Read Ebook: An Isle in the Water by Tynan Katharine

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Sisyphus-like task of endeavouring to roll a very large water-barrel through his mother's very small door, all one winter night, while his mother alternately coaxed and threatened. Mick's pranks were endless, but lest they meet with a severer judge than Mick ever met with, I spare you the recital of them.

Now Mrs. Sheehy was far less tolerated and tolerable than either of her peccant sons. She had a little withered face, with hard red cheeks and bright, rather mad black eyes, set in a frame of crinkly black hair. You might meet her on the road of a sweet summer morning, trapesing, to use the expressive Irish word, along, with a sunshade over her battered bonnet. Her attire was generally made up of very tarnished finery,--a befrilled skirt trailing in the dust behind her, and a tattered lace shawl disposed corner-wise over her shoulders. She seemed always to wear the cast-off garments of fine ladies, and we had an explanation of this fact. It was supposed that Mrs. Sheehy represented herself to pious Protestant ladies, for about a radius of twenty miles, as a Papist, who might easily be brought to see the error of her ways, and as one who for her liberal tendencies was much in disfavour with the priests. I know that to her co-religionists she complained that Protestant charities were closed to her because she had become a Catholic. There was a legend that Mrs. Sheehy came from a Protestant stock, but I do not know whether this were true or merely invented for convenience when the lady went asking alms.

It was from some of these Protestant ladies the suggestion came that Mick should go to America under some precious emigration scheme. They are always, with their mistaken philanthropy, drafting away the boys and girls from Ireland, to cast them, human wreckage, in the streets of New York; always taking away the young life from the sweet glens over which the chapel bell sends its shepherding voice, and casting it away in noisome places, while at home the aged folk go down alone the path to the grave.

Now we always thought that Mrs. Sheehy must have suggested Mick as an emigrant, for he was distinctly not eligible. But it was very easy to puff up poor Mick's mind with pictures of America as a Tom Tiddler's ground, and the mother did this in private, while in public she wrung her hands over the wilful boy that would go and leave her lonesome in her old age. Pretty soon the matter was settled, and Mick went about as vain as any young recruit when he has taken the Queen's shilling and donned the scarlet, and has not yet realised that he has been a fine fat goose for the fox-sergeant's plucking.

But if Mick was full of the spirit of adventure, and looked forward to that spring Wednesday when he should leave for Queenstown, his mother made up for his heartless joy by her lugubriousness. As the time drew near she would buttonhole all and sundry whom she could catch to pour out her sorrows. The trailing gown and ragged lace shawl became a danger signal which we would all flee from, an it were not sprung upon us too suddenly. We had a shrewd suspicion that the tears Mrs. Sheehy shed so freely were of the variety known as crocodile. Rumour had it that Mick once out of the way she was to be accommodated comfortably for life as a lodgekeeper to one of those emigrating ladies. Sometimes she used to follow us to our very doors to weep, and on such occasions would be so overcome with grief that it took a little whisky and water and the gift of an old dress or some broken victuals to prepare her for the road again.

On the Tuesday of the week Mick was to start he made a farewell progress round all the houses of the neighbourhood. We were called into the big farmhouse kitchen about five of the afternoon to bid him good-bye. Mick sat forward on the edge of his chair, thrusting now and then his knuckles into his eyes, like a big child, and trying to wink away his tears. We all did our best to console him, and after a time from being very sad he grew rather uproariously gay. Mick was no penman, but for all that he made the wildest promises about writing, and as for the gifts he was to send us, the place should be indeed a Tom Tiddler's ground if he were to fulfil his rash promises. Meanwhile we all pressed our parting gifts on him; some took the form of money, others were useful or beneficial, as we judged it. Mick added everything to the small pack he was carrying, which had indeed already swollen since he left home, and was likely to be considerably more swollen by the time he had concluded his round.

Mick had got over the parting with his mother. The emigrants' train started in the small hours, and the emigrants were to rendezvous at a common lodging-house close by the big terminus. We inquired about poor Mrs. Sheeny with feeling. Mick responded with a return of tears that he'd left her screeching for bare life and tearing her hair out in handfuls. The memory caused Mick such remorse at leaving her that we hastened to distract his mind to his fine prospects once more.

He delayed so long over his farewells to us that we began to fear he'd never catch up with the other emigrants, for the road to the city was studded with the abodes of Mick's friends, whom he had yet to call upon. However, at last he really said good-bye, and we accompanied him in a group to the gate of the farmyard, from which, with a last distracted wave of his hands, the poor fellow set off, running, as if he could not trust himself to look back, along the field-path. It was a dewy May evening after rain, and the hawthorn was all in bloom, and the leaves shaking out their crumpled flags of tender green. The blackbird was singing as he only sings after rain, and the fields were covered with the gold and silver dust of buttercup and daisy. It was sad to see the poor fellow going away at such a time, and from a place where every one knew and was kind to him, to an unknown world that might be very cruel. Once again as we watched him we anathematised the emigration which has so steadily been bleeding the veins of our poor country.

