“o fair, large day!
the unpractised sense brings heavings from a sea of life too broad.”
“such seemed the whisper at my side.
‘what is it thou knowest, sweet voice?’ i cried.
‘a hidden hope,’ the voice replied.”
the old graveyard on the promontory was at most times the forlornest and least frequented spot about durrus. the dead people who lay in crowded slumber within the narrow limits of the grey, briar-covered walls seldom heard any disturbing human voice to remind them of the life they had left. their solitude was ensured to them{33} by the greater solitude of the sea, which on three sides surrounded them, and by the dreary strip of worn-out turf bog which formed their only link with the rest of the world. there was nothing to mark for them the passing of time, except the creeping of the shadow thrown dial-wise by the gable of the broken-down chapel, or the ever-increasing moaning in the caves beneath, which told of the yearly encroachments of the sea.
between the verge of the cliff and the wall of the graveyard was only a little space, along which the sheep had worn themselves a track among the thickly lying shells and débris, flung up by the waves during autumn storms. i had wandered round this narrow path, holding with a careful hand to the wall as i went; and now had clambered on to it, and, with pat seated in my lap and jinny on the tail{34} of my gown, i was watching the quick dives and casual reappearances of the slim black cormorants in the sunlit water beneath me. the murmur of the sea, lightly lipping the rocks, and an occasional bleat from the sheep in the graveyard behind me, were the only definite sounds i heard, and the soft wind that rustled in my ears in little gusts seemed the expression of the pervading stillness.
this delicate breezy morning was the first of the new year. yesterday’s sunset had been a wild one; it had gleamed angrily and fitfully before me through packs of jagged cloud while i drove home from clashmore, and my heart had sunk low as i watched the outlines of durrus growing darker against it. but that was already a thing of last year. the long uneventful darkness had made everything new, and on this first of january the sun{35}shine was lying purely and dreamily on sea and bog, and was even giving something like warmth to the head-stones, whose worn “anno dominis” were since yesterday more remote by a year.
it was a desire for this freedom and freshness which had driven me out of the house on this, the second morning after the dance at mount prospect. when i came back to durrus the evening before, i had found the house empty and desolate. willy was not there; he had gone to cork, uncle dominick had told me, looking at me, as he spoke, with a questioning glance that showed me his anxiety to know if i could account for this unexpected move.
all the morning at clashmore, the thought of the inevitable meeting with willy had hung over me. it had made me absent during a lesson at billiards, and{36} stupid in a violin accompaniment; and, combining with the guilt which i felt at enjoying myself, as, in spite of what had happened, i could not help doing, it had made me unnecessarily and awkwardly determined in refusing several invitations to stay on. as i sat beside nugent in the dog-cart on the way home, and felt that every step of the horse was bringing me nearer to willy, i had become silent in the attempt to nerve myself for the dreaded first few minutes. if i could struggle through them creditably, things might not afterwards be so bad. i think nugent must have seen that something was troubling me. having told me that he was afraid i was very much done up by the dance, he had considerately left me to myself, and scarcely spoke until we were at the durrus hall door—an act of thoughtfulness for which i could almost have{37} thanked him. he refused my invitation to come in to tea—an invitation so faintly given that he could hardly have accepted it—but asked if he might come over some other afternoon, perhaps the day after to-morrow, and with an excuse for not coming in, which he had obviously fabricated to help me out of the difficulty, he had driven away.
my first question to roche as the hall door closed behind me, was to know where willy was. he was away; he had gone to cork the day after the dance, and it was uncertain when he would be at home. then, i might have stayed at clashmore after all—that, i am afraid, was my first thought; and then came the feeling of blank collapse, the blending of relief and disappointment, which is the usual result of needless mental strain. i had for an instant an insane desire to run down the{38} avenue after the dog-cart, and say that i would go back to clashmore; that there was no reason now—— i laughed drearily to myself as i took off my wraps. what would nugent have said when i had overtaken him with such an excuse? it amused me to think of it; but yet, i thought, i should have liked to have known.
the restlessness of over-fatigue and excitement was upon me. i did not know how to endure the long dull dinner, and the solitary evening which followed it. i tried to play the piano, but the tunes of the waltzes of the night before still rang in my ears, and the unresponsive silence of the room as i ceased was too daunting to be faced a second time. between my eyes and the columns of the newspaper came a vision of mr. croly’s dark little room, and my tired brain kept continually framing{39} sentences which might have averted all that had taken place there. i could not even think connectedly, and finally went to bed, as lonely and miserable as i have ever felt in my life.
in the morning my thoughts had confusedly shaped themselves into one problem. would it be possible to go on staying at durrus? half the morning had slipped away, and i had still found no answer to the question. my head ached, and i felt i could come to no decision until i was, for the present at least, out of the depressing atmosphere of the house.
