CHAPTER XVIII.
THE STORY OF BETTY CUNNINGHAM.
The disaster which swept over all Ireland through the final success of the treachery of Crowe raged soon after in Ballybay. The town had been reduced by successive misfortunes to a condition so abject that one calamity was sufficient to completely submerge the greater portion of its inhabitants. Mr. Anthony Cosgrave, J. P., signalized the event by driving out the few tenants who still remained on the properties he had bought. He turned all his land into pasture, for this was the prosperous era of the graziers, and cattle were rapidly transformed into gold. Other landlords pursued similar courses, and within a couple of years, ten thousand people had been swept from the neighborhood around.
The calamity reached down to the very lowest stratum, and touched depths so profound as the fortunes of the widow Cunningham and her daughter Betty.
It had now become habitual for the widow and her daughter to remain for a couple of days with barely any food. One night they were sitting opposite each other on the bare floor of the railway arch in which they had for several years found refuge, staring at each other with the blank, wild gaze of hunger. There was a terrible pang at the heart of the mother on this night of nights. Throughout all her long years of struggle two great thoughts still remained burning in her soul, and in spite of poverty and hunger that soul still remained afire. One was vengeance on Cosgrave for the long train of woes through which she herself had passed, and the other was the protection of her child.
With that profound reverence for female honor which is still one of the best characteristics of the Irish poor, she had seen the growth of her beautiful daughter with a love mixed with terror, and guarded her child as the tigress watches by her lair. Her own life had long since ceased to be dear to her. She walked for hours through the streets, she pleaded for custom, she smiled under insult, she bore rain and hail and snow, in hope of the fulfilment of this great passionate purpose—to keep her daughter pure.
The misery of the last six months had been aggravated by the dread, growing in intensity with every hour, that all this endurance would be in vain, that behind the wolf of hunger there stalked the more cruel wolf of lust, and that her daughter was doomed. On this subject not a word passed between the two women, for the delicacy of feeling which marks even the humblest grade of Irish life sealed their lips; but the dread was always there in the mother's heart, pursuing her as a nightmare through the long watches of the darkness, and haunting her every moment as wearily she carried her basket through the streets in the day.
"Buy a few apples, yer honor, for God's sake," she often said to a passer-by, in a tone that might have struck one as menacing, or at least as entirely disproportionate to the urgency of the appeal; but in every such prayer for pence the mother felt that she was crying for her child, and her child's soul, and her accents came from the very anguish of her mother's heart.
On this night—it was about a month after the election of Crowe—the two sat together, buried in their own sad thoughts. They were suddenly aroused by the floor becoming inundated, and at once knew what to expect. The Shannon periodically rose above its banks outside Ballybay, and then its waters overspread the "Big Meadows," and the railway arch underneath which the widow and her daughter had taken refuge was, as will be remembered, close to these Meadows.
They rose and rushed from the spot. They were now absolutely homeless, without even a place on which to lay their heads. They went further on to another railway arch, and at last slept. When the mother awoke in the morning she was alone.
At this period a Ballybay landlord, afterwards destined to figure largely in the social life of Ireland, had just come of age. Thomas McNaghten was perhaps the handsomest Irishman of his day; tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. He had a physique as splendid as that of the race of peasants from whom his father sprang; while from the gentler race of his mother he derived features of exquisite delicacy and the complexion of a lily-like pink and white. He afterwards ran a career of mad dissipation that made his name a by-word even among the reckless and debauched class to which he belonged, and died a paralytic before he was forty. But at the period of our story, he was still in the full strength and the first flush of manhood. He had cast his eyes on Betty Cunningham, and had held out to her bribes that seemed to unfold to the girl visions of untold wealth. The innate purity of the maiden had hitherto been proof against the direct influences of poverty and wretchedness and the advances of her tempter. But at last the combined intensities of hunger and despair became his allies.
Three weeks after her desertion of her mother Betty Cunningham was drunk in one of the public-houses, which were frequented by the soldiers quartered in Ballybay. The fatal progress of the Irish girl who has fallen is more rapid than in any other country. Society, always cruel to its hapless victims and its outcasts, in Ireland is fanatically and barbarously savage. Betty was driven out from every house! People shuddered as she passed. She lay under hedges, her bed was often in the snow. To Ballybay she was as much an object of loathing and of horror as though she were some wild beast that men might lawfully destroy.
