Chapter I: Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES

“Ὅσσ’ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθ’· ὅσα δ’ οὐχ ἕλομεν, φερόμεσθα.”

A CREEL OF IRISH
STORIES

BY
JANE BARLOW
AUTHOR OF “IRISH IDYLLS”

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
1897

PRINTED BY
W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD
RIVERSIDE PRESS
EDINBURGH

TO

J. W. B.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST 1

A DESERTED CHILD 97

AN ACCOUNT SETTLED 125

M‘NEILLS’ TIGER-SHEEP 155

THE SNAKES AND NORAH 185

THREE PINT MEASURES 211

THE SURREE AT MAHON’S 231

THE SHORTEST WAY 253

THE STAY-AT-HOMES 271

A PROUD WOMAN 299

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST

The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden. It runs westward—that is, towards the ocean—but never reaches the shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at one point—about midway on the right hand looking westward—it is suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybody _the Nick of Time_. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me over the opposite hills, but he replied: “Sure, what else would they be callin’ it?” Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory explanation.

The effect of Letterglas’s solitude and verdure somehow seems to be heightened if one notices its single visible sign of human handiwork. This is a road-track, now all but quite grassed over, leading into the valley from its open end, where the Clonmoragh highway passes, and stopping aimlessly at the slope immediately below the Nick, having first flung two or three zig-zag loops up the hillside. A rust-eaten, handleless shovel, and the wreck of an overturned wheelbarrow, still mark the point where the work was abandoned on a misty morning in April, more than fifty springs ago; but the track itself is now merely a most faint difference of shade in the sward, which has crept back again indefatigably, even where the austere road-metal had been thrown clattering down.

A day before that misty morning, if anybody had climbed up and had passed through the Nick of Time, in at which the new road was to go, he would have found himself on a long level of fine-bladed turf, stretching like a lofty causeway laid down atop of the hill-embankment Everything else up there looked so softly smooth and flecklessly green that the eye was at once caught by a big block of stone, which stood just opposite the gap, at a few yards’ distance. It was an oblong mass of blackish limestone, perhaps seven feet by four, with a shape curiously symmetrical for a piece of Nature’s rough-hewing; plumb-and-rule guided chisel could scarcely have made its lines truer. That, and its solitariness, uncompanioned as far as could be seen by so much as a single pebble, gave its aspect an incongruity which prompted the question how it had come there; for whose answer we must revert through unimaginable wastes of years to the time when our last huge ice-sheet was scoring and grinding all the country’s face on its slithering way to the western ocean. Then it was that this big boulder dropped fortuitously through a small rent in the isle-wide coverlid, and so being left behind did not share in the final weltering plunge a few miles farther on, where the stark folds slipped over the sea-cliffs like the counterpane off a restless sleeper’s bed. Ever since that catastrophe it had sat there looking rather like a rude unwieldy coffer or chest, a portion—as in fact it had been—of the impedimenta carried and lost by some Titanic traveller. The resemblance was increased by a clean-cut horizontal crack, no doubt sustained when the mass came _sogging_ heavily to earth, which ran all round it, a few inches from the top, counterfeiting a lid. All the old ages that had passed over it afterwards had wrought only slight changes in its aspect. As the years went on, the dark peaty mould deepened a little about its base, and dull golden and silvery lichen-circlets crept out here and there like wraiths of the sun and moon beams that had touched it. Otherwise it was unaltered, and for many a long century so were its surroundings.

But at last a new feature appeared among them; a very inobtrusive one. Fifty years ago, anybody approaching the big stone from the Nick of Time might have observed that a little footpath led up to it from the contrary direction, and went no farther. A more inartificial path could not well be: a simple product of steps going to and fro. You might have supposed a sheep-walk, only that there were no fleeces nibbling over Letterglas. Indeed, its most frequent passers-by being such promiscuous wayfarers as the shadows of wings and clouds, it was not easy to conjecture any plausible _raison d’être_ for this track, which ran distinctly defined, though faintly, merely a crease in the flowing sward mantle, not a seam worn threadbare, so to speak, through to the brown earth. Certainly the rather gloomy-looking block had no apparent attractions wherewith to invite resort, not even a view, as it stood at the bottom of a very shallow dent in the green. Yet there the path ended; and if you took a dozen steps to the brow of the hill, you could trace the course of that pale thin line far down the slopes; through the fenceless “mountainy land” first, and then into two or three steep, dyke-girdled fields, before it was lost among the round-topped trees which gathered about a rambling old mansion-house. Whoever visited the big stone evidently thought it worth while to come a long way.

Such an humble and artless path has always a certain element of romance about it, lacking in more pretentious thoroughfares contracted for at so much a mile. They differ as does a brook from a canal. Like the brook, which has wrought itself as it went along, with and by its own purpose, the little footpath has some special meaning and object, albeit perhaps a less obvious one. It is the visible trail of a want or wish, though of what kind we may be unaware, and with want or wish it will cease to exist, or soon after. For the living green things will creep back and efface it speedily. But meanwhile it seems half to keep and half to betray a secret: you can only guess what has brought feet thither day by day to tread it out.

