Part 8

“There are two of him,” says the peeler.

“Swear ’em,” says he, and Kilsheelan stepped up to a great murdering joker of a clerk, who gave him a book in his hand and roared at him: “I swear by Almighty God....”

“Yes,” says Kilsheelan.

“Swear it,” says the clerk.

“Indeed I do.”

“You must repeat it,” says the clerk.

“I will, sir.”

“Well, repeat it then,” says he.

“And what will I repeat?”

So he told him again and he repeated it. Then the clerk goes on: “... that the evidence I give....”

“Yes,” says Kilsheelan.

“Say those words, if you please.”

“The words! Och, give me the head of ’em again!”

So he told him again and he repeated it. Then the clerk goes on: “ ... shall be the truth....”

“It will,” says Kilsheelan.

“ ... and nothing but the truth....”

“Yes, begod, indeed!”

“Say ‘nothing but the truth,’” roared the clerk.

“No!” says Kilsheelan.

“Say ‘nothing.’”

“All right,” says Kilsheelan.

“Can’t you say ’nothing but the truth'?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Well, say it!”

“I will, so,” says he, “the scrapings of sense on it all!”

So they swore them both, and their evidence they gave.

“Very good,” his lordship said, “a most important and opportune discovery, in the nick of time, by the tracing of God. There is a reward of fifty pounds offered for the finding of this property and jewels: fifty pounds you will get in due course.”

They said they were obliged to him, though sorrow a one of them knew what he meant by a due course, nor where it was.

Then a lawyer man got the rights of the whole case; he was the cunningest man ever lived in the city of Cork; no one could match him, and he made it straight and he made it clear.

Old Horan must have returned from his journey unbeknown on the night of the gale when the deed was done. Perhaps he had made a poor profit on his toil, for there was little of his own coin found on his body. He saw the two drunks staggering along the bay—he clove in the head of the one with a bit of pipe—he hit the other a good whack to still or stiffen him—he got an axe from the yard—he shore off the Mexican’s two hands, for the rings were grown tight and wouldn’t be drawn from his fat fingers. Perhaps he dragged the captain home to his bed—you couldn’t be sure of that—but put the hand in the captain’s pocket he did, and then went to the paddock to bury the treasure. But a blast of wind whipped and wove some of the hemp strand around his limbs, binding him sudden. He was all huffled and hogled and went mad with the fear struggling, the hemp rolling him and binding him till he was strangled or smothered.

And that is what happened him, believe it or no, but believe it you should. It was the tracing of God on him for his dark crime.

Within a week of it Peter Corcoran was away out of gaol, a stout walking man again, free in Ballygoveen. But on the day of his release he did not go near the ropewalker’s house. The Horans were there waiting, and the two old silly men, but he did not go next or near them. The next day Kilsheelan said to her: “Strange it is my cousin not to seek you, and he a sneezer for gallantry.”

“’Tis no wonder at all,” replied Christine, “and he with his picture in all the papers.”

“But he had a right to have come now and you caring him in his black misfortune,” said Tom Tool.

“Well, he will not come then,” Christine said in her soft voice, “in regard of the red murder on the soul of my dad. And why should he put a mark on his family, and he the captain of a ship.”

In the afternoon Tom Tool and the other went walking to try if they should see him, and they did see him at a hotel, but he was hurrying from it; he had a frieze coat on him and a bag in his hand.

“Well, who are you at all?” asks Peter Corcoran.

“You are my cousin from Ameriky,” says Kilsheelan.

“Is that so? And I never heard it,” says Peter. “What’s your name?”

The Man from Kilsheelan hung down his old head and couldn’t answer him, but Tom Tool said: “Drifty he is, sir, he forgets his little name.”

“Astray is he? My mother said I’ve cousins in Roscommon, d’ye know ’em? the Twingeings....”

“Twingeing! Owen Twingeing it is!” roared Kilsheelan. “’Tis my name! ’Tis my name! ’Tis my name!” and he danced about squawking like a parrot in a frenzy.

