The Irish get credit, even from their enemies, for being a quick-witted, imaginative, and artistic people, yet they display astonishingly little taste or originality in their domestic architecture. In Connaught, where the Celtic genius may be supposed to have the freest opportunity for expressing itself, the towns are all exactly alike, and their resemblance consists in the absence of any beauty which can please the eye. An English country town, although the English bucolic is notoriously as stupid as an ox, has certain features of its own. So has a Swiss cottage or a French village. It is possible to represent these upon Christmas cards or the lids of chocolate-boxes without labelling them English, Swiss, or French. Any moderately well educated young lady will recognise them at once, and exclaim without hesitation, ‘How truly English!’ or ‘How sweetly Swiss!’ But no one can depict an Irish town with any hope of having it recognised unless he idealizes boldly, introducing a highly-intelligent pig, or a man in knee-breeches kissing a fancifully-attired colleen. And then, after all, he might as well have labelled it Irish at once in good plain print, and saved himself the trouble of drawing the symbolic figures.
To describe Ballymoy, therefore, mountains, rivers, and such like natural eccentricities being left out of the count, is to describe fifty other West of Ireland towns. There is a railway-station, bleak, gray, and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable. There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land the most prominent building. There is a convent, immense and wonderfully white, with rows and rows of staring windows and a far-seen figure of the Blessed Virgin, poised in a niche above the main door. There is a Roman Catholic church, gray-walled, gray-roofed, and unspeakably hideous, but large and, like the workhouse and the convent, obtruding itself upon the eye. It seems as if the inhabitants of the town must all of them be forced, and that at no distant date, either into religion or pauperism, just as small bodies floating in a pond are sucked into connection with one or other of the logs which lie among them. The shops in the one tortuous street block the footpaths in front of their doors with piles of empty packing-cases. The passenger is saluted, here by a buffet in the face from a waterproof coat suspended outside a draper’s, there by a hot breath of whisky-laden air. Two shops out of every three are public-houses. These occupy a very beautiful position in the economic life of the town. Their profits go to build the church, to pay the priests, and to fill the coffers of the nuns. The making of the profits fills the workhouse. A little aloof stands the Protestant church, austere to look upon, expressing in all its lines a grim reproach of the people’s life. Beyond it, among scanty, stooped trees, is the rectory, gray, as everything else is, wearing, like a decayed lady, the air of having lived through better days.
Such, save for one feature, is Ballymoy, as the traveller sees it, as Hyacinth Conneally saw it when he arrived there one gusty afternoon. The one unusual feature is Mr. James Quinn’s woollen mill. It stands, a gaunt and indeed somewhat dilapidated building, at the bottom of the street, in the angle where the river turns sharply to flow under the bridge. The water just above the bridge is swept into a channel and forced to turn the wheel which works some primitive machinery within. In the centre of the mill’s front is an archway through which carts pass into the paved square behind. Here is the weighbridge, and here great bundles of heavy-smelling fleeces are unloaded. Off the square is the office where Mr. Quinn sits, pays for the wool, and enters the weight of it in damp ledgers. Here on Saturdays two or three men and a score of girls receive their wages. The business is a peculiar one. You may bring your wool to Mr. Quinn in fleeces, just as you sheer it off the sheep’s back. He will pay you for it, more or less, according to the amount of trouble you have taken with your sheep. This is the way the younger generation likes to treat its wool. If you are older, and are blessed with a wife able to card and spin, you deal differently with Mr. Quinn. For many evenings after the shearing your wife sits by the fireside with two carding-combs in her hands, and wipes off them wonderfully soft rolls of wool. Afterwards she fetches the great wheel from its nook, and you watch her pulling out an endless gray thread while she steps back and forwards across the floor. The girls watch her, too, but not, as you do, with sleepy admiration. Their emotion is amused contempt. Nevertheless, your kitchen wall is gradually decorated with bunches of great gray balls. When these have accumulated sufficiently, you take them to Mr. Quinn. A certain number of them become his property. Out of the rest he will weave what you like—coarse yellow flannel, good for bawneens, and, when it is dyed crimson, for petticoats; or blankets—not fluffy like the blankets that are bought in shops, but warm to sleep under when the winter comes; or perhaps frieze, very thick and rough, the one fabric that will resist the winter rain.