* * * * *

Fifty years ago or more, you would have been likely enough any fine morning to catch the chief maker of this particular path in the act. If the years were, say, ten more, it would have proved to be a very little little-girl, whose brown hair held both sunshine and shadow, and whose hazel-green eyes were softly lit, and who in those early days of hers always wore an ugly reddish checked pelisse, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with velvet rosettes to match. This was little Eileen Fitzmaurice, six or seven years old, who, ever since she could recollect anything, and maybe some twelve months longer, had lived with her mother and aunt at the Big House in Glendoula. As you would, no doubt, never guess her errand up the side of Slieve Ardgreine, I will at once explain that she was seeing after the safety of her family plate.

Although Eileen had herself no recollection of anywhere else than this Glendoula, a valley much resembling its neighbour Letterglas, but with its green dotted and chequered by a few cabins and fields, she knew by hearsay that there was another place in the world, a most wonderful place called Drumlough Castle or At Home, where “there wouldn’t be as much as a wing of a cold chicken served in the parlour without its silver dish under it, and as for the ould black sideboard of an evenin’ there would be company in it, that now was somethin’ worth lookin’ at; the full moon on a dark night was a joke to the big salvers.” To be sure there were there other fine things innumerable, which would have appealed quite as strongly to her imagination, if they had had equal justice done to them; however, it was upon these that Eileen’s informant always laid most stress, for she looked back to her ancient home through the eyes of old Timothy Gabbett, the lame butler, whose pride and affection had dwelt in his pantry and plate-chest, enjoying their supreme moments before a gala-night spectacle of snowy and crystal and lustrous argent gleams.

Yet this paradise, of which old Timothy used to say mournfully, “Ah, Miss Eileen, them was the rael times,” was haunted by lurking shadows. Eileen never learned the true reason of their exile: how wild Sir Gerald, her father, had been found one summer morning entangled among the serpentine coils of the water-weeds at the end of the lake, with his only son and heir dead in his arms, three-year-old Jack, who, when told by the garden-boy Mick that the master was looking for him high ways and low ways, had stumped off greatly elated, with no foreboding of the method in which Sir Gerald had resolved to settle his grievously involved affairs. She had been too small a baby then to be conscious of her mother’s flight from the memories of Drumlough, and the circumstances of their coming to Glendoula remained for her in their original obscurity. But she very quickly perceived that it was worse than useless to ask questions on such subjects of anybody except old Timothy, and that any allusion to his stories in the presence of her elders was a grave misdemeanour, which made her invalid mother cry, and her melancholy aunt scold; and Eileen would have desisted at a subtler hint. She did not often wonder why this should be, because her world was so full of mysteries that she generally accepted their existence as a matter of course. There was just one of them, however, that exercised her mind not a little, and that she sometimes vainly tried to get cleared up. She wanted to know what had become of all those most beautiful silver things that Timothy talked about—the great shining salvers, the claret-jugs, the tankards and flagons, the piles “as high as your head, Miss Eileen,” of plates with a polish on them “the stars in the sky might be the betther of gettin’,” and the grand potato-rings, and the frosted cake-baskets, and the tall _up-urny_, which seemed to be a marvellous composition of lights and flowers. Of all these resplendent objects, the only one, a few uninteresting spoons and forks excepted, that apparently had moved with the family to Glendoula, was an antique teapot of fantastic shape. It could no longer be used for its proper purpose, owing to the infirmity of its dragon-tail handle, but old Timothy turned it to account in his own way. You would always have been warned that it was Quality—and Quality was almost invariably either Dr M‘Clintock or Canon Roche—who had called at Glendoula House had you seen Timothy hobbling to answer the bell. For, having reconnoitred through the half-glass back hall-door, it was his practice in such cases to equip himself with the old teapot and a bit of “shammy,” that he might appear rubbing up ostentatiously, and muttering a stereotyped apology: “Beg your pardon, sir, but there does be such a terrible sight of silver clanin’ in this house that I scarce git time to lay a bit out of me hand.” All the while he felt more than half-conscious that it was a poor and rather unseemly pretence; but he had not much invention, and could devise no better expedient for the magnifying of his diminished office and the upholding of the family’s fallen fortune. Nor was he ready with any very satisfactory answers when Eileen questioned him about the present bestowal of his treasures. Full well he knew that they had long since gone to the Jews and other hopeless destinations, and were by this time irrecognisably melted down, or, more intolerable still, adorning alien boards, and subject to alien powder and brushes. This knowledge gave him acute pangs, which made his replies curt and vague. “Where are they now, Miss Eily? Ah, sure, just put away somewheres safe; they’re not wanted these times, when the poor misthress is seein’ no company; but it won’t be so one of these days.... Ah no, Miss Eily darlint, I couldn’t be showin’ them to you—sure, they’re not in this house at all.” And once he added: “They’re just stored up handy, Miss Eily, waitin’ till you’re grown a big enough lady to be ownin’ of them.”

“Me?” said Eileen, startled.

“Why, in coorse, Miss Eileen. Who else has anythin’ else to say to thim after poor little Master Jack, that had a right to ha’ been Sir John, gettin’ dhrown—bein’ took suddint, I mane, that way? Hiven be good to the both of them. Ay, to be sure, honey, it’s all in a very safe place waitin’ for you. And thank ’ee kindly for bringin’ me in the grand little bunch of daisies—they smell iligant.”