i put the perplexing subject away from me in my half-hour’s walk across the bog, and thought of the dogs, the seagulls, the patches of white cloud and blue sky that seemed so out of place reflected in the black pools by the side of the road—of anything, in fact, rather than the difficulty{40} which was troubling me. i thought that when i got to the edge of the cliffs, with nothing but the open sea before me, i should be able to take a steadier view of the whole position.
but i had been sitting in perfect tranquillity for half an hour, and yet no inspiration had been brought to me on the breath of the west wind that was coming softly over the sea from america. “i suppose i ought to go back to aunt jane,” was my last, as it had been my first, thought; “but it will be very hard to have to leave ireland. besides, if i go away now, willy will think that i am going out of kindness to him, and i could not bear that.”
here pat, who had found the distant observation of the cormorants a very tantalizing amusement, looked up in my face with a whimpering sigh, and curled him{41}self up with his head on my arm and his back to the sea. as i stooped over and kissed his little white and tan head, a crowd of insistent memories rushed into my mind. in every one willy’s was the leading figure; his look, his laugh, his voice pervaded them all, but with a new meaning that made pathos of the pleasantest of them. i wondered, with perhaps a little insincerity, why i had not liked him as well as he liked me. he had said that, if i were to try, i might some day; but though i should have been glad for his sake to believe it, every feeling in me rose in sudden revolt at the idea with a violence that astonished myself. “we shall never have any good times again,” i thought. “i suppose he is miserable now, and it is all my fault. oh, willy! i never meant to be unkind to you.” i ended, almost aloud, and the bright reaches of sea quivered and{42} dazzled in my eyes as the painful tears gathered and fell.
i have always found that tears rather intensify a trouble than lessen it, and they now gave such keen reality to what i was feeling that i could bear the pressure of my thoughts no longer. i got up quickly to go home, and as i turned i saw a string of three or four boats heading for the little strand at the foot of the cliff, just below where i was standing. they were the cumbrous rowing-boats generally used for carrying turf, and came heavily on through the bright restless water, loaded, as well as i could see, with men and women.
the pounding and creaking of the clumsy oars in the rowlocks grew louder; i was soon able to make out that the long dark object, round which several figures were clustered in the leading boat, was a{43} coffin, and i now remembered willy’s having told me that this little cove was called “tra-na-morruf,” the strand of the dead, from the fact that it was the landing-place for such funerals as came by boat to the old burying-place. the people were quite silent as the boats slowly advanced to the shore; but directly the keel of the first touched on the shingle, the women in the others raised a sustained, penetrating wail, which vibrated in the sunny air, and made me shiver in involuntary sympathy.
i thought i had never heard so terrible a cry. i had often been told of the irish custom of “keening” at funerals, but i was not prepared for anything so barbaric and so despairing. it broke out with increasing volume and intensity while the coffin was being lifted from the boat and was toilfully carried up the steep path in the cliff, the women clapping their hands and{44} beating their breasts, their chant rising and swelling like the howl of the wind on a wild night. the small procession halted at the top of the cliff, and another set of bearers took the coffin, and carried it with staggering steps across the irregular mounds of the graveyard, to where, behind the ruined chapel, i now noticed, for the first time, an open grave. the dark crowd closed in round it, and, after a few stifled sobs and exclamations, i heard nothing but the shovelling of the earth upon the coffin.
it was soon over. the throng of heavily cloaked women and frieze-coated men opened out, and i saw the long mound of brown earth, with a couple of women and a man kneeling beside it. the rest, for the most part, made their way down the cliff to the strand, from which a clatter of conversation soon ascended. about half a dozen of the women, however, remained{45} behind; each sought out some special grave, and, kneeling there, began to tell her beads and pray with seemingly deep devotion.
i moved away from where i had been standing, with the intention of going home, but stopped at the gateway to look again at the effect of the black figures dotted about among the grey stones, with their background of pale blue sky. near the gate was the ugly squat mausoleum in which lay many generations of sarsfields, and as i passed through the gate i saw, kneeling at the farther side of it, a mourner dressed like the others in a hooded blue cloak. she was clapping her hands and beating her breast as if keening, but she made no sound. a country woman at this moment passed me, curtseying as she did so, and, feeling a natural curiosity to know who had taken upon{46} herself the office of bewailing my ancestors, i said—
“can you tell me who that woman at the sarsfield tomb is?”
“faith, then, i can, your honour, miss! but sure yourself should know her as well as me. ’tis moll hourihane, that lives below at the lodge of the big house.”
“oh yes, of course, so it is,” i said, recognizing her as i spoke; “but what has she come here for?”
“throth, i dunno, miss. but there’s never a buryin’ here that she’s not at it, and that’s the spot where she’ll always post herself. sure she’s idiotty-like; she thinks she’s keening there, and the divil a screech out of her, good or bad, all the time.”
my informant gave a short laugh. she was a tall, handsome woman, with a strong spanish type of face and daring black eyes, and she had a grimly humorous manner which interested and amused me.{47}
“why does she pick out the durrus tomb?” i asked, as much to continue the conversation as for any other reason.
