The conversation abruptly closed, as the priest who was to have performed the Funeral Office scorched up on his bicycle, scarlet-faced, and half an hour late. As if the sight of him set the seal of the irrevocable upon what had been done, the widow of Tom Cashen broke into hoarse wailing; she was arduously consoled and taken away, and her husband was left behind in the solitude, he, who hated to be alone, and was afraid to pass the churchyard at night.
A discussion raged as to the opening of his strong box, the men who stamped down the earth on the grave using the action as an emphasis to their assertions. At length the churchyard emptied, the evening wind was raw, and in the gloom the white chapel on the hill stared with its gaunt windows, impervious to the life histories of its own making impossible as an accessory to sentiment.
"WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NO-ASE?"
Obvious duty has seldom gone more suavely hand-in-hand with perfect enjoyment than in the attendance of the parish, practically en masse, at the levée held next day, and for many succeeding days, by the Triplets. A grey road runs north and south past their cabin door, level on the level face of the bog for a shelterless half-mile, and neither wake nor "Stations" could have commanded a more representative gathering than went and came upon it in those moist autumn afternoons. The gander who lorded it over the nibbled strip of grass in front of the cabin yard was worn down to amiability by a hundred assaults on new comers and an equal number of glorious returns to the applause of his family; the half-bred collie, coiled under a cart, closed his cunning eyes to aggressions that were beyond all barking; a five-year-old boy with tough tight curls of amber, and an appallingly dirty face, regarded me from the doorstep with brazen sang froid as I approached, and said in a loud and winding drawl: "What have ye on yer no-ase?" Praise is seldom perfected in the mouth of the babe and suckling. I removed my pince-nez, and passed with difficulty into a doorway filled with people, the blue smoke from the interior filling up the crevices. The father of the Triplets, a lanky young man, in the Sunday clothes in which he had just returned from making his application for the King's Bounty, was according an unchanging, helpless grin to the shafts of felicitation that beset him, the most barbed being screamed in Irish by the old women, to the rapture of the audience.
Behind this unequal strife the Triplets held their court, in a cradle by the fire, canopied with coarse flannel, and rocked unceasingly, one would say maddeningly, by a female relative with an expression of pomp befitting the show-woman. It suggested the bellringer who said, "We preached a very fine sermon to-day." The wicker walls rolled creakily. The rockers were uneven, so was the earthen floor beneath them, and each oscillation contained three separate jerks. In this bewildering world, composed of sallow blankets and an unceasing earthquake, the three brand new souls reposed as best they might; the show-woman's grimy hand parted their firmament of flannel, and revealed three minute faces of the pallor of lard, dome-like in forehead, with tiny and precisely similar features, wonderfully absorbed in sleep. The infant of a day old appeals unfailingly to the compassion, but its most impassioned adherent must admit that it is out of drawing. The light from the open door struck suddenly into the cradle, as some one clove a path through the assemblage; one of the absorbed faces worked in vexation, elderly, miserable vexation. Tears, too, angry and pitiful; the long slit of opening eyelid was full of them, the unseeing disc of dull blue within swam in them, the stately bald head turned to terra-cotta.
"SHE'S THE LIVELIEST OF THEM, GOD BLESS HER!"
"She's the liveliest of them, God bless her!" said the show-woman, in high admiration, "but as for the little one-een next the fire, she'll never do a day's good. 'Twasn't hardly making day this morning when I had a pot of water on the fire for her."
Being interpreted, this meant that the little one-een by the fire had in the cold autumn dawn retraced her way so far into the white trance of the unknown that all was made ready for washing and laying her out. She lay like a doll made of pale puckered wax, her sleeping lids had a lavender tone, and the shadows about her mouth were grey. Next morning the cocks had crowed but once when the pot of water simmered again over the turf fire, and the weak and lonely combat with death ended in defeat.