After learning this fact about her far-off proprietorship in the hoarded plate, Eileen thought about it oftener than ever, though from motives of delicacy she spoke about it seldomer, lest she should appear unduly prying and eager on her own behalf. And for a long time the more she pondered the matter, the less possible she found it to excogitate any possible hiding-place. But at last she made a fateful discovery.

* * * * *

It was one fine May morning when she went for an unusually long ramble with Norah Kinsella, the housemaid. Norah—a tall, strong, cheerful lass, far more active than rheumatic old nurse—thought nothing of carrying her pet, little Miss Eileen, who at six years old was still only “a light fairy of a crathur,” up and down steep places, so that they could go all the farther. On this occasion they climbed right up to the top of the hill behind the house, higher than Eileen had ever been before; and one of the first things she noticed was the great boulder-block. She never had seen a stone of nearly so large a size, nor imagined one; and she did not now class it with the small unshapely fragments and insignificant pebbles with which she was familiar. Rather, it reminded her of the turf-stacks that she had watched people building up carefully in the yard. Yet a turf-stack it certainly was not.

“Doesn’t it look like a great big box, Norah?” she said.

“Ay, indeed does it, Miss Eily,” Norah said; “and a fine power of things it ’ud hould inside of itself, too. Sure now, you could be puttin’ away a one of them little houses down below there in it, or very nearly.”

“It must be extrornarly heavy, Norah,” Eileen said, patting the sun-warmed side of the stone with her hand. “If that’s its lid, I couldn’t lift it.”

“Sorra a bit of you, honey, nor ten like you. Troth, ’twould take ten strong men to give that a heft,” said Norah, making as if she would prise it up with the flat of her hand. “Whativer was inside it ’ud have to stay there for you or for me, if it was silver or gould itself—we’d ha’ ne’er a chance.”

Her random words gave Eileen the shock of a new idea. Perhaps there really might be silver, quantities of silver, in it. For why should not this be the handy safe place that old Timothy meant? A safer there could not well be, since it was so far removed from all meddlers; and she almost thought that she did espy a bright twinkle as she stared hard at the lid-like crack, which was just on a level with her eyes. She discreetly said nothing about it to Norah, and her pre-occupation with the subject made her so abstractedly silent on their way home that Norah feared the walk must have been too long. But, in fact, she was considering whether or no she should mention her discovery to old Timothy. He might be vexed, she thought, at her finding out what he had refused to tell her: still, she would have liked to ask him whether her guess were right. The point needed much deliberation, and remained undecided for many days.

* * * * *

Meanwhile she chanced upon something that seemed to be an independent corroboration of her own theory. By nature Eileen had not particularly studious tastes, but solitariness had early driven her to seek for company on the shelves in the long low-windowed book-room. She did not find there much that was very congenial. Sixty years ago juvenile literature was, as a rule, a solemn and dreary thing; and Eileen’s meagre library was not even up to that date, having for the most part belonged to the preceding generation. The favourite authors of the day would appear to have been infested with a mole-like fancy, which commonly led them to linger among tombs and worms and epitaphs, seldom, indeed, stopping short at those grisly precincts, or forbearing to light them up with a lurid flare from the regions beyond, but, nevertheless, dwelling upon them with a fond elaboration of detail. Accordingly, a few days after her first ascent of Slieve Ardgreine, Eileen fished down from its shelf a small, old dusty, half-calf volume, which was composed of several short stories bound together. One of them, entitled _The Churchyard Prattler_, related the experiences of a child, aged four, who, as an appropriate and improving pastime, was sent out provided with a string of his own length, and instructed to ascertain by measurement how many of the graves in his cheerfully chosen playground were shorter than himself. He was pictorially represented as attired in a long bib and a broad-brimmed chimney-pot hat, and he moralised his lively researches into the strains of a brief rime-doggerel hymn:

“_Oft may be found
A grassy mound
By the yew-tree,
Much less than me;
It seems to cry:
Prepare to die!_”

Another showed how a frivolous little girl, in a huge coal-scuttle bonnet, had her sinful hankering after toys and such vanities rebuked by being conducted past a series of attractive shop-windows, from each of which she was bidden to select herself a present, until she arrived at an undertaker’s establishment, where she was likewise required to place an order.

