THE KEYS OF THE CHEST

THE KEYS OF THE CHEST

The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden. It runs westward—that is, towards the ocean—but never reaches the shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at one point—about midway on the right hand looking westward—it is suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybody the Nick of Time. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me over the opposite hills, but he replied: “Sure, what else would they be callin’ it?” Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory explanation.

The effect of Letterglas’s solitude and verdure somehow seems to be heightened if one notices its single visible sign of human handiwork. This is a road-track, now all but quite grassed over, leading into the valley from its open end, where the Clonmoragh highway passes, and stopping aimlessly at the slope immediately below the Nick, having first flung two or three zig-zag loops up the hillside. A rust-eaten, handleless shovel, and the wreck of an overturned wheelbarrow, still mark the point where the work was abandoned on a misty morning in April, more than fifty springs ago; but the track itself is now merely a most faint difference of shade in the sward, which has crept back again indefatigably, even where the austere road-metal had been thrown clattering down.

A day before that misty morning, if anybody had climbed up and had passed through the Nick of Time, in at which the new road was to go, he would have found himself on a long level of fine-bladed turf, stretching like a lofty causeway laid down atop of the hill-embankment Everything else up there looked so softly smooth and flecklessly green that the eye was at once caught by a big block of stone, which stood just opposite the gap, at a few yards’ distance. It was an oblong mass of blackish limestone, perhaps seven feet by four, with a shape curiously symmetrical for a piece of Nature’s rough-hewing; plumb-and-rule guided chisel could scarcely have made its lines truer. That, and its solitariness, uncompanioned as far as could be seen by so much as a single pebble, gave its aspect an incongruity which prompted the question how it had come there; for whose answer we must revert through unimaginable wastes of years to the time when our last huge ice-sheet was scoring and grinding all the country’s face on its slithering way to the western ocean. Then it was that this big boulder dropped fortuitously through a small rent in the isle-wide coverlid, and so being left behind did not share in the final weltering plunge a few miles farther on, where the stark folds slipped over the sea-cliffs like the counterpane off a restless sleeper’s bed. Ever since that catastrophe it had sat there looking rather like a rude unwieldy coffer or chest, a portion—as in fact it had been—of the impedimenta carried and lost by some Titanic traveller. The resemblance was increased by a clean-cut horizontal crack, no doubt sustained when the mass came sogging heavily to earth, which ran all round it, a few inches from the top, counterfeiting a lid. All the old ages that had passed over it afterwards had wrought only slight changes in its aspect. As the years went on, the dark peaty mould deepened a little about its base, and dull golden and silvery lichen-circlets crept out here and there like wraiths of the sun and moon beams that had touched it. Otherwise it was unaltered, and for many a long century so were its surroundings.

But at last a new feature appeared among them; a very inobtrusive one. Fifty years ago, anybody approaching the big stone from the Nick of Time might have observed that a little footpath led up to it from the contrary direction, and went no farther. A more inartificial path could not well be: a simple product of steps going to and fro. You might have supposed a sheep-walk, only that there were no fleeces nibbling over Letterglas. Indeed, its most frequent passers-by being such promiscuous wayfarers as the shadows of wings and clouds, it was not easy to conjecture any plausible raison d’être for this track, which ran distinctly defined, though faintly, merely a crease in the flowing sward mantle, not a seam worn threadbare, so to speak, through to the brown earth. Certainly the rather gloomy-looking block had no apparent attractions wherewith to invite resort, not even a view, as it stood at the bottom of a very shallow dent in the green. Yet there the path ended; and if you took a dozen steps to the brow of the hill, you could trace the course of that pale thin line far down the slopes; through the fenceless “mountainy land” first, and then into two or three steep, dyke-girdled fields, before it was lost among the round-topped trees which gathered about a rambling old mansion-house. Whoever visited the big stone evidently thought it worth while to come a long way.

Such an humble and artless path has always a certain element of romance about it, lacking in more pretentious thoroughfares contracted for at so much a mile. They differ as does a brook from a canal. Like the brook, which has wrought itself as it went along, with and by its own purpose, the little footpath has some special meaning and object, albeit perhaps a less obvious one. It is the visible trail of a want or wish, though of what kind we may be unaware, and with want or wish it will cease to exist, or soon after. For the living green things will creep back and efface it speedily. But meanwhile it seems half to keep and half to betray a secret: you can only guess what has brought feet thither day by day to tread it out.

Fifty years ago or more, you would have been likely enough any fine morning to catch the chief maker of this particular path in the act. If the years were, say, ten more, it would have proved to be a very little little-girl, whose brown hair held both sunshine and shadow, and whose hazel-green eyes were softly lit, and who in those early days of hers always wore an ugly reddish checked pelisse, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with velvet rosettes to match. This was little Eileen Fitzmaurice, six or seven years old, who, ever since she could recollect anything, and maybe some twelve months longer, had lived with her mother and aunt at the Big House in Glendoula. As you would, no doubt, never guess her errand up the side of Slieve Ardgreine, I will at once explain that she was seeing after the safety of her family plate.

Although Eileen had herself no recollection of anywhere else than this Glendoula, a valley much resembling its neighbour Letterglas, but with its green dotted and chequered by a few cabins and fields, she knew by hearsay that there was another place in the world, a most wonderful place called Drumlough Castle or At Home, where “there wouldn’t be as much as a wing of a cold chicken served in the parlour without its silver dish under it, and as for the ould black sideboard of an evenin’ there would be company in it, that now was somethin’ worth lookin’ at; the full moon on a dark night was a joke to the big salvers.” To be sure there were there other fine things innumerable, which would have appealed quite as strongly to her imagination, if they had had equal justice done to them; however, it was upon these that Eileen’s informant always laid most stress, for she looked back to her ancient home through the eyes of old Timothy Gabbett, the lame butler, whose pride and affection had dwelt in his pantry and plate-chest, enjoying their supreme moments before a gala-night spectacle of snowy and crystal and lustrous argent gleams.

Yet this paradise, of which old Timothy used to say mournfully, “Ah, Miss Eileen, them was the rael times,” was haunted by lurking shadows. Eileen never learned the true reason of their exile: how wild Sir Gerald, her father, had been found one summer morning entangled among the serpentine coils of the water-weeds at the end of the lake, with his only son and heir dead in his arms, three-year-old Jack, who, when told by the garden-boy Mick that the master was looking for him high ways and low ways, had stumped off greatly elated, with no foreboding of the method in which Sir Gerald had resolved to settle his grievously involved affairs. She had been too small a baby then to be conscious of her mother’s flight from the memories of Drumlough, and the circumstances of their coming to Glendoula remained for her in their original obscurity. But she very quickly perceived that it was worse than useless to ask questions on such subjects of anybody except old Timothy, and that any allusion to his stories in the presence of her elders was a grave misdemeanour, which made her invalid mother cry, and her melancholy aunt scold; and Eileen would have desisted at a subtler hint. She did not often wonder why this should be, because her world was so full of mysteries that she generally accepted their existence as a matter of course. There was just one of them, however, that exercised her mind not a little, and that she sometimes vainly tried to get cleared up. She wanted to know what had become of all those most beautiful silver things that Timothy talked about—the great shining salvers, the claret-jugs, the tankards and flagons, the piles “as high as your head, Miss Eileen,” of plates with a polish on them “the stars in the sky might be the betther of gettin’,” and the grand potato-rings, and the frosted cake-baskets, and the tall up-urny, which seemed to be a marvellous composition of lights and flowers. Of all these resplendent objects, the only one, a few uninteresting spoons and forks excepted, that apparently had moved with the family to Glendoula, was an antique teapot of fantastic shape. It could no longer be used for its proper purpose, owing to the infirmity of its dragon-tail handle, but old Timothy turned it to account in his own way. You would always have been warned that it was Quality—and Quality was almost invariably either Dr M‘Clintock or Canon Roche—who had called at Glendoula House had you seen Timothy hobbling to answer the bell. For, having reconnoitred through the half-glass back hall-door, it was his practice in such cases to equip himself with the old teapot and a bit of “shammy,” that he might appear rubbing up ostentatiously, and muttering a stereotyped apology: “Beg your pardon, sir, but there does be such a terrible sight of silver clanin’ in this house that I scarce git time to lay a bit out of me hand.” All the while he felt more than half-conscious that it was a poor and rather unseemly pretence; but he had not much invention, and could devise no better expedient for the magnifying of his diminished office and the upholding of the family’s fallen fortune. Nor was he ready with any very satisfactory answers when Eileen questioned him about the present bestowal of his treasures. Full well he knew that they had long since gone to the Jews and other hopeless destinations, and were by this time irrecognisably melted down, or, more intolerable still, adorning alien boards, and subject to alien powder and brushes. This knowledge gave him acute pangs, which made his replies curt and vague. “Where are they now, Miss Eily? Ah, sure, just put away somewheres safe; they’re not wanted these times, when the poor misthress is seein’ no company; but it won’t be so one of these days.... Ah no, Miss Eily darlint, I couldn’t be showin’ them to you—sure, they’re not in this house at all.” And once he added: “They’re just stored up handy, Miss Eily, waitin’ till you’re grown a big enough lady to be ownin’ of them.”

“Me?” said Eileen, startled.

