The Curse of the Wise Woman Page 9

  Another memory that I have of that long ride is the glow of port by lantern-light. One man had suddenly urged his horse into some sort of a brisk trot and gone on ahead of us: his house was on our road, only a few yards back from the very roadside, and when we came up, there he was outside his hall door with a lantern; and soon he was giving us port in claret glasses, and the port glowed near the lantern. Queer things one’s memory carries far into another century.

  And a few miles further on I parted from them all with affectionate farewells as they took the road to Gurraghoo and I the road home, the magistrate with whom I had talked at the meet, and the Master himself, both offering to ride with me to our gates. “You don’t think you’ll meet any of those four blackguards in the dark?” said one of them. “Better let us see you home.”

  But I wouldn’t take them out of their way on their tired horses. “They couldn’t know where I am,” I said, “after a hunt like this.” Which they agreed was true enough, and we said goodnight.

  The last few miles I walked beside my horse. But I had not gone far from where I said goodbye to the rest, nor yet dismounted, when my horse shied suddenly, and I saw a figure step from the dark of the hedge. First the stranger spoke to my horse, seeming to soothe it instantly, and I recognised the voice of the man with whom I had talked in Gurraghoo; and then he spoke to me.

  “Are you all right, Master Char-les?” he asked.

  “I am that,” I said.

  “What kept you so late?” he said. “I’ve been here three hours.”

  “We had a great hunt,” I told him.

  “Glory be to God,” he remarked.

  Then I told him how we had gone to Clonnabrann from the covert beyond Clonrue. It was too dark to see his face, but I knew that he was looking up at me wondering.

  “And you saw the end of it, Master Char-les?” said he.

  “I did,” I answered.

  And he gave thanks to God again, and said: “All the gentry will know you now, Master Char-les; and you’ll not be feeling so lonely without your father.”

  And I trotted on.

  When I got to our lodge on the Clonrue road, with my tired horse dragging behind me as we walked, a sleepy lodge-keeper who, but for me, would have been by now in bed, opened the gates and let us through and then locked them up for the night. I too was sleepy and our talk was brief. I remember the little fires glowing dimly in the demesne, burning heaps of branches that the snow had broken and that now had been tidied up and were being burned, but looking more like fires that gnomes had lit for warming small brown hands secretly while man was out of the way. Then I had a long talk with Ryan, but what either of us said I do not remember. I remember the glow of the hall when I came to the house, a brightness hurting the eyes. And I was not very hungry, as I would have expected to be. And that is about all I remember of that evening.

  I woke quite early next morning. I woke with the pleasant sense of treasure in the room that a buccaneer might have felt, when overnight he had come by a good share of the treasure of Spain, or some merchant or pirate who by any means has newly come by a little sack of pearls, only needing to be strung. So, only needing to be tidied up by a taxidermist, lay raw and fresh on my pillow the brush whose mouldering remains hanging here beside me to-day cause Monsieur Alphonse to say that no Englishmen are serious; and I point out to him that I am not an Englishman, but a representative of the Irish Free State; and Monsieur Alphonse apologises in that whimsical way he has, which is really no apology at all, but is completely disarming.

  I soon went round to the stables, and there I saw Ryan, in with the horse, running a hand down one of the fore-legs from knee to fetlock.

  “Good morning, Ryan,” I called out.

  “He’ll hunt no more for a long time,” said Ryan. “He has a big leg on him.”

  I hardly believed it, and in my disappointment I retorted to Ryan: “I thought you said he had wings.”

  “And so he might have,” said Ryan; “but he could have lost all the feathers out of them between here and Clonnabrann.”

  And in the end I had to accept Ryan’s judgment; both the fore-legs were hot, and he would not be fit for a long time.

