The Quiet Man and Other Stories by Maurice Walsh

Author:Maurice Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1935-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

III

The girl’s name was Ellen—Ellen Roe O’Danaher. But, in truth, she was no longer a girl. She was past her first youth into that second one that has no definite ending. She might be twenty-eight—she was no less—but there was not a lad in the countryside who would say she was past her prime. The poise of her and the firm set of her bones below clean flesh saved her from the fading of mere prettiness. Though she had been sought in marriage more than once, she had accepted no one, or, rather, had not been allowed to encourage any one. Her brother saw to that.

Red Will O’Danaher was a huge, rawboned, sandy-haired man, with the strength of an ox, and a heart no bigger than a sour apple. An overbearing man given to berserk rages. Though he was a churchgoer by habit, the true god of that man was Money—red gold, shining silver, dull copper, these the trinity he worshiped in degree. He and his sister, Ellen Roe, lived on the big ranch farm of Moyvalla, and Ellen was his housekeeper and maid of all work. She was a careful housekeeper, a good cook, a notable baker, and she demanded no wage. Her mean brother saw that she remained without a sweetheart, and hinted at his inability to set her out with a dowry. A wasted woman.

Red Will, himself, was not a marrying man. There were not many spinsters with a dowry big enough to tempt him, and the few there were had acquired expensive tastes—a convent education, the deplorable art of hitting jazz out of a piano, the damnable vice of cigarette smoking, the purse-emptying craze for motorcars—such things.

But in due time the tocher and the place—with a woman tied to them—came under his nose, and Red Will was no longer tardy.

His neighbor, James Carey, died of pneumonia in November weather, and left his fine farm and all on it to his widow, a youngish woman without children, and a woman with a hard name for saving pennies. Red Will looked once at Kathy Carey, and she did not displease him; he looked many times at her sound acres and they pleased him better, for he had in him the terrible Irish land-hunger. He took the steps required by tradition. In the very first week of the following Shrovetide he sent an accredited emissary to open formal negotiations.

The emissary was back within the hour.

“My soul!” said he to Red Will, “but she is the quick one. I hadn’t ten words out of me when she up and jumped down my throat. ‘I am in no hurry,’ says she, ‘to come wife to a house with another woman at the fire corner.’ ‘You mean Ellen Roe,’ says I. ‘I mean Ellen Roe,’ says she. ‘Maybe it could be managed—’ ‘Listen!’ says she: ‘When Ellen Roe is in a place of her own—and not till then—I will be considering what Red Will O’Danaher has to say. Take that back to him.

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