"God bless you, father, for the kindly word. Yis, I'm comin' back to my
duty with His help, and I thank Him this day, and His blessed Mother,
and blessed St. Patrick, that they held my hand. Oh, sure, father, to
think of me layin' a hand on my purty colleen that I love better nor my
life, and the little weany child that laughed up in my face with his two
blue eyes, and crowed for me to lift him out of his cradle! But with the
help of God, I'm going to make up to them for it wan day. But, father, I
won't stay here where my family was always respectable and held up their
heads, to have it thrown into my face every day that I had nigh murdered
my wife and child. Sure I could never rise under such a shame as that.
Give me your blessin', father, for me and Winnie has settled it. I'm
goin' to Australia to begin a new life, and the mother's snug, and'll
keep Winnie and the child till I send for them, or make money enough to
come for them."
The priest looked at him gravely, and pondered a few minutes before his
reply.
"Well, I don't know but you're right. God enlighten you to do what is
for the best. It will be a complete breaking of the old evil ties and
fascinations, at all events, and, as you say, the mother'll be glad to
have Winnie and her grandson."
And a week later, wife and child being on the high road to
convalescence, Jim Daly sailed for Australia.
This was in February, and outside the little golden-thatched farmhouse
the birds were calling to one another, wildly, clearly, making believe,
the little mad mummers--because spring was riotous in their blood--that
each was not quite visible to the other under his canopy of interlaced
boughs, bare against the sky, but that rather it was June, and the
close, leafy bowers let through only a little blue sky, and a breath of
happy wind, and a blent radiance of gold and green, and that so they
must perforce signal to each other their whereabouts. Some in the thatch
were nest-building, but these little merry drones were swaying to and
fro on the bare boughs, delirious with the new delight that had come to
them, for spring was here, and there was a subtle fragrance of her
breath on the air; and all over the land, for the sound of her feet
passing, there was a strange stirring of unborn things somewhere out of
sight, and where she had trodden were springing suddenly rings and
clusters of faint snowdrops, and tender, flame-colored crocuses, and
double garden primroses, and the dear, red-brown velvet of the
wall-flowers lovely against the dark leaves.
February again--but now far away from the mountain-side. In the city,
where no sweet premonition of spring comes with those first days of her
reign, and in the slums that crouch miserably about the stately
cathedral of St. Patrick's, huddling squalidly around its feet, while
the lovely tower of it soars far away into the blue heart of the sky. It
is a blue sky--as blue as it can be over any spreading range of solemn
hills, for poor Dublin has few tall factory chimneys to defile it with
smoke--and there are little feathery wisps of white cloud on the blue,
that lie quite calm and motionless, despite the fact a bright west wind
is flying.
It is so warm that the window of one room in one of the most squalid
tenement houses of the Coombe is a little open, and the wind steals in
softly, and sways to and fro the clean, white curtains; for this room is
poor, but not squalid and grimed as the others are. The two small beds
are covered with spotlessly white quilts, and the wooden dresser behind
the door is spotless, with its few household utensils shining in the
leaping firelight; and opposite the window is a small altar, carefully
and neatly tended, whereon are two pretty statuettes of the Sacred Heart
and our Blessed Lady, and at the foot of these, no gaudy, artificial
flowers, but a snowdrop or two and a yellow crocus, laid lovingly in a
wineglass of water.
It is all very clean and pure, but, alas! it is a very sad room now,
despite all that, because--oh, surely the very saddest thing in all the
sad world! there is a little child dying there in its mother's arms. And
the mother is poor little Winnie Daly, far from kindly Tipperary and the
good priest, and the pleasant neighbors who would have been neighborly
to her, and here, in the cruel city, she is watching her one little son
die. He is lying on his small bed, with his eyes closed--a little,
pretty, fair boy of seven--his breath coming very faintly, and the
golden curls, dank with the death-dew, pushed restlessly off his
forehead, and the two gentle little hands crossed meekly on each other
on his breast. His mother, her face almost as deathly in its pallor and
emaciation as his, is kneeling by the bed, her yellow hair wandering
over the pillow, her head bent low beside his, and her eyes drinking
thirstily every change that passes over the small face, where the gray
shadows are growing grayer. They have lain so for a long time, with no
movement disturbing the solemn silence, except once, when her hand goes
out tenderly to gather into it the little, cold, damp one. But she is
not alone in her agony. Two Sisters of Mercy, in their black serge
robes, are kneeling each side of the bed, and their sad, clear eyes are
very tender and watchful; they will be ready with help the moment it is
needed, but now the great beads of the brown rosary at each one's girdle
are dropping noiselessly through the white fingers, and their lips are
moving in prayer. One is strangely beautiful, with a stately, imperial
beauty; but it is etherealized, spiritualized to an unearthly degree,
and the flowing serge robes throw out that noble face into fairer relief
than could any empress's purple and gold brocade. Both women are
wonderfully sweet-faced: these nuns are always so pitying and tender,
because their daily and hourly contact with human pain and sin and
misery must keep, I think, the warm human sympathies in them alive and
throbbing always. Now there is a faint movement over the child's face
and limbs, and the tall, beautiful nun rises quickly, because,
well-skilled in death-bed lore, she sees that the end cannot be very far
off. His eyes open slowly, and wander a little at first; then they come
back to rest on his mother's face, and raising one small hand with
difficulty he touches her thin cheek caressingly, and then his hand
falls again, and he says weakly, "Mammy, lift me up."
