“The greatest convenience in the world it was,” declared Mrs. Hugh, “to be able to see you crossing it of a morning, and you coming in from the lower field, the way I could put the bit of bacon down ready for the breakfast.”
“Musha, good gracious, woman alive, if that’s all’s ailing you, where’s the need to be so exact?” said Hugh.
“Exact, is it?” said Mrs. Hugh. “Maybe you’d like to have the whole of it melted away into grease with being set on the fire half an hour too soon. Or else you to be standing about open-mouthed under me feet, like a starving terrier, waiting till it’s fit to eat. That’s how it’ll be, anyway, like it or lump it. And I used to be watching for old Matty Flanaghan going by with the post-bag, and the Keoghs coming back from early Mass—’twas as good as an extra clock for telling the time. But now, with that big lump of a thing stuck there, I might as well be shut up inside of any old prison. Them Quins done it a-purpose to annoy me, so they did. Sorra another raison had they, for what else ‘ud make them take and build it behind our backs? But put up with it is what I won’t do. Stepping over to them I’ll be this night, and letting them know how little I think of themselves and their mean tricks. And if I see old Peter, I’ll tell him you’ll have the law of him unless he gets it cleared away out of that to-morrow. Bedad will I; and yourself ‘ud say the same, if you had as much spirit in you as a moulting chicken.”
“Have sense, Julia,” Hugh remonstrated, wedging in a protest with difficulty. “Stop where you are, now, quiet and peaceable. It’s only making a show of yourself you’d be, running out that way raging about nothing What foolish talk have you about the man moving his rick, that he’s just after building? You might as well be bidding him move Knockrinkin over yonder; and he more betoken with his haggart bursting full this minyit. What annoyance is there in the matter, Julia woman? Sure in any case it won’t be any great while standing there, you may depend, and they bedding cattle with it, let alone very belike sending in cartloads of it every week to the market. Just content yourself and be aisy.”
But, as he had more than half expected, Hugh spoke to no purpose. His wife would not be said by him, and his expostulations, in fact, merely hastened her impetuous departure on her visit to the Quins. She returned even more exasperated than she had set out, and from her report of the interview Hugh gathered that she had stormed with much violence, giving everybody “the height of abuse.” He was fain to console himself with the rather mortifying reflection that “the Quins knew well enough she did be apt to take up with quare nonsensical fantigues, that nobody minded.”
A hope that the morrow might find her more reasonable proved entirely vain, as many additional grievances, resented with increasing bitterness, had been evolved during the night. When Hugh went out to his work, he left her asserting, and believing, that the noise of the wind whistling round the rick hadn’t let her get a wink of sleep, and when he came in again he found her on the point of setting off to the police barracks that she might charge the Quins with having “littered her yard all over with wisps of straw blown off their hijjis old rick, till the unfortunate hens couldn’t see the ground under their feet.” This outrage, it appeared, had been aggravated by Micky Quinn, who remarked tauntingly, that “she had a right to feel herself obligated to them for doing her a fine piece of thatching”; and an interchange of similar rejoinders had taken place. On the present occasion Hugh was indeed able forcibly to stop her wild expedition by locking both the house doors. But as he knew that these strong measures could not be more than a temporary expedient, and as arguments were very bootless, he was at a loss to determine what he should do next. She had begun to drop such menacing hints about lighted matches and rags soaked in paraffin, that he felt loth to leave her at large within reach of those dangerous materials. Already it had come to his knowledge that rumours were afloat in the village about how Mrs. Lennon was threatening to burn down the Quin’s rick. The truth was that she had said as much to several calling neighbours in the course of that day.
Hugh’s perplexity was therefore not a little relieved when, early on the following morning, his wife’s eldest married sister, Mrs. Mackay, from beyond Kilcraig, looked in on her way to market. Mrs. Mackay, an energetic person with a strong will regulated by abundant common sense, was one among the few people of whom her flighty sister Julia stood in awe. In this emergency her own observations, together with her brother-in-law’s statements, soon showed her how matters stood, and she promptly decided what steps to take. “Our best plan,” she said to Hugh apart, “is for Julia to come along home with me. She’ll be out of the way there of aught to stir up her mind, and she can stop till she gets pacified again. ‘Twill be no great while before she’s glad enough to come back here, rick or no rick, you may depend; for we’re all through-other up at our place the now, with one of the childer sick, and ne’er a girl kept. I’ll give her plenty to do helping me, and it’s much if she won’t be very soon wishing she was at home in her own comfortable house. She doesn’t know when she’s well off, bedad,” Mrs. Mackay added, glancing half enviously round the tidy little kitchen.
Hugh fell in with her views at once. The Mackays lived a couple of miles at the other side of Kilcraig, so that Julia would be safely out of harm’s way, and he could trust her sister to keep her from doing anything disastrously foolish. So he cheerfully saw his wife depart, and though her last words were a vehement asseveration that she would “never set foot next or nigh the place again, as long as there did be two straws slanting together in Quin’s dirty old rick,” he confidently expected to see her there once more without much delay.
Up at the Mackay’s struggling farmstead on the side of Knockrinkin, Mrs. Hugh found things dull enough. Internally the house was incommodious and crowded to uncomfortable excess, and its surroundings externally were desolate and lonesome. Mrs. Hugh remarked discontentedly that if the inside and outside of it were mixed together, they’d be better off, anyway, for room to turn round in, and quiet to hear themselves speak; but the operation appeared impracticable. Nor were the domestic tasks with which Mrs. Mackay provided her by any means to her taste, and her discontent continued. One evening, shortly after her arrival, she grew so tired of hearing the children squabble and squawl, that as soon as supper was over she slipped out at the back door into the soft-aired twilight. She proposed to wile away some time by searching the furzy, many-bouldered field for mushrooms and blackberries, but neither could she find, and in her quest she wandered a long way down the swarded slope, until she came to a low boundary wall. There she stopped, and stood looking across the valley towards a wooden patch beyond the village, which contained her own dwelling, as well as that of the hateful Quins. Her wrath against them burned more fiercely than ever at the reflection that they were clearly to blame for her present tedious exile. The thought of going home, she said to herself, she couldn’t abide, by reason of their old rick.
Through the dusk, the darker mass of those trees loomed indistinctly like a stain on the dimness, and Mrs. Hugh fancied that she could make out just the site of the Quin’s rick—the best of bad luck to it. Why didn’t some decent tramp take and sling a spark of a lighted match into it, and he passing by with his pipe? As she strained her eyes towards it, she suddenly saw on the very spot the glimmer of a golden-red light, glancing out among the shadowy trees. For a moment she was startled and half scared, but then she remembered that it would be nothing more than the harvest moon rising up big through the mist. Hadn’t she seen it the night before looking the size of ten? This explanation, at least, half disappointed her, and she said to herself with dissatisfaction, watching the gleam waver and brighten, that it looked as red as fire, and she wished to goodness it was the same as it looked. “There’d be nothing aisier than setting the whole concern in a blaze standing so convanient to the road,” she thought, while she gazed and gazed with tantalised vindictiveness over the low, tumble-down wall.