The last story in the volume, however, was of a very different type, and upon it Eileen now alighted, instinctively judicious in her skipping of its ghoulish companions. It was called _The Glittering Hoard in the Coffer of Stone_; and the passage that most profoundly impressed her ran as follows: “The flare of the scented torches fell upon the vast coffer of dark stone, which stood in one corner of the cavern. Its smooth sides were crusted here and there with patches of lichen and grey moss, and it looked as if no hand had touched it for many an age. But at a gesture from the Prince, six gigantic black slaves raised up the massive slab which formed its lid. As they did so, the foot of one of them slipped, and before he could recover himself, the unwieldy weight slid down with a crash, and was shattered into three fragments on the floor. Nobody heeded, however, for the light that broke out of the open chest drew all eyes thither. It was like a cistern filled with crystalline fire. “Empty it, my son,” said the old Sultaness, and the Prince began to lift out one by one the treasures it contained. Silver goblets there were and flagons, great gilt bowls and ewers, filigree caskets set with diamonds, chains of red gold, and ropes of milk-white pearls, diadems and necklaces, armlets and girdles, whose pendant gems dripped a many-coloured brilliance, as of flower-distained dew. At the bottom of the chest lay a round golden buckler, studded with knots of jewels, and a mighty sword in an ivory scabbard inlaid with pale coral and amber: the hilt was carved out of a single lump of apple-green chrysoprase. All these, strewn over the flagged floor, shimmered and bickered under the glancing torch-gleams, until it seemed as if a rippled and moon-lit sea lay there flashing around a murky rock. The beholder could hardly realise that its uncouth bulk had indeed been the receptacle of a treasure so richly wrought and exquisite.”

Eileen read and pored over this account with keen interest and pleasure. From the first she drew a parallel between the two great blocks of stone, so that the wealth disclosed by the one strengthened her most splendid conjectures about the other. As she read, she easily shifted the scene from the shadowy cavern to the sunny hill-top, and imagined the grass all scattered over with shining gear, which by some strange decree of fortune she was to look upon as her own property. Silver dishes and jewelled diadems, the _up-urny_ and the buckler, both these alike fascinatingly mysterious, sparkled for her in the clear light of day. The only objects in the picture that she shrank from reproducing were those six gigantic black men, whose presence she felt to be an ugly blot upon the brightness. But then she reflected that the lifters of the lid perhaps need not be either black or gigantic. Dan Donnelly, and Christy Shanahan, and Murtagh Reilly, would surely be strong and big enough to do it; and they were all pleasant familiar faces, who said “Good mornin’ to you kindly, Miss Eily,” or “The Lord love you,” with friendly smiles, whenever they met her, and were in no wise alarming. So she substituted them for the formidable figures, and could almost hear old Murtagh saying, “Hup boyos! or what for was yous aitin’ all them pitaties?” which was his usual exordium upon such strenuous occasions.

* * * * *

The next time that she went for a walk with Norah Kinsella, which happened soon after this, in the continuance of old nurse’s rheumatism, Eileen said, half-scared at her own temerity: “Let us go up again to the big box”; and she felt happy when Norah at once assented, tacitly accepting the fact that a box it was. Eileen wanted to see whether she were tall enough to look in, supposing the lid removed, and she found, to her gratification, that on tiptoe her stature sufficed.

It was some while longer, however, before she ventured to touch upon it in conversation with old Timothy; nor did she then make any point-blank statement. She introduced the subject allusively and implicitly. “That _is_ an exceedingly safe place where you keep the plate now, Timothy, isn’t it?” she said to him one day when she was helping him to lay the table, by following him with a little sheaf of spoons as he hobbled round it. Her brown frock was hidden beneath a white cambric pinafore, and her large eyes glinted wistfully through a soft cloud of hair.

“It is so bedad, missy,” said the old man resignedly, “we’ve took good care of that.”

“How many people do _you_ think it would take to lift off the lid of the chest?” said Eileen.

“Is it the led, Miss Eily? Troth, now, they’d be bothered to do that on us at all, if they was as many as they plased, and the kay of it put away out of the raich of them—or the likes of them,” old Timothy said, arbitrarily blackening her colourless term.

“Oh, then, it’s locked?” said Eileen.

“To be sure it is, Miss Eily. Why now, if it wasn’t, you might as well be gad’rin’ the things together handy for villins to run away wid thim convanient. But ah, sure, you’re innicent yet, Miss Eily, and small blame to you, or you’d understand the raison of kays.”

“So I do, Timothy,” said Eileen. “It’s villins. But I think I don’t quite understand the reason of _them_.”

She went away pondering. This locking of the chest compelled her to modify somewhat the details of the opening scene. However, she quickly re-arranged them completely to her satisfaction, and her fondness for visiting the site of it did not diminish. About this time she began to be allowed to ramble out unattended, for old nurse went invalided home, and Eileen had acquired the character of a quiet, sensible child, not apt to get into mischief. The use she made of her liberty was a daily pilgrimage up to the big stone, where she dreamed away many pleasant hours, largely occupied with plans for the future, when she should have found that key. Sometimes she brought the _Glittering Hoard_ book up with her, and read it there to whet the edge of anticipation; but in general she was content to weave a dazzling fabric out of the material supplied her by old Timothy’s reminiscences.

