Larry bicycled up to the white chapel
on the hill, to Second Mass, on the following morning.
He rode fast through the converging groups of people,
on foot, on outside cars, in carts, on horseback.
It was four years since he had last attended a service
there, and to many of the assembled congregation he
had become a stranger. None the less there was
no hesitation in any man’s mind in identifying
him; these were people who knew a gentleman when they
saw one, and the young owner of Coppinger’s
Court was the only gentleman ever to be seen at the
white chapel on the hill.
Therefore it was that Larry’s
right hand was seldom on his handle-bar, as he skimmed
through the people, decent and dark-dressed in their
Sunday best, who saluted with a long-established friendship
and respect this solitary representative of their
traditional enemies, the landlords.
There cannot be in the world a people
more unfailingly church-going than those sons and
daughters of Rome who are bred in Southern Ireland.
Larry looked down, from his pew in the gallery, at
the close ranks of kneeling figures, and thought with
compunction how long it was since he had been in a
church, and thanked God that he had come home to his
own people, and that their religion was his. He
followed the words of the service with a new realisation
of their ancient beauty. He trembled with an
unfamiliar emotion, as, in the charged silence of
the crowded chapel, the bell tinkled and the censer
clashed, sounds that have in them at such moments a
heart-shaking power, magnetic, mystical. He heard
nothing of the sermon; in his eager mind two thoughts
raced side by side, now one, now the other, leading.
These two marvels that had befallen. That Christian
should love him; this had the mastery, irradiating
all; but with the vivid sense of fellowship and communion
that the service brought the other thought, the old
dream that was coming true of standing for these people,
of making their interests his, their welfare his care,
moved him profoundly.
Outside in the chapel yard, after
the service, the congregation was in no hurry to disperse.
Larry looked about him, and found many friendly eyes
set on him. Larry, too, had a friendly heart,
and he bethought him that, as a future M.P., he should
lose no opportunity of intercourse with his constituents.
He recognised the solid presence of John Herlihy,
an elderly farmer who had been one of the largest of
his own late tenants, and he went across the yard
to where he stood and shook hands with him.
“Fine day, John! Good and
hot for the harvest! Got your threshing done
yet?”
“’Tis very warm, sir,”
answered John Herlihy, correcting, as is invariable,
Larry’s employment of the vulgar adjective “hot”;
“very warm entirely, and sure I have my corn
threshed this ten days, the same as yourself!”
“Nothing like taking time by
the fetlock, is there, John!” chaffed Larry
(who, until that moment, had been unaware that he possessed
any corn); “it’s a good harvest all round,
isn’t it?”
“Well, pretty fair, thank God!”
“And the country’s quiet?”
“Never better, sir, never better!”
responded John Herlihy, weightily; but something in
his cool eyes, grey and wise as a parrot’s, impelled
Larry, in his new-born sense of responsibility, to
further questioning.
Mr. John Herlihy was a man of the
order to whom the label “respectable”
inevitably attaches itself (that adjective which acts
as a touch-stone in the definition of class, and is
a compliment up to a certain point, an offence higher
up the scale); one of those sound and sensible and
thrifty farmers who are the strength of Ireland, and
are as the stones of a break-water, over which the
storm-froth of the waters of politics sweeps unheeded.
“Well,” Larry went on,
“it wasn’t a very nice way that those Carmodys
up at Derrylugga treated Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry
the other day! Killing her mare under her, the
cowardly blackguards!”
The grey parrot eyes scanned Larry,
summing him up, determining how far he might be trusted,
deciding that an oblique approach might be most advisable.
“Major Lowry’s a fine
gentleman,” said John Herlihy, largely; “a
fine, easy, grauver man! I declare I was
sorry to me heart when he gave up the hounds!
If it was to be only a scold or a curse from him,
ye’d rather it, and to have he be goin’
through the country!”
“Then what have people against
him? Good God!” cried Larry, hotly.
“It’s too easy he is! I wouldn’t
have let those devils off as easy as he did!”
“I heard the Priest and a few
more, was above at Mount Music ere yesterday,”
said John Herlihy, in a slightly lowered voice, “about
the sale of the property they were, I b’lieve.
You done well, Master Larry, you got quit o’
the whole kit of us!”
