Chapter I

The Widow M‘Gurk flung down a black sod into the midst of the blossom-like pink-and-white embers and ashes on her hearth with a shock that splashed up vivid sparks in all directions, causing a pair of long-legged, panic-stricken chickens to fly higher, far less nimbly, and seek refuge from the startling shower among the rafters overhead. Her action was symbolical, for as she performed it she said: “It’s gone; there’s the whole of it. And you might as well be holdin’ your tongue till you’ve got somethin’ raisonable to say.” As a matter of fact, her niece, Minnie Walsh, had not been making any observations; but Mrs M‘Gurk had some excuse for indiscriminate censoriousness just then, seeing that she referred to the loss of nothing less than what she called “the greatest chance ever she got in her life’s len’th.” Perhaps that rather long length had really been not more productive of great chances than is usual in the lives of people who dwell on the bog-lands at Lisconnel. Yet her neighbours were disposed to consider that she had enjoyed a somewhat full share of good luck. They all remembered, for instance, the handsome legacy of half a dozen half-crowns that had once come to her from the States, and some of them would say when discussing her affairs: “And she widout a crathur to be thinkin’ of only herself.” This latter circumstance could, of course, be otherwise stated as the fact that “she had not a soul belonging to her in the wide world to be doing e’er a hand’s turn for her”; and when she was first left a childless widow, many years ago, that view had predominated. It still prevailed among most of the older inhabitants, whose children were grown up, and capable of lending a helping hand, sometimes from across the western foam; but they of a younger generation, whose long families were as yet the “burden” which the Gaelic sorrowfully calls them, would speak of her loneliness in a tone implying: “It’s well to be her.” In this opinion the widow’s proudly independent spirit helped to confirm them, her habit being to pose as a prosperous person, resentful of any sympathy which appeared incongruous with that attitude, while she adopted an extension of the principle: “_Tell thou never thy foe that thy foot acheth_,” in this respect treating everyone impartially as an enemy. Here, however, was a quite exceptional occurrence, upon the cruel unluckiness of which the most stoical pride could scarcely be imagined to forbear exclaiming. It came about thus.

Early in the summer, Mrs M‘Gurk’s portly yellowish hen had hatched her a clutch of eggs with such singular success that not one of the whole baker’s dozen failed to produce its chick, and had brought them up so discreetly and warily that all, save the solitary victim of a bright-eyed hawk’s swooping pounce, had come securely to a more profitable fate. Mrs M‘Gurk, furthermore, had obtained remarkably good prices--as much, sometimes, as eighteenpence a couple--for them down beyond in the town, and the consequence was that, after paying her rent at Michaelmas, and buying several parcels of tea for distribution as well as for her own use, she found herself one day possessed of two shillings, which she had no immediate occasion to spend. Now it happened that she was at this time entertaining as a guest her niece’s daughter, Minnie Walsh, who had been visiting some relations away over beyond Moyallen, and found her great-aunt’s cabin a convenient halting-place on her journey back to her home near the town of Ballytrave. Her father’s cousin, Peter M‘Gonigal, had promised to pick her up in his cart, which would be passing within a mile or so of Lisconnel on its return from leaving a couple of calves over at Letter-french; and Peter’s own destination being within an easy walk of the long-car from Ardlesh to Ballytrave, Minnie’s route lay smooth and clear. All the while she stayed at Lisconnel she kept on counting the days until she could set off, less from impatience to rejoin her domestic circle than because of a wonderful festival which was in prospect at Ballytrave. It would even be grander, she had heard tell, than the ones last autumn, and everybody had said that the like of _them_ nobody had ever beheld--play-acting, and dancing, and the beautiful music, with a roomful of fiddlers and pipers, and a couple of big harps that were like a fairy wind through the trees, and the songs that would make you wish you couldn’t tell what, and think you were come just near to getting it somehow. And the whole of them in Gaelic, too, the very same way, people said, that they did be in the old ancient times. She wouldn’t miss it for anything at all.