"Yes, my lamb," poor Winnie answers brokenly, gathering him up in her
arms and laying the little golden head on her breast. He closes his eyes
again for a minute, then reopens them, and his gaze wanders around the
room as if seeking something, and one of the nuns, understanding, goes
gently and brings the few spring flowers to the bedside; this morning
tender Sister Columba had carried them to him, knowing what a wonder and
happiness flowers always were to the little crippled child,--for Jim's
little lad was crippled from that fall in his babyhood. He lies
contentedly a moment, and then says weakly, the words dropping with
painful pauses between each,--
"Mammy, will there--be green fields in heaven--an' primroses--an' will I
be able--to run then? I wouldn't go to Crumlin last summer--with the
boys--'kase I was lame--but they got primroses--an' gev me some."
And it is the nun who answers, for the mother's agonized white lips
only stir dumbly: "Yes, Jimmy, darling little child, there will be green
fields in heaven, and primroses, and you will run and sing; and our dear
Lord will be there and His Blessed Mother, and He will smile to see you
playing about His feet."
Then she lifts the great crucifix of her rosary, and lays it for a
moment against the wan baby lips that smile gently at her, and the white
eyelids fall over the pansy eyes, and gradually the soft sleep passes
imperceptibly and painlessly into death. And one nun takes him out of
his mother's arms, and lays him down softly on the pillows and smooths
the little fair limbs, and passes a loving hand over the transparent
eyelids; and the other nun gathers poor Winnie into her tender arms,
with sweet comforting words that will surely help her by and by, but now
are unheeded, because God has mercifully given her a short
insensibility. And the nun turns to the other, with a little soft
fluttering sigh stirring her wistful mouth, and says, "Poor darling! the
separation will not be for long. Our dear Lord will very soon lay her
baby once more in her arms."
A fortnight later a bronzed and bearded man landed on the quay of
Dublin. It was Jim Daly--a new, grave, strong Jim Daly, coming home now
comparatively a wealthy man, with the money earned by steady industry,
in the gold-fields. There he had worked steadily for three years, with
always the object coloring his life of atoning for the past, and making
fair the future to wife and child and mother, and the object had been
strong enough to keep him apart from the sin and riotousness and
drunkenness of the camp. He would have been persuasive-tongued, indeed,
among the wild livers who could have persuaded Jim Daly to join in a
carousal. But the worst living among the diggers knew how to come to him
for help and advice when they needed it; and many a gentle, kindly act
was done by him in his quiet unobtrusive manner, with no consciousness
in his own mind that he was doing more than any other man would have
done.
He had never written home in all those years, though the thought of
those beloved ones was always with him--at getting up and lying down, in
his dreams and during the hours of the working day. At first times were
hard with him, and for three years it was a dreary struggle for
existence; and he could not bear to write while every day his feet were
slipping backward. Then came the rush to the gold-fields, and he, coming
on a lucky vein, found himself steadily making "a pile," and so
determined that when a certain sum was amassed he would turn his steps
homeward; and because postal arrangements in those days were so
precarious, and the time occupied by the transit of a letter so long, he
had then given up the thought of writing at all, watching eagerly the
days drifting by that were bringing him each day nearer home. In his
wandering life no letter had ever reached him; but he never doubted that
they were all quite safe; in that little peaceful hillside village, and
cluster of farmsteads, life passed so innocently and safely; the people
were poor, but the landlord was lenient, and they managed to pay the
rent he asked without the starvation and misery that existed on other
estates; and apart from the pain and destitution and sin of the towns,
the little colony seemed also to be exempt from their diseases, and the
little graveyard was long in filling up; the funerals were seldom,
unless when sometimes an old man or woman, come to a patriarchal age,
went out gladly to lay their weary old bones under the long grasses and
the green sorrel and the daisy stars.
This had all been in his day, and he did not know at all how things had
changed. First, after he sailed, things had gone fairly; Winnie had
grown strong again, and even when his silence grew obstinate, no shadow
of doubt crossed her mind; she was so sure he loved her, and she knew he
would come back some day to her. The first cloud on the sky came when
the baby developed some disease of the hip, the result of the fall, and
it refused to yield to all the doctor's treatment; indeed it became
worse with time, and as the years slipped by, the ailing, puny babe grew
into a delicate, gentle child, fair and wise and grave, but crippled
hopelessly. Then, the fourth year after Jim went, there came a bad
season, crops failed, and the cow died; and then, fast on those
troubles, the kind old landlord died, and his place was taken by a
schoolboy at Eton, and, alas! the agency of his estates placed in the
hands of a certain J. P. and D. L., tales of whose evictions on the
estates already under his charge had made those simple peasants shiver
by their firesides in the winter evenings. Then to this peaceful
mountain colony came raising of rents like a thunder-clap, followed soon
by writs, and then the Sheriff and the dreadful evicting parties. And
one of the first to go was old Mrs. Daly; and when she saw the little
brown house whereto her young husband, dead those twenty years, had
brought her as a bride, where her children were born, and from whose
doors one after the other the little frail things, dead at birth, had
been carried, till at last her strong, hearty Jim came--when she saw the
golden thatch of it given to the flames, the honest, proud old heart
broke, and from the house of a kindly neighbor, where neighbor's hands
carried her gently, she also went out, a few days later, to join husband
and babes in the churchyard house, whence none should seek to evict
them. And the troubles thickened, and famine and fever and death came;
and then the good priest died too--of a broken heart, they said. And so
the last friend was gone--for the people, with pain and death shadowing
every hearthstone, were overwhelmed with their own troubles--and poor
Winnie and the little crippled son drifted away to the city.
