The rock was everywhere. Even the hazels were at last squeezed out of existence, and inland, over the slowly swelling hills, it lay like the pavement of some giant city, that had been jarred from its symmetry by an earthquake. A mile away, on the further side of this iron belt, a clump of trees rose conspicuously by the lake side, round a two-storied white house, and towards these trees the road wound its sinuous way. The grass began to show in larger and larger patches between the rocks, and the indomitable hazels crept again out of the crannies, and raised their low canopies over the heads of the browsing sheep and goats. A stream, brown with turf-mould, and fierce with battles with the boulders, made a boundary between the stony wilderness and the dark green pastures of Gurthnamuckla. It dashed under a high-backed little bridge with such excitement that the black mare, for all her intelligence, curved her neck, and sidled away from the parapet towards Lambert’s horse.
Just beyond the bridge, a repulsive-looking old man was sitting on a heap of stones, turning over the contents of a dirty linen pouch. Beside him were an empty milk-can, and a black-and-white dog which had begun by trying to be a collie, and had relapsed into an indifferent attempt at a grey-hound. It greeted the riders with the usual volley of barking, and its owner let fall some of the coppers that he was counting over, in his haste to strike at it with the long stick that was lying beside him.
“Have done! Sailor! Blasht yer sowl! Have done!” then, with honeyed obsequiousness, “yer honour’s welcome, Mr. Lambert.”
“Is Miss Duffy in the house?” asked Lambert.
“She is, she is, yer honour,” he answered, in the nasal mumble peculiar to his class, getting up and beginning to shuffle after the horses; “but what young lady is this at all? Isn’t she very grand, God bless her!”
“She’s Miss Fitzpatrick, Miss Mullen’s cousin, Billy,” answered Lambert graciously; approbation could not come from a source too low for him to be susceptible to it.
The old man came up beside Francie, and, clutching the skirt of her habit, blinked at her with sly and swimming eyes.
“Fitzpatrick is it? Begob I knew her grannema well; she was a fine hearty woman, the Lord have mercy on her! And she never seen me without she’d give me a shixpence or maybe a shillin’.”
Francie was skilled in the repulse of the Dublin beggar, but this ancestral precedent was something for which she was not prepared. The clutch tightened on her habit and the disgusting old face almost touched it, as Billy pressed close to her, mouthing out incomprehensible blessings and entreaties. She felt afraid of his red eyes and clawing fingers, and she turned helplessly to Lambert.
“Here, be off now, Billy, you old fool!” he said; “we’ve had enough of you. Run and open the gate.”