Chapter I

Dwellers at and around Beltranagh assert that a man who can find his way about their shore by daylight “won’t be bothered anywhere else in the dark,” and the saying is tinctured with truth. For those high cliffs, which show to the waves and west winds a long front seldom broken, seem to have been left with the _débris_ of their building materials littered at their base so profusely that it crops up perpetually above the water-pavement, or, still more perilously, lurks unseen just below the surface. The sea is thick with rocks and reefs, shoals and bars, which so vary in aspect and obstructiveness from tide to tide that to thread the shifting labyrinth is a difficult feat even for a mariner holding the clue of maturest experience. It is perhaps most intricate just outside Carrickawn Bank, a long shingly isthmus lying stretched across the mouth of one of the few gaps in that great cliff-wall which here abruptly swerves inland to form a deep embrasure filled with a hill-girt lough. Such a mere thread is the isthmus in breadth that only its extremely tenacious stuff could have refused to snap ages since under the stress of thundering seas. A piled-up glacis of smooth oval granite stones, like an ogre’s sugar-almonds, each one a heavy two-handsful, slopes seaward almost its whole length, and so far has clattered defiance when the clutching foam leaps highest to snatch it down. But near the northern end is one weak point, where the gigantic pebbles are scattered sparsely with silvery sand showing between them; and it seems probable that, in the course of some thousand centuries, the Atlantic will there break through into Lough Orren. Meanwhile, not many years back, the inhabitants of Beltranagh Farmhouse used the slight depression in the shingle-bank as a sheltered berth for their couple of boats.

The Beltranagh Farm seems a curiously situated little homestead even for that countryside, where tillage is carried on in unlikely places, and holdings have not uncommonly a more or less amphibious character. Its existence is due to a small triangle of “land,” as opposed to “strand” wedged in between the foot of the cliffs and one end of the stony isthmus. A jut of the towering rock-wall screens a few precious stacks and sheds from the full sweep of the west wind, but the dwelling-house itself stands aloof from this protection, and faces the sea across only a meagre dryish strip, even at low water. It has two windows and a door below, and three windows above, and is washed with a livid silurian blue, which seems to parody the colour of its surroundings. About it are shredded the short-furrowed patches, with soil dwindling towards their dykes from mitigated to unmitigated sand and shingle. Potatoes struggle there sometimes into fairly vigorous existence; and old John Moriarty’s whim was always to have a scrap “down in oats,” which kept him “heart-scalded” half the year. He was a proud man if his grain-crop loaded “the little ass” or the slug-shaped curragh. This scantiness of the farm produce certainly saved some trouble, as all that went to market had to be conveyed painfully along the rough natural causeway, or at the owner’s greater risk by the lapping water, which in wild weather can rage fiercely even on the landward side of the barrier. Up the steeps behind the house nothing less primitive than a goat-and-gossoon path leads to nothing more civilised than a wet bog, while at the further end of the isthmus you come upon only one road that deserves the name, blustery, sea-skirting, three lonesome miles long before it begins to be fringed with the outlying cabins of Haganstown. As for the boreen that turns off to the left and runs along the lough shore, it very soon degenerates into the rudest of cart-tracks, and except for the name of the thing you might as well take your own way across the grassy-ledged hill-slopes, girdled with sheep-walks and seamed with water-courses.

When Jim Moriarty came back to Beltranagh Farm, after an absence of more than a dozen years, there were circumstances that threatened to make a peace-lover’s course as troublesome steering as if it had literally lain among the adjacent reefs and shoals. He was the eldest son of old John Moriarty, whose death had been the cause of his return to a home from which a falling out with his stepmother in early youth had banished him to employment in a woollen manufactory at Mallow. The joining of threads so long severed always calls for considerable tact and adroitness, but Jim brought to his job, which was unusually complicated, rather less than an average equipment of these qualities. He found the household now consisting of his brother and sister, Andy and Biddy, whom he had parted from as children, and his much younger half-brother, Jack, whom he had never met at all, so that he must needs make three new acquaintances, a thing he was slow to do. But he had not simply to deal with the inevitable estrangement of absence; there was also his father’s will. By this document John Moriarty, to the surprise of all parties concerned, divided his property, comprising several acres, into six equal shares, three of which he left to his son Jim, and one apiece to his other children. Furthermore, Jim had power to buy out his brethren compulsorily, if he pleased, or sell the farm to somebody else; so that his position was one of very commanding superiority.