“glory be to god, miss! how would i know?”—darting at me, however, a look of extreme intelligence, combined with speculation as to the extent of my ignorance. “’twas she laid out the owld masther afther he dying, whativer—yis, an’ young mrs. dominick too. though, fegs! the sayin’ is, she cried more for her whin she was alive than whin she was dead.”
we were walking slowly along the uneven bog road towards durrus, my companion trudging sociably beside me, with her hood thrown back from her coarse black hair.
“what do you mean?” i said, hoping to hear at last something of the origin of moll’s madness.{48}
“there’s many a wan would cry if they got the turn out,” she responded oracularly.
“why, what was she turned out of?” i asked.
“out of the big house, sure! ’twas there she was till the young misthriss came.”
“i suppose she was a servant there?”
she gave a loud laugh. “och! ’twasn’t thrusting to being a servant at all she was! mr. dominick got her wan time to tend the owld masther that was sick three years before he died, and the like o’ that; and ’twas there she stayed till mr. dominick got marri’d, and then, faith, she had to quit.”
i was rather puzzled.
“i suppose mrs. sarsfield liked to choose her servants for herself.”
the woman gave a derisive snort. “it ’ud be a quare thing if she’d choose her{49} whatever!” she said. “annyway, she never came next or nigh the house till after mrs. dominick dyin’, and thin she was took back to mind the owld masther and masther willy.”
“but i thought she was weak in her head?”
“och! the divil a fear! she was as cute as a pet fox till the winther the owld masther died; but whativer came agin her thin i don’t rightly know. ’twas about the time she marri’d owld michael brian it began with her. she looked cliver enough; but the spaych mostly wint from her, and she was a year that way.” here she looked behind her, and crossed herself with a start. “the saints be about us!” she exclaimed, in a whisper; “look at herself follying us!”
i also turned, and saw moll hourihane close behind. she was walking on the{50} strip of grass by the side of the road, and, without looking at us, she passed by, moving with a sliding shuffle, which i can only compare to the rolling action of an elephant. she shambled along in front of us until she came near the gate in the durrus avenue, when, turning aside into the bog, she made her way across it to a large black pit filled with water, apparently one of the many deep holes from which turf had once been dug. having wandered once or twice round its shelving, ragged edges—perilously near them, it seemed to me—she knelt down at its verge, and, folding her hands on her breast, as she had done on the first night i had seen her, she remained there without moving.
“look at her now,” said my companion, superstitiously, “saying her prayers there down by poul-na-coppal, as if ’twas before the althar she was. faith, whin she had{51} her sinses she wasn’t so great at her prayers!”
“i don’t think it is very safe to let her go to a place like that,” i said. “i suppose that hole is deep enough to drown her.”
“is it poul-na-coppal? shure, it’s the greatest shwallow-hole in the country! shure, wasn’t it there a fine young horse fell down in it wan time, and they niver seen the sight of him agin? there’s no bottom in it, only mud. throth, if she got in there, she’d be bound to stay there; and ’twould be a good job too—god forgive me for sayin’ such a thing!”
“don’t you think we ought to try and get her away from there?” i said, still watching moll with a kind of fascination, as she rocked herself to and fro close to the edge.
“wisha, thin, i’d be in dhread to{52} near her at all. shure, there’s times when she wouldn’t be said nor led by her own daughther.”
“it was after anstey was born that she went completely out of her mind, was it not?” i said, as we walked on.
“well, ’twas thin the sinse left her entirely, miss; but she wasn’t all out right in her head, as i’m tellin’ ye, for a year before that. there was a big snow came afther the little gerr’l was born, and they say, whin she seen that she let one bawl out of her, and niver spoke a word afther.”
we had by this time come to the little gate that led out of the bog.
“good evening to your honour, miss. may the lord comfort your honour long, and that i may niver die till i see you well married; for you’re a fine young lady, god bless you!”—with which comprehensive benediction, mary minnahane,{53} as i afterwards found was her name, tramped off down the avenue.
i felt lonelier for the cessation of her rough, vigorous voice; and, turning, i leaned on the gate, and looked back over the sunshiny bleakness of the bog. it looked now very much as it had looked on the day when i had gone out to see willy put alaska through her paces, and as the fragrant wind brought the sea murmurs to me, i almost cheated myself into the belief that this was still that brilliant october afternoon, and that willy was now riding down to meet me at the lodge.
my eyes fell on the solitary figure at the bog hole. it recalled in a moment the funeral, the graveyard, my futile tears, and all that had led to them. i turned towards home with the same feeling of uncertainty and dejection with which i had set out.