“Why, in coorse, Miss Eileen. Who else has anythin’ else to say to thim after poor little Master Jack, that had a right to ha’ been Sir John, gettin’ dhrown—bein’ took suddint, I mane, that way? Hiven be good to the both of them. Ay, to be sure, honey, it’s all in a very safe place waitin’ for you. And thank ’ee kindly for bringin’ me in the grand little bunch of daisies—they smell iligant.”

After learning this fact about her far-off proprietorship in the hoarded plate, Eileen thought about it oftener than ever, though from motives of delicacy she spoke about it seldomer, lest she should appear unduly prying and eager on her own behalf. And for a long time the more she pondered the matter, the less possible she found it to excogitate any possible hiding-place. But at last she made a fateful discovery.

It was one fine May morning when she went for an unusually long ramble with Norah Kinsella, the housemaid. Norah—a tall, strong, cheerful lass, far more active than rheumatic old nurse—thought nothing of carrying her pet, little Miss Eileen, who at six years old was still only “a light fairy of a crathur,” up and down steep places, so that they could go all the farther. On this occasion they climbed right up to the top of the hill behind the house, higher than Eileen had ever been before; and one of the first things she noticed was the great boulder-block. She never had seen a stone of nearly so large a size, nor imagined one; and she did not now class it with the small unshapely fragments and insignificant pebbles with which she was familiar. Rather, it reminded her of the turf-stacks that she had watched people building up carefully in the yard. Yet a turf-stack it certainly was not.

“Doesn’t it look like a great big box, Norah?” she said.

“Ay, indeed does it, Miss Eily,” Norah said; “and a fine power of things it ’ud hould inside of itself, too. Sure now, you could be puttin’ away a one of them little houses down below there in it, or very nearly.”

“It must be extrornarly heavy, Norah,” Eileen said, patting the sun-warmed side of the stone with her hand. “If that’s its lid, I couldn’t lift it.”

“Sorra a bit of you, honey, nor ten like you. Troth, ’twould take ten strong men to give that a heft,” said Norah, making as if she would prise it up with the flat of her hand. “Whativer was inside it ’ud have to stay there for you or for me, if it was silver or gould itself—we’d ha’ ne’er a chance.”

Her random words gave Eileen the shock of a new idea. Perhaps there really might be silver, quantities of silver, in it. For why should not this be the handy safe place that old Timothy meant? A safer there could not well be, since it was so far removed from all meddlers; and she almost thought that she did espy a bright twinkle as she stared hard at the lid-like crack, which was just on a level with her eyes. She discreetly said nothing about it to Norah, and her pre-occupation with the subject made her so abstractedly silent on their way home that Norah feared the walk must have been too long. But, in fact, she was considering whether or no she should mention her discovery to old Timothy. He might be vexed, she thought, at her finding out what he had refused to tell her: still, she would have liked to ask him whether her guess were right. The point needed much deliberation, and remained undecided for many days.

Meanwhile she chanced upon something that seemed to be an independent corroboration of her own theory. By nature Eileen had not particularly studious tastes, but solitariness had early driven her to seek for company on the shelves in the long low-windowed book-room. She did not find there much that was very congenial. Sixty years ago juvenile literature was, as a rule, a solemn and dreary thing; and Eileen’s meagre library was not even up to that date, having for the most part belonged to the preceding generation. The favourite authors of the day would appear to have been infested with a mole-like fancy, which commonly led them to linger among tombs and worms and epitaphs, seldom, indeed, stopping short at those grisly precincts, or forbearing to light them up with a lurid flare from the regions beyond, but, nevertheless, dwelling upon them with a fond elaboration of detail. Accordingly, a few days after her first ascent of Slieve Ardgreine, Eileen fished down from its shelf a small, old dusty, half-calf volume, which was composed of several short stories bound together. One of them, entitled The Churchyard Prattler, related the experiences of a child, aged four, who, as an appropriate and improving pastime, was sent out provided with a string of his own length, and instructed to ascertain by measurement how many of the graves in his cheerfully chosen playground were shorter than himself. He was pictorially represented as attired in a long bib and a broad-brimmed chimney-pot hat, and he moralised his lively researches into the strains of a brief rime-doggerel hymn:

Another showed how a frivolous little girl, in a huge coal-scuttle bonnet, had her sinful hankering after toys and such vanities rebuked by being conducted past a series of attractive shop-windows, from each of which she was bidden to select herself a present, until she arrived at an undertaker’s establishment, where she was likewise required to place an order.

The last story in the volume, however, was of a very different type, and upon it Eileen now alighted, instinctively judicious in her skipping of its ghoulish companions. It was called The Glittering Hoard in the Coffer of Stone; and the passage that most profoundly impressed her ran as follows: “The flare of the scented torches fell upon the vast coffer of dark stone, which stood in one corner of the cavern. Its smooth sides were crusted here and there with patches of lichen and grey moss, and it looked as if no hand had touched it for many an age. But at a gesture from the Prince, six gigantic black slaves raised up the massive slab which formed its lid. As they did so, the foot of one of them slipped, and before he could recover himself, the unwieldy weight slid down with a crash, and was shattered into three fragments on the floor. Nobody heeded, however, for the light that broke out of the open chest drew all eyes thither. It was like a cistern filled with crystalline fire. “Empty it, my son,” said the old Sultaness, and the Prince began to lift out one by one the treasures it contained. Silver goblets there were and flagons, great gilt bowls and ewers, filigree caskets set with diamonds, chains of red gold, and ropes of milk-white pearls, diadems and necklaces, armlets and girdles, whose pendant gems dripped a many-coloured brilliance, as of flower-distained dew. At the bottom of the chest lay a round golden buckler, studded with knots of jewels, and a mighty sword in an ivory scabbard inlaid with pale coral and amber: the hilt was carved out of a single lump of apple-green chrysoprase. All these, strewn over the flagged floor, shimmered and bickered under the glancing torch-gleams, until it seemed as if a rippled and moon-lit sea lay there flashing around a murky rock. The beholder could hardly realise that its uncouth bulk had indeed been the receptacle of a treasure so richly wrought and exquisite.”

Eileen read and pored over this account with keen interest and pleasure. From the first she drew a parallel between the two great blocks of stone, so that the wealth disclosed by the one strengthened her most splendid conjectures about the other. As she read, she easily shifted the scene from the shadowy cavern to the sunny hill-top, and imagined the grass all scattered over with shining gear, which by some strange decree of fortune she was to look upon as her own property. Silver dishes and jewelled diadems, the up-urny and the buckler, both these alike fascinatingly mysterious, sparkled for her in the clear light of day. The only objects in the picture that she shrank from reproducing were those six gigantic black men, whose presence she felt to be an ugly blot upon the brightness. But then she reflected that the lifters of the lid perhaps need not be either black or gigantic. Dan Donnelly, and Christy Shanahan, and Murtagh Reilly, would surely be strong and big enough to do it; and they were all pleasant familiar faces, who said “Good mornin’ to you kindly, Miss Eily,” or “The Lord love you,” with friendly smiles, whenever they met her, and were in no wise alarming. So she substituted them for the formidable figures, and could almost hear old Murtagh saying, “Hup boyos! or what for was yous aitin’ all them pitaties?” which was his usual exordium upon such strenuous occasions.

The next time that she went for a walk with Norah Kinsella, which happened soon after this, in the continuance of old nurse’s rheumatism, Eileen said, half-scared at her own temerity: “Let us go up again to the big box”; and she felt happy when Norah at once assented, tacitly accepting the fact that a box it was. Eileen wanted to see whether she were tall enough to look in, supposing the lid removed, and she found, to her gratification, that on tiptoe her stature sufficed.

It was some while longer, however, before she ventured to touch upon it in conversation with old Timothy; nor did she then make any point-blank statement. She introduced the subject allusively and implicitly. “That is an exceedingly safe place where you keep the plate now, Timothy, isn’t it?” she said to him one day when she was helping him to lay the table, by following him with a little sheaf of spoons as he hobbled round it. Her brown frock was hidden beneath a white cambric pinafore, and her large eyes glinted wistfully through a soft cloud of hair.

“It is so bedad, missy,” said the old man resignedly, “we’ve took good care of that.”

“How many people do you think it would take to lift off the lid of the chest?” said Eileen.

“Is it the led, Miss Eily? Troth, now, they’d be bothered to do that on us at all, if they was as many as they plased, and the kay of it put away out of the raich of them—or the likes of them,” old Timothy said, arbitrarily blackening her colourless term.

“Oh, then, it’s locked?” said Eileen.

“To be sure it is, Miss Eily. Why now, if it wasn’t, you might as well be gad’rin’ the things together handy for villins to run away wid thim convanient. But ah, sure, you’re innicent yet, Miss Eily, and small blame to you, or you’d understand the raison of kays.”

“So I do, Timothy,” said Eileen. “It’s villins. But I think I don’t quite understand the reason of them.”

She went away pondering. This locking of the chest compelled her to modify somewhat the details of the opening scene. However, she quickly re-arranged them completely to her satisfaction, and her fondness for visiting the site of it did not diminish. About this time she began to be allowed to ramble out unattended, for old nurse went invalided home, and Eileen had acquired the character of a quiet, sensible child, not apt to get into mischief. The use she made of her liberty was a daily pilgrimage up to the big stone, where she dreamed away many pleasant hours, largely occupied with plans for the future, when she should have found that key. Sometimes she brought the Glittering Hoard book up with her, and read it there to whet the edge of anticipation; but in general she was content to weave a dazzling fabric out of the material supplied her by old Timothy’s reminiscences.