Having thus shelved the controversial
subject, Mr. Herlihy, laughing heartily at his own
jest, moved towards his horse and car, that were hitched
to the chapel gate, and let down the upturned side
of the car.
“Come! Get up, woman!
Get up!” he called to his wife, a prosperous
lady, in a massive, blue, hooded cloak, who had been
standing by the gate, patiently waiting his pleasure;
“don’t be delaying me this way!”
He winked at Larry, scrambling on to the car.
“What tashpy he has!”
remarked Mrs. Herlihy, benignantly, as Larry shook
hands with her.
“Ah, you spoil him, Mrs. Herlihy!
You should dock his oats!” said Larry, laughing
into her jolly, round, red face, that was glistening
with heat under the heavy cloth hood. “It’s
a grand hot day, isn’t it?”
“’Tis very warm, sir,
indeed,” corrected Mrs. Herlihy, as she mounted
the car with an agility as competent, and as unexpected,
as that of a trespassing cow confronted with a stone-faced
bank.
Larry went home, and continued a letter
to Christian that he had begun over night. He
told her of Barty’s visit, and of all that it
was likely to involve. He said that he was very
lonely, and he believed she had been gone a year.
Even Aunt Freddy had bolted off to Dublin, on urgent
private affairs, which meant the dentist, as usual.
He would go over to see Cousin Dick, only that he
was absolutely bound to go into Cluhir. At this
point he entered anew upon the subject of his political
future, and what it meant to him. Of the fun he
would have canvassing the electors. Christian
would have to come round with him, and in very obdurate
cases there was always the classical method of the
Duchess of Devonshire to be resorted to! Already,
he said, he was frightfully interested in the whole
show, and he meant several pages were devoted
by Larry to his intentions.
Christian, far away in the County
Limerick, received the letter with her early cup of
tea, and, as she read it, felt her soul disquieted
within her. The conjunction of the stars of Love
and Politics presaged, she felt, disaster as
if the question of religion had not been complicating
enough! Even had her gift of envisaging a situation
by the light of reason failed her, that spiritual aneroid,
which, sensitive to soul-pressure, warned her intuitively
of coming joy or sorrow, ill luck or good fortune,
had fallen from set fair to stormy. She had gone
to sleep with sunshine in her heart; she awoke in clouds,
dark and threatening. She read Larry’s letter,
and knew that the foreboding would come true.
It is probable that no human being
was ever less the prey of intuitions or presentiments
than was young Mr. Coppinger, as he bicycled lightly
into Cluhir along the solitary steam-rolled road of
the district, a typical effort of Irish civilisation,
initiated by Dr. Mangan, that had proposed to link
Cluhir with the outer world, but had died, like a
worn-out tramp, at the end of a few faltering miles,
on the steps of the work-house hospital at Riverstown.
The road ran along the bank of the great river, with
nothing save a low fence and a footpath between it
and the water. The river was still and gleaming.
Masses of dove-coloured cloud, with touches of silver-saffron,
where their lining showed through, draped the wide
sky, in over-lapping folds. The planes of distance
up the broad valley were graduated in tone by a succession
of screens of luminous vapour that parcelled out the
landscape, taking away all colour save that bestowed
by the transparent golden grey of the mist. The
roofs of Cluhir made a dark profile in the middle
distance, the lower part of the houses hidden in the
steaming mist, and the beautiful outline of the twin
crests of Carrigaholt was like a golden shadow in
the sky above them. The spire and the tower of
the two churches of Cluhir, rose on either side of
the pale radiance of the river, with the slender arch
of the bridge joining them, as if to show in allegory
their inherent oneness, their joint access to the
water of life. Religion counted for but little
with Larry in those days, yet as the wonder of beauty
sank into his soul, that was ever thirsty for beauty,
the thought of what it would mean for Ireland if the
symbol of the linking bridge had its counterpart in
reality sprang into his eager mind. Then he thought
of himself and Christian, and knew that religion could
never come between him and her, and, as the close-followed
thought of what these last days had brought, rose
in his mind, the wonder of it overwhelmed him.
He told himself that the only possible explanation
of her caring for such as he, was that Narcissus-like,
she had seen her own image reflected in his heart,
and had fallen in love with it. The fancy attracted
him; he rode on, his mind set on a sonnet that should
fitly enshrine the thought, and politics and religion,
symbols and ideals, faded, as the stars go out when
the sun comes.
