My Lords of Strogue Volume Ii Part 7

CHAPTER V.

AWAY TO DONEGAL.

The countess was much scandalised at the scene from which she had escaped, and favoured her niece with decided opinions on the subject, as six horses dragged the carriage through the night along the road to Drogheda.

'This will give you a notion, my dear,' she said, 'of the results of letting low people have too much of their own way. I confess that Lord Clare's conduct surprises me. If your friends the United Irishmen were to obtain the upper hand for a few days, they would disgrace themselves and disgust the world. You can't expect wisdom from a Helot-cla.s.s.'

'It was not my friends who misbehaved themselves to-night,' Doreen retorted, 'but yours; the vulgar squireens and half-mounted gentry, who belong to the dominant party.'

'They certainly should have learnt manners from their betters,'

acquiesced my lady, lowering her standard. She had seen but little of the world of late, had been content to view events through coloured gla.s.ses, and the hasty glimpse of garish daylight which had just flashed out saddened and shocked her. She began unconsciously to wonder whether Lord Clare had always spoken the truth. It would be hard, she felt, to lose faith in her old friend. Then the tangle of long-rooted prejudice, parted for an instant, closed round her again.

'Well, well! the squireens might possibly be more brutish than was desirable; but they were at least Protestants, and as such, superior to the Helots over whom they tyrannized!'

This reflection was a comfort to my lady; for she was not a bad woman, but one whose sympathies had been narrowed by the hardness of the world, and who had grown as uncharitable as many excellent people are who, professing to be more enlightened than their neighbours, are certain that they only are right, and all those who differ from them wrong.

Doreen lay back on the cus.h.i.+ons, too sore in mind and body to carry on the argument. All that she could distinctly realise was that hope had flown away; that Theobald had been near at hand and was gone; that perhaps he had been captured and executed. What must he have suffered to have been within touch of motherland, only to be swept back again to sea! Hope, forsooth! What is hope? too often but long-drawn disappointment in disguise!

The party jerked and jolted over the interminable road. The hostelries at Drogheda and Dundalk were full. It was well that my lord had ridden forward, for so many families were beginning to steal out of Dublin that, as an ostler put it, there was a 'furious penury of beds.'

At Derry they were compelled to leave the great family coach, for there was only a rough track along each wild bank of Lough Sw.i.l.l.y, at whose mouth--its feet laved by the Atlantic--stood the island home of the pirate earls of Ennishowen. Their yacht lay ready in Rathmelton harbour; but Shane said he preferred riding across the bog to Malin Head, whence a boat would transport him in no time to Glas-aitch-e; and Doreen offered to ride too, even in his company--so anxious was she in her numbed condition to divert her thoughts by exercise. My lady--her projects being what they were--was little likely to object to a prolonged _tete-a-tete_ which might a.s.sist in the realisation of cherished wishes; but her own riding-days were over, she said. She would take the yacht, and would not be sorry of a few hours' solitude.

Poor mother! She was sacrificing more to her elder-born than he would probably ever know, in revisiting the ill-omened place--where that which darkened her life had been accomplished--where everything would prattle of that past time which it had been a never-ending struggle to forget. She desired to look again on the weather-worn parapets and slender watch-tower of Glas-aitch-e Castle alone, lest her face should betray her feelings, and hint at the secret which had blanched her hair before its time.