We all thought of Mick the next morning, and imagined him on the various stages of his journey to Queenstown, and the big liner. For a week or so we did not see Mrs. Sheehy, but heard piteous accounts of her prostration. The poor woman seemed incapable of taking comfort. Report said that she could neither eat nor drink, so great was her grief. We felt rather ashamed of our former judgments of her, and were very full of good resolutions as to our future treatment of her. Only Mary, our maid, disbelieved in this excessive grief; but then Mary is the most profound cynic I have ever known, and we always discount her judgments.

Anyhow, when Mrs. Sheehy reappeared in our kitchen she looked more wizened, yellow, and dishevelled than ever, and at the mention of Mick's name she rocked herself to and fro in such paroxysms of grief that we were quite alarmed. As for the benevolent ladies interested in the schemes of emigration, their eyes would have been rudely opened if they could have heard Mrs. Sheehy's denunciations of them. She called them the hard-hearted ould maids who had robbed her of her one child, who had persecuted her boy--her innocent child, and driven him out in the cold world, who had left her to go down a lone woman to the grave. Nor was this all, for she was an adept at eloquent Irish curses, and she sprinkled them generously on the devoted heads of the ladies aforesaid. It was really rather fine to see Mrs. Sheehy in this tragic mood, and we were all touched and impressed by her. We comforted her with the suggestion that a letter from Mick was nearly due, and with assurances, which we scarcely felt, that Mick was bound to do well in America and prove a credit to her; and we finally got rid of her, and were rejoiced to see her going off, with her turned-up skirt full as usual of heterogeneous offerings.

Well, a few days after this, some one brought us the surprising story that Mick had returned or was on the way to return. One of the carters had given him a lift on the first stage of his journey from Dublin, and had left him by his own request at one of the houses where he had had such a sorrowful parting a little while before. The man had told Mick of his mother's grief, a bit of intelligence which somewhat dashed the radiant spirits with which he was returning home. However, he cheered up immediately: 'Tell th' ould woman,' he said, 'that I wasn't such a villain as to leave her at all, at all, an' that I'll be home by evenin'. She'll be havin' a bit o' bacon in the pot to welcome me.' The man told us this with a dry grin, and added, ''Tis meself wouldn't like to be afther bringin' the poor ould woman the good news. It might be too much joy for the crathur to bear.' This ironic speech revived all our doubts of Mrs. Sheehy.

There were plenty of people to tell us of the prodigal's welcome. The village had buzzed all day with the dramatic sensation of Mick's return, but no one had told Mrs. Sheehy--though every one was on tiptoe for the hour of Mick's arrival. He came about six in the evening, and having passed through the village was escorted by a band of the curious towards his mother's cottage.

Mrs. Sheehy lives in a by-road. On one side are the woods, on the other the fields, and at this hour of the May evening the woods were full of golden aisles of glory. Now Mrs. Sheehy had come out of her house to give a bit to the pig, when she saw a group of people advancing towards her down the sunshine and shadow of the road. She shaded her eyes and looked that way. For a minute or two she could not make out the advancing figures, but from one in the midst broke a yell, a too-familiar yell, for who in the world but Mick could make such a sound? Then her prodigal son dashed from the midst of the throng and flew to her with his arms spread wide.

Mrs. Sheehy seemed taken with a genuine faintness. She dropped the 'piggin,'--the little one-handled tub in which she was carrying the rentpayer's mess of greens,--and fell back against the wall. The spectators, and it seemed the whole village had turned out, came stealing in Mick's wake. They were safe from Mrs. Sheehy's dreaded tongue, for the lady had no eyes for them. As soon as she realised that it was Mick, really her son, come back to her, she burst into a torrent of abuse, the like of which has never been equalled in our country. The listeners could give no idea of it: it was too continuous and too eloquent. It included not only Mick, 'the villain, the thief of the world, the base unnatural deceiver,' but ourselves, and all to whom Mick had paid those farewell visits. Mick heard her with a grin, and when she had exhausted herself she suddenly clutched him by his mop-head, dragged him indoors, and banged the door to.

