Chapter I

The strange childer must have come to Clochranbeg a good while before young Dan Mulrane the man-trapper’s emigration, for at that time they were quite settled in the place. That is to say, they were so in fact, though by a sort of convention it was always assumed that they were only temporary sojourners. Upon their first arrival this had promised to be really the case, as the elderly vagrant with whom they were travelling intended to pass but one night in the village, and did actually make an even shorter stay there, for the people who tried to awaken him next morning found that he had set off again some hours earlier. Whence he had come seemed, to Clochranbeg, a more unanswerable question than whither he had gone, nor could the small girl and smaller boy, who were left behind, throw much light upon his past. Their recollections, which might be supposed to reach back a couple of years or so, were of nothing except tramping about with “Himself,” otherwise “the man,” and they could give no account either of their relationship to him or to each other, or of how he had become their guardian. They called one another “Min” and “Atty,” which was all they knew about names; so that there were not enough to go round the three of them, as Mr Heany the schoolmaster remarked in the course of a discussion about funeral arrangements.

It was lucky that nobody’s feelings would be hurt by this stranger’s coming on the rates, for burial at the expense of the Union seemed inevitably to await him. But there was a general opinion that he should not be allowed to go to the pauper’s corner of Kilanure burying-ground unprovided with at least a name; and it appeared as if that much could easily be done for him by a simple invention, until Dermot Cassidy, who had a turn for raising difficulties, started a question about the impropriety of “as good as puttin’ a lie in the poor man’s mouth, and he on the way to his grave.” For it was fifty chances to one, Dermot argued, against their guessing a name for him that would be even an offer at his own. It might, for anything they knew, said Dermot, be cast up to the _crathur_ where he was going. This speculation appealed to fears and fantasies that were always rife among Dermot’s hearers, and it was a relief when the schoolmaster recommended what could be approved of as a safe and blameless step by those who felt most strongly that you cannot take too many precautions when dealing with matters of such mysterious moment.

“It’s liker than not,” Mr Heany said, “that he had the one Christian name with the little gossoon, if he was the grandfather, as the chances are. And if you add to that just ‘Mann’--I seen the name now and again meself, spelt with the two n’s--you’ll be saying no more of him than you might of any mother’s son of us all. ‘A Mann’ or ‘Art Mann’--no fear but that’s a right guess anyway.”

This suggestion being accepted in all seriousness, and an inquest being deemed unnecessary, the death of A. Mann was officially registered, while the surname became less formally a property of that forlorn little pair, who were thenceforth known collectively as “the strange childer,” but individually as Min and Atty Mann.

Since their late guardian had transmitted to them nothing else except a walking-stick, and a red cotton bundle, containing a few rags, some crusts, and fourpence-halfpenny in coppers, it seemed evident that the workhouse would have to provide for them also; and the Relieving Officer’s deputy did, in fact, propose to convey them thither in the old man’s hearse. But Mrs O’Hagan, with whom they were meanwhile lodging, so vehemently protested against the unluckiness of such a plan, and was so strongly backed up by all her cronies, that he agreed to leave them where they were until the next time he had business in the neighbourhood. And when before long this did happen, he was met on her very threshold by Mrs O’Hagan with a flat refusal to hand him over Atty and Min. She gave him impudence, he said, and asked if himself wasn’t the sensible man to be thinking to take children driving ten or a dozen miles in a draughty ould covered van, and they choking with the whooping-cough that mortal minute. Faix then, he might catch them himself, if he wanted to, she couldn’t tell where they were playing outside down along the road. Whereupon Mrs Daly next door had poked out her head, and peremptorily troubled him not to be drawing up his ould workhouse yoke in front of _her_ place. Poor Alec Hanlon reported these affronts with not a little resentment, but without obtaining much redress from the authorities. The truth was that they were by no means eager to make themselves responsible for the support of the derelict children, and were more than willing to be relieved of it by anybody else. So they instructed him to leave the woman alone; if she had a fancy to keep the children, well and good; she’d be sure to let them know plenty soon enough whenever she got tired of it; trust her for that. It was perhaps a rather unofficial and irregular line of action, but it satisfied all the persons concerned, except Alec Hanlon, who could have wished to be charged with some alarming reprimand for the over-awing of _impident_ Mrs O’Hagan and abusive Mrs Daly.