Minnie Walsh was generally a silent, quiet girl, but when she spoke of this _Feish_, she brightened up out of a dulness which made her enthusiasm the more striking by contrast. Its glow was caught by her hearers, and often gave a livelier turn to assemblies of the neighbours, whether on the swarded edges of the bog, basking in long, honey-coloured sunbeams, or gathered closer, on rough-hewn stools and benches, about a less distant hearth-fire. Mention of the jigs and _rinca-fadhas_ would set the young folk dancing, and their elders’ memories were stirred into another sort of activity, producing fragments of half-forgotten ditties, and familiar phrases long disused. For Lisconnel had hardly any Irish speakers in those days except Pat Ryan’s very old mother, who so seldom said anything, that her language might indeed be a matter of conjecture. She pricked up her ears one evening upon hearing her son exchange certain guttural greetings with Joe Sheridan, and she suddenly declaimed in her corner a long Gaelic ballad, relating the adventures of a Princess, a Giant, and an enchanted steed, which seemed but gibberish to some of her audience, and to the rest would have seemed so, only that it being a widely spread folk-tale, they were able to guide themselves through it by the clues of a word or name recognised here and there. At the end of it, Widow M‘Gurk sighed profoundly with a regretful satisfaction, and said: “Sure now the sound of it does me heart good. It must be a matter of fifty year since ould Kit Maher would be singin’ the very same at me poor father’s house away in Asherclogher. But, bedad, if I got a sight of a one of them reels, Minnie says is to be in it, I’d consait I was a little _girsheach_ again, I would so.”

“And why wouldn’t you come see them?” said her grand-niece. “Me mother was biddin’ me many a time to be bringing you along, and me cousin Peter’d take the two of us just as ready as one; and he could drop you here on his way back in a couple of days as handy as anythin’.”

“Them two shillin’s I have saved would just pay me car fare goin’ and comin’,” said her great-aunt, “supposin’ I was fine fool enough to think of such a thing.”

It was from this doubtful beginning that Mrs M‘Gurk’s resolve to attend the Ballytrave _Feish_ sprang and rapidly matured. Everything helped it on. Minnie Walsh, desirous of company on her formidable day-long journey, coaxed and cajoled, the neighbours athirst for even vicarious variety and excitement, encouraged and urged her, and above all her own wishes took her by the hand. It would be one while, she said to herself, before she got such another chance; you might think it had all happened on purpose. Her pitaties finished lifting, and her turf well saved, just at the time when a cart was going and coming that way, and she so far beforehand with the world that, as she reasoned, the journey wouldn’t cost her a penny. So the expedition was speedily determined upon, and her plans approached the brink of accomplishment without a check.

The possibility of the whole project, however, was for the time being compressed into the shape of two current coins, those marvellous seeds from which most heterogeneous crops are raised at all seasons; and since so much hinged upon her possession of them, “Sure now Mrs M‘Gurk was the very foolish woman”--as neighbours repeatedly pointed out to her--“to go put her two shillings into a pocket with a hole in it.” Yet that was exactly what she did one unlucky afternoon. She had been in the act of transferring them from a little lustre jug on the dresser to an old patchwork bag, when sounds of barking and bleating made her apprehend that the Sheridans’ young collie was molesting her kid, tethered on a grassy strip beside the bog stream. Whereupon she had slipped the shillings into her pocket, and ran down to the rescue. And, alas, as she was recrossing the stepping-stones, she had put her hand into that pocket and discovered there only _one_ shilling and a hole very amply large enough to account for the absence of the other. From the first it seemed a sadly hopeless case. The bit of ground on which the shilling must have been dropped was, indeed, of limited extent, not many yards square; but the rough surface, shagged with tangled tussocks, furzes, heather clumps, and marsh greenery, mocked at the quest for a thing so small, and she had moreover passed the black mouths of two or three bog-holes, which might have irretrievably swallowed it up. Mrs M‘Gurk almost despaired on the spot, though she groped wildly till she was too stiff for longer stooping. But when the news of her loss spread, there was no lack of volunteers to carry on the search. A party of them, including representatives from nearly all the half-score houses of the hamlet, were to be seen at any day-lit hour diligently employed. The children especially found it a fascinating new pastime, and, fired as much by a spirit of emulation as by several promises of a halfpenny, threw themselves into the pursuit with ardent zeal and supple joints. Yet the widow drew little or no comfort from the sight of their energy. She said they might all as well be looking for it to come tumbling down out of the stars, the way Crazy Mick was looking for his wife and childer that died on him. Her neighbours’ other attempts at consolation were equally unsuccessful, Mrs Doyne’s being perhaps the most complete failure. A person of invariably dark forebodings, she now suggested that if Mrs M‘Gurk had gone, she might have been very apt to lose her life. Them long cars were terrible dangerous things. Or else the playhouse at Ballytrave might be going on fire, and everybody in it burning to ashes--the Lord have mercy on them. She was reading of that same happening on the paper not so long ago. And it would be a deal worse than losing a shilling, or two shillings, for that matter. Mrs M‘Gurk replied that if some she could name lost all the sinse they ever had, it would make no great differ; and strode indignantly away from the group of bucket-filling women, while Judy Sheridan said apologetically: “The crathur’s annoyed. Sure her heart was set on gettin’ the jaunt.”