She had apprehended the true state of the case. The potations at some houses, the gifts at others, had been the causes of the failure of Mick as an emigrant. When his round of visits was concluded he had slept comfortably in a hay-stack till long after the hour when his fellow emigrants were starting from Kingsbridge. The next morning he had gaily set out for 'a bit of a spree' in Dublin, and having sold his passage ticket and his little kit, had managed, with the proceeds and our gifts, to make the spree last a fortnight. For a little while we deemed it expedient to avoid passing by Mrs. Sheehy's door, though Mick assured us that it was 'the joy of the crathur had taken her wits from her, so that she didn't rightly know what she was saying.'

There was one more attempt made to emigrate Mick, but it was futile, Mick declaring that 'he'd deserve any misfortune, so he would, if he was ever to turn his back on the old woman again.' Mrs. Sheehy has forgiven us our innocent share in keeping Mick at home with her. The mother and son still live together, with varying times, just as the working mood is on or off Mick. I believe his favourite relaxation of an evening, when he stays at home, is to discover in the wood embers the treasures which would have fallen to him if his love for his mother hadn't kept him from expatriating himself. The Hon. Miss Ellersby's vacant gate-lodge has been filled up by Kitty Keegan, who is Mrs. Sheehy's special aversion out of all the world.

CHANGING THE NURSERIES

To-day the fiat has gone forth, and we are already deep in consultation over paper and paint, chintz, and carpeting. How many years I have dreaded it; how many staved off, beyond my hope, the transformation of those two dear rooms! They have been a shabby corner in my big, stately house for many a day--a corner to which in the long, golden afternoons I could steal for an hour and shut out the world, and nurse my sorrow at my breast like a crying child. You may have heard Catholics talk about a 'retreat,' a quiet time in which one shuffles off earthly cares, and steeps one's soul in the silence that washes it and makes it strong. Such a 'retreat' I have given my heart in many and many an hour in the old nurseries. I have sat there with my hands folded, and let the long-still little voices sound sweet in my ear--the voices of the dead children, the voices of the grown children whose childhood is dead. The voices cry to me, indeed, many a time when I have no leisure to hear them. When I am facing my dear man at the other end of our long dining-table, when I am listening to the chatter of callers in my drawing-room, at dinner-parties and balls, in the glare of the theatre, I often hear the cries to which I must not listen.

A mother has such times, though her matronhood be crowned like mine with beautiful and dear children, and with the love of the best husband in the world. I praise God with a full heart for His gifts; but how often in the night I have wakened heart-hungry for the little ones, and have held my breath and crushed back my sobs lest the dear soul sleeping so placidly by my side should discover my inexplicable trouble. In the nurseries that I shall have no more after to-day, the memories of them have crowded about my knees like gentle little ghosts. There were the screened fire-place and the tiny chairs which in winter they drew near the blaze, and the window overlooking the pleasance and a strip of the garden, where the wee faces crowded if I were walking below. Things are just as they were: the little beds huddled about the wall; the cheap American clock, long done ticking, on the mantelshelf; the doll's house, staring from all its forlorn windows, as lonely as a human habitation long deserted; the cupboard, through the open doors of which you may see the rose-bedecked cups that were specially bought for the nursery tea. Am I the same woman that used to rustle so cheerfully down the nursery corridor to share that happy afternoon tea? From the door, half denuded of its paint, peachy little faces used to peep joyfully at my coming; while inside there waited my little delicate one, long gone to God, who never ran and played with the others. I can see her still, with the pleasure lighting up her little, thin face, where she sat sedately, her scarlet shoes to the blaze and her doll clasped to a tenderly maternal breast.

They will tear down the wall paper to-morrow, and the pictures of Beauty and the Beast, and those fine-coloured prints of children and doggies and beribboned pussy-cats that the children used to love. There is one of a terrier submitting meekly to be washed by an imperious small mistress. One of my babies loved that terrier so tenderly that he had to be lifted morning and night to kiss the black nose, whence the oily shine of the picture is much disfigured at that point. He is grown now and a good boy, but less fond of kissing, and somehow independent of his father and of me. There on the window shutter is a drawing my baby, Nella, made the year she died, a strange and wonderful representation of a lady and a dog. I have never allowed it to be washed out, and perhaps only mothers will understand me when I say that I have kissed it often with tears.

