future daughter-in-law, and Ody Rafferty's aunt, and the Widow M'Gurk. "I'll be wearin' it no more. 'Twas she herself stuck it in for me, but sure I knew well enough all the while she'd liefer I wouldn't be goin' about wid such things on me head, and sorra a bit of me will agin."

"Whethen now but yourself's the quare man, Con," said Ody Rafferty's aunt, "to be takin' up wid that notion these times, when ne'er a differ it'ill make to her. There might ha' been some sinse in it, if you'd done it to plase her, but now you're more than a trifle too late wid that. A day after the fair you are. Sure she'll never set eyes on you or your old caubeen agin," she said, as if announcing some unthought-of discovery of her own, "no matter what ould thrash you might take and stick in it. You might be wearin' a young haystack on your head for anythin' she could tell."

"That may be or mayn't be," said Con. "But at all evints the next body that goes there out of this countryside 'ill be very apt to bring her word. Discoorsin' together they'll be of all the news, and as like as not he—or it might be she—'ill say to her—'I seen Con the Quare One goin' the road a while back, and he wid ne'er a thraneen of anythin' in his hat, good or bad; the same way the other boys are; lookin' rael dacint and sinsible.' Belike she might be axin' after me herself, and that 'ud put it in the other body's head. Yourself it may be, Moggy. Faix now, I wouldn't won'er a bit if it was, for there must be a terrible great age on you these times. Sure you looked to be an ould, ould woman the first day I ever beheld you, and that's better than a dozen year ago."

"Troth then there's plinty of oulder ould people than me, let me tell you," protested Moggy, who was about ninety, "that you need be settlin' I'm goin' anywheres next. Musha cock you up. And your own hair turned as white as sheep's wool on a blackthorn bush."

She seemed so much put out by Con's statement and inference that young Thady Kilfoyle, always a good-natured lad, sought to soothe her.

"Sure there's no settlin' any such a thing, and for the matter of goin', the young people often enough get their turn as fast as anybody else. It's meself," he said, "might be sooner than you bringin' news of yous all, and Con's ould caubeen, and everythin' else to Heaven the way he sez."

"I dunno if you've any call to be talkin' that fashion," said the Widdy M'Gurk, disapprovingly, "as if you could be walkin' permisc-yis into Heaven widout wid your lave or by your lave. Maybe it isn't there any of us'ill be bringin' our news."

"Might you know of e'er a better place then, ma'am?" said Con.

"Heard you ever the like of that?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt, not unwillingly scandalised, "I should suppose nobody, unless it was a born haythen, 'ud know of any place better than Heaven."

"That's where she is then," said Con, stroking his feather. "For the best place ever was is none too good for her, God knows well."

"And thrue for you, man," said the Widdy M'Gurk. "But she's one thing, and we're another. It's not settin' ourselves up we should be to have the same chances."

"Ah, well, sure maybe we're none of us too outrageous altogether," said Mrs. Kilfoyle, looking hopefully round at her company. "And if they can put up wid us at all at all, they will. We'll get there yet, plase God. And anyway I'll be takin' good care of your feather, Con. Ay will I so; same as if it was dropped out of an angel's wing."

"So good-night to you kindly, ma'am," said he. "I'll be steppin' back to Laraghmena. I on'y looked in on you to bring you that, and give you news of Theresa. And I question will I ever set fut agin in Lisconnel."

He did not, however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him sitting on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in a bank. Con sat with his back turned to it until the dusk had muffled up everything in dimness, and then he stole an armful of turf-sods from the nearest stack, and groped his way in through the deserted door. The shadows within were folded so heavily that he could scarcely more than guess where the hearth had been. One of Con's peculiarities was a strange horror of a fireless hearth. At the sight of its hoarily sprinkled blackness he always felt as if he were standing on the verge of some frightful revelation; a vague reminiscence, no doubt, from the scene of his life's tragedy, all distinct memory of which had been blurred away by his illness. Now he piled and crumbled his sods with practised skill, and set them alight in well-chosen places. But he stayed only for a minute or so, till the little fluttering flames had fairly taken a hold, and were sending golden threads running along the netted fibres. Then he groped his way out again, and returned to his seat on the bank. Presently, as he watched, he saw a red light beginning to flicker through window and door, and growing steadier and stronger. When it was at its brightest, he got up and turned away. "That's the very way it would be shinin'," he said, "and I comin' along the road to see Herself and Himself and the childer—God be good to them all, wherever they may be. And that's the notion of it I'll keep in me mind."

And Con the Quare One came no more to Lisconnel.



CHAPTER XI

MAD BELL

Not so very long before the sound of Con the Quare One's fiddle ceased to enliven Lisconnel any more, Mad Bell's singing had begun to be heard there occasionally, as it has been at intervals ever since she arrived with her two housemates, Big Anne and the Dummy, and took up her abode in the last of the cabins that you pass on the left hand, going towards Sallinbeg. Perhaps Lisconnel should not reckon her among its residents, so much of her time is spent on the tramp as an absentee. Still, she sometimes has tarried with us for a long while, and she is understood to have some property in the house-furniture, so it seems natural to consider the place her home.

From the first it appeared obvious to all that the dementedness which characterised the little wizened yellow-faced woman was of a much more pronounced type than Con the Quare One's. Any attempt to spare people's feelings by ignoring the fact would have been very futile, and it was therefore lucky that the three new-comers, Mad Bell herself included, were quite content to accept the situation. The neighbours were at first inclined to commiserate Big Anne, who was pronounced to be "a dacint, sinsible, poor woman," for the oddities of her household, the incalculable flightiness of Mad Bell, and the impenetrable silence of the Dummy. But to their condoling remarks she was wont to reply in effect—"Ah sure, ma'am, that's the way I'm used to them, the crathurs. Why, if Mad Bell said anythin' over-sinsible, or poor Winnie said anythin' at all, it's wond'rin' I'd be what was goin' to happin us next." And Big Anne evidently looked upon this as an uncomfortable frame of mind. At first, too, they speculated much about the circumstances which had brought the curious trio together beneath one thatch, and found it especially hard to conjecture how the daft little vagrant had come into possession of sundry tables and chairs. All its members, however, being incommunicative persons, no satisfactory elucidation of these points was arrived at in Lisconnel.

