[Illustration]
When the iron-studded hall-door of Renvyle House Hotel had closed behind
us, we found ourselves in a low-panelled hall, with oaken props for guns
and fishing rods, and long black oaken chests along its walls.
Everything was old-fashioned, even mediæval, dark, and comfortable.
Nothing was in the least suggestive of a hotel, unless it might have
been a row of letters and telegrams on the chimney-piece, and I was
beginning seriously to fear that we had made a mistake, when I noticed
my second cousin’s eye-glasses were at full cock, and following their
direction, I saw the “Innkeepers’ Regulation” Act hanging framed on the
wall. It was both a shock and a relief.
Our various belongings--somewhat disreputable and travel-stained by this
time--having been conveyed from the trap, we were told that tea was
ready in the drawing-room, and followed the servant through two deep
doorways into another room, also mediæval and panelled. “What is so rare
as a day in June?” asks Mr. Lowell. Nothing, we can confidently reply,
except a fire in July, and there on the brick hearth we saw with
gloating, incredulous eyes a heap of burning turf sending a warm, dry
glow into the room, and making red reflections in the antique silver
tea-service that was placed on a table near it. For ever quelled were
our vague anticipations of the hotel drawing-room and its fetishes, the
ornate mirrors, the glass-shaded clocks, and the alabaster chimney
ornaments; and as we extended our muddy boots to the blaze, and sipped
hot tea through a heavy coating of cream, we felt reconciled to the loss
of an ideal.
[Illustration: RENVYLE HOUSE HOTEL.]
After the clank of our tea-cups had continued for a few minutes, there
was a stir under the frilled petticoat of the sofa, and a small
black-and-tan head was put forth with an expression of modest but
anxious inquiry, the raised flounces making a poke bonnet round the
face, and giving it an old-ladyish absurdity, of which its owner was
happily unaware. We laughed--an unkindness which was followed by an
expression of deep but amiable embarrassment, and a tapping on the
floor that told of deprecatory tail waggings. We simultaneously extended
a piece of bread-and-butter, and an animal, allied apparently to the
houses of black-and-tan terrier and dachshund, at once came forward with
its best manner and took our offerings with suave good breeding and
friendliness. A trick of sitting up and waving the fore-paws as a
request for food was exhibited to us without delay, and further
researches discovered a proficiency in that accomplishment of “trust”
and “paid for,” which must be the bitterest problem in dog-education,
and perhaps gives in later dog-life some free-thinking ideas about the
unpractical nature of the exercise, and the flippancy of supreme beings
generally. We said all this to each other, luxuriously and at great
length, and had some pleasure in contrasting the refined behaviour of
the Renvyle dog with the brutal cynicism of the Recess penwiper and the
_blasé_ effeteness of its fox-terrier. Under the influences of dark
mahogany panelling and a low Queen Anne window we became mellow and
thoughtful, and sank into soothing reflection on our natural affinity
to what is cultured and artistic. I am sure, at least, that my second
cousin felt like that; she always has since the disastrous day on which
a chiromantist looked at her hand and told her that it was essential to
her to have nice surroundings.
I was beginning to feel a little acrid at this recollection when the
door-handle turned in its place high up in the panels, and Mrs. Blake
came in to see her visitors. That my cousin belonged to her county
seemed to her a full and sufficient reason that she should welcome us as
friends, and perhaps it gave us throughout our stay an advantage over
the ordinary tourist in the more intimate kindnesses and opportunities
for conversation that fell to our lot.
We looked as hard at Mrs. Blake as politeness would permit, while the
broad columns of the _Times_ seemed to rise before our mind’s eye, with
the story sprinkled down it through examination and cross-examination of
what she had gone through in the first years of the agitation. It
required an effort to imagine her, with her refined, intellectual face
and delicate physique, taking a stick in her hand and going out day
after day to drive off her land the trespassing cattle, sheep, and
horses that were as regularly driven on to it again as soon as her back
was turned. We did not say these things to Mrs. Blake, but we thought
about them a good deal while we sat and talked to her, and noticed the
worn look of her face and the anxious furrows above her benevolent
brows.