Should anybody hence infer that Eileen Fitzmaurice must have been in her early youth an avaricious sort of person, he cannot be flatly contradicted; for so she was, in a way. But in a way it was. Her theories about the privileges of property were peculiar, and restrictive. For instance, in her definition “my own” meant merely “promptly transferable”; and the Paradise she supposed was a place where everybody else would like everything that she had. Here, the failure of her few possessions to please other people not infrequently caused her disappointment; and she occasionally thought scorn of herself for having only trifles to offer so scant and paltry. Sometimes, indeed, it was nothing better than a bunch or so of blackberries, perhaps wanting still several shades of their mature glossy jet, which she had torn hands as well as frock in extricating from among their barbed briers—the greediest child never plucked with a more eager recklessness. When she could meet with no friend who was imprudent or complaisant enough to accept these spoils, she would, a little crestfallen and regretful, scatter them on some walk or window-stool, in hopes that at least the small birds might condescend to benefit thereby. She was all the more dependent upon opportunities for bestowing such a tangible proof of her regard, because she seldom had any for others of the less material kind. Her mother was too drearily isolated by ill-health and despondency to be within reach of caresses, while her aunt Geraldine was mostly absent, inhabiting some remote volume, and seemed to be rather bored by the people whom she encountered in her brief visits to the outer world. The acquisition of the wonderful chest, however, would release Eileen from these straitened circumstances, as its contents would surely comprise what could not but give satisfaction to all. She could scarcely believe that anybody, not even poor mamma, who only pretended so badly to care about her presents of wild flowers and the like, could really be indifferent to the set of six little silver salt-cellars shaped like water-lilies, which old Timothy described so fondly. It might be possible also to provide Aunt Geraldine with something of which she should not say hurriedly, coming reluctantly out of her book: “Oh, thank you, my dear child, but what use would it be to me?” Then there were Norah Kinsella, and old nurse, and old Timothy, and after them a small crowd of neighbours, very adequately representing the population of Glendoula, so catholic being Eileen’s good will that there was hardly a dresser in the hamlet on which some brilliant object should fail to shine. And if anything remained over after the distribution, she thought to herself that she would leave it for the villins, who would no doubt be much disappointed, supposing they ever did come to look and found nothing at all. Such plans as these were commonly in her mind as she toiled up and trotted down the smooth-swarded steps, where the thread-like track of her footsteps slowly began to follow them.

Generally Eileen went to and fro quite alone beneath the spacious domed skies, which seemed to make no more account of her than of the rabbits, who played here and there on the side of the hill. The rabbits evidently did not think much of her either, and hid themselves when she came near without any great show of flurry or fright, rather intimating by their demeanour that they had simply no wish to make her acquaintance. But Eileen used to watch them wistfully from their prescribed distance, and think to herself that they looked enviably sociable and friendly together. Sometimes, too, she wished that her tame robin would hop along with her farther than to the end of the holly walk, but it never would; and one day the black cat ate it, all except a fluff of heart-rending feathers, no doubt to warn her that her desires were vain. For destiny had assigned her little intercourse with her fellow-creatures.

Once, however, she had a companion for a while. It was during her seventh summer, when her cousin Pierce Wilmot spent his holidays at Glendoula House. Just at first Eileen found this an experience as alarming as it was novel. Breakfast and luncheon became such serious ordeals when she had to confront a great-sized stranger—Pierce was about double her age and much more than twice as big—concerning whom the furtive glances she ventured upon gave her an impression of a very black head, and eyebrows as dark and straight as if they had been ruled with pen and ink. She thought he looked ferocious, and privately inquired of Norah whether holidays were many days.

But on the second morning, after breakfast, this forbidding person suddenly said to her: “Come along, little Bright-Eyes, and show me everything.” At which address her terror culminated, and then, as terrors sometimes do, toppled over into nothing at all. A few minutes later they were going about together quite amicably out of doors. Pierce was so immeasurably Eileen’s superior in age and all its privileges that he had no need to assert his dignity by keeping her at a distance—as the rabbits did—and they fraternised apace. The July morning was still freshly fair, with a twinkling trail of dew shifting along from blade to leaf up the sun-lit sward, as the moon’s silver-spun wake shifts over a rippled water, and with gossamer threads, that might have been ravelled out of a rainbow, woven between furze and broom bushes, when Eileen and Pierce began to ascend Slieve Ardgreine. For one of the first things she had to show him was her stone chest. She took an especial pleasure in doing so, because she very seldom had an opportunity of even talking about it to anybody, the matter being, she felt, a family affair, which she could not with propriety enter upon except to old confidential Timothy, whose distaste for the subject she was bound to respect.

“Why, you’ll never get up there,” Pierce said with some incredulity, when, in answer to his inquiry whither he was being taken, Eileen pointed to the ridge above their heads, “Were you ever up so high?” he asked, doubtfully.

Eileen would have been very sorry to let him perceive how absurd she thought this curious misconception, and she only replied: “Every fine day, if they don’t say the grass is too boggy altogether. And old Murtagh says I skyte up as fast as his Cruiskeen going after a rabbit.”

On the way up, Eileen gave her companion, whose life seemed to have been spent chiefly in towns, a good deal of information about common natural objects. Some of this she had excogitated for herself during her solitary rambles, and it appeared to surprise and amuse him rather unaccountably. Her explanation, for instance, of how the hedgehogs came and stuck themselves over with the withered spines of the furze-bushes, that had dropped off mottled and grey. Among other things she showed him two or three rabbit-holes; but here it was Pierce who had new facts to impart. “So that’s where they sleep, is it?” he said, “I always thought they hung themselves up like bats, head downwards against a wall; at any rate, that’s how they manage in Dublin.”

“That is funny,” said Eileen; “I don’t think they ever do here. And I suppose they drop down when they awake?”

“Oh, I rather fancy they never do awake,” said Pierce.

“Never at all? Are you quite sure, now, that they’re not dormouses, Pierce?” said Eileen wisely.

“Am I sure that you’re not an elephant, Miss Eileen?” he said, mimicking her. “But I can tell you that if I can borrow a gun, I’ll soon teach your rabbits the same trick. Why, haven’t you ever been in a poulterer’s shop”—Eileen never had—“and seen them hanging up?”

“Oh,” said Eileen. She disliked guns and shooting, and moreover became suddenly aware that she must have displayed a ridiculous stupidity about Pierce’s joke. This made her turn disconcertedly pink, so that Pierce was afraid he must have hurt her feelings, which he had not meant to do. Therefore he was glad to find, when a few minutes afterwards they reached the big stone, that she had evidently quite forgotten any little vexation in the excitement of relating its wonderful romance. He was careful to listen with such interest, and seemingly so fully share all her sentiments, that she very soon ventured upon confiding to him a particular anxiety which had of late grown up in her mind. “Do you see what a small keyhole it has?” she said, pointing to a little round orifice which occurred high up on one side of the block, and the discovery of which had been to her a source both of hopes and fears. “Only a tiny little pinny key would fit into it. Wouldn’t you think it would take a bigger one to open a box like this?” As the hole barely admitted the tip of her forefinger, it could not be considered roomy, but Pierce replied with decision: “The largest box in the world might be opened with the smallest key that ever was made”; and one of her haunting fears being thus dispelled, she produced another, which took this form: “Well, but supposing the people somehow lost the key, then I suppose the box couldn’t ever be opened again, even if the person that the things in it were belonging to did live to be as much as twenty—old enough to be let have them, you know?” And again Pierce could re-assure her. “Why, there’d be nothing easier than to get another key made. One takes an impression of the lock with cobbler’s wax; I could do it myself. So if they lose it on you, little Bright-Eyes, just send word to me, and I’ll come and settle it for you.” Eileen looked grateful and relieved. “It won’t be for a long while, but I’ll not forget,” she said.

As they returned down the hill she said: “I wonder whether there is that very fine sort of sword in this chest too. I hope so, and perhaps there may be, only old Timothy never told me. I must ask him about it, and if there is one, Pierce, I’ll give it to you.”

“And then I’d maybe kill you with it,” Pierce said, absently joking, for just at that time he was speculating upon his chances of getting a shot at the rabbits. But Eileen replied quite solemnly: “I don’t believe you’d ever like to do that on purpose—at any rate, not unless I growed up very detestfully nasty; and you’re too big to do anything by accident.” And she proceeded home, much cheered by the event of their walk.

Less satisfactory was the result of an interview which she had shortly afterwards with old Timothy. For, in the first place, she regretted to hear that “he couldn’t be sure, but he thought it noways likely there would be a sword, or any such description of an ould skiverin’ conthrivance, put up along with the good plate; at all events, he never remimbered any talk of e’er a one—not to his knowledge.” And still more mortifying than this, she quickly perceived that the old butler had no liking for her cousin. What Timothy said on the subject was exactly as follows:—“Goin’ out wid Master Pierce, missy jewel? Och well, to be sure, he’s a fine young gentleman, considherin’. If the night’s black enough, the baste’s white enough, as Andy Goligher said, and he misdhrivin’ home the wrong Kerry bullock.” An aphorism the application of which may seem rather obscure to the undiscerning, but which Eileen quite clearly understood as an intimation that of Master Pierce Timothy thought poorly, and she was sorry for this, as she would have liked her old and her new acquaintance to be friends.

