CHAPTER III.

They who in contempt, the Dryad’s hauntsProfane with empty bottles and loose papers,Find tongues in tarts, ants running on their boots,Wasps in the wine, and salt in everything!

But a long road and an early breakfast create an earnestness and sincerity in the matter of luncheonthat were lacking in the artificial junketings of the Bard. Certainly, our stopping-places were not such as a Dryad could haunt with any degree of comfort. On this first day we pulled up under the lee of a low bank, one of the few roadside fences we had come to in that waste of heather and grey-blue lakes, and spread out our eatables on the seats of the cart with a kind of bashfulness of the possible passer-by; a bashfulness soon to be hardened by custom into a brazen contempt for even the passing mail-car and the fraternal backward grin of its driver. Most people who have wolfed the furtive sandwich in a crowded railway carriage have felt all of a sudden how gross and animal was the action, but how, if persevered in, a callous indifference may be attained; this was the case with us.

After that first lunch the complexion of things changed. The wind sharpened into a wet whip, the clouds swooped down on the hilltops, the lakes turned a ruffled black, like a Spanish hen with its plumage blown the wrong way, and the first mishap to the

“WE PURSUED OUR WAY TO RECESS.”

expedition occurred. I turned my head to look with mild surprise at the end of an iron bedstead with which an ingenious farmer had closed an opening in his stone wall, and as I did so my hat soared upwards from my head, and flew like a live thing towards the lake by which we were driving. I followed with as much speed as I possess, while my cousin lay in idiot laughter in the cart, and had the pleasure of seeingmy hat plunge with theélanof a Marcus Curtius into a bed of waterlilies by the bank. From this I drew it, pale, half-drowned, but sane and submissive; and placing it in solitary confinement at the bottom of the trap, I donned a chilly knitted Tam o’Shanter, and we pursued our way to Recess.

DECOROUS black posts, with white tops, on either side of a little avenue, a five-pound trout laid out on the hall door-steps, with some smaller specimens of its kind, a group of anglers admiring these, and a fine, unostentatious rain that nobody paid any attention to—these were our first impressions of the Royal Hotel, Recess. With many injunctions as to her “giddiness” about the head, Sibbie was commended to the care of a stable-boy, and we marched over the corpses of the trout into a little hall in which the smell of wet waterproofs and fishing tackle reigned supreme.

Our only information as to the hotels of Connemara had been gathered from a gentleman whose experience dated some thirty years back. He told us that on arriving at the hotel to which fate hadconsigned him, his modest request for something more substantial than bread and whisky had been received with ill-concealed consternation. A forlorn hope of children was sent forth to find and hunt in a chicken for his dinner; he had watched the search, the chase, the out-manœuvring of the wily victim; he had heard, tempered by a single plank door, its death screech in the kitchen, and he had even gone the length of eating it, when it was at last served up on a kitchen-plate, brown and shrivelled as “She” in her last moments, and boiled with a little hot water as its only sauce. As to the bedrooms, our friend had been almost more discouraging. He said that while he was dining he heard a trampling of feet and the moving of some heavy body in the passage. The door opened, and a feather bed bulged through the narrow doorway into the room, and was spread on the floor by the table. It was then explained that, as he had asked for dinner and a bed, sure there they were for him, and they were elegant clean feathers, and he should have them for eightpence a pound. Withsome difficulty the traveller made them understand that, though he meant to carry the dinner away with him, he had no such intentions with regard to the bed; and after a more lucid setting forth of his requirements, his host and hostess grasped the position. He was taken into a room which was quite filled by two immense four-post beds, and having been given to understand that one was reserved for domestic requirements, he was offered the other. He was on the point of accepting this couch when a snore arose from its depths.

A FISHERMAN AT RECESS.

“Ah, sure, that’s only the priest,” said the lady of the house; “and he’s the qui’test man ever ye seen. God bless him! He’ll not disturb ye at all.” This was our friend’s experience, and though possibly it had gained flavour and body with age, it had, at allevents, made us look forward with a fearful interest to what might be our lot in Connemara.

But the first vision of the long Recess dinner-table dissipated all our hopes of the comic squalor that is endured gladly for the sake of its literary value, and I may admit that the regret with which my cousin and I affected to eat our soup and pursue our dinner through its orderly five or six courses was not altogether sincere. From one point of view it might have been called a fish dinner, as from clear soup, to raspberries one topic alone filled the mouths of the diners—the outwitting of the wiles of trout and salmon. There was a reading-party of Oxford men, their blazers glowing rainbow-hued among the murky shooting coats of the other diners; there were young curates, and middle-aged majors, and elderly gentlemen—to be an elderly gentleman amounts to a profession in itself—and all, without exception or intermission, talked of fish and fishing. Not to talk to the comrade of your travels at atable d’hôteis an admission of failure and incapacity, so much so thatrather than sit silent, I would if need were, repeat portions of the Church Catechism to my friend in a low conversational voice. My cousin and I have seldom been forced to this extreme, and on this occasion we kept up the semblance of a cultured agreeability to one another in a manner that surprised ourselves. But the volume of discussion raging round us overwhelmed us in the end. We felt the Academy and the jennet to be alike an impertinence; we faltered and became silent.

