later a very pale bride stood up at the altar of Columb Island Chapel,
and was married, with Father Tiernay's housekeeper and the sacristan
for witnesses.
When they were married Father Tiernay said to the bridegroom: 'Take
her home by the back road. You won't meet a soul, and I'll tell the
people when I join them what has been done. But above all, impress on
her that the story is a wicked lie.'
So Mauryeen went home with her husband to his little cottage on the
cliffs. And in the afternoon, when Father Tiernay came to distribute
the prizes and to merry-make with his people, he raised his hand for
silence and addressed them.
'Children,' he said, 'I hear there has been a grave scandal among you,
and a great sin committed before you this day. The wicked sought to
crush the innocent, as I believe, by bearing false witness, but the
wicked has not triumphed. A few hours ago I made Randal Burke and
Mauryeen Daly man and wife. And I give you solemn warning that the one
who gives ear and belief to the story of the miserable woman who
dishonoured herself to crush her innocent flesh and blood, shares in
that unnatural guilt.'
So after a time Mauryeen crept back to the sunshine, and let herself
be persuaded that her mother was mad. No one on the Island saw Ellen
Daly again; they said she had crossed to the mainland by the
afternoon ferry. She never came back, and there were some in the
Island who believed she had sold her soul to the devil, and that he
had claimed her fulfilment of the compact. But Mauryeen is an honest
man's wife, and whatever people may conjecture in their inmost hearts
as to the truth or falsity of her mother's tale, they say nothing, for
did not Father Tiernay declare such gossip to be a sin? But for all
that Mauryeen's ways are finer and gentler than those of any woman in
the Island.
VII
A WRESTLING
Mike Sheehan tossed awake in the moonlight. The gulls were quiet, and
there was no noise in the night save the sound that had rocked his
cradle--the Atlantic foaming up the narrow ravine before his door, and
withdrawing itself with a loud sucking noise. The cabin was perched on
a bleached hillside. A stony, narrow path went by the door and climbed
the ravine to the world; a bed of slaty rock slanted sheer below it to
the white tossing water. A dangerous place for any one to pass unless
he had his eyes and his wits well about him; but Mike Sheehan was such
a one, for he had the eye of the eagle over Muckross, he could climb
like the mountain goat, and could carry his drink so well that no man
ever saw him less than clear-headed.
Mike, with his six-feet-six of manhood, was well in request at the
country gatherings. But of late, said the folk, the man had turned
queer: in that melancholy, stately country by the sea,
madness--especially of the quiet, melancholic kind--is a thing very
common. A year ago a wrestling match between him and Jack Kinsella had
gathered two counties to see it. No man could say which was the
champion. Now one was the victor, again the other. They kept steady
pace in their victories. Jack was captain of the Kilsallagh team of
hurlers, Mike of the Clonegall. No one could say which captain led his
team oftenest to victory. The men had begun by being friends, and their
equality at first had only made them genial laughter. The wrestling was
on Sunday, after mass, in a quiet green place at the back of the
churchyard. The backers of the two champions took fire at the rivalry
long before the men themselves. That would be a great day for the men
and women of his following, when either champion should decisively
lead. But the day seemed ever receding in the future, and no one could
say which was the better man. June came, when not only the hurling, but
the wrestling, had its thin fringe of female spectators perched on the
low wall of the churchyard--girls mainly, with little shawls over their
soft hair, and their little bare feet tucked demurely under their
petticoats.
The country people scarcely guessed at the time their two champions
became enemies. Indeed, it was a secret locked in their own breasts,
scarcely acknowledged even when in his most hidden moments each man
looked at the desires of his heart. It only showed itself in a new
fierceness and determination in their encounters. Each had sworn to
himself to conquer the other. The soreness between them came about
when by some sad mischance they fell in love with the same girl. Worse
luck, she wanted neither of them, for she was vowed to the convent:
the last feminine creature on earth for these two great fighters to
think of, with her soft, pure eyes, her slender height, and her pale
cheeks. Any girl in the country might have jumped at either man, and
she, who wanted neither, had their hearts at her feet. She was shy and
gentle, and never repelled them so decisively as to make them give up
hope. In the long run one or the other might have tempted her to an
earthly bridal; but she made no choice between them; and each man's
chance seemed about equal when she slipped from them both into
Kilbride churchyard. When she lay there neither man could say she had
distinguished him by special kindness from the other. And their
rivalry waxed more furious with the woman in her grave.