The grounds of Timothy’s prejudice, however, she did not guess. The fact was that he had a few days before scowlingly from his pantry window espied Master Pierce “discoorsin’ as plisant as anythin’” with young Larry M‘Farlane, “that was sister’s son to ould Pather Doran, and bad luck to him.” Now, maybe as many as a dozen years ago, Timothy and Pather had differed in a discussion about the proper season for sowing asparagus, and one of Pather’s arguments had been: “That it was no great thanks to Timothy if he had sted a goodish while wid the Family, and he, you might say, tied to thim be the leg like a strayin’ jackass.” Pather’s allusion was to the effects of an accident, which, met with by Timothy on the cellar-stairs at Drumlough Castle in his youth, had left him a hobbler for life; and since the controversy Pather and he “weren’t spakin’.” Therefore, now, if Master Pierce chose “to be great wid a one of that pack, and to go sthreelin’ up the hill wid him after the rabbits,” it was only natural that old Timothy should entertain no high opinion of so indiscriminating a person.

But his veiled disparagement did not check the progress of a real friendship between the cousins, and when the end of Pierce’s holidays came, Eileen thought they had not been nearly many enough. On the regretful evening before he went, they paid a farewell visit to the big boulder, and, standing by it, Eileen said forlornly: “Next time I’ll only be myself.”

“Perhaps I may be here again next summer,” Pierce said encouragingly. He had already learned by experience that even twelve months are not interminable.

“I wish it would be next year always,” said Eileen. “For that’s the time when people come back. The Widow Shanahan’s son’s coming home from the States next year, please goodness; but she says she’ll not be in this world then, so he might as well stop where he’s gettin’ the fine wages. Norah says that she means that she’ll be dead. I wonder who told her, or how she knows. You don’t know how soon you are going to die, Pierce, do you?”

“Not I, nor anybody else,” said Pierce.

“I wanted to give her her little silver jug,” said Eileen; “she’s to have the little fat one that’s gilt inside and has two spouts, because it’s the nicest, and she’s to be pitied, the dear knows, Norah says, with one thing and the other. But if she goes and dies first, I never can. Do you think she’d wait a while, if I told her about it as a secret?”

“She mightn’t be able,” said Pierce.

“Ah, and then it would only tantinglise her,” said Eileen, “so I’d better not. But I’m sorry.”

“Don’t forget that you must send me word, if they lose the key, and you want another,” Pierce said to change the subject.

“I’ll remember,” said Eileen. “But I’ll have to keep on living for ever so much longer before they’ll let me want it. You see, I’ll not be twenty-one even next year, I should think.”

“I should think not indeed, Miss Eileen,” said Pierce; “you’re no age worth speaking of at all.”

They were now descending the hill, and for some way Eileen mused vainly about possible remedies for this deplorable state of affairs. “I wish,” she said at length, “that a great many days would happen all together sometimes—in bunches like the black and white currants, instead of one by one and one by one: ever so long they last, when there’s nobody here but me. One might get old pretty quick then. Wouldn’t you like it better, Pierce?”

“Well, no,” said Pierce. “If the days were used up that way, there’d be so little time for doing anything. Mostly they’re short enough; and there’s no hurry about getting old, as you call it—an old woman of twenty—you’re a queer young person, Eileen.”

“I was only thinking,” said Eileen, “that perhaps I mightn’t be able to wait a great while, any more than the Widow Shanahan. And it would be a pity if I wasn’t in this world when the chest is opened”; and although Pierce replied: “Oh, nonsense; where else should you be?” she continued to contemplate this contingency in sad silence as they trotted down after their perch-long shadows over the sunny turf with its jewelled embroideries of golden trefoil and pearly eyebright, and dim amethystine thyme. But when they had just come to the gap in the dyke, where you step across two flat stones into the highest field, a somewhat consolatory thought struck her. It was: “Perhaps, then, they’d give all those things to you, Pierce, and I’ve told you what everybody’s to have, so mind you don’t forget.”

She was so engrossed by the idea that she nearly tripped over the unheeded stones, and her heir and executor, preventing her tumble, said: “Oh, it will be all right, never fear; but meanwhile, little Bright-Eyes, you’d better not break your neck. We’ll both of us have grand times when I come with the key.”

Eileen had many of her long years, almost nine, in fact, during which she might have forgotten Pierce and his promises, but she never did. Only once in all that time did anything happen to remind her of them, and that was on the Christmas after his visit, when Tom Roe, the postman, brought the first letter that had ever been addressed to Miss Eileen Fitzmaurice. Being opened hastily, it was found to contain a little white cardboard box, within which lay among rosy cloudlets of marvellous pink cotton-wool a tiny silver key, sent to Eileen by her cousin Pierce—her affectionate cousin, Pierce’s mother, who put up the packet for him, had written him down without consulting him, as a matter of form. The gift filled Eileen with gratitude and delight. Yet, in the course of the morning, her Aunt Geraldine came upon her when she sat in the book-room window, eyeing her new possession with a somewhat doubtful countenance. “I’m almost afraid,” she said half-aloud, “that it isn’t quite long enough. And I never did see a key with a pin in it before.”

“Long enough for what?” said her Aunt Geraldine. “It seems to me to be a very pretty little brooch, and it was exceedingly good-natured of your cousin to think of sending you one.”

“Oh yes, indeed, and it is very pretty, as pretty as can be,” Eileen protested. She flushed distressfully at the implication of ingratitude partly, and partly at this new view of the trinket, which would involve the vanishing of its peculiar charm. “I was only thinking,” she said, “that I have poked my finger farther down the hole than this would reach; but, of course, if it’s a brooch”—Aunt Geraldine had not stayed to hear her explanation; and Eileen presently put away the little box in her drawer, feeling that something had blunted the fine edge of her pleasure.

Those nine long years passed by uneventfully. It seemed, indeed, as if fewer things and fewer happened at Glendoula. In the Big House life went on somewhat in the manner of a machine gradually slowing down. Lady Fitzmaurice grew from season to season a little more invalided and melancholy, her sister-in-law more abstracted and apathetic, old Timothy stiffer and lamer in his gait. Even the ancient grey parrot on his pole in the parlour sank deeplier into his dotage, and only grimaced silently at Eileen when she tried to start a conversation with him. Eileen herself was an exception, though perhaps potentially rather than actually, the fresh spirit of youth making less resistance than is commonly imagined for it against the coercion of dreary external circumstances. Still her disposition was naturally blithe and hopeful, and she would have been ready enough with her: O brave new world! if any fair wind had borne the good ship into her ken. But instead of that she was destined to see a woeful wreck come drifting by.

It was gradually, by an aggregation of rumours, faint and vague at first, that warnings of the black time impending stole into Glendoula valley, much as the wan mists creep thither from seaward, a mere smoke-wreath falling away down the purple-rifted shoulders of Slieverossan, with the murk of a sky-enfolding cloud gathered up opaquely behind them. Felix O’Riordan, returning from Clonmorragh fair one July day, first brought authentic news of how “the quare ugly blackness on the pitaties, the same that done destruction last year on the crops away down in different parts of the counthry, was desthroyin’ all before it now no farther off than Kilfintragh, just at the back of the hills.” And through the rainy harvest weather ensuing, reports of the like became as frequent as the unkindly and chilly showers that drip-dripped unseasonably over the little fields. Then fell a heavy thunderous night, with flickerings of sheet-lightning fitfully casting an evil eye through the dark, and on the morrow, when its pall lifted, there was grief and fear among the neighbours at Glendoula, for the sober green ridges looked as if a scorching breath had passed over them, and from their drooping haulms and leaves came wafted the ill-auguring odour.

After that the trouble throve and waxed like the most unmolested weed. A man perhaps seldom tastes despair much cruder and sheerer than when at the impatiently desired potato-digging he turns up spadeful after spadeful, spadeful after spadeful, nothing but dangling lumps of malodorous slime, nothing but that whatever, on to the very end of the drill, where the wife stands watching him and saying: “Ah, the Lord be good to us—have we ne’er a sound one in it at all?” with the childer beside her looking on, piteously concerned or piteously indifferent. Before Slieverossan had drawn down his winter snow-hood, the dearth wrought by the ruined harvest was finding its victims far and wide. Serious distress existed in the big houses, where people were at their wit’s end to devise some agreeable substitute for that empty dish on the dinner table. Savoury rice, they tried, and stewed toast, and Yorkshire pudding, and many other such things, but none of them satisfactorily filled the place of the missing potato. There still remained a gap all-thing unbecoming at their feast. It was a dreadful loss. But in the small houses people were spared all worry of that sort at least, because when they had no pitaties, they had nothing else to eat, bad or good, which made their bill of fare a perfectly simple matter, thus illustrating, no doubt, the providential law of compensation.

