Part 18

The ladies are the Providence of the district. There is a room at the back of the great gallery filled nearly to the ceiling with rolls of homespun made by the peasant women in the villages. Whenever a cottage mother is in want of money she runs up to Miss Margaret or Miss Caroline, bringing or promising the product of her loom. A good deal of money is advanced; a good deal paid in this manner, chiefly out of the ladies’ generous pockets.

“Of course, poor things, you must know the way to take them,” says Miss Caroline in her Irish way. “One of them will come up and declare they’ll all be ‘lost entirely, ruined out and out’ for the want of five pounds. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t do with thirty shillings, now?’ I say to them. ‘Oh, Miss Caroline’—it will be then—‘as thrue as I’m a living woman, I couldn’t do with less than two pound ten!’ ... I get at the truth that way,” she adds.

It is Miss Margaret who undertakes the sale of goods which have already cost Kilcoultra so dear, and no one can say that she shows a commercial spirit.

“Let me see now,” she will say, fingering the stuff—and splendid stuff it is—with tentative finger and thumb. “I think we paid three-and-tenpence a yard for this, or maybe it was four shillings, but”—with a delighted smile—“I’ll let you have it for one-and-six, if you’re sure—really sure—you want it.”

XL

[Sidenote: THE COLOUR OF THE WEST]

The country all about Kilcoultra is typically wild and melancholy. The fields stretch, barren and yellowing, strewn with giant stones. Except where sombre belts of woodland mark the great estates, there is scarcely a tree to break the monotony; a monotony intensified by the low, unending lines of rough grey walls that border every road. But there is a kind of poetry even in this desolation, and a satisfaction to all who love the freedom of unbounded horizons. Then the mountains of Clare stretch their incomparable plum and grape colours against the sky. The colour of Ireland is a thing scarcely realized over here, where, somehow, hues seem washed out. “In England everything has got grey in it,” an artist friend of ours discontentedly avers.

We are taken across the county to a castle standing by a lake, which is a place of wonder. It is a castle no older, in its mediæval sturdiness, than the Gothic mansion we are staying in, but quite as convincingly built. Loughcool is a realm of beauty. At the end of the long approach the road rises very steeply through a stern grove of pines. All at once, as you approach the summit of this dark woodland, the ground breaks away abruptly on the right, and, between the pines, far, far below, lies the lake smiling, and on its banks what is called “the hidden garden”—a stretch of fairy beauty. Words are poor things to describe the vision which breaks so unexpectedly upon the eye. Everything that gardening art can do has been accomplished at Loughcool. You have terraces and a glory of roses overhanging the water even this late September; and there are “Auratum” Lilies rising in splendid groups on each side of a grass walk that runs grandly into the woods between stately trees. The lady of Loughcool is fighting a hard fight to make Azaleas and Rhododendrons grow in the limy soil; but it is a question whether the struggle is worth while.

“We have given it up,” says the sensible châtelaine of Kilcoultra.

We smiled privately. Villino Loki has at least some points of superiority.

* * * * *

We made another expedition, over the border into County Clare. A white plastered pillared house this, dating from the terrible neo-Italian period of the end of the last century. There dwells an eccentric gentleman, one of the chief instigators of the Young Ireland movement; but he was unfortunately away. We visited the house, and were entertained by his housekeeper. This lady’s name was Mrs. Quinlan, and she was an old friend of our hostesses. We think we enjoyed that afternoon as well as any of our excursions; and certainly we laughed as much as ever.

Mrs. Quinlan came creaking down in a flowing black silk, which brought me instantly back to the Sundays of my childhood and the genteel appearance of my mother’s maid. We sat in the early Victorian drawing-room and had tea and Albert biscuits, listening with unremitting amusement to the conversation between Miss Caroline and Mrs. Quinlan. Be it mentioned that the owner of Curriestown has long been a widower and that the question of his remarriage has never ceased to agitate the bosoms of his neighbours since the event, so many years ago, which qualified him once again for the matrimonial market.

