“Ah sure, the Avenue!” said Rickeen, as one that sets aside the thing that is obvious. “No one wouldn’t know what ’d be in it. There was one that seen fairies as thick as grass in it, and they havin’ red caps on them!”
He turned from us, and fell to outlining the scraws that he was going to cut. We watched him for a space, while the afternoon shadow of the house crept nearer to us down the slope, and Martin began to talk of the coach that drives to Ross when the head of the house dies. At the death of her grandfather she had been too little to comprehend such things.
“I can only remember ‘The Old Governor’ in snatches,” she said.
From across the lake the rattle of the mail car on the Galway road came, faintly, and mysterious enough to have posed as the sound of the ghostly coach. The staccato hunting yelps of the Puppet had died down, and from among the boughs of a small beech tree, a little hapless dwarf of a tree, twisted by a hundred thwarted intentions, a thrush flung a spray of notes into the air, bright and sudden as an April shower. Rickeen paused.
“Ye’d like to be leshnin’ to the birds screechin’,” he remarked appreciatively; “But now, Miss Wilet, as for the coach, I dunno. There’s quare things goin’; ye couldn’t hardly say what harm ’d be in them, only ye’d friken when ye’d meet them.” He gave his white flannel bauneen, which is a loose coat, an extra twist, stuffing the corners that he had twisted together inside the band of his trousers, and entered upon his narration.
“I remember well the time the Owld Governor, that’s yer grandfather, died. Your father was back in Swineford, in the County Mayo, the same time, and the Misthress sent for me and she give me a letther for him. ‘Take the steamer to Cong,’ says she, ‘and dhrive then, and don’t rest till ye’ll find him.’
“But sure Louisa Laffey, that was at the Gate-house that time, she says to me, ‘Do not,’ says she, ‘take the steamer at all,’ says she. ‘Go across the ferry,’ says she, ‘an’ dhrive to Headford and ye’ll get another car there.’
“I was a big lump of a boy that time, twenty years an’ more maybe, and faith, I didn’t let on, but God knows I was afraid goin’ in it. ’Twas night on me when I got to Headford, and when I wint to th’ hotel that was in it, faith sorra car was before me; but the gerr’l that was mindin’ th’ hotel says, ‘D’ye see the house over with the light in it?’ ‘I do,’ says I. ‘Maybe ye’d get a car in it,’ says she. Faith, the man that was there ruz out of his bed to come with me!”
A pause, to permit us to recognise the devotion of the man.
“We went dhrivin’ then,” resumed Rickeen, with a spacious gesture, “dhrivin’ always, and it deep in the night, and we gettin’ on till it was near Claremorris, back in the County Mayo. Well, there was a hill there, and a big wood, and when we come there was a river, and it up with the road, and what ’d rise out of it only two wild duck! Faith, the horse gave a lep and threwn herself down, an’ meself was thrown a-past her, and the man the other side, and he broke his little finger, and the harness was broke.”