It was some time before we went up to see the two rooms of which we had
been offered a choice. Both were low and panelled, both had low, long
windows; in fact it will save trouble if we say at once that everything
at Renvyle was long and low and panelled. The first room looked to the
front of the house, and out over the Atlantic towards the muffled ghosts
of Innis Boffin and Achill Islands; a fine view on a fine day, and
impressive even at its worst; but to us, the room’s chiefest attraction
was the four-poster bed, a magnificent kind of upper chamber, like a
sumptuous private box, with gilded pillars, and carved work, and
stretched canopy; something to admire with the help of a catalogue at
South Kensington. We felt, as we were taken down two long passages to
view the other room, that it was a mere matter of form, and that the
golden bed was too regal a circumstance to be abandoned. But before my
cousin’s eye-glasses were fairly adjusted for the inspection, we had
begun to waver. The other bed was brass instead of gold, there was no
denying that; but these windows looked out to a great ridge of
mountains, crowded about the head of the bay, roses climbed to the sill,
and the grassy stretch below was cut out in gaudy flower-beds. A peacock
screamed just under the windows, and we saw him with his meek spouse
trailing his tail about the grass among the flower-beds that were wired
in from his ravaging beak. I think it was the broad window seat in
conjunction with the mountains that turned the scale--(the peacock also
turned the scale, but in a different way, generally turning it at C in
alt; but, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling says, that is another story). We
forewent the golden glories of the new Jerusalem bed, and remained where
we were.
There was unconfessed peace in the certainty that it was not an
afternoon for sight-seeing; rather for fervent shin-roasting at the
drawing-room fire, blended with leisurely, unsystematic assimilation of
the _Times_ for the last four days. Fishermen, apparently, take a
holiday from newspapers, along with their other duties when they go
a-fishing, and expose themselves to nothing more severe in the way of
literature than the _Field_ or _Land and Water_; at all events, these
and a pre-historic _Illustrated London News_ had been our only
opportunities for keeping ourselves in touch with the outer world since
we had left it. Boaconstrictor-like, we slowly gorged ourselves with
solid facts, and then subsided into a ruminative torpor,
misanthropically delighted at the fact that we had chanced upon an
intermediate period as to tourists, and that the owners of the letters
and telegrams that we had seen in the hall had not arrived to claim
[Illustration: “IT WAS THE BROAD WINDOW SEAT, IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE
MOUNTAINS, THAT TURNED THE SCALE.”]
them and their lawful share of the fire and the newspapers.
[Illustration: “SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY.”]
Our most salient recollections of the rest of the evening are connected
with the velvet delicacy of the lobster soup at dinner, and the tortured
bashfulness of the English youth, who crept, mouse-like, into the room
after the rest of the small party were seated, and raised neither his
eyes nor his voice till the meal was ended. Directly he had finished, he
hurried from the room and was seen no more. A lady who sat next us
volunteered the information that he always acted just so, and that he
spent his days, so far as anyone could guess, in slinking around the
mountains. “He’s so shy,” she concluded, “that he’ll scrape a hole in
his plate trying to get the last mite of butter off it rather than ask
me to pass the cooler.” It appeared that she was an American lady who
had come to Renvyle to inquire into the advantages of the Land League
and other kindred institutions, which was perhaps why she was in the
habit of noticing little things. She certainly seemed to have noticed
the Englishman a good deal.
Given a sloping, sunshiny bank of shingle, a mass of yellow
lichen-covered rocks between it and a purple-and-emerald streaked sea, a
large empty morning, and a cock-shot, there is no reason why one should
ever stop throwing stones. That is how my second cousin and I occupied
ourselves the morning after our arrival at Renvyle. We had started
early, with sketching materials and luncheon, full of a high resolve to
explore several miles of coastline, beginning with the famous Grace
O’Malley’s Castle, and ending with afternoon tea and well-earned repose.