The coalescence of Big Anne's and the Dummy's fortunes is a simple history enough. Anne Fannin, while yet a youngish woman, was left alone in the world to do for herself in her little wayside cabin. Without a dowry to recommend her rough-hewn features and large-boned ungainliness, she never had any suitors, and she found it as much as she could contrive to make out her single living by means of her "bit of poultry" and her pig. Nevertheless, when her nearest neighbours—the Golighers—died, leaving their daughter Winnie, "who had niver got her speech, the crathur," to live on charity or the rates, what else was a body to do except take her in? Anne would have put this question to you with a sincere want of resource. So Winnie Goligher transferred to Anne Fannin's house, herself and all her worldly goods, which consisted of the clothes she had on, and a prayer-book, and a lame duck, and thenceforward the two "got along the best way they could."

Mad Bell's history has more complications in it. They began one pleasant April day when she was only a slip of a lass, who had taken a little place at the Hunts' farm near her home, for the purpose of saving up a few pounds against her marriage with Richard McBirney. She had been given an unexpected holiday, and was running home across the fresh, spring-green grass-fields, thinking to take her people by surprise, when she came to a hedge-gap whence you look down into a steep-banked lane. And at the foot of the bank Richard McBirney was sitting with his arm round her sister Lizzie's waist.

To a dispassionate observer this transference of his attentions might have seemed a matter of small moment. Most of their acquaintances, for example, were just as well satisfied that he should court Eliza as Isabella. But the sight turned all the current of her life awry. For it set her off rushing away from it across the same sunny green fields, and she never came home again. Nor ever again would she settle down quietly anywhere. She had a strong, clear voice and a taste for music, and this led her to take to singing ballads about the country at markets and fairs. The harder she was thinking about fickle Richard McBirney, the louder and shriller she sang. A very few years of such wandering shrivelled up her plump "pig-beauty," so that in her little sallow, weather-beaten face her own mother would scarcely have recognised pretty Isabella Reid. Then, after a long spell of illness in a Union infirmary, she began to grow noticeably odder and stranger in her looks and ways; until at length the children shouted "Mad Bell" as she passed, and that became her recognised style and title.

Such, briefly, had been her experience of life, when one September evening she came by chance to Big Anne and the Dummy's door. She had got a very bad cold, and felt hardly able to drag herself along between the berried hedges, and was so hoarse that she could with difficulty ask for the night's lodging, which they granted without demur. Their times had been unusually bad of late. In fact, their room was looking several sizes larger than they were accustomed to see it, because they had sold any articles of furniture for which "e'er a price at all" could be obtained. But to whatever accommodation this bareness permitted they made Mad Bell kindly welcome, the crathur being sick and crazy, and she stayed with them for three or four days. By that time, finding herself recovered, she resumed her journey, setting off early in the morning with the abruptness and absence of circumlocution which, as a rule, distinguished her proceedings. A friendly nod and grimace she made serve for announcement of departure and leavetaking all in one. As her hostesses watched her out of sight down the road, Big Anne said—

"Well, now, I never seen that quare little body in this counthry before, and we're very apt to not set eyes on her agin. God be good to us all, but the likes of her is to be pitied. She's worse off than the two of us. But bedad, Winnie, if thim hins there don't prisintly take to layin' a thrifle, it's in a tight houle we'll be ourselves. I dunno what's bewitchin' them. And the sorra an ould stick have we left in it that man or mortal 'ud give us the price of a pullet's egg for—and small blame to him, unless he was as deminted as herself that's quittin'."

Mad Bell's tramp that day was all along a sequence of lonesome winding lanes, where few dwellings were dotted among the green and gold of the fields. The bustle of the harvest, its reaping and binding, was over in them, and they lay without stir or sound. In some of them the stooks were still encamped, but some were smooth stubble, empty, except where a flock of turkeys filled it with dark, bunchy shapes. She walked steadily on the whole day without any adventure, but when the dew was beginning to fall through the twilight she came to a short, shady reach of lane, at the end of which stood, in a green nook, a small, prim white cottage with two peaked windows and a door to match. That, at least, is how it would under ordinary circumstances have presented itself to a passer-by. Just then, however, nobody would have noticed anything about it except the fact that out of the open door thick coils of woolly black smoke were rolling and rolling, stabbed through every now and again by thrusts of flame, which even in the lingering daylight gleamed strongly fierce and red. The house was evidently on fire. As Mad Bell drew nearer, she became aware of a wheaten-coloured terrier standing in front of it; and when he saw her he began to bark vehemently. She was used to being barked at, though not in this way, for howls were interspersed, and it was clearly meant not for a menace but an appeal. No other live creature was visible about the place, until she had come quite close to the surging door, when a small gossoon jumped up out of the ditch on the opposite side of the road and rushed across to her.

"What 'ill I do at all, then?" he said, whimperingly, catching hold of her shawl. "If them childer's burnt up widin there, Mr. Wogan 'ill be in a fine way. It's for killin' the whole of us he'll be. And it wasn't me set it afire. Sorra the match was I meddlin' wid, I could swear it. I wasn't out of it any time, gettin' a few ripe berries to pacify them childer, agin they would be wakin' and roarin', and when I come back, there it is all a smother of smoke. Divil a thing else was I doin' on'y mindin' them childer, and not meddlin' wid the matches, and goin' after a couple of blackberries. And Mr. Wogan himself's away to Ballymacartrican wid his boxes in the ass-cart. And all of them goin' to quit out of it to-morra, if it wasn't for them childer bein' burnt up inside—or maybe it's smothered they are. It's as unhandy as anythin'. It went afire of itself. And he'll be ragin'."