Should anybody hence infer that Eileen Fitzmaurice must have been in her early youth an avaricious sort of person, he cannot be flatly contradicted; for so she was, in a way. But in a way it was. Her theories about the privileges of property were peculiar, and restrictive. For instance, in her definition “my own” meant merely “promptly transferable”; and the Paradise she supposed was a place where everybody else would like everything that she had. Here, the failure of her few possessions to please other people not infrequently caused her disappointment; and she occasionally thought scorn of herself for having only trifles to offer so scant and paltry. Sometimes, indeed, it was nothing better than a bunch or so of blackberries, perhaps wanting still several shades of their mature glossy jet, which she had torn hands as well as frock in extricating from among their barbed briers—the greediest child never plucked with a more eager recklessness. When she could meet with no friend who was imprudent or complaisant enough to accept these spoils, she would, a little crestfallen and regretful, scatter them on some walk or window-stool, in hopes that at least the small birds might condescend to benefit thereby. She was all the more dependent upon opportunities for bestowing such a tangible proof of her regard, because she seldom had any for others of the less material kind. Her mother was too drearily isolated by ill-health and despondency to be within reach of caresses, while her aunt Geraldine was mostly absent, inhabiting some remote volume, and seemed to be rather bored by the people whom she encountered in her brief visits to the outer world. The acquisition of the wonderful chest, however, would release Eileen from these straitened circumstances, as its contents would surely comprise what could not but give satisfaction to all. She could scarcely believe that anybody, not even poor mamma, who only pretended so badly to care about her presents of wild flowers and the like, could really be indifferent to the set of six little silver salt-cellars shaped like water-lilies, which old Timothy described so fondly. It might be possible also to provide Aunt Geraldine with something of which she should not say hurriedly, coming reluctantly out of her book: “Oh, thank you, my dear child, but what use would it be to _me_?” Then there were Norah Kinsella, and old nurse, and old Timothy, and after them a small crowd of neighbours, very adequately representing the population of Glendoula, so catholic being Eileen’s good will that there was hardly a dresser in the hamlet on which some brilliant object should fail to shine. And if anything remained over after the distribution, she thought to herself that she would leave it for the villins, who would no doubt be much disappointed, supposing they ever did come to look and found nothing at all. Such plans as these were commonly in her mind as she toiled up and trotted down the smooth-swarded steps, where the thread-like track of her footsteps slowly began to follow them.

* * * * *

Generally Eileen went to and fro quite alone beneath the spacious domed skies, which seemed to make no more account of her than of the rabbits, who played here and there on the side of the hill. The rabbits evidently did not think much of her either, and hid themselves when she came near without any great show of flurry or fright, rather intimating by their demeanour that they had simply no wish to make her acquaintance. But Eileen used to watch them wistfully from their prescribed distance, and think to herself that they looked enviably sociable and friendly together. Sometimes, too, she wished that her tame robin would hop along with her farther than to the end of the holly walk, but it never would; and one day the black cat ate it, all except a fluff of heart-rending feathers, no doubt to warn her that her desires were vain. For destiny had assigned her little intercourse with her fellow-creatures.

Once, however, she had a companion for a while. It was during her seventh summer, when her cousin Pierce Wilmot spent his holidays at Glendoula House. Just at first Eileen found this an experience as alarming as it was novel. Breakfast and luncheon became such serious ordeals when she had to confront a great-sized stranger—Pierce was about double her age and much more than twice as big—concerning whom the furtive glances she ventured upon gave her an impression of a very black head, and eyebrows as dark and straight as if they had been ruled with pen and ink. She thought he looked ferocious, and privately inquired of Norah whether holidays were _many_ days.

But on the second morning, after breakfast, this forbidding person suddenly said to her: “Come along, little Bright-Eyes, and show me everything.” At which address her terror culminated, and then, as terrors sometimes do, toppled over into nothing at all. A few minutes later they were going about together quite amicably out of doors. Pierce was so immeasurably Eileen’s superior in age and all its privileges that he had no need to assert his dignity by keeping her at a distance—as the rabbits did—and they fraternised apace. The July morning was still freshly fair, with a twinkling trail of dew shifting along from blade to leaf up the sun-lit sward, as the moon’s silver-spun wake shifts over a rippled water, and with gossamer threads, that might have been ravelled out of a rainbow, woven between furze and broom bushes, when Eileen and Pierce began to ascend Slieve Ardgreine. For one of the first things she had to show him was her stone chest. She took an especial pleasure in doing so, because she very seldom had an opportunity of even talking about it to anybody, the matter being, she felt, a family affair, which she could not with propriety enter upon except to old confidential Timothy, whose distaste for the subject she was bound to respect.

“Why, _you’ll_ never get up there,” Pierce said with some incredulity, when, in answer to his inquiry whither he was being taken, Eileen pointed to the ridge above their heads, “_Were_ you ever up so high?” he asked, doubtfully.

Eileen would have been very sorry to let him perceive how absurd she thought this curious misconception, and she only replied: “Every fine day, if they don’t say the grass is too boggy altogether. And old Murtagh says I skyte up as fast as his Cruiskeen going after a rabbit.”

On the way up, Eileen gave her companion, whose life seemed to have been spent chiefly in towns, a good deal of information about common natural objects. Some of this she had excogitated for herself during her solitary rambles, and it appeared to surprise and amuse him rather unaccountably. Her explanation, for instance, of how the hedgehogs came and stuck themselves over with the withered spines of the furze-bushes, that had dropped off mottled and grey. Among other things she showed him two or three rabbit-holes; but here it was Pierce who had new facts to impart. “So that’s where they sleep, is it?” he said, “I always thought they hung themselves up like bats, head downwards against a wall; at any rate, that’s how they manage in Dublin.”

