“ ‘I’m off.’
“ ‘Where are you off?’
“ ‘I’m going into the world.’
“ ‘What will become of the farm?’
“ ‘You can have it yourself,’ said I, and with that I stepped clean out of the house and away to the road. I didn’t stop walking for two days, and I never went back from that day to this.
“I do play on the concertina before the houses, and the people give me coppers. I travel from place to place every day, and I’m as happy as a bird on a bough, for I’ve no worries and I worry no one.”
“What did become of the money?” said Patsy.
“I’m thinking now that it might have been fairy gold, and, if it was, nobody could touch it.”
“So,” said Mac Cann, “that’s the sort of boys they were?”
“That’s the sort.”
“And one of them was your own Guardian Angel!”
“He said that.”
“And what was the other one?”
“I don’t know, but I do think that he was a spook.”
Patsy turned to Finaun:
“Tell me, mister, is that a true story now, or was the lad making it up?”
“It is true,” replied Finaun.
Patsy considered for a moment.
“I wonder,” said he musingly, “who is my own Guardian Angel?”
Caeltia hastily put the pipe into his pocket.
“I am,” said he.
“Oh, bedad!”
Mac Cann placed his hands on his knees and laughed heartily.
“You are! and I making you drunk every second night in the little pubs!”
“You never made me drunk.”
“I did not, for you’ve got a hard head surely, but there’s a pair of us in it, mister.”
He was silent again, then:
“I wonder who is the Guardian Angel of Eileen Ni Cooley? for he has his work cut out for him, I’m thinking.”
“I am her Guardian Angel,” said Finaun.
“Are you telling me that?”
Mac Cann stared at Finaun, and he lapsed again to reverie.
“Ah, well!” said he to Billy the Music, “it was a fine story you told us, mister, and queer deeds you were mixed up in; but I’d like to meet the men that took our clothes, I would so.”
“I can tell you something more about them,” Caeltia remarked.
“So you said a while back. What is it you can tell us?”
“I can tell you the beginning of all that tale.”
“I’d like to hear it,” said Billy the Music.
“There is just a piece I will have to make up from what I heard since we came here, but the rest I can answer for because I was there at the time.”
“I remember it too,” said Art to Caeltia, “and when you have told your story I’ll tell another one.”
“Serve out the potatoes, Mary,” said Mac Cann, “and then you can go on with the story. Do you think is that ass all right, alannah?”
“He’s eating the grass still, but I think he may be wanting a drink.”
“He had a good drink yesterday,” said her father, and he shifted to a more comfortable position.
XXV
Said Caeltia:
“When Brien O’Brien died people said that it did not matter very much because he would have died young in any case. He would have been hanged, or his head would have been split in two halves with a hatchet, or he would have tumbled down the cliff when he was drunk and been smashed into jelly. Something like that was due to him, and everybody likes to see a man get what he deserves to get.
“But, as ethical writs cease to run when a man is dead, the neighbours did not stay away from his wake. They came, and they said many mitigating things across the body with the bandaged jaws and the sly grin, and they reminded each other of this and that queer thing which he had done, for his memory was crusted over with stories of wild, laughable things, and other things which were wild but not laughable.
“Meanwhile he was dead, and one was at liberty to be a trifle sorry for him. Further, he belonged to the O’Brien nation—a stock to whom reverence was due. A stock not easily forgotten. The historic memory could reconstruct forgotten glories of station and battle, of terrible villainy and terrible saintliness, the pitiful, valorous, slow descent to the degradation which was not yet wholly victorious. A great stock! The O’Neills remembered it. The O’Tools and the Mac Sweeneys had stories by the hundred of love and hate. The Burkes and the Geraldines and the new strangers had memories also.
“His family was left in the poorest way, but they were used to that, for he had kept them as poor as he left them, or found them, for that matter. They had shaken hands with Charity so often that they no longer disliked the sallow-faced lady, and so certain small gifts made by the neighbours were accepted, not very thankfully, but very readily. These gifts were almost always in kind. A few eggs. A bag of potatoes. A handful of meal. A couple of twists of tea—suchlike.
“One of the visitors, however, moved by an extraordinary dejection, slipped a silver threepenny piece into the hand of Brien’s little daughter, Sheila, aged four years, and later on she did not like to ask for it back again.
“Little Sheila had been well trained by her father. She knew exactly what should be done with money, and so, when nobody was looking, she tiptoed to the coffin and slipped the threepenny piece into Brien’s hand. That hand had never refused money when it was alive, it did not reject it either when it was dead.
“They buried him the next day.
“He was called up for judgment the day after, and made his appearance with a miscellaneous crowd of wretches, and there he again received what was due to him. He was removed, protesting and struggling, to the place decreed:
“ ‘Down,’ said Rhadamanthus, pointing with his great hand, and down he went.
“In the struggle he dropped the threepenny piece, but he was so bustled
