Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 July 1894 — JOANNA'S ROMANCE. [ARTICLE]

JOANNA'S ROMANCE.

Where I first saw Joanna was In the draper’s shop of a stagnant little country town, a place storied enough for a hundred towns, small and great. The place was quite dead, and given over to its illustrious ghosts, and to the lashing, tearing voices of the j Atlantic, that even in the mild autumn shouted and smote incessantly, making a tumult in the air. The shop was hung with shawls and cheap, shoddy prints and linseys, so that in the dark one could scarcely see Joanna’s bright head at first, as one came blinking out of the daylight ; the shop was sunk a step or two below the street. She was a big, generously built, handsome girl. Her hair, twisted in splendid coils, was of that pale color which Is as much silver as gold; her face, with its regular, large features, was suffused with a healthy color; she looked at us from large gray eyes, clear as agate and as hard. Our business was t>o make some small purchase of a basket, if we could find one, to carry home a specimen of the town’s manufacture of rough red pottery. Joanna assisted us in this to the best of her power, and then some remark about the slowness of business brought down upon us a perfect avalanche of explanation. Joanna had little to do at that moment; indeed, for an hour or more we conversed with her, her customers were a small child for a half penny spool, and a girl who came back repenting a purchase, and wanting the money restored. With these Joanna dealt summarily and came back to the chat she was apparently eager for. She set us a couple of chairs between the lines of shawls, and leant forward herself with her arms akimbo on the narrow counter. Here was a discourse on the Irish Land Laws, the relation between landlord and tenant, the deterioration in the condition of the Irish poor, with divergencies to the general subject of labor, the cause of strikes, and a great many other things. We were well content to listen. The girl was extraordinarily well informed and intelligent. The soft brogue was musical. Also we were in the very midst of a disturbed and distressed district, and were both keenly interested. We were not English tourists, but a pair of Irishwomen with a certain knowledge of the matter, though without Joanna’s illumination from within. We were both filled with admiration for the creature before us. For in the excitement of her voluable talk Joanna had grown brilliantly handsome. What a girl to be doling out farthing purchases in this melancholy, haunted little place, which was only tolerable because of the contrast to one’s own vivid life far away in the world. As we talked the wind lashed the sea-blown alders and a dreary patter of dead leaves came down the street, where,-at long intervals, a human footfall sounded. “Yep will not always stay here,” Rosa said, with sudden, quick sympathy. “You are saving your wages, no doubt, and will get away some day to a bigger place, because you are such a clever girl.” “Saving!” echoed Joanna scornfully. “No indeed then; if you knew what my wages were ’tis little you’d talk of saving. And what for would I save? lam as happy here as if I Went foreign to Dublin or Cork. What for would I go saving an’ roaming?” Rosa answered deprecatingly. “But a fine, handsome girl like you won’t spend all your life behind this poor little counter? You will want a business of your own, and it is perhaps possible you might think of marriage.” “Marriage!” said the girl almost fiercely. “ There’s not a man to be had here less nor three hundred pounds. An’ them ould shows of widowers, for ther’s nothing else here. Why, if I ever could have under the sun three hundred pounds, is it on the like of them I’d spend it?” Her wailing Cork brogue rang out vehemently in her indignation. It was our first experience of the results of the Munster match-making system. Rosa looked rather shocked. I felt vastly amused. “ But, my dear,” said Rosa, “you are young and clever and handsome. There are many men in the world who would love you just for your own sake. Do you only think of marriage in the way you have said, and not at all as a union in which you would be dearly loved and love in return?” “Men and love,” said Joanna emphatically; “I don’t set any store by them. People marries for love foreign in Dublin and Cork, not here. A friend of mine married for love, find what came of it? ’Twaslove they had to live on, no more. Och, he was the worthless stravager with his love. He brought her to live on his father as long as the ould man would let them. Then when they were turned out he took her to America. But there was no place there for him and his Idle ways and his love. And now

1 they’re back, and she is supporting I the great lazy sturk. Him an’ his love!” It is impossible to express the disI dain with which Joanna used the | little noun, which has wrought such great havoc and turned to such great issues in this world of ours. She | hammered out the word every time ; she spoke it as if she was shattering j the thing itself to atoms. She had i drawn herself up till she looked like 1 a fierce, handsome young Amazon, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkling, her fingers pointing her contempt. Rosa looked as if she eouH scaree!ly endure. these unnatural opinions iin Joanna. Perhaps the girl saw she I was shocked. At all events her attitude suddenly relaxed, her face and voice suddenly softened. “Deed,” she said, and you could hardly recognize her for the same girl, “ ’tis not that I’d be saying love wasn’t good for married people. Who’d know what it is between husband and wife better than me, James O’Connell’s own sister? But ’tis married love, love that comes with the priest’s blessing, and none of that sort of miaulin an’ stravagin. Look here ladies,” she said with another sudden change of tone, “ye were talking about the evicted tenants.