Eileen’s mind, however, was not philosophic enough to show her this aspect of the case, and what she did actually see and hear smote her with sorrow and dismay. It seemed as if the way of her world, hitherto a tranquil, sometimes rather tedious, one, had changed into the path of a surging flood, whence cries of despair and beseeching hands appealed to her vainly where she stood, secure herself and helpless and remorseful. So little for anybody could she do, who would fain have rescued them all. Even if she had commanded the whole resources of the household, they would have been miserably inadequate; but as it was, Aunt Geraldine said drearily that she supposed it was no use giving to vagrants, and old Timothy, whose inborn tendency towards “naygurliness,” had developed into a vice-like clamp, which acted automatically at the pressure of a petition, kept one watchful eye perpetually upon the hall-door, and another on the little store-room across the passage. Only by rare conjunctions of good luck with agility could Eileen elude his vigilance so far as to fetch and carry between them unbeknownst. More often than not, she arrived too late to do anything; and at best, her stealthiest operations among the bread-crocks and biscuits were pretty sure to bring the old man shuffling thither in defence of the menaced commissariat.

“Arrah now, Miss Eily, what work have you there, cuttin’ up the fresh loaf? and the laws bless us all, but that’s the hunch! If there was a slab of a brick wantin’ for repeerin’ the house-wall, you could make a shift wid that.”

“There’s a very decent poor man at the door,” Eileen might say, “who looks as if he had been starving for a month of Sundays; and he has a scrap of a baby with him; its mother died yesterday at Kilfintragh. I must get it a piece of soft bread, and a drink of milk, if there’s any left.”

“And what for need you be destroyin’ a whole loaf for a crathur o’ that size? Sure, I seen it comin’ past me window, sittin’ cocked up like a kitten bewitched. I’ve some stale bits in the other crock ’ud do it grand.”

“Oh, those are nothing but little crumbs, only fit for the chickens.”

“Musha, long life to it! And is it settin’ itself up to want betther feedin’ than the chuckens? Well, now, I should suppose that what’s good enough for them’s plenty good enough for it, when the most differ between them is that sorra the use it’s ever apt to be, starved or no, except makin’ throuble for itself and other people.”

“Well, if some babies had been fed like chickens, perhaps they wouldn’t have grown up so fond of gabbling like old geese,” Eileen might rejoin, inaudibly, so that the repartee should relieve her own at no cost to Timothy’s feelings, as she escaped with her booty.

But her raids were not by any means invariably so successful. Sometimes she found that Timothy had forestalled her, and had swept everything into an inaccessible locker; and sometimes there was really nothing left to sweep. So then she had no resource save to ensconce herself in the remotest backward-looking room, that she might not hear the interchange of entreaty and denial, nor witness the lingering withdrawal of the rejected suppliants, wandering away disappointed out of sight, but not out of mind so soon, behind the glossy-walled belt of laurels.

For a like reason she shunned in those days what used to be a favourite walk beyond the front gates along the quiet lane, with its broad green banks softly on one side mounting up into amply spreading grass-slopes, now haunted at its every turn by sorrowful spectres that she had no charm to lay. Occasionally one of them would say to her: “Ah, melady, the blessin’s of God on the sweet face of you, and may you never know what it is to want the bit,” and this made her feel herself all the more to be a sort of ravening locust. Her own meals, indeed, those times, were partaken of grudgingly and of necessity, after which, carrying everything she could lay hands on, she hurried off to the end of the elm-grove, where a herd of small children would be looking out for them with large eyes. But day by day she thought her supplies seemed to dwindle, and the pinched faces to multiply, and she was as powerless against that as if it were the oncoming of night. One day in a week of black frost she desperately sold her godmother’s cameo bracelet to a passing higgler for a shilling, wherewith she bought out of a baker’s cart three portly loaves; and the satisfaction which these caused to prevail for a while, a short while, almost compelled her to think that she would dispose in the same method of her silver key-brooch, her only other ornament, the next time he came by. But always, having looked at it for some minutes, she replaced it in its box without achieving any resolve. The pencilled line, still legible on the lid, seemed to protest against the transaction in the name of the dead summer that lived with her brightest memories.

All this while the big boulder stone was lying out under the stars and mists and shadow-shifting winds on the grassy ridge of Slieve Ardgreine; and thither constantly travelled Eileen’s thoughts, although her bodily pilgrimages to it had grown less frequent than heretofore, since dripping tussocks and long, bedraggled skirts had become a graver consideration. She had never lost her faith in it and its contents. Nothing whatever had occurred to alter her opinion about it, and the silence on the subject which various reasons obliged her to maintain helped to ward off chances of disillusioning enlightenment. Eileen’s sixteen years in lonely Glendoula had taught her so very little either at first or second hand about other Quality’s domestic arrangements, that for anything she could tell, it might not be unusual to keep the family plate locked up in a large stone chest out-of-doors. Therefore no antecedent improbability cropped up to struggle with the existence of a long-cherished, deep-rooted dream and desire.

The one change that had here been wrought by those slow-footed, empty-handed years was in the use she designed for her riches. This change grew more radical under stress of the famishing winter. She no longer could care to admire the beauty of the bright gleaming silver things, nor to sort out from among them fastidiously appropriate gifts for each—that indeed had become only too simple a process, since everybody’s need was the same. Her sole wish now was to sell all that she had straightway—she would have waited to make no pious bargains about treasure in heaven—that she might satisfy the poor with bread. But the more intensely her wishes concentrated themselves upon that object, the more keenly she felt how far it was out of reach. Four years and some months, jealously reckoned, still were lacking to her of the age that would legally entitle her to enter upon the possession of her property; and although she now knew from other sources than old Timothy that some inheritance did then await her, what could such a distant prospect avail in the face of to-day’s direful necessity? Chafing sorely against the law’s delay that set bars between the owner and her rights, Eileen wondered sometimes whether the Lord Chancellor, whom she understood to rule her destinies, might not under the circumstances be persuaded to trust her with her fortune, now that she was sixteen and a half, just to keep poor Denis Madden’s half-dozen orphans, and old Widow Flynn and her blind daughter, and all the rest of the people from starving completely. Once she actually ventured upon a remote hint at some such possibility to her Aunt Geraldine, but lacking courage did not approach the subject closely enough to make herself intelligible; a failure for which her conscience often pricked her in the following days.

More than ever on the morning when this incident befell: It was mocking March weather, bright and calm and pitilessly cold, and Eileen thought she would warm herself by running up to her big stone, which she had not visited since the autumn. But before she reached the first bend in the avenue young Larry M‘Farlane hastily met her, and turned her aside into a shrubbery with a moving story about a crippled blackbird which was fluttering there among the bushes. “Unless some ould miscreant of a cat might be slinkin’ away under the low branches this minyit, Miss Eileen, wid the crathur grabbed in her mouth.” Larry had invented this little fiction on the spur of the moment, the fact being that just round the turn, a few yards from where he stopped Eileen, a heap of rags seemed to have fallen, as if flung or blown down across the road. Its halt there had indeed been so unpremeditated that only a remnant of the crust someone had begged hard for up at the House a minute before was still gripped in a gaunt hand. Coming upon this obstruction, young Larry, whose fare nowadays did not conduce to athletic feats, found its removal quite beyond his powers, and therefore ran on to seek help, when his meeting with Miss Eileen converted his most urgent duty into the task of hindering her from “gettin’ a quare fright along of the misfort’nit poor body.” He accomplished it only in part. For he could not contrive but that she should notice the gathering of a crowd in the avenue, and the shrilling of shocked ejaculations, and then the bearing away with slow solemnity, which apprised her of how near the cloaked shadow had passed.

Eileen gave up her expedition to the stone chest; its baffling impenetrability seemed just then a cruel gibe of Fate, wiselier ignored. Larry, for his part, temporarily lost sight of the errand which had been bringing him up to the Big House: a commission he had undertaken to execute for the postman. Thus it was not until the evening, when the cold March twilight had faded, too tardily for many people impatient to huddle away into oblivious sleep, that a letter reached the thriftily-lit drawing-room, where Eileen and her aunt were also getting through the interval before bed-time as best they could, which was but dully. A letter was something of an event in itself, and this one, unlike most of its predecessors, did not collapse inanely into a listless “Oh, it’s only”—for it contained a real piece of news.

Glendoula was to have another visit from Pierce Wilmot. Pierce, who had grown up a civil engineer, was now in charge of certain road-making relief-works, which were about to come creeping down Letterglas valley and up through the Nick of Time into the neighbouring glen. The superintendence of these would bring him to stay for a while near the place, and he hoped to renew his acquaintance with his kinsfolk at the Big House. All the establishment was more or less thrilled by the intelligence. It seemed, of course, only natural that he should take up his quarters there, and the prospect pleased on the whole. Lady Fitzmaurice, even, and her sister-in-law were slightly cheered and roused; even old Timothy, despite his prejudice, set about his polishing with a revived zest, in anticipation of a visitor who might be expected to appreciate “the differ between spoons that had a proper shine kep’ on them, and ones that was as dingy as if you’d loaned them for stirrin’ the Ould Fellow’s tay.” All the others, who remembered Master Pierce as a fine friendly-spoken young gentleman, thought that it would be a pleasant variety to set eyes on him again, and the rest were quite ready to welcome him on that recommendation. Eileen alone looked forward to his return somewhat doubtfully. She knew right well that things could not be the same as they were in those very olden days; and the differences might not be improvements. Suppose that she did not like the grown-up Pierce, nor he her? Then her reminiscences, she thought, would be superseded and spoiled. Still, she believed herself, after all, to be glad that he was coming.

