Neck and neck with the copper turkey cock came Old Michael, equal in malignity, but less active. He was nominally a stable helper, and was also a self-constituted spy in the service of the government—or rather of the governess—and a more implacable tale-bearer never truckled to authorities.
"The two o' them is round back o' the cow-house, Miss. It's now this minute I seen them climbing out over the garden gate!"
Thus we, prone on the slant of the cow-house roof, under the drooping laurel branches, with our pockets crammed with green, young apples, have listened, panting, to our betrayal. Any other man on the place would have lied in our cause with chapter and verse.
There was a tradition about Old Michael that he had once been bitten by a mad dog, and had thereupon, as a recognised antidote, killed the dog and eaten its liver. There was something luridly attractive about the transaction, and we often discussed the possibility as to whether the liver had thoroughly played its part, and whether it might not be that he suffered from slight chronic hydrophobia, and that, at any moment, he might turn snarling and foaming upon us. His ordinary manner lent itself to the fancy, his rages were so explosive, his yells at the horses under his charge so ungoverned, so screeching. One of these was a white pony that might have walked straight out of a fairy tale, in which he would have been exclusively employed as palfrey to the principal Princess. He had been bought through, or from, we never quite knew which, an old farmer, one Jer Sullivan, who lived at the head of a long and lonely Atlantic cove, and was as much fisherman as farmer, and more beggar than either. His main source of income was a petition in which was feelingly narrated the manner of death that befell his only horse.
"She was clifted one night by dogs hunting her, and drowned in the tide, and I have no one now to trust to, only the Lord."
Thus sorrowed the petition, Christmas by Christmas, getting a little browner as time went by, but no less insatiable. One windy Christmas Eve Jer Sullivan and the petition had appeared as usual, together with the horde of old women who, by long-established custom, received a dole on that day.
"ANCIENT WIDOWHOOD AND SPINSTERDOM"
In the twilight of the December morning they came by twos and threes, fluttering up the avenue, looking, with their long dark cloaks and thin red legs and feet, like the choughs that used to breed in the neighbouring cliffs. Upon the wet grass on the way round to the stable yard they squatted in a gabbling row, waiting for the coming forth of the master, and chaffing Jer Sullivan for having joined the ranks of ancient widowhood and spinsterdom, with the unquenchable spirit that lurks in the oldest and most forlorn Irish peasant woman. On this occasion, Jer, having exhausted his stock of repartee, planted himself on the hall-door steps.
"Is the granddada comin'?" he called through the window to us, assembled in the hall. His face, wrinkled and grizzly, was pressed against the glass, his filmy eye was full of unutterable things.