Opposite to us sat one of the most whole-souled of the elderly gentlemen, with a face of the colour and glossy texture of Aspinall’s Royal Mail red enamel, in vigorous conversation with a callow youth in a pink blazer, one of whose eyes was closed by midge-bites; and, though the general chorus might rise and wane in the long intervals between the courses, their strident bass and piping tenor sustained an unflagging duet.

“I assure you, my dear sir,” protested the elderly gentleman, earnestly, with an almost pathetic oblivionof the difference in age between him and his neighbour, “it is not a matter of a fly with these Glendalough trout. I have seen a man fail repeatedly with a certain butcher, and immediately afterwards the same butcher, putpleasantlyto a fish, you understand, rose him at once.”

“H’m,” returned the Pink Blazer, gloomily, receiving this, to us, surprising statement, with perfect calm, “myexperience—and I’ve fished these lakes for years—is that a full-bodied Jock Scott”—but we will not betray our ignorance by trying to expound second-hand the profundities of the Pink Blazer. When they had been given to the world, he hid his little midge-bitten face in a tumbler of shandygaff, while his aged companion gravely continued the argument.

There were only two or three other ladies at the table, and they evidently had, by long residence in the hotel, been reduced to assuming an interest in the prevailing topic, which we found hard to believe was genuine. They may, of course, have been enthusiasts, but their looks belied them.

Next morning we were awakened by the babble of fishermen in the hall, then the rattle of cars on the gravel told that they had started on their daily business, and when at a subsequent period we came down to breakfast, we found ourselves alone, and the hotel generally in a state of peaceful lethargy. It was, so we had heard excited voices in the hall proclaiming, a splendid day for fishing. This meant that when we looked out of the window we saw two blurred shadows that we believed to be mountains, and heard the rushings of over-fed streams, which, thanks to the mist, were quite invisible. But the hotel weather-glass stood high, and at ten o’clock we were hopeful; at eleven we were despairing; at twelve we were reckless, and we went to our room to get ready for a walk. We have hitherto omitted all reference to one important item of our equipment, and even now, remembering that we were travelling in a proclaimed district, I mention with bated breath the fact that my second cousin insisted on taking an ancient and rusty revolver with her. She had secretlypurchased a box of cartridges, weighing several pounds, and at the last moment she had requested me to stow this armoury in the travelling-bag—“In case of mad dogs and things on the road,” she said. The pistol, in its leather case, I consented to, but the tin box of ammunition was intolerable, and we compromised by putting six cartridges into an “Easy Hair Curler” box, which really might have been made for them. So far there had been no occasion to use it, but now, as my cousin struggled into her mackintosh, she remarked tentatively, “Don’t you think this would be a good day for the revolver?”

I said I was not much of a judge, but she might bring it if she liked; and having secreted it and a few “easy hair curlers” in her mackintosh pocket, she was ready for the road.

We paused in the hall for a last vengeful look at the barometer, which still stood cheerfully at Set Fair (we believe its constructor to have been a confirmed fisherman), and at the door we encountered the two hotel dogs—a large silky black creature of the breedthat is generally selected to adorn penwipers, and a smirking fox-terrier, with polite, and even brilliant manners of a certain flashy hotel sort.

“Would they come for a walk with the ladies?” said I, my voice assuming the peculiar drivelling tone supposed to be attractive to dogs.

THE TWO HOTEL DOGS.

The penwiper regarded me with cold amber eyes, and composed itself for slumber.

“Come along, then!” I said, still more persuasively adding, as I stepped out into the thick fine mist, “Cats!”

The amber eyes closed, and their owner curled into an inky heap with a slumbrous growl; while the fox-terrier, having struck a dashing attitude to keep up his character as a sportsman, affected to believe that the cats I referred to were in the kitchen, and hurried off in that direction. We were snubbed; and we went forth reflecting on the demoralising effect of hotel life. Its ever-changing society and friendships of an hour had turned the penwiper into an ill-mannered cynic, and the fox-terrier into an effete andblaséloafer. Thus moralising, we splashed along the road, past the little post and telegraph office, where you write your telegrams in an arbour of roses, and post your letters between the sprays of clematis, and struck gallantly forward, with the telegraph posts, along the Clifden road. Glendalough lake lay on our left hand, and the bare mountains towered up on our right—at least, we were given to understand by the guide-books and the waiter that they towered, the mist allowing us no opportunity of judging for ourselves. Across the lake we saw the Glendaloughhotel among the woods that came down to the water’s edge, and on it—we allude to the lake—were the boats of some of the maniacs who had left their comfortable asylum in the grey of the morning. We did not see them catching any fish; in fact, we have been forced to the conclusion that we had some malign influence on the anglers of Connemara, for, though we have watched them long and often, we have never seen so much as a rise.

