Orange Lily: Chapter V

Author: May Crommelin

Date: 1879

Source: Orange Lily

Comments: A novel set in Carrowdore, County Down, in the 1860s

“There is a nameless air

Of sweet revival over all which fills

The earth and sky with life;

· · · · · · · ·· ·

Already above the dewy clover

The soaring lark begins to hover

Over his mate’s low nest;

And soon from childhood’s early rest

In hall and cottage to the casement rise

The little ones with their fresh morning eyes,

And gaze on the old Earth which still grows new,

And see the tranquil Heaven’s unclouded blue;

And since as yet no sight nor sound of toil

The fair-spread, peaceful picture comes to soil,

Look from their young and steadfast eyes

With such an artless sweet surprise

As Adam knew when first on either hand

He saw the virgin landscapes of the morning land.”

Songs of Two Worlds.

The saving of Orange Lily’s life was the beginning of a happier one for Tom Coulter. Daily he trotted to school with his little friend all that windy spring; all the warmer summer through, cooled by constant sea-breezes; through all the pleasant, windless autumn. How, after school-hours, they played together till late in the gloaming! First, the wild winds lulled somewhat; and the whole land grew green and blossomed into a great Garden of the Lord, with wee wild-flowers laughing and nodding up in the sun’s face. Windwafts of scent blew over the country from the hawthorn-hedges, that made a great network over hills and hollows. The little brown birds began to sing. The butterflies and all manner of insects seemed to start into life; and the swallows flew back from over the sea. The cuckoos, too, and the corncrakes reappeared; but where from none knew—excepting those who agreed with James Keag that they had lain asleep at the bottom of the horse-ponds all winter.

“For no man need go for to tell me that corncrakes could fly three or four and twenty miles over till Scotland, at neardest. Them as can hardly rise above a hedge at the best of times, and are that weighty on the wing,” quoth he one spring twilight to an assenting audience loitering like himself on the white road. “And, as to the cuckoos, I don’t misdoubt but they may go to Africa. Only I have neither read nor yet heerd tell of any yun as seen them there for certain.”

After which speech, he would have been foolish who doubted that Keag was a sensible, temperate-minded man; so dispassionately did he nod his head, so thoughtfully did he wrinkle his sunburnt brow, striving fairly to consider all that could be adduced in favor of the new-fangled notion of the migration of corncrakes and cuckoos.

While Keag and his men-neighbors thus discoursed beside some gate, you would only have to go a “bit further along” the road to find Tom and Orange Lily, with the little Keag children, quietly diverting themselves with some self-invented game or other. For our sonsie little maiden was carefully kept from consorting with the wilder-mannered village children; and Tom (bar an occasional outbreak with kindred spirits) liked her company, and all the delights of farm-visiting it involved, hugely.

And a “piece further on” one would surely come upon a Jack and Jill sitting courting under the hedge; with many more pairs all along to the village. The road was thus the common meeting-place for all after the sun had set and the day’s work was done. Then, a few weeks later, when the two drums were got out and the Orange lads began to practise beforehand for the Twelfth of July and the great Orange meeting, how excited were Tom and Lily! How, long after they were both in their beds, one in the comfortable farm-house, one in the bare cottage, they listened to the tum-tum-ming round the lanes; and fell asleep with the brave strains of Protestant Boys in their ears.

Soon after that day, to be remembered much by Tom, of the great wind, Keag had come down to the Coulters’ cottage, and had offered most kindly to take Tom, after school hours, as a job-boy, so to say, about the farm; secretly prompted by the wish to give the poor little lad his fill to eat, in return for saving the good man’s dearly-loved eldest-born. So Tom gleefully did his best to stable the horses, feed the pigs, fetch in the cows, or herd the turkeys, from afternoon till six; had his supper like the two farm-servants; and might then play with his ideal of all that was nice in a wee gurl, his little mistress in some ways, his small sweetheart in others, but always his fast friend—Lily Keag.

