“No; you’re my mother’s blood, and a son of hers will never draw it from your heart; but I can make sure of you again; stop a bit.”
He ran to his own prostrate horse, took off its bridle and its saddle-girth, and with both secured his uncle’s limbs beyond all possibility of the struggler being able to escape from their control.
“There,” resumed Shamus; “lie there till we have time to send an ould friend to see you, that, I’ll go bail, will take good care of your four bones. And do you know where I’m going now? You tould me, on Lunnon Bridge, that you knew that, at least,” pointing to the abbey; “ay, and the quare ould hearthstone that’s to be found in it. And so, look at this, uncle, honey.” He vaulted upon his relative’s horse. “I’m just goin’ to lift it off o’ the barrel-pot full of good ould goold, and you have only to cry halves, and you’ll get it, as, sure as that the big divil is in the town you came from.”
Nance Dempsey was nursing her new-born babe, sitting up in her straw, and doing very well after her late illness, when old Noreen tottered in from the front of the ruin to tell her that “the body they were just speaking about was driving up the hill mad, like as if’t was his own sperit in great throuble.” And the listener had not recovered from her surprise when Shamus ran into the shed, flung himself, kneeling, by her side, caught her in his arms, then seized her infant, covered it with kisses, and then, roughly throwing it in her lap, turned to the fireplace, raised one of the rocky seats lying near it, poised the ponderous mass over the hearthstone, and shivered into pieces, with one crash, that solid barrier between him and his visionary world of wealth.
“It’s cracked he is out an’ out of a certainty,” said Nance, looking terrified at her husband.
“Nothing else am I,” shouted Shamus, after groping under the broken slab; “an’, for a token, get along wid yourself out of this, ould gran!”
He started up and seized her by the shoulder. Noreen remonstrated. He stooped for a stone; she ran; he pursued her to the arches of the ruin. She stopped half-way down the descent. He pelted her with clods to the bottom, and along a good piece of her road homeward, and then danced back into his wife’s presence.
“Now, Nance,” he cried, “now that we’re by ourselves, what noise is this like?”
“And he took out han’fuls after han’fuls of the ould goold afore her face, my dear,” added the original narrator of this story.
“An’ after the gaugers and their crony, Ould Nick, ran off wid the uncle of him, Nance and he and the childer lived together in their father’s and mother’s house; and if they didn’t live and die happy, I wish that you and I may.”