We left the main road at the end of the lake, and turned into one running in another direction. It was, like every Connemara road, good and level, and in perfect order. Like all the others, too, it disdained fence or protection of any kind, unless an occasional deep ditch or lake on each side can be called a reassurance to the driver. Here and there on the road the little black demon cattle were standing disgustedly about, declining to eat the wet grass among the wetter heather, and concentrating all their attention on us in a manner that, taken in connection with the most villainous expression of countenance, and hornslike Malay Krisses, made it advisable to throw stones at them while there was yet time. They at once withdrew, recognising the fact that is early implanted in the mind of every known Irish animal, that sermons in stones are unanswerable. We had got on to a long stretch of bog road, bounded only by the vaguely suggestive mist, and we were beginning to feel the ardour for a long walk awakening in us, when we heard a strange yelping on the road behind us, and looking back, saw a large brindled bulldog advancing out of the mist at a lumbering trot. No one was with him; a short piece of rope hung round his collar, and his aspect altogether was so terrific that my cousin and I again provided ourselves with the national weapon, and stood discreetly aside to let him pass. He instantly stopped and stared at us in what seemed a very threatening manner.

“Perhaps he’s mad!” I suggested. “Where’s the gun?”

“In my pocket,” returned my cousin in a low voice “and I can’t get it out. It’s stuck.”

“NOW!”

“Well, you’d better hurry,” I said, “for he’s coming.”

The bulldog was moving slowly towards us, uttering strange grunts, and looking excitedly round at the cattle, who were beginning to close in on us and him. My cousin with one strenuous effort ripped the pocket off her mackintosh.

“I’ve got it at last!” she panted, putting in a cartridge with trembling fingers and cocking the pistol. “It’s awfully stiff, and I know it throws high, but anyhow, it will frighten him—I don’t really want to hit him.”

“For goodness’ sake wait till I get behind you,” I replied. “Now!”

There was a report like a cannon, and I saw my cousin’s arm jerk heavenwards, as if hailing a cab. The next moment the cattle were flying to the four winds of heaven, and the bulldog, far from being alarmed or hurt, was streaking through the heather in hot pursuit of the largest cow of the herd.

This was a more appalling result than we couldpossibly have anticipated. Not only had we failed to intimidate, but we had positively instigated him to crime.

“He’s used to guns,” I said. “He thinks we are cow-shooting.”

“He’s gone to retrieve the game,” replied my cousin in a hollow voice.

In another instant the bulldog had overtaken his prey, and the next, our knees tottering under us with horror, we saw him swinging from her nose by his teeth, while her bellowings rent the skies. Back she came down the hill, flinging her head from side to side, while the bulldog adhered with limpet tenacity to her nose, and, jumping the bog-ditch like a hunter, she set off down the road, followed by a trumpeting host of friends and sympathisers who had re-gathered from the mountain-side on hearing her cries. The whole adventure had been forced upon us so suddenly and unexpectedly that we had no time to argue away the illogical feeling that we were responsible for the bulldog’s iniquities. I see now that the sensible thingwould have been to have gone and hid about among the rocks till it was all over. But that course did not occur to us till afterwards. As a matter of fact, my cousin crammed the pistol into her uninjured pocket, I filled my hands with stones, and we pursued at our best speed, seeing from time to time above the heaving backs and brandished tails of the galloping cattle the dark body of the bulldog as he was swung into the air over his victim’s head. Suddenly the wholecortégewheeled, and flourished up a bohireen that led to a cottage, and in the quick turn the cow fell on her knees, and lay there exhausted, with the bulldog prone beside her, exhausted too, but still holding on. The presumable owner of the cow arrived on the scene at the same instant that we did.

“Call off yer dog!” he roared, in a fearful voice.

“He’s not ours!” we panted; “but come on, and we’ll beat him off!” the bulldog’s evident state of collapse encouraging us to this gallantry.

The man’s only reply was to pick up a large stone, and heave it at the dog. It struck his brindled ribsa resounding blow, but he was too much blown to bear malice satisfactorily; to our deep relief he crawled to his feet, slunk away past us on to the main road, and, setting off at a limping trot in the direction from which he had come, presently vanished into the mist.

The man stooped down and examined the poor cow’s torn and bleeding nose, and she lay, wild-eyed, with heaving sides, at our feet.

“That the divil may blisther the man that owns him!” he said; “and if he isn’t your dog, what call have you taking him out to be running my cows?”

“We met him on the road,” we protested. “We couldn’t help his following us.”

“Aha! thin it’s one of them dirty little fellows of officers that has the fishing lodge below that he belongs to!” said the man. “I heard a shot awhile ago, and ye may b’lieve me I’ll have the law o’ them.”

We exchanged guilty glances.

“Yes; I heard a shot, too,” I said nervously.“Well, I—a—I think we must be getting on now. It’s getting late, and—a—I hope the cow isn’t very bad. Anyhow”—my voice sinking into the indistinct mumble that usually accompanies the benefaction—“here’s something to get soft food for her till her nose gets well.”

The ambition for the long walk was dead. With more hurried good wishes and regrets we wished the man good evening, and so home, much shattered.

P.S.—We should like to meet the owner of that bulldog.

