Part 24

“Ar'n't I waiting for the gorloch, to take up to The Beg? I won't be sint back wid it, I'll engage.”

“Ah! Pat, why trouble yourself?--Couldn't we keep it ourselves?--Good luck would follow us,--and we've no child of our own, Pat.”

Well, where's the use of making a long story of it?--the wife persuaded Pat, with much ado, and a dale of begging and beseeching, to let her keep the little crature herself; but he insisted upon first taking it off to the lady who bought The Beg.

“I'll take the little thing up to her at once,” says Pat; “and may be, well get something for our charity.” And sure enough so they did, for my lady kissed the little crature betuxt the two eyes, and gave Pat a trifle in hand, and promised to allow him so much a week, for keeping the child, until she grew--did I tell you she was a girl?--until she grew up intirely. And a fine young woman she's grown, and all the boys about are dying for her as, to say nothing of her good-looking face, Pat has promised her a fortune of fifteen pounds; and I don't know but it might be a match with her and my niece's son Paudrigg, wasn't it for one thing;--she won't have him.

Now, after this, though Paddy Doolan did well by the little one, and had the allowance, and over and above it often, from my lady, things didn't go right with him. He wint on swimmingly for two or three years or so; but from that time, Pat's appearance grew poorer, and the wife's bit of finery wasn't brought home so often, when Pat wint to market. And where he used to crack a joke with a friend, living by the road-side, as he came along, he'd sigh, and say uncivil things of this world, and make wry faces. You'll think Pat was right, for a good deed ought not to go unrewarded; and you'll like to know how it was. I'll tell you that in a few words,--more or less;--it's foolish to promise.

At the place where Pat carried his property to market, there was a half-rogue of a fellow,--Larry Morris by name,--something in Pat's way of business; but he also bought and sould badgers, and foxes, and poisoned rats for people; and wouldn't mind, may be, tying up a dog that followed him home, and lying by till a reward was given out for the brute. What I mane to say is this,--Larry hadn't the very best of characters. One day, after coming from somewhere, where he'd been, it so fell out, that Larry passed by Pat Doolan's cabin, and who should be playing in front of it, but the child Pat picked up that time two years, or thereabouts.

“Whose child have you there?” says he to Mrs. Doolan, who was plucking a duck or a goose at the door.

“Why do you ask, sir?” says she.

“May be, I know the mother of it,” says he.

When they got inside the cabin,--for Mistress Doolan was a woman, and hearing what she did, of course, invited him in, to know the middle and both ends of the matter,--she began questioning him: but he was too deep for her, and got the whole pedigree and history of Pat's finding the baby, and the lady's giving him money to keep it dacent, and what else I don't know. Says Larry, when she'd done, “I know the child as if I'd never lost sight of it. The features are oulder than when I last saw it, but not changed: and here's the four little round spots on its temple, like shot-marks, or the picks of a domino. Her mother lodged in a back room of mine, and ran away one day, no small trifle in arrear with me, and I never set eyes on her or the child since, before to-day. So much for the mother;--and”--continued he, in the same breath, turning to Pat Doolan, who just then walked into the cabin,--“may I be moon-struck,” says he, pointing to Pat, “but here comes the father!”

What to do, any way, Pat didn't know. You'll agree with me, perhaps, he'd a right to look astonished. There was Mistress Doolan, who had lifted her eye-brows up under her hair with the surprise, standing as mute and as motionless as Pat himself, whose tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth nearly; while the child was innocently giggling below, and trying to undo Pat's gaiters. After a while, Mistress Doolan found her speech. “Is this you, Pat?” says she, quite quietly, for she was too thunderstruck to be in a passion.

“Faith! and why not, Mistress Doolan?” says he, “worse luck!”--for it was true, and he couldn't deny it. And Larry Morris went on to tell the wife, that the child's mother said she was married, and made an excuse for her husband coming to see her now and then only; and who should the husband be, but Pat? Moreover, since she had walked off, the way I tould you, Larry had never seen Pat; and, sure enough, Mistress Doolan remembered that Pat convinced her, about that time, it would be well for him to carry his poultry to another market; and he did so.

