The Curse of the Wise Woman Read online

  I stood silent, and all was silent but for her sobs. Then Marlin turned to me quietly: “She’s been looking at the future,” he said.

  CHAPTER XI

  I stayed for some while watching the old witch weeping, and found nothing to say or do. And then I thought that if I waited awhile, her weeping might soon stop. But Marlin seemed to read what I was thinking, and slowly shook his head. And at that look from Marlin I said good-bye to him quietly, shook hands and went out of the cottage, and so walked back to Clonrue, haunted all the way by the memory of that wild laughter, which often troubles me yet. In Clonrue the horse was waiting in the stables behind the public-house, and the young men gathered in the doorway, or leaning against its wall, with their faces hopeful and sunlit, began at last to free my mind from the echoes of that terrible derision with which Mrs. Marlin had looked at the future. As for tears, there were none in Clonrue; and, as nothing else seemed to be afoot, several of the young men strolled round to the stables, and by the time the horse was led out there were seven or eight of them there, watching the horse being harnessed and estimating his qualities, for the Irish people are born judges of horses. Nor is there any sport at which they are not connoisseurs, even when they have failed to find any opportunity to follow it; so I was soon telling them that I had shot nothing that day on the bog, and they were giving me reasons why this must be, partly out of politeness and kindness, and partly because they knew the bog and its ways and were giving me sound advice. “The snow’s sent all the snipe to the sea, Master Char-les,” said one. “You should go to the red bog in the full of the moon,” said another. And they all repeated that. Marlin had already told me this, but these men were all emphatic about it. And they were right. It is one of the few things that are known about other lives than ours, that snipe go to the peat and the heather whenever the moon is full. For each bit of knowledge like this, that we have of the wild folk’s ways, there must be a hundred equally strange and romantic of which we have caught no hint.

  And why were these men, of whose names I only knew two, all urging me to go shooting over there at the best time? It excited no surprise in me. Gratitude, I hope, yet no surprise. But the reader, if he dwell in towns, may feel surprised. No men in London guide him to the best shops, or advise him what to buy. Yet this was the way of Clonrue.

  Then I asked of the geese, and they shook their heads and spoke more weightily. To tell the habits of snipe was one thing; it was another to bring news of the geese, to whom a hundred miles was a light journey. And then the horse was harnessed and I said good-bye to them, and they all said good-bye and urged me to come back as soon as the snow was gone, when the snipe would be hungry and back on their feeding grounds. And why? It was the Irish way.

  I drove home and went straight to Brophy, and found him among the farm buildings. Of what I began to speak I do not remember, but he saw at once that it was not the topic about which I wished to speak to him, so he moved further away from the men that were working there, and when we were out of ear-shot, I said: “I am afraid we shall have no more letters from Mr. Peridore.”

  “Do you say that?” he replied.

  “I do,” I said.

  “And why wouldn’t the Duke write?” he asked.

  “Because he never put a pellet of shot in the letter at all,” I said.

  “But didn’t you find it?” said Brophy.

  “Yes,” I told him. “But I think those that opened the letter put it in when they read that it should be there. I think he meant them to do it. It was the surer way of the two.”

  “That would be very complicated,” said Brophy.

  Some time in that afternoon the wind swung round from the North, and came back to that point whence it blows so much upon Ireland, back to the south-west, whence come the clouds that wrap us warm in the winter and protect us from summer’s heat, clouds bringing us dreams with their shapes and abundant crops with their moisture. Turn your back to an iron balustrade on the side that has gone rusty, or turn away from the mossy side of a tree, and you will have that wind in your face, moist and warm and gentle. It is the wind that has given us our green fields and flowing rivers, when other fields in our latitude are white and other rivers frozen. It blew once more, and a drip splashed from the eaves of farm buildings, and snow slipped softly down suddenly-slanting branches. All night the south-west wind blew, and in the morning patches of snow remained, and patches of green appeared, and patches of flood.

  “It’s the weather for snipe,” said Murphy, when I saw him that morning. And I went to the stables to tell Ryan that I should want the trap, to drive to one of the black bogs not far away, and that I should walk home. And Ryan astonished me by saying: “The Duke’s horse is home, Master Char-les.”

  “But when did he come?” I said; for there had been no word of it yesterday.

  “Last night,” said Ryan.

  “Who brought him?” I asked.

  “Sure, I don’t know that,” said Ryan.

  “Didn’t you see him come in?” I asked.

  “Sure, it was long after I’d gone to bed.”

  “But don’t you lock the stables up?” said I.

  “Sure, I do,” Ryan replied.

  “Then how did he get in?” I asked.

  “Begob, I don’t know that,” said he, with all the air of thinking of something new. And when I saw that look I realised that I should get no more out of Ryan.

  So I turned to more practical things.

  “Is he fit?” I asked.

  “He is,” said Ryan.

  “Could he carry me in a hunt?” I said

  “He could that,” replied Ryan.

  And a new prospect was opened for the holidays.