The girl herself had no compensation for all this dread outlawry. The Traviatas of other lands are painted for us in gilded saloons, with costly wines in golden goblets, and noble lovers sighing for their smiles. But Betty, outcast, hungry, and houseless, had not one second's enjoyment of life. The faith in which she had been trained still held its grip upon her, and neither vice nor drink nor human cruelty could relax its grasp. She was a sinner against Heaven's most sacred law; and after brief life came death, and after death eternal torment. Pursued by this ever-present spectre she drank and drank, and awoke more wretched than ever, and then she drank again.
She would sometimes seek refuge from her burning shame and from her tortured soul in fierce revolt. She rolled in mad delirium through the streets, yelled the blasphemies in the shuddering ears of Ballybay, fought the police who came to arrest her, developed, in short, into a raging demon. Her face became bloated, her expression horrible to witness. One day, as she passed through the streets in one of these frenzies, she met Mat Blake. She shivered in every limb, and a pang, as from the thrust of a dagger, passed through her heart. But she attempted all the more to steel her nerves, and to harden her face. She raised her eyes and glared, but the eyes fell, and she slunk away.
And thus it was that Mat saw, for the first time since his return to Ballybay, the gentle, timid, lovely girl who had once willingly stood between him and death.
A few minutes afterwards, Betty's mother appeared. Her features bore the traces of the deepest grief that had yet assailed her. All pride had gone from that once imperious face; she was a stooped, shame-faced, old woman. As Mat looked at her there rushed before his memory the many momentous hours of his life with which that face was bound up, his days of childhood in her prosperous home, his association with her daughter, and the glad hours during the first election of Crowe, when life was still full of glorious hope, and she had dashed the glad vision with the first breath of suspicion and anticipated evil.
They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then she shook her head, and with a look of infinite grief in her eyes, said to him—
"Ah, Master Mat, it was the hunger did it; it was the hunger did it."
By a trick of memory Mat recollected that these were the words he had heard on that day, long ago, when Betty had rescued Mary and himself from the enraged bull.
One thing Mat had noticed as Betty Cunningham had passed; it was that amid the wreck of her beauty one feature still remained as strangely witching as ever. The soft eyes had not lost their delicacy of hue, nor had the evil passions of her soul deprived them of their gentle look. Those who mentioned her, and she was not an uncommon topic among the men of the town, still spoke of Betty's beautiful eyes.
At last there came a temporary change in her fate. A branch of the Mary Magdalene Asylum was established in Ballybay for the rescue of fallen women, and she was one of the first to enter. But her temper, spoiled by excesses and disappointment, fretted under the restraint. She quarrelled with the nuns, and one night she fled. Then the revival in all its fierce vigilance of the old spectre of eternal punishment made her more infuriate than ever. She drank more deeply, cursed more fiercely, was oftener in the police-cell, and Ballybay loathed her more than ever.
One morning—it was a Christmas morning—Mat was walking with his father in the "Big Meadows." Snow had fallen heavily the night before; and as they passed a bush, they saw the impress of a woman's form; it was evident that an unhappy being had there spent her Christmas Eve.
"My God!" said Mat, "a woman has slept there."
Mat's father was the kindest and most humane being in all the world, but "Serve the wretch right!" was his comment.
Her story wound up in a tragic climax. One night she made more violent resistance than ever to the attempts of the police to arrest her, and when she was at last captured, she was torn and bleeding. They put her into a cell by herself; she could be heard pacing up and down with the infuriate step of a caged tiger. The policeman on duty afterwards told how he had heard her muttering to herself, and that he thought he caught the words, "These eyes! These eyes! They have undone me! They have undone me!" Soon afterwards he heard a wild, unearthly shriek that froze his blood. He rushed into the cell, and there, horrible, bleeding.... But I dare not describe the sight.
Betty Cunningham was taken once more into the Mary Magdalene Asylum. Her voice was trained, and after some years she sang in the choir. A strong hush always came over the chapel when her voice was heard. People still told in whispers the terrible story of the blind lay sister; and Mat, sitting in the chapel years afterwards, was carried over the whole history of her career and his own and that of Ballybay generally as he listened to her rich contralto singing second to the rest. He had always thought that there was something wondrously pathetic, at least in sacred music, in the voice that sings seconds, and the impression was confirmed as he listened to the blind girl's accompaniment to the other voices; low when they were loud, sad when they were triumphant, following painfully their quicker steps with that ever plaintive protest and soft wail—fit image of life, where our highest joys are dogged by sorrow's quick and inevitable step.
Conclusion next month.
Charity's mantle is often made of gauze.