  I had set out to write down memories of an Ireland fast passing away, so that something might remain of it, if only on shelves where books sleep and are seldom disturbed, and dust gathers softly as the days and the years go by; of hunts that led a field of over two hundred, with a hundred men in red coats, where now there are twenty or thirty out at the most, and five red coats to be seen; and of the life of an Irish gentleman on his estate. Briefly I meant in my idle moments, which are very many here, to do the little that a wandering pen may do to check the flight to oblivion of pleasures and occupations that Ireland knew once so abundantly. What oblivion can never claim, what outlasts histories, is consequently irrelevant to my purpose. Yet, only yesterday there occurred an episode, trifling enough to the casual onlooker, which turned my memories far aside from the work I had planned for them, to contemplate once again the very first of those unchanging and time-defying things. I had been writing down my memories in the morning, and they set me thinking so much of Ireland again that either this or an impulse that I can never explain urged me, almost compelled me, to go down to the station to see the Overland Express come in at 12.25. On this train, that contains mostly travellers from other countries coming to drink the waters at the well-known springs in this State, I thought that I might see an Irish face once more. I went on to the platform without paying the usual schlwig, almost the equivalent of our penny, which is one of my diplomatic privileges, and saw the train come in. A commissaire was going along the first-class carriages with forms that had to be filled in, merely the full names of the traveller and of his parents, the correct address of the house in which he was born, his exact age, the number of his teeth (this purely for identification), his religion and occupation, the number of his motor-car and the name of his usual laundress. The whole thing took no more than a minute. I noticed that all the German first-class passengers enjoyed doing this, and that all the English ones submitted to it. The third-class passengers have to register at a bureau. Then I saw the commissaire go up to a lady whom I could not clearly see in the dark of the railway-carriage, but I saw from a certain air that he wore that there was some kind of charm about her that brightened the commissaire’s eye and even seemed to illumine a little his rather absurd uniform. He began to ask his questions, he began on behalf of the country he served to attempt to reduce the lady to a formula, as it was his duty to do. Fifty passengers had been so reduced already; none had complained and many of them had enjoyed it. But Irish people do not like forms and formulæ. And this was an Irish lady. She was thinking of her luggage, and he of the mathematical formula by which it was his duty to sum up all human souls on that train in possession of a first-class ticket. At first I did not hear what they said. He was on the platform and she inside the carriage. When she came into the doorway I saw an elderly lady, but one with an air and a grace well able to account for that bright look that had come in the eye of the commissaire; a look that she had not missed. He had already asked her, I suppose, eight or nine questions, and as she stood there he politely asked her her age. Then she turned on him. He was looking up at her still with that rather foolish expression that was his tribute to those feminine graces about her.

  “Seventy,” she rapped out. “And ripe for the grave.”

  So falls the hail on the apple-blossom.

  The bright, foolish look fell from his face, but his politeness did not desert him.

  “Ah, no, madame,” he said.

  “Should I come here to drink your foul waters if I weren’t?” she said.

  And they have a foul taste, though very medicinal.

  And in the end he never got his form filled in, but filled it in himself from imagination; and did it so well that when he brought it later to me, who could have filled it in to the tiniest detail, I left it just as it was.

&nb
sp; But the moment she spoke I knew her. I went forward then, and at first she didn’t remember me; so I told her my name, and she gave me the old smile, that all those years never altered; and it was that smile that has interfered with my memories, turning them from a chronicle of things that are passing away, to what will not pass away while any life remains to watch stars or dawn on this planet.

  I too was shocked to hear her say she was seventy, for I had remembered her seventeen. She was about a year older than I. I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a life-time, for no imagination copes with it. Try it yourself, reader. Look at any young girl, lithe, athletic, full of strength and dreams, and try as you look at her to picture her seventy. The picture before you blurs the imagination’s picture. You cannot see the two. And another thing you cannot do: you cannot hold your forefingers before you horizontally, nearly touching, and then revolve one of them one way and one the other. We are always more concerned with one thing at a time than our intellect chooses to recognise.

  And so it was that once she was seventeen.

