Jim and Wally

by Mary Grant Bruce

A woman, barefooted and with a shawl over her head, had come across the grass from the cottage. She curtseyed to O’Neill.

“It was left this morning, sir,” she said, indicating the crutch. “Sure, the man that owned it was in a bad way: he come from Dublin, an’ he crippled in his hip. On a side-car they brought him, and there was two men to lift him on and off it, and he yellow with the dint of the pain he had. I seen him limping on his crutch across to the well. And when he went away he walked over to the car as aisy as you or me, and not a limp on him at all, and him throwing a leg on to the car like a boy.”

“You mean to say he went away cured?” exclaimed Mr. Linton.

“Sure, there’s his crutch,” said the woman, simply. “He’d no more use at all for it.”

“Well-l!” The Australians looked blankly at each other.

“ ’Tis fourteen years I’ve been living over beyant,” said the woman. “I’ve seen them come on sticks and on crutches; some of them carried, and some of them put on cars: but they all walked away—all that had faith in the saint. Why wouldn’t they?”

It was a brief question that somehow left them without any answer, since simple faith is too big a thing to meddle with. They said good-bye to the woman and went back to the Rock, where the groom was waiting to help his master in the climb—an old groom with a face like a withered rosy apple. The ascent was not difficult: a winding path led to the summit of the Rock, and they were soon at the top.

“Between them, Elizabeth and Cromwell didn’t leave us many of our old monuments,” said O’Neill, looking away across the country. “But thank goodness they couldn’t touch the Doon Rock!”

The summit was almost flat; a long narrow plateau with soft grass growing in its hollows. One end was wider than the other, with a kind of saddle connecting the two: and in the middle of the smaller end was a great flat stone that looked almost like an altar. All about the high, precipitous eminence the country lay like an unrolled map far beneath them: a wide expanse of flat moor and field and fallow, in the midst of which the great Rock showed, almost startling in its rugged steepness. Little villages were dotted here and there, and sometimes could be seen the blue gleam of water. The white smoke of a train made a creeping line against the dark bog.

Con and the groom had placed the luncheon-basket in a grassy hollow where there was shelter from the breeze that swept keenly across the high Rock; and had retreated with the instinctive delicacy of the Irish peasant, who never intrudes upon “the genthry” when eating, and himself prefers to eat alone. After lunch, Norah and Wally collected the débris of the feast and burned it under the lee side of a boulder, in the belief that no decent person leaves such things as picnic-papers for the next comer to see: and then they strolled across the narrow saddle to the stone on the farther side, where the others had already wandered.