Orange Lily: Chapter III

“A cottar howkin in a sheugh,

Wi’ dirty stanes biggin a dyke,

Baring a quarry and sic like,

Himself, a wife, he thus sustains,

A smytrie o’ wee duddie weans,

An’ nought but his han’ darg to keep

Them right and tight in thack an’ rape.”

Burns.

Alas! they had been friends in youth,

But whispering tongues can poison truth.

And what happens to any human pair, must have happened to many such a pair, since men and women multiplied on earth; thus was it with our little Lily and Tom.

For some of the other school children, prompted thereunto by the naughty feelings that spring up, the devil best knows how! in the hearts of all human dwellers on the green earth, partly invented and much magnified the tale, that “Tommy Cowltert had bragged about beating Lily Keag in class.” The little story-tellers did not thereby mean to do harm. Half the wrong-doers in the world mean to do no harm, bless you! Either their deeds diverge quite unaccountably from the uprightness of their intentions, or else folk interpret things unkindly; but still—“no harm was meant!”

Well, the Keags’ farm-house lay on a hill-slope, half a mile from Ballyboly village, with very few neighbors’ houses around, and none near but that of the Coulters. This lay still further from the village, and was a big cottage in some disrepair, down in a bit of marsh-ground, full of meadow-sweet in summer, and of snipes in winter season. It will therefore be seen that Tom and Lily had no other children near to play with; and, when the former took himself off to the village in search of fun, he got so skelped by his mother and clouted by his father, who were only unanimous in such very necessary attentions towards their offspring, that he decided it “answered best” to work after school hours. It was one of his duties to bring up the cow at milking time; and then Lily had been accustomed to trot down the hill to the end of her father’s big meadow that marched with the Coulters’ one small field, and have a talk with Tom across the gap or the thorn bushes that generally supplied the place of gates in Ballyboly parish. Sometimes Tom hauled these aside, and she crept through and tasted the delights of usefulness by “shooing” at the old cow too.

One evening Lily did not come. It was on that morning she had heard of Tom’s ingratitude to his mentor—to her who had coaxed him to school; and her little heart felt queer and sore. Tom felt only lonely that evening. But, next morning, as he came along by their marsh, or “quaw,” as he delighted in calling it to Lily, who considered it vulgar to say such “broad “ words, he was startled to see her trotting far ahead on the straight, lonely causeway through the bog which lay between the village and the grass land about their own homes. She gone on! who had daily waited for him at the corner where the Keags’ private lane and his own marsh-path met. It was curious!

“What for did ye not stop a wee while for me this morning?” he asked simply, when, after three o’clock, they were released from school and he joined her, as usual. “I cried on ye, all my able. Did ye no hear?”

“Ay! but why should I be late at school for the likes of you?”

Lily’s cross answer died away in a sort of frightened whisper, its bitterness shocking herself; her eyes filled with tears. Tom was silent with utter amazement, but he, too, felt queer now and sore. They trotted along silently for a long time, then he suggested—

“I’m feared ye’ve taken the sulks.”

“I never have them; it’s yourself,” said Lily, with an angry sob.

“Them that has them never acknowledges till them. I’m sorry for ye,” was the young Pharisee’s calm reply in tones of pitying superiority. Then, parrot-like, mimicking a sentence much used by his uncle by marriage towards his aunt, which he kept stored in his memory like mental ammunition, awaiting a good occasion for discharging it with effect, he added, “I’m thankful the Lord never made me one of yer sulkers—like wimmen! I get in a tearing rage, and then it’s over.”

Lily piously pursed up her lips, shocked at his presumption in impugning the work of Providence in her person.

“I suppose the Lord made me the way he wanted me. Perhaps he was tired of tearing-ragers!”

