III
You are to suppose Captain Breagh, startled by the unexpected apparition of his eldest son, swallowing the whole jorum of whisky and water at a gulp, and his wife dropping her darning into her lap with the very exclamation Carolan had previously promised himself. Still as a mouse, he had lain in ambush beneath the Pembroke table, with the portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a gray charger in the foreground of the highly varnished oil-painting—representing the Royal Ennis Regiment in the performance of prodigies of gallantry in conflict with the French at Vimiera—staring with bolting blue eyes, and pointing at him with a Field-Marshal's bâton whenever he had peeped out.
Now, conscious of having made an impression, and with a curious mixture of sensations, emotions, impulses, fermenting in a brain of six years, the boy stood upright before his elders, his well-knit shoulders thrown back, his sturdy legs, arrayed in their virile coverings of blue cloth adorned with cat-stitches of yellow basting-thread, planted wide apart upon the tiger-skin hearthrug, and his stomach thrust forward with the arrogance characteristic of the newly made capitalist.
"Why the devil were you hiding there? Eh, you young Turk, you?" blustered the Captain.
"Eavesdroppers," said Mrs. Breagh acidly, "never go to Heaven."
"Farver Haygarty——" Carolan began.
"We don't want to know what Father Haygarty says!" snapped Mrs. Breagh, whose Protestant gorge rose at the Papistical teachings of the regimental chaplain. And then she remembered that in a few years the worldly prospects of her three children might depend on the good-will of this chubby-faced, red-haired urchin who stood silently before her, contemplating her with a new expression in a very round pair of oddly amber-flecked gray eyes. And being a weak, ill-balanced, underbred woman, and a mother into the bargain, she truckled, as such women will, to the latent potentialities vested in the stubborn wearer of the unfinished suit of clothes.
"Not but what Father Haygarty is a good man and much respected—and I dare say you're sorry for having kicked poor Josey. So, since it's your birthday we won't say any more about it—and Nurse shall pull out those basting-threads and sew on the brace-buttons when you're in bed to-night——"
"There! you hear! Stop, you young rascal! Come back and kiss your mother, and thank her, and run away to Mrs. Povah!" bade the Captain, for Carolan, driving a pair of grubby fists deep into the pockets of the new breeches, had swung contemptuously upon his heel, and made for the door.
"She's not my muvver!" said the son, pausing in his struggle with the door-handle to turn a flushed and frowning face upon his sire. "She said so just now and so did you!"
"Then shut the door!" thundered the Captain, but it had slammed before the words were fairly out. And Carolan stamped across the landing whistling defiantly, and burst into the nursery, where Baba—for the moment its sole occupant—was asleep in her bassinette, Alan and Monica having gone out to walk with Miss Josey, and Nurse being busy in the adjoining room.
Carolan's head was hot, and his heart felt big and swollen. He was a person of consequence, and at the same time a thing of no account. Thus the pride that flamed in his gray eyes was presently quenched by scalding salt drops of resentful indignation. He was sorrowful, elated, angry, and complacent, all at once, as he stood by Baba's crib.
He had never until now suspected Mrs. Breagh was not his mother. He had called her "Mamma" ever since he could speak. No question had ever risen in his mind as to the existence of some secret reason for her dislike of him.
When she had seemed most hateful in his eyes, by reason of her lacking reticence and absent sense of honor—for she couldn't keep a secret if she promised you ever so, and was always telling tales of you to Dada!—Carolan had frequently relieved his feelings by going into corners and calling her "that woman" under his breath. The appalling sense of crime, involved with the relief this process brought—for to call your real mother names would be a sin of the first magnitude—bad invested it with a dreadful fascination. Now the glamour had vanished, together with the wickedness. Mrs. Breagh was nothing to Carolan. He was the son of another woman—and she was dead in India. Her name was Milly—a gentle, prettily sounding name.
