When I first heard these words I was not highly impressed by them, or by anything at the moment except the redness of the bridegroom\'s nose, and the surprising manner in which one of "the young ladies\'" dresses had been coerced into fitting the bride. The solemnities of the service passed, in every sense, over my head, which was then not much higher than the table at which the priest stood; indeed, it was only by putting forth the fullest wriggling powers of childhood that I was able to gloat in comfort on the bride\'s blushes from a loophole between the turf-flavoured folds of her mother\'s Galway cloak and the repressive elbow of my elder brother. Why the ceremony should have taken place in the vestry I cannot say, beyond that it was a custom in the little Roman Catholic Chapel of which I write; just as it was in those friendly days a custom with us to go to the marriages of the tenants, and to take our share of the blessing and the sprinkled holy water.
The accustomed gold, silver, and copper were laid on the book by the bridegroom, the portentous words were spoken, with the melancholy Galway accent adding its emphasis to them, and at the next interval the priest opened the window behind him.
"Run down to Mick Leonard\'s for a coal," he said in Irish to some one outside, and then proceeded with a most sound and simple exordium to the newly married pair.
In a few minutes there appeared in the open window a hand holding a live coal of turf in a bent stick. I can see it yet, the pale fire in the white ash of the sod, thrust between us and the blue sky, and the priest\'s hand put out to take it, but I cannot remember now what was its mission, whether to light a candle or incense.
After this came a sprinkling with holy water with something that nearly resembled a hearth-brush. A drop fell into my open mouth as I stood gaping with the detestable curiosity of my age, and its peculiar, slightly brackish flavour is always the impression that comes first when I recall that day. There was a long business of hand shakings and huggings, and the wedding party squeezed itself out of the narrow vestry doorway, with hearts fully attuned to the afternoon\'s entertainment.
At the gate some shaggy horses were tied up, and having clambered on to one of these, much as a man would climb a tree, the bridegroom hauled his bride up behind him, and started for home at a lumbering gallop. Shouting and whooping, the other men got on their horses and pursued, and the whole clattering, bumping cavalcade passed out of sight, leaving us transfixed in admiration of the traditional "dragging home" of the bride. For me the only remaining recollections of the day are of a surfeit in the bedroom of the bride\'s mother, where in gluttonous solitude I partook of hot soda-bread, half a glass of luscious port, and a boiled egg; while the less honoured guests in the kitchen outside harangued and sang songs, and drank the wine of the country in its integrity. My wedding garment was, I recollect, a Holland "waggoner," loosely girt by a shiny black belt with a brass serpent buckle. At no subsequent wedding breakfast have I been as enjoyably dressed, and, as a natural consequence, at none have I eaten as much.
As my first distinct glimpse into matrimony it stands far back and detached; after it, in the Bayeux tapestry of childhood, horses, dogs, and baffled governesses moved on in untiring confusion, for periods of unmeasured time, before the subject again presented itself.
There lives in my memory a Sunday morning in spring, when the little beech leaves were poised like pale green moths among the bare branches, and the northerly showers whipped the lambs into shelter. The servants had gone in a body to early mass, leaving the preparations for breakfast in the hands of Tom Cashen, a trusted friend and counsellor, whose ordinary business it was to attend to the affairs of the yard and its pigs.
There was soda-bread to be watched in the oven, there were saucepans and kettles resolved upon untimely boiling, there was porridge to be stirred, and there was also Tom Cashen\'s dog, a hungry, furtive thing, capable at any moment of clearing the table of all that was upon it. The moment came, as it comes to those who wait with complete attentiveness, and Tom Cashen\'s dog did not let it slip. It was during the retributions of justice that the bread burned in the oven, the coffee boiled over on the range, and the porridge adhered massively to the bottom of the saucepan.
"I\'d sooner be digging the clay from morning till night," said Tom Cashen, after a long and prayerful imprecation, "than to be at this kind of work. There isn\'t a man in the world without getting married but he\'s sure to die quare, and no wonder, from the work that\'s within!"
Translated into our inferior English this aphorism sets forth the opinion that a bachelor who has to do his own household work is bound to end his days in a lunatic asylum. This view of matrimony had not before been heard by me, and it seemed to be wholly reasonable. For one thing, the men in the yard were always right in our eyes, and always full of just complaints against the kitchen; in any case, the Work that was Within—the arduous triflings with saucepans and sweeping-brushes—was certainly contemptible as compared with the realities and the fascinations of the stable and the hay-cart. The point of view of Mrs. Tom Cashen was not touched upon; I think I realised that she was not likely to have one.
She was described at the time of her marriage as "fine and fair and freckled, and a great warrant to fatten turkeys," and she walked two miles every day, with a basket on her back, to carry Tom Cashen\'s dinner to him—potatoes and boiled eggs, kept hot in a clean towel. Later on the dinner was carried by two barefooted little boys; from thenceforward, during many years, there was always a barefooted little boy or two to carry it, whereat the heart of Tom Cashen was glad, and so, in a modified degree, was the heart of Mrs. Tom Cashen, combating hourly, in a swarming cabin, with the Work that was Within.
Some time afterwards, when a spare son or two had betaken themselves, weeping direfully, to America, it fell to my lot to sit by the fire in the Cashen household, and to read aloud a letter from one of them, for the enlightenment of his parents, who were not skilled in the finer arts. It was a most affectionate letter, inquiring in turn for all members of the family, and it enclosed an order for two pounds. It concluded as follows:
"I think, my dear father, I will not see you again, because you are very old and you will soon die, but when I come home I hope to have the pleasure of visiting your grave and crying my stomachful over it."