On and on they trotted along the black bog causeways in bitter silence. The little girl’s heart was bursting at the boy’s accusation, all the more that conscience could not excuse her. She only knew that it was burning pain to her to be in a real rage with anybody; it made her feel, in her horrified penitence afterwards, as if she was an utterly hopeless sinner. She loved her playfellow, Tom, too well to take his supposed ill-treatment lightly; but was too sensitive to reproach him for his reported jeers about her. There was the situation.

This quarrel proved to be the thin end of the wedge that parted these small friends during the wet, windy winter following—a dull time to both. Not that Lily’s good temper in the main, and Tom’s latent generosity might not have made all straight again, had they met. But there it was! Like older folks, chance, and the wishes of others, kept them asunder. First Tom’s mother took poorly, and kept him many weeks from school to do odd jobs in the cottage; then Lily and her little brothers got the chin-cough, which was prevalent through the country, and had measles after that again, so stayed at home at the farm till nearly spring-time. This was chance; the persons who helped on fate were their respective mothers. Lily’s step-mother honestly and openly rejoiced that the wean ran about less with that wee boy of the Cowlterts’; who she was sure—because he belonged to them ones—could never come to good. Tom’s amiable parent objected to his “divarting himself with thon wee lass of Mr. Keag’s,” on the broad principle that opposition to his every childish wish kept him in his place finely—and afforded herself an unnatural satisfaction. During those weeks Tom got more whalings, skelpings, scoldings, and stray clouts on the side of the head than during all his short life before, when he had generally escaped from home all day, or, of late, gone to school. But, now, being deprived of the schooling was, curiously enough, what most troubled his mind; and that really did so.

One day, Tom’s mother, being up near the Castle, made so free as to ask Miss Alice for some jam for her cold in the head—a sovereign recipe. And she not only got a pot of preserved black currants, but also a diffidently gracious offer that the ladies would come and visit her some day, as she was ailing.

The day on which the ladies went down to the marsh was keen and windy, yet the cottage door stood wide open; for the chimney smoked so badly that breathing without such means would have been impossible. Therefore, as both stood gently on the threshold, feebly tapping on the doorposts, and asking, “Is Mrs. Coulter in?” while gazing at her back as she crouched over the fire, they had the full benefit of a loud monologue from Tom, who was violently rocking the cradle, in which lay his baby sister a few weeks old. Thump! bump! went the cradle. “E-m-b-a-r—r-a-s-s-e-d; embarrass’d!” shouted Tom, by way of impressing the spelling forcibly on his memory; while his dirty finger travelled down the lines of his “spells” to the next biggest word in his school-book. Bump! thump! went the cradle again. He was seated on the damp mud floor, in a shirt and ragged corduroy breeches, bare-toed and shock-headed. Miss Alice and Miss Edith knew mildly what embarrassed meant, when they could not make themselves heard.

“Hould yer whisht, Tom! Here’s the ladies,” called his mother, then, from one side of the fireplace; and his father added from the other, where he, too, was stooping over the peat-embers—

“Don’t ye see the quality? A body can’t hear theirselves speak with the tongue of ye.”

“But is the poor little boy learning his lessons for school?—that is very nice!” mildly put in both sisters, seating themselves on the dirty chairs, to which Tom’s mother, being “a proud body,” never condescended to give the usual apron wipe.

“Och! we have to keep him at home because she’s weakly,” dully observed the father. “But he’s terrible fond of the schooling. He’s always for learning his spells or his joggraphy by himself.”

“He’s that cross at missing the school that many’s the day I have to beat him,” snappishly interrupted the mother; “but, now that he has till mind the wean, he’s quieter.”

“And do you like the baby?” asked Miss Edith, bending down to the boy with interest.

Tom only said, “Ay.” But he had a manner of saying that which made people believe him thoroughly.

Out of kindness to him, both ladies changed the conversation, perceiving that Tom’s fondness for learning was considered either vanity or impudence at home; but they bore it in mind none the less.

“I am glad to see you are looking a little better to-day,” said one of the twins to Mrs. Coulter.