But six months later, and their battles still undecided, Jack Kinsella
fell sick and followed Ellen to Kilbride. Then Mike Sheehan was
without an equal for many miles. But little comfort it was to him,
with the girl of his heart dead, and the one man he had desired to
overthrow dead and unconquered. He secluded himself from the sports
and pastimes, and lived lonely in his cabin among the gulls, eating
out his unsatisfied heart. Somehow it seemed to him that at the last
his rival had cheated him, slipping into the kingdom of souls hard on
the track of those slender feet he had desired to make his own. At
times he hated him because he had died unconquered; yet again, he had
a hot desire upon him, not all ungenerous, for the old days when he
met those great thews and sinews in heavy grips--when the mighty hands
of the other had held him, the huge limbs embraced him; and his eyes
would grow full of the passion of fight and the desire of battle. None
other would satisfy him to wrestle with but his dead rival, and indeed
he in common with the country people thought that no other might be
found fit for him to meet.
Kilbride churchyard is high on the mainland, and lies dark within its
four stone walls. The road to it is by a tunnel of trees that make a
shade velvety black even when the moon is turning all the sea silver.
The churchyard is very old, and has no monuments of importance: only
green headstones bent sideways and sunk to their neck and shoulders in
the earth. A postern gate, with a flight of stone steps, opens from
Kilbride Lane. Here every night you may see the ghost of Cody the
murderer, climbing those steps with a rigid burden hanging from his
shoulder.
But as Mike Sheehan ascended the steps out of the midnight dark he
felt no fear. He clanged the gate of the sacred quiet place in a way
that set the silence echoing. The moon was high overhead, and was
shining straight down on the square enclosure with its little heaped
mounds and ancient stones. Some mad passion was on Mike Sheehan
surely, or he would not so have desecrated the quiet resting-place of
the dead. There by the ruined gable of the old abbey was a fresh mound
unusually great in size. Mike Sheehan paused by it. 'Jack!' he cried
in a thunderous voice, hoarse with its passion. 'Come! let us once for
all see which is the better man. Come and fight me, Jack, and if you
throw me let Ellen be yours now and for ever!'
The blood was in his eyes, and the sea-mist curling in from sea. His
challenge spoken, he swayed dizzily a moment. Then his eyes saw. The
place seemed full of the sea-mist silvered through with the moon. As
he looked to right and left substantial things vanished, but he saw
all about him in a ring long rows of shadowy faces watching him. Many
of them he knew. They were the boys and girls, the men and women, of
his own village who had died in many years. Others were strange, but
he guessed them ghosts from Kilsallagh, beyond Roscarbery, the village
where Jack used to live. He looked eagerly among the folk he
remembered for Ellen's face. There was one who might be she, the ghost
of a woman veiled in her shadowy hair, whose eyes he could not see.
And then Jack was upon him.
That was a great wrestling in Kilbride churchyard. The dead man wound
about the living with his clay-cold limbs, caught him in icy grips
that froze the terrified blood from his heart, and breathed upon him
soundlessly a chill breath of the grave that seemed to wither him.
Yet Mike fought furiously, as one who fights not only to satisfy a
hate, but as one who fights to gain a love. He had a dim knowledge of
the fight he was making, a dim premonition that the dead man was more
than his match. The ghostly spectators pressed round more eagerly,
their shadowy faces peered, their shadowy forms swayed in the mist.
The ghost had Mike Sheehan in a death-grip. His arms were imprisoned,
his breath failed, his flesh crept, and his hair stood up. He felt
himself dying of the horror of this unnatural combat, when there was a
whisper at his ear. Dimly he seemed to hear Ellen's voice; dimly
turning his failing eyes he seemed to recognise her eyes under the
veil of ashen fair hair. 'Draw him to the left on the grass,' said the
voice, 'and trip him.' His old love and his old jealousy surged up in
Mike Sheehan. With a tremendous effort he threw off those paralysing
arms. Forgetting his horror he furiously embraced the dead, drew him
to the left on the grass, slippery as glass after the summer heats,
for a second or two swayed with him to and fro; then the two went down
together with a great violence, but Mike Sheehan was uppermost, his
knee on the dead man's breast.