Only the day before, Carolan had found out what the thing grown-up people called "death" and "dying" meant. He had given a shiny sixpence that had lain hidden for weeks at the bottom of the pocket in his old plaid frock to Bugler Finnerty for a thrush he had limed, a beautiful brown thrush with a splendidly dappled breast. Only the bird's eyes looked like beads of dull jet glass instead of round black blobs of diamond-bright bramble-dew. And it had squatted on the foul floor of the little wood and wire cage in which Finnerty had been keeping it, panting, with ruffled feathers and open beak.
Finnerty had said that the bird would thrive on snails and worms, and Carolan had promised it plenty of these luxuries. He had meant to range for them through all the soldiers' vegetable-allotments, and ransack the Parade-ground flower-beds. But all at once the thrush had fallen over on its side, fluttering and struggling—and Carolan had been so sorry for it that he had thrust his pudgy hand into the cage, and taken the poor sufferer out with the intention of nursing it in his pinafore for a little, and then letting it go free, since it was so unhappy in captivity.
But when he had bidden it fly away it had had no strength to do so. It had lain helpless in his hands, and the strange quivering thrills that had passed through its slender body had communicated themselves to the child. Something was taking place—some change was coming. Without previous knowledge he had been sure of that.
And the change had come, with the drawing of the thin gray membrane from the corners next the beak, over the round yellow-rimmed eyes. Then the upper and underlids had sealed themselves over the veiled eyeballs—the quick panting had changed to long gasps, the head had rolled to one side helplessly—and with a long shuddering convulsion the thing had taken place. The slender body had stiffened in Carolan's hand, the glossy wings had closed down tightly against its dappled sides, its scaly legs had stretched out rigidly and not been drawn back again. And a voice that seemed to speak inside Carolan had said to him: "This is death!"
Now broke in upon his immature brain a flash of blinding brilliancy. Milly, who had been his mother, was dead, like the thrush. He shut his eyes, and saw her lying, very pale and pretty and helpless, with ruffled brown hair the exact color of the bird's feathers, and beautiful brown eyes—why was he so certain that they had been brown?—all dim and filmy, and her slender body and long graceful limbs now quivering and convulsed, and now growing rigid and stiff. And a lump rose in his throat, and a tear splashed on the front of the brand-new blue jacket, and another that would have fallen was dried by a glow of inspiration. For he had dug a grave with a sherd of broken flower-pot in the angle of one of the official flower-beds that decorated the oblong patch of lawn before the Mess House, and buried the dead thrush in the shelter of a clump of daffodils, and said a "Hail Mary!" for it, because, though Miss Josey and Mrs. Breagh—whom he would never call "Mamma" again!—termed it a Popish practice,—Father Haygarty said that one ought to pray for the dead....
Surely one ought to pray for the soul of Milly. She would understand, it was to be hoped! why one had never done it before. Somebody would tell her Carolan hadn't known! Poor, poor Milly! He wished he had been there with his new tin sword when that snuffing Thing came out of the jungle and frightened her so that she had died....
He looked about the nursery. There stood Monica's Indian-cane cot, and Alan's green-painted iron crib on either side of Nurse's wooden four-poster. At the bed-head above Nurse's pillow was nailed a little plaster Calvary, and a miniature holy-water stoup, and over Carolan's little folding camp-bedstead hung a noble crucifix of ebony and carved ivory, so large and so massive that two iron staples held it in its place.
The Face of the pendent, tortured Figure—there was death in that also. It seemed to the child that the breast beneath the drooped, thorn-encircled Head, heaved with long sighs, that the lips gasped for breath—that long shuddering spasms rippled through the tortured Body, bringing home, as nothing ever had before, the meaning of the lines that the boy had learned as a parrot might....
"He was crucified also for us ... suffered ... and was buried...."
And that was why we prayed to Him for the dead and buried people, because He had suffered death and gone down into the dark grave, and He knew how to help souls.... Carolan nailed his resolution to say a nightly "Our Father" for poor Milly to the masthead of determination, unaware that Father Haygarty had incurred the displeasure of Mrs. Breagh by urging the necessary discharge of this filial duty as a reason why the boy should be told about his mother who was dead.