The latter sniffed, and was manifestly annoyed.

“Och, och! the dear knows but I am far worse,” quoth she, rocking herself to and fro. “Pains in me head, an’ me arms, an’ me body; an’ a blast of wind in me chest that comes out under me shouldher.”

“Oh, dear me, how strange!” murmured both spinsters, utterly amazed at this strange complaint; and perceiving too late that Tom’s mother, like her neighbors, felt insulted at any one taking away the distinction given her through illness by supposing her better.

“Ach, she’s no better. Shure ye can see it in her face,” now broke in Coulter himself, slowly; for he, too, felt his wife had a right to expect much sympathy from visitors—else why did they come?—and sympathy meant enlarging on her sufferings. “She’ll never be better,” he added, groaning.

“Never! never!” echoed his wife.

“Ye’re dying, woman, dear—ye’re dying!” added the husband, uttering his black-cap sentence with a sort of cheerful decision, meant to compose his wife’s wounded feelings, that left the Castle ladies gazing at each other, stricken dumb.

“And he has no been well himself this time past,” said the wife, after a pause: thinking it due now to let Coulter share her dignity. “He has pains too.”

“Rheumatism, no doubt—he looks old enough for it,” observed Miss Alice, with a vigor that startled herself. “Since they like hearing disagreeable things, I’ll gratify them,” she had inwardly declared. But she had made a mistake.

“Deed he’s not so to say horrid old; though he is horrid bad for certain—horrid bad!” answered the sick woman, with some asperity.

The sisters secretly wondered whether she alluded to his character or his complaint.

“The doctor from Maghrenagh” (the best doctor thereabouts), “he said I had dispepshyur,” went on Coulter; pleased with the opportunity of detailing his symptoms. “But the Ballykillycocky doctor” (a mere licensed man-slayer), “he said it was cowld in me chest; and ordered me a linseed poultice and mustard every morning. Ochone—ochone!”

“Doesn’t it make you better?” asked Miss Alice, touched by his groan, as the gaunt man raised himself from cowering over the white peat ashes, and looked at her with a gray face.

“I’m aye sicker after each while I takes it.”

“Perhaps you put it on wrong,” suggested Miss Edith, anxiously, who mostly thought whilst her sister spoke.

“Wrong—!” interrupted Mrs. Coulter, jealous for her conjugal care of him. “Och, shure, don’t I give it him meself after his breakfast, reg’lar, as the doctor said he be’d to have it; and mixes up the linseed nicely in a tumbler o’ warm water wi’ the mustard, and he drinks it all down—but it disagrees wi’ him awful every time!”

“Drink his poultice! and when he has dyspepsia!” exclaimed the horrified sisters, and began both at once a duet of lectures and warnings. Nor, indeed, did these fail; for the Ballyboly faith in “the skill” of ladies of quality who meddled with medicines either transported the mind to feudal ages, or argued great things for lady-doctors hereafter practising in that district; if so be always that the Ballybolyites knew what family these had come of; otherwise they would be simply reduced to the same vaguely suspicious level as the doctors around, from no-one knew where.

“Och, it was the workin’ through the wet ploughed fields that done it on me,” ended Coulter at last, with a shake of his head. “They tell me Providence sends us only what’s best for us; but troth, I wonder it doesn’t know better than to send us such bad weather.”

“It is wick—yes, it is wicked to say that. Providence does all things in kindness,” retorted Miss Alice, growing pink-complexioned; for he had really roused what fire there was in her mild nature.

“Weel, maybe,” retorted Coulter, slowly.

“But it seems queer kindness o’ the Almichty to rain on the fields till they’re champit up like a bran-mash! … Is yon good for us, will ye tell me? Doesn’t that hurt the likes of us poor folk?”

The women, both gentle and simple, were for a moment silent; not that they had nothing to say, but the poor one was too conscious of poverty’s sufferings, the ladies too sorrowfully conscious of the immunity of the rich from such harm, to know how best to frame the answer of patient womanhood to impatient man. A childish treble broke the silence.