“If it’s Owen Twingeing you are, I’ll bring you to my mother in Manhattan.” The captain grabbed up his bag. “Haste now, come along out of it. I’m going from the cunning town this minute, bad sleep to it for ever and a month! There’s a cart waiting to catch me the boat train to Queenstown. Will you go? Now?”

“Holy God contrive it,” said Kilsheelan; his voice was wheezy as an old goat, and he made to go off with him. “Good-day to you, Tom Tool, you’ll get all the reward and endure a rich life from this out, fortune on it all, a fortune on it all!”

And the two of them were gone in a twink.

Tom Tool went back to the Horans then; night was beginning to dusk and to darken. As he went up the ropewalk Christine came to him from her potato gardens and gave him signs, he to be quiet and follow her down to the strand. So he followed her down to the strand and told her all that happened, till she was vexed and full of tender words for the old fool.

“Aren’t you the spit of misfortune? It would daunt a saint, so it would, and scrape a tear from silky Satan’s eye. Those two deluderers, they’ve but the drainings of half a heart between ’em. And he not willing to lift the feather of a thought on me? I’d not forget him till there’s ten days in a week and every one of ’em lucky. But ... but ... isn’t Peter Corcoran the nice name for a captain man, the very pattern?”

She gave him a little bundle into his hands. “There’s a loaf and a cut of meat. You’d best be stirring from here.”

“Yes,” he said, and stood looking stupid, for his mind was in a dream. The rock at one horn of the bay had a red glow on it like the shawl on the neck of a lady, but the other was black now. A man was dragging a turf boat up the beach.

“Listen, you,” said Christine. “There’s two upstart men in the house now, seeking you and the other. There’s trouble and damage on the head of it. From the asylum they are. To the police they have been, to put an embargo on the reward, and sorra a sixpence you’ll receive of the fifty pounds of it: to the expenses of the asylum it must go, they say. The treachery! Devil and all, the blood sweating on every coin of it would rot the palm of a nigger. Do you hear me at all?”

She gave him a little shaking for he was standing stupid, gazing at the bay which was dying into grave darkness except for the wash of its broken waves.

“Do you hear me at all? It’s quit now you should, my little old man, or they’ll be taking you.”

“Ah, yes, sure, I hear you, Christine; thank you kindly. Just looking and listening I was. I’ll be stirring from it now, and I’ll get on and I’ll go. Just looking and listening I was, just a wee look.”

“Then good-bye to you, Mr. Tool,” said Christine Horan, and turning from him she left him in the darkness and went running up the ropewalk to her home.

_Tribute_

Two honest young men lived in Braddle, worked together at the spinning mills at Braddle, and courted the same girl in the town of Braddle, a girl named Patience who was poor and pretty. One of them, Nathan Regent, who wore cloth uppers to his best boots, was steady, silent, and dignified, but Tony Vassall, the other, was such a happy-go-lucky fellow that he soon carried the good will of Patience in his heart, in his handsome face, in his pocket at the end of his nickel watch chain, or wherever the sign of requited love is carried by the happy lover. The virtue of steadiness, you see, can be measured only by the years, and this Tony had put such a hurry into the tender bosom of Patience: silence may very well be golden, but it is a currency not easy to negotiate in the kingdom of courtship; dignity is so much less than simple faith that it is unable to move even one mountain, it charms the hearts only of bank managers and bishops.

So Patience married Tony Vassall and Nathan turned his attention to other things, among them to a girl who had a neat little fortune—and Nathan married that.

Braddle is a large gaunt hill covered with dull little houses, and it has flowing from its side a stream which feeds a gigantic and beneficent mill. Without that mill—as everybody in Braddle knew, for it was there that everybody in Braddle worked—the heart of Braddle would cease to beat. Tony went on working at the mill. So did Nathan in a way, but he had a cute ambitious wife, and what with her money and influence he was soon made a manager of one of the departments. Tony went on working at the mill. In a few more years Nathan’s steadiness so increased his opportunities that he became joint manager of the whole works. Then his colleague died; he was appointed sole manager, and his wealth became so great that eventually Nathan and Nathan’s wife bought the entire concern. Tony went on working at the mill. He now had two sons and a daughter, Nancy, as well as his wife Patience, so that even his possessions may be said to have increased although his position was no different from what it had been for twenty years.