On receiving these cheering assurances the gratification of Tom Cashen was enormous; it was more to him, he said, than the two pounds itself, and, in his own words, he "had to cry a handful."
There came a day when the words of the letter recurred in their extremest force. Within sight of the Chapel, spoken of further back, stands a ruin, with the ground inside and outside of it choked with graves; mound and crooked headstone and battered slab, with the briar wreathing them, and the limestone rock thrusting its strong shoulder up between. In the last light of an October afternoon I found myself there, in a crowd that huddled and swayed round one intense point of interest—a shallow grave, dug with difficulty, where was laid in its deal coffin the quiet body left behind by the restless spirit of Tom Cashen, at the close of a companionship that had always been interesting and generally happy.
The parish priest was ill, and his substitute was late; the matter was proceeded with in a simplicity that was quite without self-consciousness or embarrassment. Tom Cashen\'s eldest son, grieved, as was well known, to his gentle heart\'s core, had in a newspaper earth that had been blessed (by whom I know not), and from the newspaper it was shaken by him upon the coffin. Holy water was poured into the grave from a soda-water bottle, and the bottle itself thrown in after it; then followed the shovelling in and stamping down, and the tender twilight falling in compassion on the scene.
The crowd became thin and dispersed, and as I walked away meditating on things that had passed and things that had endured during an absence of many years, a woman kneeling by a grave got heavily on to her feet and called me by my name. A middle-aged stranger in a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of friendliness; that was the first impression. Then some wraith of old association began to flit about the worn features, and suddenly the bride of twenty-five years ago was there beneath the cap frill. Five minutes told the story: ill-health, an everlasting pain "out through the top of the head," sons and daughters in profusion, and baskets of turf carried on the back in boggy places. "Himself" was pointed out among the crowd. His nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard, and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tilt. The introduction was not pressed.
The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the glare of sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent life, the scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom, the daffodils hanging their lamps in the shady places. How strangely, how bleakly different was the life history summarised in the melancholy October evening. Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day, with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with talk of guano and geese and pigs\' food, and a perfect foreknowledge of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been well and duly laid at the funeral.
The possessor of these materials for discontent was quite unaware of any of them. Her husband was as good as other people\'s, and seldom got drunk, except at funerals, weddings and fairs, or on the Holy days of the Church, and that was no more than was natural. Anything less would be cheerless, even uncanny. She introduced her daughter, "the second eldest, and she up to twenty years, and she having her passage paid to America with all she earned in the lace school." The young lady up to twenty years had her hair down her back, and wore a long coat with huge buttons, and a whole Harvest Festival in her hat, from which wisps of emerald grass drooped over the fierce fringe below it. To be very young, even childish, is the aim of her generation. The battle has been waged, even to weeping, by the ladies of the Big House, with a "tweeny" of seventeen, who, on every descent to the populous regions of the yard and kitchen, plucked the hairpins from her orange mane, and allowed it to flow forth in assertion of her infant charms. The previous generation, superior in this as in many other ways, grows old as unaffectedly as animals; it is a part of its deep and unstudied philosophy.
"I\'m very old now, sure," said the matron of twenty-five years\' standing, with a comfortable laugh, "I think I must be near forty-five years."
Had she said sixty it would not have seemed much above the mark, and she would have said it with equal composure. I looked the conventional incredulity, and realised that it was thrown away. She, in return, assured me that for my part she had often read of beauty in a book, but had never till now really seen it, that my face was made for the ruin of the world, and that she\'d know me out of my father\'s family by the two eyes and the snout. All was accepted with fitting seriousness, and the piece of news that had been held back with difficulty during these ceremonial observances, was at length given the rein. Had I not heard of how her sister\'s daughter, down in Drohorna, had that morning brought three children into the world, daughters, unfortunately, but still a matter reflecting much lustre on the parish, and on that Providence that had singled it out from the Diocese for the honour.
The conversation abruptly closed, as the priest who was to have performed the Funeral Office scorched up on his bicycle, scarlet-faced, and half an hour late. As if the sight of him set the seal of the irrevocable upon what had been done, the widow of Tom Cashen broke into hoarse wailing; she was arduously consoled and taken away, and her husband was left behind in the solitude, he, who hated to be alone, and was afraid to pass the churchyard at night.
A discussion raged as to the opening of his strong box, the men who stamped down the earth on the grave using the action as an emphasis to their assertions. At length the churchyard emptied, the evening wind was raw, and in the gloom the white chapel on the hill stared with its gaunt windows, impervious to the life histories of its own making impossible as an accessory to sentiment.
"WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NO-ASE?"
"WHAT HAVE YE ON YER NO-ASE?"
Obvious duty has seldom gone more suavely hand-in-hand with perfect enjoyment than in the attendance of the parish, practically en masse, at the levée held next day, and for many succeeding days, by the Triplets. A grey road runs north and south past their cabin door, level on the level face of the bog for a shelterless half-mile, and neither wake nor "Stations" could have commanded a more representative gathering than went and came upon it in those moist autumn afternoons. The gander who lorded it over the nibbled strip of grass in front of the cabin yard was worn down to amiability by a hundred assaults on new comers and an equal number of glorious returns to the applause of his family; the half-bred collie, coiled under a cart, closed his cunning eyes to aggressions that were beyond all barking; a five-year-old boy with tough tight curls of amber, and an appallingly dirty face, regarded me from the doorstep with brazen sang froid as I approached, and said in a loud and winding drawl: "What have ye on yer no-ase?" Praise is se............