“Da,” said Tom, in a coaxing aside, as he stood leaning against his father’s shoulder, who treated him far more affectionately than did his mother, “when ye gi’ed me a hiding yesterday, because I hadn’t snedded” (cut the tops off) “enough turnips, it hurted me; and when I cried on ye to give over, ye said it was for my good.”

The boy’s voice had dropped to a frightened whisper, perceiving, to his alarm, that the great ladies and his mother were listening. At home he only trusted to male sympathy, begotten by fellow-suffering.

“Weel; and what’ll ye be wanting?” responded the father, speaking likewise aside, with a grim smile; for these two understood and a good deal loved each other.

“Och, dinny hurt me for my good again!” roguishly murmured the little lad, putting his lips near his father’s ear; “for I don’t like it, and ye said yersel’, just now, no more do ye.”

The father swore a big oath.

“The wee fallow has more wit nor any one of us,” said he, “and a more releegious way of explainin’ the ways of Providence.”

Then the Misses Alexander rose and came away, with a last look at the smoky, windy kitchen; the black pile of turf in one corner; the hollows in the mud floor, used to keep food in for the fowl that ran in and out at will; the barrel that held, not meal, but a clucking hen on her eggs. And as they went the black-haired boy was again resignedly rocking the cradle with a thump and a bump, having cowered nearer the dull peat-embers on the flat hearthstone to get a “wee-thing” warmer.

“A fine little lad!” murmured Miss Edith, reflectingly. “If she does die (and she seems distressingly ill), I must see to his schooling. He might turn out a—a remarkable man.”

And the good lady tried to review in her dim mind the names of the many Northern Irishmen who, despite low birth, arduously rose to high estate. But their histories were hazy to her. “We must read them again, too,” she sighed. Then the sisters passed the marsh, with its rank grass and melancholy rustling reeds, and starting snipe; and went up the hill meadows by Farmer Keag’s untidy but comfortable-looking home, meaning to pass down his lane. But Mistress Keag met them, with floury hands, on her threshold, crying out lustily,

“Och! och! ladies, but I’m glad to see you. You’re not often visitors.”

In truth the sisters had never called there before; had only come by as a short cut; and, though willing enough to enter in, were too shy to like doing so for the first time without some pretext. Mistress Keag had a shrewd notion of this when she so ably intercepted them; and therefore beamed upon them with her broadest smiles, to put the poor souls at their ease.

“Ye’d rather step into the room?” she cried, in interrogative persuasion; only just refraining from clapping them on the back, as she afterwards told her husband, “they looked so timorsome.”

“The room,” or parlor, opened off the kitchen, and contained two testered beds, a table, a picture of King William III. (adorned with spangles about the coat), and six new chairs in its narrow compass. It was further set out with two samplers, three orange and blue bead mats, and five antimacassars, all owing their origin to Lily’s busy fingers and longing, poor child, to “have things pretty.”

“It is very nice,” said the sisters, gazing round it and shivering, being chilly souls. ‘‘But the kitchen looks so cheerful we would rather sit there and see the children—if you don’t much mind.”

“Mind!” quoth Mistress Keag, hooting the idea; and returning there, she planted two chairs right before a glowing peat-fire on the hearth, above which swung a griddleful of mixed bread, made of potatoes and oat-meal, that had an excellent smell. The sisters glanced round at the cheerful though somewhat untidy room; the dresser full of crockery; the baking-board covered with dough; the children crowding round Orange Lily, each eating a buttered cake fresh from the griddle, while the latter herself kept them all in order, besides rocking Osilla, the baby, on her knee, keeping time with one foot on the ground like any grandmother.