The Regents, now living just outside Braddle, had one child, a daughter named Olive, of the same age as Nancy. She was very beautiful and had been educated at a school to which she rode on a bicycle until she was eighteen.

About that time, you must know, the country embarked upon a disastrous campaign, a war so calamitous that every sacrifice was demanded of Braddle. The Braddle mills were worn from their very bearings by their colossal efforts, increasing by day or by night, to provide what were called the sinews of war. Almost everybody in Braddle grew white and thin and sullen with the strain of constant labour. Not quite everybody, for the Regents received such a vast increase of wealth that their eyes sparkled; they scarcely knew what to do with it; their faces were neither white nor sullen.

“In times like these,” declared Nathan’s wife, “we must help our country still more, still more We must help; let us lend our money to the country.”

“Yes,” said Nathan.

So they lent their money to their country. The country paid them tribute, and therefore, as the Regent wealth continued to flow in, they helped their country more and more; they even lent the tribute back to the country and received yet more tribute for that.

“In times like these,” said the country, “we must have more men, more men we must have.” And so Nathan went and sat upon a Tribunal; for, as everybody in Braddle knew, if the mills of Braddle ceased to grind, the heart of Braddle would cease to beat.

“What can we do to help our country?” asked Tony Vassall of his master, “we have no money to lend.”

“No?” was the reply. “But you can give your strong son Dan.”

Tony gave his son Dan to the country.

“Good-bye, dear son,” said his father, and his brother and his sister Nancy said “Good-bye.” His mother kissed him.

Dan was killed in battle; his sister Nancy took his place at the mill.

In a little while the neighbours said to Tony Vassall: “What a fine strong son is your young Albert Edward!”

And Tony gave his son Albert Edward to the country.

“Good-bye, dear son,” said his father; his sister kissed him, his mother wept on his breast.

Albert Edward was killed in battle; his mother took his place at the mill.

But the war did not cease; though friend and foe alike were almost drowned in blood it seemed as powerful as eternity, and in time Tony Vassall too went to battle and was killed. The country gave Patience a widow’s pension, as well as a touching inducement to marry again; she died of grief. Many people died in those days, it was not strange at all. Nathan and his wife got so rich that after the war they died of over-eating, and their daughter Olive came into a vast fortune and a Trustee.

The Trustee went on lending the Braddle money to the country, the country went on sending large sums of interest to Olive (which was the country’s tribute to her because of her parents’ unforgotten, and indeed unforgettable, kindness), while Braddle went on with its work of enabling the country to do this. For when the war came to an end the country told Braddle that those who had not given their lives must now turn to and really work, work harder than before the war, much, much harder, or the tribute could not be paid and the heart of Braddle would therefore cease to beat. Braddle folk saw that this was true, only too true, and they did as they were told.

The Vassall girl, Nancy, married a man who had done deeds of valour in the war. He was a mill hand like her father, and they had two sons, Daniel and Albert Edward. Olive married a grand man, though it is true he was not very grand to look at. He had a small sharp nose, but they did not matter very much because when you looked at him in profile his bouncing red cheeks quite hid the small sharp nose, as completely as two hills hide a little barn in a valley. Olive lived in a grand mansion with numerous servants who helped her to rear a little family of one, a girl named Mercy, who also had a small sharp nose and round red cheeks.

Every year after the survivors’ return from the war Olive gave a supper to her workpeople and their families, hundreds of them; for six hours there would be feasting and toys, music and dancing. Every year Olive would make a little speech to them all, reminding them all of their duty to Braddle and Braddle’s duty to the country, although, indeed, she did not remind them of the country’s tribute to Olive. That was perhaps a theme unfitting to touch upon, it would have been boastful and quite unbecoming.

“These are grave times for our country,” Olive would declare, year after year: “her responsibilities are enormous, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel.”