Doolan put as good a face as he could upon all this. Larry said he was sorry to be a maker of mischief; but the rogue took advantage of it, for he drew Pat aside, and, from what passed privately between them, Pat carried his poultry afterwards to the town where Larry lived.

From that day, poor Paddy Doolan pined;--wouldn't any one in such a way?--Larry stood between Pat and the market, making Pat sell all his poultry to him at an under-price, and then going to the great buyers that sould them again to the consumers; so making a profit beyond Christian credence out of Pat. And what would you have Doolan do? Wasn't he afraid of Larry's telling upon him? And if he haggled to get any way near a fair price, didn't Larry tell him--“Paddy, boy, ar'n't you under my thumb?” He did: and Doolan was as much afraid of the disgrace of being exposed, as the loss of my lady's allowance. So he struggled and struggled, and every day got worse in the world; and bitterly did he suffer and repent for what he had done. His wife didn't quarrel with the child this while, but loved and nourished it as if it was her own; so did Pat--and he had a right, you'll say:--but I wouldn't swear to that; for who knows but Pat himself might have been cheated, as well as he cheated Sally his wife?

Now I'm coming near the end of my story--no bad news that, you'll say:--Pat was tortured for a long time by Larry, “like a toad under the harrow,” as the story goes, till he could scarcely scrape enough together to get on with from week's end to week's end. At last and in the long run, what does Larry do,--like others like him, who, trying to make the most of their villany, ruin all outright,--what does he do, but insist upon Pat's paying him half the allowance he got from my lady, to hould his peace?--Doolan knocked him down with a goose he had in his hand at the time; jumped on his garron; and if you want to know the rate he came home at, ask the people by the road-side. Grogy, his little garron, wondered whether Ireland was sinking, or what was the matter,--and no blame to him.

When Doolan got home, he tould the wife how he had ruined himself by knocking down Larry. “You've done well,” says she, “and it was high time you did.”--Didn't you ever remark, that when a man gets at his wits' end, and don't know which way to turn, how well a woman will carry him through? I'm sure you have; and seen the courage of the poor creatures too, when men are cowed, and can't look the danger that threatens them full in the face. “You shall be under the thumb no longer, Pat,” says she:--“you've done that by me I don't like, but it's forgiven, if not forgot; and let the worst come to the worst, we'll be as well as we are:--so, come with me at once.”

“Where'll I go?” says Doolan, staring at her, and drawing back, for he half suspected what she intinded. But Sally was resolute; she took the child in her hand, and half persuaded, half dragged Pat away, up to my lady at The Beg. Doolan went down on his knees, while his wife tould her ladyship the whole story; and when it was done, Pat got such a lecture as he never had before; no--not even from his wife after Larry's first visit.

“Look at the fruits,” said my lady; “look at the consequences, Patrick Doolan, of your misdoings:--didn't you know that sin is always followed by sorrow?--that deceit can never long plaster up iniquity? You have richly merited your sufferings, Pat. I shall, of course, stop the allowance, and take away the child from you. When I find you are so far deserving, you shall have my protection, and the little girl again; till then, I withdraw both.”

Terribly downcast was Pat, to be sure, as you may guess but he was no longer under the thumb. Besides, he'd a hope left, of getting into grace again by good conduct so to work he went like a Trojan. Larry came down as hard as he could after Pat, determined to ruin him or make him knock under again: but when he got to the village, Pat was back from The Beg, and had tould all his neighbours what he'd been doing; so that they hadn't much the laugh of him; and as Pat wasn't disliked, the boys and girls made such a mudlark of Larry, nobody could tell the colour of his coat.

Pat began to prosper, and, by-and-by, got on well enough: in a year or two after, the little girl walked into his cabin one day, with a goulden guinea in her hand, and has lived under Pat's roof ever since. Among us, she is, as I tould you, much admired for her beauty,--to say nothing of her being an heiress.

