The ring of the trowel travelled far on the wind across the heather, a voice of civilization, saying pertinent, unhesitating things to a country where all was loose, and limitless, and inexact. Up here, by the shores of Lough Turc, people had, from all ages, told the time by the sun, and half-an-hour either way made no difference to any one; now—most wondrous of all impossibilities—the winter sunrise was daily heralded by the steely shriek of an engine whirling truckloads of men to their work across the dark and dumb bog-lands. The trout in the lakes no longer glided to safety at the recurrence of the strange tremor and clatter that accompanied the twilights, the wild{101} duck no longer splashed into wing along the water’s surface, and the people scattered among the hillsides already counted as their chiefest landmark the red gable of the new railway-station. Every morning saw a villageful of men shot into it; bricklayers working high up in the gable, stone-cutters dressing limestone blocks with infinite chip and clink, workmen shovelling gravel, and over all the voice of the ganger arising at intervals in earnest, profuse profanity. The Dublin artisans worked in silence, except when one or other trolled forth one of the ditties of his class—genteel romance, with a waltz refrain, or obscure vulgarity of the three-penny music-hall, yet representing to the singer the songs of Zion in a strange land; while the local gang used every chance of proximity to carry on a low growl of conversation. Whether it was the party of twenty whose picks and spades were gradually levelling and filling the unfinished platform, or the two whose voices{102} ascended in Irish from the depths of the well that they were sinking, the general topic was the same, and was one that intimately concerned Mr. Glasgow.
“Jim Mulloy’s brother told me he seen the paymasther ’ere yestherday in Letther Kyle,” said a withered little man, who was mixing mortar with extraordinary deliberation. “He was comin’ out o’ the bank, an’ he havin’ the brown bag with him.”
“Maybe it’s little chance oursel’ has of it, whether or no,” responded his satellite, a red-faced youth, whose occupation of eternally shaking sand through a sieve might well foster pessimism. “Don’t ye know well thim isn’t workin’ for nothin’”—indicating the bricklayers on the gable, and the portly and prosperous stonemasons, chipping away in professional silence. “Short thim fellows’d be leggin’ it away to Dublin if they wasn’t gettin’ their pay; an’ d——d well Glasgow knows it’s the likes of us must be waitin’ on him!{103}”
The man who was supplying the sand tilted his barrow up on end and leaned on the handles, secure in the knowledge that the ganger was engaged at the other side of the station in raining down expletives upon the heads of the sinkers of the well.
“It’s what they’re sayin’ beyond,” he remarked, jerking his head in the direction of the men working at the platform, “that what has him desthroyed is the bog of Tully. Eight months now they’re sthrivin’ to fill that spot.”
“An’ if they were eight months more,” said the man who was mixing the mortar, “they’ll not fill it.” He took off the tin lid of his pipe and stirred up its embers with a horny fore-finger. “Betther for him not to be intherfarin’ with the likes o’ that place.”
The pessimist with the sieve laughed with the superiority of youth, and of a reader of the Daily Independent.
“There’s wather runnin’ undher the ground there in every place,” went on the{104} same speaker, “me father knew that well—sure the bog itsel’ is only sittin’ on it. There’s holes up in Cahirdreen that’s sixty feet deep, and wather runnin’ in the bottom o’ them. ’Tis out undher Tully that wather goes. Sure there was a man had a grand heifer—God knows ye’d sooner be lookin’ at her than atin’ yer dinner—she fell down in one o’ them holes, and went away undher the ground with the wather. As sure as I’m alive, they heard her screeching up through the bog!”
The reader of the Independent was half-staggered, and the ganger, who had advanced upon the party with the quietness of a dangerous bull, here broke upon the conversation in gross and fervid oratory.
“They’re gettin’ it in style down there,” said one of the platform party. “By damn, if he comes to talkin’ to me, I’ll throw down the shovel and ax him where is me three weeks’ wages!”
“Maybe ye will, Mortheen,” rejoined his next-door neighbour, “an’ maybe this time{105} next week ye’ll be afther him axing him to take ye back.”
“Is it him?” replied the undaunted Mortheen; “little I’d think of breaking his snout for him, or Glasgow’s ayther!”
As he spoke, the whistle of an engine, thinned by distance, made itself heard, and away on the horizon the steam cloud blossomed like a silver flower against the sunny sky.
When the engine and its accompanying brake-van drew up at the station, Glasgow’s eye could discover no flaw in the exemplary and dead silent industry that prevailed. The shovelfuls flung by Mortheen were heavier and more frequent than those of his fellows, and even the spectacle of Lady Susan emerging in sables from the van and passing among the buckets and heaps of lime, did not seem to be noticed by so much as the lift of an eyelid. It was almost one o’clock, and the ganger, transformed into an official of submissive urbanity, sounded his whistle for the dinner-{106}hour. The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds, and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step.
Their employer’s picnic-party was already established in the newly-roofed kitchen of the new station, by............