When he came to himself in the moonlight, all was calm and peaceful.
An owl hooted from the ruined gable, and from far away came the bark
of a watch-dog, but the graveyard kept its everlasting slumber. Mike
Sheehan was drenched with the dews as he stood up stiffly from Jack
Kinsella's grave, upon which he had been lying. It was close upon
dawn, and the moon was very low. He looked about him at the quietness.
Another man might have thought he had but dreamt it; not so Mike
Sheehan. He remembered with a fierce joy how he had flung the ghost
and how Ellen had been on his side. 'You're mine now, asthoreen,' he
said in a passionate apostrophe to her, 'and 'tis I could find it in
my heart to pity him that's lying there and has lost you. He was the
fair fighter ever and always, and now he'll acknowledge me for the
better man.' And then he added, as if to himself, 'Poor Jack! I wish
I'd flung him on the broken ground and not on the slippery grass. 'Tis
then I'd feel myself that I was the better man.'
VIII
THE SEA'S DEAD
In Achill it was dreary wet weather--one of innumerable wet summers
that blight the potatoes and blacken the hay and mildew the few oats
and rot the poor cabin roofs. The air smoked all day with rain mixed
with the fine salt spray from the ocean. Out of doors everything
shivered and was disconsolate. Only the bog prospered, basking its
length in water, and mirroring Croghan and Slievemore with the smoky
clouds incessantly wreathing about their foreheads, or drifting like
ragged wisps of muslin down their sides to the clustering cabins more
desolate than a deserted nest. Inland from the sheer ocean cliffs the
place seemed all bog; the little bits of earth the people had
reclaimed were washed back into the bog, the gray bents and rimy
grasses that alone flourished drank their fill of the water, and were
glad. There was a grief and trouble on all the Island. Scarce a cabin
in the queer straggling villages but had desolation sitting by its
hearth. It was only a few weeks ago that the hooker had capsized
crossing to Westport, and the famine that is always stalking
ghost-like in Achill was forgotten in the contemplation of new graves.
The Island was full of widows and orphans and bereaved old people;
there was scarce a window sill in Achill by which the banshee had not
cried.
Where all were in trouble there were few to go about with comfort.
Moya Lavelle shut herself up in the cabin her husband Patrick had
built, and dreed her weird alone. Of all the boys who had gone down
with the hooker none was finer than Patrick Lavelle. He was brown and
handsome, broad-shouldered and clever, and he had the good-humoured
smile and the kindly word where the people are normally taciturn and
unsmiling. The Island girls were disappointed when Patrick brought a
wife from the mainland, and Moya never tried to make friends with
them. She was something of a mystery to the Achill people, this small
moony creature, with her silver fair hair, and strange light eyes, the
colour of spilt milk. She was as small as a child, but had the gravity
of a woman. She loved the sea with a love unusual in Achill, where the
sea is to many a ravening monster that has exacted in return for its
hauls of fish the life of husband and son. Patrick Lavelle had built
for her a snug cabin in a sheltered ravine. A little beach ran down in
front of it where he could haul up his boat. The cabin was built
strongly, as it had need to be, for often of a winter night the waves
tore against its little windows. Moya loved the fury of the elements,
and when the winter storms drove the Atlantic up the ravine with a
loud bellowing, she stirred in sleep on her husband's shoulder, and
smiled as they say children smile in sleep when an angel leans over
them.
Higher still, on a spur of rock, Patrick Lavelle had laid the clay for
his potatoes. He had carried it on his shoulders, every clod, and
Moya had gathered the seaweed to fertilise it. She had her small
garden there, too, of sea-pinks and the like, which rather encouraged
the Islanders in their opinion of her strangeness. In Achill the
struggle for life is too keen to admit of any love for mere beauty.
However, Patrick Lavelle was quite satisfied with his little wife.