“Well, if yem like to know one that has been through with it, I’ll take ye any Sunday to see my own brother that old Poltimcffe evicted. He’s under Major Hannay now, glory be to Ged! but ’tis long he and the wife and the little ones were in a cabin with the wet coming through the thatch, and only the black shadow of Bari ass Hill for shelter against the north wind.” “We’ll go gladly,” said Rosa for both of us, “and t next Sunday after mass, if that will suit you, Miss O’Connell.” Joanna joined us at the hotel on Sunday about 1 o’clock. We had a rickety hotel-car, and a ragged driver in high spirits, who kept incessantly urging the little lean mare. We flew down-hill and up-hill at breakneck pace, but the urchin who was driving never relaxed his long whistle, which seemed perfectly maddening to the horse. However, a 3 he left our entreaties unheeded, we soon got used to our flight through the air. As we passed we scattered stones and flints freely from the road, set the hens screaming wildly, and made' an occasional old woman at a cottage door lift up her hands in amazement. Agleesh, when we reached it, was a poor little place enough, but an oasis of cultivation after lierry Moor. There we had seen the wide, boggy country, traversed by streams of water stained red with the iron washings, patches of partially reclaimed land were fast returning to bog-land; and we saw the remains of roofless cabins standing up here and there black and smoke-dried. Joanna was an entertaining companion. She knew every man, woman and child along the road, and could tack a history to each. She pointed us out this and that evicted farm, and far away under Barlass Mountain, made us see, through our spy-glass, as she called it, the huts of evicted tenants, hive-shaped, like the hut of a New Zealand aborigine. “But, Joanna,” one of us said—she had prayed early in the day that we should call her Joanna—“how is it that if your brother couldn’t pay rent to Col. Poltimore he is able to pay for the land of this Major Hannay, who you say is of the old stock, and a kind landlord?”

For once Joanna’s loquacity seemed frozen. She answered sententiously and with a vague flush, It was an answer that told nothing, and we felt that somehow we had presumed. There was an awkward silence for quite five minutes. Agleesh was an ordered little place, with tiny patches of fields, cropped, and in a way to prosper. The house was long and low, a house of three or four . rooms, perhaps. The dunghill was'out of sight at the back, and the place, though bare, as if they were newcomers, had a tidy look. As the car drew up at the house door, a pale, pretty young woman ran out. She had a baby in her arms, andia boy or two hid his shy eyes in heii skirt. Following came her husband, a tall young man, happy-looking, but with a certain pallor and thinness as from late privation. We were welcomed with genu: ne courtesy and hospitality ; but J 3anna seemed to disappear in her sis er-in-law’s embraces, and the kisses of “young Jemmie.” This scion of Ihe house seemed to be a source of mingled'pride and embarrassment o Joanna. “Quit h ding your face, you rogue,” she said, Itrying to disentangle the fat arms a jout her neck. “What’ll the ladies think of you at all at all, for an unmannerly rogue?” It was a new light on Joanna. We felt a little; out of it amid the enthusiastic affefction of which she was the centre. We lingered, therefore, in “the room j to which Mrs. O’Connell presently conducted us to lay aside our wraps. A charming room it was, with the til y window framing purple Barlass, tE e gay patchwork quilt on the bed, th i altar with its statue and lamp, and Ihe perfect purity we had scarcely locked for. We concluded that we sho aid have to remake our impressions of Joanna. When wn went down at last she was sitting at the tea table, voluble as usual, ahd buttering hot potato cakes as they came from the griddle. The father ind mother were looking at her with pleased admiration; the placid baby lay on her extended knees; young Jemmie was standing by her skirt with an air bf proprietorship. We had said to each other upstairs that the brother and his wife were of finer clay than Joanna, a judgment we afterward thought upon Remorsefully. However, there was no doubt that the simple refinement and good will written in the faces of the pair did not belie them. I have seldom spent i pleasanter evening than in that farmhouse kitchen. It |was cold enough to enjoy the big turf fire; the tea and eggs and cake were dolicious, and served with a cleanliness that left nothing to be desired. Then James O’Connell, though slowsr-witted than the redoubtable Joanna, who often reminded him of this or that as he pain takingly elu-‘ eidated for us the problem of land--