It was late on a wild bleak evening that Pierce arrived, after a long open-air day of surveying and supervising. An additional pair of candles illuminated the drawing-room in his honour, and were burning clearly enough to show what manner of man he was at four-and-twenty. He had not changed at all irrecognisably, being still black and straight-browed, alert and rather resolute-looking, as beseemed a person whose business consisted largely in the clearing away of obstacles, by summarily forcible methods if need were. He had done this figuratively upon occasion as well as literally since his last visit to Glendoula. But the little girl who then used to patter up and down that primitive path beside him was now much harder to identify, having shot up so slender and tall. Also in Pierce’s honour, Eileen had put on her best gown that evening, a fine white muslin, sprinkled with a pattern of little lilac rose-bunches, outlined in a cloud of black dots. It was not more than half a decade lag of the latest Dublin fashions, but the six months’ growth since its last wearing had certainly made its skirt a rather skimpy length, as she noted with chagrin when putting it on. Some consolation was found in fastening her deep embroidered collar with the silver key. She had plaited her brown hair, darker now, yet keeping its richness of latent gold, in an unusually elaborate Grecian-plait to coil in a careful spiral knot at the back of her head. But first it framed her face in satin-sleek bands, smoothed down low on the delicate curve of the cheek, and then gathered up, leaving on either side a loop discovering a shell-like ear. As pink as a geranium-blossom one of them was that evening, the nipping cold and her thin dress had tempted her to sit so near the fire; and her eyes were as softly bright as ever, with such light as a sunbeam, questing beneath leaf-lattices, may waken in a moss-brimmed nook of clearest well-water.

Pierce noticed all these things, and none of them, while he was greeting his Aunt Geraldine; and he fell in love so simultaneously that it would have been impossible to say whether his observations came before or after. His habit was to be prompt and decided, and with promptitude and decision did he grasp this new experience—of which, nevertheless, an access of very unwonted diffidence and irresolution seemed part and parcel. These set in immediately, as if he had passed a vote of want of confidence against himself upon the spot, and its effect was retrospective, throwing a slur alike upon his present and his past. He wondered whether his cousin had not thought him a peculiarly odious schoolboy. His old pet name for her suddenly occurred to him as persistently appropriate, but the mere remembrance of it made him feel so over-presumptuous that he almost wished her to have forgotten it. In like manner he recollected, and could not dare to remind her of, their climb up Slieve Ardgreine, or their adventure with the strayed goats, and other episodes. He had retained only just enough common-sense to understand that Eileen’s silence all the evening upon this, and indeed every other topic, was not intended for a rebuff; and the flow of his conversation with his Aunt Geraldine was not a little impeded by a perpetual apprehension, altogether superfluous, of her niece as a critic.

Of course, he was not very long in recovering his presence of mind. In a day or two he began to dispense with such hampering precautions, but the sentiment that had suggested them continued in full force, and did not cease to influence his behaviour. Less, perhaps, in his dealings with Eileen than with the world at large, it made him transpose himself, so to speak, into a softer key. He unlearned in a single week some tricks of peremptoriness and self-assertion, which the vicissitudes of one early set in authority had been teaching him through several past years. For it was with him as if he had suddenly discovered the existence of something precious and perishable, that a touch might shatter or a breath destroy, and thereupon he grew wonderfully sensitive to the wide-spreading intricacies of cause and effect. How could he tell but that a rough word spoken anywhere might set a-stirring peril-fraught vibrations to reach and threaten the head that he loved? For her sake, he would have liked everything to be on velvet, and he was always instinctively aiming at that end. The most unskilled and incapable of the labourers whose efforts he superintended found their miscellaneous inefficiency treated with singular forbearance, even if it attained an egregiousness characterised by their comrades as “a quare botch intirely,” and driving their foreman to demand of various powers, celestial and otherwise: What to glory the great gaby was at? During leisure moments their lank and hollow-eyed gang were prone to pass the remark that “the captain” was “a rael gintleman”; while up at the Big House all the inmates accorded him all sorts of golden opinions.

Eileen herself meanwhile was not in the least aware of what had befallen him, but she had left off dreading any detriment to her cherished memories, and his visit had undoubtedly brought an influx of pleasure and interest to cheer her present day. She was so unaccustomed to being made much of by relations that this kinsman’s good nature impressed her as quite extraordinary, and so little used to making much of herself that she never thought of attributing it to anything except a special quality in Pierce, rather more likely, no doubt, to be exercised in another person’s behalf than in her own. It repeatedly surprised her to see that he remembered and acted upon her opinions and wishes, as if they were really important—a new view of them which she would have been slow to adopt. One morning he rode off all the long way to Denismore and back to get her Alfred Tennyson’s latest volume, and her delight in it was alloyed only by the intrusive consideration of how much coarse meal the price of it would have purchased. For her mind was still engrossingly pre-occupied with the neighbours’ trouble.

The cloud of it had lifted a little since Pierce’s coming. Possible wages loosened the famine-grip on such households as could send forth a man to ply pick and shovel, instead of hopelessly lying abed “agin the hunger”; and then a spell of more genial weather interposing released everybody from the clutches of that other icy-fingered foe, whose co-operation is so deadly. “For sure,” as old Christy Shanahan had been known to remark in this connection, “to be starvin’ inside and outside at the one time is more than any raisonable man can stand at all, unless be good luck he was a graven image.” This dim lightening of the prospect, however, rousing a stir of hope where numb despair had begun to prevail, made the need of plans for a timely rescue seem all the more urgent. One evening at dinner, Eileen heard Pierce say that if the people could get food enough to ward off the fever just until the potatoes—supposing there should be any—were dug, they might do well enough; otherwise, it was a bad lookout. And he added that it was hard to see how it could be managed, as the road-making grant had nearly run short, and where else should the money come from? At that Eileen had almost spoken her haunting thought aloud, and it was: “the great chest full of silver.” And though the unpropitious moment enjoined silence, therefrom dated the designing of an enterprise so venturesome that the possibility of carrying it out was a point upon which she hopefully and fearfully changed her mind a dozen times daily for as many days.

At last there came a brilliant, capriciously-lighted morning, with its shine and shadow under the control of a shifting snow-drift, which sailed at the wind’s will. It was a holiday, and Pierce succeeded in setting out almost as soon as he wished on the early walk he had planned with his cousin. What slight delay did intervene was caused by the arrival, just as they were starting, of the Widow Barry with a couple of eggs to sell on commission for her next door neighbour—the Widow Shanahan, who “could get that far be no manner of manes herself, the crathur.”

“And they’re the last ones you’ll be takin’ off her, Miss Eileen, she bid me tell you,” said Widow Barry. “For she’s after killin’ her ould hin this mornin’, because it’s torminted she was to be seein’ it mopin’ around starvin’ the same as a raisonable body, sorra a bit had she to be throwin’ it this great while back whativer. ’Deed now, you might as well be walkin’ along the shore of the say these times as along be the dures down the street, for e’er a scrap of pitaty-parin’ or anythin’ else you’d find lyin’ about. The crathur had to be contintin’ itself wid whativer it could pick out of the ground, and bedad I won’er it had the heart to think of layin’ e’er an odd egg at all. So she took and wrung its neck this mornin’, and she said the sup of broth ’ud keep the life in herself and poor Katty for a day or so anyway. But och, Miss Eileen dear, it’ll be the weeny sup entirely. For ’twas meself caught the crathur for her, and I declare to goodness it wasn’t the weight in me hand of a little wisp of hay. Sez I to her, the feathers on it ’ud be heavier be thimselves. But sure she could do no betther; and if it boiled into the name of broth even, it’d give them the notion they was aitin’ somethin’.” In prospect of this repast, the sixpence that Pierce sent seemed to him hardly more than an emphasising of a “strong distemper and a weak relief”; but the Widow Barry, who went her way filled with a gratitude to God and man, may have understood the situation better.

And then the two young people set out on their rambles. They took their old favourite route up Slieve Ardgreine, for the first time since Pierce’s visit, on Eileen’s part, as the milder weather had been “soft” too, turning the mossy nap of the turf into a treacherous sponge, that squelched coldly over-shoes at the lightest footfall. To-day, however, it might be traversed dry-shod, given a discreet avoidance of extra vivid patches in the golden green; and a busy thirsty breeze had left scarcely a dewdrop in the glazed cups of the celandines and the pink-rimmed saucers of half-blown daisy-buds. Up this daintily carpeted path Eileen picked her steps rather silently. Her companion thought that she had been saddened by the incident of the ill-faring fowl, but that was not the reason. What pre-occupied her was the great venture which she appeared to be approaching more or less in spite of herself. The very direction which their walk was taking, at no choice of her own, was like a hand beckoning imperiously. On the way up she hovered towards the verge of it, and recoiled from it, and came stealing back to it again, oftener than the flitting clouds furled and unfurled their shadow-mats at her feet; and the big boulder, the stone plate-chest, hove in sight while she was still wavering. Failure would be so very terrible to her. She knew that if Pierce were shocked or indignant, or even amused, she would be miserable indeed; and she could not by any means convince herself that he would not be all these things. Yet, when they were standing beside the tall, blackish shape together, just as in old times—only it used to be the taller then—she felt desperately that, chance what might, she must not go away without speaking the sentence she had been mentally rehearsing all the week. It rang in her ears like a clamorous bell, and made her deaf to any other speech, so evidently that Pierce stopped in the middle of what he was beginning to remark, as if she had interrupted him. Just at that moment the sun swam out clear of a high-tossed drift, and sent a golden wave sweeping widely up and down the hill-slopes. It broke against the big stone, shining into Eileen’s face with all the dazzlement of an April forenoon, and she accepted the omen as if it had been the cordial clasp of some encouraging hand. Before the radiant rim had slidden on many paces farther, she took heart of grace, and the irrevocable word was spoken.