The strange childer themselves acquiesced in their new situation quite contentedly. They continued to lodge with Mrs O’Hagan, who, living her lone, had room to spare, and they boarded dispersedly among the neighbours, who never failed to produce at least a sufficiency of potatoes. It could not be said that either of them did credit to their ungrudged fare, as they both remained thin and peaky-faced. In appearance they resembled one another, though Min’s hair was dark chestnut and Art’s a brownish hay-colour, and though the sun that had tanned his face had sprinkled hers with constellations of freckles of the first magnitude. In disposition there was less likeness, yet more than showed on the surface, the difference between them lying in development rather than in character. It was, however, noticed that two peculiarities were equally shared by each of them. Both feared horribly policemen and all kinds of officials, and both were most reluctant to set foot anywhere except along the road. Evidently the main precepts of their moral law had been: _Thou shalt keep out of the way of the pólis_, and _Thou shalt not stravade about_; while its sanctions had comprised shutting up in gaols and workhouses, and getting lost and starved. Several weeks passed after their arrival before the little Clochranbegians could persuade them to venture out upon the bog, and for many a day did Min and Atty cast dismayed and mistrustful glances at good-natured Andy M‘Evoy, who happened to be wearing an old postman’s cap. Although, as time went on, familiarity and the force of example undermined the authority of these fears, they never wholly lost their influence.

It was furthermore discovered that the strange childer were both endowed with the gift of song, possessing voices unexpectedly powerful for persons of their age and growth. Min, whose years were estimated at six or seven, had obviously formed her style upon that of various street-singers, and in a high treble reproduced the quavers and flourishes with more exactness, happily, than the words of their ditties, which in her version had at least the grace of complete unintelligibility. Atty, her junior by some twelve-month, owned the clear pipe of a blackbird, and appeared to be an improviser into the bargain, the stock piece in his repertoire showing all the signs of an original composition. A simple and artless lay enough, it became exceedingly popular at Clochranbeg, and was so repeatedly demanded by audiences of both young and old that its strains might often be heard rising from some out-of-door playground in the daytime, and after dark from some flickering fireside.

“_I would I were a mountain pig,
I would indeed bedad_;”

it ran to a monotonous, mournful sort of chant,

“_I would I were a mountain pig
A-walking in the lane_;”

and it continued thus indefinitely, varying only with respect to the occupation of the mountain pig. Perhaps the very monotony of its music may have been found soothing, or possibly the charm lay in the perfect senselessness of the words; undoubtedly it somehow hit the fancy of the neighbours, and it is probably chanted to this day upon the bog-lands of Meenaclochran.

One summer morning, when they had been a couple of months in the place, Min and Atty wandered down towards the beach with a number of other children, and near the end of a sandy boreen halted in a convenient hollow, where Atty was called upon for his song. Seated under a gold-flecked furze bush, he was chanting to a well-satisfied audience, when a young fisherman came along up from the shore, and paused to listen. He had a dark melancholy face, which did not look at all amused, though he presently remarked: “That’s a comical lilt you have, sonny, entirely.” His voice sounded gruff, and, as it were, rusty, but in no way menacing, yet several of the children immediately in warning tones bade Atty “whist,” while the eldest girl pulled him up by the hand, and rushed off with him out of sight among the banks and bushes, all the others stampeding after her. Little Tim Nolan, looking back as they scampered, and seeing that the young man had turned away, threw a small pebble slightly in his direction, as if to symbolise their sentiments.

“Who was yon thin?” said Min. “Has he anythin’ to say to the pólis?”

“Sure not at all,” she was informed. “Pat Mulrane he is, one of the man-trappers, that’s livin’ down below on the strand round the corner there, along wid th’ ould mother of them. Quare and cruel bad they are. One time they took and drownded the ould grandfather they had, in a big black hole in the middle of Slughnatraigh, and they’d be apt to do the same on anybody they got scramblin’ about the rocks near their house. You’d a right to keep out of it.”

The warning impressed Min and Atty all the more because it came from contemporaries of their own, and thenceforward to their list of perils to be avoided were added the man-trappers, and the man-trappers’ home.

Before very long, Atty’s mind began to be harassed by yet another anxiety, and this was the conduct of Min. Ever since Min could remember she had walked literally in a prescribed track, from which she dared not deviate, controlled by a will not to be, even in imagination, gainsaid. And now that she found herself in a state of unprecedented freedom, her long-repressed energies tended to run riot. Within the limits imposed by her abiding fear of getting locked up, on the one hand, and lost, on the other, she waxed rather wild and venturesome. Foolhardy she appeared to Atty, whose spirits, less elastic, had not rebounded as vigorously as hers, and whose further-seeing mind foreboded evil from her exploits. Often did he watch her proceedings with scared and scandalised eyes, and often did she turn a deaf ear to a low whisper admonishing her: “They’ll put us out of it, Min, if you do be going’ on that-a way.” Many a time, as he gave by request a recital of his _Mountain Pig_, his thoughts were all the while full of apprehensions about the pranks which he surmised her to be playing, and the calamitous consequences which they might entail. As things turned out, he might have seemed entitled to say: “Wasn’t I after tellin’ you?” Yet it may be doubted whether Min’s misdeeds had in reality much to do with the event. Her habit of hunting the neighbours’ poultry, and of “rising rows” among their children, did, it is true, cause some annoyance, but would hardly have produced such an effect unaided by other circumstances.