  I did not tell you that she was in the hunt to Clonnabrann. I had not meant to write of her at all, but Fate thrust her among my memories yesterday morning, and they will not leave her now. I see her still so clearly, I who saw her yesterday; I see her standing on the grass by the side of the avenue at Cloghna­currer, as I rode up on our carriage-horse; medium height, a very slender figure, a face not thin but rather as though it had been chiselled first to an exquisite profile, long ago in Greece by a sculptor, and afterwards copied in Heaven from the cold marble and given there the colour and warmth of humanity; a darkish dress, no hat, the wind in her hair, and above everything her grey eyes. That slender figure that more than fifty years cannot efface from my memory, is surely undimmed by a day; and the figure that I saw yesterday in the train, perhaps a little burlier than the dapper form of the commissaire, cannot oust from its place a single one of those visions that I have brought from the past, and that I cherish more than a child cherishes bright shells and pebbles that it has taken home from the seaside, and for whose sake I principally live. And the eyes are the same as ever. Well then, a letter came about noon the day after the hunt, brought by the postman from Gurraghoo, and sent there on a horse, a letter from Mrs. Lanley, and that was Laura’s mother; and Laura Lanley was the lady who years later refused, I am afraid rather unreasonably, to tell the commissaire the number of her teeth, the name of her laundress or the address of the house in which she was born. And the letter invited me to come over to tea at Cloghnacurrer that day, and asked if I would mind bringing over to show them, the brush of the Clonrue fox. So might the Queen of Sheba have asked Solomon if he would mind showing her his treasure of gold and ivory, and though that wise mind would have known that it was said to please him, still it would have done so. So I took the relic and rode over, five or six miles on the carriage-horse, past Gurraghoo to Cloghnacurrer; and that is where I saw her, not for the first time, but it is the time when she seemed to walk into my memories for ever. I saw her standing by the avenue as I rode up to the house, and I dismounted and showed her the brush, and she looked at it with just the same expression with which she saw it again yesterday, when she came to have a cup of tea with me; and Monsieur Alphonse, who had escorted her to my rooms, saw her thus, standing in silence. And Monsieur Alphonse said: “I see, then, that it is a holy relic.”

  “No, no!” I exclaimed.

  But, before I had time to stop him, he crossed himself. I tried to explain, but all he said was: “Pardon me, my friend, if I have said you are not serious, because of this. I see, now, that it is your religion.”

  “No, no,” I said, and finding that I was making no headway with him I turned to Laura, knowing that she could do it, and said to her: “Please explain to Monsieur the Attaché.”

  And Laura said: “Yes. It is our religion.”

  I was in despair then. “What will you think of us?” I cried to Monsieur Alphonse.

  “My friend,” he said, “I respect all men’s religions. I have no exalted post. To the contrary. But I should not be even where I am if I had not shown that respect always.”

  And he turned to the old brush and crossed himself again.

  “That’s right,” was all that Laura said to him.

  I am once more fifty-two years ahead of my story, but the events of yesterday have disturbed the quiet routine by which I was jotting down memories every day as a man writes a diary. Well then, I showed that brush to Laura Lanley fifty-two years ago, and she gazed at it in the same stillness that made Monsieur the Attaché act so strangely only yesterday. And how easily she might have had that brush for herself; so easily that I think that only by some look of hers at the Master, that I had not seen, or perhaps merely by turning away from him, the vacancy can have been left open to me. I could not give it to her, for such things cannot be given by ordinary men, but must come direct from the hand of a Master of Fox Hounds. She gazed at it and we walked to the house talking of that great day, that was then so near to us, and the memories of which were shared among so many. How many remember it now?

