CHAPTER II
THE WOLF AND THE CARPENTER
or a year after their arrival in Antrim they lived in the home of the master-shoemaker for whom Jamie worked as journeyman. It was a great hardship, for there was no privacy and their daily walk and conversation, in front of strangers, was of the "yea, yea" and "nay, nay" order. In the summer time they spent their Sundays on the banks of Lough Neagh, taking whatever food they needed and cooking it on the sand. They continued their courting in that way. They watched the water-fowl on the great wide marsh, they waded in the water and played as children play. In more serious moods she read to him Moore's poems and went over the later lessons of her school life. Even with but part of a day in each week together they were very happy. The world was full of sunshine for them then. There were no clouds, no regrets, no fears. It was a period—a brief period—that for the rest of their lives they looked back upon as a time when they really lived. I am not sure, but I am of the impression that the chief reason she could not be persuaded to visit the Lough in later life was because she wanted to remember it as she had seen it in that first year of their married life.
Their first child was two years of age when the famine came—the famine that swept over Ireland like a plague, leaving in its wake over a million new-made graves. They had been in their own house for over a year. It was scantily furnished, but it was home. As the ravages of the famine spread, nearly every family in the town mourned the absence of some member. Men and women met on the street, one day were gone the next. Jamie put his bench to one side and sought work at anything he could get to do. Prices ran up beyond the possibilities of the poor. The potato crop only failed. The other crops were reaped and the proceeds sent to England as rent and interest, and the reapers having sent the last farthing, lay down with their wives and children and died. Of the million who died four hundred thousand were able-bodied men. The wolf stood at every door. The carpenter alone was busy. Of course it was the poor who died—the poor only. In her three years of married life Anna realized in a measure that the future held little change for her or her husband, but she saw a ray of hope for the boy in the cradle. When the foodless days came and the child was not getting food enough to survive, she gave vent to her feelings of despair. Jamie did not quite understand when she spoke of the death of hope.
"Spake what's in yer heart plainly, Anna!" he said plaintively.
"Jamie, we must not blame each other for anything, but we must face the fact—we live at the bottom of the world where every hope has a headstone—a headstone that only waits for the name."
"Aye, dear, God help us, I know, I know what ye mane."
"Above and beyond us," she continued, "there is a world of nice things—books, furniture, pictures—a world where people and things can be kept clean, but it's a world we could never reach. But I had hope"—
She buried her face in her hands and was silent.