The triangular peninsula which lies 'twixt Lough Sw.i.l.l.y and Lough Foyle has been known, time out of mind, as Ennishowen; has belonged to the pirate earls for centuries, who, by reason of their craft, built themselves a fortress years ago on the sea as more convenient than a dwelling on mainland. It was a territory well suited to such masters, for, by guarding its narrow neck, it could be converted into an impenetrable fastness which was protected by sheer cliffs to seaward, whilst its internal features rendered it a foolhardy proceeding to attempt to invade it from the land side. Hence its population was a peculiar one, differing in many respects from the other dwellers in Donegal. When James I. planted Ulster with staunch Protestants, the ousted Catholics fled, some to Connaught, some to the extreme points of the north-western county where nothing flourished but wild birds. A large number took refuge in Ennishowen, where they embraced the trade of fis.h.i.+ng, eking out a precarious existence by rearing flocks of geese upon the barren moors, whilst their wives wove frieze for clothing. An independent, warm-hearted, frugal, superst.i.tious colony, extremely poor but decent, accustomed from the cradle to endure all hards.h.i.+ps with a cheerful mien, too far removed from the world to know aught of Orangeism. Imbued with the clannish feeling which elsewhere had nearly vanished, they looked to Glas-aitch-e with reverence as to a holy shrine, and fully believed that the bodyguard of Sir Amorey were sleeping by their horses in the sea-caves ready to defend the fortress if peril dared to threaten it. It was evident that if the disease, which Lord Clare was so fond of discussing, should take a serious turn in the north, it would be well for the chiefs to be among their followers, at least those who were friendly with the Government; for a timely word might prevent much trouble--a timely order be of incalculable service. My Lord Glandore, then, carried with him the blessings of the executive, with sundry vague promises of good things in store for him if he showed prudence, and directions as to how his time would be best spent; namely, in cajoling the peasants to put their shoulders to the wheel for the speedy erection of beacons along the seaboard. The recent Gallic escapade (for Hoche's expedition was really nothing more) taught the executive a lesson. Happily the fleet, or a portion of it, had been driven upon the coast of Bantry, whose inhabitants, being disinclined to rebellion, looked on the tricolour with the eye of unconcern. But for the blessed wind, the expedition might have landed on some more friendly spot, and be half-way to Dublin before the Viceroy heard anything about it. The enemy must not have such a chance again. Martello towers must be built within short distances all round the coast. On the apparition of the tricolour a fire must be kindled, which should be the signal for a second on the summit of the next tower, and so on; so that in case of danger a girdle of fires would encircle the island, warning the soldiery in all directions--speeding intelligence to the capital in the twinkling of an eye.

My Lord Glandore was to busy himself with this matter so far as Donegal was concerned, and his sense of self-importance was so far tickled and amused that for awhile he endured, without too much swearing, the temporary separation from his Norah.

So my lady sailed up Lough Sw.i.l.l.y, marking the new forts of Rathmullen and Knockalla, of Duneen and Inch, which gave to it a resemblance to a shark's mouth with teeth set raggedly in either jaw; whilst her son and niece started in the twilight before sunrise with a wild ride before them of forty miles and more. First they pa.s.sed rows of mud-huts in straggling knots beside the way, which became more spa.r.s.e as they advanced; crazy hovels whose rotten roofs were kept together by hay-ropes--thatch dyed to richness by decay, adorned with dry tufts of oats and barley, wafted in the summertime from some less forbidding spot. Their ears could catch the clicking of a homely loom within as they pa.s.sed, ere the housewife, low-browed and heavy-jowled, came to her door to gape at the unusual sight of strangers, an amus.e.m.e.nt in which she was speedily joined by a pack of naked children, then by her goodman, who rose as if out of a dung-heap--a dudheen between his coa.r.s.e lips, a long coat of faded homespun on his back.

Presently the road became a mere track upon the heather, which, leaving the lough to the left, struck out across the hills inland--a wheel-track over a vast expanse of purple prairie, now deep-indented in the bog, now barely discernible on a plateau of rock--impression of the rude carts of the turf-cutters across the mountains. No human dwelling might be seen for miles; no human figure, save perhaps an elfish child plying knitting-needles on a stone as she watched her herd of geese for fear of foxes--an uncanny, shock-pated pixie who seemed half-sister to the herons that were scrutinising their portraits in the pools.

Mountain succeeded mountain with a great heaving like that of the ocean hard-by, sometimes in an unbroken wave of black and russet; sometimes rent into a gorge where it had been torn by a strong convulsion, with overhanging crags of grey and twisted trees bent awry by the sea-blasts. Sometimes in the hazy distance might be detected a string of circular stains of a blacker colour than the rest--tarns in the moorland, home of the silver trout. Bushy and reedy some--some tawny with the paled glories of dead water-lilies. Then would the scene change to a bleak spread of stones--flat stones of monster size, with rifts like rivulets between, choked thick with feathery herbage.

It was as though the rubbish left from the creation of the world had been carted and shot out there--a secluded medley of unconsidered trifles, of no value or consequence to the human race. Then again would the stones give place to water--mora.s.ses of peat sodden with salt ooze which quaked under the weight of the traveller, the hoof-marks of his horse bubbling with slimy wash as he splashed on his uncertain way; troops of scurrying fowl starting up before him, protesting loudly as they fled at the irruption into their cherished solitude.