He bawled all this louder and louder in competition with the clamour of the dog, who kept on jumping up at each alternately, and evidently considered his remarks better entitled to a hearing. But Mad Bell merely replied, "Whisht gabbin', and hould that," thrusting, as she spoke, her little handkerchief bundle into his arms. And thereupon, making a sudden dive, she vanished among the flame-sheathing smoke.

Scarcely had she disappeared when an empty donkey-cart came round the turn of the lane, led by a rather dejected-looking middle-aged man, whose countenance, nevertheless, had for some time back been gradually clearing up at every wind of the way that brought him nearer to this particular point of view. But as he caught sight of the black smoke drifting and rolling, his aspect of reasonable melancholy changed to one of a despair that could not have been wilder if the reek of hell-mouth had blown into his face. He dropped the bridle, and hurled himself down the road like the distracted body that he well might be. For a twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped by the back door.

If the most radiant of guardian angels, in snowy plumes and golden tresses, had restored his children to him with a befitting speech, poor Matthew Wogan could not well have been more joyfully relieved from his terror than he was when this odd little yellow-faced woman, with a red handkerchief wisped round her head, and a singed grimness generally pervading her, handed over to him Minnie and Tom, casually remarking, "Bedad, it's the big heavy lumps they are." Minnie and Tom both were crying and coughing loudly, because the smoke had got into their eyes and throats, which they resented; and when their father returned with them to the front of the house, this noise was swelled by the gleeful yap-yapping of the terrier and the voices of a few other people who had appeared upon the scene—a matronly looking woman and two or three sun-burnt harvestmen. From Mrs. Massey's observations it could be gathered that she had been minding the Wogan twins by deputy, and further that she entertained the gloomiest views about the mental and moral qualities of her son little Larry, who replied to her animadversions with over-reaching protestations about matches and theories of spontaneous combustion. While they wrangled in the background, the young men inspected the conflagration, which proved to be less extensive than it looked, though undoubtedly serious enough to have soon put the sleeping children past waking, if rescue had not come. A heap of blankets and other bedding, that smouldered and blazed near the front door, was the source of the most stiffling smoke; and when it had been subdued by many buckets of water, everybody began to drag what bits of the furniture they could out of harm's way. There was not much, because, as Wogan explained, he had sent "the marrow of it" to his sister at Ballymacartrican; and the legs of the largest table were charred so badly that it collapsed with a crash "the instiant minyit it set its four feet on the ground," as Mrs. Massey said. However, there were two smaller ones not much the worse, and three or four chairs, and a couple of stools, and some pots and pans, and a small clothes-horse, and a wagging clock, whose round white face glimmered through the dusk like a fallen moon as it lay flat on the grass. All these things made a little crowd on the plot of sward by the door.

"And what will you be doin' wid them now?" said Mrs. Massey. "There's my place below you'd be welcome to stand them in as long as you plase. 'Deed would you, sir. The dear knows I'm not throubled wid too many sticks of furnitur'. That's a very handy-sized washin'-tub Larry's after carryin' out for you. I was noticin' to-day ours has a lake in it this long while back that dhrips over everythin'. I must get himself to thry mend it."

"That's a lovely table," suddenly said Mad Bell, who had hitherto made no remarks. "A rael grand one it is," she repeated, in a wistful sort of way, smoothing the leaf fondly with her hand.

"And very welcome you'd be to have it in a prisint, ma'am, if you've e'er a fancy for it; ay, or for the matter of that to the whole lot of them altogether," said Matthew Wogan, who, with his arms full of the smoky twins, felt a weight of gratitude which he would gladly have expressed in deeds. "Little vally there is on them—it's a small thing after what you're after doin' for us. I wouldn't like to be payin' away me bit of money from the childer, or else—But if I auctioned them things off the way I was intindin' it's on'y a thrifle of a few shillin's they'd be bringin' me. Welcome you are to them, ma'am."

"Sure what use at all 'ud such a thing be to the likes of her?" put in Mrs. Massey. "It's on'y annoyed you'd be, woman, wid tables and chairs. And she thrampin' about, you may depind, wid ne'er a place to be bringin' them to, if she had them twyste over, let alone any way of movin' them. It's very convanient we are, just round the turn of the road."

"She might take the little cart and the ould ass along," said Matthew Wogan, looking at his equipage, which was straying towards them intermittently as the beast grazed the green border of the lane. "They're no use to me now. Then there'd be nothin' delayin' her that she couldn't be cleanin' out of it wid them right away—You needn't throuble yourself to be liftin' the little stool, Mrs. Massey. What wid fire and water, that'll be no place to sleep in," he said, pointing to the still smoking door. "The Mahonys 'ud take us in for to-night, and to-morra early we're off to me sister's and next day to Queenstown. 'Twill be a grand thing for the childer to be settled near their uncle Tom, that's doin' right well in New Jersey, in case anythin' happint me. So I'd as lief be shut of all that collection, supposin' they'd be any benefit to this crathur."

"Saints bless us, but you're givin' away all before you, Mr. Wogan," said Mrs. Massey, with a discomfited laugh.

"Have you e'er a house you could be puttin' them in?" one of the harvestmen asked of Mad Bell.

"Ay, bedad," she said. And with that she picked up a chair, and dumped it down into the cart, which had come to a halt at the door.

This promptitude on her part seemed to settle the question. Without more ado the rest of the salvage was loaded in, all except the handy-sized washing-tub, which by means of an adroitly taken up position Mrs. Massey contrived to have overlooked and left behind, when Mad Bell drove away with her newly acquired property.

On through the gloaming she drove, till the white dust flakes gathered up by the wheels grew damp and fragrant with dew, and till the moonlight was glimmering among the golden sheaves silverly, and till live embers were fanned out of the ashes low in the east. The small hours had a frosty chill, and old Ned's short steps were leisurely, and his halts for refreshment frequent; still Mad Bell continued to sit with serene patience. She was retracing her route of the day before, but at so much slower a rate of progress that the sun had been up for more than an hour when she stopped in front of Big Anne and the Dummy's little house. They were disturbed at their breakfast by the sound of the arrival, and when they came to the door, saw their visitor in the act of depositing a second chair upon the ground beside the cart.