When he came home from the fishing he found his cabin more comfortable
than is often the case in Achill. They had no child, but Moya never
seemed to miss a child's head at her breast. Daring the hours of his
absence at the fishing she seemed to find the sea sufficient company.
She was always roaming along the cliffs, gazing down as with a fearful
fascination along the black sides to where the waves churned hundreds
of feet below. For company she had only the seagulls and the bald
eagle that screamed far over her head; but she was quite happy as she
roamed hither and thither, gathering the coloured seaweeds out of the
clefts of the rocks, and crooning an old song softly to herself, as a
child might do.
But that was all over and gone, and Moya was a widow. She had nothing
warm and human at all, now that brave protecting tenderness was gone
from her. No one came to the little cabin in the ravine where Moya sat
and moaned, and stretched her arms all day for the dear brown head she
had last seen stained with the salt water and matted with the
seaweeds. At night she went out, and wandered moon-struck by the black
cliffs, and cried out for Patrick, while the shrilling gusts of wind
blew her pale hair about her, and scourged her fevered face with the
sea salt and the sharp hail.
One night a great wave broke over Achill. None had seen it coming,
with great crawling leaps like a serpent, but at dead of night it
leaped the land, and hissed on the cottage hearths and weltered gray
about the mud floors. The next day broke on ruin in Achill. The bits
of fields were washed away, the little mountain sheep were drowned,
the cabins were flung in ruined heaps; but the day was fair and sunny,
as if the elements were tired of the havoc they had wrought and were
minded to be in a good humour. There was not a boat on the Island but
had been battered and torn by the rocks. People had to take their
heads out of their hands, and stand up from their brooding, or this
wanton mischief would cost them their dear lives, for the poor
resources of the Island had given out, and the Islanders were in grips
with starvation.
No one thought of Moya Lavelle in her lonely cabin in the ravine. None
knew of the feverish vigils in those wild nights. But a day or two
later the sea washed her on a stretch of beach to the very doors of a
few straggling cabins dotted here and there beyond the irregular
village. She had been carried out to sea that night, but the sea,
though it had snatched her to itself, had not battered and bruised
her. She lay there, indeed, like that blessed Restituta, whom, for her
faith, the tyrant sent bound on a rotting hulk, with the outward tide
from Carthage, to die on the untracked ocean. She lay like a child
smiling in dreams, all her long silver hair about her, and her wide
eyes gazing with no such horror, as of one who meets a violent death.
Those who found her so wept to behold her.
They carried her to her cottage in the ravine, and waked her. Even in
Achill they omit no funeral ceremony. They dressed her in white and
put a cross in her hand, and about her face on the pillow they set the
sea-pinks from her little garden, and some of the coloured seaweeds
she had loved to gather. They lit candles at her head and feet, and
the women watched with her all day, and at night the men came in, and
they talked and told stories, subdued stories and ghostly, of the
banshee and the death-watch, and wraiths of them gone that rise from
the sea to warn fishermen of approaching death. Gaiety there was none:
the Islanders had no heart for gaiety: but the pipes and tobacco were
there, and the plate of snuff, and the jar of poteen to lift up the
heavy hearts. And Moya lay like an image wrought of silver, her lids
kept down by coins over her blue eyes.
She had lain so two nights, nights of starlit calm. On the fourth day
they were to bury her beside Patrick Lavelle in his narrow house, and
the little bridal cabin would be abandoned, and presently would rot to
ruins. The third night had come, overcast with heavy clouds. The group
gathered in the death chamber was more silent than before. Some had
sat up the two nights, and were now dazed with sleep. By the wall the
old women nodded over their beads, and a group of men talked quietly
at the bed-head where Moya lay illumined by the splendour of the four
candles all shining on her white garments.
Suddenly in the quietness there came a roar of wind. It did not come
freshening from afar off, but seemed to waken suddenly in the ravine
and cry about the house. The folk sprang to their feet startled, and
the eyes of many turned towards the little dark window, expecting to
see wild eyes and a pale face set in black hair gazing in. Some who
were nearest saw in the half-light--for it was whitening towards
day--a wall of gray water travelling up the ravine. Before they could
cry a warning it had encompassed the house, had driven door and
window before it, and the living and the dead were in the sea.