SIBBIE looked as suspicious and unamiable as ever when she came to the door next morning; her long day in the stable had evidently not propitiated her in the least, but to her subtle mind had only augured a journey of unprecedented length on the following day. We started, however, with great brilliancy, and with a vulgar semi-circular sweep, like a shop-boy making a capital letter, that Sibbie considered very telling when in society. It took altogether by surprise the penwiper dog, who, with a little more than his usual elaborate ill-breeding, was standing with his back to us, looking chillingly unconcerned, and compelled him to show the most humiliating adroitness in order to escape from Sibbie’s venomous fore-feet. The incident rounded off pleasingly our last impressions of Recess, and we whirled out on tothe main road in a manner that nearly took our breath away, and probably left the gate-post in a state of hysterical gratitude at its escape.

It was not raining, but the day had got itself up to look as like rain as possible, and was having a great success in the part. A rough wind was blowing the clouds down about us, and, as on the day before, the hills hid their heads and shoulders in the odious mist, leaving only their steep sides visible, with the wrathful white watercourses scarring them, like perpendicular scratches on a slate. It was on one of these hills that a tourist missed his footing last year in trying to get to the bottom faster than someone else; the heather clump broke from the edge of the ravine, and the young fellow went with it. They searched for him all the summer night, and next morning a shepherd found him, dead and mutilated, at the foot of the cliff. We drove on steadily by bare bog and rocky spur for three or four miles, with the wind hard in our faces, till we came to a cross road, where a double line of telegraph wires branched from thesingle one, and following, according to directions the double one, we left the mail-car road behind. The wind now screamed into our right ears, and Sibbie’s long tasselled tail, which before had streamed back out of sight under the cart, turned like a weather cock and swept out in front of the left wheel. It was not a pleasant day for seeing one of the show places of Connemara, but it was the best and only one we could afford; besides, from what we had heard of Ballinahinch, it seemed as if it would be able to bear an unbecoming atmosphere better than most places.

It need scarcely be said that the new road ran by a lake, or lakes; every road we have seen in Connemara makes for water like an otter, and finds it with seeming ease, sometimes even succeeding in getting into it. In a forlorn hollow by one of these lakes, we came on a little Roman Catholic chapel, with its broken windows boarded up, and its graveyard huddled under a few wind-worn trees on the hill behind. Crooked wooden crosses, or even a single uprightstake, were the landmarks of the dead; perhaps in a country where trees take more trouble to preserve than game, and are far more rare, a piece of timber is felt to be more honourable than the stone that lies profusely ready to the hand. The graveyard trees quivered rheumatically in the wind, long bending before it in one direction having stiffened them past waving; the pale water chafed and sighed in a rushy creek below; even Sibbie chafed and sighed as we stood still to look back, and she took at least ten yards of the hill at full gallop when we started her again.

As we drove along the high ground beyond, Ballinahinch came slowly into sight; a long lake in a valley, a long line of wood skirting it, and finally, on a wooded height, the Castle, as it is called, a large modern house with a battlemented top, very gentlemanlike, and even handsome, but in no other way remarkable.

It was not the sort of thing we had expected. We had heard a great deal about Mary Martin, who wascalled the Princess of Connemara forty years ago; we had read up a certain amount of Lever’s “Martins of Cro’ Martin,” of which she was the heroine, and knew from other sources something of her gigantic estate, of the ruin of it during the famine, of the way in which she and her father completed that ruin by borrowing money to help their starving tenants, and of her tragic death, when she had lost everything, and had left Ireland for ever. We were prepared for anything, from an acre of gables and thatch to a twelfth century tower with a dozen rooms one on top of the other, and a kerne or a gallowglass looking out of every window, but this admirable mansion with plate-glass windows, and doubtless hot water to the very garrets, shook down our sentimentalities like apples in autumn. We drove on in silence. I knew that my cousin felt apologetic.

“I believe I had forgotten,” she said, “that it was Mary Martin’s father who built this, sixty or seventy years ago. Of course you couldn’t expect it to look old.”

“BALLINAHINCH CAME SLOWLY INTO SIGHT.”

“No, of course not,” I replied, “and even if I did I don’t think it would be much use. That house is too conscientious to look a day older than its age.”

We arrived at the gate while I spoke, a modest entrance to what seemed a back road to the house, and Sibbie turned in at it with her usual alacrity in the matter of visiting. She would visit at a public-house, at a pigstye, at a roofless ruin, anywhere rather than go along the road. The picnic was beginning; certainly the view was. We looked along the lake and saw how it coiled and spread among its wooded islands; the shrouded hill behind it gave for the moment some indication of its greatness; there was no doubt that even at its worst, as it undoubtedly was, Ballinahinch was worth seeing.