"Whethen now and is it yourself back agin?" said Big Anne. "And what at all have you got there?"

"Inside they're goin'," said Mad Bell, pointing to the cart-load with an elated air. "It's a dale handier to have some chairs and tables."

This was a fact which Big Anne might well have admitted, considering that she had just been squatting on her heels to eat her plate of stirabout. However, she only continued her perplexed catechism: "Where at all was you after bringin' them things from, and who might be ownin' them?"

"Out of a house burnin' down," said Mad Bell.

"Och between us and harm. What house is it then? And how did it get burnin'?"

"Sure it's aisy enough settin' a house on fire," said Mad Bell with a grin, which to Big Anne who at this time was not familiar with her manners, looked rather sinisterly significant. "Flarin' up rael strong," she said, pushing towards her, as if in confirmation of the statement, the little wooden clothes-horse, whose rails were blackened and charred.

"Aisy it may be," Big Anne said, looking aghast at it, "but dreadful divilment it is to do such a thing, wid the misfort'nit people very apt to lose their lives, let alone everythin' else."

"There was nobody in it on'y the couple of fat little childer," said Mad Bell.

"The saints be among us all, woman," said Big Anne, "what sort of talk have you? It's not streelin' about the counthry you are, wid them ould sticks of furnitur', and lavin' the little childer in the house blazin' up? The Lord pity the crathurs, what 'ud become of them if they was left thataway? Burnt to cinders be now very belike."

"Stufficated," said Mad Bell, with a complacent nod.

Big Anne and the Dummy stared at one another in great horror. The Dummy could express her feelings only by crossing herself and gasping; but Big Anne spoke volubly: "May God forgive me for openin' me lips to the likes of you. Och but you're the unnatural wicked woman to go do such a thing, if you was twyste as cracked and crazy itself. Git along out of this, yourself and your ould cart, afore the polis comes after you. Och the misfort'nit little crathurs. And don't be offerin' to darken our doors agin wid the ojis sight of you."

"Gimme a hand wid liftin' in them two tables," said Mad Bell. Whereupon Big Anne whisked away from her, and banged the door in her face.

Mad Bell, however, did not appear to be discouraged by this reception. She finished unloading the cart of all except the tables, which she found unwieldy single-handed. Then she unharnessed old Neddy, and went and seated herself on the low wall beside the house. She was seemingly quite content with the situation. But to the two women indoors it was a dreadful experience. Their minds were firmly persuaded that the daft little woman had designedly set fire to some dwelling, and made off with what household gear she could lay hands on, leaving the hapless children to perish amid the flames. It shocked and enraged them that their premises should be infested by the presence of such a criminal, and that her ill-gotten goods and chattels should be brought to their very threshold, not to speak of her outrageous proposal to harbour them under their roof. Big Anne declared that wid the legs of them chairs and tables glimpsing through the door, as if they were on'y turned out to be airin' a bit, she and the Dummy seemed as good as a pair of murderers.

Every now and then they went to the door and peered out, and the incendiary always greeted them with cheerful nods. On these occasions Big Anne sometimes said: "Oh, very well, me good woman. Just you sit brazenin' there till the patrol comes round this way, and then if I don't give you in charge as sure as the sun's shinin' crooked over our heads.—Begone out of that, and take them things out of litterin' about our place." Or she would remark loudly to her companion: "Just stop a minyit, Winnie, till I sling me ould shawl over me head, and run down to the barracks. It's not very long they'll be puttin' her out of it, and bundlin' her into jail, instead of to be sittin' there, wid ne'er a spark of shame in her, annoyin' dacint people." But neither mode of address produced any effect. The morning sunbeams still slanted down on the small pile of furniture, and old Neddy went on munching the blades off which they were drying the dew, and Mad Bell continued to sit upon the wall, as if placidly waiting for events.

Such was the posture of affairs until towards noon, when an outside-car came trotting quickly down the lane. On one side of it sat a black-whiskered man in his best clothes, with each hand tightly grasping a small, fat, wrigglesome child. And the three were Matthew, Tom, and Minnie Wogan. On catching sight of Mad Bell, he made the driver pull up.

"Well, ma'am," he called to her, "so you're after gettin' home. Bedad it's the fine long step you've took th'ould donkey; one while he'd be doin' it. And you're about gettin' in the few things? Very welcome she is to the whole of them," he continued to Big Anne, who had now emerged. "And begorrah nobody else had a better right to any trifle might be saved out of it. She'll ha' tould you, ma'am, the way the place was set on fire on me last night—some little divil of a spalpeen playin' wid matches it seems. But anyhow, there it was in blazes, and me galloppin' home like a deminted cow, consaitin' these two imps of the mischief here would be smotherin' inside it. And, troth, if herself over there hadn't them fetched out safe into the yard, when it was as much as your life was worth to put your head in at the door, for the stiflin' of the smoke. I dunno how she conthrived it. Maybe the crathur isn't altogether over sinsible," he said in a confidential tone; "but if she'd had all the wit ever was thought of, she couldn't ha' done better be the childer. So it's kindly welcome she is to the bits of furniture, and the ould baste. And dhrivin' on we must be. Good mornin' to yous all."

Mad Bell listened to this praise with the same equanimity as to Big Anne's threats and reproaches. But when the car had trotted on, she came up to her, saying just as before, "Gimme a hand wid liftin' in thim tables;" and Matthew Wogan, jogging down the long lane, may have caught the last glimpse of one of them as it vanished in at the doorway.

Thus it was that Mad Bell came to be domiciled with Big Anne and the Dummy in the pauses between her wanderings. The arrangement seemed equitable in view of her substantial contribution to the plenishing of the house. The donkey-cart, likewise, was found very serviceable, enabling them to turn a penny occasionally by fetching and carrying. And the coalition worked well upon the whole. But after a few years of such prosperity that they were seldom without a bit of food in the house, and sometimes had bacon on Sunday, things took a turn for the worse. Old Ned died under the burden of his many years, and a sort of murrain among the fowl cut off several promising pullets in the heyday of their youth. Then arose difficulties about "rint," while their landlord, who was new to the property, had a natural zeal for sweeping it clear of encumbering tenants. And the end of it was that the three women transferred themselves to Lisconnel, where they became not the least respected of its inhabitants.