Mrs. Quinlan stood, her perfectly unwashed hands crossed on the last button of her black silk bodice; her faded face all over lines, querulous, good-humoured, quizzical, under the untidy wisps of her yellow-grey hair; and, while we ate and drank, she flowed continuously on, stimulated by a question here and there, or an appropriate comment.

[Sidenote: SPEAKING THE IRISH]

“And indeed, Miss Caroline, it’s very busy I am. For sure, didn’t the master wire there’d be twelve of them here the day after to-morrow? It’s getting all the rooms ready I am, and the Professor here and all. Not that he’s much trouble, the crathur. Them’s his shoes, in the hall beyant. I’m sorry he’s out, then, for it’s the queer-looking body he is. He’s wearing the kilt, ye know, Miss Carrie. And not a word out of him but Irish! Musha, I don’t know what he’d be saying!—It’s a deal of store they do be setting on speaking the Irish now, Miss.”

Here Mrs. Quinlan, seized with a paroxysm of silent laughter, claps one of the grimy hands over her mouth and doubles herself in two.

“The master’s wild about it, God help him!” she proceeds presently. “But sure, I do be tellin’ him, I’m too old to be thinkin’ about that kind of thing at my time of life. Troth, and it’s queer times we do be having! Isn’t the master bringing back a black lady on us!”

“A black lady?” ejaculated Miss Carrie, startled out of her placidity. “Good gracious, Mrs. Quinlan!”

“Indeed, and it’s true. A rale black lady I hear she is, and it’s in Paris he met her.”

“In Paris!”

It seemed a strange place from which to bring a black lady. We were all full of the liveliest interest.

“I suppose,” says Miss Caroline, “you mean a very dark lady, Mrs. Quinlan—a brunette?”

“I do not, then—rale black she is, I’m told. Out of the Indies, or Africa, or some of them places.”

“Dear me!” Our hostess is much puzzled. “Is he thinking of marrying her, Mrs. Quinlan?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him, Miss Carrie!”

A black lady! Was this to be the end of twenty-five years’ expectation?

“Well, now, and is he bringing her with him to-morrow night?”

“Och, maybe he is! He’s coming by the midnight train, Miss Carrie, and the Lord knows what time in the world they’ll be up here.”

“Oh, he must mean to marry her!” says Miss Carrie, and Mrs. Quinlan laughs again exhaustedly with an undercurrent of plaintiveness, and remarks once more that she wouldn’t put it past him.

We go through the house in Mrs. Quinlan’s wake. There is something that looks like a kitchen rubber laid over one corner of the mahogany table in the great red-papered dining-room; and on it a crusty loaf flanks a dim glass and a cracked plate. Mrs. Quinlan casts a phrase of explanation as she trails us around.

“He do be looking for his bit of dinner early.” We presume “he” to be the “crathur that gives no trouble.”

We pass through a bewildering series of bedrooms. The damp has been coming in very copiously at Curriestown. Mrs. Quinlan points out the worst places in each apartment as we go along:

“Look athere, now! Just cast your eye on that, Miss Carrie, and sure it’s nothing to what’s behind the bed. If ye could see the way it is at the back of that press, Miss Carrie, you’d be hard set to believe it. Och, the house is in a tirrible state! Me heart’s broke pulling the furniture about, thrying to get them bad bits covered.”

Some one suggests that perhaps the owner will have it painted for the black lady. But Honoria Quinlan is still of opinion that you couldn’t tell what he’d be at.

* * * * *

On the way back we burst a tyre, not far from one of those hamlets which are typical of the western coast. Set in surroundings of the wildest beauty, it is practically deserted. The four walls of the ruined chapel gaping to the sky, and the long row of empty broken-down cottages testify still to the ruthless policy that laid the country waste in far Cromwellian times. Perhaps there are no more than fifteen smoking hearths left, beaten by passionate seas, guarded by the tremendous black cliffs. Life here, it would seem, must be hard won indeed from stony fields and treacherous waters.

