“‘I assure you, Miss Wilet, you are very handsome, I may say beautiful. ‘I often read of beauty in books, but indeed we never seen it till to-day. Indeed you are a perfect creature.’ ‘All the young ladies in Connemara may go to bed now. Sure they’re nothing but upstarts.’ ‘And it’s not only that you’re lovely, but so commanding. Indeed you have an imprettive look!’ This, I believe, means imperative. Then another sister took up the wondrous tale. ‘Sure we’re all enamoured by you!’
“This and much more, and I just sat and laughed weakly and drunkenly. Many other precious things I lost, as all the sisters talked together, yea, they answered one to another. Custom has taken the edge off the admiration now, I am grieved to say, but it still exists, and the friend of my youth, Patcheen Lee, is especially dogmatic in pronouncing upon my loveliness. I am afraid all these flowers of speech will have faded before you get here; they will then begin upon you.”
Another extract from the letters of these early days I will give. The sister whose return to Ross is told of was Geraldine, wife of Canon Edward Hewson;[8] it is her account of Martin, as a little child, that is given in Chapter VIII.
“Geraldine felt this place more of a nightmare than I did. The old days were more present with her, naturally, than with me. I pitied her when she came up the steps. She couldn’t say a word for a long time. There was a bonfire at the gate in her honour in the evening, built just as we described it in the Shocker, a heap of turf, glowing all through, and sticks at the top. Poor Geraldine was so tired I had to drive her down to it, but she went very gallant and remembered the people very well. There was little cheering or demonstrativeness, but there was a great deal of conversation and some slight and inevitable subsequent refreshment in the form of porter.
“I can hardly tell you what it felt like to see the bonfire blazing there, just as it used to in my father’s time, when he and the boys and all of us used to come down when someone was being welcomed home, and it was all the most natural thing in the world. It was very different to see Geraldine walk in front of us through the wide open gates, between the tall pillars, with her white face and her black clothes. Thady Connor, the old steward, met her at the gate, and not in any ‘Royal enclosure’ could be surpassed the way he took off his hat, and came silently forward to her, while everyone else kept back, in dead silence too. Of course they had all known her well. What with that glare of the bonfire, and the lit circle of faces, and the welcome killed with memories for her, I wonder how she stood it. It was the attempt at the old times that was painful and wretched, at least I thought it so. Edward was wonderful, in a trying position. In about two minutes he was holding a group of men in deep converse without any apparent effort, and he was much approved of.
“‘A fine respectable gentleman’—‘The tallest man on the property’—such were the comments.”
There are two poems that were written many years ago, by one of the tenants, one Jimmy X., a noted poet, in praise of the Martins and of Ross, and mysteriously blended with these themes is a eulogy of a certain musician, who was also a tenant. The first few verses were dictated to Martin, I know not by whom; the last three were written for her by the poet himself; his spelling lends a subtle charm. To read it, giving the lines their due poise and balance, demands skill, the poem being of the modern mode, metrical, but rhymeless. There is a tune appertaining to it which offers some assistance in the matter of stress, but it must here be divorced from its words; since, however, it is a tune of maddening and haunting incompleteness, a tune that has “no earthly close,” one of those tunes, in fact, that are of the nature of a possession (in an evil and spiritual sense), this need not be regretted.
ROSS.
It is well known through Ireland
That Ross it is a fine place
The healthiest in climate
That ever yet was known.
When you get up in the morning
Ye’ll hear the thrishes warbling
The cuckoo playing most charming
Which echoes the place.