THE HOLY WELL, SALRUCK.
his mouth for a night and a day but prayin’; there wasn’t a saint in Heaven, big nor little, he didn’t dhraw down on the head o’ the same well. Afther that thin ag’in, he got his books, and he wint back in the room, and he was readin’ within there till he was in a paspiration. Oh, faith! it’s not known what he suffered first and last; but before night the wather was runnin’ into the well the same as if ye’d be fillin’ it out of a kettle, and it’s in it ever and always since that time. The priest put a great pinance on the sisther, I’m told, but, in spite of all, he was bet by the fairies afther that till he was near killed, they were that jealous for the way he put the wather back. The curse o’ the crows on thim midges!” she continued, with sudden fury, striking at the halo of gnats that surrounded her head as well as ours, “the divil sich an atin’ ever I got.”
We had been slaughtering them with unavailing frenzy for some time, and at the end of her story we fled from the graveyard, and made for the high-road.
The hospitalities of the shooting-lodge did not end with Sibbie. Its hostess was waiting to meet the two strangers as they toiled, dishevelled and midge-bitten, to its gate, and with a most confiding kindness, brought them in and gave them the afternoon tea for which their souls yearned.
CHAPTER X.
WE have never met Julius Cæsar, or the Duke of Wellington, or General Booth, but we are convinced that not one of the three could boast a manner as martial or a soul as dauntless as the sporting curate on a holiday. We came to this conclusion slowly at the Leenane table d’hôte, and there also the companion idea occurred to us that in biting ferocity and headlong violence of behaviour the extra ginger-ale of temperance far exceeds the brandy-and-soda. Opposite to us sat three of them—not brandies-and-sodas—curates; and our glasses were filled with two of them—not curates—bottles of ginger-ale; and so the manners and customs of both classes were, as it were, forced upon us conjointly. If our reflections appear unreliable we are not prepared to defend them; they were formed through the blinding mist of tears that followed each fiery sip of the ginger-ale.
The curates, as we have said, were three in number; and comprised three of the leading types of their class—the dark and heavily moustached, the red-whiskered and pasty, the clean-shaven and athletic. The two former sat together and roystered on a pint of claret, which they warmed in the palms of their hands, and smacked their lips over with a reckless jollity and dark allusions to swashbuckling days at Cambridge. The third sat apart from his cloth, among a group of Oxford undergraduates, with whom he interchanged reminiscences, and from the elevation of his three terms seniority regaled them with tales of hair-breadth escapes from proctors and bulldogs, and, in especial, of the enormities of one Greene, of Pembroke, in connection with a breakfast given by a man who had been sent “a big cake from home.” The story was long, and profusely decked with terms of the most esoteric undergraduate slang, but we gathered that Greene, having become what the curate leniently termed “a little on,” had cast the still uncut cake out of the window at a policeman, upon the spike of whose helmet it became impaled. We have since heard with real regret that the Oxford police do not wear spikes on their helmets; but we adhere to the main facts of the story, and when we tell it ourselves we call the policeman a volunteer. The robust voice of the narrator clove its way into the loud current of the fishing talk, the table paused over its gooseberry pie and custard to laugh, and even the Cambridge curates were compelled to a compassionate smile. They were a good deal older than any of the Oxford clan, and it seemed to us that the superior modernity and flavour of the Oxford stories had a depressing effect upon them. They finished their claret unostentatiously, and talked to each other in lowered tones about pocket cameras and safety bicycles.