The wind fought with us along the first stretch of the drive, dragging at our hat pins, lifting the rug off our knees; blowing our hair in our eyes; but at the first turning a great and sudden calm fell about us. For the first time in our travels we were in a largeplantation. Some local genius once said that “Connemara got a very wooded look since them telegraph posts was put up in it,” and after many a drive in which the line of black posts dwindling to the horizon was the only break in the barrenness we began to understand this. Here at all events the civilising hand had done its work, and we slackened pace in the greenness and shelter, and, fortified by the knowledge that the present owner of the place was far away, we began to think of luncheon. My cousin pacified the fly-tormented Sibbie with a few handfuls of fresh grass, and got out our pewter spoons and other elegances of the luncheon table, while I, grovelling on the floor of the cart, nurtured there the spirit-lamp through one of its most implacable moods. There was a charming stillness, broken only at first by the occasional heavy splash of a leaping salmon in the lake below, and by Sibbie’s leisurely mastications, then the first sulky sigh came from the tin kettle, and a long beckoning finger of blue flame darted from beneath it. That was a weird habit of the spirit-lamp,to beckon to us when the kettle began to boil, and on this occasion it did not play us false. We made our homely cup of Bovril, we devoured our cheese, we crunched our Bath olivers, and it was just then, when the seats of the trap were covered with cups and crumbs, and we were altogether at our grimiest, that we heard wheels close at hand.

My cousin at once showed a tendency to get over the wall and hide, leaving undivided degradation to me, but the descent to the lake on the other side was too steep. As she turned back discomforted I was quite glad to see how dishevelled she looked, and how crooked her hat was, and before any remedial steps could be taken the Philistines were upon us. They consisted of four young men, crowded on a car with their fishing-rods and baskets, and, to do them justice, they, after a first stare of astonishment, considerately averted their eyes from the picnic. The narrowness of the road made it necessary that they should pass at a walk, and it was at that moment, while we were affecting unconsciousness of all things in heaven andearth, that the nightmare of yesterday rose up before us—the bulldog. He was close behind the axle of the car, fastened to it, thank heaven, with a glittering chain, but between the spokes of the wheel we saw his eyes rolling at us with a bloodshot amiability or even recognition, while his crooked tail wagged stiffly, and his terrible nose twitched amorously towards the Bath oliver I held in my hand. The car quickened up again, and he dragged at his chain as he was forced into a shuffling trot along with it. “Come in, Stripes,” shouted one of the youths, and the party passed out of sight.

“Did you see him?” I said excitedly. “I believe he knew us!”

“Of course he did,” returned my cousin, with an offensive coolness that was intended to carry off any recollections of her dastardly moment of panic, “but he won’t tell. He knows if he gives us away about the revolver we will inform about the cow. For my part I’m rather sorry he isn’t here now,” she went on, as she wiped a knife in the grass, and then stabbed it

“WE HEARD WHEELS CLOSE AT HAND.”

into the earth to give it a polish; “no picnic should be without a dog. When I was a child we used always to wipe the knives on the dogs’ backs between the courses at a picnic, and then the dogs used to try and lick that spot on their backs——”

I am not squeamish, but I checked my cousin’s recital at this point, and we pursued our way to the house. Tall sliding doors, in perfect order, admitted us to a large quiet yard, so orderly that, as we looked round it, we felt, like Hans Andersen’s black beetle, quite faint at the sight of so much cleanliness, and would have been revived by the only familiar whiff of the cow-shed and pigstye. We gave Sibbie and her luncheon bag to a man who was hanging about, and were proceeding to ask whether we might walk about the grounds, when a door into the house opened, and there issued from it a young woman of such colossal height and figure that we stared at her awe-struck. She smiled at us with all the benevolence of the giantess, and advancing, offered to be our guide. We thanked her like Sunday School children and followed hermeekly towards the hall door, feeling as we looked at her that it would have been simpler to have climbed on to her tremendous shoulders and got at once a bird’s-eye view of the demesne. It was apparently part of the programme that we should see the inside of the house, and she led us through the rooms in the lower story, billiard-room, dining-room, drawing-room, library; all comfortable, and in their way imposing, but unfortunately devoid of special objects to comment on, while the giantess stood and held the door of each open, with, as it seemed to us, an ogress-like avidity for approbation. But she proved to be a kindly giantess, and when we looked, in spite of ourselves, a little unenthusiastic at the prospect of viewing the upper part of the house she relented and said we might go out into the grounds.

The hill sloped steeply from the dining-room windows, to the lake in front, and to a wood at the side, and going down some steps we found ourselves in a shady walk by the water.

“This is Miss Martin’s seat,” said the giantess, stopping in front of a curiously-shaped and comfortless-looking stone block, “ye can sit in it if ye like.”

We did so, gently.

“How very nice,” said my cousin, getting up again, and removing an earwig and some dead leaves of last year from her skirt, “but I should have thought she would have liked more of a view. Those laurels two yards off are very pretty of course, but one can’t see anything else.”

I saw an antagonistic gleam in the giantess’s eye and hastened to suggest that the laurels might have grown up since the days of Mary Martin.

“Whether or no, it’s in it she used to sit,” she said, as if that settled the question of the view. “Maybe ye’d like now to walk a piece in the woods to see them?”

“I suppose it would take us a long time to walk through such large woods as these?” I said lusciously, seeing that I was regarded with more favour than my cousin.

“Is it walk thim woods? Ye’d sleep, before ye’d have them walked. But there’s a nice road round to the boathouse ye can go.”

“Perhaps you could tell me how many acres there are in this estate?” said my cousin, trying to make hay in my private streak of sunshine.

“I declare I’m not rightly sure.”

“I suppose they’re past counting?” continued my cousin, with the fascinating smile of one who is sustaining a conversation brilliantly.

