Jim and Wally

by Mary Grant Bruce

Let the herdsman who walks in your high haunted places

Give him strength and courage, and weave his dreams alway:

Let your cairn-heaped hero-dead reveal their grand exultant faces.

And the Gentle Folk be good to him betwixt the dark and day.”

Ethna Carbery.

SIR John O’Neill paid his formal call on the Australians, tactfully choosing a day so hopelessly wet as to forbid any thought of fishing or “bog-lepping.” Bog excursions had a peculiar fascination for Norah and the boys, who loved rambling among the deep brown pools, leaping from tuft to tuft of sound grass, and making experiments—frequently disastrous—in mossy surfaces that looked sound, but were very likely to prove quagmires which effectually removed any lurking doubt in Norah’s mind that an Irish bog could be boggy. They sought the bogs in almost all weathers. But the day that brought Sir John to the old house on Lough Aniller was one of such pitiless rain that prudence, in the shape of Mr. Linton, forbade any excursion to patients so newly recovered as Jim and Wally.

Even in the most homelike of boarding-houses a wet day is apt to be depressing to open-air people. It was with relief, mingled with amazement, that they saw the motor coming up the dripping avenue in the afternoon; and a moment later Bridget, obviously impressed, ushered Sir John into the drawing-room. The Lintons were established as favourites in the household on their own merits; but it was placing them on quite a different standard of respect to find that they were visited by the “ould stock.”

Every one enjoyed the visit. Sir John was better, the lines of pain that Wally had seen nearly gone from his face. There was an almost boyish eagerness about him; he was keen to know them all, to hear their frank talk, to make friends with them. David Linton and his son liked him from the moment they met his eyes; brown eyes, with something of the mute appeal that lies in the eyes of a dog. As for Norah, in all her life she had not known what it meant to be so sorry for anyone as she felt for this brave, crippled man, with his high-bred face and gallant bearing. Afterwards, when John O’Neill looked back at heir meeting, one of his memories of Norah was that she had never seemed to see his misshapen shoulders.

That first visit had stretched over the whole afternoon, no one quite knew how. Outside, the rain streamed down the window-panes and lashed the lough into waves; but within the old house a fire of turf and bog-wood blazed, casting ruddy lights on the furniture, and sending its pleasant, acrid smell into the room. They gathered round it in a half-circle and “yarned”—exchanging stories of Ireland, and Australia, and London and war. There could be no talk in those grim days without war-stories and war-rumours; but after a time they drifted away to far-off times, and Sir John, beginning half-timidly with an old Irish legend, found that he had a suddenly enthralled circle of listeners, who demanded more, and yet more—tales of high and far-off times and of the mighty heroes of Ireland: Finn MacCool and the Fianna, Cuchulain, Angus Og, and the half-real, half-legendary past that holds Ireland in a mist of romance. He knew it all, and loved it, telling the stories with the quiet pride of a descendant of a race whose roots were deep in the soil of the land that had borne them: and the children of the country that had no history hung upon his words.

“What must you think of me?” he said at last, when, in a pause, the clock in the hall boomed out six strokes. “I come to call, and I remain to an unseemly hour spinning yarns. The fact is, you—well, you just aren’t strangers at all, and I certainly knew you before. Were you in Ireland in a previous incarnation, Miss Norah?”