And at the time all those things were happening, Jim Daly used to stand
at the door of his tent in the evening, gazing gravely away westward,
his soul's eyes fixed on a fairer vision than the camp, or the gorgeous
sunset panorama that passed unheeded before the eyes of his body. He saw
the long, green grasses in the pastures at home in Inniskeen. And he saw
Winnie--his darling colleen--coming from the little house-door with her
wooden pail under her arm for the milking, and she was laughing and
singing, and her step was light; and by her side the little son, with
his cheeks like apples in August, and his violet eyes dancing with
pleasure, and the little feet trotting, hurrying, stumbling, and the fat
baby hand clutching at the mother's apron, till, with a sudden, tender
laugh she swung him in her strong young arms to a throne on her
shoulder, wherefrom he shouted so merrily that Cusha, the great gentle
white cow, turned about, and ceased for a moment her placid chewing of
the cud, to gaze in some alarm at the approaching despoilers of her
milk.
Oh, how bitterly sad that dream seems to me, knowing the bitter reality!
That in the squalid slums of the city, the girl-wife was setting her
feet for death; that the little child, crippled by the father's drunken
blow, had never played or run gladly as other children do--never would
do these things unless it might be in the wide, green playing-fields of
heaven.
I will tell you how he found his wife. It was evening when he landed at
the North Wall, and he found then that till morning there was no train
to take him home; and with what fierce impatience he thought of the
hours of evening and night to be lived through before he could be on his
way to his beloved ones, one can imagine. Then he remembered that by a
fellow-digger, who parted with him in London, he had been intrusted with
a wreath to lay on a certain grave in Glasnevin; and with a certain
sense of relief at the prospect of something to be done, he unpacked the
wreath from among his belongings on his arrival at the hotel, and,
ordering a meal to be ready by his return, he set out for the cemetery.
It was almost dusk when he reached it, and not far from closing-time,
and, the wreath deposited, he was making his way to the gate again.
Suddenly his attention was caught by a sound of violent coughing, and
turning in the direction from which it proceeded, he saw a woman's
figure kneeling by a small, poor grave. For the dusk he could hardly see
her face, which also was partly turned away from him; but he could see
that her hands were pressed tightly on her breast, as if striving to
repress the frightful paroxysms which were shaking her from head to
foot.
Jim was tender and pitiful to women always, and now with a thought of
Winnie--for the figure was slight and girlish-looking--he went over and
laid his hand very gently on the woman's shoulder, saying, "Come, poor
soul! God help ye; ye must come now, for it's nigh on closin'-time; and,
sure, kneelin' on the wet earth in this raw, foggy evenin' is no place
for ye, at all, at all."
The coughing had ceased, and as he spoke she looked up at him wildly.
Then she gave a great cry that went straight through the man's heart;
she sprang up, and, throwing her thin arms round his neck cried out:
"Jim, Jim, me own Jim, come back to me again! Oh, thank God, thank God!
Jim, Jim, don't you know your own Winnie?" for he was standing stupefied
by the suddenness of it all. Then he gathered the poor, worn body into
the happy harborage of his arms, and, for a minute, in the joy of the
reunion, he did not even think of the strangeness of the place in which
he had found her; and mercifully for those first moments the dusk hid
from him how deathly was the face his kisses were falling on. Then,
suddenly, with a dreadful thunderous shock, he remembered where they
were standing, and I think even before he cried out to know whose was
the grave, that in his heart he knew.
I cannot tell you how she broke it to him, or in my feeble words speak
of this man's dreadful anguish; only I know that with the white mists
enfolding them, and the little child lying at their feet, she told him
all.
"An', darlin', I'm goin' too," she said, "an' even for the sake of
stayin' wid you I can't stay. I'm so tired-like, an' my heart's so empty
for the child; an' you'll say 'God's will be done,' won't ye, achora?
And when the hawthorn's out in May, bring some of it here; an', Jim
darlin', I'll be lyin' here so happy--him an' me, an' his little curly
head on my breast, an' his little arms claspin' my neck."
He said, "God's will be done," mechanically, but I think his heart was
broken; no other words came from his lips except over and over again,
"Wife and child! wife and child! My little crippled son! my little
crippled son!"
KATHARINE TYNAN, in _League of the Cross_.
What English Catholics are Contending for,