He was away to the kitchen and back before David had much more than time enough to rub the gathering frost from the window-pane and look out for a possible return of his fairy. Nothing was to be seen, however, but the snow and the trees and the trail of tiny footprints; and big Barney was beside him in the window-nook again, with a mysterious “knowledgeable look” on his face.
“Aye, there’s time and light enough still in the west to see the tale through.” He paused for an instant.
“Ye know, laddy, over in Ireland they’re not keeping Christmas the same as ye do here—the poor, I mean. ’Tis generally the day after, St. Stephen’s Day, tho’ sometimes ’tis St. Stephen’s Eve that they manage a bit of a feast and merrymaking. Them that has little shares with them that has less; and afterward the neighbors gather about the turf fire for a story-telling. Aye, many’s the strange tale ye will hear over in Ireland on one of them nights. And here’s the tale Old Con, the tinker, used for to be telling about his great-uncle Teig—the most close-fisted man in all of Inneskillen.”
And here again is the tale as Barney retold it and David heard it, as he sat in the window-nook of the lodge at dusk-hour just seven days before Christmas.
It was the Eve of St. Stephen, and Teig sat alone by his fire with naught in his cupboard but a pinch of tea and a bare mixing of meal, and a heart inside of him as soft and warm as the ice on the water-bucket outside the door. The turf was near burnt on the hearth—a handful of golden cinders left, just; and Teig took to counting them greedily on his fingers.
“There’s one, two, three, an’ four an’ five,” he laughed. “Faith, there be more bits o’ real gold hid undther the loose clay in the corner.”
It was the truth; and it was the scraping and scrooching for the last piece that had left Teig’s cupboard bare of a Christmas dinner.
“Gold is betther nor eatin’ an’ dthrinkin’. An’ if ye have naught to give, there’ll be naught asked of ye.” And he laughed again.
He was thinking of the neighbors, and the doles of food and piggins of milk that would pass over their thresholds that night to the vagabonds and paupers who were sure to come begging. And on the heels of that thought followed another: who would be giving old Shawn his dinner? Shawn lived a stone’s-throw from Teig, alone, in a wee tumbled-in cabin; and for a score of years past Teig had stood on the door-step every Christmas Eve, and, making a hollow of his two hands, had called across the road:
“Hey, there, Shawn, will ye come over for a sup?”