“About that,” responded the giantess lucidly, determined at all hazards to keep pace with outside opinion. “Here now is the little road I was tellin’ ye of. Would ye know the way in it?”

We assured her we could find the boathouse without her help, and “so in all love, we parted.”

As we walked on in the solitude the lake narrowed beside us to a river, a connecting channel between it and the larger lake beyond, and the water ran strong and quiet under the meeting branches that leaned above it from both sides. The dark mirror reflected every twig; brown stems, green canopy, and openingof grey sky arched away beneath our feet as well as above our heads; we became at last giddy with the double world, and felt our eyes cling instinctively to the silver smear on the glassy surface or the golden gleam in the shallow that testified to where illusion began. Once or twice there was a splash that sounded, in that silence, as if a large stone had been thrown in; we were, of course, looking the wrong way each time, and instead of seeing the flash of a ten or twenty pound fish we saw only the rift in the crystal, and the big ripples following each other to the shore. Once only in Galway did we see live fish without stint or hindrance, when, afterwards, we leaned over the bridge in Galway town itself, and could have counted by the hundred the dark backs of the salmon that lie all day still and shadowy in the clear water below the weir.

We were soon out again by the upper lake, and, much beset by flies and midges, walked along the edge of the wood till we came to the boathouse. On its broad steps we sat thankfully down to rest, andcommented at our leisure on the atrocities of the grey weather, and of the cloud that was cloaking the peak of the mountain opposite. We happened to know that there ought to be a mountain there, one of the Twelve Pins, in fact, but for all we could see, it might have flown into the Atlantic Ocean, in search of something less watery than Connemara. As we sat there, and saw the invariable fisherman catching the inevitable nothing, and looked at the dark sheet of water in its beautiful setting of trees, my cousin told me drowsily several things about Mary Martin. I cannot now recall the recital very clearly, but I remember hearing how Miss Martin had taken a guest up the mountain that should have been soaring into the heavens before us, and, making him look round the tremendous horizon, had told him how everything he could see belonged to her. If the weather had been like ours, it would not have been a very overpowering statement, limited, in fact, to the cloud of mist and Miss Martin’s umbrella; but as it was, with the inland mountains and moors clear to the bluestdistance, and the far Atlantic rounding her fifty miles of sea-coast, it was a boast worth making. Perhaps it was the vision that was clearest to her failing sense when she lay dying on the other side of that Atlantic without an acre and without an income, a refugee from the country where her forefathers had prospered during seven hundred years.

The retrospect became melancholy, and we began to be extremely chilly; sitting out of doors was too severe a test for this July day, and we made towards the house again. When we were nearing Mary Martin’s seat we saw through the trees a brilliant spot of colour, which gradually developed into a scarlet petticoat, worn shawl-wise about the head of an old woman who had sat down in a tattered heap to rest on the stone bench. She put away something like a black pipe as we came up, and began the usual beggar’s groaning, and when, after some fumbling, my cousin produced a modest coin, the ready blessings were followed by the ready tears, that welled from hideously inflamed eyes, and trickled over thewrinkles in her yellow cheeks. It occurred to us to ask whether she remembered Mary Martin, and in a moment the tears stopped.

“Is it remember her?” she said, wiping her eyes with some skill on a frayed corner of the red petticoat. “I remember her as well as yerself that I’m looking at!”

“What was she like in the face?” said my cousin in her richest brogue.

“Oh musha? Ye couldn’t rightly say what was she like, she was that grand! She was beautiful and white and charitable, only she had one snaggledy tooth in the front of her mouth. But what signifies that? Faith, whin she was in it the ladies of Connemara might go undher the sod. ’Twas as good for thim. And afther all they say she died as silly as ye plase down in the County Mee-yo (Mayo), but there’s more tells me she died back in Ameriky. Oh, glory be to God, thim was the times!”

The tears began again, and she relapsed into the red petticoat. We left her there, huddled on the seatmoaning and talking to herself. We could do no more for her than hope, as we looked back at her for the last time, that the pipe in her pocket had gone out. The day was slipping by; a twelve mile drive to Letterfrack was before us. Taking all things into consideration, especially Sibbie’s powers as a roadster, we hardened our hearts to starting at once, without taking the half-mile walk to see the wonderful stables that cost Colonel Martin £15,000 to build, and are paved with blocks of the green and white Connemara marble. Let us trust that our intended admiration was conveyed in some form to that costly marble flooring, in spite of an unpleasant saying about good intentions and a certain pavement that is their destination.

IT was nearly four o’clock before we got out of the Ballinahinch avenue on to the Clifden road. A young horse had got loose in the yard just as Sibbie was having her toilet made for the start, and the clattering of hoofs and cracking of whips that ensued had so upset her old-maidish sensibilities, that she refused to leave the stable, till finally, by a noble inspiration on our part, she was backed out of it. She had started from the yard in a state of mingled resentment and terror; even still her ears were fluttering like the wings of a butterfly, and she showed a desire to canter that seemed to us unhealthy. The shrunken oat bag lay at our feet; decidedly she had had more luncheon than was good for her while we were walking ourselves off our legs in the woods of Ballinahinch. The broad lake lay on our left, showing coldly and mysteriously through the changing swathes of mist, and above us, on our left, the long slopes of bog and heather stretched upwards till they steepened into the dignity of actual mountains.