These other circumstances, however, arose a year or so after the arrival of Min and Atty. A spell of exceptionally hard times set in at Meenaclochran. Disastrous weather on land and sea, wreck of crops, failure of fishing, took heavy toll from lives that had no superfluities to renounce. The cheapest of yellow meal began to be reckoned a luxury; nay, at last there was a demand outrunning the supply even for the savourless “salt leaves,” gathered off the rocks to be boiled into the sorriest pretence of a dinner. Everybody was pinched, and nobody could tell how long the trouble might continue, since the wisest person knew hardly more than little Jim Daly, who drummed on his soon-empty saucer in vain desire for a re-fill, or old Bridey Ahern, who said hopefully: “Plase goodness there might be a pitaty in it to-morra,” to console herself over her dismal sea-weedy repast.

And when matters were at the worst, nothing would suit Miss Mann but she must needs go meddle with Mrs O’Hagan’s hens and the Fottrells’ goat. She had incited a number of the children to join with her in building a very elaborate sand-house under a bent-matted bank on the north strand, which was all well and good, keeping them quite harmlessly employed. But her proceedings ceased to wear this blameless aspect one unlucky afternoon when, in the absence of her older comrades at school, she took it into her head that the new structure would make a grand shed for live stock. Whereupon she had captured Mrs O’Hagan’s four best hens, and the Fottrells’ grey goat, and conveying them severally to the sand-house, had stuffed into it the whole reluctant party. Grave results ensued, for in struggling to get free Nannie broke through the crumbling roof, which dropped in heavy lumps upon the hens, killing one of them outright, and giving the others a shock which they “weren’t the better of to their last day,” while the terrified goat rushed away, and was lost on the bog for the best part of a week, during which the little Fottrells had to forego their drop of milk, a very serious privation.

Certainly this piece of mischief happened most inopportunely, at a time when, as Mrs Fottrell next morning observed, “It would be hard enough to find feedin’ for an extry chucken, let alone a couple of growin’ childer. And they destroyin’ all before them,” she added severely. She was talking in the kitchen of Mrs O’Hagan, the strange childer’s especial patroness, having called upon her early to report the continued disappearance of Nannie the goat.

“’Deed yes, ma’am,” Mrs O’Hagan replied, “I’m thinkin’ this while back we maybe had a right to let them two go into the House. ’Twould be better for the crathurs after all than runnin’ wild here, and comin’ short as like as not. They’d be kep’ under rules there, anyway, but it’s too ould I am meself for trapesin’ after them to hinder them of doin’ mischief on other people, that aren’t well able to afford to be at the loss of anythin’ at all.”

“Bedad they are not, ma’am,” Mrs Fottrell said very promptly. “Clochranbeg does be a poor place these times. Most whiles there’d be no need for grudgin’ the likes of them their bit of food among the whole of us. But the Union van’s to be at Dunskeagh to-morra, and Himself’s goin’ over to Ballylough this evenin’, and could lave word wid them to send it on here, and pick up the strange childer on the way back.”

“I wouldn’t say but it might be the best plan,” Mrs O’Hagan said doubtfully.

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Mrs Fottrell said with decision. “Bad luck to it, I wonder where they’re after hurooshin’ the misfortunate goat to--she’s a terrible loss.”

Now this conversation was overheard by Min and Atty, hidden behind a turf creel in the corner, whither they had guiltily fled upon Mrs Fottrell’s entrance; and horror-stricken eavesdroppers they were. In fact Min seemed to Atty so nearly on the point of betraying them by breaking forth into loud lamentations, that he dragged her out unseen through the back door; and then they both ran wildly until they reached the border of the widest bog.

“Don’t you be stoppin’,” Min said, tugging Atty on in her turn. “It’s away we must get the furthest ever we can contrive, before they come after us wid their dirty ould van.”

“Where are we goin’ to?” said Atty.

“Och, how should I know? anywheres at all,” said Min.

“It’s starved and lost we’ll be,” said Atty, hanging back, and looking distrustfully over the lonely black land, that swept out a great circle, rounded off far away among the dim-white November mists.

“If we are itself, I’d liefer get lost than to be shut up in the hijjis ould House all the days of our lives’ ends,” said Min.

“I wisht to goodness, then, you didn’t take and fryken th’ ould goat on them,” Atty said querulously. “That’s the raison why she’s so mad, and they’re puttin’ us out of it,” and he sat down under a clump of broom, looking as if he intended to stay there.

“I wisht I was drownded in the middle of a bog-hole,” Min said with sudden desperation, which caused Atty to clutch her frantically crying: “Och, Min, honey, never mind. What’s to become of us at all?”

“Maybe we might find th’ ould goat some time,” Min suggested with a reactionary gleam of hope. “And then they’d be apt to let us stop. ’Twas that they thought so bad of; worser a dale than Mrs O’Hagan’s hin. We’d have a great chance if we found her.”

“Let’s go look,” said Atty, jumping up. “Och, Min, I declare to goodness there she is just over yonder.”

“It’s the moral of herself bedad,” Min said joyfully, and they both hied off across the bog towards a boulder glimmering greyly among some rushy tussocks.