“We never could have done the like,” flashed through both the sisters’ minds with a sort of envy. They loved children too, in their tenderly dreamy manner of doing most things in life; but if ever either took a baby in her arms it felt like a lump of jelly, and, with an awful conviction that its neck meant to break, she was fain to return it hastily to safer hands. What a contrast between this home and that poor cottage in the hollow below; yet in both a child taught them silent lessons. Their lonely hearts felt somehow drawn to little Orange Lily and Tom, and comforted, they knew not how, for—they could hardly have told what.

“Some there be that shadows kiss.

These have but a shadow’s bliss.”

And so both Lily and Tom did good to others also that day, unwittingly. In ran some chickens by the open door; up jumped the little boys at Lily’s bidding to shoo them out. Another difference betwixt farm and cottage.

“But are they not hungry, poor things? I noticed their bills were wide open,” said gentle Miss Edith.

“He! he! he!” laughed Mistress Keag, vastly tickled, and no wonder. Even Lily hid her smiling face on the babe’s downy head. “Hungry! It’s the gapes they have! Hungry! … Oh! he! he! he! Excuse my making so very free, ladies dear, but I can’t keep from the laughing. Shure, it’s a disease amongst fowl, and then they aye keep their bills open.”

“Then I’d tie them up,” cried Miss Alice, quite eagerly and cheerfully; for the moral atmosphere of the farm invigorated her. “Cord might hurt them, but I could bring you some old ribbon shoe-string that would just do. Ah! … that is to say, if you have none by you just at present.”

She had caught a glance from her sister, meaning, “You will offend them by offering your shoe strings, as if they were paupers.” There came a fresh burst of laughter from Mrs. Keag, who first held her sides, then clapped her knees, in an ecstasy of mirth.

“Tie them up! … O! ladies darling, but it’s worth the world to hear ye! Dear, my! but it does me good to be cheered up to a laugh!” and so on, till the sisters, perceiving they had, unawares, delighted her heart, laughed too, and felt happier and more at home than in any other farm-house or cottage round the country-side.

Suddenly one of the little boys cried—

“Lily, a feather!”

Up jumped Lily, ran outside, and, coming back with a bit of gray down just dropped from a goose, put it solemnly into a little bag hanging by the window. Her step-mother laughed heartily.

“The dear, oh! but that is the queer, careful child,” said she, in answer to the ladies’ inquiries. “She just heard me tell once how my grandmother picked up, like that, every blessed feather in her own bed, and bequeathed it to my mother, who bestowed it upon me when she died; and a darlin’ bed it is, and travelled with me to America and back.”

“What! the feather-bed?”

“Oh! every foot of the way,” cried Mrs. Keag, exultant at the recollection. “‘Woman dear,’ says my brother to me, when our ones was thinking of flitting over the water—and a lump of a girl I was then—‘would ye trail a feather-mattress into the ship, and up to Chicago?’ ‘Ay,’ says I,’ I would that! Ye may flit by yourselves, and desert me behind, but me and my feather-bed’ll no be parted.’ So out we both went; and after awhile, when my brother got married on an American woman, and I began to think long’’ (feel homesick), “back me and it came together. And James Keag was looking out for a wife at the time, to mind Lily and the house, and I’d always thought a heap of him for a decent, quiet man, so we just took up with one another.—Wean, dear” (to Lily), “you’ll be having your own ready by the time you’re forty.”

The little maid seemed nowise discomposed at this, but smiled soberly. To her steady mind, impatience to attain her goal was a rare and disturbing feeling. The Castle ladies looked wonderingly at her; so young, yet unmoved by idle words; while themselves swayed like willows to every breath, even of the foolishest human opinion.

The talk now turned upon a sort of ague prevalent around, and the visitors found, to their discomposure, that Mistress Keag knew, to a farthing’s worth, of all the relief they had ever given through the parish; but after each enumeration she cried, with such heartiness, “O! ye done well!” or, “The Lord reward you!” that their timid souls felt warmed within them. So much so, indeed, that Miss Alice almost impulsively was drawn to disemburden her soul of a grief that had lain there heavily since some days, and began—

“Do you know a most miserable old woman in the mud cabin down there, Mrs. Keag? For we went to give her some money, poor soul; but she—she shut the door in our faces, and called out that she would throw water at us.”