“That _is_ funny,” said Eileen; “I don’t think they ever do here. And I suppose they drop down when they awake?”

“Oh, I rather fancy they never do awake,” said Pierce.

“Never at all? Are you quite sure, now, that they’re not _dormouses_, Pierce?” said Eileen wisely.

“Am I sure that you’re not an elephant, Miss Eileen?” he said, mimicking her. “But I can tell you that if I can borrow a gun, I’ll soon teach your rabbits the same trick. Why, haven’t you ever been in a poulterer’s shop”—Eileen never had—“and seen them hanging up?”

“Oh,” said Eileen. She disliked guns and shooting, and moreover became suddenly aware that she must have displayed a ridiculous stupidity about Pierce’s joke. This made her turn disconcertedly pink, so that Pierce was afraid he must have hurt her feelings, which he had not meant to do. Therefore he was glad to find, when a few minutes afterwards they reached the big stone, that she had evidently quite forgotten any little vexation in the excitement of relating its wonderful romance. He was careful to listen with such interest, and seemingly so fully share all her sentiments, that she very soon ventured upon confiding to him a particular anxiety which had of late grown up in her mind. “Do you see what a small keyhole it has?” she said, pointing to a little round orifice which occurred high up on one side of the block, and the discovery of which had been to her a source both of hopes and fears. “Only a tiny little _pinny_ key would fit into it. Wouldn’t you think it would take a bigger one to open a box like this?” As the hole barely admitted the tip of her forefinger, it could not be considered roomy, but Pierce replied with decision: “The largest box in the world might be opened with the smallest key that ever was made”; and one of her haunting fears being thus dispelled, she produced another, which took this form: “Well, but supposing the people somehow _lost_ the key, then I suppose the box couldn’t ever be opened again, even if the person that the things in it were belonging to did live to be as much as twenty—old enough to be let have them, you know?” And again Pierce could re-assure her. “Why, there’d be nothing easier than to get another key made. One takes an impression of the lock with cobbler’s wax; _I_ could do it myself. So if they lose it on you, little Bright-Eyes, just send word to me, and I’ll come and settle it for you.” Eileen looked grateful and relieved. “It won’t be for a long while, but I’ll not forget,” she said.

As they returned down the hill she said: “I wonder whether there is that very fine sort of sword in this chest too. I hope so, and perhaps there may be, only old Timothy never told me. I must ask him about it, and if there is one, Pierce, I’ll give it to you.”

“And then I’d maybe kill you with it,” Pierce said, absently joking, for just at that time he was speculating upon his chances of getting a shot at the rabbits. But Eileen replied quite solemnly: “I don’t believe you’d ever like to do that on purpose—at any rate, not unless I growed up very detestfully nasty; and you’re too big to do anything by accident.” And she proceeded home, much cheered by the event of their walk.

* * * * *

Less satisfactory was the result of an interview which she had shortly afterwards with old Timothy. For, in the first place, she regretted to hear that “he couldn’t be sure, but he thought it noways likely there would be a sword, or any such description of an ould skiverin’ conthrivance, put up along with the good plate; at all events, he never remimbered any talk of e’er a one—not to his knowledge.” And still more mortifying than this, she quickly perceived that the old butler had no liking for her cousin. What Timothy said on the subject was exactly as follows:—“Goin’ out wid Master Pierce, missy jewel? Och well, to be sure, he’s a fine young gentleman, considherin’. If the night’s black enough, the baste’s white enough, as Andy Goligher said, and he misdhrivin’ home the wrong Kerry bullock.” An aphorism the application of which may seem rather obscure to the undiscerning, but which Eileen quite clearly understood as an intimation that of Master Pierce Timothy thought poorly, and she was sorry for this, as she would have liked her old and her new acquaintance to be friends.

The grounds of Timothy’s prejudice, however, she did not guess. The fact was that he had a few days before scowlingly from his pantry window espied Master Pierce “discoorsin’ as plisant as anythin’” with young Larry M‘Farlane, “that was sister’s son to ould Pather Doran, and bad luck to _him_.” Now, maybe as many as a dozen years ago, Timothy and Pather had differed in a discussion about the proper season for sowing asparagus, and one of Pather’s arguments had been: “That it was no great thanks to Timothy if he _had_ sted a goodish while wid the Family, and he, you might say, tied to thim be the leg like a strayin’ jackass.” Pather’s allusion was to the effects of an accident, which, met with by Timothy on the cellar-stairs at Drumlough Castle in his youth, had left him a hobbler for life; and since the controversy Pather and he “weren’t spakin’.” Therefore, now, if Master Pierce chose “to be great wid a one of that pack, and to go sthreelin’ up the hill wid him after the rabbits,” it was only natural that old Timothy should entertain no high opinion of so indiscriminating a person.

But his veiled disparagement did not check the progress of a real friendship between the cousins, and when the end of Pierce’s holidays came, Eileen thought they had not been nearly many enough. On the regretful evening before he went, they paid a farewell visit to the big boulder, and, standing by it, Eileen said forlornly: “Next time I’ll only be myself.”

“Perhaps I may be here again next summer,” Pierce said encouragingly. He had already learned by experience that even twelve months are not interminable.