But these particulars about their antecedents were never learned by the neighbours there; and the joint ownership of the furniture still presents itself as one of our unsolved problems. Another of them was propounded somewhat later, when Mad Bell returned from an unusually long ramble, during which she had crossed the Liffey by the spacious O'Connell Bridge, and had heard the boom of the big College bell, and with her wizened-lemon face had half-scared the smallest-sized children in villages round about Dublin. For she was wearing an elaborately fantastic piece of headgear, which moved everybody's curiosity so strongly that it cannot have been for want of wondering if we failed to find out how she had come thereby. Strangely incongruous it did undoubtedly look; yet the stages by which it had descended from its stand in the milliner's show-room and alighted upon the head of the little wandering-witted tramp, were much fewer than might have been supposed probable.

One blustery March morning when Mrs. M'Bean was on her way along by the low sea-wall to buy a bit of bacon at Donnelly's shop in Kilclone, the east wind did her the shrewd turn of whisking off her hat and dropping it into the water. It was a most shabby old black straw, rusty and battered, and torn, yet Mrs. M'Bean, a labourer's wife, who had nothing at all handsome about her, seemed to think it worth a serious risk. For she mounted on the broad wall-top, and thence made so unwary a snatch that she overbalanced herself and splashed headlong into the heaving high-tide, where she would very soon have perished beneath the cold olive-gray swell, had not the brothers Denny, fishing for bass hard by, noticed the perilous accident, and pulled timely to the rescue.

When they disembarked her, gasping and dripping, at the nearest landing-place, she was understood to say, "Sure me heart's broke," a remark which Police-sergeant Young, who formed one of the group gathered by the disaster, considered sufficient grounds for marching her off to the handiest J. P. on a charge of attempted suicide. Mrs. M'Bean vehemently repelled the accusation. She explained that she had said her heart was broke only "because she had lost her ould hat, and every thread of a rag on her had been dhrenched and ruinated with the salt water. How could she go for to do such a sin as destroy herself, she urged, and she wid a houseful of little childer waitin' for her at home, the crathurs?" Her arguments proved convincing, and the charge was summarily dismissed, not without strictures upon Sergeant Young's excessive zeal, by which he, recking nothing of Talleyrand's maxim, felt himself puzzled and aggrieved.

The incident, however, brought some more agreeable consequences to Mrs. M'Bean, as the J. P.'s ladies, commiserating her half-drowned plight, sent her that same evening a goodly bundle of cast-off clothes, over which her eyes grew gleefully bright in her careworn face. At one of the articles included they widened with almost awe. This was an enormous hat made of white fluffy felt, with vast contorted brims, and great blue velvet rosettes and streamers. Its fabric was very stout and substantial, and withal quite new, for its original owner had speedily found it so stiff and heavy that to wear it gave her a headache and a crick in her neck. Mrs. M'Bean, for her part, could not entertain the idea of carrying anything so sumptuous upon her grizzled head; and when she tried it on her eldest daughter, it totally extinguished and nearly smothered the child. So she stowed it away in a corner, where it remained unseen for several weeks.

But next month, on the afternoon of Easter Day, Mrs. M'Bean had two visitors over from Ballyhoy: Annie Cassidy, elderly and rather grim, with her young friend Nelly Walsh.

"Nelly's bound to be havin' bad luck this year of her life," Annie observed in the course of conversation, "for not a new stitch has she put on her to-day, and it Easter. That's an unlucky thing, accordin' to the sayin'."

"Ne'er a bit am I afraid of me luck," averred Nelly, cheerful and threadbare, not to say ragged. But Mrs. M'Bean was pricked by a sudden thought up the ladder to the little attic aloft, whence she creaked down again, bringing with her the great white hat. "There, Nelly," she said, "just clap that on your head, and then nobody can pass the remark that you didn't get the wear of somethin' new, any way."

Nelly took the hat, which struck her nearly dumb with admiration, but as she tried to catch a glimpse of it in the shred of looking-glass on the wall, her delighted expression waxed so eloquent that Mrs. M'Bean was impelled to say: "You're to keep it, girl alive, if you've e'er a fancy for it. Sure it's fitter for you than the likes of me, that 'ud look a quare old scarecrow if I offered to go about in such a thing." She had not at first intended this generosity, her worldly goods being so few that she could not lightly part with even a very unpromising possession.

Nelly, on her side, could hardly believe in her high fortune, when, after some polite demur, she found herself carrying off the splendid hat. To wear it on an ordinary walk would have seemed profane, so she held it under her old shawl all the way home to her cabin on the shore at the foot of the Black Banks, a good step beyond Ballyhoy. But when she reached the door, she could not forbear the pleasure of making her entrance in the glory of her new adornment. Her reception was altogether disappointing. For her mother's and grandmother's voices rose up shrill and shriller, demanding what at all hijjis gazabo she'd got on her. Billy, her eldest brother, said: "Musha, she's put a pair of blinkers on her like an ould horse;" and Larry, his junior, remarked with terse candour, "Och, the fright." More mortifying still, Joe Tierney, her sweetheart, who had called to conclude arrangements about the morrow's holiday, said in a disgusted tone: "Tare and ages! I hope to goodness, Nelly, you're not intindin' to make that show of yourself at the circus to-morra. Bedad, I niver seen such a conthrivance; you might as well be walkin' alongside some sort of deminted musharoon." This rather aptly described the effect of the huge white brim upon Nelly, who was small and short of stature; but it hurt her feelings badly.