Shane and Doreen arrived by-and-by at the summit of a hill-crest, from which the northern half of the promontory lay spread like a map before them. Just below was a white speck--the village of Carndonagh--beyond, a row of lakes, tiny mirrors set in the hill-flank--on either side the jagged lines of Loughs Foyle and Sw.i.l.l.y, varied with many a peaked headland and jutting point and shelving bay scooped out of the living rock. In front, a flat stretch on which cloud-shadows were playing hide-and-seek--a bopeep dance of subtly-chequered tones; and away still farther, looming through the mist, the bluffs of Malin Head, the extreme limit, to the north, of Ireland. As they looked, the mists melted in eddying swirls of gold, unveiling an expanse of immense and lonely sea, dotted with fairy islets strewn in a ravelled fringe--the long span of the blue-green Atlantic, marked with a line of white where it seethed and moaned and lashed without ceasing against the foot of the beetling cliff.

'What a lovely spot!' Doreen exclaimed, as she sniffed the brisk breeze; 'how wild--how desolate--how weirdly fair! Not the vestige of a dwelling as far as eye can reach--except that speck below us.'

Unpoetic Shane had been busy counting the wildfowl, watching the hawks, marking the sublime slow wheeling of a pair of eagles far away in ether heavenward. At the call of his cousin he brought his thoughts down to earth, and cried out:

'By the Hokey! a nice coast for the French to land upon. I wish them joy of it if they try. If they do we shall be in the thick of it, for look! You can just discern Glas-aitch-e---that dot in the sea, no bigger than a pin's point--between Dunaff and Malin. A fleet would have to pa.s.s close by us that was making either for Lough Sw.i.l.l.y or Lough Foyle. But come--a canter down the hill, and we will see what we can get to eat. This sharp air gives one a plaguy appet.i.te!'

Doreen spoke truly, for Ennishowen is weirdly fair. The atmosphere of winter gave the desolation she had pa.s.sed through a special charm. The ponderous banks of rolling steel-grey clouds, which had only just been conquered by a battling sun, gave a ghastly beauty to its wildness.

Dun and steel-grey, sage-green and russet-brown, with here and there a bit of genuine colour--a vivid tuft of the Osmunda fern. Such chromatic attributes were well in harmony with the intense stillness, broken only by the rustle now and then of whirring wings, or the sharp boom of the frightened bittern. But beyond Carndonagh the face of nature changed--or would have, if it had been summer--for bleak elevated moorland and iron gorge vary but little with the season, whilst lower-lying districts are more privileged. During the warm months the track between Carndonagh and Malin is like a garden--an oasis of rich, damp, dewy verdure from the ever-dripping vapours of the Atlantic--an expanse of emerald mead saturated with the moisture of the ocean. Every bush and bank breaks forth in myriad flowers. Each tarn is edged with blossom, each path is tricked with glory. It is as if Persephone had here pa.s.sed through the granite-bound gates of h.e.l.l, and had dropped her garland at its portals. White starry water-lilies clothe the lakelets. The bells of the fuschia-hedges glow red from beneath a burthen of honeysuckle and dog-roses; orange-lilies and sheets of yellow iris cast ruddy reflections into the streams, while purple heather and patches of wild heartsease vie with each other in a friendly struggle to mask the wealth of green.

Strabagy Bay cuts deep into the peninsula. A rider must skirt its edge with patience, rewarded now and again by some vision of surprise, as he finds himself at a turn in the pathway on the summit of a precipice 1200 feet above the water, or in a sheltered cove where waves of _celadon_ and malachite plash upon a tawny bed. At one point, if the tide happens to be in, he must sit and await its ebb; for the only pa.s.sage is by a ford across the sand, which is dangerous to the stranger at high-water. Not so to the dwellers in this lat.i.tude, for they speed like monkeys along the overhanging crags, or like the waddling penguins and sea-parrots that are padding yonder crannies with the softest down from off their b.r.e.a.s.t.s for the behoof of a yet unborn brood.

Towards Malin Head the ground rises gradually from a s.h.i.+ngly beach till it breaks off abruptly to seaward in a sheer wall of quartz and granite--a vast frowning face, vexed by centuries of tempest, battered by perennial storms, comforted by the clinging embrace of vegetation, red and russet heath of every shade, delicate ferns drooping from cracks and fissures, h.o.a.ry lichens, velvet mosses, warm-tinted cranesbill; from out of which peeps here and there the glitter of a point of spar, a stain of metal or of clay, a sparkling vein of ore.

The white-crested swell which never sleeps laps round its foot in curdled foam; for the bosom of the Atlantic is ever breathing--heaving in arterial throbs below, however calm it may seem upon the surface.

