A great life, his, a great and serviceable life, frustrated of glory ... And well he deserved the quiet of Ulster, where he sat and wrote his long letters to archæological papers, proving, he thought, that the Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and that the Ark of the Covenant was buried on Tara Hill ... And there were none to laugh at him ... All spirit he was; watchful, dogged, indomitable spirit with a little husk of body ... Soon, as he had directed, his old bearded sailormen would take his flag-covered casket out to sea in the night, and the guns would thunder: A British admiral sails by ...
And there was Simon Fowler in his little cottage, who was dying by inches from some tropical malady ... A small chunky man with white hair and wide blue eyes ... He had been a missionary in Africa, in China, in India—not the missionary of sentimental books, but a prophet whose calm voice, whose intrepid eyes, had gained him a hearing everywhere ... "Put fear away," he had preached in Africa; "let darkness flee. I come to tell of the light of the world ... After me will come the sellers of gin and of guns. But I shall give you a great magic against them ... Little children love one another ..." In China his fire had shamed philosophers: "I know your alms-giving. I know your benevolence. It is selfishness. Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Unless ye become as little children ..." And in the sensuous Indian lands, his voice rose in a great shout: "Subtle Greece is dead," he proclaimed, "and razed are the fanes of Ephesus. And the Unknown God slinks only through the midnight streets ..." "Blessed are the pure in heart ..." He had gone like a flame through the pagan places of the world, and here he was dying in the Antrim glens, with the quiet of Christ about him, the droning of God's little bees, and the lowing of the cattle of Bethlehem ... He was a great man. He had only one contempt: for hired clergymen.
There were three folk of heroic stature around him: the admiral, and Simon Fowler, and the woman of Tusa hErin.
§4
A very small townland is Tusa hErin, the smallest in Ireland, it is said. And a very strange name on it: Tusa hErin, the beginning of Ireland. Why it is so called, none know. Possibly because some Highlanders named it this on landing there. Probably because it was a division between the Scottish and Irish clans. So it was called when the Bruce fled to Ireland. So it is called to this day.
Twenty acres or so are in it—a wind and sea lashed little estate, a great gray house and a garden of yew-trees. For ten years it had been untenanted, until a Miss O'Malley had bought it, and opened the great oak doors, and let the sea-air blow through the windows of it, and clipped the garden of the yews. The country people knew little of her, except that she had a great reserve. To the glensmen she was Bean Tusig Erin, the woman of Tusa hErin.
"What kind of a person is she?" Shane asked.
"A strange woman is in it, your Honor; a strange and dark woman."
"If she was one of us, she would be an old woman, your Honor, what with the bitter work and the hard ways. But being what she is, she is a young woman, your Honor. I heard tell she said she was thirty-four."