  Somehow I seemed to know, though I can’t say how; it must have been merely by their expressions; that Murphy, young Finn, and all the men on the place, knew that the horse was home. But nobody ever spoke of it.

  Old willows, lurking like witches by the borders of sere fields; patches of rushes, stray pools, in a world of browns and ochres; make the scene of the next few days that my memory still revisits. There I used to go with Murphy to look for snipe, which in the dark of the moon were all on the black bogs, and I suppose that Murphy told me as much of the ways of snipe as Marlin did, but I missed the things that Marlin knew, which were, or so it seemed, beyond Murphy’s world, and I wanted to go out with Marlin again on Lisronagh and thought of it more and more. I was troubled too about that strange peril which he was so sure threatened his soul; and had some vague idea, which I see was useless, that somehow or other I might be able to help him. How I thought I could help him I do not know, but, trivial though it may seem, I kept away from Lisronagh because it was not the right time for snipe on the bogs of peat, and I had some shy reluctance to going there without much reason again, as I had done once when the bog was all under snow. As soon as the geese returned Marlin had promised to tell me. There was no saying to what distances they might have gone from the snow; they might by now be in Spain. So I shot snipe with Murphy; and then one day the hounds met three miles away. It was the first meet anywhere near, since the horse came back; they usually met far off on the other side of the hills.

  For some days before this meet Ryan had been talking to me, whenever I saw him, about the super-equine powers of the horse that had carried my father; till I knew just how he took a double, how he changed feet on a narrow-bank, and his scorn for the walls of loose stones with which men fenced their fields down by the bog-lands.

  “He’d change feet on a man’s hat,” said Ryan.

  And, not noticing quite the surprise that his exaggeration demanded, he added: “Aye, and the man would never feel it.”

  “Has he wings?” I asked.

  “He has not, for he doesn’t need them,” replied Ryan. “But he’s the kind of horse that would grow them if he got into any difficulty.”

  “He’d grow them on top of a double,” I suggested, “if he couldn’t get down without.”

  “B
egob he would,” said Ryan with great conviction.

  And I learned a great deal about the country from Ryan, for I only knew it this side of the hills, and the country I knew was mostly the bogs and marshes, and the woods of our own demesne. As for riding, I had been blooded in my pram from the pad of a fox just killed in one of our woods; and though I had never owned a hunter as yet and had only ridden ponies, there was probably horsemanship enough in my ancestry to be called up by the sanctifying touch of that wet pad in the hand of the old huntsman fourteen years earlier. Or are all symbols vain?

  On the morning of the meet I went to the stables early to see Ryan about the bit. “Give me a curb,” I said, for I was uneasy about not being able to hold him when I got near the hounds.

  “You’ll hold him better with a snaffle, sir,” said Ryan. “The only use of a curb is for putting a horse into a ditch just as he’s jumping it.”

  And I’m not sure that Ryan wasn’t right. Many a beginner clutches at the rein just as a horse is jumping, especially as the horse lands on the bank of what we call a double, with another ditch in front of him; such clutches are apt to wreck him, and if made sufficiently hard, with the curb, at the wrong moment, are certain to. An expert horseman knows more about riding than horses do, but short of that the horse knows most, especially in a difficult country, and the less one interferes with him the better.

  I had rather a fine pair of spurs; but I saw Ryan quietly looking at them so often, that, when he offered me a pair of my father’s that were only an inch long, I had the sense to take them.

  The meet was at eleven, and I started much too soon, urged by unreasonable fears of missing the hounds. They met at a little village straight out towards the hills, whose grey slopes grew clearer all the way as I rode, till one picked out every window in cottages lower down, and the gates and gaps in stone walls that wandered away to low clouds. Four cross-roads met in the village of Gurraghoo; and every one of the four drew, to a depth of at least twelve miles, from the countryside, all that were able to take their part in the quest and pursuit of a fox. Sometimes I had glimpses of them coming by one of the other three roads, a red coat or the flash of a button. But, from the gorse on the hill above Gurraghoo, the fox that dwelt there must have seen the commotion on every one of the roads to a great distance. He may not have known where they were going, but when he heard more voices than usual in Gurra­ghoo, and noise that gradually increased instead of passing on over the countryside to be dissipated in fields, he must have felt some uneasiness. And uneasiness with a wild animal is not a thing to ponder about or investigate, but a warning on which to act instantly. He probably knew every voice in Gurraghoo, certainly the normal volume of the talk of the village from which he took one chicken every night, as the hunt knew well by reading the village’s claims on the poultry fund and dividing by three. So now the old warning came to him that things amongst men were different, and that the change meant danger. At any rate the fox that had dined outside Gurraghoo the night before, was gone when we drew the gorse covert.

  So we jogged back through the village. And as we went, and as horses gradually changed their places in the long column, I met all the people I knew in the county, for they were all out. And I found that the news of my father’s going, and the cause of it, had got abroad. I was riding beside a neighbour who was a magistrate, as we went through the little crowd in Gurraghoo, a certain Major Wainwright, whom we all regarded as “rather English,” either because of his slightly uncompromising character or because he was a Cromwellian.

