“About that,” responded the giantess lucidly, determined at all hazards to keep pace with outside opinion. “Here now is the little road I was tellin’ ye of. Would ye know the way in it?”
We assured her we could find the boathouse without her help, and “so in all love, we parted.”
As we walked on in the solitude the lake narrowed beside us to a river, a connecting channel between it and the larger lake beyond, and the water ran strong and quiet under the meeting branches that leaned above it from both sides. The dark mirror reflected every twig; brown stems, green canopy, and opening of grey sky arched away beneath our feet as well as above our heads; we became at last giddy with the double world, and felt our eyes cling instinctively to the silver smear on the glassy surface or the golden gleam in the shallow that testified to where illusion began. Once or twice there was a splash that sounded, in that silence, as if a large stone had been thrown in; we were, of course, looking the wrong way each time, and instead of seeing the flash of a ten or twenty pound fish we saw only the rift in the crystal, and the big ripples following each other to the shore. Once only in Galway did we see live fish without stint or hindrance, when, afterwards, we leaned over the bridge in Galway town itself, and could have counted by the hundred the dark backs of the salmon that lie all day still and shadowy in the clear water below the weir.
We were soon out again by the upper lake, and, much beset by flies and midges, walked along the edge of the wood till we came to the boathouse. On its broad steps we sat thankfully down to rest, and commented at our leisure on the atrocities of the grey weather, and of the cloud that was cloaking the peak of the mountain opposite. We happened to know that there ought to be a mountain there, one of the Twelve Pins, in fact, but for all we could see, it might have flown into the Atlantic Ocean, in search of something less watery than Connemara. As we sat there, and saw the invariable fisherman catching the inevitable nothing, and looked at the dark sheet of water in its beautiful setting of trees, my cousin told me drowsily several things about Mary Martin. I cannot now recall the recital very clearly, but I remember hearing how Miss Martin had taken a guest up the mountain that should have been soaring into the heavens before us, and, making him look round the tremendous horizon, had told him how everything he could see belonged to her. If the weather had been like ours, it would not have been a very overpowering statement, limited, in fact, to the cloud of mist and Miss Martin’s umbrella; but as it was, with the inland mountains and moors clear to the bluest distance, and the far Atlantic rounding her fifty miles of sea-coast, it was a boast worth making. Perhaps it was the vision that was clearest to her failing sense when she lay dying on the other side of that Atlantic without an acre and without an income, a refugee from the country where her forefathers had prospered during seven hundred years.
The retrospect became melancholy, and we began to be extremely chilly; sitting out of doors was too severe a test for this July day, and we made towards the house again. When we were nearing Mary Martin’s seat we saw through the trees a brilliant spot of colour, which gradually developed into a scarlet petticoat, worn shawl-wise about the head of an old woman who had sat down in a tattered heap to rest on the stone bench. She put away something like a black pipe as we came up, and began the usual beggar’s groaning, and when, after some fumbling, my cousin produced a modest coin, the ready blessings were followed by the ready tears, that welled from hideously inflamed eyes, and trickled over the wrinkles in her yellow cheeks. It occurred to us to ask whether she remembered Mary Martin, and in a moment the tears stopped.
“Is it remember her?” she said, wiping her eyes with some skill on a frayed corner of the red petticoat. “I remember her as well as yerself that I’m looking at!”
“What was she like in the face?” said my cousin in her richest brogue.
“Oh musha? Ye couldn’t rightly say what was she like, she was that grand! She was beautiful and white and charitable, only she had one snaggledy tooth in the front of her mouth. But what signifies that? Faith, whin she was in it the ladies of Connemara might go undher the sod. ’Twas as good for thim. And afther all they say she died as silly as ye plase down in the County Mee-yo (Mayo), but there’s more tells me she died back in Ameriky. Oh, glory be to God, thim was the times!”
The tears began again, and she relapsed into the red petticoat. We left her there, huddled on the seat moaning and talking to herself. We could do no more for her than hope, as we looked back at her for the last time, that the pipe in her pocket had gone out. The day was slipping by; a twelve mile drive to Letterfrack was before us. Taking all things into consideration, especially Sibbie’s powers as a roadster, we hardened our hearts to starting at once, without taking the half-mile walk to see the wonderful stables that cost Colonel Martin £15,000 to build, and are paved with blocks of the green and white Connemara marble. Let us trust that our intended admiration was conveyed in some form to that costly marble flooring, in spite of an unpleasant saying about good intentions and a certain pavement that is their destination.