In the parish of Kilmoe—which they pronounce with a soft prolonged “moo-h,” like the murmuring call of one of their little bright-eyed, black-coated cows—the inhabitants are wont to say that the next parish is America.
It is an ancient and sterile and storm-beaten parish, this Kilmoe, thrust out in expiation of some forgotten sin or other to exist beyond the pale of human companionship. Its sons and daughters, scattered in tiny, isolated hamlets over its barren area, hear never a stranger’s voice—and their own speech is slow and low of tone because the real right to make a noise there belongs to the shrieking gulls and the wild, west wind and the towering, foam-fanged waves, which dashed themselves, in tireless rivalry with the thunder, against its cliffs.
Slow, too, in growth and ripening are the wits of the men of Kilmoe. They must have gray hairs before they are accounted more than boys; and when, from sheer old age they totter into the grave, the feeling of the parish is that they have been untimely cut off just as they were beginning to get their brains in fair working: order. Very often these aged men, if they dally and loiter on the way to the tomb in the hope of becoming still wiser, are given a sharp and peremptory push forward by starvation. It would not do for the men of Kilmoe to know too much. If they did, they would all go somewhere else to live—and then what would become of their landlord?
Kilmoe once had a thriving and profitable industry, whereby a larger population than it now contains kept body and soul together in more intimate and comfortable relations than at present exist. The outlay involved in this industry was very small, and the returns, though not governed by any squalid, modern law of percentages, were, on the whole, large.
It was all very simple. Whenever a stormy, wind-swept night set in, the men of Kilmoe tied a lighted lantern on the neck of a cow, and drove the animal to walk along the strand underneath the sea-cliffs. This light, rising and sinking with the movements of the cow, bore a quaint and interesting resemblance to the undulations of an illuminated buoy or boat, rocked on gentle waves; and strange seafaring crafts bent their course in confidence toward it, until they were undeceived. Then the men of Kilmoe would sally forth, riding the tumbling breakers with great bravery and address, in their boats of withes and stretched skin, and enter into possession of all the stranded strangers’ goods and chattels. As for such strangers as survived the wreck, they were sometimes sold into slavery; more often they were merely knocked on the head. Thus Kilmoe lived much more prosperously than in these melancholy latter days of dependence upon a precarious potato crop.
In every family devoted to industrial pursuits there is one member who is more distinguished for attention to the business than the others, and upon whom its chief burdens fall. This was true of the O’Mahonys, who for many centuries controlled and carried on the lucrative occupation above described, on their peninsula of Ivehagh. There were branches of the sept stationed in the more inland sea-castles of Rosbrin, Ardintenant, Leamcon and Ballydesmond on the one side, and of Dunbeacon, Dunmanus and Muirisc on the other, who did not expend all their energies upon this, their genuine business, but took many vacations and indefinitely extended holiday trips, for the improvement of their minds and the gratification of their desire to whip the neighboring O’Driscolls, O’Sullivans, O’Heas and O’Learys out of their boots. The record of these pleasure excursions, in which sometimes the O’Mahonys returned with great booty and the heads of their enemies on pikes, and some other times did not come home at all, fills all the pages of the Psalter of Rosbrin, beside occupying a good deal of space in the Annals of Innisfallen and of the Four Masters, and needs not be enlarged upon here.
But it is evident that that gentleman of the family who, from choice or sense of duty, lived in Kilmoe, must, have pursued the legitimate O’Mahony vocation very steadily, without any frivolous interruptions or the waste of time in visiting his neighbors. The truth is that he had no neighbors, and nothing else under the sun with which to occupy his mind but the affairs of the sea. This the observer will readily conclude when he stands upon the promontory marked on the maps as Three-Castle Head, with the whole world-dividing Atlantic at his feet, and looks over at the group of ruined and moss-grown keeps which give the place its name.
“Oh-h! Look there now, Murphy!” cried a tall and beautiful young woman, who stood for the first time on this lofty sea-wall, viewing the somber line of connected castles. “Sure, here lived the true O’Mahony of the Coast of White Foam! Why, man, what were we at Muirisc but poor crab-catchers compared wid him?”
She spoke in a tone of awed admiration, between long breaths of wonderment, and her big eyes of Irish gray glowed from their cover of sweeping lashes with surprised delight. She had taken off her hat—a black straw hat, with a dignifiedly broad brim bound in velvet, and enriched by a plume of the same somber hue—to save it from the wind, which blew stiffly here; and this bold sea-wind, nothing loth, frolicked boisterously with her dark curls instead. She put her hand on her companion’s shoulder for steadiness, and continued the rapt gaze upon this crumbling haunt of the dead and forgotten sea-lords.
Twelve years had passed since, as a child of eight, Kate O’Mahony had screamed out in despair after the departing Hen Hawk. That vessel had never cleft the waters of Dunmanus since, and the fleeting years had converted the memory of its master, into a kind of heroic legendary myth, over which the elders brooded fondly, but which the youngsters thought of as something scarcely less remote than the Firbolgs, or the builders of the “Danes’ forts” on the furze-crowned hills about.
But these same years, though they turned the absent into shadows, had made of Kate a very lovely and complete reality. It would be small praise to speak of her as the most beautiful girl on the peninsula, since there is no other section of Ireland so little favored in that respect, to begin with, and for the additional reason that whatever maidenly comeliness there is existent there is habitually shrouded from view by close-drawn shawls and enveloping hoods, even on the hottest of summer noon-days. For all the stray traveller sees of young and pretty faces in Ivehagh, he might as well be in the heart of the vailed (sp.) Orient.
And even with Kate, potential Lady of Muirisc though she was, this fashion of a hat was novel. It seemed only yesterday since she had emerged from the chrysalis of girlhood—girlhood with a shawl over its head, and Heaven only knows what abysses of ignorant shyness and stupid distrust inside that head. And, alas! it seemed but a swiftly on-coming to-morrow before this new freedom was to be lost again, and the hat exchanged forever for a nun’s vail.
If Kate had known natural history better, she might have likened her lot to that of the May-fly, which spends two years underground in its larva state hard at work preparing to be a fly, and then, when it at last emerges, lives only for an hour, even if it that long escapes the bill of the swallow or the rude jaws of the trout. No such simile drawn from stonyhearted Nature’s tragedies helped her to philosophy. She had, perhaps, a better refuge in the health and enthusiasm of her own youth.
In the company of her ancient servitor, Murphy, she was spending the pleasant April days in visiting the various ruins of The O’Mahony’s on Ivehagh. Many of these she viewed now for the first time, and the delight of this overpowered and kept down in her mind the reflection that perhaps she was seeing them all for the last time as well.
“But how, in the name of glory, did they get up and down to their boats, Murphy?” she asked, at last, strolling further out toward the edge to catch the full sweep of the cliff front, which rises abruptly from the beach below, sheer and straight, clear three hundred feet.
“There’s never a nearer landing-place, thin, than where we left our boat, a half-mile beyant here,” said Murphy. “Faith, miss, ’tis the belafe they went up and down be the aid of the little people. ’T is well known that, on windy nights, there do be grand carrin’s-on hereabouts. Sure, in the lake forninst us it was that Kian O’Mahony saw the enchanted woman with the shape on her of a horse, and died of the sight. Manny’s the time me own father related to me that same.”
“Oh, t............