  “We’ll get those men one day,” said he, “and have them all committed for trial. Of course you’ll have to identify them.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  And as he was speaking to me we passed a tall dark man in a long black coat, to whom the magistrate’s words must have been clearly audible. He was looking at me, and I stared back at him.

  “Did you ever see me before, sir?” he shouted.

  “I did not,” I answered.

  “Because I thought you were looking at me as though you did,” said the tall man.

  “No, I have never seen you before,” I said.

  What else could I have said? Had I said to the magistrate: “That is like one of the four men that came for my father,” he would, if convicted, have been sentenced to a term of penal servitude: in a few weeks he would have been let out, and long before that I should have been dead; and my father no better off for anything that had happened.

  I reined back my horse till the men in pink coats were all past me, and I was among roughly-dressed men on beautiful horses, but ill-kempt, long-haired and wild; and soon I was level with the tall man in the black coat, who was walking slowly the way that we were going.

  “I got that goose,” I said.

  “By God,” said he, “Master Char-les, that was great!”

  CHAPTER XII

  As a thread of the warp in the weaving of cloth runs through all the threads of the woof, helping to bind them together, so runs the fox in Ireland through all our lives; so that any man who is utterly unconcerned with the fox lives a little apart from the rest of us. Who such a man could be I do not know; for, to begin with, no one owning poultry or turkeys can be quite immune from the fear of the footfall of that red visitor, inaudible on the stillest nights, however closely you listen for it. And that is, I suppose, the original sin on account of which we hunt him, and it must have been to deal with those prowlings, too subtle for his own wits, that man first sought the help of his friend the dog in this matter. And, having sought it, this organisation in defence of his poultry spread ramifications round the very heart of man. There are towns to be found in which the name of a fox stirs no more quickening of pulses than does the mention of guinea-pigs; but not in Ireland. For in the little Irish towns no man is so far into the dry waste of streets that the sounds of the hunt, from say in the South, cannot reach him, but that some other pack on the northern side, passing the town’s edge, will bring him running out to see the red coats go by, and to feed his memory with the things that the pavement can never give. And so we give you the toast from our Irish shores: The Fox (death to him!), may he live for ever. And nearly two hundred of us concerned in this matter were jogging now in the direction of Clonrue, with the hills at first on our left as we rode along at the feet of them, and then almost behind us when we had turned to our right. And who was not concerned in it? First of all we had the whole of “the gentry” for twelve miles round, and as many of their daughters as a horse could be found for; then we had from a rather smaller area as many of the farmers as had a horse that could carry them; soldiers, squireens, a few strangers, grooms, second horsemen, and men with young horses of which they had hopes that they had not named to anyone; but who, as a young girl sometimes looks to Heaven, far and yet not unattainable, looked to the Grand National.

  There were no priests at the meet, because they are forbidden to hunt, though not forbidden to ride; and of course if they meet with hounds while they are riding, it is no sin to go the same way with them. All the priests in that part of the county were out riding that morning along the road under the hills from Gurraghoo to Clonrue.

  It was a long jog to Clonrue, over five miles: that is the beauty of Irish coverts, there are usually so few that when a fox leaves one he has a very long way to go to the next one: and there was a wood of wild osiers beyond Clonrue near the bog, an almost certain draw. All the way as we went that fervour leaped up among all who saw us pass, a fervour for the quest not limited to those that were taking part in it; men, women, children and dogs were all awakened from other pursuits to let their thoughts soar up from their own fields and then to sail with us over the grey-green plain, now shining in sunlight far away from those hills. And if any say that our quest was not worthy of this awakening, I can only say in argument that perhaps whatever awakens us to any vivid intensities needs no other test of its worth; but in evidence I can say this on oath, that I have seen the emptiness of many things, like
a white damp wall of mist closing roads to the spirit utterly, but never yet have I noticed it in a fox-hunt. Certainly on that day the hope of seeing a fox killed in the open, even the less presumptuous hope of being there before the tumultuous gathering at that furious feast was over, was as bright a splendour to me as could be the hope of any statesman to see the ruin of his enemy’s land, with all its fortresses fallen. And so we moved to Clonrue till the hills were grey behind us, and the voices of dogs warning Gurraghoo that something strange was afoot were faint cries adding a weirdness to the solitude of those fields. And the dogs that guarded the houses of Clonrue took up the cry. And, among those that waited to watch our coming by, the first that I saw was Marlin. He was standing dark against one of the white walls, with a look in his eyes such as inspiration might have, as he gazed at the young girls riding there, and at young well-mounted men, and the young horses. And I saw then, once for all, that quiet age and calm and repentance, and at last Heaven, were none of these things for Marlin, but that, turning away from all of them, he would only look for such glories as youth can give, and would always yearn for that land whose history was the dreams of the young and that knew nought of salvation. For a moment I would have spoken one last word to save him, and was silent knowing there was nothing that I could say; and at that moment I saw a priest ride by, and I turned to him, for he could have done it, but still no words came to me; and the priest rode on, and from the look in his eyes as he went by I saw that Marlin was lost.