This portion of his business Mr. Quinn finds to be decreasing year by year. Fewer and fewer women care to card and spin the wool. The younger men find it more profitable to sell it at once, and to wear, instead of the old bawneens, shirts called flannel which are brought over from cotton-spinning Lancashire, and sold in the shops. The younger women think that they look prettier in gowns made artfully by the local dressmaker out of feeble materials got up to catch the eye. If now and then, for the sake of real warmth, one of them makes a petticoat of the old crimson flannel, it is kept so short that, save in very heavy rain, it can be concealed. Unfortunately, while these old-fashioned profits are vanishing, Mr. Quinn finds it very hard to increase the other branch of his business. The fabrics which he makes are good, so good that he finds it difficult to sell them in the teeth of competition. The country shops are flooded with what he calls ‘shoddy.’ An army of eager commercial travellers pushes showy goods on the shopkeepers and the public at half his price. Even the farmers in remote districts are beginning to acquire a taste for smartness. Some things in which he used to do a useful trade are now scarcely worth making. There is hardly any demand for the checked head-kerchiefs. The women prefer hats and bonnets, decked with cheap ribbons or artificial flowers; and these bring no trade to Mr. Quinn’s mill. Still, he manages to hold on. The Lancashire people, though they have invented flannelette, cannot as yet make a passable imitation of frieze, and there is a Dublin house which buys annually all the blankets he can turn out. It is true that even there, and for the best class of customers, prices have to be cut so as to leave a bare margin of profit. Yet since there is a margin, Mr. Quinn holds on, though not very hopefully.
Hyacinth left the bulk of his luggage—a packing-case containing the books which the auctioneer had failed to dispose of in Carrowkeel—at the station, and walked into Ballymoy carrying his bag. He had little difficulty in making his way to the mill, and found the owner of it in his office. It was difficult at first to believe that James Quinn could be any relation to Captain Albert, the traveller, horse-dealer, soldier, and thief. This man was tall, though he stooped when he stood to receive his visitor. His movements were slow. His fair hair lay thin across his forehead, and was touched above the ears with gray. His blue eyes were very gentle, and had a way of looking long and steadily at what they saw. A glance at his face left the impression that life, perhaps by no very gentle means, had taught him patience.
‘This letter will introduce me,’ said Hyacinth; ‘it is from your brother, Captain, or Mr. Albert, Quinn.’
James Quinn took the letter, and turned it over slowly. Then, without opening it, he laid it on the table in front of him. His eyes travelled from it to Hyacinth’s face, and rested there. It was some time before he spoke, and then it was to correct Hyacinth upon a trivial point.
‘My half-brother,’ he said. ‘My father married twice, and Albert is the son of his second wife. You may have noticed that he is a great deal younger than I am.’
‘He looks younger, certainly,’ said Hyacinth, for the other was waiting for a reply.
‘Nearly twenty years younger. Albert is only just thirty.’
The exact age of the Captain was uninteresting and seemed to be beside the purpose of the visit. Hyacinth shifted his chair and fidgeted, uncertain what to do or say next.
‘Albert gave you this letter to me. Is he a friend of yours?’
‘No.’
James Quinn looked at him again steadily. It seemed—but this may have been fancy—that there was a kindlier expression in his eyes after the emphatic repudiation of friendship with Albert. At length he took up the letter, and read it through slowly.
‘Why did my brother give you this letter?’
The question was a puzzling one. Hyacinth had never thought of trying to understand the Captain’s motives. Then the conversation in the hotel recurred to him.
‘He said that he wanted to do a good turn to me and to you also.’
‘What had you done for him?’
‘Nothing whatever.’
Apparently James Quinn was not in the least vexed at the brevity of the answers he received, or disturbed because his cross-examination was obviously disagreeable to Hyacinth.
‘In this letter,’ he went on, referring to the document as he spoke, ‘he describes you as a young man who is “certainly honest, probably religious, and possibly intelligent.” I presume you know my brother, and if you do, you may be surprised to hear that I am quite prepared to take his word for all this. I have very seldom known Albert to tell me lies, and I don’t know why he should want to deceive me in this case. Still, I am a little puzzled to account for his giving you the letter. Can you add nothing in the way of explanation to what you have said?’
‘I don’t know that I can,’ said Hyacinth.
‘Will you tell me how you met my brother, and what he is doing now, or where he is?’
‘I do not think I should be justified in doing so.’
‘Ah, well! I can understand that in certain circumstances Albert would be very grateful to a man who would hold his tongue. He might be quite willing to do you a good turn if you undertook to answer no questions about him.’
He smiled as he spoke, a little grimly, but there was laughter lurking in the corners of his eyes. A Puritan will sometimes smile in such a way at the thought of a sinful situation, too solemn to be laughed at openly, but appealing to a not entirely atrophied sense of humour. Hyacinth felt reassured.
‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘I made no promise of silence. It is only that—well, ............