We may guess that the influence of the second wife had inspired the Captain to insist that the hour of enlightenment should be deferred indefinitely. And if any one had suggested to Mrs.. Breagh that she had been prompted by a belated jealousy of her predecessor, she would have been genuinely horrified at the idea.
Nurse came in as Carolan decided on his course of future loyalty, and started at the sight of the sturdy little figure standing, with legs planted wide apart, on the shabby nursery drugget, its childish brows puckered with profound thought.
"Now may the Saints stand between you and the mischief I know you're plannin'!" said Nurse, who prided herself on reading thoughts in faces. "Is ut playin' acreybats on the windy-sill, or shavin' wid the Captain's razor? Spake ut out!"
Carolan spoke.
"Mamma is not my muvver, an' I shall call her Mrs. Breagh always!"
"God be good to me!" said Nurse, quite pale, and putting her hand to her side. "An' who tould ye that, an' set the two eyes of ye blazin' like coals of fire?"
"You saided it!—and she saided it—and Dada saided it—when I was playin' robber's cave under the sittin'-woom table," Carolan proclaimed. "And I'm goin' to pray for Milly—that's my weal muvver—because she's dead—even if they say I shan't!"
"There'll none durst," said Nurse rather awfully, "wid Bridget Povah to the fore! And what else?"
Slightly damped by the prospect of being permitted to carry out his shining new intention without interruption, Carolan reflected.
"Nuffing," he said at last, "'cept that I want to know how much is seven fousand golding sovereigns? For I am going to have them when I grow up."
"Sure!" said Nurse, slightly bewildered, "a sovereign is the same as a wan-pound note! Ye have seen thim things, have ye not?"
Carolan had seen the soiled rags of Bank paper changing hands on market-days, and the recollection wrinkled his nose.
"'Tis quare talk ye have," said Nurse, "about the sivin thousand wan-pound notes. 'Tis a little haystack av them ye would be gettin' from the gintleman at the Bank. Where arr ye goin' now, ye onaisy wandherer? Wid your hoop for a rowl in the Barrack-square? Take your cap—an' remember that wheniver ye're clane out av sight, Biddy Povah has her eye on you!"
But Carolan was already out of the room and half-way down the stairs.
Outside under the blue sky, with its flocks of fleecy white clouds all hurrying southward, it was easy to forget the things that had hurt. The crackle of the sandy gravel underfoot, the purr of the iron hoop in the metal driving-hook soothed and stimulated; the ringing clatter when one got upon the cobblestones, and the echo when one came under the archway of the Barrack-gate—were familiar, pleasant things.
Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated—for at all times and seasons of the year a nipping wind howled through the stony tunnel that ended in the arch of the Barrack-gateway—and pacing his official strip of pavement, that began at the yellow-painted sentry-box with the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big spiked gate. And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings sprawling on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers, and the sergeant sitting on his cot stiffly stocked and fully accoutered—that had the charm of a well-known, never too familiar sight. To other senses besides the eyes and ears appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched blue gingham umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank mounted on two barrels, against the great bare wall on the left of the Barrack-entrance, exercising a privilege permitted to no other, because Mary's stone ginger-pop bottles might be relied upon as containing nothing else....
It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place, bordered by a line of shops and houses, broken by the bridge, under which flowed a famous salmon-river, was seething with people out to buy and sell and enjoy themselves. On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a modern building of no great design, animated bundles of rags containing female penitents performing the devotions of the Stations round it. While upreared upon the summit of an isolated rock beyond the rushing river, perched the ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient castle from which the town derived its name; once held against the Commonwealth by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet bedded in the massive masonry.
The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about blared on the ear from a field where some caravans of strolling show-people had encamped themselves. Rows of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down, waited their squireen owners in the bleakest angle of the market-place; and in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them, covered with gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had jolted and joggled from their distant homes, and—the last bargain made—would jolt and joggle back again.
Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese, butter, and other dairy-produce. Crates were crammed with quacking ducks and loudly cackling fowls. Strings of shaggy-footed horses and knots of isolated cows were ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be purchaser; hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive mood, alive and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig. In reeking basements below the shops—cellars where potatoes, cabbages, and onions were peddled to the poorest, and turf and firewood were sold in ha'p'orths—piles of pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted herring in popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to be frizzled over turf-embers for supper.
A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a clarionet on a square of smooth flagstones in the middle of the market-place. And—for this was the West of Ireland in the early fifties—the bright red or dark blue cloaks and white frilled caps of the matrons, the short stuff petticoats, chintz jacket-bodices and bright handkerchief-shawls of the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches, blue yarn stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed chimney-pots—gave charm and variety to the shifting scene.
Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse, strapping, red-faced women who daily patroled the square in the neighborhood of the Barracks; whisky-hardened viragoes whose uncovered heads of greasy hair, thrust into sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and uniform attire of clean starched cotton print, worn over a multiplicity of whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,—as did their coarse speech and loud laughter,—members of the ancient sisterhood of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient profession in the world.
Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers of the greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of captive red-coats. One of them was fairly sober, and sulky at being thus paraded under the eyes of his countrymen. The other, a raw young recruit, half-fuddled with libations of porter and whisky, staggeringly promenaded the pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in the pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic comment from the crowd into shaking off the women who supported,—while they feigned to lean on him,—and challenging the critic of morals, in broad Yorkshire, to a bout at fisticuffs.
"Leggo o' me, tha——!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians. "Cannowt a chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an' armin' him? As for tha!"—he addressed the critic—"Ah'll teach tha to meddle wi' thy betters. If tha'rt a mon—coom on!"
"Fight, is ut? Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a fist wud level ye," commented the censor, turning on his heel contemptuously. Upon which, the belligerent, taking the act as a confession of recreancy, wrenched himself from the women, and, staggering forward, came into violent contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed to tempt customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk, or rolled gaily down the gutter; pursued with yells of joy by certain ragged urchins who usually were to be found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.
Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the upset and the subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions on the soldier's drunken clumsiness and the predatory activity of the raiders, shook her fists at their flying heels.
"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha! Wull sixpence neet maak guid thy loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman, thrusting a hand into his trousers-pocket in search of the coin. Then his flaming face darkened heavily, and he said, withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah havena a brass farden t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence. Mak't oop to her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"
And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her arm in the soldier's and affectionately ogling him:
"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and a kiss av the handsome boy you are will pay me!"
Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive sense of things that are incomprehensible, saw with a strange shock and thrill that never quite passed away.
The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump clean fingers with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings on them was dashed to the flags by a fierce blow of the old, bony, wrinkled hand....
"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said sternly to the staring woman, "and thrapse upon your way!"
And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the faces in the crowded market-place seemed to be looking that way, the woman had picked up the coin; and as her comrades hurried on, had slunk after them, leaving the tipsy soldier standing there.
"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him, "that ye are hastin' quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid Thim Wans?"
And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that might have meant anything, and hung his head sulkily, and gone staggering upon his way, but in an opposite direction to that taken by the women. And Mary Daa looked after him long and sorrowfully.
"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the apple-woman, for Mary and he had struck up a friendship over divers ha'p'orths of nuts and pink peppermint-candy sticks, "what are they, and why are they wicked?"
Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel of her huge and venerable bonnet, and became aware of a small boy with a scarlet topknot and a pair of honest gray eyes.
"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were shining drops of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the cracked glasses of her huge iron-framed spectacles were foggy. She took them off, and wiped them on her old green plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been referring to Thim Wans.
"What arr they? Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous planets; thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate up the bodies an' souls av men! Look me in the face wid your child's eyes, ye that will be a man wan day, an' get by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you! An' when the pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av you—kape them worruds in mind!"
Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny, purchased a cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock, and went home crunching. He had learned a good deal that day. The mystery of Death and the power of Money had been revealed to him. Also, he had gained some slight preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against the human soul in its march through this strange world of ours, and of the strange and foul and ugly things that lie hidden beneath the shining surface of Life.