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 to the 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 the single 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 upright stake, 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 was called 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.”
[Illustration: “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 large plantation. 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 and earth, 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
[Illustration: “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 her meekly 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 opening of 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, and commented 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 bluest distance, 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 the
wrinkles 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 seat moaning 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.