Every year one of the workmen would make a little speech in reply, thanking Olive for enabling the heart of Braddle to continue its beats, calling down the spiritual blessings of heaven and the golden blessings of the world upon Olive’s golden head. One year the honour of replying fell to the husband of Nancy, and he was more than usually eloquent for on that very day their two sons had commenced to doff bobbins at the mill. No one applauded louder than Nancy’s little Dan or Nancy’s Albert Edward, unless it was Nancy herself. Olive was always much moved on these occasions. She felt that she did not really know these people, that she would never know them; she wanted to go on seeing them, being with them, and living with rapture in their workaday world. But she did not do this.

“How beautiful it all is!” she would sigh to her daughter, Mercy, who accompanied her. “I am so happy. All these dear people are being cared for by us, just simply us. God’s scheme of creation—you see—the Almighty—we are his agents—we must always remember that. It goes on for years, years upon years it goes on. It will go on, of course, yes, for ever; the heart of Braddle will not cease to beat. The old ones die, the young grow old, the children mature and marry and keep the mill going. When I am dead ...”

“Mamma, mamma!”

“O yes, indeed, one day! Then _you_ will have to look after all these things, Mercy, and you will talk to them—just like me. Yes, to own the mill is a grave and difficult thing, only those who own them know how grave and difficult; it calls forth all one’s deepest and rarest qualities; but it is a divine position, a noble responsibility. And the people really love me—I think.”

_The Handsome Lady_

Towards the close of the nineteenth century the parish of Tull was a genial but angular hamlet hung out on the north side of a midland hill, with scarcely renown enough to get itself marked on a map. Its felicities, whatever they might be, lay some miles distant from a railway station, and so were seldom regarded, being neither boasted of by the inhabitants nor visited by strangers.

But here as elsewhere people were born and, as unusual, unconspicuously born. John Pettigrove made a note of them then, and when people came in their turns to die Pettigrove made a note of that too, for he was the district registrar. In between whiles, like fish in a pond, they were immersed in labour until the Divine Angler hooked them to the bank, and then, as is the custom, they were conspicuously buried and laboured presumably no more.

The registrar was perhaps the one person who had love and praise for the simple place. He was born and bred in Tull, he had never left Tull, and at forty years of age was as firmly attached to it as the black clock to the tower of Tull Church, which never recorded anything but twenty minutes past four. His wife Carrie, a delicate woman, was also satisfied with Tull, but as she owned two or three small pieces of house property there her fancy may not have been entirely beyond suspicion; possession, as you might say, being nine points of the prejudice just as it is of the law. A year or two after their marriage Carrie began to suffer from a complication of ailments that turned her into a permanent invalid; she was seldom seen out of the house and under her misfortunes she peaked and pined, she was troublesome, there was no pleasing her. If Pettigrove went about unshaven she was vexed; it was unclean, it was lazy, disgusting; but when he once appeared with his moustache shaven off she was exceedingly angry; it was scandalous, it was shameful, maddening. There is no pleasing some women—what is a man to do? When he began to let it grow again and encouraged a beard she was more tyrannical than ever.

The grey church was small and looked shrunken, as if it had sagged; it seemed to stoop down upon the green yard, but the stones and mounds, the cypress and holly, the strangely faded blue of a door that led through the churchyard wall to the mansion of the vicar, were beautiful without pretence, and though as often as not the parson’s goats used to graze among the graves and had been known to follow him into the nave, there was about the ground, the indulgent dimness under the trees, and the tower with its unmoving clock, the very delicacy of solitude. It inspired compassion and not cynicism as, peering as it were through the glass of antiquity, the stranger gazed upon its mortal register. In its peace, its beauty, and its age, all those pious records and hopes inscribed upon its stones, seemed not uttered in pride nor all in vain. But to speak truth the church’s grace was partly the achievement of its lofty situation. A road climbing up from sloping fields turned abruptly and traversed the village, sidling up to the church; there, having apparently satisfied some itch of curiosity, it turned abruptly again and trundled back another way into that northern prospect of farms and forest that lay in the direction of Whitewater Copse, Hangman’s Corner, and One O’clock.

