"Where's the hurry at all, supposin'?" said his aunt, desperately.
"Blathers!" said Ody, "there's room in the cart waitin' ready. You'd be better bundlin' yourself into it than to be sittin' here all the mornin' delayin' us."
"'Deed, then, beggars drive as chape as they walk," she said, "and I might as well be gettin' the lift as far as you can take me."
The old white-faced pony preferred to pace slowly on the long bog-road, and, as Ody always respected his whims, the journey barely ended with the March daylight. The old, sad-visaged woman sat all the while under her muffling shawl in silent apathy undisturbed, and as during the latter stages of the drive a blinking drowsiness co-operated with her want of interest in the scenes through which she jogged, she naturally looked around her in bewilderment when roused by the jerk of the stopping cart. She expected to find herself in the streets of Moynalone, drawn up, probably, at the door of the big Union workhouse. But, instead of its long rows of casements staring down blankly on her, she saw only the one mole's-eye window of a tiny whitewashed cabin peering at her from beneath its thatched eaves, and all about it the great lonely bog spreading away with never a trace of any town.
"Och, wirrasthrew, man, what are you after doin' on me?" she said, beginning to bewail herself querulously. "Sure you haven't brought me to any place at all. Every hour of the black night it'ill be afore ever I'll get there now, and the Union'ill be shut, and what's to become of me then I dunno. You'd a right to ha' tould me——"
"Blathers!" said her nephew, "git down out of that wid your yawpin'. D'you want the folk here to think you're a sackful of ould hins? And go in and be seein' after a bit of fire; it's late enough to be sure. What fool's talk have you about the Union, and bad luck to it? You'll find the things for the supper in the inside of the ould churn. Union, moyah!"
And old Moggy, alighting with cramped limbs, entered her home at Lisconnel, feeling blissfully as if she had been unpacked out of a most horrible nightmare.
Ody was probably actuated by several unassorted motives in dealing thus with his superfluous old great-aunt. Pride and pity and perversity and generosity—all had, no doubt, some influence upon his conduct, while long use and wont had unawares given her the same sort of hold upon his affections that was possessed in a much higher degree by Rory, the pony, whose humours were of course easier to put up with than human foibles. But the old woman measured his magnanimity by the immensity of the benefit which it had conferred upon her, and with a strong revulsion of feeling she formed an opinion of his virtues and talents as exalted quite as that which she had often secretly jibed at in his father. Accordingly she sang his praises unweariedly among their new neighbours, and, as Ody was vain enough not to dislike the echoes which reached him, he soon began to look upon her with more complacency, so that they agreed much better than heretofore. She found no small solace, too, after her long cronyless isolation up at the Three Mile Farm, in the company of Mrs. Joyce, and Mrs. Keogh, and the other Lisconnel dames. In short, a kind of Indian summer of content seemed to be setting in for her. Moggy's mind, however, was of the self-tormenting type, and soon devised means of marring it. They took the form of apprehensions that Ody would presently get married, and that thereupon "the wife would put her out of it." If she had only known, Ody was at this time, as for many years ensuing, far too much taken up with himself, and Rory, and "the little consarn away in the bog," to entertain any such project; but as it was she felt that the event, with all its direful consequences, perpetually hung over her, and might at any moment bring her new prosperity to a miserable end. Her impending great-niece-in-law was a vaguely appalling spectre, who threatened to take the roof from over her head, and the bit out of her mouth, and turn her adrift to founder hopelessly on the workhouse doorsteps. But it was not until more than a year after their settlement at Lisconnel that she endued her bogey with one definite form, by making up her mind that Ody "was thinkin' of Theresa Joyce."
Her reason was that she had one fine evening seen him carrying Theresa's water-pail for her down the hill, an ordinary act of courtesy enough, but the sight of which suddenly darkened the world before her foolish old eyes more dismally than if the golden fleece of the summer sunset had been smothered under the blackest pall ever woven in cloud-looms. "Fine colloguin' they're havin' together," she said to herself as she watched them and their long shadows down the slope, "and he sloppin' the half of it over the edge instead of mindin' what he's doin'. It's throwin' me out on the side of the road she'll be." In reality Theresa was wondering why there would be, a quare black sidimint like, in the water on some days and not on others; and Ody was explaining the phenomenon confidently and erroneously on an extemporised theory of his own. But to old Moggy's fears it seemed quite possible that they might be fixing the wedding-day. For Theresa Joyce herself she had no manner of misliking at all, considering her to be "a very dacint plisant-spoken little girl," but Mrs. Ody Rafferty seemed none the less certain to evict her without remorse. And Ody's aunt retired to rest that night in a despondent mood.
It was just about this time that Denis O'Meara came to stay at Lisconnel on sick leave. The O'Mearas lived in one of the three cabins which used to stand near the O'Beirne's forge, but which the great Famine and Fever year left tenantless for ever after. Their household consisted of the two infirm old people with their melancholy middle-aged son Tim, and their sickly grandson, little Joe Egan, who was Denis's cousin. Now Denis had been wounded in a battle somewhere out in India, and had been promoted sergeant—"and he but a young boyo so to spake"—and owned four medals, and stood six foot three in his stockings, and was as fine a figure of a man as you could wish to see, let alone his gorgeous scarlet uniform, which was a sight to behold; so if he was not a hero, get me one, as we say in Lisconnel. But Lisconnel was quite satisfied with him in that worshipful character, and found it very easy to adopt the appropriate attitude towards him. For Denis was good-natured and cheerful and never conceited at all, nor vain when there was anything more to the purpose for him to be; qualities which have an irresistible fascination in distinguished personages and make their followers' duty a pleasure. It was wonderful how his sojourn enlivened everybody, even his mournful little old grandmother, whose gratification expressed itself chiefly in regrets that his poor father and mother had not lived to see the illigant man he'd grown. When she said this to the younger matrons of Lisconnel, they thought that the crathurs' fate was commiserable indeed, and earnestly hoped that they themselves would be spared, plase God, to witness the splendid careers that lay before their own Denises at present playing among the puddles. But the older ones had to content themselves with the knowledge that if they had only just so happened to get the same chances, their own lads would have done the very same things; a fact which seemed to give them a sort of hypothetical proprietorship in Denis's glory. His presence brightened up society as a tall poppy brightens up all a sombre potato-plot, and his conversation brought strange lands and extraordinary events within one remove—a single pair of eyes and ears—of everybody's experience. For many years after "the summer we had Denis O'Meara up here" made a vivid time-mark in our annals; and I fancy that the stories of some of his exploits, with their outlines looming large through a mythical mistiness, still float in our atmosphere. There is at least one legend relating how a soldier out in the East cut off a mad elephant's head at a stroke of his sabre, with the hero of which Denis O'Meara could probably be identified. Altogether he was so exceptionally brilliant a figure both in himself and in his fortunes, that the interest which he excited had no element of envy in it, as might have been the case had emulation seemed less utterly beyond everybody's reach.