  CHAPTER XV

  We must have had tea early; for I remember going out with Laura afterwards, and the sunset still lingered. I have the impression of a warm evening while we walked on gravel paths through the shrubs of the garden. I think that walking slowly in those latitudes, after sunset in January, would kill me now; so the warmth that seemed to come from the glow in the western sky cannot really have been sufficient to warm us without those hopes and emotions that come no more. Their splendours, it must have been, that kept us warm. What we talked of I do not remember. But I remember there came a time, as we walked in that evening, when I wished to tell her of strange lands, and of things and people seen that she did not know; but I had never travelled, and knew the land round about us less than she did, and there seemed no such places of which I could tell her anything and my boyish whim seemed frustrated. And suddenly I thought of Marlin and the way over the bog to the pools that glimmered in sunlight, and thence, as he had so often told me, the bog, narrowed and all hemmed in and yet wandering free to the ocean; and a little way over the water, the land to which the dreams of so few had gone. Of this I could tell her. And so I began to speak of Tir-nan-Og, the land of the young. As she heard me her eyes darkened, and I saw that no land to which I could have travelled, had I been able to follow wherever youth’s spirit led, would ever have excited that interest that was awakened in her by the mention of Tir-nan-Og, which from its place outside geo­graphy exerts through the twilight that curious lure to which Marlin had wholly surrendered. It is strange indeed that talking of Tir-nan-Og seemed to strengthen its frontiers; and, sentence by sentence, as though they were the steps of a traveller walking westwards through twilight, Tir-nan-Og came nearer. Over the shrubs and through the branches of evergreens, now blackening with the approach of night that seemed to come first to them, we both glanced westwards to where the day was sinking: on what shores, we wondered.

  At first I had asked her if she believed that the bog went all the way to the sea, as Marlin said; and she fully corroborated him. So much for geography. And then I spoke a little of Irish legends, like a traveller of strange lands fearing his wonders will not be believed; and she told me other legends of this land of ours. Mere incredulity unarmed, without its weapons of ridicule, would have swept Tir-nan-Og out of my thoughts for ever, and better perhaps if it had, even regarding only my interests in this world; but the tales she told from old writings upon the outskirts of history, and I from the talk of Marlin, so bore each other out that a new land seemed gradually lifting into sight of our wonder, with streams and gardens clear enough at any rate for our hopes; and how much in life is no more certain than that? It was easy just then to believe in such a land, if I did believe in it, for I was walking in the twilight in Ireland, side by side with youth in its triumph and in its power. What mi
racles might not be achieved by such a radiance? As for immortality in unfading gardens of the West, that was little more to imagine than the belief which we both held firmly, that this radiant youth of ours would be with us always, and that the longings our hearts had then would never pass away. Time was then a grey spectre that other people had seen, like the phantom told in a ghost story before a pleasant fire, but not a power whose lightest finger had touched us, or of whom we had any fear.

  And then I told her of Marlin, and Marlin became for us the pioneer of this strange new world we had found for ourselves, a kind of gate-keeper at the border of fairyland. He was so clearly a citizen of Tir-nan-Og, and yet he lived here on the solid land that is mapped; and the thought of him linked the two lands, as that sunlit stretch of water out by the bog’s horizon seemed to link them whenever I saw it. I told her, too, something of Marlin’s mother, and of the witchcraft of her, and of how she had foretold me of Clonnabrann; so that always after that, whenever we spoke together, there seemed to be something of magic tingeing our talk, a background of wonder behind Laura and me that others had not got, or so it appeared to me, as though we stood together before curtains of rare fabric veiling a witch’s chamber, or draping windows that looked from some sheer tower far over enchanted lands. Then as the light went out of the sky and colour grew more triumphant, and mystery as though on tiptoe stole into the sleeping air, we spoke again of the West and the Land of the Young. And if Tir-nan-Og have its foundations more firmly based upon the dreams of a few people, growing, I fear, fewer, than upon whatever land there may be in the Atlantic a little out from our coasts, then how much of its twilight may not be lit by the love of Laura and me, which soon rose up and glowed as we talked of Tir-nan-Og? It shone upon all my youth and lit many years for me: may not some rays of it have ripened the apple-blossom on those immortal branches?