No one can accuse these papers of a superfluity of local information. We
have exercised a noble reticence in this respect, owing partly to a
sympathetic dislike of being instructive, and partly also to the
circumstance that we never seemed able to collect any facts. We have
questioned waiters, and found that they came from Dublin, and bothered
oldest inhabitants only to find that they were either deaf or “had no
English.” But Grace O’Malley is a lady of too pronounced a type to be
ignored, and even our very superficial acquaintance with her history
compels us at least to express our regret that such a female suffragist
as she would have made has been lost to our century. If she had lived
now she would have stormed her way into the London County Council, and
sat upon that body in every sense of the word; and had the University of
Oxford refused to allow her to graduate as whatever she wished, she
would indubitably have sacked the town, and borne into captivity all the
flower of the Dons. In the reign of Elizabeth, however, her energies
were confined to the more remunerative pursuit of piracy. She is known
to have had a husband, but he does not seem to have occupied public
attention to any extent, except secondarily, as when it is recorded that
“the Lady Grace O’Malley went to England to make a treaty with the
Queen, and took her husband with her.” One of her strongholds was this
square tower, that looks down with such amiable picturesqueness on the
waters of Renvyle Bay, and we were told that on those rare occasions
when she condescended to sleep ashore instead of afloat, a hawser
leading from her ship was fastened to her bedpost, and the skipper had
orders to haul on it if anything piratically promising should turn up.
I think we had begun to discuss this energetic Grace and her probable
action in modern politics as we strolled across the fields between
Renvyle and the sea. At all events, something beguiled us to sit down
upon that slope of small round stones, when we were as yet but a quarter
of a mile from the hotel, and then a flaunting tuft of white bladder
campion on a point of yellow rock offered itself irresistibly as an
object for stone-throwing. As we write this we are sensible of its
disappointing vulgarity. The word “sketch,” if not, indeed, “sonnet,”
should have closed the sentence; but the humiliating fact remains that
we simply lay there and pelted it till we had used up all the available
pebbles, and stiffened our shoulders for the next three days, and still
the bladder campion flaunted in our despite. We crawled from that too
fascinating shingle beach to the grass above it, and stretched ourselves
there in heated fractiousness. How hot the sun was! How blue and green
the sea! And how enchantingly the purple gloom of the mountains showed
between the grey hairy legs of the thistles! And after an interval of
healing torpor, how admirable was luncheon!
But after luncheon Grace O’Malley’s tower seemed farther off than ever,
and relinquishing the vigorous projects of our morning start, we began
to drift along the shore towards the pale stretches of the sands. We
dawdled luxuriously across a low headland, where the mouths of the
rabbit-burrows made yellow sandy patches in the coarse grass, and we
slid down the crumbling slope on to the hard, perfect surface of the
sand. Its creamy smoothness had something of the romance of new-fallen
snow, and none of its horrors. An insane and infantine ardour possessed
us--to run, to build castles, to paddle! We came very near paddling,
forgetful of our age, our petticoats, and the fact that no one ever yet
was able to paddle as deep as they wanted to. In fact, we resolved that
we _would_ paddle, and we set off down the slanting glistening plane
towards the far-off line of foam. Here and there the blue sky lay
reflected in the wet patches of sand, Achill Island was a cloudy
possibility of the horizon, Croagh Patrick and Mweelrea, immense
certainties of the north-eastern middle distance, and at our feet were
laid lovely realities of long lace-like scarves of red seaweed,
flattened out with such prim precision that we expected to find their
Latin and English names written beneath them on the sand.
Another fifty yards would have brought us to the water’s verge, when
suddenly crossing our path at right angles, we came upon a long line of
footmarks, masculine in size, pointed in shape, fraught with sinister
suggestion of spying eyes. A group of immense rocks, the leaders of a
procession of boulders trailing glacier-wise from the mountains to the
sea, easily suggested an ambush, and the footmarks, as far as we could
see, led in their direction. The same thought of the hidden watcher
struck us both, and instantly and for ever abandoning the paddling
scheme, we resolved to follow up the track of the footprints until we
had routed the unworthy foot-printer from his lair. Little prods, as of
a stick in the sand, accompanied the boot-marks, and at one spot certain
rudimentary efforts in both art and literature made me think that the
wearer of the boots was guiltless of object in his retreat upon the
rocks. Suddenly, however, the marks lost their almost complacent
evenness, and became extended and irregular, as if their owner had given
himself over to ungoverned flight.
“What did I tell you?” remarked my cousin; “he was rushing off to hide
before we should see him!”
We reached the rocks, and, with eyes that must have imparted to her
_pince-nez_ the destructive quality of burning glasses, my cousin swept
their weedy crevices to discover some indication of the spy.
“He must be at the other side,” she began, when our eyes simultaneously
fell upon a small white object.
It was a sandwich.
It lay between two big rocks that leaned to each other, leaving just
room for a slim person to squeeze through; and looking through the
aperture, we saw a long narrow vista of the sands, and on them a
solitary flying speck--the Englishman.