“There was one thing I wanted to ask you about, Pierce,” she said. She had moved round to the opposite side of the chest, and was looking at him across the lid, with eyes very bright and wistful beneath her broad-brimmed straw hat, which had brown ribbons tied in a bow under her chin. “I shouldn’t wonder if you thought it very dreadful of me,” she continued; “but I really don’t think it is myself. After all, I only want to use my own things, and that can be no great harm; and if these don’t belong to me now, they don’t belong to anybody, which is absurd. At any rate, it couldn’t possibly make any difference worth speaking of to those people up at the office in Dublin, and it would make all the difference in the world to the poor people here; so ‘the right of it over-leps the wrong of it,’ as old Murtagh Reilly used to say.” She was gradually arguing herself into courage; still a mere shadow falling anywhere would have routed it.

“I hope it is something truly appalling, or else I’ll be horribly disappointed now,” Pierce replied, a little puzzled by this prologue, but rather pleasantly so, because he liked her to consult him. “You’ve raised my expectations cruelly.... But if you wish, I’ll undertake not to think it very dreadful, nor dreadful in the least degree,” he added, as after a short pause she seemed still to be hesitating. He would have said that he had never made a safer promise.

“Well, then,” said Eileen; “do you remember how you said one time that you could easily get a key for this old chest of ours? Here’s the keyhole, you see, all right. I’ve always kept it clear of moss. And, I wonder, would you mind—if it didn’t give you a great deal of trouble—getting one for me now? Without telling anybody else, I mean, for of course they wouldn’t let me. I know I can have no legal right to take anything out of it until I come of age; but that’s only the law, and really when people are starving, one can’t be expected to wait for years and years just on account of such nonsense. At the best of times it seems a great pity to keep it lying here useless for so long, but now it’s like locking up other people’s lives. If I can’t get at it in time to do anything for them, I might as well never have it at all—there’ll not be a soul left in Glendoula. You’ve no idea how hateful it makes one feel. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m nearly as bad as the wretches who go on carting off their wheat and oats to sell in England. Only it isn’t my fault in reality, for until you came I never had a chance of speaking to any possible person about it. And then, Pierce, I was thinking that when we have got this opened, you’d maybe help me to manage about selling the silver. It must be worth a great deal of money: enough, at any rate, to last while they are waiting for the potatoes; for we really had very fine plate, I believe, though it mayn’t be quite so splendid as old Timothy used to declare—he is a little given to romancing. And, of course, these times I don’t expect to find the yards of pearl and ruby ropes that were in the Glittering Hoard! You do remember that I told you, and that you promised about the key, don’t you, Pierce?” she said anxiously, perplexed by his expression, for he was looking hard at her with a sort of bewildered blank dismay, almost as if something had frightened him—an effect which she had not included among her many apprehensions.

He was taken wholly unprepared, because during her irresolution Eileen naturally had shunned the perilous subject, and he had himself for the time being entirely forgotten the existence of that old childish myth. But now he did indeed remember it, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, instead of all those long years ago. There had stood the little girl eagerly telling him her absurd story, to which he listened with amused forbearance, thinking to himself that he must not vex her by incredulity, and carelessly noticing how swiftly her small face flushed, and how brightly her large eyes shone in the excitement of her narrative. And to-day the same thing seemed coming to pass again—but with differences. For here unchanged in the sunshine was the dark stone block with its yellow dappling of lichen, and that same clear voice came to him across it, speaking so much in earnest that the transparent flower-flush rose and the glance brightened just as of old. But the small child had grown into a tall maiden, and her voice was the one that gave meaning to all the other sounds in his world, and her absurd story no longer amused him in the least, seemed liker breaking his heart, seemed the pronouncing of an evil spell, that blurred the light of his eyes, and conjured up a web of black forebodings over the fair horizon of his future. If the soft-aired spring morning had suddenly began to scowl and keen around him, and sting him with frozen pellets, it would have faintly shadowed forth the transition. A man’s mood, however, may fall from one level to another in much less time than it takes to tell, and Eileen thought his answer came quickly.

“Don’t you know that you’re talking nonsense, Eileen?” he said.

She had never heard him speak so sharply, almost roughly—not even when he had seen his case of mathematical instruments dropped by Hughey Brian into the bottomless bog-hole, nor when he had come upon the Donnellys’ little goat tethered with the remnant of an urgently-needed and long-sought measuring-line. And she was immediately aware that the very worst had befallen. Her plan was impracticable, and she had disgusted Pierce by proposing it. The poor Glendoula people must starve, and her cousin, who had been so good-natured, could never like her any more. Probably he considered her request worthy of a dishonestly-minded idiot, and was deeply, perhaps justly, offended at her suggestion that he should take part in such a transaction. Certainly, he would not hear of the scheme, so all her hopes were scattered like mist before a hurrying wind, and there again loomed the grim trouble ahead, with its inexorable face turned unveiled upon her. Just at that moment, however, it was partially screened by the interposition of a still uglier one, which would thrust itself between, asking and answering a question with the same tormenting result: What must Pierce be thinking of her? He had surely meant worse than “nonsense.”

Amid this rude crowding in on her of disappointment jostling with grief and mortification, Eileen clung half-consciously to the sense that it behoved her by all means to retain the footing of her self-possession, and she replied very gently: “Not exactly nonsense, I think; but perhaps—I daresay it would be quite out of the question to take these things now, and not even right. It seemed to me the only way I could do any thing to help the people, but of course I knew it mightn’t be possible at all. I don’t understand much about the law. Don’t you think it’s getting rather cold up here? Perhaps we’d be wiser to come back before the day clouds over.”

This dignified composure seemed to Pierce as it were a seal set upon his fear, the document of which her fantastic story had supplied, and he dejectedly turned down the hill-path with her in silence. The sullen-looking stone which they left behind them, a blot on the sunny sward, might have been a little ancient altar to some unpropitious God, whence they were taking home, sorrowfully, discomfortable oracles. In truth, one of them had there said farewell to an old hope, and the other struck up an acquaintance with a new fear; both experiences apt to arouse pre-occupying meditations. Neither of the cousins gave much heed to their surroundings as they went. The small wild clouds flirted the sunshine about as if flocks of white wings were flickering by; here and there they flung down the shadows which make one marvel how their “little-seeming substance” can be the cause of such deep purple stains. But now nobody marked them, nor the far-off pipe of the plover, nor the fragrance of the basking herbage underfoot.

Thus they presently came to the gapped dyke leading into the first field, and all the way neither of them had spoken a word. Now, at that moment it happened that Eileen was looking very straight before her, with her head held rather high, and her eyes steadily opened, to give the tears a chance of going back the way they had come, and walking warily as one who felt how even the quiver of an eyelash might be fatal. Yet these precautions defeated themselves, for they were the reason why she stumbled at the flat stepping-stones, so that Pierce had to save her from falling just as he had done nearly nine years before. This time, however, he did not let her go again with a laugh. He held her close and said: “Oh, my darling, my sweetheart, don’t be vexed, don’t be vexed. It will be all right, never fear. We’ll pull them through—all of them—safely somehow. Don’t think about that old silver any more; and you won’t mind what I said just now? I’m a stupid brute, you see, sweetheart; but there’s nothing on earth that I wouldn’t do for you.”

While she listened to this statement, Eileen went through, in an intensified form, an experience somewhat resembling that of the bygone summer morning when the unknown Pierce had first spoken to her: a sudden surging up of dread, that wave-like took her off her feet for the instant, but only to lift her unharmed into a new world, most beautifully strange, and shut out from all troubles of the mere earth with the light that never was on land or sea. A reflection of it in her eyes encouraged him to pursue that line of argument, and he said a great deal more, all much to the same purport, as they went down the steep green fields, where the young bracken-fronds were uncoiling their flossy silken whorls beneath last season’s weather-beaten brown plumes, and the golden blossom-flakes were melting off the tall winter furzes; and then on between the fledged boles of the elm-grove, and under the scented shadow of the laurel-walk, until at the hall-door Eileen ran away to make a solitary survey of the unexplored regions in which she had wonderfully arrived. Just for the moment Pierce felt gratefully disposed towards the big stone, which had, at all events, given him his cue.

But later on that afternoon he spoke very bitterly to his Aunt Geraldine, whom he found alone in the book-room. The hearing of candid opinions is a privilege not uncommonly enjoyed by spinster aunts.

“You’ve kept her moping here all these years,” he said, “without companions or amusement or occupation, till it’s no wonder that she has taken up queer fancies. Why, it was enough to drive her—to make anybody unlike other people. Surely you might have managed better for her somehow.”

