“What’s that black thing you’ve got?” she asked through her tune, and it was not his sister at all, it was Bridget Rooney from over the hill. At that same moment his mother brought in the lamp from the bedroom where she had been lighting it out of the draught, and set it on the table, and Dan saw Bridget in the sudden glare of white light sitting in the corner of the settle behind the fire, with one bare leg crossed over the other, and dancing the time of the jig in the air, and her dark head tucked down over the melodion on her knee, her mouth shut and smiling at it in a thin red half-moon, and her eyelashes turned down as she looked at it, lying on her brown cheeks in two dark half-moons.
As Dan saw her sitting there, where he had been expecting to see his plump little sister, Mary, he wondered if she had just turned into Bridget for his sake, for it was so surprising and so lovely to see her there that it must be the work of magic.
“It’s a bit of old iron I found in the earth when I was after cutting the corn,” he said. He wanted to tell her about the magpies, “six for gold,” but he was shy of her laughing at him for childishness to believe that; he watched her now, and that secure private smile on her as she looked down at the melodion she was playing, and he wondered if he would ever be able to tell her anything that he longed to. Perhaps it had been seven magpies after all, and his secret would always stay inside him and never be told.
His mother had brought the teapot from the hob and was cutting the loaf into thick slabs; there was the steaming smell of rank-strong tea and of hot bread as they all sat round the table, and Mary came in with her white scarf still wound round her head and neck like an Eastern woman’s in protection against the sun that hot day. She unwound it now, telling them of a dance next Sunday up over at the MacElhinneys and that she had been asked to play her melodion for part of the time, and did her mother think her father would bring her a new one tomorrow from the fair, for he had promised to if the Ace of Hearts fetched as good a price as he should. The Ace of Hearts was a black bull calf with a white patch on its forehead just the shape of a heart, and Dan thought as they mentioned him, “Ah now, that’s the gold they’re bringing!” for his father should get more than a pound or two for it, and though the gold were paper it meant the same.
Then Mary and Bridget began to talk of what they would wear at the dance on Sunday. Bridget had saved half a crown from knitting socks and bought herself five yards of bright silk that had come from Japan free of duty and could be got at sixpence a yard at O’Grady’s shop—it was a blue check with a dull yellow line in it which had a gleam in it in the lamplight, and she was making it with a full skirt and a tight bodice and long full sleeves, for the stuff was a yard wide like the best silks in Dublin and so there was plenty of it.
“You will be wanting a collar with it,” said Mary.
Well, she would indeed, but her mother had a bit of lace that she’d saved from the time when she had been a maid at the Big House and her old Ladyship had given her a thing here and there, and Bridget could make do with that, “though they do say old lace isn’t the fashion now.”
“Oh, but it’s coming back,” said Mary quickly, for she wanted to tell what she was going to wear.
Dan heard not a word of that. He thought of Bridget in a silk dress that gleamed in the lamplight, and he wished he could give her a collar for it that would not be old-fashioned.
You would have thought he was sure to dream of Bridget that night when he went to bed on the settle, but he did not, though he dreamed very vividly, but of a beautiful young man, beautifully dressed, and presently Dan found that he himself was that young man, and that the ache in his arms and back was not from stooping over cutting the corn all the day, but from riding after his hounds, who were now leaping round him and up at the fine stag that his huntsmen were carrying into the hall.
A servant came and told him that his bath was ready, and he lay in hot water easing his limbs and thinking how good it was to be tired; a servant brushed and combed his hair, and another brought him clean clothes to wear, and now they said that dinner was ready, but Dan looked round him and said, “Where’s my collar?” for though he never wore a collar from one year’s end to another when he was in the little white house with the black roof, yet he knew that in this big house he must not go in to dinner without a collar—any more than Sir Miles down at the Big House would dream of wearing the white shirt-front he put on every evening, without a collar.
But this big house was not in the least like Sir Miles” Big House; it was far bigger, a hall big enough to hold all the Big House inside it, and painted in bright colours and patterns so twisted you couldn’t see where they went; and the only thing that was like the hall at Sir Miles” was the number of stags” heads and antlers that hung on the walls. And Dan was dressed quite differently from Sir Miles or any of the gentry; he was wearing a scarlet cloak and leggings of white leather laced with gold, and his hair was longer than Bridget’s or Mary’s, which was why it took so long for the servants to comb out the tangles he had got in his curls while riding through the wind. But there he was in his gorgeous clothes, and a dinner waiting for him that smelt, not of rank red tea and hot soda dough and potatoes, but of juicy red meat and spices and the sour-sweet smell of wine. And the hungrier he felt for it, the greater his despair, for he could not find his collar, and he woke himself shouting in a great voice, “Where is my coilar?”
The next day he finished cutting the field of corn, and as he worked he thought first of all of his dream, but as the day went on he thought less of it and more of Bridget and of the dance next Sunday. He went back to his tea in the evening just before his father came in from the Killybags Fair. He had not sold the Ace of Hearts for as much as he had hoped, and the drink had soured on him, and as he came in at the door he stubbed his toe on a bit of old iron that that fool boy of his had brought in from the field.
