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{61} 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{62} 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{63} 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{64} 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.{65}”
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“ballinahinch came slowly into sight.”
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“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{68} 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,{69} 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{70} 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{71}
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“we heard wheels close at hand.”
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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{74} 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, stop{75}ping 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 y{76}e’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{77} 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{78} 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{79} 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{80} 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{81} 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.