I shall miss my nurseries bitterly. No one ever came there but myself in those quiet afternoon hours, and my old Mary, my nurse, who nursed them all from first to last. She surprised me once as I sat strangling with sobs amid the toys I had lifted from their shelves, the dilapidated sheep, the Noah's Ark, the engine, which for want of a wheel lies on its side, and a whole disreputable regiment of battered dolls and tin soldiers. On my lap there were dainty garments of linen and wool, every one of which I kissed so often with a passion of regret. I have kept my baby clothes selfishly till now, hidden away in locked drawers, sweet with lavender. To-day I have parted with them. They are gone to dress the Christmas babies at a great maternity hospital. Each one I set aside to go tore my heart intolerably. May the Christmas Babe who lacked such clothing in the frost and snow, love the little ones, living or dead, to whom those tiny frocks and socks and shirts once belonged! Giving them away, I seem to have wrenched my heart from the dead children; each gift was a separate pang. The toys, too, go to-morrow to the Sisters of Charity, who have a great house near at hand. A Sister, a virginal creature whom I have seen holding the puny babies of the poor to a breast innocently maternal, has told me of the children who at Christmastide have no toys. This year they shall not go without; so I am sending them all--the doll's house and the rocking-horse, and all the queer contents of the nursery shelves, and the fairy stories well thumbed, with here and there a loose page, and the boxes of bricks and the clockwork mouse--all, all my treasures.

Yet, if the children had all lived, I might yet have had my nurseries. The three youngest died one after another: my smallest boy, whom I have not ceased yet to regard as my baby, I kept in the nurseries as long as I could. He has not yet outgrown his guinea-pigs, and his bantams, his squirrels, and his litter of puppies. When he went to school he commended each to my care, with tears he in vain tried manfully to wink away. Dear little sweetheart, he gave way at last, and we cried together passionately. But I wish he need not have gone for another year. He was more babyish than the others, more content to remain long my baby. His first letters from school were tear-stained and full of babyish thoughts and reminiscences. But he is growing ashamed of the softness, I can see, and talks of 'fellows,' and 'fielding,' and 'runs,' and 'wickets' in a way that shows me that my baby has put on the boy.

It was not fair, I see, to have kept the nurseries so long. The boys at the University, the girls, enjoying their first introduction to the gay world, have wanted rooms for their friends, and generous as the big house is, it does not do much more than hold its own happy brood. The nurseries are to be made into a couple of charming rooms, the one with a paper of tea-roses on a white satin ground, and yellow and white hangings, and paint and tiles in the pretty grate. The other is to be green and pink, with a suite of green furniture and rosy hangings. I entered into it with zest as my girls debated it. But all the time my heart cried out against the devastation of its dreams. To-morrow, when they begin to dismantle my nurseries, I do not know how I shall bear it. I feel to-night as if they were going to turn the gentle inhabitants out into the night and rain, the shades of my little children who used to sit round the fire of winter evenings, or by the window in the long, exquisite summer days. It is like long, long ago, when Nella and Cuckoo and Darling died.

THE FIELDS OF MY CHILDHOOD

They lie far away, gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie--common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a child once who knew every inch of them as well as the ant her anthill, or the silvery minnow her brown well under the stone cover, to which one descends by ancient water-stained steps.

The fields are there, but their face somewhat changed, as other things are changed. We were little ones when we came to live among them, in a thatched house full of little nests of rooms, the walls of which were run over by flowery trellises that made them country-like even by candle-light. Of candle-light I have not much memory, for we went to bed in the gloaming, when the long, long day had burned itself out and the skies were washed with palest green that held the evening star; and we slept dreamlessly till the golden day shot through the chinks of the shutters, and we leapt to life again with a child's zest for living. At the back of the house there was an overgrown orchard, a dim, delicious place where the gnarled boughs made a roof against heaven. It was our adventure, time and again, to escape through our windows and wash our feet in the May dew before we were discovered. One whole summer, indeed, these revels were hindered by a bull which was pastured on the lush herbage. But how entrancing it was to hear him roar at night, close by our bed's head, or to see his great shadow cross the chink of moonlight in the shutter! Sometimes he ate the rose-bushes that wreathed our window, and, rubbing his gigantic flanks against the house-wall, bellowed, while we shook in bed in delicious tremors, and imagined our cosy nest a tent in the African desert, with lions roaring outside. I remember the rooms so well: the chilly parlour, only used when we had grown-up visitors, for we were there in charge of a nurse; the red-tiled kitchen, with its settle and its little windows opening inward; the door that gave on a grass-grown approach; and the stone seat outside, where we sat to shell peas, or made 'plays' with broken bits of crockery and the shreds of shining tin pared by the travelling tinker when he mended the porringers. I remember the very cups and saucers from which we drank our rare draughts of tea--delicate china, with sea-shells on it in tones of gray, the varied shapes of which gave us ever-new interest.

Across it you saw the gray house-chimneys of the lonely house reputed to be haunted. Opposite its door stood an old fort on a little hill, a noted resort of the fairies. Any summer gloaming at all, you might see their hundreds of little lamps threading a fantastic measure in and out on the rath. I never heard that any one saw more of them than those lights, which floated away if any were bold enough to approach them, like glorified balls of that thistledown of which children divine what's o'clock.