“What the devil is this?” he asked.
“I don’t know what it is at all,” said Dan.
“The more fool you,” said his father. “It’s easy seen it’s a bit of old clasping from a coffin. Would you bring death into the house?”
He picked it up and flung it as far as he could out of the door, and it caught on a thorn bush a little way down the hill. “Now you can see it”s no right thing,” he said, “for that bush is a fairy thorn, and it’s gone straight to its own. Would any but my own son think of bringing bad luck like that into the house?” All through his tea he grumbled and said it was no wonder he’d made a bad bargain with the Ace of Hearts, and he swore that he’d bury the old rubbish in the bog next day so that no more bad luck should come of it.
That night on the settle Dan dreamed again of the beautiful young man who had turned into himself. This time he did not do so; he looked at Dan in reproach and said, “What have you done with my collar?” Dan could not think what he meant, but the young man went on, “You have dug my collar out of the black earth and brought it to the light of day, and now will you let it be thrown out to be trampled back into the bog?”
“Collar?” cried Dan. “I know nothing about any collar. It’s a bit of an old coffin that I dug out of the field.”
He was so worried and perplexed that he turned from one side to the other, kicking the blanket off him, and then woke with a jump to see a shaft of moonlight lying across the bare floor. So bright it was that he thought for an instant that the door must be open. It was not, but the moon was shining through the tiny square window of dim glass, not much bigger than a gentleman’s pocket-handkerchief, that was beside the door. Dan went to it and looked out. He saw the strip of ragged potato plants, their dark leaves sprawling in all directions now that it was so late in the summer, and he saw the rocks sparkling white in the moonlight just beyond them, and the black thorn tree pointing its crooked fingers against the sky, a boggart of a tree, wild and mocking, holding up in its branches a queer black thing, shaped like a wide crescent moon, and the light of the full moon in the sky striking a white spark out of it in the
middle of all that blackness.
It looked as though it were winking at him, and Dan did not like to look at it, and did not like to do what he knew he must, but he did it; he pulled his trousers on over his shirt and he pulled back the bolt on the door very softly so as not to wake his parents in the next room or his sister Mary in the other tiny room at the back, and he stole out in his bare feet on to the bright gravel and looked round him at a shining, shadowy, colourless world that was quite different from the world he knew.
He went up to the thorn bush, and very carefully, trying not to touch the branches, he drew the black thing out from the middle of it and tucked it under his arm, and then walked on over the rocks and the tall ragwort flowers that were silver-grey now instead of yellow, and down to the little black wood that clustered at the foot of the hill: and there again he hesitated, for it was very black inside there under the twisted, stunted trees that the sea winds would never allow to grow tall and straight.
But he went in under them to one that he knew had a little platform of criss-cross branches, so thick that you could see nothing below of anything that you might put on the top of it. When Dan was a small boy he had hidden treasures there and no one had ever found them—a bag full of marbles that Mary, magpie-like, had tried to steal, a tin of sweet biscuits washed up from a wreck, a revolver that had been dropped by some fellow running for his life in the latest bad times. He only had to swing himself up by a branch or two, and he knew it well enough to do it easily in the dark; he put his queer new treasure on the little platform, slid down and went back to bed.
Next morning his father said it was clear that that black thing had been no right thing, for look if it hadn’t flown off by itself for dread of hearing it was to be buried in the bog! Dan listened to him and his mother and Mary all exclaiming and blessing themselves at the great wonder, and he felt very sly to be keeping his secret all to himself. Surely it must have been seven magpies for a secret that he’d seen at the moment he’d found the black thing, but no, he knew it had been six, for he’d counted them on the fingers of one hand and a thumb on the other,—“six for gold,’—and at that a sudden notion took him.
As soon as he could get away without being seen, he went down into the wood.
The wood was now all brilliant with green ferns and mosses and dappled gold lights, and he couldn’t believe that he had been here last night and seen it so different; he began to think that it was just another of the queer dreams he had been having lately. But when he had climbed the twisted tree whose branches grew across and across, there was the black thing just where he had put it. He carried it down with him and looked at it this way and that way, and then he rubbed it with his coat sleeve, and then he spat on it and rubbed again, and he went on rubbing at that one place until it got lighter and lighter, and at last he could see a glint of yellow peeping out through the black, but by then it was past his dinner-time, and he had to go back.
That afternoon his mother had to go and help a sick friend who had just had a baby, and Mary went with her to see the baby, and his father was working in the fields, and Dan was told to mend the felt on the roof where the rain came in, for the wind had gone round to the south-west, and with the next heavy rain from the Atlantic the bedroom would be flooded. Dan started work on the roof till they were all out of sight, and then hared down to the wood, tucked his treasure under his coat and ran up to the house again, and when he took it out he noticed that it was so pliable that it had bent to the shape of his body when he was holding it to him, and yet it was heavy as iron. He took the black wash-pot outside the wall and put it on the fire, and he got the wash-rag and soap, and when the water was boiling, he washed and he scoured till the water in the pot was as black as a bog pool, but the thing that he lifted out of it was as yellow as gold.
