The stern natural law of mutability—of ceaseless growth, change and decay—which the big, bustling, preoccupied outside world takes so indifferently, as a matter of course, finds itself reduced to a bare minimum of influence in such small, remote and out-of-the-way places as Muirisc. The lapse of twelve years here had made the scantest and most casual of marks upon the village and its inhabitants. Positively no one worth mentioning had died—for even snuffy and palsied old Father Harrington, though long since replaced at the convent by a younger priest, was understood to be still living on in the shelter of some retreat for aged clergymen in Kerry or Clare. The three old nuns were still the sole ladies of the Hostage’s Tears, and, like the rest of Muirisc, seemed only a trifle the more wrinkled and worn under this flight of time.
Such changes as had been wrought had come in a leisurely way, without attracting much attention. The mines, both of copper and of pyrites, had prospered beyond the experience of any other section of Munster, and this had brought into the immediate district a considerable alien population. But these intrusive strangers had fortunately preferred to settle in another hamlet in the neighborhood, and came rarely to Muirisc. The village was still without a hotel, and had by this time grown accustomed to the existence within its borders of a constabulary barracks. Its fishing went forward sedately and without much profit; the men of Muirisc only half believed the stories they heard of the modern appliances and wonderful hauls at Baltimore and Crook-haven—and cared even less than they credited. The lobster-canning factory had died a natural death years before, and the little children of Muirisc, playing about within sight of its roofless and rotting timbers, avoided closer contact with the building under some vague and formless notion that it was unlucky. The very idea that there had once been a man who thought that Muirisc desired to put up lobsters in tins seemed to them comic—and almost impious as well.
But there was one alteration upon which the people of Muirisc bestowed a good deal of thought—and on occasion and under their breath, not a few bitter words.
Cormac O’Daly, whom all the elders remembered as a mere “pote” and man of business for the O’Mahonys, had suddenly in his old age blossomed forth as The O’Daly, and as master of Muirisc. Like many other changes which afflict human recollection, this had all come about by reason of a woman’s vain folly. Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony, having vainly cast alluring glances upon successive relays of mining contractors and superintendents, and of fish-buyers from Bristol and the Isle of Man, and even, in the later stages, upon a sergeant of police—had at last actually thrown herself in marriage at the grizzled head of the hereditary bard. It cannot be said that the announcement of this ill-assorted match had specially surprised the good people of Muirisc. They had always felt that Mrs. Fergus would ultimately triumph in her matrimonial resolutions, and the choice of O’Daly, though obviously enough a last resort, did not shock their placid minds. It was rather satisfactory than otherwise, when they came to think of it, that the arrangement should not involve the introduction of a stranger, perhaps even of an Englishman.
But now, after nearly three years of this marriage, with a young O’Daly already big enough to walk by himself among the pigs and geese in the square—they said to themselves that even an Englishman would have been better, and they bracketed the connubial tendencies of Mrs. Fergus and the upstart ambition of Cormac under a common ban of curses.
O’Daly had no sooner been installed in the castle than he had raised the rents. Back had come the odious charge for turf-cutting, the tax on the carrigeens and the tithe-levy upon the gathered kelp. In the best of times these impositions would have been sorely felt; the cruel failure of the potatoes in 1877 and ’78 had elevated them into the domain of the tragic.
For the first time in its history Muirisc had witnessed evictions. Half way up the cliff stood the walls of four cottages, from which the thatched roofs had been torn by a sheriff’s posse of policeman during the bleakest month of winter. The gloomy spectacle, familiar enough elsewhere throughout Ireland, had still the fascination of novelty in the eyes of Muirisc. The villagers could not keep their gaze from those gaunt, deserted walls. Some of the evicted people—those who were too old or too young to get off to America and yet too hardy to die—still remained in the neighborhood, sleeping in the ditches and subsisting upon the poor charity of the cottagers roundabout. The sight of their skulking, half-clad forms and hunger-pinched faces filled Muirisc with wrathful humiliation.
Almost worst still were the airs which latterly O’Daly had come to assume. Even if the evictions and the rack-renting could have been forgiven, Muirisc felt that his calling himself The O’Daly was unpardonable. Everybody in Ivehagh knew that the O’Dalys had been mere bards and singers for the McCarthys, the O’Mahonys, and other Eugenian houses, and had not been above taking service, later on, under the hatred Carews. That any scion of the sept should exalt himself now, in the shoes of an O’Mahony, was simply intolerable.
In proportion as Cormac waxed in importance, his coadjutor Jerry had diminished. There was no longer any talk heard about Diarmid MacEgan; the very pigs in the street knew him now to be plain Jerry Higgins. Only the most shadowy pretense of authority to intermeddle in the affairs of the estate remained to him. Unlettered goodnature and loyalty had stood no chance whatever against the will and powers of the educated Cormac. Muirisc did indeed cherish a nebulous idea that some time or other the popular discontent would find him an effective champion, but Jerry did nothing whatever to encourage this hope. He had grown stout and red-faced through these unoccupied years, and lived by himself in a barely habitable nook among the ruins of the castle, overlooking the churchyard. Here he spent a great deal of his time, behind barred doors and denying himself to all visitors—and Muirisc had long since concluded that the companion of his solitude was a bottle.
“I’ve a word more to whisper into your ear, Higgins,” said O’Daly, this very evening, at the conclusion of some unimportant conversation about the mines.
The supper had been cleared away, and a tray of glasses flanking a decanter stood on the table at which the speaker sat with his pipe. The buxom and rubicund Mrs. Fergus—for so Muirisc still thought and spoke of her—dozed comfortably in her arm-chair at one side of the bank of blazing peat on the hearth, an open novel turned down on her lap. Opposite her mother, Kate sat and sewed in silence, the while the men talked. It was the room in which The O’Mahony had eaten his first meal in Muirisc, twelve years before.
“‘A word to whishper,’” repeated O’Daly, glancing at Jerry with severity from under his beetling black brows, and speaking so loudly that even Mrs. Sullivan in the kitchen might have heard—“times is that hard, and work so scarce, that bechune now and midsummer I’d have ye look about for a new place.”
Jerry stared across the table ............