‘Is not that our village yonder, where I see the smoke?’
‘Yes; and there on the stile sits your little groom awaiting you. I shall get down here.’
‘Stay where you are, sir. It is by your blunder, not by your presence, that you might compromise me.’ And this time her voice caught a tone of sharp severity that suppressed reply.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE EXCURSION
The little village of Cruhan-bawn, into which they now drove, was, in every detail of wretchedness, dirt, ruin, and desolation, intensely Irish. A small branch of the well-known bog-stream, the ‘Brusna,’ divided one part of the village from the other, and between these two settlements so separated there raged a most rancorous hatred and jealousy, and Cruhan-beg, as the smaller collection of hovels was called, detested Cruhan-bawn with an intensity of dislike that might have sufficed for a national antipathy, where race, language, and traditions had contributed their aids to the animosity.
There was, however, one real and valid reason for this inveterate jealousy. The inhabitants of Cruhan-beg—who lived, as they said themselves, ‘beyond the river’—strenuously refused to pay any rent for their hovels; while ‘the cis-Brusnaites,’ as they may be termed, demeaned themselves to the condition of tenants in so far as to acknowledge the obligation of rent, though the oldest inhabitant vowed he had never seen a receipt in his life, nor had the very least conception of a gale-day.
If, therefore, actually, there was not much to separate them on the score of principle, they were widely apart in theory, and the sturdy denizens of the smaller village looked down upon the others as the ignoble slaves of a Saxon tyranny. The village in its entirety—for the division was a purely local and arbitrary one—belonged to Miss Betty O’Shea, forming the extreme edge of her estate as it merged into the vast bog; and, with the habitual fate of frontier populations, it contained more people of lawless lives and reckless habits than were to be found for miles around. There was not a resource of her ingenuity she had not employed for years back to bring these refractory subjects into the pale of a respectable tenantry. Every process of the law had been essayed in turn. They had been hunted down by the police, unroofed, and turned into the wide bog; their chattels had been ‘canted,’ and themselves—a last resource—cursed from the altar; but with that strange tenacity that pertains to life where there is little to live for, these creatures survived all modes of persecution, and came back into their ruined hovels to defy the law and beard the Church, and went on living—in some strange, mysterious way of their own—an open challenge to all political economy, and a sore puzzle to the Times commissioner when he came to report on the condition of the cottier in Ireland.
At certain seasons of county excitement—such as an election or an unusually weighty assizes—it was not deemed perfectly safe to visit the village, and even the police would not have adventured on the step except with a responsible force. At other periods, the most marked feature of the place would be that of utter vacuity and desolation. A single inhabitant here and there smoking listlessly at his door—a group of women, with their arms concealed beneath their aprons, crouching under a ruined wall—or a few ragged children, too miserable and dispirited even for play, would be all that would be seen.