Very soon, while the chauffeur worked at the wheel, a small knot of onlookers gathers about us; children with a tangled thatch of bleached hair, and eyes that look half-fiercely, half-appealingly out from under it. Black eyes they seem at first sight, set as they are with raven lashes. It is only on examination that you find them to be richly violet. There is an old man fantastically attired in a blanket laced with twine down to his knees. Such a creature of savage primitiveness he seems that one of the party is moved to ask him humorously if he has ever driven in a motor-car. He surveys us with his mild blue eyes that are as innocent as the child’s beside him, and shakes his shaggy white head.

“Bedad, I have,” he then says unexpectedly. “And sure it never touched the ground at all but an odd time between here and Connemara.”

[Sidenote: CLARE ROADS]

Yet motor-cars must be very rare apparitions along these Clare roads; for at their approach the people fling themselves sideways into the ditches and against the walls, when they cannot escape through a gap into the fields. Even the dogs will flee. One poor Collie flattened himself on a bank in a paroxysm of terror that we cannot forget. When I remember how along the English roads my heart is for ever in my mouth over the callous indifference of the British cur, I realize that canine folk are very much like human beings when all is said and done.

The Irish of the west have curious habits and customs which seem to link them with their forgotten eastern ancestral race. The women will draw their garments over their heads at the approach of a stranger, so closely that you may not get even a glimpse of their faces. Their husband is still “the master” to them, and they walk two steps behind him when they go abroad. But it is the old Catholic spirit that leads them to expect the greeting “God save all here!” when you enter their cottage, and “God bless the work!” when you pass them in the field.

[Sidenote: AN IRISH STRIKE]

We hurry away, much against our will, from these attractive scenes because of the breaking out of the railway strike. The newspapers are all very alarming, and we are threatened with being flung for an indefinite period upon the hospitality of our most hospitable friends. We do not fear for a minute that that would fail us, but we are due in England at appointed dates, and so we bustle off, “against the heart” as the French say.

But when you make acquaintance with a strike from an Irish point of view, it seems one huge joke. Never did we make a journey to the sound of so much laughter as that day. Every station was crowded with soldiers, and all the inhabitants mustered on the platforms to exchange sallies with them. An eager, curious, good-humoured gathering greets and speeds the train which is supposed to be kept running at imminent risk of riot and peril.

A very splendid looking police-inspector came into our carriage and had an animated conversation on the prospects with an elderly gentleman whom he addressed as “Judge.” Both seemed inspired with glee.

When we arrived in Dublin there was indeed a slight drawback in finding no porters available for our many boxes. But the stalwart man of the party made “no bones,” as they would say, about shouldering them himself, and this was accomplished amid the unstinted enthusiasm of the “jarvies.” He was aided ‹save the mark› by the only faithful porter, as old as Pantaloon, who quivered and quavered behind him. A further occasion for cheers.

“Ah, will ye look at the gintleman! To think of the likes of him now, being put to carry the thrunks! Isn’t it ashamed of themselves they ought to be! Well done, Larry, it is a grand old boy ye are! Let me get a hould of the box, yer honour. Oh, begorra, isn’t it the stringth of ten ye do be having....”

“And how do ye like Dublin now, Mr. Smith?” we heard a pretty Irish girl saying to a stalwart young British soldier on the platform.

He was grinning down at her in stolid admiration. She herself had dove-like eyes and a dove-like cooing voice.

We think he liked Dublin very much indeed.

It was the laughing face behind the mask of tragedy.

XLI

[Sidenote: THE FALL OF THE LEAF]

Once more has the Equinox come and dropped into the past. Autumn—the Fall, as our older and more poetic term had it to balance the image of Spring, and as America still prefers to call it—is about us.

We disagree radically with Chateaubriand’s estimate of the “russet and silver days.”

“A moral character” ‹thus does the Father of _Romantisme_ meditate, in his usual melancholy mood, upon the season of shortening days and long-drawing nights› “is attached to autumnal scenes.... The leaves falling like our years, the flowers withdrawing like our hours, the colours of the clouds fading like our illusions, the light waning like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives—everything about Autumn bears secret relations to our destinies....”