The only upholder of the hat was Annie Cassidy, who is fond of controverting the opinions of other people, and who despises men. She said: "Don't be lettin' them put you out of consait with it, Nelly; it suits you lovely. Sure if anyone doesn't think your app'arance is good enough for them, you needn't throuble them wid your company. Circuses, to my mind, is thrash—to be watchin' folks figurandyin' on a pack of ould horses' backs. There's a lot of us goin' over to-morra to Rathbeg, where they've merry-go-rounds you can ride in yourself, and all manner, if you'd just step down to the Junction station and come along wid us on the early train."

"'Deed then I might," said Nelly; not that she had the least intention of doing any such thing, but because, being somewhat of a belle, she was unaccustomed to uncomplimentary criticisms and much affronted by them. Furthermore, for the same reason, she escorted Annie home, and stayed so long talking, that Joe before she returned had to go off about his milking, which annoyed him a good deal.

However, he had quite forgotten his vexation next morning, as he hurried through his early tasks with a day's pleasuring before him. He worked at the Kellys', whose land is bounded north and south by the Junction lane and the sea; and as he walked about the fresh April fields he was in view of Howth, dark pansy-purple against the eastern amber, confronting the sweep of the Dublin mountains, outlined in wild hyacinth-coloured mist, across the dancing silver of the bay. The calves had been fed so expeditiously that Joe found he could spare time to stop at the starred bank under the hedge and pick a bunch of primroses, some of which Nelly's mother would proudly keep in a jam-pot on the window-stool, while Nelly herself might like to wear a few at the circus, brightening up her brown-striped shawl.

But when he was compressing a thick sheaf of the cool soft stalks in one hard hand, he chanced to look up, and saw what thrilled him with dismay. Bobbing along over the jagged edge of the wall, a short way down the lane went a gleaming white object, which he at once recognised as Nelly's new hat. He ran aghast to look through the gate, and despite intercepting road-curves and obstructive hedges, the hat it unmistakably was, making for the Junction station. So Nelly, intending a serious quarrel, had thrown him over and joined the Rathbeg party. A pleasure, hoarded in anticipation for many a month, shrivelled into dead leaves suddenly like fairy gold, as he perceived how certainly this must be the case.

His first angry impulse was a resort to Haskin's Public at Portbrendan, where he might spend his spoilt holiday taking drinks and making bets in the society of some cronies. What hindered him from immediately acting upon it was a compunctious forecast of the concern which would prevail in his family, if he absented himself contrary to expectation. "There's me mother's never aisy," he reflected, "unless she's persuadin' herself some of us are kilt on her." This made him resolve to postpone Portbrendan till after breakfast, and he turned lothfully homewards. As he passed along the Kellys' yard-wall, he relieved his feelings by tossing his nosegay over it at the place where he heard the grunting of their pigs, who on that occasion fared almost as delicately as Marvel's rose-lined fawn.

It was early still when he reached his cabin, one in the Walshes' row; and he sat down listlessly on a bank, to wait for nothing in particular. Presently Mrs. Walsh, senior, came by with a twinkling can of water. "Och, there you are, Joe," she said: "Nelly's been lookin' out for you this good while."

"Whethen it's quare lookin' out she had," said Joe, "and she took off wid herself to ould Annie Cassidy—bad manners to her for her interfarin'."

"What's the lad talkin' about at all?" said Mrs. Walsh, standing amazed; "Nelly's widin there this instiant of time, readyin' herself up."

"Maybe you'll tell me," said Joe, "that I didn't see her streelin' down the Junction lane afore I was lavin' Kellys'."

"And maybe you'll tell me," said Nelly's grandmother, "that she wasn't just now callin' to me they were wantin' wather. It's a fine bawl she'd ha' had to let out of her, if I was to be hearin' her, and she up beyond Kellys'."

"There she was anyway," Joe said, doggedly. "Wouldn't I know that dad fetched-lookin' ould new caubeen she's stuck on her a mile o' ground?"

"You great gomeral," said Mrs. Walsh. "If that's all you might aisy enough ha' seen the big hat goin' the road—but have you the notion it's growin' on Nelly's head? Why, you omadhawn, you hadn't quit ten minyits last night, and Nelly was just after gettin' back, when who should come by but poor Mad Bell. Och now the raggedy objick the crathur was, wid nothin' over her misfort'nit head but an ould wisp as full of houles as a fishin'-net. So little Larry sez, jokin' like, 'Look here, Nelly,' sez he, 'you'd a right to be lettin' Mad Bell have a loan of your grand nappy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.' But belike Nelly'd took a turn agin the thing wid the way they'd all been makin' fun of it; for sez she, 'Will you have it, Bell?' sez she, houldin' it out to her. And if she did, Mad Bell grabbed it in her two hands—it's not often she'll have a word for anybody—and no more talk about it, but cocked it on, and tied it firm under her chin wid the sthramers, as tasty as you plase. Musha good gracious, to see the len'th she drew the bow out on aich side of her bit of a yeller face, and the nod she gave her ould head when she'd got it done. So that's what's gone wid the hat. Goodness guide us, if she wasn't the poor crazy-witted body she is, 'twould be a sin to let her go makin' such a show of herself; but sure no one 'ud think to mind anythin' the likes of the crathur might have on her, the saints may pity her. Ay, bedad, them kind of quare consthructions do be fit for nothin' unless Quality and mad people," old Mrs. Walsh continued, without malice, soliloquising, as Joe had caught up the can, and was hurrying it with prodigal splashes towards his sweetheart's door.

The circus, with its flaring lights and whirl of tinselled prancing marvels, was so rapturous an experience to Nelly that she had not a regret for her discarded hat, which at this time was moving on beneath a soft dappled sky, between greening hedges, westward along quiet roads and lanes. It found shelter for the night under the ley of a tall hayrick near Santry, thus ending the first stage of Mad Bell's tramp home to the wide brown bogland of Lisconnel.