The speaker had lowered her voice to a shocked whisper, and eyed her more reticent sister guiltily. Both twins flushed all over their pale cheeks at the painful remembrance. Mrs. Keag threw up her hands in boisterous indignation.

“Dear!—ah dear!—ah dear!—but I am affronted to hear that!”

“The coachman drove over a duck one day,” went on Miss Edith, taking up the recital. “We stopped the carriage at once, and—and spoke severely to him; but he said, ‘Indeed, ladies, I have been trying to drive over ducks all my life; and I never thought till now it was possible.’ So next day we heard it was hers, and were much grieved, and went to her with money—but, as we tell you—”

“It was all on account of that duck. She told me her heart was broken,” interrupted Lily, with eager eyes and warm cheeks.

The ladies looked round surprised; but James Keag, who had come in a little while before, and stood silently by, patted his child’s head.

“I’ll warrant ye, ladies, my wee girl can insense you into the rights of it. Many a bite and sup she carries down to thon old witch; who wouldn’t let another livin’ soul inside her door.”

“She called it Betty; and it slept with her, and ate out of her hand,’’ explained Lily, in a shy voice; frightened at the novel attention bestowed upon herself; “and it knew its name, oh! as well—and she said, excepting me, it was the only living thing that cared for her.”

The two poor ladies looked ready to weep.

“We know money would never repay her; but we could not help it,” murmured Miss Alice, miserably.

“I told her so—and how good you were to everybody—and that she was very unkind to be so unmannerly,” stammered Orange Lily.

“You did, child? And what did she say?”

“First, she was fit to kill me; but then she cried, and said I spoke God’s truth, and that maybe she had been as much in the muck as the ladies were in the mire.”

The little peacemaker blushed deeply as she spoke, being ashamed to mention the Misses Alexander’s names in such a vulgar manner; but, to her intense relief, the ladies smiled quite warmly upon her. They told her she had best be their almsgiver in future to the bereaved old crone; as Keag advised them. And they looked wistfully at this child who had found the secret of comforting a miserable human soul, as they themselves could never do.

“We were not angry; we were only hurt, you know,” explained Miss Edith to James Keag, with a gentleness painful to witness; and there were tears in her eyes. “For we try ourselves to be respectful to everybody.”

“Oh! faith, ye do that.”

“And I often think that the poor ought to remember how much will be expected of the rich; and that it will be easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for us to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,” the poor lady went on low, making a great effort to say, if only for once, what was in her heart; although it was pain, almost desecration, to do so. “And even if we do gain it, doubtless they will be placed high above us; yet there we shall certainly feel no envy.”

There was a silence around. But the farmer wagged his head dubiously at the beginning of her last sentence, muttering, “I’m thinking that will depend upon their conduck;” and eying Miss Edith with a sort of curious reverence, as if she were a psychological study the like of which he had never known before.

“It is just a little painful to be misunderstood, you know,” ended their timorous rich guest, more cheerfully, but with a sad moonlight smile.

“Ah! weel,” replied James Keag, with strong emphasis, “there’s one place where none of us will misunderstand the other; so bide that time, ladies. It will be when we meet in the city that lieth four square, of gold and of glass, and full of light; ay, verily!” Therewith he took up his hat, and stepped out to his ploughing again.

When the ladies left the farm that day it was with hearts gladdened in a manner they did not understand; but, in truth, it was by the hearty, healthy atmosphere of family life, so different from their own indoors existence of solitary self-consciousness.

Order the new paperback edition of Orange Lily which includes an introduction, footnotes and a glossary of words by Dr Philip Robinson. The book also includes the short stories The Witch of Windy Hill and An Old Maid’s Marriage.