The mishap had necessarily brought the whole scheme to an end. For as she no longer possessed the price of her return fare, how would she ever get home again to her cabin on the knock-awn’s side, her field-fleck, her turf-stack, her few hens and her old kid--all her worldly wealth? “’Deed then, ma’am, ’twould be like slammin’ a door wid the handle on the wrong side of you,” Mrs Rafferty reluctantly agreed, when talking over the disaster with her. Mrs Rafferty was to have had the kid’s milk during Mrs M‘Gurk’s absence, in return for boiling the few hens their bit of food, and the arrangement had seemed to her so advantageous that she regretted its collapse on personal grounds. But regrets, interested or otherwise, were alike futile; and now on the day but one before she should have been starting, Mrs M‘Gurk, shaking off the last twining tendril of withered hope, had gloomily faced the worst.

Having thus summarily mended her fire and snubbed her grand-niece, the Widow M‘Gurk went out of doors again, in pursuit of a white chicken, which she had espied astray at a dangerous distance when she was fetching in her turf. It gave her a long and exasperating chase over the bog before it would be captured, and as she tramped back heavily with it under her shawl, she commented to herself that the only thing she wondered at was how it had contrived not to get lost on her too. The golden beams that slanted to her from a fiery scaffolding in the west dazzled her sight, and made her stumble over stocks and stones, but in her mind she beheld nothing except the eclipse of her bit of pleasure darkening with its shadow her whole horizon. Yet at this very moment Minnie Walsh, with sunshine and glee brightening her fair hair and blue eyes, was watching at the house-door for its unforeseeing mistress, whom she greeted with: “It’s found, Aunt Bridget; glory be to goodness, it’s found.”

“Och, don’t be romancin’,” Mrs M‘Gurk said, while the chicken screeched in her excited grasp. “Who was it?” she shouted jubilantly as she mounted the steep little footpath.

“Ould Mr Rafferty brought it just after you goin’ out,” Minnie explained, as they bustled in together; “he got it down below.” And, sure enough, there on the smoke-darkened deal table gleamed a silver shilling. Mrs M‘Gurk seized it eagerly, as if grasping a friend’s hand, and then--dashed it down with a rap on the table again, pressed under a wrathful thumb. “The ould liar,” she said bitterly, “the ould liar,” and closed a mouth whose grimness was mutely very eloquent. Minnie stared at her with a pink and white face of disappointed perplexity. “Is it lettin’ on to you he was that this is me own shillin’ he’s after findin’ yonder?” Mrs M‘Gurk said, “and it wid the new pattron of the Queen on it, in the little quare crown, and 1889 on it as plain as print, when me own one’s wore that thin an smooth, you’d say she hadn’t a hair on her head, let alone anythin’ else, and 1861 just dyin’ off it. It’s fools he was makin’ of you and me.... And what’s this, to goodness?” she continued, catching sight of another coin on the table, “a sixpenny bit it is--and where might that come from, if you plase?”

