Chapter II

The voyager up Lough Orren, having passed through the straits where it is cut nearly in two by the shears of opposing hills, will see on ahead a snowy gleam, which grows on his sight from what might be a floating lily, a gull’s wing, a skiff’s sail, into the white front of the MacNees’ little house. It stands on a steep bank overlooking the lough, whence its reflection often strikes back sharp and clear, for this green-rimmed bowl of fair water is seldom a flawed mirror. Jim Moriarty had not been long at Beltranagh before he learned to welcome the white fleck when it came into view as he made his way towards it by boat or on foot. These MacNees were distant cousins of the Moriartys, and for all an intervening league, their nearest neighbours, so lopsided visiting terms were maintained between the two families. That is to say, the Moriartys occasionally called upon the MacNees, who did not return their visits. It had long been a joke among them to apologise and account for this by declaring that the lough was double the length going backwards. Andy had more recently begun to add, with significance, to his versions of the jest: “Sure it knows who it does be separatin’ us from, isn’t that the raison, Lizzie?” But Lizzie had never yet “let on” that she heard him. It was true enough that the MacNees’s situation seemed almost more out-of-the-way than their friends’, considering the disabilities of the household: Mrs MacNee, an elderly little widow woman, with her two daughters, Maria an invalid, and Lizzie, whom her sister half wistfully called “as cogglesome about settin’ out to go anywheres when she got the chance as if every fut she put down would be treadin’ on red-hot pitaties.” Accordingly they were rarely to be met abroad. Andy and Biddy were rowing over to them one fine Sunday afternoon when Biddy invited Jim to join the party, mainly that it might be graced by his fine Mallow tweed suit, but also to disoblige Andy, with whom she was temporarily affronted, and who she well knew would have preferred his brother’s room. Jim, on his part, regretfully consented, lest they should “think too bad” of his refusal. But the expedition after all proved more agreeable than he could have by any means expected; he was afflicted much less than usual with gawky dumbness, and in fact found it so possible to converse with Mrs MacNee that he regarded the visit as a rare social success. This encouraged him to repeat it, and he presently acquired a habit of doing so at short intervals. Sometimes he went with Andy and Biddy, but more often with Jack to supplement his one-armed rowing; or he tramped alone round by the lough side, a longer and slower route. Soon, as he grew quite at his ease in the society of the quiet, good-natured sisters, their kitchen, being warm and weather tight, with a transfiguring illumination of fire-light shaken over it, seemed to him a far pleasanter living-room than his own at Beltranagh, which had several of the features of a sea-cave. Still, his original and permanent attraction was old Mrs MacNee in her frilled white cap and large-plaided little shawl, with her last-generation reminiscences, and her assumption, not displeasing to his consciousness of approaching thirty, that he had not yet ceased to be merely a youth.

Now nobody could be long in Mrs MacNee’s company without becoming aware of her three ruling passions. These might be summed up as a love, a fear, and a hate, of which the respective objects were her son, ghosts, and spiders. None of these emotions existed unmixed with another. As no one holds any such possessions in fee simple, she had to pay a heavy fine of fear for her interest in Paddy, all the heavier on account of his absence in terribly far-off States. Fear, again, mingled with her abhorrence of the long-legged spinners, who, hideously sprawling, let themselves down by sudden threads from the rafters “on top of a body’s cap” maybe, or glanced in hobgoblin gallops over wall and floor. Nor could she truthfully have denied, though she dared not avow, a mortal antipathy to those ghostly enemies, whose presence, less frankly manifested, was scarcely a whit more doubtful, and more dreadful by far. She found it a solace to discourse about these things to a sympathetic hearer, and such a one she had in Jim Moriarty. With respect to Paddy and the ghosts he was nothing more. All he could do was to listen appreciatively while she expatiated on the various virtues of her son, or related how the lough and its shores had come to be infested with phantoms of an ill-omened sort. But in the matter of the spiders he was able to lend more practical assistance, and it became his custom to spend part of each visit in pursuing them, with the help of a heather-tipped oar-handle, to their most obscure and recondite recesses. Lizzie doubted whether “he mightn’t as well be offerin’ to hunt the clouds off the sky as them crathurs that kep’ on patchin’ up their old webs out of nothin’ at all;” and Maria sometimes complained that he stirred up the dust to fly about choking them; but as the chase seemed a satisfaction to Mrs MacNee, it was persevered in until at length it brought disaster.