For the last couple of miles before
Cluhir was reached the road and the river ran their
parallel course in a line that was nearly direct,
and, from a long way off, Larry was aware of the figure
of a man and woman and a dog, preceding him towards
the town. He noted presently that the dog had
passed from view, and then he saw the man and the
woman hurry across the road and pass through the gateway
of a field. He was soon level with the gate.
There was a little knot of people just within the
field, and in the moment of perceiving that the woman
was Tishy Mangan, he also saw that a fierce fight was
in progress between two dogs.
“Oh, stop them, stop them!”
Tishy was screaming. “That’s my father’s
dog, and he’ll be killed!”
She belaboured the dogs, futilely, with her parasol.
The man who was with her, a tall and
elaborately well-dressed young gentleman with a red
moustache, confined himself, very wisely, to loud
exhortations to the remainder of the group, who were
lads from the town, to call off their dog; and the
remainder of the group, with equal wisdom and greater
candour, were unanimously asserting that they would
be “in dhread” to touch the combatants.
The dogs were well matched strong, yellow-red
Irish terriers; each had the other by the side of
the throat, and each, with the deep, snuffling gurgles
of strenuous combat, was trying to better his hold
on his enemy.
Larry, swift in action as in thought,
was off his bicycle and into the ring without a second
of hesitation.
“Catch your dog by the tail,”
he shouted to the boys, while he performed the like
office for the Doctor’s dog. “Now
then! Into the river with them!”
The two dogs, fast in each other’s
jaws, were lifted, and were borne across the road
to the edge of the footpath, below which the river
ran, deep and strong.
“Now then!”
The two rough, yellow bodies were
swung between Larry and his coadjutor.
“Now! Let ’em go!”
The dogs flew like chain-shot through
the air, and, with a tremendous splash disappeared
from view in the river. They rose to the surface
still keeping their hold of one another, and sank again.
A second time they rose without having loosened their
grip, but at their third appearance they were apart.
“Now boys! Cruisht them
well, or they’ll be at it again when they land!”
The “cruishting,” which
means pelting with stones, succeeded. The enemies
landed at different points. Miss Mangan’s
charge was recaptured, his antagonist was stoned by
his owners until out of range, and the incident closed.
It was not, however, without result.
“I think you never met Captain
Cloherty, Mr. Coppinger?” said Tishy, with a
glance at Captain Cloherty that spoke disapproval.
“He’s not as useful in a fight as you
are, though he is in the Army!”
“My branch of the service mends
wounds, it doesn’t go out of its way to get
them!” returned Captain Cloherty, composedly,
“and I haven’t any use for getting bitten.”
“Mr. Coppinger wasn’t
so nervous!” retorted Miss Mangan, scorchingly,
“and it’s well for me he wasn’t!
What’d I say to the Doctor if I had to tell
him his pet dog was dead?”
“Something else, I suppose!”
suggested Captain Cloherty, his red moustache lifting
in a grin that Miss Mangan found excessively exasperating;
“it wouldn’t be the best time to tell the
truth at all!”
“How funny you are!” said
Tishy, with a blighting glance. “It’s
easy to joke now, when Mr. Coppinger has done the
work!”
She swept another glance of her grey
eyes at Larry, very different from that that she had
bestowed upon the callous Cloherty.
Few young men object to exaltation
at the expense of another, especially if that other
has two or three inches the advantage in height, and
they are themselves not unconscious of deserving.
Larry led his bicycle and walked beside Tishy, and
found pleasure in meeting her again after four years
of absence. For one thing, she had become even
better-looking than he remembered her turned
into a thundering handsome young woman, he thought and
it became him, as an artist, to be a connoisseur in
such matters.
“Oh, so you’re going to
see the Doctor, are you?” she said, “I
know he was expecting you.” She hesitated.
“I told him I thought I’d be at Mrs. Whelply’s
this afternoon. He he might be surprised
if he thought I had Tinker out, and that he was in
a fight
“I’ll keep it dark,”
Larry said, reassuringly, while he wondered if the
protecting darkness were also to envelop Captain Cloherty,
R.A.M.C. He thought, on the whole, perhaps, yes.