People generally trate a fable as the boys do a dog sometimes,--tie a moral tay-kittle to its tail; and so would I, if my story was a fable: but it's neither a story nor a fable, but the downright truth, and if I made a moral to it, you'd suspect 'twas a fable; as the boys suspect the dog, if they meet him with a kittle in his train, to be a suspicious and a stray dog,--don't you see?--and so despise and pelt him. However, for all that, there can't be much harm in just mentioning that a man will do well to take warning by Paddy Doolan, and do nothing in the wide world that may bring him under the thumb.

OUR TOMMY.

We'd often be frightened out of our lives a'most, did we know, while we were about them, what mighty events, to ourselves or somebody else, would spring from some of our every-day doings. But it's right we shouldn't. If it wasn't so, Paddy Doolan might be breaking his heart, for the sow that's going to be choaked next Monday, by a bone he'll throw into her trough to-night. There's none of our actions, big or little, in my mind, goes off, without leaving a family: something I did three days,--or, may be, three years ago, was the grandmother of something I'm doing, or that may befall me, to-day. Peg Dwyer's husband threw his can at the head of a cow, that wouldn't give out her milk as she ought, and one of her horns made a hole in its side. That happened him on a Wednesday;--very well;--he wetted his floor, through carrying water in the can with the hole in it, on Thursday; it froze in the night; and early on Friday he got such a bruise, through slipping up on the floor, which he'd wetted by carrying water in the can that he'd thrown on the horn of the cow, because she wouldn't give milk, that it laid him up for a month, and killed him outright in the long run. A boy quarrels with his home and quits it, because he fancies he don't get as much buttermilk to his peeathees, or peeathees to his buttermilk, as some of his brothers; he walks off with himself to the next town; and, a year after, to the next to that, may be: by-and-by he gets taken by the tar, as birds are by birdlime; and, after being aboard ship awhile, casts anchor in foreign parts. Before he can whistle, he's pushed another move further: and something or other continues to poke him from place to place, and from post to pillar, till he reaches the wild Indians at last, and marries Hullamullaloo, the king's youngest daughter, or gets roasted and devoured--just as it may happen--by that lady and her iligant maids of honour. And, supposing he'd a good memory, and could look back, while he stood tied to the stake, or about to be tied to Hullamullaloo at the altar, as the case might be, he'd find each of the moves he made through life was owing, one way or another, to something as simple as his quarrelling, when a boy with his peeathees and buttermilk, at his mother's mud cabin here at home in ould Ireland.

Poor Tommy Maloe got his liking for martial music, through thumping a drum, which he'd stolen from young Veogh, when they were both little boys, and didn't know right from wrong; or if they did, wouldn't make a shew of what they knew, by doing as they ought. Though Pierce's parents were rich, and Tommy's were poor, Tommy was Pierce's playmate: they spent most of their time together, and were always at war, and frequently fighting. Tommy was the sole and only boy far or near, that would dare stand up before Master Pierce, when he clenched his little fist; and there was few that Tommy would demean himself to thump or play tricks with but Pierce.

Tommy, as I said, stole a drum from little Pierce, or may be carried it off as booty after a fray; and it was from the delight he got by bating it with the drumstick of an ould goose, that years after, he bartered a new hat for a bad fife from which time, for six months and more, morning, noon, and night, the fife was at Tommy's lips, and he trying to coax marches out of it, but couldn't. At last he threw it away in a pet; and took to trapesing after Mick Maguire when he'd be going out to fire at, and sometimes shoot, the water-birds. Tommy, who was now grown a man a'most, never felt happier than when Mick would allow him to carry the gun; and one day, while Mick's back was turned, something or other tempted him to fire it off. By chance, I suppose, he shot a little bird--a tern, or a petrel it was--and from that time, Tommy talked of nothing but shouldering a musket, and getting a pelt at a Frenchman. He walked thirty miles over mountains and bogs, without a shoe to his foot, (for his father had hid them that he mightn't go,) to see a review of two companies of the North Cork, and three dozen of beggarly volunteers.