The fact was that these dispositions had been made not many months back by old John in a spleenful mood, which caused the absent--who are not quite always unduly blamed--to appear less distasteful than the perpetually and irritatingly present. “The little gossoon’s an ass,” their father had grumbled to himself. “And the other two’s as headstrong as a couple of pigs--done the very thing I bid them to not do wid the Kerry heifer. It’s my belief Jim ’ud make a better offer at lookin’ after the place, if he got the chance.” And acting upon these views he instructed Councillor Dowdall that Jim’s the chance was to be. But Jim’s brother and sister were vastly aggrieved, the more so because for the last year or two they had managed domestic affairs much as they would; and they immediately formed the opinion that this arrangement had been designedly brought about by his “slutherin” letters to their father. Jim’s letters had been in reality few and brief, and entirely free from sentiment. Andy and Biddy, however, were guided less by probabilities than by a natural desire for an object of resentment still accessible. Jim would have borne the whole brunt of theirs had they not been constrained by other considerations to manifest it in modified forms. They dared not quarrel utterly with a person who could no doubt oust them from the old home in which their affections were rooted. Accordingly their behaviour was a series of compromises between wrath and prudence. They stopped short at direct accusations and confined themselves to innuendoes. Andy never “up and tould him to his face that he was a schemin’ villin, and had as good as grabbed the bit of land off them behind their backs.” He only muttered, with the vague allusiveness of Greek tragedy, about “some he could name that had been a great hand at featherin’ their nest with the scrawm of a pen now and agin and the price of a penny stamp.” And if Biddy at dinner-time wore the aspect of a Gorgon who had tasted something bitterly unpalatable, or if she flounced ostentatiously out of the room upon Jim’s entrance, she would afterwards apologise through the medium of hot cake for supper, or an offer to do a bit of mending. More overt demonstrations must, they felt, be deferred until their present precarious position became assured one way or the other.

Jim himself was both more and less alive than they supposed to the state of their feeling. Under a somewhat stolid demeanour he concealed no small chagrin at the discovery that “them two weren’t anyways disposed to be over-friendly.” But his wits were not quick, and his conscience was clear of anything except a regret that he had kept aloof from Beltranagh all those years nor sought to restore amicable relations with his father more effectually than by intermittent letters; and this made him slow to guess the true cause of their animosity. Thus the sallies which they themselves feared might have gone too far failed to reach him with explanatory effect; he merely perceived that they were meant to be somehow disagreeable.

Yet even if Andy and Biddy had been “a bit pleasanter in themselves,” Jim would have found Beltranagh a dreary abode, comfortless within as without, and remote from familiar friends and occupations. His stay there would most likely have been brief only for the special circumstance that at this time his right arm was still partially crippled by an accident, which hindered him from attending to his business, and made him think it advisable to spend his enforced leisure rent free on his property. So while he waited for the tardy re-knitting of injured ligaments and sinews, the season slid on from autumn into winter. His chief resource at first against the monotony of those empty hours, and his hankering after the meadow and woodlands about Mallow, lay in the companionship of his young half-brother Jack. Rather dull and backward for his nine years was Jack, partly by nature, and partly owing to a life of singular isolation and insipidity, flavoured only with acids and bitters infused at the discretion of elders’ uncertain humours. It was a strange joy for him to associate with a person whose temper seemed to be uniformly unruffled, and whose dexterity, even though one-handed, appeared quite marvellous. By the time that Jim had constructed a fascinating miniature lake and canal with loughs on it among the boulders, Jack had become his faithfully attached ally. Whereupon Biddy expressed to Andy some gloomy expressions: “Mark my words,” she would say, “it’s makin’ a fool of the little ape he is, the way he’ll have him aisy persuaded to stop along wid himself here whenever he throws the two of us out of it, as he’s apt to take and do one of these days. And then ’twill be mighty convanient for me fine gentleman to keep the poor child growin’ up big and strong to be doin’ him a man’s work about the place for nothin’. That’s what he’s up to, you may depind.” However, as weeks passed and he betrayed no disposition to encroach or interfere, much less evict, matters were, on the whole, tending towards improvement at the time of his first call upon the MacNees.