It was that prospect which most delighted Pettigrove, for he was a simple-minded countryman full of ambling content. Not even the church allured him so much, for though it pleased him and was just at his own threshold, he never entered it at all. Once upon a time there had been talk of him joining the church choir, for he had a pleasant singing voice, but he would not go.

“It’s flying in the face of Providence,” cried his exasperated wife—her mind, too, was a falsetto one: “You’ve as strong a voice as anyone in Tull, in fact stronger, not that that is saying much, for Tull air don’t seem good for songsters if you may judge by that choir. The air is too thick maybe, I can’t say, it certainly oppresses my own chest, or perhaps it’s too thin, I don’t thrive on it myself; but you’ve the strength and it would do you credit; you’d be a credit to yourself and it would be a credit to me. But that won’t move you! I can’t tell what you’d be at; a drunken man ’ull get sober again, but a fool ... well, there!”

John, unwilling to be a credit, would mumble an objection to being tied down to that sort of thing. That was just like him, no spontaneity, no tidiness in his mind. Whenever he addressed himself to any discussion he had, as you might say, to tuck up his intellectual sleeves, give a hitch to his argumentative trousers. So he went on singing, just when he had a mind to it, old country songs, for he disliked what he called “gimcrack ballads about buzzums and roses.”

Pettigrove’s occupation dealt with the extreme features of existence, but he himself had no extreme notions. He was a good medium type of man mentally and something more than that physically, but nevertheless he was a disappointment to his wife—he never gave her any opportunity to shine by his reflected light. She had nurtured foolish ideas of him first as a figure of romance, then of some social importance; he ought to be a parish councillor or develop eminence somehow in their way of life. But John was nothing like this, he did not develop, or shine, or offer counsel, he was just a big, solid, happy man. There were times when his childless wife hated every ounce and sign of him, when his fair clipped beard and hair, which she declared were the colour of jute, and his stolidity, sickened her.

“I do my duty by him and, please God, I’ll continue to do it. I’m a humble woman and easily satisfied. An afflicted woman has no chance, no chance at all,” she said. After twelve years of wedded life Pettigrove sometimes vaguely wondered what it would have been like not to have married anybody.

One Michaelmas a small house belonging to Mrs. Pettigrove was let to a widow from Eastbourne. Mrs. Cronshaw was a fine upstanding woman, gracefully grave and, as the neighbours said, clean as a pink. For several evenings after she had taken possession of the house Pettigrove, who was a very handy sort of man, worked upon some alterations to her garden, and at the end of the third or fourth evening she had invited him into her bower to sip a glass of some cordial, and she thanked him for his labours.

“Not at all, Mrs. Cronshaw.” And he drank to her very good fortune. Just that and no more.

The next evening she did the same, and the very next evening to that again. And so it was not long before they spoke of themselves to each other, turn and turn about as you might say. She was the widow of an ironmonger who had died two years before, and the ironmonger’s very astute brother had given her an annuity in exchange for her interest in the business. Without family and with few friends she had been lonely.

“But Tull is such a hearty place,” she said. “It’s beautiful. One might forget to be lonely.”

“Be sure of that,” commented Pettigrove. They had the light of two candles and a blazing fire. She grew kind and more communicative to him; a strangely, disturbingly attractive woman, dark, with an abundance of well-dressed hair and a figure of charm. She had carpet all over her floor; nobody else in Tull dreamed of such a thing. She did not cover her old dark table with a cloth as everybody else habitually did. The pictures on the wall were real, and the black-lined sofa had cushions on it of violet silk which she sometimes actually sat upon. There was a dainty dresser with china and things, a bureau, and a tall clock that told the exact time. But there was no music, music made her melancholy. In Pettigrove’s home there were things like these but they were not the same. His bureau was jammed in a corner with flowerpots upon its top; his pictures comprised two photo prints of a public park in Swansea—his wife had bought them at an auction sale. Their dresser was a cumbersome thing with knobs and hooks and jars and bottles, and the tall clock never chimed the hours. The very armchairs at Mrs. Cronshaw’s were wells of such solid comfort that it made him feel uncomfortable to use them.