He put it on the table and pressed it gently but heavily this way and that to get all the kinks and bends straightened out of it, until it lay almost quite flat on the table, and as he looked down at it he saw the most exquisite little lines and patterns dancing all over it, like the pattern on a leaf but more various. It was plain to him that no human hand could have worked patterns on the metal so fine, and he saw that what he must have carried off was a golden horse-collar from one of the fairies” little horses harnessed with gold and jewels, that are just sticks of yellow ragwort by day. For ragwort in Irish means “the yellow boys” or “the yellow horses,” and that is how the fairies get their mounts, they have only to fling a leg across a stem of ragwort and shout to it, and it will turn into a little horse beneath them. And here was part of their harness left behind.
He stared at it, hardly daring to hold it, thinking that at any moment it might turn back into a bunch of ragged yellow flowers, when he heard his mother’s and Mary’s voices coming up through the potato patch, and quick as thought he whipped that bright thing under the rug on the settle. They exclaimed at seeing him inside the house and with all that mess of the washing-pot, and the soapsuds on the floor. Had he been taking down the roof itself and washing it? his mother demanded in scorn.
“I have that,” said Dan, blessing her, for till this minute he didn’t know what he would say. “There was a bit of felt I was going to put on, and it had been trodden into some cow-dung, and I knew you’d never like the neighbours to be saying we lived under a dung-heap. So I took it and washed it and it’s on the roof now and I came down again to clear this away, but Mary can do that now while I finish the roof.”
Mary sat down on the settle. “Can I, indeed?” she asked coldly, and Dan was in dread that she’d notice the metal under her, but he had got it so well flattened that she never felt it under the rug. He had to leave them in the cottage with it, and trust to luck they wouldn’t lift the rug, and that evening he got it back to the wood again, but this time with a bit of the old felt from the roof to keep its brightness from getting tarnished.
That night you would have thought he’d spend his dreams riding with the little people, but no, he was seeing that young man again in his silk tunic and fine white leggings, and this time that great golden thing, that Dan had thought was a piece of the fairies” harness, was fastened round his neck as an immense collar, with the two bosses or buckles in front under his chin. When Dan had done looking at him, he found again, as on the first night, that he himself was that young man, and he felt the weight of the collar on his neck and he put up his hand and touched the long cold curves of it, and ran his finger-nail along the intricate fine lines on it as though he were tracing the pattern of a spider’s web.
He stood in that painted hall that would hold a thousand men, and drank from a cup made of crystal and gold; a mighty wolf-hound in a jewelled collar nuzzled its long nose into his hand; he heard harps playing and the deep voice of a man singing a long, long song; and more and more men in cloaks of blue and white and crimson came into the hall through doors of carved silver between green doorposts, and hailed him as they came. And he knew that he was a great man, a ruler in Ireland, a country more full of great and wise men and fine houses and beautiful things than any country then on earth.
When he woke he was saying the name of the place that was his home over and over to himself. “Lisdoonara,” he said, and “Lisdoonara,” and then thought for the first time what he was saying, for “lis” means in Irish “The House of the Prince,” and “doon” means a hill, and all this time he had been living in the House of the Prince on the Hill, and never noticed it, though he had spoken Irish before he could speak English, and then learned it all over again at school.
He felt strange and proud with himself that day, and as though he could stand up and say anything to anyone, if it were the King of England himself (“And what is he but a neighbour King, after all?” thought Dan).
That day was Sunday, and in the evening he went up over the hill to the Rooneys” house and he walked straight in to where they were all sitting round their tea, and paid his respects to Mr. and Mrs. Rooney, but he looked only at Bridget, who was sitti
ng among all her brothers in the new dress she had made for herself for the dance that evening, and he said to her, “If you’ve finished, Bridget, will you come with me?”
She looked up at him as though she had never seen him before, and indeed she never had with this new splendour about him, and he holding his head as though there were a crown on it.
“But Bridget is just starting for the dance,” said Mrs. Rooney.
“So she is, when she’s ready,” said Dan, “and that will be in a few minutes now,” and all the time his eyes never left Bridget’s.
She got up without a word, and went with him, and without a word spoken he led her away out of earshot of the house, and then he told her to stop and shut her eyes and count six slowly. She did what he told her, for it was as though he had put an enchantment on her and she must do whatever he said. She was counting “six” when she felt something heavy press on her shoulders and stopped to cry out, “What are you putting on me?” But still she did not open her eyes.
“Six for gold,” he answered. “I have got you a collar for the dancing tonight.”
She opened her eyes and saw something glittering just beneath them in the late sunlight. She put up her hands and felt something heavy and cold round her neck, a great piece of metal. “What is it, in the name of the Saints?” she asked. “I could never wear a great horse-collar like this!”
“You would wear it,” said Dan, “if you could see yourself now in your blue silk dress and the collar shining like the sun itself on the top of it, making a glory round your face.”
She couldn’t resist that. She had to see herself with the glory round her face, and she went back with him into the cottage to stare at herself in the little glass, two dark eyes burning back at her above a thin sheet of beaten gold. She paid no heed to her parents” questions and her brother’s jeers, nor did Dan.
Bloodstock and Other Stories Page 9