We exchanged guilty glances.
“Yes; I heard a shot, too,” I said nervously. “Well, I—a—I think we must be getting on now. It’s getting late, and—a—I hope the cow isn’t very bad. Anyhow”—my voice sinking into the indistinct mumble that usually accompanies the benefaction—“here’s something to get soft food for her till her nose gets well.”
The ambition for the long walk was dead. With more hurried good wishes and regrets we wished the man good evening, and so home, much shattered.
P.S.—We should like to meet the owner of that bulldog.
CHAPTER IV.
SIBBIE looked as suspicious and unamiable as ever when she came to the door next morning; her long day in the stable had evidently not propitiated her in the least, but to her subtle mind had only augured a journey of unprecedented length on the following day. We started, however, with great brilliancy, and with a vulgar semi-circular sweep, like a shop-boy making a capital letter, that Sibbie considered very telling when in society. It took altogether by surprise the penwiper dog, who, with a little more than his usual elaborate ill-breeding, was standing with his back to us, looking chillingly unconcerned, and compelled him to show the most humiliating adroitness in order to escape from Sibbie’s venomous fore-feet. The incident rounded off pleasingly our last impressions of Recess, and we whirled out on to the main road in a manner that nearly took our breath away, and probably left the gate-post in a state of hysterical gratitude at its escape.
It was not raining, but the day had got itself up to look as like rain as possible, and was having a great success in the part. A rough wind was blowing the clouds down about us, and, as on the day before, the hills hid their heads and shoulders in the odious mist, leaving only their steep sides visible, with the wrathful white watercourses scarring them, like perpendicular scratches on a slate. It was on one of these hills that a tourist missed his footing last year in trying to get to the bottom faster than someone else; the heather clump broke from the edge of the ravine, and the young fellow went with it. They searched for him all the summer night, and next morning a shepherd found him, dead and mutilated, at the foot of the cliff. We drove on steadily by bare bog and rocky spur for three or four miles, with the wind hard in our faces, till we came to a cross road, where a double line of telegraph wires branched from the single one, and following, according to directions the double one, we left the mail-car road behind. The wind now screamed into our right ears, and Sibbie’s long tasselled tail, which before had streamed back out of sight under the cart, turned like a weather cock and swept out in front of the left wheel. It was not a pleasant day for seeing one of the show places of Connemara, but it was the best and only one we could afford; besides, from what we had heard of Ballinahinch, it seemed as if it would be able to bear an unbecoming atmosphere better than most places.
It need scarcely be said that the new road ran by a lake, or lakes; every road we have seen in Connemara makes for water like an otter, and finds it with seeming ease, sometimes even succeeding in getting into it. In a forlorn hollow by one of these lakes, we came on a little Roman Catholic chapel, with its broken windows boarded up, and its graveyard huddled under a few wind-worn trees on the hill behind. Crooked wooden crosses, or even a single upright stake, were the landmarks of the dead; perhaps in a country where trees take more trouble to preserve than game, and are far more rare, a piece of timber is felt to be more honourable than the stone that lies profusely ready to the hand. The graveyard trees quivered rheumatically in the wind, long bending before it in one direction having stiffened them past waving; the pale water chafed and sighed in a rushy creek below; even Sibbie chafed and sighed as we stood still to look back, and she took at least ten yards of the hill at full gallop when we started her again.
As we drove along the high ground beyond, Ballinahinch came slowly into sight; a long lake in a valley, a long line of wood skirting it, and finally, on a wooded height, the Castle, as it is called, a large modern house with a battlemented top, very gentlemanlike, and even handsome, but in no other way remarkable.
It was not the sort of thing we had expected. We had heard a great deal about Mary Martin, who was called the Princess of Connemara forty years ago; we had read up a certain amount of Lever’s “Martins of Cro’ Martin,” of which she was the heroine, and knew from other sources something of her gigantic estate, of the ruin of it during the famine, of the way in which she and her father completed that ruin by borrowing money to help their starving tenants, and of her tragic death, when she had lost everything, and had left Ireland for ever. We were prepared for anything, from an acre of gables and thatch to a twelfth century tower with a dozen rooms one on top of the other, and a kerne or a gallowglass looking out of every window, but this admirable mansion with plate-glass windows, and doubtless hot water to the very garrets, shook down our sentimentalities like apples in autumn. We drove on in silence. I knew that my cousin felt apologetic.