CHAPTER XII

A FLITTING

Among the latest of the strangers that have visited Lisconnel were some who came at a time when the neighbours stood rather in need of distraction. For the summer following Mrs. Kilfoyle's death was, between one thing and another, a drearyish season with us. That little old woman had left a great gap; and then there were many long spells of gloomy bad weather, which seemed to beat people's troubles down upon them as the damp drove the turf-reck back through their smoke-holes into the dark rooms, where they could scarcely see how dense the blue haze was growing. Stacey Doyne's marriage also had removed something young and pleasant, and at times, when the thatch dripped without and within, neighbours were apt to talk about her in tones of commiseration, and say, "Sure, her poor mother's lost entirely." So that towards autumn the diversion of some new residents' arrival happened opportunely enough. It was made possible by the fact that Big Anne had given up her holding and entered into partnership with the widow M'Gurk, thus leaving her late abode empty for another tenant, who appeared much sooner than any one might have anticipated from the aspect of the cabin.

Except as a fresh topic of conversation, however, the strangers gave small promise of proving an acquisition to the community. Lisconnel did not like their appearance by any means, and further acquaintance failed to modify unfavourable first impressions. These were mainly received in the course of the day after their arrival, which took place on a night too black for anything beyond a shadowy counting of heads, and a perception that the bulk of the new-comers' household stuff had jogged up on one donkey, and must therefore be small. A portion of Big Anne's furniture had remained behind her in the cabin, owing to certain arrears of rent. Her heart was scalded, she said, wid the prices she'd only get for her early chuckens, and they the weight of the world, if you'd feel them in your hand; and poor Mad Bell, that 'ud mostly bring home a few odd shillin's wid her, was away since afore last Christmas, and might never show her face there agin, the crathur; and the poor Dummy gone, that was great at the knittin' if she got the chance—a bit of narration which would look funny enough in anybody's rental. Mrs. Quigley, who went to the door with the offer of a seed of fire, found it shut, and a voice inside called, "as onmannerly as you plase," "No, we've got matches;" whereupon another voice, further in the interior, quavered, "Thank'ee kindly, ma'am." So she departed little wiser than she had come. But daylight showed that the party consisted of an old man, and his son, and his son's wife, and her sister, and three small children, besides some cochin-china fowl, and a black cat with vividly green eyes. This much was apparent on the surface. Also that the old man was frail, bent, shrivelled, and civil spoken, that the son was "a big soft gomeral of a fellow," that both the women were sandily flaxen-haired, with broad, flat cheeks and light eyes, and that two of the children resembled them, while the third—a girl a trifle older—was a dark-haired, disconsolate-looking little thing, "wid her face," Mrs. Brian said, "not the width of the palm of your hand, and the eyes of her sunk in her head." As for the fowl, there could be no doubt that their "onnathural, long, fluffety legs were fit to make a body's flesh creep," and the cat looked "as like an ould divil as anythin' you ever witnessed, sittin' blinkin' atop of the turf-stack."

Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees—more slowly than might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not prospered—in fact, they had been "sold up and put out of it," as the young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle. They were a somewhat intricately connected family, by the name, predominantly, of Patman. The sister-in-law was Tishy M'Crum, which seemed simple enough, but the two light-haired boys were Greens, Mrs. Patman having been a widow, while the little girl was the child of a wife whom Tom Patman had already buried; for though he looked full young to have embarked upon matrimony at all, this was his second venture. "And it's a quare comether she must ha' been after puttin' on him," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "afore he took up wid herself, that's as ugly as if she was bespoke, and half a dozen year oulder than the young bosthoon, if she's a minyit." It is true that at the time when Mrs. Quigley expressed this unflattering opinion she and her neighbours had been exasperated by an impolite speech of Mrs. Patman, who had said loudly in their hearing, "Well, for sartin if I'd had a notion of the blamed little dog-hole he was bringin' us into, sorra the sole of a fut 'ud I ha' set inside it;" and had then proceeded to congratulate herself upon having prudently left "all her dacint bits of furniture up above at her mother's, so that she needn't be bothered wid cartin' them away out of a place that didn't look to have had ever e'er a thing in it worth the throuble of movin', not if it stood there until it dropped to pieces wid dirt." Mrs. Quigley rejoined (to Judy Ryan) that "it would be a great pity if any people sted in a place that wasn't good enough for them, supposin' all the while they was used to anythin' a thraneen better—maybe they might, in coorse, and maybe they mightn't. It was won'erful to hear the talk some folks had, and they wid every ould stick they owned an aisy loadin' for Reilly's little ass." But Judy Ryan, with a flight of sarcastic fancy, hoped that Mrs. Patman and her family "were about goin' on a visit prisintly to the Lady Lifftinant, because it was much if they'd find any place else where there'd be grandeur accordin' to their high-up notions."

Skirmishes such as this, however, were a symptom rather than a cause of the Patmans' unpopularity. That sprang from several roots. For one thing, both the women had harsh, scolding voices, and it was even chances that if you passed within earshot of their cabin you would hear them giving tongue. Their objurgations were, as a rule, addressed to the young man or the old, the latter of whom soon grew into an object of local compassion as "a harmless, dacint, poor crathur," while his son came in for the frank-eyed looking-down-upon which is the portion of an able-bodied man, shrew-ridden through sheer supineness and "polthroonery." But what Lisconnel often said that it "thought badder of" was the stepmotherly treatment which seemed to be the lot of the little girl Katty. Of course the situation was one which, under the circumstances, would have made people believe in such a state of things upon the slenderest evidence. Still, even to unprejudiced eyes, it was clear that Katty's rags were raggeder than those of her small step-brothers, and that she crept about with the mien of a creature which has conceived reasonable doubts respecting the reception it is likely to meet in society. When the autumn weather began to grow wintry, little Katty Patman, "perishin' about out there in the freezin' win'," became a spectacle which was viewed with indignant sympathy from dark doorways whence she received many an invitation to step in and be warmin' herself. Her hostesses opined that she was fairly starved just for a taste of the fire, and didn't believe she was ever let next or nigh it in her own place. Often, too, the consideration that she had no more flesh on her bones than a March chucken led to the bestowal of a steaming potato or a piece of griddle-bread; but the result of this was sometimes unsatisfactory to the giver, Katty being apt to dart away with her refreshments, which she might presently be seen sharing among Bobby and Stevie, for whom she entertained a strong and apparently unreciprocated regard.

