The Dew of Their Youth

by S. R. Crockett

But whether for the purpose of mere tying up, or to carry out the extreme sentence of the law, I did not gather. I resolved that, in the latter case, Crazy should come with me to the school-house. There was a place I knew of there, a crib at the end of the stick-cellar, which at a pinch would do admirably for Crazy. And I felt sure that Crazy, wholly incompetent at his own business of shepherding, would be a perfect “boys’ dog” and a permanent acquisition to the Academy of Eden Valley. There was, of course, my father to consider. But I did not stop to think of that. The classics and Fred Esquillant were enough for him at the moment.

As she passed various cottage doors my grandmother had several bouts with joiners who blocked the road with unfinished carts and diffusive pots of red paint, with small wayside cowherds in charge of animals which considered the hedge-rows as their appointed pasturage, with boys going fishing who had learned at school that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and who practised their Euclid to the detriment of their neighbours’ fences.

But nothing of great moment occurred till, on the same knoll from which he had summoned us to view the smoke of the ghost’s afternoon fire at Marnhoul, we encountered Boyd Connoway. He was stretched at length, as usual, one leg crossed negligently over the other. He had pivoted his head against a log for the purpose of seeing in three directions about him—towards the Great House, and both up and down the main road. A straw, believed to be always the same, was in his mouth.

A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors—quite incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight of the pet idler of Eden Valley.

She rushed instantly to the assault, much as she would have led a forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle through a load of hay, were employed in hopeful work when compared with Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this mass of self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway’s long-lost conscience.

“Why are you not at home?” she cried; “I heard Bridget complaining as I came by, that she could not feed the pig because she had nobody to bring her wood for her boiler fire—and she in the middle of her blanket washing!”

The husband whom fate and her own youthful folly had given to Bridget Connoway, took off his battered and weather-beaten hat with the native politeness of a born Irishman. He did not rise. That would have been too much to expect of him. But he uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way about.

“Mistress Lyon,” he said indolently, but with the soft, well-anointed utterance of the blarneying islander, which does not die away till the third generation of the poorest exile from Erin, “now, misthress dear, consider!”

“I have considered you for seven years, and seven to the back of that, Boyd Connoway, and you are a lazy lout! Every year you get worse!”

My grandmother counted nothing so stimulating as truth spoken to the face. She acted, with all save her male grandchildren, on the ancient principle that “Praise to the face is an open disgrace!” And Boyd, in his time, had been singularly exempt from this kind of disgrace, so far as my grandmother was concerned.