Part 40

It was Sunday, and we found the Châtelaine—a little lady renowned for her vivacity and charm—out in the field with her children and her lord, energetically teaching hockey to the young men and women of the village. Her little boy was running up and down after her, wringing his hands and ejaculating, “Mamma, ye’ll be kilt! Mamma, ye’ll be kilt!” to perfectly regardless ears.

In a whirl of energy we were rushed into tea; and, while drawing off her loose gloves and flinging them at random into a corner, our hostess’s tongue, which was as nimble as her little feet, never ceased wagging:

“I hope you don’t mind the smell! Oh, it’s a terrible smell. But it’s only the dogs, ye know. We’ve been washing them. They’re sick, poor things. Not infectious, ye needn’t be a bit afraid. Only mange, or something. It’s the sulphur in the soap, ye know. Come in, come in!—Oh, I do hope we have got something fit to eat! Katie, Katie! ‹Katie’s me eldest daughter› Katie, what have we got? Ah, it’s horrid!—Ah, I don’t know what’s the matter with them.—Yes, it’s a fine big room. We were dancing here last week. You wouldn’t think it to look at it now, would you? ’Pon my word! I was thinking to meself that night, ‘It’s a queer world we live in, with all those saints looking down at us with their bare legs, and we with our bare backs!’ Oh, yes, they’re very grand old paintings, I dare say! But there is a deal of bare legs about them.—Will you have any more? Ah, no, ye can’t eat it!—I don’t wonder, I can’t meself.—Will you come into the garden? I’d like to be showing you the garden. Where’s me gloves?—Where’s me yellow gloves? Katie, did ye see me yellow gloves? Ah, never mind! This way.—I’ve been making a new herbaceous border. Ah, ’pon me word, if they’ve not gone and locked the garden door! Sunday’s the mischief! Never mind, I’ll ring the bell. Green! Green, Johnny Green, are ye there? Is Mrs. Green there? Is Patsy there? Where’s young Condren? Ah, they’re all out! But I’ll not be beaten.—Maybe I’ll get it open. Will ye push, now? I’ll turn the handle. Give a good shove. It’s an old lock. Ah, devil a bit of it! Will ye give me your stick.—No, thank ye. I’d rather hit it meself.”

Even to her it was impossible to continue talking, while she was, as she herself would have expressed it, “laying on to the garden door.” Scarlet, panting, dishevelled, but still completely fascinating, she desisted at last and handed back the stick with a smile and gasp, and a resigned: “Ah, I clean forgot, I see how it is now. They’re all off to the funeral of the priest’s brother’s sister.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXXIX

From the rich plains of Meath to the barren lands of Galway, it is a far cry and an unforgettable journey. The country grows more and more desolate, and grand in desolation, as one approaches the Atlantic. There was an orange sunset that evening, over an illimitable stretch of bog, a vision of savage, haunting beauty that went with us into the darkness of the fast closing day like a strain of wild music.

Ireland has always been as a living creature to her children. She has taken, in their fanciful minds, a distinct personality. To get such a glimpse of her as that, is to understand the passionate ardour of fealty which she has had the power to inspire; to understand how she has come to be “Kathleen na Hoolihan,” and “My dark Rosaleen,” to those poet hearts. We were speeding now to that very corner of land from which her younger lovers have chiefly sprung.

It was pitch dark when we alighted at a town which had once been large and prosperous and was now forlornly sunk in decay; mute witness, like so many others, to that act of tyranny—blunder and crime—the effects of which England can never wipe away.

Our kind friends had ordered “a carriage from the hotel” to meet us. We had a long cross-country drive before us. Looking doubtfully by the light of the station lamp at the two emaciated animals that were to draw us, we wondered, in our tired brains, if two bad horses are not worse than one. It had begun to drizzle rain, a fine soft rain that is like a caress in the air.