"I wouldn't go for to be sayin' anythin' to set her agin them," Mrs. Brian Kilfoyle remarked on some such occasion. "But, goodness forgive me! I've no likin' for them two little brats. I'd misthrust them."

"Ah, sure they've no sinse," said Biddy Ryan. "Where'd they git it? And the biggest of them, I'd suppose, under four year ould."

"Sinse!" said Mrs. Quigley. "Bedad, then, if sinse was all that ailed them, the pair of them is as 'cute as a couple of young foxes. I mind on'y a day or so after they'd been in it, I met the laste one on the road, and I comin' home wid be chance a sugarstick in me basket. So, just to be makin' friends like, I gave it a bit for itself, and a bit for the other that I seen comin' along. Well, now, ma'am, if it had took and ate up the both of the bits, I'd ha' thought ne'er a pin's point of harm—'twould ha' been nathural enough to the size of it. But I give you me word, when it seen it couldn't get the two of them swallied down afore its brother come by, what did it go do but clap the one of them into a crevice in the wall, and cover it under a blackberry laif. And wid that down it squats, and begins sayin', 'Creely-crawly snail—where's the creely-crawly snail I'm after huntin' out of its houle?'—lettin' on to be lookin' for somethin' creepin' in the grass. And a while after it come slinkin' back, when it thought nobody was mindin', to poke the bit out of the wall where I was gatherin' dandelions under the bank. So while it was fumblin' about, missin' the right crevice, sez I, poppin' up, thinkin' to shame it, 'Maybe the crawly snail's after aitin' it on you,' sez I. 'Och, yis; I seen it,' sez the spalpeen, as brazen as brass. 'Gimme 'noder bit instid.' There's a schemin' young rapscallion for you!"

"They're too like their mother altogether to plase me," said Judy Ryan. "The corners of their eyes do be as sharp as if they were cut out wid a pair of scissors. Not that I'd mind if they'd e'er a sthrake of good-nathur in them; but I misdoubt they have. The little girl, now, is as diff'rint as day and night."

"If she takes after her father, she's a right to want the wit powerful, misfort'nit little imp," said Mrs. Brian. "For if he isn't a great stupid gomeral and an ass, just get me one. Why, if he was worth the dust blowin' along the road, he'd purvint of his own child bein' put upon."

"Och, they have him frighted," said Mrs. Quigley, with scornful emphasis. "They won't let him take an atom of notice of her, they're that jealous. Sure, if he gets talkin' to her outside the house there, one of them 'ill let a bawl and send him off to be carryin' in turf or wather. I've seen it times and agin."

"If he'd take and sling it about their ears some fine day he'd be doin' right, and it might larn them to behave themselves," said Judy.

"But the ould man would disgust you," pursued Mrs. Quigley, "wid the romancin' he has out of him about his son Tom. You'd suppose, to listen to him, that the omadhawn's aquil never stepped. He'll deive you wid it till you're fairly bothered. Troth, he thinks the young fellow's doin' somethin' out of the way if he just walks down the street, and expec's everybody to stand watchin' him goin' along. It's surprisin' the foolery there does be in people."

"Och, murdher, women alive!" said Ody Rafferty, whose pipe went out at this moment, "there's no contintin' yous at all. It's too cute they are, and too foolish they are. Musha, very belike they're not so much off the common if you'd a thrifle more exparience of them; there's nothin' to match that for evenin' people. Bedad, now, there's some people I know so well that I can scarce tell the one from the other."

Lisconnel, however, generally declined to fall in with Ody's philosophical views, and the Patmans, whether suspected of excessive cuteness or folly, remained persistently unpopular. There was only one exception to this rule. The widow M'Gurk has a certain fibre of perversity in her which sometimes twists itself round unlikely objects, for no apparent reason save that they are left clear by her neighbours, and this peculiarity renders her prone upon occasion to undertake the part of Devil's Advocate. When, therefore, she had once delivered herself of the opinion that the newcomers were "very dacint folks," she did not feel called upon to abandon it because it stood alone. As grounds for it she commonly alleged that they were "rael hard-workin' and industhrious," which was obviously true enough, since Mrs. Patman and her sister might constantly be seen tilling their little field with an energy far beyond the capacity of its late tenant. Her neighbours' unimpressed rejoinder, "Well, and supposin' they are itself?" did not in the least disconcert the widdy, nor yet their absence of enthusiasm when she stated that it was "a sight to behould Tishy M'Crum diggin' over a bit of ground; she'd lift as much on her spade as any two strong men." As for little Katty, "she'd never seen anybody doin' anythin' agin the child; it might happen by nature to be one of those little crowls of childer that 'ud always look hungry-like and pinin', the crathurs, if you were able to keep feedin' them wid the best as long as the sun was in the sky." In short, something more than talk was usually needed to put the widow M'Gurk out of conceit with any notion she had taken up. Perhaps the comparative aloofness of her hillside cabin helped to maintain the Patmans at their original high level in her estimation. At any rate they had not sunk from it by the time that they had been nearly three months in Lisconnel, and when Mrs. Patman and her sister were on terms of the very glummest civility with all the other women in the place. Even towards the widow M'Gurk they were tolerant rather than expansive. She said "they had done right enough to not be leppin' down people's throaths."

One morning not long after Christmas, the widow, being bound on an errand down below, called in at the Patmans' with a view to possible commissions. Meal was wanted, and, while Tishy M'Crum stitched up a rent in the bag, Mrs. M'Gurk noticed where little Katty, who had been "took bad wid a could these three days," rustled uncomfortably among wisps of rushes and rags in an obscure corner. Fever made her bold and self-assertive, for she was wishing nothing less than that her daddy would get her an orange—"An or'nge wid yeller peel round it"—Katty laid stress upon this point—"like the one her mammy got her a long time ago. And daddy'd be a good daddy and get her another now. And she'd keep a bit for Bobby and Stevie and all of them—a big yeller or'nge." Katty's eyes blazed with excitement as she reiterated these extravagant desires.