Irish Memories

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

There was everything to be done, inside and outside that old house, and no one to do it but one fragile, indomitable girl. Ireland, now, is full of such places as Ross was then. “Gentry-houses,” places that were once disseminators of light, of the humanities; centres of civilisation; places to which the poor people rushed, in any trouble, as to Cities of Refuge. They are now destroyed, become desolate, derelict. To-day

“The Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.”

But even more than the laying waste of Ross House and gardens I believe it was the torture of the thought that the Ross people might feel that the Martins had failed them, and that the “Big House” was no longer the City of Refuge for its dependants in the day of trouble, that chiefly spurred Martin on, in her long and gallant fight with every sort of difficulty, that summer, when she and her mother began to face the music again at Ross.

In that music, however, there was an undertone of discord that threatened for a while to wreck all the harmony. There are a few words that Martin had written, in continuation of the account of her brother Robert, that explain the matter a little, and I will quote them here.

“The white chapel that overlooked the lake and the woods of Ross, heard much, at about this time (i.e. the later years of the ’eighties), that was not of a spiritual tendency. The Land League had been established in the parish; the branch had for its head, in the then Parish Priest, an Apostle of land agitation, a man whose power of bitter animosity, legal insight, and fighting quality, would have made his name in another profession. He made his mark in his own, a grievous one for himself. He rose up against his Bishop, supported by the great majority of his parish, and received the reprimand of his Church. He went with his case to Rome, and after long intrigue there, came home, a beaten man, dispossessed of his parish, and was received in Galway with a brass band and a procession, the latter of which accompanied him, brokenly, but with persistence, to his home, a distance of about fifteen miles. For many months afterwards the strange and not unimpressive spectacle presented itself, of a Roman Catholic Priest defying his Church, and holding, by some potent spell, the support of the majority of his parish. Sunday after Sunday two currents of parishioners set in different directions, the one heading to the lawful Chapel on the hill and the accredited priest, the other to the green and white ‘Land League Hut,’ that had been built with money that Father Z. had himself collected.”

Martin’s MS. ceases here. I may add to it a little.

I went to Ross not long after Father Z.’s return from Rome. I chanced but once to see him, but the remembrance of that fierce and pallid face, and of the hatred in it, is with me still. He is dead, and I believe that his teaching died with him. The evil that men do does not always live after them. The choice of his successor was a fortunate one for the parish of Rosscahill. Few people out of Ireland realise how much depends on the personality of the parish priest. Father Z. had had it in his power to shake a friendship of centuries, but it was deeply rooted, he could do no more than shake it. His successor had other views of his duty; in him the people of Rosscahill and the House of Ross, alike, found a friend, unfailing in kindness and sympathy, a priest who made it his mission to bring peace to his parish, and not a sword.

No one was more sensible of this friendship, or more grateful for it than Martin. What sustained her and made the sacrifice of time, strength, and money in some degree worth while, during that hard, pioneer year at Ross, was the renewal of the old goodfellowship and intimacy with the tenants. Sixteen years is a big gap, but not so big that it cannot be bridged. Even had the gap been wider, I believe Martin’s slender hand would have reached across it. As she has said of the relation between the Martins and their tenants—“The personal element was always warm in it ... the hand of affection held it together....”[7]

And so she and her mother proved it. It was the intense interest and affection which Martin had in and for the “Ross people” that made enjoyment march with what she believed to be her duty. She had a gift for doing, happily and beautifully, always the right thing, at no matter what cost to herself. A very unusual gift, and one of more value to others than to its possessor. One remembers the Arab steed, who dies at a gallop. It was not only that she was faithful and unselfish, but she so applied her intellect to obliterating all traces of her fidelity and her unselfishness, that their object strode, unconscious, into the soft place that she had prepared, and realised nothing of the self-sacrifice that had gone to its making. With her, it was impossible to say which was the more beautiful, the gentleness of heart, or the brilliance of intellect. I have heard that among the poor people they called her The Gentle Lady; in such a matter, poor people are the best judges.

In her first letters to me from Ross, the place it held in her heart is shown, and there is shown also some of the difficulties, the heartrendings, the inconveniences, the absurdities, of those first months of reclamation. No one but Martin herself will ever know what courage and capacity were required to cope with them. She overcame them all. Many times have I been a guest at Ross, and more wholly enjoyable visits seldom fall to anyone’s lot. But the comfort and restored civilisation of the old house had cost a high price.