Chapter III

Near the back gates of Lady Winifred’s Big House, the Widdy Connor’s very little one makes a white dot on the edge of the black bog-land that winds away towards Lisconnel. She lived in it quite alone after her son Terence had listed on her, which he did one winter when times were hard and work was scarce. Everybody almost concurred in the opinion that there “wasn’t apt to be such another grand-lookin’ soldier in the regiment as young Terry Connor, or in an army of regiments bedad.” For Terry’s good looks and good nature and athletic prowess were celebrated round and about Clonmalroan. Six foot three in his stockings, and not a lad to stand up to him at the wrestling; there wasn’t another as big a man in the parish, unless it might be the Captain.

But, of course, it was not in the nature of things that anyone else should equal the extravagant pride and pleasure in those pre-eminent qualities evinced by Terry’s mother. She made a show of herself over him, according to the view entertained by some matrons with smaller sons; and now and then, when the widow had exceeded unusually in vaingloriousness, one of them might be heard to predict that, “she’d find she’d get none the better thratement from him for cockin’ him up wid consait; little enough he’d be thinkin’ of her, or mindin’ what she bid him.” The widow for her part always declared that “the only thing he’d ever done agin her in his life was listin’; and that he’d never ha’ thought of if the both of them hadn’t been widin to-morra mornin’ of starvation.” And perhaps the affliction which that step caused her was not so very far from being made amends for by her exulting delight in the splendour of his martial aspect when he came over to visit her on furlough in his scarlet with green facings beautiful to behold. One of those carping critics declared to goodness after Mass, that she had come into chapel with him “lookin’ as sot up as if she was after catchin’ some sort of glittery angel flyin’ about wild, and had a hold of him by the wing.”

But then at that time the regiment was safely quartered at Athlone, a place no such terribly long way off, and known to have been actually visited by ordinary people. It was a woefully different matter when the Connemaras were sent off on active service to strange lands about which all one’s knowledge could be summed up in the words “furrin” and “fightin’”--words of limitless fear. Then it was that retribution might be deemed to have lighted upon her inordinate vanity about her son’s conspicuous stature. For this now became a source of special torment, as threatening to make him the better mark, singling him out for peculiar peril.

“And you’ll be plased to tell him, Mr Mulcahy,” she dictated to the schoolmaster, who was also cobbler and scribe at Clonmalroan, “that whatever he does he’s not to be runnin’ into the forefront of the firin’, and he a head and shoulders higher than half of the lads. He’d be hit first thing. God be good to us. Bid him to be croochin’ down back of somethin’ handy. Or if there was ne’er a rock or a furze bush on the bit of bog, he might anyway keep stooped behind the others. But if he lets them get aimin’ straight at him, he’s lost.”

Mr Mulcahy, who was stirring up the sediment of his lately watered ink, received these suggestions about conduct in the field with decided disapproval. “Bedad now, Mrs Connor,” he said, “there’d be no sinse in tellin’ him any such things. For in the first place he wouldn’t mind a word of it, and in the next place--goodness may pity you, woman, but sure you wouldn’t be wishful to see him comin’ back to you after playin’ the poltroon, and behavin’ himself discreditable?”

“Troth and I would,” said Mrs Connor. “If he was twinty poltroons. All the behavin’ I want of him’s to be bringin’ himself home. Who’s any the betther for the killin’ and slaughterin’? The heart’s weary in me doubtin’ will I ever get a sight of him agin. That’s all I’m thinkin’ of, tellin’ you the truth, and if I said anythin’ diff’rint it ’ud be a lie.”

“He might bring home a trifle of honour and glory, and no harm done,” Mr Mulcahy urged. But Mrs Connor said: “Glory be bothered”; and in the end he only so far modified his instructions as to substitute for her more detailed injunctions a vague general order to “be takin’ care of himself.”

It may perhaps be considered another righteous judgment upon this most un-Spartan mother, that while these precautions of hers were entirely neglected, little of the honour and glory which she had flouted did attend the fate of her Terry. He was shot through the lungs by a rifle posted a mile or two distant from the dusty hillock on which he dropped, and where he lay gasping and choking for what seemed to him a vastly long time, before the night fell suddenly dark and cold, and not to pass away. As this particular casualty was not discovered till the next morning, his name did not appear on the list which Barny Keogh spelled over to the Widdy Connor a few days later, and at the end of which she said fervently: “Thanks be to the great God. There’s no sign of himself in it.” But on the very next evening, a half line in the _Freeman_ ran: “_Add to Killed: Private T. Connor_;” and when Peter Egan down below at Donnell’s read it out by chance, the widdy, listening, felt as if she had just wakened up into a dim sort of nightmare. All the more she felt so, because everybody round her was saying: “May the Lord have mercy on his soul,” as if anybody could believe that Terry had really become to them a subject for such pious ejaculations. So she hurried back through the wide spaces of the bleak March gloaming to her little, silent house, where she shut herself in to sleep off her dream. But it woke up with her in the grey of the early dawning.

Lady Winifred’s Captain was killed about the same time as Terry Connor, and, like him, without anything specially glorious in the circumstances of his death. Rather the contrary. The occasion of it was a minor disaster to the arms of his side--a check, a reverse--over which it could not be but that someone had blundered. In point of fact a highly-distinguished General, dictating a draft report of the same to his discreet Secretary, had expressed an opinion that the regrettable incident had been brought about by want of judgment on the part of the commanding officer, the late Captain O’Reilly, when the younger man coughed significantly, and casually remarked: “Ah, O’Reilly--he married one of Lord Astermount’s daughters--the third, I think, Lady Winifred, a little fair girl. Her people didn’t like the match at all, I believe, but still--” His chief appeared scarcely to notice the observation: but Captain O’Reilly’s want of judgment was not mentioned in despatches.