“Sure, Mrs Fahy it was come wid that a little while ago,” Minnie said with much diffidence; “she said she was just after pickin’ it up on the very same place where you lost the shillin’, and she had the notion it might ha’ been two sixpennies you dropped; and says I to her I well knew it was not. But says she to me it wasn’t hers anyway, and she’d lave it wid you on chance. So I couldn’t forbid her.”

“The schamin’ thief,” said Mrs M‘Gurk, “and yourself was the quare _stronseach_. Just let her wait aisy till I tell her what I think of herself and her impidence and her dirty sixpennies.” In the meanwhile she relieved her feelings by hurling away the white chicken from beneath her plaid shawl, and hunting it to its roosting-place among the rafters of the inner room, whither she followed it.

Minnie stood looking out at the front door. She was cast down by the repudiation of the shilling, which had once more shattered her hopes of a travelling companion, and she perceived that her great-aunt considered her in some degree to blame for an offence whose nature she did not clearly understand. This made her view with misgivings the approach of another visitor, who now came quickly up the footpath. It was no acquaintance of hers, a tall thin girl, with a baby on her arm, and so poor-looking, even for Lisconnel, that Minnie thought her errand would be some request. But when a slender brown hand opened to disclose several dark “coppers,” Minnie was not much surprised to hear: “I’m after findin’ these four pennies down below, so I thought I had a right to be bringin’ them up here, in case it was some of the money Mrs M‘Gurk is after losin’ out of her pocket.”

“It is not,” said Minnie, “by any manner of manes. She lost nothin’ only a shillin’. You might be takin’ them away, if you plase, and thank you kindly, for it’s annoyed me aunt is.” She tried to intercept the girl, who slipped past her and laid the money on the table. “Ah, now, don’t be lavin’ them there,” said Minnie in a whisper, “she’s inside in the room this minyit, ragin’. Or, at all events, tell her yourself, the way she won’t be blamin’ me for lettin’ you. For she’s torminted already wid people bringin’ her the wrong things. I’ll call her out to you.” The girl, however, said: “Ah! not at all,” and ran swiftly away.

While Minnie stood doubting whether or no to pursue her with the pennies, Mrs M‘Gurk’s voice came through the inner door: “What talk was that you had wid Joanna Crehan, and what brought her trapesin’ up here?”

“She’s after findin’--” Minnie began to reply deprecatingly, but a peremptory injunction cut her short.

“Sling it out to her then, and bid her not throuble herself to be comin’ next or nigh my place again,” Mrs M‘Gurk shouted, with an evident desire to be overheard.

Before Minnie could have taken any steps towards executing this delicate commission, a little gossoon bolted into the house, and the jingle of something in his hand was hardly needed to apprise her of his business. “It’s entirely too bad, and so it is,” she grumbled to herself, slipping out at the door. “I’ll just go and sit the other side of the hill for a while, till they’ve done pickin’ up pinnies and shillin’s down below. Plase goodness it ’ill soon be too dark now to see a stim. But bedad there must ha’ been a quare dale of money dropped on that one little small bit of ground. I wonder how it happened at all.”

Minnie, whose imaginative powers were limited, could descry no probable explanation; but she pondered over it among the furze bushes, until the September dusk fell so greyly over their fairy golden lamps of blossoms that she thought she might safely venture back. When she went indoors she saw her great-aunt standing by the table, on which several additional coins seemed to have been deposited--more pennies, and, Minnie thought, another shilling; but the fire-light flickered on them uncertainly, and the expression of her great-aunt’s countenance was a warning notice to questioners. Mrs M‘Gurk surveyed them in silence for a few moments longer, and then she swept them together with the side of her hand, more contemptuously than if they had been potato skins. “Just wait, me tight lads,” she said, “and I’ll larn yous to be litterin’ up me house wid your ould thrash.”