Yes, we disagree with every one of these similes. Rather should Autumn be considered as the happy season of the task accomplished. The wine is pressed and stored, the fruit is garnered.... In the garden it is the time of eager preparation against new delights, another year; of solicitude for the treasures of beauty which are to brighten another Spring, another Summer. The seed of the dying Annuals has been saved; the more tender of the Perennials are timely withdrawn into shelter, while the hardier are cosily tucked in their own bed for the coming long winter sleep. It is the time of the tidying down and of the confident “good night—till next year!”

“Colder, like our affections,” indeed! What will not love of rhetoric perpetrate?—and Christmastide drawing on apace!

* * * * *

The Master of the House has an old-fashioned weakness—what may be called a “Dickensy” weakness—for things Christmassy. And his family have all childlike tastes and are quite ready to minister to his picturesque fancy.

We have a Christmas tree—a Spruce sapling, selected yearly for sacrifice in the territory called the Wilderness. It must be said that the wide library, with the capacious hearth and the beamed ceiling, lends a suitable scenery to this homelike ‹but, we fear, obsolescent› entertainment. The tree is lit up on the first night for ourselves; on the second for the household; and a third time for the children. For the true pleasures of Yule would be incomplete without a “foregathering-and-rejoicing-together” ‹as only a tough German compound word could express it› of all grades of age and station. The children, in this case, are those of the Catechism class and of our _employés_—which pompous term must be understood to refer to the gardener, the chauffeur, the under-gardener, and the “occasional help.” This last has five of them—so it mounts up satisfactorily.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: THINGS CHRISTMASSY]

The beloved “furry ones” are not forgotten. Loki, who is always in a state of violent excitement on Christmas Tree nights, has a toy animal to make acquaintance with, tease, and finally worry. Some one ‹it must have been Juvenal› suggested tying up nice clean bones in red ribbons; but out of regard for Grandma’s carpet, the succulent thought has never been “materialized.”

The Master of the House, and Juvenal, are also full of solicitude for the feathery things in Winter. The bird-baths are carefully thawed—it seems, by the way, to be in the coldest days of the year that they appear to prefer to bathe; sand baths are generally found sufficient in the Summer, one wonders why. In cold weather generally, cocoanuts filled with fat are disposed in various parts of the garden, around which tits and finches of every shade dispute noisily all day. But on Christmas day the terraces, the balustrades and steps round the house are further disfigured with such an abundance of crumbs and other tempting morsels, that, even with the help of all the black birds from neighbouring copses, they cannot come even with the whole of the feast.

* * * * *

We give each other enchanting presents. The lovely little carved-wood Joan of Arc, on a bracket in Grandpa’s library; the Madonna of Cluny “prayer-stick” in one corner of the chimney-piece; the Medici copy of Filippino Lippi’s wonderful angel in the National Gallery, in the grey and yellow bedroom; the cut-glass goblets painted with purple plums and red cherries and blue grapes in the drawing-room—all these were this year’s Christmas gifts, cunningly chosen, we think, and a constant delight to our eyes.

* * * * *

Loki’s Grandma, after the fashion of a lady in a recent celebrated lawsuit, likes to choose her own presents. But she is not so indelicate as to demand money and buy it herself—No, she drops an absent hint, as Christmastide draws near. If this is not satisfactory, she abandons diplomacy for an engaging frankness.... But she is always overwhelmed with surprise and delight when “the very thing she wanted” duly appears about the Tree. The Master of the Villino, on his side, has had all the pleasure of purchasing; and, being of a guileless nature, is often quite persuaded that the choice was his own.

In fact we all become like children again at Christmas; and this, after all, cannot be displeasing to the Christ Child. It is a time of hectic preparation, of pleasurable brain-racking over the suitability of gifts; of endless tying up of parcels for foreign and home dispatch. We decorate the Villino with round compact Holly-wreaths, which Adam makes with rare raste and adroitness. Never was such a year as the last for Hollies; and some of the trees were still scarlet with them in the late Spring.