Away down through the crystal water you can detect the blackened base resting on a bank of weed--dense, slippery citrine hair, swinging in twilit ma.s.ses slowly to and fro, as if humming to itself, under the surface, of the march of Time, whose hurry affects it not; for what have human cares, human soul-travail, human agony, to do with this enchanted spot, which is, as it were, just without the threshold of the world? The winter waves, which dash high above the bluffs in spray, have fretted, by a perseverance of many decades, a series of caverns half-submerged; viscous arcades, where strange winged creatures lurk that hate the light; beasts that, hanging like some villanous fruit in cl.u.s.ters, blink with purblind eyes at the fishes which dart in and out, fragments of the suns.h.i.+ne they abhor; at the invading shoals of seals, which gambol and turn in clumsy sport, with a glint of white bellies as they roll, and a shower of prismatic gems.

In June the salmon arrive in schools, led each by a solemn pioneer, who knows his own special river; and then the fisher-folk are busy. So are the seals, whose appet.i.te is dainty. Yet the hardy storm-children of Ennishowen love the seals although they eat their fish--for their coats are warm and soft to wear; their oil gives light through the long winter evenings for weaving of stuff and net-mending. There is a superst.i.tion which accounts for their views as to the seals; for they believe them to be animated by the souls of deceased maiden-aunts. It is only fair, in the inevitable equalisation of earthly matter, that our maiden-aunts should taste of our good things, and that we in our turn should live on theirs.

A mile from the sh.o.r.e--at Sw.i.l.l.y's mouth--stands Glas-aitch-e Island, a mere rock, a hundred feet above sea-level, crowned by an antique fortress, which was modernised and rendered habitable by a caprice of the late lord. At the period which now occupies us, it consisted of a dwelling rising sheer from the rock on three sides; its rough walls pierced by small windows, and topped by a watch-tower, on which was an iron beacon-basket. The fourth side looked upon a little garden, where, protected by low scrub and chronically asthmatic trees, a few flowers grew unkempt--planted there by my lady when she first visited the place as mistress. On this side, too, was a little creek which served as harbour for the boats--a great many boats of every sort and size; for the only amus.e.m.e.nt at Glas-aitch-e was boating, with a cast for a salmon or a codling now and again, and an occasional shot at a seal or cormorant.

My lady arrived there in the yacht, and spent her afternoon alone as she wished, for it was late at night before Shane and Doreen were rowed across--the latter wearied by the long ride, but calmed in spirit by communing with nature.

It was with a gloomy face and set lips that the Countess of Glandore wandered from room to room, all damp and chill from long neglect, each chair and table telling its own tale, each faded carpet and curtain whispering of the hated past, with its desperate anguish of humiliation. For this was the heart-chord which tw.a.n.ged most painfully in my lady's breast upon revisiting the place again. 'Set right the wrong while yet there is time'--how often had that wailing cry echoed in her ears! Yet while there still was time that wrong was never righted; for my lady had been so humbled, so abased, so utterly wrenched and mangled, during the year she had dwelt upon that island with my lord, that she revolted, with indignant protest, at a possibility of having to traverse the dark Valley of the Shadow yet again.

As she looked at the chairs and tables, the whole bitterness of that degradation flooded back on her. She recalled how, sobbing on that sofa, she had prayed for death with scorching tears; how, standing by that cas.e.m.e.nt, the sublime panorama of Donegal had been shut out by boiling drops of agony.

She sat down on an old chair, and looked back upon her life since last she touched its worm-eaten woodwork. A life lulled sometimes to a half forgetfulness, which was nearer to positive happiness than she ever expected to attain. The reflection returned again and again to her, that what had been done was my lord's fault, not hers--that she had acquiesced as the weaker vessel, and had washed her hands of the consequences. But then, several times, her peace had been rudely broken by vague terror of troubles renewed.

Would she be able to avert them? Would her puny woman's arm be strong enough to grapple with Fate? Events certainly looked threatening.

Terence had involved himself in a forlorn hope. What if he should fall? My lady rose hastily, and flinging wide the window, panted there for breath. She realised, with a tingling horror of abas.e.m.e.nt, that if he fell, her own burthen would be lightened--that far away, m.u.f.fled in her inmost soul, there was a voice babbling a hint that it would be a mercy if he fell. Her own son! It was a mother's inner voice that spoke! She pressed her face helplessly upon the tattered curtain, as she had used to do when imploring a release, and groaned aloud--it was well that the others had not yet arrived.

