[image of two ladies and the letter w]hen 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 medi?val, 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-{140}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 medi?val 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.{141}
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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{142} 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 thought{143}ful, 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{144} 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{145} 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{146} 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{147}
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“it was the broad window seat, in conjunction with the mountains, that turned the scale.”
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them and their lawful share of the fire and the newspapers.
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“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{150} 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 cir{151}cumstance 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{152} 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;{153} 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{154} 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{155} 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{156} 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.