“If I thought the weather could not hear me,” observed my second cousin, “I should say it was going to clear up. It looks almost as if there were sunlight on those children’s petticoats ahead of us.” An enchanting group was advancing to meet us; half-a-dozen or so of children, boys and girls petticoated alike in mellow varieties of the dull red or creamy white Galway flannel, a few cattle wandered in front of them, and in their midst a long-suffering donkey was being ridden by three of them and beaten by the remainder. We were so absorbed in sitting with our heads on one side to better appreciate the artistic unity of the picture that we took no heed of the dangerous forward slant of Sibbie’s ears. No one could have supposed that in her short intimacy with “the quality” she could have already developed a fine-ladyish affectation of horror at the sight of anestimable poor relation; yet so it was. Casting one wild look at the appalling spectacle, she sprang sideways across the road, whirled the trap round, only avoiding the black bog-ditch by a hair’s breadth, and fled at full speed in the direction from which she had just come.

My cousin and I were for the moment paralysed by surprise, and by the sudden horrid proximity of the bog-ditch, which was hospitably prepared to take us all in and do for us, and think nothing of it. Sibbie’s strong little brown back was hooped with venomous speed, and her head was out of sight between her forelegs. The telegraph posts were blended into a black streak, the lakes swam past us like thoughts in a dream, it seemed useless to get out to go to her head; obviously, Sibbie was running away. The governess cart quite entered into the spirit of the thing, and leaped and bounded along in a way that—considering its age and profession—we thought very unbecoming. It is perhaps afaçon de parlerto say that I was driving. To put it more accurately, I

“HANGING ON EACH TO OUR REIN.”

had been driving, and now I was trying very hard to do the opposite. However, after laying the seeds of two blisters in vain, I was ignominiously compelled to hand one rein to my cousin. Hanging on each to our rein, we lay back in the trap, getting a good leverage for our pull over the ridge of the luncheon basket. I shudder to think of the result had those reins broken. Two human Catherine wheels would have been seen revolving rapidly over the stern of the governess-cart, and as for Sibbie—— But the reins were staunch, and though at first a want of unanimity caused us to swing from side to side of the road in a series of vandykes, the combined weight of the expedition slowly told, and Sibbie’s ears were hauled into sight. Back and up they came till they were laid along her back, and her long nose pointed skywards in a fury of helpless protest, while her gallop grudgingly slackened.

Of course my hat had blown off early in the proceedings, but nothing else had happened. I handed my rein to my cousin without a word, and got out of the trap.

“No doubt this had been extremely amusing,” I said, “but I am going to buckle the reins as low down on this bit as they will go.”

And I did so. I hate people who do nothing but laugh on an emergency, simply because they think it looks brave.

As I turned Sibbie round I saw, nearly a quarter of a mile away, a child standing by a telegraph post, holding in its hand a white disc that I knew must be my hat, and I also saw with much pleasure that the other children, with the cows and the donkey, had left the road, and were climbing up the hillside. So, with hearts overflowing with a great thanksgiving that “Earl Percy,”i.e., the mail-car and its English tourists, had not “seen our fall,” we drove back again at a cautious jog, Sibbie obviously as much on the look-out as we were for anything that she could reasonably shy at. The girl with the hat was regarded by her with an anguish of suspicion, only allayed by my getting out of the cart while the hat was smuggled in, and leading her—a process whichalways suggests taking a child by the hand to give it confidence.

It was a long way, about six Irish miles, back to the turn that we had been instructed would take us to Letterfrack, and the invalid sunshine had already swaddled itself again in cotton wool and retired for the night. If my second cousin has a failing, it is that she believes herself to possess “an eye for country,” a gift fraught with peril to its possessor. Unfortunately, she had, before starting, studied on a map the relative positions of Ballinahinch, Recess, and Letterfrack, and now that she was face to face with the situation her eye for country flashed fire at the idea of having to traverse two sides of a triangle instead of one, which was pretty much what we were called upon to do.

“It is absurd,” she said, hotly, “to go back almost to Recess to go by that ‘new line’ to Letterfrack, when I am almostsureI remember seeing on the Ordnance Map a dear little roadeen that would take us through the mountains somehow on to the Kylemore road.”

From the use of the affectionate diminutive “roadeen,” I knew that my cousin was trying to engage my sympathies, and though I tried to steel my heart against the suggestion, there certainly was something attractive in the thought of a short cut.

“It ought to be a little further on,” she continued, “by a little lake; and you know it’s getting pretty late now.”

