X.
WHY THE RENT IS RAISED—THE HISTORY OF AN EVICTION FROM ONE OF THE EVICTED—A DONEGAL CONGREGATION—A CLIMB TO THE TOP OF DOONHILL—DOON HOLY WELL—MAKING THE BEST OF A STRANGER.
In the silence of the night when sleep would not come, and when my imagination rehearsed over and over again sights I had seen and tales I had heard, I made an almost cast-iron resolution to escape to the estate of Stewart of Ards and have one letter filled up with the good deeds of a landlord. Alas for me! another storm, a rain storm, and a touch of neuralgia conspired to keep me "ben the house" in the little room upon the mountain side. One can weather snow or hail easier than a mountain rain storm. The rain is laden with half-melted snow, and the wind that drives it is terribly in earnest.
It is one queer feature of this mountain scenery, the entire absence of trees. The hills look as if the face of the country had been shaved. Up the hill sides the little fields are divided off by high, broad stone fences, the result of gathering the stones out of the fields. The bog land to be reclaimed requires drains three feet deep every six feet of land.
To trench up a little field into ridges six feet apart, to gather stones out of a little field sufficient to surround it with a four feet high stone fence, to grub out and burn whins, to make all the improvements with your own labor, and then to have your landlord come along with his valuator and say, "Your farm is worth double what you pay for it; I can get thirty shillings an acre for it," and to raise the rent to its full value, which you must pay or go out. This sort of thing is repeated, and repeated, in every variation of circumstances and of hardship, and the people submit and are, as a whole, quiet and law-abiding.
I was called out of my little den to see a woman, one of the evicted tenants of Mr. Adair. She was on her way to Letterkenny to see her son, who is in the asylum since the eviction. It was hard enough to wander through the ruins and hear of the eviction scenes from others, but to sit by the turf fire and listen to one who had suffered and was suffering from this dreadful act, to see the recollection of it expressed in look and tone was different. This woman—husband dead, son in the asylum—was a decent-looking body in cloak and cap, with a bleached face and quiet voice.
"We were all under sentence of eviction, but it was told to us that it was for squaring the farms. Then we were warned to pay in the half- year's rent. It was not due till May, and we had never been asked to pay the rent ahead of us before. But the landlord was a new one, and if he made a rule, why, we must obey him; so we scraped up and sold this and that and paid it. If we had known what was coming we might have kept it, and had a penny to turn to when we were out under the sky. It was to get the rent before he turned us out that he made that plan. We were put out in the beginning of April; our rent was paid up to May. Oh, I wish, I wish that he had driven us into the lake the day he put us out. A few minutes would have ended our trouble, but now when will it end! I have been through the country, my lady, and my boy in the asylum ever since."
Went to the Catholic chapel up here in the mountains. It was quite convenient to my lodging. It is a very nice building with a new look. I was surprised to see such a fine building in the mountains, for, owing to the poverty of the people, there were no chapels at all in some places a little time ago. Mass was celebrated in scalans, a kind of open sheds, covered over head to protect the officiating priest from the weather, while the people clustered round in the open air. When I spoke of the nice appearance of the chapel I was told that the children of these hills scattered through the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, had helped in its building. There were between seven and eight hundred people present. There were no seats on the floor of the chapel. I could not help admiring the patient, untiring devotion of these people, and the endurance that enabled them to kneel so long. The prevailing type of face is eminently Scottish, so is the tone of voice, and the names, Murrays, Andersons, and the like.
Were it not for the altar and the absence of seats I could have imagined myself in a Glenelg Presbyterian congregation. The Irish spoken here, and it is spoken universally, has a good deal of resemblance to Glenelg Gaelic. I was surprised at how much I understood of the conversations carried on around me. The women, too, in their white caps, with their serious, devotional comely faces, reminded me of faces I have seen in dear old Glengarry.
There were not half a dozen bonnets in the whole congregation—snow- white caps covered with a handkerchief for the matrons. They wore cloaks and shawls, and looked comfortable enough. I saw some decent blue cloth cloaks of a fashion that made me think they had served four generations at least. The lasses wore their own shining hair "streeling" down their backs or neatly braided up; abundant locks they had, brown color prevailing. Fresher, rosier, comelier girls than these mountain maidens it would be hard to find.
The men's clothing, though poor, and in some instances patched in an artistic fashion, was scrupulously clean. In the congregation were some young men well dressed, bold and upright, whose bearing, cut of whiskers, and watch chains, showed that they had lived among our trans- Atlantic cousins of the great Republic.
The priest of the hills is the one man whom these people trust. The prevailing type of landlord has been their enemy and oppressor. The priest has been friend, counsellor, sympathizer, helper, as well as clergyman, and so he is soggarth aroon.
The storm continues at intervals. I get one clear, cold bit of fair weather to climb to the top of Doune hill, where the Ulster kings used to be crowned, a sugar-loaf shaped hill with the top broken off, rising in isolated grandeur up high enough to give one a breather to get to the top.
The weather returned to its normal condition of storm, and I was shut up again. I became a little homesick, had the priest to tea, and enjoyed his conversation very much, but he had to go off in the storm on a sick call. A priest in these mountains has not the easiest kind of life in the world.
Illusions took possession of my brain. I fancied myself a great queen, to say the least of it. A whisper got among the hills that a great American lady with unlimited power had come seeking the welfare of the country, and so any amount of deputations wafted on me. I will give a few specimens.
Two men to see my lady in reference to a small still that had been misfortunately found on the place of an old man upward of eighty. He was fined L12, and would my lady do anything?
Two women under sentence of eviction, my lady (I saw the place of one of these, the roof was on the floor, and a little shelter was in one corner like the lair of a wild beast, and here she kept possession in spite of the dreadful Captain Dopping; the agent). Would my lady send out their two daughters to America and place them in decent places?
And here was old Roseen, old and miserable, without chick or child, or drop's blood belonging to her in the wide world, and would my lady remember her?
Here's the crature of a widow from the mountain with four small children, and no man body to help her with the place, and not a four- footed beast on it belonging to her; all went in the scarcity; would my lady look to her a little, sure she was the neediest of all?
And here was the poor cripple boy that his reverence was so good to, &c., &c., &c., in endless file.
Nothing kept this over-dose of "my lady" from going to my head like Innishowen poteen, but the slenderness of my purse. Determined at last, warned by my fast-collapsing portmonnaie, to refuse to see any more deputations and keep ben-the-house strictly. A cry arose that Captain Dopping and his body-guard, on evictions bent, were coming up the hill. I rushed out, mounted a ditch of sods for one more look at the little tyrant of their fields. As I stood shading my eyes with my hand and looked across at the dreaded agent, a plaintive "my lady," bleated out at my side, drew my eyes down. It was a woman; she did not speak any more, but looked, and that look drew out my fast collapsing purse. I walked slowly into the house, determined to escape from the hills while I had the means left of escaping.