At the other side of the Ten Acres was a fantastic corner of grass, which was always a miniature meadow. There swung the scarlet and black butterflies which have flown into Fairyland, and there the corn-crake built her nest in the grass. It was a famous corner for bird's-nesting, which with us took no crueller form than liking to part the thick leaves to peep at the pretty, perturbed mother-thrush on her clutch. Sometimes we peeped too often, and she flew away and left the eggs cold. We saw the world from that corner, for one could see through the hedge on to the road by lying low where the roots of the hedge-row made a thinness. We should not have cared about this if it were not that we could look, unseen ourselves, at the infrequent passer-by, for the hedge grew luxuriantly. Further down it became partly a clay bank, and there on the coarse grass used to hang snail-shells of all sizes, and, as I remember them, of shining gold and silver. The inhabitant was the drawback to all that beauty, yet when we found an empty house, it was cold, dull, and with the sheen vanished.

Across the road was the moat-field, the great fascination of which was in the wild hill that gave it its name. What the moat originally was I know not. I think, now, it must have been a gravel-hill, for it was full of deep gashes, of pits and quarries, run over by briar, alight with furze-bushes. It must have been long disused, for the hedge that was set around it--to keep the cattle out, perhaps--was tall and sturdy, and grew up boldly towards the trees that studded it at intervals. There was no other entry to it except by gaps we made in the close hedge, and, wriggling through these, we climbed among briars and all kinds of vegetation that made a miniature jungle overhead. Near the top we emerged on stunted grass, with the wide sky over us, and before us the champaign country stretching to the plains of Meath, and the smoke of the city, and the misty sea. Southwards there were the eternal hills which grow so dear to one, yet never so intimate that they have not fresh exquisite surprises in store. We threaded the moat by paths between the furze, on the golden honey-hives of which fluttered moths like blue turquoise. The dragon-fly was there, and the lady-bird and little beetles in emerald coats of mail. And over that the lark soared in a wide field of air to hail God at His own very gates. Bitter little sloes grew on the moat, and blackberries in their season; and if you had descended into one of the many cups of the place, even long before the sun had begun to slant, you liked to shout to your companions and be answered cheerily from the human world. The moat had an uncanniness of its own; it was haunted by leaping fires that overran it and left no trace. You might see it afar, suffused by a dull glare, any dim summer night. So have I myself beheld it when I have crept through the dews on a nocturnal expedition: and though one of the commonplace suggested that it might have been the new moon rising scarlet behind the luxuriant vegetation of the moat, that was in the unimaginative next day, and not when we discussed the marvel in the scented darkness that comes between summer eve and dawn.

Then there was the well-field, where a little stream that fed the well clattered over pebbles, made leaps so sudden down tiny inclines that we called the commotion a waterfall, and widened under a willow-tree into a pool, brown and still, where, tradition said, had once been seen a trout. For sake of this glorious memory we fished long with squirming worms and a pin, but caught not even the silliest little minnow. This small game we used to bag, by the way, at will, by simply lowering a can into the green depths of the well, where there was always a tiny silver fin a-sailing. Once we kept a pair three days in the water-jug, and finally restored them to their emerald dark. The well-field was in part marshy and ended in a rushy place, where water-cresses grew thick, and a little bridge led into the neighbour's fields. There we found yellow iris, and the purple bee orchis, and fox-gloves.

Hard by was Nano's Field, which we affected only in the autumn, for then we gathered crab-apples, of a yellow and pink, most delightful to the eye. And also the particular variety of blackberry which ripens first, and is large and of irregular shape, but, to the common blackberry, what purple grapes are to the thin, green variety. And again, there was the front lawn, where the quicken-berry hung in drooping scarlet clusters above us, as we sat on a knoll, and a sea of gold and white washed about us in May. But the fields make me garrulous, and if I were to go on they that never tired the children might weary the grown listener. Said I not they were seldom visited? Yet their enchantment is still there for happy generations unborn. The children and the fields and the birds we have always with us. I would that for every child there might be the fields, to make long after a dream of green beauty, though the world has grown arid. Because the dream seems so sweet to me I have gossiped of it, but have not named half its delicate delights, nor some of the great ones: as the romps in the hay fields, the voyage of discovery after hens' nests, the mysteries of that double hedge that is the orchard boundary, and the hidden places in gnarled boughs, where you perched among the secrets of the birds and the leaves, and saw the crescent moon through a tender veil of enchantment while yet the orange of the sunset was in the west.

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