“It really wouldn’t have been easy,” his aunt said, but meekly on the defensive; “we always have had so little ready money, and then your poor Aunt Gerald’s wretched health is another difficulty. Besides that, I never noticed anything odd about Eileen. She always seems contented and cheerful enough, and I thought she was a sensible sort of child, and very quiet. Just once or twice, now that I think of it, she has said something that rather puzzled me about a plate-chest, but I had no idea she had any delusion of the kind.”

“Yes, that’s just where it is; nobody has cared to look after her or take any trouble about her,” Pierce said, wrathful and reproachful, a little unreasonably; so fresh was his discovery that concern for Eileen’s welfare ought to be the prime consideration in every rightly ordered mind. He did not surmise, either, that he was upbraiding a friend. Yet such was the case. For, from the very first evening, their Aunt Geraldine had guessed whither things were tending, and ever since had been watching their course, a melancholy sort of Prospero, who was powerless to work any wonders, and whose joy at nothing could be much, but who did feel some pleasure in the growing likelihood that her favourite sister’s son would some day reign in the wreck of the old place, and take charge of the person whom she had always regarded half-pityingly, half-impatiently as “Eileen, poor child.” Therefore the cropping up of this ominous obstacle was a disappointment by which she felt so cast down that she had not the spirit to rebut with any energy the accusation of contributory negligence.

Neither she nor Pierce had spoken of the circumstances that lent the matter its menacing aspect, but they were uppermost in the mind of each. What made Eileen’s futile story sound so warningly in their ears was the remembered existence of that baneful spectre whose mischief might be traced among the annals of the Fitzmaurice family, as well in the notorious eccentricities which had preluded poor Sir Gerald’s last desperate act, as in the more or less pronounced oddities and deficiencies which had wrought the history of this kinsman and the other into a tragedy with a grotesquer plot.

“I can’t think what has put such a notion into her head,” Miss Fitzmaurice said dejectedly. The workings of Eileen’s mind could hardly indeed have been more remote from her observation if they had gone on in a different planet. “But, after all, Pierce, if one considers how young she is—scarcely more than a child.”

“No reasonable child would believe anything so preposterous,” Pierce replied with gloom. “A rough lump of a boulder with moss growing in the cracks!”

“And did you tell her so?” asked his aunt.

“Well, no, not exactly; we began talking about something else, and I thought I’d better see whether you knew anything about it; but apparently you don’t,” said Pierce.

“Oh, you must just laugh her out of it,” his aunt said, laughing nervously herself, and had not any more helpful suggestion to offer. Pierce left the interview dissatisfied and unreassured.

Towards sunsetting, however, he found himself once more on the summit of Slieve Ardgreine. He had promised to go and see after Barney Foyle, who had been “took bad wid the road-sickness” on the day before, and as the Foyles’ cabin stood by the side of the Clonmoragh road, his shortest route was up and down through the Nick of Time. The sight of the solitary boulder, squatting there starkly black amid the flushed western glow, made him realise his trouble with much searching of heart. It seemed a symbol, or something more than a symbol, a visible tangible embodiment of the obstruction which had thrust itself into the clear path of his desires. Now, Pierce Wilmot was alike by nature and training a person who could not, without great and grudging reluctance, admit impediments to his progress along the way wherein he would go; and in this case he felt more loth than ever before. As he crossed the stretch of sward towards the gap, he eyed the dark mass with a hot thrill of resentment, as if against somebody who had wittingly baulked and baffled him. Yet withal it was for him so obviously nothing more than just an ordinary lump of limestone, that in view of it Eileen’s quaint belief took a stronger tinge of unreason. Nor did he possess, to soften it down, any knowledge of how the seed had been sown in her mind, and had grown up, fostered and never disturbed, through the long years of a lonely childhood. So, for a few paces, his heart sank and sank, till it reached depths where a poignant pity was the most endurable element in his mood.

But before he reached the Nick of Time, an idea that flashed across him made him deviate several yards to the right, and walk up to the big stone. He stood still beside it, reflecting for a while, and then gave it a slight kick, as though to mark his arrival at some definite conclusion. At that moment he was saying to himself: “In any case it would be better out of this; and I’ll do it the first thing to-morrow, by Jove I will! Then I’ll bring her up here, and the chances are that when once she’s seen it in fragments she’ll never give the matter another thought. There was that young fellow the Barnards knew, who got rid of a curious hallucination in much the same sort of way. They burned an old paper on which he had taken it into his head that the safety of the whole world depended; and when he found that nothing happened, he grew perfectly rational about it. And so will she. For indeed she’s as sensible as anybody can be, except just on that one point, which won’t signify an atom, if it’s taken in time. It’s a good job the notion occurred to me. Ay, that’s the kind of key I must get you, sweetheart—poor little Bright-Eyes. However, I’ll take good care that she shan’t be vexed about it. So there’ll be a short end of you, you old stookawn, and joy go with you,” he said half-aloud, with a defiant flourish of his blackthorn towards the big stone, which, as he turned his back upon it, flung a long, murky shadow after him, like a scowl, over the sheeny grass.

The next morning did not smile upon anyone’s undertakings; rather, it might be said to survey them unsympathetically through a blank, expressionless mask. For Letterglas and all its neighbouring glens were full of a white fog. It was not merely the soft mist that clings about distant tree-clumps and cabin-clusters when the sun is still low, and uncurls slowly, peeling off from round them, while he climbs, giving one an impression that the landscape is a fragile work of art, not yet quite finished careful unpacking out of delicate cotton-wool wrappings. All the night through a vast white cloud had been adrift thither from the westward, over seas, hanging low always, and sometimes trailing on the very face of the water like a huge disabled pinion. Beneath it the dim blue tide had crept to the limitary foot of the cliffs, furtively, as if from an ambush; but the wavering ribbon of weed and froth set no boundary for the thronging vapour-masses, which passed on wafted inland through rifts and over crests, till at length the escorting breeze dropped and left them halted motionless, a crowd checked by invisible barriers. Round about Glendoula they made all the valleys into one, spanning the ravines with ghostly causeways and bridges, and levelling the peaks, lost among aërial snowfields. The curd-white impenetrable wall looked at a few yards’ distance so dense and solid that the thought of walking through it almost took away one’s breath, and people about to emerge from it loomed along with such dim, unsubstantial shapes that their voices sounded startlingly loud and near.

Yet, notwithstanding these obstructive conditions, work was going on in Letterglas valley, where wheel-barrows trundled to and fro invisibly, tilting out clattering loads, and picks swung unseen till one stood close to the wielder’s elbow. Pierce, the inspector, had made his way thither, gropingly, at an early hour, having a special job in view, which he was anxious to get done as soon as might be. But since a field of vision wider than the present was desirable for his operations, he consulted the weather-wise among his men as to the probability of the fog clearing off. In old Murtagh Reilly’s opinion, which was highly esteemed upon such points, this might be expected to take place before they were much older.

“I wouldn’t wonder if it was very apt to be givin’ itself a heft agin we’re done breakfast, your honour,” he said; “and once it fairly gits a rise on it, it won’t be long streelin’ itself off out of your way. It’s quare somewhiles to see the rate them mists ’ill be skytin’ up the hillside at, and not a breath of win’ stirrin’ that ’ud thrimble the feather of steam whiffin’ out of an ould kettle’s spout, let alone liftin’ a big cloud fit to thatch a townland.”

“Sure it’s the sun shinin’ on the wrong side of them does be drawin’ them up,” said Christy Martin instructively, “like as if they was a wet shirt shrinkin’ in front of the fire. The flannen’s a terror for cocklin’ up into nothin’ if the hate’s too strong for it.”

“I dunno where the great likeness is then,” said old Reilly, who had not a taste for instruction.

“Maybe there’s not, Christy,” said Christy’s brother Willy; “very belike there is not. But all the same, you and me’d be glad enough of a pinny for ivery time we’ve seen the sun comin’ out red on this side, lookin’ the livin’ moral of a hot cinder burnin’ through a blanket.”

“Have it your own way, lads,” said old Reilly, sublimely abandoning the whole expanse of the heavens to them with a comprehensive flourish of his hand. “Howsomiver, your honour, if you was axin’ me, I’d say this day’s apter than not to be takin’ up prisintly, or next door to it, as thick as it is this instiant minyit.”

Old Reilly seemed to have said truly, for by the time that everybody rose from the sodded bank, on which some of them had been eating slices of bread as they sat—others were in the same plight as John O’Mahony, who remarked humorously that it saved a dale of throuble to have your breakfast yisterday or else to-morra—there was a perceptible curtailment in the flowing drapery of the hill-slopes, and a thinning of its texture, paler shimmering brightness running through it here and there, to show that the opaque folds might shake out into diaphanous tissues of pearl and silver.

Accordingly, a small knot of men by-and-by detached themselves from the rest, and began to ascend towards the Nick of Time, whose gap was still hidden by an ample curtain. Pierce was one of the party, which carried up with it a supply of gritty black grains and sundry coercive-looking tools. He invited Murtagh Reilly to accompany them, but the old man cried off the expedition. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll stop where I am,” he said, “for these times when there does be a notorious curse on the counthry, and the hungry-grass growin’ over ivery inch of it, troth it’s as much as a man’s life’s worth—and if that’s no great things, it’s the most he has—to be settin’ his misfortnit fut e’er a step further than he’s bound. But you’ve a plinty of the lads along widout me, your honour.”