[Sidenote: HUES OF WINTER]

As for Juvenal, he shows a recrudescence of genius in the devising of table decoration with unthought-of evergreens; with rich-toned leaves in the sear and the brown and purpling hues of Winter, brightened with an astonishing variety of haws, hips, and berries.

In the little Chapel a crib is built up in a stone manger brought from Rome. Therein lies the Italian _Bambino_, purchased two generations ago by a dear one who has now gone from us. It is the quaintest little wax figure imaginable, with its painted red curls and one wax foot uplifted in the act of kicking.—The story goes that the original much venerated image in a certain Roman church, the object of yearly pilgrimages, was purloined, or for some reason moved to another Church, to the woe and indignation of the faithful of the district. But on the first Christmas night after this translation, a loud knocking was heard at the door of the original Church, and the small figure was discovered, kicking with all its might for re-admittance. Captured and carried in with devotion and joy, it was re-established with much pomp in its old quarters, but ever after remained with a little kicking leg in the air!

Our Crib, surrounded with Roman Hyacinths and White Narcissus and Primulas, is fragrant and poetic; but we do not attempt to show anything more than the one image. Want of space prevents it. Our ambition, however, finds larger scope in the village Chapel. There Juvenal has built a very noble stable, thatched with heather; and all the figures of those first scenes of the Greatest Story in the World will take their place this year.

Last year the tragedy happened that the St. Joseph and Our Lady; the Ox and the Ass; the Kings and Shepherds, which had been ordered in secret to surprise every one, remained on the high seas detained by December gales, until too late.—But our coming Noel will be the richer for the enforced postponement of the Holy Picture.

* * * * *

At the last Yuletide the Mistress of Villino was unable, after a long year’s illness, to join the family party at Midnight Mass in the village below the hill. ‹Midnight Mass, be it noted in parenthesis, has an extraordinary charm for the household and indeed for the neighbourhood. And, when all is said and done, it certainly is as picturesque and touching a ceremony as ever men of goodwill are happy to join in. It seems to bring one in direct touch with the simplicity of the shepherds of those far-off hills.› But as the excluded _padrona_ was lying quietly in bed waiting for the sounds of departure, she was touched and charmed to hear the strains of a carol rising softly from the terrace beneath her windows:

_See amid the winter’s snow, Born for us on earth below, See, the tender Lamb appears, Promised from eternal years!_

_Hail, thou ever blessed morn! Hail, Redemption’s happy dawn! Sing, through all Jerusalem, Christ is born in Bethlehem!_

_Lo, within a manger lies He Who built the starry skies; He, Who throned in heights sublime Sits amid the Cherubim!_

All the household had gathered there to give her this pleasure and make her feel that she was not altogether shut out from the Christmas privileges! Wrapped in their thick cloaks, with Juvenal swinging a lantern, they stood in a long row and chanted to her. It was one of those small sweetnesses in life that leave a lasting memory.

* * * * *

There is a picture in a garden paper of Japanese single Asters growing wild in grass: the seeds had been mixed by mistake, but the result, according to the illustration, was singularly attractive. When we saw it we said that the experiment should be made at Villino Loki!—Many indeed are the experiments, many the improvements to be made within our small acres.

But what a difference lies between conception and execution. Of late ‹for an instance› we had revolved round the agreeable thought of a Pool and a wet place generally, for Iris Kæmpheri, Spiræa and other moisture-loving darlings. We had indeed intended something altogether choice in the shape of a large sunken basin with a piping faun on the edge of it. Oh, something quite delightful.... But an inconvenient attack of “conscience”—in other words the heavy memory of garden bills, already incurred over the Autumn lists, rose up and barred the way. We felt something like Scrooge when the ghost with the bony finger ‹horrible vision of our youth› pointed to the tomb. Only, on our tablet what was written was the ghastly total of our bulbous liabilities! Like Scrooge, we covered our faces with our hands. No wonder the faun took fright and leaped into next year.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: THE TURN OF THE YEAR]