“You haven’t tould me that,” cries Darby, quickly.
“No,” says the King, looking at him sideways.
“At laste not yit,” says Darby, looking sideways at the King.
“Not yit, nor will I fer a long time yitter, you covetous, ungrateful spalpeen!” snapped the fairy.
“Well,” said he, paying no more attention to Darby, “this young omadhaun is six feet high in his stockings, and as foine a looking lad as you’ll see in a day’s walk. Now what do you think he’s mourning and crooning for?”
“Faix, I dunno,” answered Darby. “Maybe it’s a horse or a dog or a cow, or maybe a pair of pigs.”
“You’ve not hit it,” said the Ruler of the Good People; “it’s a colleen. And him having a college education, too.”
“Troth, thin,” said Darby, with a knowledgeable wag of his head, “some of them larned students are as foolish in that way as ignorant people. I once met a tinker named Larry McManus, who knew the jography from cover to cover, and still he had been married three times.”
“Poor gossoon! Who is the omadhaun?” asked Maureen, not minding Darby.
“He’s no less,” said the King, “than Roger O’Brien, a son of ould Bob O’Brien, who was the richest and proudest man in the County Tipperary. Ould Bob thraces his ancestors for five hundhred years, and he owns a mile of land and has forty tenants. He had no child but this omadhaun.”
“And who is the colleen? Some grand Princess, I suppose,” said Maureen.
“There was the whole throuble,” answered the little man. “Why, she’s no one at all, but a little white-cheeked, brown-eyed, black-haired girl named Norah Costello, belonging to one of his own tenants on the domain. It all came from eddicatin’ people above their station.”
“Faix,” Darby says, “there’s Phelem Brady, the stonecutter, a fine, dacint man he was till he made up his mind to larn the history of Ireland from ind to ind. When he got so far as where the Danes killed Brian Boru he took to dhrink, and the divil a ha’porth’s good he’s been ever since. But lade on with your discoorse, King,” says he, waving his noggin of punch.
At this the King filled his pipe, Maureen threw fresh turf on the fire, and the wind dhrew the sparks dancing up the chimney. Now and thin while the King talked, some of the fairies outside rapped on the windowpanes and pressed their little faces against the glass to smile and nod at those within, thin scurried busily off agin intil the darkness. Once the wail of a child rose above the cry of the storm, and Maureen caught the flash of a white robe against the windowpane.
“It’s a child we’ve taken this night from one Jude Casey down in Mayo,” says King Brian Connors. “But fill my noggin with fresh punch, Maureen, and dhraw closter till I tell you about the omadhaun.” And the Master of the Good People crossed his legs and settled into telling the story, comfortable as comfortable could be.
“The way the throuble began was foine and innocent as the day is long,” said the King. “Five or six years ago—it was on the day Roger was first sent to college at Dublin—Misther and Misthress O’Brien, mighty lonesome an’ downhearted, were dhriving over the estate whin who should they spy standing, modest and timid, at her own gate, but purty little Norah Costello. Though the child was only fourteen years old, Misthress O’Brien was so taken with her wise, gentle ways that Norah next day was sint for to come up to the big house to spind an hour amusing the Misthress. There was the rock they all split on.
“Every day afther for a month the little girl went visiting there. At the end of that time Misthress O’Brien grew so fond of her that Norah was brought to the big house to live. Ould Bob liked the little girl monsthrous well, so they put fine clothes on her until in a couple of years one couldn’t tell her from a rale lady, whether he met her in the house or at the crossroad.
“Only every Saturday night she’d put on a little brown poplin dhress and go to her father’s cottage, and stay there helping her mother till Monday or maybe Chewsday. ‘For I mustn’t get proud-hearted,’ she’d say, ’or lose the love I was born to, for who can tell whin I’ll need it,’ says she.”
“A wise girl,” says Darby.
“A dear colleen,” says Maureen.
“Well, every summer me brave Roger came home from college, and the two rode together afther the hounds, or sailed his boat or roved the woods, and the longest summer days were too short entirely to suit the both of them.
“Although she had a dozen young fellows courting her—some of them gentlemen’s sons—the divil an eye she had for anyone except Roger; and although he might pick from twinty of the bluest-blooded ladies in Ireland any day he liked, Norah was his one delight.
“Every servant on the place knew how things were going, but the ould man was so blind with pride that he saw nothing at all; stranger than all, the two childher believed that ould Bob guessed the way things were with them an’ was plazed with them. A worse mistake was never made. He never dhramed that his son Roger would think of any girl without a fortune or a title.
“Misthress O’Brien must have known, but, being tendher-hearted and loving and, like all women, a trifle weak-minded, hoped, in spite of rayson, that her husband would consint to let the childher marry. Knowing ould Bob as she knew him, that was a wild thought for Misthress O’Brien to have; for if ever there was a