The wave retreated harmlessly, and in a few minutes the frightened
folk were on their feet amid the wreck of stools and tables floating.
The wave that had beaten them to earth had extinguished the lights.
When they stumbled to their feet and got the water out of their eyes
the dim dawn was in the room. They were too scared for a few minutes
to think of the dead. When they recovered and turned towards the bed
there was a simultaneous loud cry. Moya Lavelle was gone. The wave had
carried her away, and never more was there tale or tidings of her
body.
Achill people said she belonged to the sea, and the sea had claimed
her. They remembered Patrick Lavelle's silence as to where he had
found her. They remembered a thousand unearthly ways in her; and which
of them had ever seen her pray? They pray well in Achill, having a
sure hold on that heavenly country which is to atone for the cruelty
and sorrow of this. In process of time they will come to think of her
as a mermaid, poor little Moya. She had loved her husband at least
with a warm human love. But his open grave was filled after they had
given up hoping that the sea would again give her up, and the place by
Patrick Lavelle's side remains for ever empty.
IX
KATIE
The little house where Katie lived was over the fields. She was a
dimpled, brown child, as soft as the yellow ducklings she used to
carry in her pinafore. Her little fat shoulders were bare as I
remember them, and you could see the line where the sunburn ended with
her frock and the whiteness began. She was the late child of a
long-married couple, vouchsafed long after they had given up hopes of
a living child.
Her mother was an angular woman who walked a little crookedly,
throwing one hip into ungainly prominence as she went. Her face, too,
was brown as a russet apple, with a pleasant hard redness on the
cheeks. She had white teeth, brown eyes, and an honest expression.
But people said she was a difficult woman to live with. She had
extreme ideas of her own importance, especially since the honest
fellow she was married to had become steward to his master, a 'strong
farmer,' as they say in Ireland, and the owner of broad acres. She
expected a certain deference from the folk she had grown up amongst,
and who were often not quite inclined to yield it. In a sense she was
a fortunate woman, for her good man was as much a lover as in the days
when he had come whistling his lover's signal, like any blackbird, to
call her out from her mother's chimney-corner. She told me about those
days herself when I was but a callow girl. I don't know why, except
from some spirit of romance in her, which she could not reveal to folk
of her own age and circumstances. She was the mother of many dead
babies, for never a one had lived but Katie; but the romance of her
marriage was still new. I remember one summer evening, when the low
sun shone between the slats of her dairy window, and I, on a creepy
stool by the wall, alternately read _The Arabian Nights_ and talked
to her while she gathered the butter from the churn, that her man came
in, and, not seeing me in the shadow, drew her head back and kissed
her brown face and head with a passion not all common after courting
days.
The house was by the roadside, only shut off by its own garden-wall
and a high gate, which it was comfortable to lock of winter evenings.
There were two small rooms in it beside the kitchen and the dairy, and
a loft reached by a ladder, wherein to store many a sack of potatoes,
or wood for the winter firing. The kitchen was very pleasant, with its
two square windows full of geraniums in bloom, the pictures of saints
on its white-washed walls, the chimney-piece with its china
shepherdesses and dogs, and the dresser with a very fine show of
crockery. There was always a sweet smell of cream there from the
dairy, which opened on one side. The two rooms went off each side of
the fire-place. The walls were cleanly white-washed, the tiled floor
ochred; altogether it was a charming little house for love to build a
home in.
Little Katie, precious as she was, roamed at her own sweet will. No
harm could come to her in the fields where she strayed. She was
home-keeping, and never went far from her own doorstep; nor need she
for variety. On one side of the field there was a violet bank, mossy,
and hung over with thorn trees. Under the thorns it was possible to
hide as within a greenhouse, and children love such make-believe. On
the other side of the bank was a steep descent to a tiny stream
prattling over shining stones; and fox-gloves grew in the water with
the meadow orchis, and many other water-loving flowers. That field was
a meadow every year, and once hidden between the hedge and the
meadow-grasses a child was invisible to all but the bright-eyed birds,
who themselves have a taste for such mysteries, and the corn-crake,
which one thinks of as only half bird, that scuttled on Katie's
approach down one of a million aisles of seeding brown grasses.