I now recognise that this was the moment at which to have stamped upon the scheme, and to have made the time-honoured remark that we had no time for short cuts. But I let it slide by me, and when we reached a narrow, but to all appearance sufficient mountain road, bending plausibly away to the left, we mutually succumbed to its fascinations. For a mile or so it was really very fair. It certainly did occur to me that it might be awkward if we met anything larger than a wheelbarrow, as the governess-cart easily monopolised the space between the usual bog-ditches, but as, so far, the district seemed quite uninhabited, we did not trouble ourselves on that account. Theroad became steeper and stonier as we advanced, but Sibbie toiled on gallantly, the pride of having run away clearly still working in her and encouraging her in a way no mere whip could have done. The cotton-wool into which the sun had retreated had now covered all the sky, and was wrapping up the mountain tops as if they were jewellery, which, as they were armoured from head to foot in sheets of grey rock, seemed to us unnecessary care. We were getting deeper and deeper into the hills, and the higher we got the heavier the rain became. It felt as though some important heavenly pipe had burst, and we were getting near the scene of the explosion. The three shilling umbrella did its best; it humped its back against the torrent like an old cab-horse, and really kept my second cousin fairly dry. But things were going very badly with the luncheon basket, and, though we did not mention it to each other, the belief in the short cut was dying in us.

The road ahead was narrowing in a way not to be accounted for by the laws of perspective; it wasbecoming suspiciously grassy, and rocks of a size usually met with only in the highest Druidical circles lay about so near to the track that steering was becoming a difficulty. A wild-looking woman, wearing a coarse white flannel petticoat over her red hair instead of a cloak, came paddling along with barefooted indifference to the wet, and stopped to stare at us with a frank and open-mouthed amazement which was not reassuring.

“Shall we ask her the way?” I suggested.

“It’s no good,” replied my cousin, sombrely; “we must go on now. It’s too narrow to turn round. Let’s get on to those cottages and ask someone there.”

(The belief in the short cut here heaved its final groan and expired.)

We had climbed to a kind of small plateau in the heart of the hills, and on the farther side of the little indigo lake round which the track wound were a couple of cottages. We beat Sibbie into a trot, and made for the nearer of the two, and the barking of theusual cur having brought a young man out of the house, my cousin proceeded to discourse him.

“Are we going right for Kylemore?”

“Yo’re not.”

“Where does this road lead to?”

“To the Widda Joyce’s beyant.”

“And is that the end of it? Can’t we get on any farther?”

The young man looked at us much as an early Roman might have regarded the Great Twin Brethren.

“Bedad I dunno what yerselves is able to do; but there’s no answerable road for a cart whatever.”

Our eyes met in dumb despair, but my second cousin still rose above the waves. (This metaphor is most appropriate, as we could not have been much wetter if we had been drowned.)

“Where is the nearest hotel?” she asked, with all the severity of an examining Q.C.

“Back in Recess. Ye’d be hard set to get there to-night.”

“Think now, like a good boy, is there no sort of a place hereabouts where they’d put us up for the one night?”

The despairing relapse into the vernacular had its effect.

“Well, faith, I wouldn’t say but the Widda Joyce ’d be apt to be able to do it. There was an English gintleman, a Major, that she had there for the fishin’——”

In what capacity the English Major was used in the fishing we did not stop to inquire; he might have been employed as a float for all we cared; it was about all we felt ourselves fit for.

We did not ask the Widow Joyce if she could take us in. We simply walked into her house and stayed there. We had heard a good deal of the Spanish type of beauty that is said to abound in Connemara, but the Widow Joyce was the first specimen of it that we had seen. A small, pale, refined woman, with large brown eyes, and dark hair tucked shiningly away under a snowy white frilled cap, she heard our storywith flattering interest and compassion, and we had hardly finished it before most of her eleven children were started in different directions to prepare things for us and “the pony.” By-the-bye, we noticed that during our travels Sibbie was always given brevet rank, the delicate inference being that we were far too refined and aristocratic to be associated with anything so vulgar as a jennet.

A lovely clear fire of turf was burning on the hearth, and Mrs. Joyce hospitably insisted on our each sitting on little stools inside the big fireplace, and roasting there, till the steam of our sacrifice showed how necessary a proceeding it was. In the meantime that sacred place known as “Back-in-the-room” was being prepared for our reception; as far though we should have preferred the kitchen with its clean earth floor and blazing fire, Mrs. Joyce would not hear of our having our dinner there.

“Sure the Meejer always ate his vittles back in the room,” she said; and to this supreme precedent we found it necessary to conform.

We certainly owed a great deal to the Meejer. It was the Meejer, we discovered, who had broken an air-hole in the hermetically-sealed window. “An’ faith, though he give us the money to put in the glass agin, we never got it done afther. It’s a very backwards place here.” The Meejer’s sense of decorum had prescribed the muslin curtains that shielded the interior from the rude gazer’s eye. The Meejer had compelled the purchase of a jug and basin, and “a beautiful clane pair o’ sheets, that not a one ever slep in but himself.” In fact, what of civilisation there was, was due to his beneficent influence, and we rose up and said that the Meejer was blessed. Our dinner was an admirable meal; a blend of the resources of the luncheon-basket and of Mrs. Joyce; its only drawback being that, forgetful, as she herself admitted, of the precepts of the Meejer, she had put the teapot down “on the coals to dhraw,” and the result was a liquid that would have instantly made me sick, and would have kept my second cousin awake in agony till she died next morning. So we avoided the tea.

Back to Index Next