Our Tommy--for that's the name he is best known by--from his father's always calling him so--though it was only to himself, a poor doating ould widower, he belonged;--our Tommy, I say, at last determined to enlist. He wouldn't be satisfied, he said, until, as every one ought, he'd killed at least two or three of the enemies of his king and country. His father begged of him not to go for a souldier and leave him alone, when he could get good bread at home: but, though Tommy in other things was as dutiful as most sons, he wouldn't mind his father in this. At one time, however, it was thought he would forget the Frenchmen, and behave himself; for he fell in love with one of the prettiest little girls in these parts, and offered to give up all thoughts of campaigning, and killing his share of the foreigners, if she'd have him. But the little girl gave him a downright denial; and a week after that he got picked up by a recruiting-party at a fair.

Tommy was all on fire to go abroad; and it wasn't long before he got his wish granted of being sent on foreign service. You'll think of the little drum, and the goose's leg, and the bad fife, and Mick Maguire's gun, and the review of the North Cork with the volunteers, and feel sad, for a moment, may be, when I tell you, that the very first Frenchman he saw, run his baggonet right through poor Tommy, in a skirmish, before he could even pull his trigger, and killed him on the spot.

When I say that Tommy was killed on the spot, I mane that he never stirred from the place where he fell; though he lived long enough to see the enemy driven back; and then,--as we heard from a disabled dragoon, who passed through this place on his way home a year after,--poor Tommy Maloe, though he'd been disappointed so sorely,--like a good boy as he was in the main,--departed this life with a smiling eye and a prayer on his lips. And I trust I may do no worse;--though, I must confess, I'd rather die on a bad bed, than on the finest field of battle,--for I'm not heroic; and in my own mud cabin, than a grand hospital,--for I'm not ambitious. And yet I don't know, upon giving the thing a thought dying is dying all the world over, and it don't matter much where we do it. I was going to say too, that I'd prefer a natural death in ould age, to the honour of being cut off by a dragoon's sabre in my prime: but there's a riddle about death no one can solve; and it isn't often we see even the ould people go off and melt away like a mist. We may prate and preach as much as we plaze about hard deaths and aisy deaths;--the horror and agony of going off one way, compared with another:--but there isn't a living soul on the face of the earth knows any thing about dying at last. Drowning is spoken of as being the least disagreeable by some; others prefer a bullet; one says one thing, and another says another; even hanging isn't without advocates but _I_ say, there's no knowing which is best, and which is worst; and we never _shall_ know, that's certain, until some of us is dead, and gets brought to life again;--and that you know never can be: for it's nothing but blarney an honest man tells you about the feelings of death, who has been relieved from suffocation by a lancet; or, to go further, it's foolish to listen to what one that has been some time under water, and gets picked up, and restored, as they call it,--to hear such a one tell what little or what much he suffered, with an idea of your gathering enough from his story to know what death by drowning is. If you do that, it's mighty mistaken you are; and I'll tell you why:--them people that gets restored that way or any other, no matter how, know but little about the thing, not much more than-myself or you and why don't they?--because _they never have died._ You never met with a man in your life, that had died, out and out. You couldn't; for them that dies completely never breathes mortal breath again. My father--rest his soul!--thought as I do; and he'd say, when the fire of existence is once extinguished, it's gone for ever and ever. When death has entirely done his work, the body is clay; then the spirit departs, and nothing human can ever bring it back. A man may lie motionless, breathless, and, what's more, senseless, at the bottom of a well, for an hour, or, may be, more,--who can tell?--and yet not die. In that case, by clever means and much work, the dying embers of life may be brought to a flame again; but once fairly dead, we're dead for ever. And so, I say, that the man who gets taken out of the water and recovers, can't say that he was dead. It's true, he has gone to the door; but has he passed over the threshold?--answer me that! If he had, he wouldn't have come back to us again, I'll engage! Don't you see, that we can't take a pair of compasses or a piece of tape, and measure exactly where life ends and death begins? And how do we know, when we take leave of a friend, because he don't move, and there's none o' the dew of life on the glass we put to his lips,--that he's dead?--Tossing the arms, or gnashing the teeth, shews pain, but there may be greater agony without it; for if we're violent, it shews we're strong; and it's suffer we may, much worse perhaps, when we're so weak that we can't wag a finger. Well, then,--and this is what I've been coming to all through my rigmarole, but I couldn't before,--how do we know that,--after the breath goes, and the limbs lose their power, and all is still,--the dying man, without breathing or moving, or his heart beating, don't feel the true grapple of death--the parting of soul and body?--Therefore, I say, as nobody ever came back, as I think, in body,--I don't spake of ghosts,--from the clutch of our enemy, we don't know anything much about him; and it's well we don't:--God be praised! all things in this world is ordered for the best!