Then, her mental vision sharpened by this pang, she wandered on, oblivious of the stories murmured by the tables and the chairs--for she was peering with all her might into the future now. Things were going crooked. There could be no denying that. She had schemed for the best. What would come of her scheming? Shane was deplorably difficult to manage--looked so like his father sometimes when angered, that she recoiled as she remembered the expression of his visage when she moaned over her fate to him upon this very spot all those years ago.

He grew daily more difficult to manage, did Shane; because he was a Cherokee, a h.e.l.lfire; and it stands to reason that an important attribute for a h.e.l.lfire to cultivate must be a scorn of maternal lecturing and fiddlefaddle.

Lady Glandore (taught by a rough apprentices.h.i.+p) quite admitted this; but looked forward now with satisfaction to the taming his spirit would undergo through a judiciously prolonged residence on a barren rock, with no one to uphold him in resistance to her will. Here he had no bully-Blasters to oppose a check to her influence. He would have n.o.body to talk to but the fisherfolk, save when he sailed down the lough to Letterkenny to be entertained by the squireens in garrison.

She did not fear their influence--poor country oafs! She gauged the inherent weakness of Shane's nature, which cloaked itself under a mask of fierceness; she knew his overbearing, swashbuckling ways would sink into a minor key of mewing if they had no encouraging sympathy from without. She knew better than really to believe that 'absence makes the heart grow fonder.' Nonsense! The heart is too selfish a thing to feed long upon itself or shadows. If she could only manage to keep Shane here long enough, he would become as meek as a lamb, and would cease to bleat of Norah in his dreams.

On one side things were going crooked, no doubt, but on the other they were preternaturally straight. Could they be expected to remain so?

Arthur Wolfe, whose self-interest told him to stay on in Dublin and watch events, was only too thankful to throw a responsibility on his sister (in whom he trusted), who, oddly enough, was gracious as to the burthen. He might have been compelled to leave Ireland for Doreen's sake--to take her away out of a false position, and so sacrifice the opportunity of rapid advancement, which is the marked characteristic of a turbulent time.

But this difficulty was got rid off by packing the girl off to Donegal. He could drift where expediency drove, unshackled, to add to his darling's fortune. Nothing could be more satisfactory to her father's peace of mind; nothing could jump better with my lady's long-established plan of joining these two incongruous cousins in holy matrimony. Shut up in idleness in Glas-aitch-e (for the building of Martello towers could not really engross his attention), what else could he do but fall a victim to the charms of his handsome cousin?

One little ghost of doubt yet lingered in my lady's mind, which she did her best to exorcise. Doreen was dreadfully pigheaded. What if moping were to render her more obstinate? She was not a Blaster or a Cherokee, but a stern-browed damsel, with much romance, tempered by a little common-sense, and an awkward tendency to rely upon her own judgment. Being a woman, too, she would probably detect at once another woman's web, such as might hope to escape the scrutiny of male observation. Was it possible that she might choose to upset all her aunt's elaborate scaffolding, after all?

She had her own reasons for determining to tie Shane, wealthy Lord Glandore though he might be, to somebody with money. What a pity that he declined polite society, where complaisant heiresses were to be met with who would joyfully take his coronet, and afterwards obey his mother. Circ.u.mstances had so ordained it that there was absolutely no available or possible heiress for him but this stiff-necked Catholic.

It is exasperating, is it not, to mark how people persist in opposing that which others think is best for them? The prejudiced, warped Countess of Glandore must have had urgent motives indeed for the prosecution of her project to account for the way in which she was stooping from her pedestal. Doreen was sharp enough to recognise this fact, and was never weary of marvelling at the enigma which seemed ever and anon to languish, then to spring to new life again. But Lady Glandore, when her mind was made up, could be obstinate too, though she had suffered much buffeting in life's conflict. That these two cousins were to be drawn together somehow, she was resolved.

Opposition would come probably from Doreen's side, not Shane's. When her friends of the forlorn hope were slain and gone, she would surely succ.u.mb from mere despair.

My lady was glad, then, when she meditated on Lord Clare's hints as to the certain fate of the United Irishmen. It was distressful, though, that her own son should be amongst them. Was it distressful, or a relief? Would his mother be sorry if word came that he was dead?

My lady buried her face in the curtain yet again, and rocked her bowed form and wrung her hands. There is a phase of self-hatred and upbraiding which is more poignant than any physical pain, from which we emerge more wrecked and broken after each fresh access, and pray more desperately to be set free from torment.

CHAPTER VI.

GLAS-AITCH-e.