If anything could beat the Dublin cab, it was that Galway carriage. We set off lurching and rattling; and soon, the wind catching us from over the fields, the rain began to strike in across the open windows. To have a window up seemed the simple remedy; but things simple elsewhere are not so in the West of Ireland. One window was as impossible to lift out of its socket as the oyster out of its closed shells, for it was strapless. We fell upon the other strap and instantly the window shot outwards at right angles, with the evident intention of casting itself on the road, had we not held it despairingly by its shabby appendage. If you have ever tried to hold a window in that position by its strap you will know how agonizing is the process. The driver was hailed.

“Look here! Your window’s loose!—You’d better stop and put it back.”

The slogging trot of the horses slackened, and over his shoulder the man of Galway demanded:

“Is it the windy on the left, or the wan to the right of ye?”

“The left, the left! Oh, do be quick!”

“The left, is it? Sure, isn’t that the wan with the sthrap?” He jerked his reins and clucked at his horses. What more could we want? Wasn’t that the one with the “sthrap?”

With great difficulty, with imminent risk to the life of the window and our own safety, we got the recalcitrant pane back into its socket, and discovered that by dint of judicious manipulation, and a tight hold of the “sthrap,” it was possible to shelter the most neuralgic of the party.

A ten Irish miles’ drive along the stoniest of roads, through complete darkness—for there was only a partial glimmer from one carriage-lamp half the way, which then became extinct altogether—it is something of an enterprise! But it was worth it to find such a welcome at the end!

A “Gothic” mansion, dating from the early part of last century, Kilcoultra is outwardly a very grand pile and stands nobly in the midst of a rolling park, reclaimed from the wild stony land of Galway. And inside, the first impression is like stepping in to the glories of a missal page. The whole house is homogeneous and entirely successful in its mediæval colouring. On the walls are gorgeous enamel blues, peacock greens or yet carmine crimsons appropriately set with fleurs-de-lis, maltese cross or some other conventional device in gold; ceiling and cornices are richly illuminated to correspond. To find this glow of colour in the midst of the melancholy greys and greens of the western landscape, under the low drifting cloud-ridden skies, has a great charm; it has a poetic Maeterlinckian atmosphere.

There is something too of the delicate sadness of an old romance in the lives of these kindly ladies who rule so wisely over the lands left to them by their brother—the last of his name. He was a man round whom justly centred unusual hopes and ambitions. Now he, who had so great a heart and so splendid a mind, lies in the ruined chapel in the park, alone. The chapel is roofless. It is a nobly solitary and fit resting-place for one who was nobly apart from the petty aims of his contemporaries; who lived and died true to his ideals; whose work still prospers in the freed lands of his people. He gave up much for Ireland, and Ireland gave him nothing at all in return ... except that wonderful sleeping-place with the changing sky overhead.

They say there is no such word in the Irish language as gratitude, and yet—

My Kilcoultra hostess drove me round the property on the day after my arrival, and drew the pony to the standstill on a height that finely dominated the park and house. When I had duly admired the view she pointed with her whip to a little white cottage that stood a few yards away and began a kindly tale of the old woman who had long lived there and had but recently passed away.

“When I’d come round to see her, I used to find her, times out of number, leaning over the wall, gazing down at Kilcoultra. Always she’d be leaning over the wall, staring down at the house. And one day I said to her, ‘Mary, what in the world makes you stand there like that?’ And she answered me, ‘I’m looking down on the roof that shelters me lovely master!’”

“My lovely master!” A fragrant thing to have become to the poor that live on your soil! When we reach a sphere where things are judged by different standards and higher measures than we can now conceive, how far will not such a title outweigh any paltry worldly honour!

Yet if the memory of its lost master dominates and haunts all Kilcoultra house and lands, there is nothing to sadden one in the thoughts it inspires; and our stay there is altogether full of charm and pleasure.

Not only are the ladies a fund of anecdote, racy of the soil; not only do they live delightfully in touch with their peasantry, with eye and ear ever ready to catch the humour and the pathos about them; but they are cultured, far-travelled beings. Not much in the outer world escapes their knowledge and shrewd apprehension.

Home topics, however, are what appeals to their visitors most.