It's little or nothing that's left me to add to my story:--poor Tommy Maloe's father, when he heard of the death of his son, got quite childish at once, and unable to help himself any way: so that he'd have had little to look to, but his poor neighbours, if my lady hadn't put him down on her little list of pensioners, and paid Peg Dwyer to mind the poor soul, and make him as comfortable, considering all things, as he well could be. You may still see ould Darby--that's his name--strolling about, from house to house, as he did on the morning after the disabled dragoon brought us news of his son's death, and telling every one who'll listen to him, how his beautiful boy was struck through and through by a baggonet, like a souldier's loaf,--or a tommy, as it's called in the army,--when he wint to fight the French, in foreign parts.

THE DENTIST.

Malachi Hoe is known, for twenty miles round his house, as a cow-doctor, and a rat-catcher, and a man of tip-top talent in two or three dozen useful arts and sciences,--as he himself calls tooth-drawing, and dog-cropping, and all the things he's famous for. He has the finest terriers and traps in the whole country; and if there isn't a fox to be found by the subscription pack, that Squire Lawless, and the rest of them has, nine miles off, at the brook of Ballyfaddin, they've only to send a dog-boy to Malachi, before sun-set, and he'll have one in a bag, ready to turn out before them, by the morning. He's very sparing of talk, and when he spakes, it's in short bits; and he'll look all the while as if he'd a right to be paid for his words: and it's well paid he is for them too, sure enough, by them that can do it. There isn't a hair's-breadth of a horse, from the crown down to the coronet, or below that again, to the head of the nail in his shoe, but Malachi knows: he's as much at home in the inside of a cow as that of his own cabin, and can tell where any thing is, as well in one as the other,---just as if he'd put it there himself. But Malachi prides himself most on his skill in tooth-drawing; and if you ask him what he is, he'll tell you--a dentist.

It's full thirty years ago, since Malachi came to settle among us. You hadn't then to send for him if he was wanted, for he seemed to scent sickness like a raven; and if your cow was taken ill, the next news you heard was, that Malachi's horn was blowing on the hill; and, in ten minutes more, he stood at your door, with a drench if you wished it.

Malachi now keeps closer to his nest: still he's to be had, if you'll pay him his bill. He's looked upon as an oracle in most things, by every body except Ileen, his wife, who thinks one of her opinions worth two of his, any day; and though Malachi Roe is a wise man, I won't say but Ileen is right. If you knew him, you'd as soon think of saying black was white, as contradicting the dentist: but Ileen don't care a bawbee for him, and often tells him right up to his face that he's wrong. Malachi wishes she'd bide at home; but she'd rather be busy on the beach, having an eye to the girls and women she employs to gather the dillosk: and, though feared, her goodness of heart secures her the love of every one of her neighbours--high and low. By all accounts, she must be the exact temper of her grandmother and namesake Ileen, the Meal-woman; who, though left a widow, at eighteen, with a child looking up to her for support, never got married again; but kept herself dacent, and brought up her little one, without a ha'p'orth of help from man, woman, or child. She put on the manners and resolution of a man, with her weeds;--the mills which her husband had occupied she kept going; and managed so well, that she got more and more grist by degrees, till at last, the name of Ileen the Meal-woman, was known all over the country.