The Untilled Field

by George Moore

"I think she said, your reverence, she was going to send you ten pounds."

"That's very good of her," and this proof that a public and religious spirit was not yet dead in his parish softened the priest's temper, and, thinking to please him and perhaps escape a scolding, Pat began to calculate how much Biddy had saved.

"She must be worth, I'm thinking, close on one hundred pounds to-day." As the priest did not answer, he said, "I wouldn't be surprised if she was worth another fifty."

"Hardly as much as that," said the priest.

"Hadn't her aunt the house we're living in before mother came to Kilmore, and they used to have the house full of lodgers all the summer. It's true that her aunt didn't pay her any wages, but when she died she left her a hundred pounds, and she has been making money ever since."

This allusion to Biddy's poultry reminded the priest that he had once asked Biddy what had put the idea of a poultry farm into her head, and she had told him that when she was taking up the lodgers' meals at her aunt's she used to have to stop and lean against the banisters, so heavy were the trays.

"One day I slipped and hurt myself, and I was lying on my back for more than two years, and all the time I could see the fowls pecking in the yard, for my bed was by the window. I thought I would like to keep fowls when I was older."

The priest remembered the old woman standing before him telling him of her accident, and while listening he had watched her, undecided whether she could be called a hunchback. Her shoulders were higher than shoulders usually are, she was jerked forward from the waist, and she had the long, thin arms, and the long, thin face, and the pathetic eyes of the hunchback. Perhaps she guessed his thoughts. She said:—

"In those days we used to go blackberrying with the boys. We used to run all over the hills."

He did not think she had said anything else, but she had said the words in such a way that they suggested a great deal—they suggested that she had once been very happy, and that she had suffered very soon the loss of all her woman's hopes. A few weeks, a few months, between her convalescence and her disappointment had been all her woman's life. The thought that life is but a little thing passed across the priest's mind, and then he looked at Pat Connex and wondered what was to be done with him. His conduct at the wedding would have to be inquired into, and the marriage that was being arranged would have to be broken off if Kate's flight could be attributed to him.