One evening after tea Jim was flourishing his mop with especial energy on the track of a huge spider, which his hostess had descried “leggin’ it up the wall beside the turf-bin, with horns on it’s hijjis head the len’th of your arm and as black and hairy in itself as the divil’s hind-foot.” This prodigious object was elusively swift in its movements, and dodged about for a long while among the rafters with tantalising disappearances and reappearances, until at last Jim, making a desperate lunge, tripped over a stool and brought down his weapon with much violence on the jingling dresser. It stood so thick with crockery that the resulting damage seemed strangely slight, being limited to the fracture of a single cup. Only Jim and Lizzie witnessed the accident, Mrs MacNee having stepped into the other room bringing tea for Maria, who was laid up with asthma. “That’s contrary now,” said Lizzie. “Of course nothin’ would suit it but to be the one our Paddy gave me mother just before he quit, and that she sets the greatest store by at all.”

“Ay, ay, ay, it’s too bad altogether,” Jim said, standing in large disconcertion, and looking down on the small pink-and-white victim of his clumsiness.

“The worst of it is,” said Lizzie, “that she’ll be sure to think it’s a sign of somethin’ happenin’ him, and fretting herself into fiddlestrings she’ll be till we hear from him agin.”

“I wonder now would there be e’er a chance I could match it anywhere,” Jim said, ruefully examining the pink-banded cup with the piece out of its side. “It’s not too oncommon a pattron.”

“It wouldn’t be the same thing to her as Paddy’s one, even so,” said Lizzie.

“Suppose it happened she didn’t know the differ,” said Jim.

“To be sure if I kep’ the right side turned out she might maybe never notice it till you thried for the other,” said Lizzie.

“Do then, like a jewel,” said Jim.

“It might be the best plan,” said Lizzie. “For I well know she’d have us all bothered hearin’ banshees, and dreamin’ ugly dreams, and sayin’ it was a sign of troubles. And you might have a good chance of matchin’ it at the fair there is to-morrow or next day down below.”

“I will so,” said Jim.

Thus the conspiracy was hatched, with what seemed a fair prospect of success. But the Fowl of Fortune never will sit upon only a single egg; and it seldom happens that at least one of the brood does not turn out an unchancy bird.

On the next day was Haganstown Fair, at which six of the Moriarty sheep off the mountainy lands were to be sold. Andy had intended to drive them over with the help of Garry the collie and Jack; but at the early breakfast Jim proposed to come instead of the latter. He said it was because the young chap had a heavy cold on him to be going out under the wet, and Andy said (aside to Biddy) it was because the big ass did be always stuffin’ himself wherever he wasn’t wanted; but neither explanation was strictly true. And at the Fair the first acquaintance Jim fell in with was Lizzie MacNee, who for a wonder had been persuaded to accept a seat on the Duffs’ side-car. The meeting seemed a lucky event, as they both hoped that the right teacup might be found in time for Lizzie to carry it home with her. “And that,” said Lizzie, “would be a great thing; for she’s apt enough to take the notion of usin’ it at the party to-morra night, and then where’d we be?” To-morrow was no less an occasion than Shrove Tuesday, which the MacNees were to celebrate with friends to tea. But the Duffs were in a hurry home out of the rain, and Lizzie had to go before the china-hunt had well begun. “I’ll get it sure enough yet, no fear,” Jim prophesied at parting. “’Twill be on one of them stalls. And I brought the broken bit along, the way I mightn’t be mistook in the colour.” He showed her, with some pride at his own providence, the pink-and-white fragment which protruded from a pocket of his best coat.

“Don’t be late bringin’ it over to-morra,” said Lizzie. “Of course Biddy and little Jack ’ill be comin’ along--and Andy, maybe, that’s too much took up wid his ould sheep to come and spake a word to anybody.”

Andy, standing black-browed at a little distance, looked as if any words he might see fit to speak would be far from agreeable. He had watched the meeting of Lizzie with Jim, and through the voluble bargaining of old Joe Megarity had overheard snatches of their conversation, which he thought betokened some secret understanding between them. His impression when setting out had been that Jim was coming to keep an eye on the sale of the sheep, lest he should be defrauded of the profits in which he owned so large a share. But now a different motive suggested itself, and shrivelled up the more sordid suspicion as a wave of flame might scorch up a muddy little puddle. As the Duffs’ car drove off he withdrew scowlingly into the seclusion of a dense crowd, and for the remainder of the Fair evaded notice so completely that Jim had to return alone.