lord and tenant as shown on the Pol* timore estate, was a man of much intelligence, and a fair-mindedness which came of his extreme gentleness. He said very little of his own suflere ings in the bleak winter of eviction, when the shelter for him and his was one of those conical huts under th* lee of Barlass. “I wouldn’t live through it again, ladies,” he said, “not for a power. We carry-the traces of it still, me an’ Mollie, and even little Jimmie, the creature. But, thanks be to God, and another who’ll be nameless”-he lifted eloquent eyes to Joanna—“sure it’s in heaven we are now, an’ God knows if we’d be as happy if we hadn’t had a taste of the other place.” The mystery of this speech was elucidated when Mrs. O’Connell took us to put on our hats. Joanna had gone out with her brother to see "a bit that needed drainin’.” Nothing had amazed us more in this extraordinary girl than the practical knowledge and enthusiasm she showed about farming. We had left them to set forth up the boreen; Joanna with young Jemmie by her side, and with the baby clasped to a breast suddenly, it seemed to us, grown maternal, Mrs. O’Connell watched them forth with much pride and tenderness, and then led the way to “the room.” We said somethiug of Joanna’s cleverness and beauty. As we did a flush came up in her sister-in-law’s delicate face. In her excitement she became quite loud-voiced and assertive. “Handsome she is, an’ clever she is, ladies,” she said: “but our Joanna's better than any other. She hates to be talked about, an’ if she was here would be the first to clasp her hand over my mouth. She’ll neverewn it to any one that it was h r bit of a fortune that took us, as Jemmie says, in heaven. She had £BOO of : her own that the ould man scraped an’6aved.

“He left Jemmie the land, but what good was it when the old lord died, and Poltimore came in an’ riz the rint? When we were efut there under Barlass she never mentioned to us what was in her heart. She came often bringing the food and the clothes that was life to me and Jemmie—Jemmie that lay six months with a lung complaint caught in that rotten place. An’ little Jemmie at the breast, and little Jo, God bless her! expected. But the day that she could release her fortune, for the ould man had tied it up until she was 21, she was off to Cork to a ’torney, an’ she said nothing to any one till she had bought the lease of Agleesh from Major Hannay. “And one day, when Jemmie was that low that I feared he’d never lift his head again, she came marching in and flung the lecjse on the quilt. ‘Get up, Jemmie O’Connell,’ she said, ‘your farm’s waiting for you.’ And the next day we moved here; and from that hour Jemmie began to pick up life and hope. We’ve done finely since then, thank God; and Major Hannay, kind gentleman that he is, isj, maybe, a little kindlier to Jemmie than to another by raison of the good will he bears Joanna.” She stopped for breath, and then went on again more quickly. “Maybe ’tis shame to us for taking it,” she said, “but sure ’twas all done before we knew a word about it. The cruel thing was that Joanna’s match was nearly made with young Spelman of the mills beyond. He cried off quick enough when he heard where Joanna’s fortune was gone to. Joanna won’t speak of him now; but I often think she’d a liking for him. “Anyhow, he wasn’t fit for her, for he was rich enough to have taken her if he liked.” She looked at us with a certain trouble. “I'm often misdoubting,” she said, “that it’s right to have Joanna wearing out her days in Dunstable's. Sure, Jemmie talks of re-paying the debt we owe her. Godblessher! but we’ll be old before that comes about. She seems happy and well,” she added, looking at ua wistfully for corroboration. Outside the window Joanna’s voice rang out in emphatic assertion on some disputed point. She had young Jemmie by the hand, and her brother strolled by her peacefully, his two hands elasped behind his back. “He’s a picking up wonderfully,” said his wife, her eyes passing Joanna to linger on her husband’s face; “but there’s no doubt Joanna saved his life. Dr. Bogers said so; he said it was the damp of Barlass Moor was killing him, but I knew it was the heart break.”

We assured her that we thought Joanna was, happy and well quit of young Spelman. While she was at Agleesh she certainly seemed full of vicarious happiness. As we drove away she leant across the well of the car. “Now, there’s love for you,” she said triumphantly, “an’ that’s the love I believe in. There’s many a one talks of love before marriage. It’s myself doesn’t believe in it then. ‘Tis all lies an’ deceivin’—so it is. Sure, I’d rather be behind the counter of Dunstable’s all my life long than believe some that comes smelling after money-bags. A woman’s heart ought to be worth more than even $800.” They were the first words approaching sentiment we had heard from Joanna. Rosa and I look at each other sympathetically, having a clew to their meaning. A week later we left Y , and since have heard no more of Joanna.—[Good Words.