In social position Tom was, of course, much Lill’s inferior; but at her tender age neither father nor step-mother heeded this friendship enough to interfere with it. One was busy indoors, the other out of doors, all the day, and much of the evening; they were good-humored, rather “throughother,” careless folk. So the pleasant play-hours of the children in barn or byre, stack-yard or lane, would be by them remembered gladly to their lives’ end, and seem the principal part of their young years; while the parents might barely recall that the children had been much together—and be utterly amazed to guess how to each the other’s figure was associated with almost every dear memory of their sweet human springtime. Well, too, for Tom that, besides the gratitude owed him, his home was far from the village, and the contamination, in Mrs. Keag’s eyes, of the small inhabitants thereof. He did not use bad language, was a biddable enough boy in her eyes; a “verily remar-r-kable smart wee chap” in those of her husband. Then his father, though poor, was always allowed through the country to be on the whole a decent, quiet man.

“And that sometimes means a footherin fool, that has neither the wit nor spirit to get into mischief,” quoth James Keag. But it likewise means one as goes his own road in peace, and lets others go theirs; does harm to none, and mostly leaves the whiskey alone—and that’s Cowltert for ye.”

It was agreed universally that father and son did just as well without the late Mrs. Coulter; a sharp-tongued, unthrifty woman, with whom there could be no peace in the house. Now a spinster aunt of Tom’s came to keep house for her brother: and, by degrees, an air of comparative comfort began to appear in the cottage by the marsh. First, a big clock was bought; then the dresser was covered with crockery; the bare four-post beds testered, to keep out draughts. And, most important of all, in Tom’s opinion, a new crane was hung. Hitherto they had made shift with a broken one; which, as his appetite well knew, supported meagre pots indeed. Till then, dinner often meant to him a broken brown teapot put to draw among the peat embers; no milk or sugar on the table; not always butter on the gritty oatmeal cakes. This should not have been. Smaller cottages, without land attached, poorer inmates, were to be found in Ballyboly village, who swung full pots on the bools (or pot-hooks), which fasten these to the crane.

But truth will out, so it must be told at last that Tom’s mother, besides other faults, had a craving for drink; so what else could you expect but that her home should be a wretched, throughother dwelling? Ah well! those bad days were past. Let the poor soul’s sins be buried under the churchyard mould that hid her coffin; forgotten by others as the two who suffered most from her yet loved her best—Tom and his father—forgot them. That summer, and just when all the grass was cut, and tiny hay lap-cocks dotted the meadows, came a pair of visitors to tea at the Keags’ farm, whom Lily minded well in later years; for they gave her henceforth fresh pleasure in her simple little life. These were old Hans Majempsy and his wife, from their handsome farm by the sea; a now childless couple, as old friends of James Keag, almost, as himself was aged in years. And at tea it was naturally related, when the children were discussed, how near-hand wee Lily there—who sat up so nice and pretty—had been to drowning in the moss (bog).

“Och and och! … child dear—och and och!” exclaimed white-haired Mrs. Majempsy at intervals; regarding the little girl with brimming eyes, fed from a full heart, whose love went out to all other weans now her own were grown, and gone to heaven before her. “And this is the wee boy as saved ye? Hans! Hans!—Man dear! … but he’s like our darlin’ son that’s now drowned, when he was the same age.” And the good old farmer’s wife suddenly burst out weeping.

Everybody was sorry, and tried to comfort her. The men clacked their tongues on the roofs of their mouths, and stared at the big fireplace glowing with hot turf. Osilla, the baby, gave a sympathetic howl. Tom, in utter terror of the woe his face had wrought, ducked under the table, pretending he had dropped his buttered farl of potato-bread, and stayed there. Mistress Keag urged hospitably—

“Take another wee drop of tea, Mistress Majempsy—poor soul! Ochone! now, a bit more bread; and just this wee taste of butter to comfort ye. Dear-ah-dear! to think of your son lying down at the bottom of the sea this blessed minute! … A sore end he came by, surely.”

But Lily, who sat beside the old woman, kept softly stroking her hand. Suddenly the latter turned and kissed the child’s brow, to everybody’s surprise, saying—

“Bless you, daughter! You have done my heart more good than any of them.”

When the visitors left on that evening in the scented summer twilight, the wife solemnly invited little Lily to pay her a visit “come August,” when school-holidays began; adding, with a hungering look towards lower-born Tom Coulter—

“And let him come too, to mind her, Mistress Keag: if I may make that request.”

“Ay, ay. She might drown herself in the sea otherwise—she has such a fancy that way, it appears,” laughed the old husband, as assent was given.

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.

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