“I wish it would be next year always,” said Eileen. “For that’s the time when people come back. The Widow Shanahan’s son’s coming home from the States next year, please goodness; but she says she’ll not be in this world then, so he might as well stop where he’s gettin’ the fine wages. Norah says that she means that she’ll be dead. I wonder who told her, or how she knows. _You_ don’t know how soon you are going to die, Pierce, do you?”

“Not I, nor anybody else,” said Pierce.

“I wanted to give her her little silver jug,” said Eileen; “she’s to have the little fat one that’s gilt inside and has two spouts, because it’s the nicest, and she’s to be pitied, the dear knows, Norah says, with one thing and the other. But if she goes and dies first, I never can. Do you think she’d wait a while, if I told her about it as a secret?”

“She mightn’t be able,” said Pierce.

“Ah, and then it would only tantinglise her,” said Eileen, “so I’d better not. But I’m sorry.”

“Don’t forget that you must send me word, if they lose the key, and you want another,” Pierce said to change the subject.

“I’ll remember,” said Eileen. “But I’ll have to keep on living for ever so much longer before they’ll let me want it. You see, I’ll not be twenty-one even next year, I should think.”

“I should think not indeed, Miss Eileen,” said Pierce; “you’re no age worth speaking of at all.”

They were now descending the hill, and for some way Eileen mused vainly about possible remedies for this deplorable state of affairs. “I wish,” she said at length, “that a great many days would happen all together sometimes—in bunches like the black and white currants, instead of one by one and one by one: ever so long they last, when there’s nobody here but me. One might get old pretty quick then. Wouldn’t you like it better, Pierce?”

“Well, no,” said Pierce. “If the days were used up that way, there’d be so little time for doing anything. Mostly they’re short enough; and there’s no hurry about getting old, as you call it—an old woman of twenty—you’re a queer young person, Eileen.”

“I was only thinking,” said Eileen, “that perhaps I mightn’t be able to wait a great while, any more than the Widow Shanahan. And it would be a pity if I wasn’t in this world when the chest is opened”; and although Pierce replied: “Oh, nonsense; where else should you be?” she continued to contemplate this contingency in sad silence as they trotted down after their perch-long shadows over the sunny turf with its jewelled embroideries of golden trefoil and pearly eyebright, and dim amethystine thyme. But when they had just come to the gap in the dyke, where you step across two flat stones into the highest field, a somewhat consolatory thought struck her. It was: “Perhaps, then, they’d give all those things to you, Pierce, and I’ve told you what everybody’s to have, so mind you don’t forget.”

She was so engrossed by the idea that she nearly tripped over the unheeded stones, and her heir and executor, preventing her tumble, said: “Oh, it will be all right, never fear; but meanwhile, little Bright-Eyes, you’d better not break your neck. We’ll both of us have grand times when I come with the key.”

* * * * *

Eileen had many of her long years, almost nine, in fact, during which she might have forgotten Pierce and his promises, but she never did. Only once in all that time did anything happen to remind her of them, and that was on the Christmas after his visit, when Tom Roe, the postman, brought the first letter that had ever been addressed to Miss Eileen Fitzmaurice. Being opened hastily, it was found to contain a little white cardboard box, within which lay among rosy cloudlets of marvellous pink cotton-wool a tiny silver key, sent to Eileen by her cousin Pierce—her affectionate cousin, Pierce’s mother, who put up the packet for him, had written him down without consulting him, as a matter of form. The gift filled Eileen with gratitude and delight. Yet, in the course of the morning, her Aunt Geraldine came upon her when she sat in the book-room window, eyeing her new possession with a somewhat doubtful countenance. “I’m almost afraid,” she said half-aloud, “that it isn’t quite long enough. And I never did see a key with a pin in it before.”

“Long enough for what?” said her Aunt Geraldine. “It seems to me to be a very pretty little brooch, and it was exceedingly good-natured of your cousin to think of sending you one.”

“Oh yes, indeed, and it is very pretty, as pretty as can be,” Eileen protested. She flushed distressfully at the implication of ingratitude partly, and partly at this new view of the trinket, which would involve the vanishing of its peculiar charm. “I was only thinking,” she said, “that I have poked my finger farther down the hole than this would reach; but, of course, if it’s a brooch”—Aunt Geraldine had not stayed to hear her explanation; and Eileen presently put away the little box in her drawer, feeling that something had blunted the fine edge of her pleasure.

Those nine long years passed by uneventfully. It seemed, indeed, as if fewer things and fewer happened at Glendoula. In the Big House life went on somewhat in the manner of a machine gradually slowing down. Lady Fitzmaurice grew from season to season a little more invalided and melancholy, her sister-in-law more abstracted and apathetic, old Timothy stiffer and lamer in his gait. Even the ancient grey parrot on his pole in the parlour sank deeplier into his dotage, and only grimaced silently at Eileen when she tried to start a conversation with him. Eileen herself was an exception, though perhaps potentially rather than actually, the fresh spirit of youth making less resistance than is commonly imagined for it against the coercion of dreary external circumstances. Still her disposition was naturally blithe and hopeful, and she would have been ready enough with her: O brave new world! if any fair wind had borne the good ship into her ken. But instead of that she was destined to see a woeful wreck come drifting by.

