END OF PART I
PART II
CHAPTER IX
A brisk little gentleman, with a sharp profile and a slight stoop, was walking along a road in the south of Kerry. He had a somewhat lost, undecided air as he halted now and then, and vaguely stared about him. He was, in fact, a total stranger to the locality, being a certain Mr. Bence Usher, head of a well-known firm of London solicitors, who was spending his vacation for the first time in Ireland, and Ireland’s beauty had decoyed him far astray; the active, enterprising tourist was a good five miles from his hotel and his dinner—he was exploring alone, for Emily Usher, his housekeeper and sister, preferred to sit in the shady garden at the “Glenveigh Arms,” in company with the hotel tortoise and a new novel. As he moved onwards, sheer above him rose the purple Reeks; low on the right hand glittered a silver lake, of which each bend in the way, or break among the trees, revealed an enchanting vista of wooded islands, bays, or promontories. By degrees the prospect became lost to sight, and at length a high, dilapidated wall screened it completely—a wall bulging out dangerously here and there, but held together with ropes of ancient ivy. An equally dilapidated entrance presently came into view, and perched on one of the tumbledown gate piers sat an old man in his Sunday clothes, smoking a short black dhudeen. This he removed from his mouth in order to say, “A fine evening, yer honour”—for the southern-born peasant is always gracious, and never meets a stranger without some civil salute.
“Can you tell me whereabouts I am?” inquired the Englishman, in his thin, polite voice.
“And to be sure I can! An’ why wouldn’t I?” he returned, with unexpected emphasis. “This place,” indicating a grass-grown avenue which wound away vaguely among the trees, “is called Lota, but sure, ’tis in ruins. An empty house hereabouts falls to pieces in ten years’ time. ’Tis the soft climate as does it.”
“How far am I from the ‘Glenveigh Hotel’?”
“Faix, it depends on the road ye go—by wan way it’s in or about six miles, and the other it’s three—though it’s all the same distance. Ye understand me?”