Part 41

“Carrie,” the younger sister will say to the elder, “I heard Whalen the guard, and Tim Rooney the porter, at Athenmore Station, talking together. And Tim is thinking of making up to a young lady, you know, and I suppose he’s always talking about it, for Whalen was saying to him just as I came up: ‘’Pon me word, I wish you were married, and had your family rared on me!’ They had a great jollification at our station the other night,” she goes on, turning to us. “And they brewed the punch in the station bell! Whalen’s a very humorous man,” she proceeds. “They used to stop the express from Galway at Athenmore when required; but there were complaints of the delay and orders came from Dublin it wasn’t to be done on any account. But it’s a recent regulation and everybody doesn’t know about it. And the other day there was terrible work, for there was Father Blake and the Doctor both counting on it for an urgent sick call—dying, they said the poor man was.

“‘You’ll have to stop the train for this once, Whalen,’ says Father Blake.

“‘I’ll maybe save him yet,’ says the doctor.

“‘I couldn’t, yer riverence,’ says Whalen; ‘it’s as much as me place is worth. Don’t you be askin’ me, doctor. It ’ud be me ruin. The company’s very strict.’

“‘Think of his poor soul,’ says the priest.

“‘I’ll hold ye responsible for his life,’ says the doctor.

“‘Wirra, I can’t,’ says poor Whalen, and calls up Tim. ‘Tell his riverence, Tim,’ says he, ‘tell his riverence and the doctor that I can’t be disobeying orders.... And begorra, she’s due this minute! Up into the signal-box with you. And down with that signal, so the express can get by,’ says he. And as Tim starts off at a great pace, Whalen shouts after him, ‘And I’m sure I hope ye’ll get it to work, Tim, for it’s terrible stiff it is, that same signal, and it at danger!’

“Well, whether he had winked at Tim, or what, but Tim worked and worked.

“‘I can’t get it to move,’ he says. ‘Will you come up yourself, Mr. Whalen, sir, and have a try?’

“And, oh,” says Miss Margaret, in fits of laughter, “the way the two of them went on in that signal-box, and the way Whalen pumped and pulled, and at last he cries, ‘There’s no help for it, it’s stuck! And sure the company can’t blame me, if the machinery’s out of order,’ says he. ‘Well, there’s wan good thing, your riverence, the thrain ’ull have to stop now, anyhow.’”

We laugh a good deal during those pleasant meals at Kilcoultra. Not one dull moment does the house hold for us, and we don’t want any better company than that of the two dear ladies.

“We’ve got,” Miss Caroline, the elder, explains to me carefully, “a very careful coachman, a very steady man, so you needn’t be the least nervous driving out with us. He was selected, indeed, because he could be trusted. It wouldn’t do for us unprotected women, you know,” she says in all seriousness, “to be risking our necks with a tipsy coachman.”

Two days we are driven by this paragon. The third day there sits a stranger on the box.

“I hope,” says Miss Carrie apologetically, “that you don’t mind his being out of livery.”

“The fact is, Regan had an accident last night,” explains Miss Margaret. “He fell into the old gravel pit going back home and cut his head open, and——”

“It was my fault entirely,” interrupts Miss Caroline in distressed accents. “I had to send him in to Galway town, and to tell him to wait and bring back Captain Blake. And that meant loitering an hour.”

“Dear, dear!” Miss Margaret clacks her tongue. “That was very unfortunate! He—such a steady man! But an hour in Galway town...!”

“It’s only what might have been expected,” Miss Caroline concludes. “I blame myself entirely.—I generally,” she adds, turning to me, “avoid leaving him any time in the town, you know.”

And the best of it is that Regan remains in their minds “the steady man.” How impossible it is for the stranger to understand Ireland and Ireland’s ways! How much humour must you have—and what unlimited patience! There is nothing, of course, that so conduces to patience as a pleasant sense of humour.

The ladies are the Providence of the district. There is a room at the back of the great gallery filled nearly to the ceiling with rolls of homespun made by the peasant women in the villages. Whenever a cottage mother is in want of money she runs up to Miss Margaret or Miss Caroline, bringing or promising the product of her loom. A good deal of money is advanced; a good deal paid in this manner, chiefly out of the ladies’ generous pockets.

“Of course, poor things, you must know the way to take them,” says Miss Caroline in her Irish way. “One of them will come up and declare they’ll all be ‘lost entirely, ruined out and out’ for the want of five pounds. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t do with thirty shillings, now?’ I say to them. ‘Oh, Miss Caroline’—it will be then—‘as thrue as I’m a living woman, I couldn’t do with less than two pound ten!’ ... I get at the truth that way,” she adds.

It is Miss Margaret who undertakes the sale of goods which have already cost Kilcoultra so dear, and no one can say that she shows a commercial spirit.

“Let me see now,” she will say, fingering the stuff—and splendid stuff it is—with tentative finger and thumb. “I think we paid three-and-tenpence a yard for this, or maybe it was four shillings, but”—with a delighted smile—“I’ll let you have it for one-and-six, if you’re sure—really sure—you want it.”

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The country all about Kilcoultra is typically wild and melancholy. The fields stretch, barren and yellowing, strewn with giant stones. Except where sombre belts of woodland mark the great estates, there is scarcely a tree to break the monotony; a monotony intensified by the low, unending lines of rough grey walls that border every road. But there is a kind of poetry even in this desolation, and a satisfaction to all who love the freedom of unbounded horizons. Then the mountains of Clare stretch their incomparable plum and grape colours against the sky. The colour of Ireland is a thing scarcely realized over here, where, somehow, hues seem washed out. “In England everything has got grey in it,” an artist friend of ours discontentedly avers.

We are taken across the county to a castle standing by a lake, which is a place of wonder. It is a castle no older, in its mediæval sturdiness, than the Gothic mansion we are staying in, but quite as convincingly built. Loughcool is a realm of beauty. At the end of the long approach the road rises very steeply through a stern grove of pines. All at once, as you approach the summit of this dark woodland, the ground breaks away abruptly on the right, and, between the pines, far, far below, lies the lake smiling, and on its banks what is called “the hidden garden”—a stretch of fairy beauty. Words are poor things to describe the vision which breaks so unexpectedly upon the eye. Everything that gardening art can do has been accomplished at Loughcool. You have terraces and a glory of roses overhanging the water even this late September; and there are “Auratum” Lilies rising in splendid groups on each side of a grass walk that runs grandly into the woods between stately trees. The lady of Loughcool is fighting a hard fight to make Azaleas and Rhododendrons grow in the limy soil; but it is a question whether the struggle is worth while.

“We have given it up,” says the sensible châtelaine of Kilcoultra.

We smiled privately. Villino Loki has at least some points of superiority.