CHAPTER VII—THE O’MAHONY’S HOME-WELCOME.
The road from the brow of the hill down to the plain wound in such devious courses through rock-lined defiles and bog-paths shrouded with stunted tangles of scrub-trees, that an hour elapsed before The O’Mahony again saw the fires which had been lighted to greet his return. This hour’s drive went in silence, for the way was too rough for talk. Darkness fell, and then the full moon rose and wrapped the wild landscape in strange, misty lights and weird shadows.
All at once the car emerged from the obscurity of overhanging trees and bowlders, and the travellers found themselves in the very heart of the hamlet of Muirisc. The road they had been traversing seemed to have come suddenly to an end in a great barn-yard, in the center of which a bonfire was blazing, and around which, in the reddish flickering half-lights, a lot of curiously shaped stone buildings, little and big, old and new, were jumbled in sprawling picturesqueness.
About the fire a considerable crowd of persons were gathered—thin, little men in long coats and knee-breeches; old, white-capped women with large, black hooded cloaks; younger women with crimson petticoats and bare feet and ankles, children of all sizes and ages clustering about their skirts—perhaps a hundred souls in all. Though The O’Mahony had very little poetic imagination or pictorial sensibility, he was conscious that the spectacle was a curious one.
As the car came to a stop, O’Daly leaped lightly to the ground, and ran over to the throng by the bonfire.
“Now thin!” he called out, with vehemence, “have ye swallowed ye’re tongues? Follow me now! Cheers for The O’Mahony! Now thin! One—two—”
The little man waved his arms, and at the signal, led by his piping voice, the assembled villagers sent up a concerted shout, which filled the shadowed rookeries round about with rival echoes of “hurrahs” and “hurroos,” and then broke, like an exploding rocket, into a shower of high pitched, unintelligible ejaculations.
Amidst this welcoming chorus of remarks, which he could not understand, The O’Mahony alighted, and walked toward the fire, closely followed by Jerry, and by Malachy, the driver, bearing the bags.
For a moment he almost feared to be overthrown by the spontaneous rush which the black-cloaked old women made upon him, clutching at his arms and shoulders and deafening his ears with a babel of outlandish sounds. But O’Daly came instantly to his rescue, pushing back the eager crones with vigorous roughness, and scolding them in two languages in sharp peremptory tones.