"But I don't mean them only," said Christian, standing to her guns; "I mean the individual—you and me! Just anybody—we're all the same. The Shan van Voght has got to free us from each other before she takes on England!" She looked at Larry; the seriousness left her face, and she shook back the dark hair from her forehead with just the same gay, mutinous toss of the head that a young horse will give when the rider picks up the reins. "I may have been stuck down here in a hole!" said Christian, mocking him; "but anyhow, I haven't lived in England and lost my eye!"
"What about seeing from a distance, and seeing the whole and not the part?" retorted Larry. "What about a bird's eye view?" He had risen to his feet and was looking down at her, feeling the moral support of physical elevation.
"That depends on the bird!" said Christian. "Now, if it were a goose, for example! Like——Hi! Dogs! Look, Larry! Look! Down by the furze bushes! A huge rabbit!"
The discussion closed abruptly, as such discussions will, when the disputants are at the golden age, and views and opinions are winged, and have not yet become ballast, or, which is worse, turned to mooring-stones.
The origin of the Coppinger's Court picnic was complicated and has remained obscure. Whether its author had been Mrs. Mangan, or her friend, Mrs. Whelply, or young Mr. Coppinger himself, was uncertain, but the fact remained that a picnic, with indirect reference to the blossoming of the bluebells (i.e., the wild hyacinths) was decided upon, and that Larry, in the course of the visit that he never failed to pay to the Mangan household, had placed the demesne of Coppinger's Court at the disposal of the ladies of Cluhir, as a scene for the entertainment.
Larry's fidelity to the Mangans was a matter that was undoubtedly something of a trial to his Aunt Freddy. She was too inflexibly conscientious to attempt to deny, even to Lady Isabel, still less to herself, that such fidelity was creditable, but she felt justified in considering it superfluous; when, as now, it took the form of inviting a party of unknown size, under the patronage of Mrs. Mangan, to accept the Ownashee as its washpot, and (as it were) to cast forth its shoe over Coppinger's Court, Aunt Freddy may be forgiven the manoeuvre that arranged a séance with her Dublin dentist for the date decided upon for the picnic, and may be felt to deserve the sympathy of those who can appreciate the inwardness of her position. And this last, improbable though it may seem to some people, was made immensely more difficult by the simple and irrelevant fact that she, on Sundays, betook herself to the Knock Ceoil Protestant church, while Larry went to the white chapel on the hill. It was to the grey, stone Protestant church that Larry's forbears had gone for one hundred and fifty years or more, even since the then reigning Coppinger had fallen in love with an English heiress, and, agreeing with Henri Quatre, that Paris was well worth a Mass, had 'verted to marry her. Never in living memory had the congregations that filled full the white chapel on the hill, included in their dutiful ranks any being of higher degree than might have been found in those other congregations, that, some nineteen hundred years earlier, were gathered in the hills of Galilee; those humble crowds who came to hear Christ preach, of whom it was said that they were of the common people, and that they heard Him gladly. Miss Frederica was as good a Christian—in some ways probably a better one—as might have been found in the white chapel, but it was impossible for her not to feel, what was, indeed, felt, with a singular mixture of satisfaction and disapproval, by the majority of the white chapel's congregation, that Larry's parents had, socially, been ill-advised when they "made a Roman of him." In the creed of Mary Twomey, and her fellows, it was only in conformity with natural law in the spiritual world that ginthry should go to church, and the like of herself to chapel. She, no more than Frederica, could subdue the feeling of incongruity imparted by the fact of Master Larry and herself worshipping together; it was as though, if she had run into the kitchen to get a sup of hot water, or the wetting of her mouth o' tay, she had found him sitting among the maids in the servants' hall. Mary Twomey, and her fellows, would have indignantly repudiated the idea of taking service with one of their own church. "No! Thank God! I never sank to that!" Mary had once said, when such had been imputed to her. There was no question of religion in it. Merely of fitness. So inveterate in the older Ireland is, or was, what Christian might have considered to be the outcome of The Spirit of the Nation, but that, in this special connection, may with, perhaps, greater accuracy, be ascribed to the aristocratic instinct.
Something like a sheet of thin ice had come into existence between Larry's life and that of his aunt. It had come gradually, almost imperceptibly. There had been a time, after his First Communion, when Larry had confided in Frederica. He had even told her of the anxieties he had felt before his first Confession, and of how difficult he had found it to decide upon the sins that he could, without arrogance lay to his own charge. He told her that he had invented several crimes, in order to dignify the occasion. Frederica wondered secretly how that charming Jesuit Father, to whom, at Monkshurst, she had been introduced as her nephew's spiritual director, had dealt with the sinner; but this, Larry had not divulged. There were, from that time forward, an increasing number of things that Larry did not divulge to his Aunt Freddy, and the sheet of ice slowly became thicker. It was "the religious aspect of the case," as Miss Coppinger complained to Mr. Fetherston, that made it so impossible for her to speak her mind to Larry about the Mangans.
"Do you remember you advised us to send him to Oxford?" she reproached him. "I'm afraid it has only had the effect of making him take his religion more seriously—for which, I suppose, one ought to be thankful——"
"And why not?" the Reverend Charles had replied. "They say all roads lead to Rome, so no doubt the converse holds good, and out of Rome some road must lead to Heaven!"