* * * * *

It was gradually, by an aggregation of rumours, faint and vague at first, that warnings of the black time impending stole into Glendoula valley, much as the wan mists creep thither from seaward, a mere smoke-wreath falling away down the purple-rifted shoulders of Slieverossan, with the murk of a sky-enfolding cloud gathered up opaquely behind them. Felix O’Riordan, returning from Clonmorragh fair one July day, first brought authentic news of how “the quare ugly blackness on the pitaties, the same that done destruction last year on the crops away down in different parts of the counthry, was desthroyin’ all before it now no farther off than Kilfintragh, just at the back of the hills.” And through the rainy harvest weather ensuing, reports of the like became as frequent as the unkindly and chilly showers that drip-dripped unseasonably over the little fields. Then fell a heavy thunderous night, with flickerings of sheet-lightning fitfully casting an evil eye through the dark, and on the morrow, when its pall lifted, there was grief and fear among the neighbours at Glendoula, for the sober green ridges looked as if a scorching breath had passed over them, and from their drooping haulms and leaves came wafted the ill-auguring odour.

After that the trouble throve and waxed like the most unmolested weed. A man perhaps seldom tastes despair much cruder and sheerer than when at the impatiently desired potato-digging he turns up spadeful after spadeful, spadeful after spadeful, nothing but dangling lumps of malodorous slime, nothing but that whatever, on to the very end of the drill, where the wife stands watching him and saying: “Ah, the Lord be good to us—have we ne’er a sound one in it at all?” with the childer beside her looking on, piteously concerned or piteously indifferent. Before Slieverossan had drawn down his winter snow-hood, the dearth wrought by the ruined harvest was finding its victims far and wide. Serious distress existed in the big houses, where people were at their wit’s end to devise some agreeable substitute for that empty dish on the dinner table. Savoury rice, they tried, and stewed toast, and Yorkshire pudding, and many other such things, but none of them satisfactorily filled the place of the missing potato. There still remained a gap all-thing unbecoming at their feast. It was a dreadful loss. But in the small houses people were spared all worry of that sort at least, because when they had no pitaties, they had nothing else to eat, bad or good, which made their bill of fare a perfectly simple matter, thus illustrating, no doubt, the providential law of compensation.

Eileen’s mind, however, was not philosophic enough to show her this aspect of the case, and what she did actually see and hear smote her with sorrow and dismay. It seemed as if the way of her world, hitherto a tranquil, sometimes rather tedious, one, had changed into the path of a surging flood, whence cries of despair and beseeching hands appealed to her vainly where she stood, secure herself and helpless and remorseful. So little for anybody could she do, who would fain have rescued them all. Even if she had commanded the whole resources of the household, they would have been miserably inadequate; but as it was, Aunt Geraldine said drearily that she supposed it was no use giving to vagrants, and old Timothy, whose inborn tendency towards “naygurliness,” had developed into a vice-like clamp, which acted automatically at the pressure of a petition, kept one watchful eye perpetually upon the hall-door, and another on the little store-room across the passage. Only by rare conjunctions of good luck with agility could Eileen elude his vigilance so far as to fetch and carry between them unbeknownst. More often than not, she arrived too late to do anything; and at best, her stealthiest operations among the bread-crocks and biscuits were pretty sure to bring the old man shuffling thither in defence of the menaced commissariat.

“Arrah now, Miss Eily, what work have you there, cuttin’ up the fresh loaf? and the laws bless us all, but that’s the hunch! If there was a slab of a brick wantin’ for repeerin’ the house-wall, you could make a shift wid that.”

“There’s a very decent poor man at the door,” Eileen might say, “who looks as if he had been starving for a month of Sundays; and he has a scrap of a baby with him; its mother died yesterday at Kilfintragh. I must get it a piece of soft bread, and a drink of milk, if there’s any left.”

“And what for need you be destroyin’ a whole loaf for a crathur o’ that size? Sure, I seen it comin’ past me window, sittin’ cocked up like a kitten bewitched. I’ve some stale bits in the other crock ’ud do it grand.”

“Oh, those are nothing but little crumbs, only fit for the chickens.”

“Musha, long life to it! And is it settin’ itself up to want betther feedin’ than the chuckens? Well, now, I should suppose that what’s good enough for them’s plenty good enough for it, when the most differ between them is that sorra the use _it’s_ ever apt to be, starved or no, except makin’ throuble for itself and other people.”

“Well, if some babies had been fed like chickens, perhaps they wouldn’t have grown up so fond of gabbling like old geese,” Eileen might rejoin, inaudibly, so that the repartee should relieve her own at no cost to Timothy’s feelings, as she escaped with her booty.

But her raids were not by any means invariably so successful. Sometimes she found that Timothy had forestalled her, and had swept everything into an inaccessible locker; and sometimes there was really nothing left to sweep. So then she had no resource save to ensconce herself in the remotest backward-looking room, that she might not hear the interchange of entreaty and denial, nor witness the lingering withdrawal of the rejected suppliants, wandering away disappointed out of sight, but not out of mind so soon, behind the glossy-walled belt of laurels.