While the old woman was performing this operation over the turf fire, there was some discussion as to what was the nature of the circumstances that demanded such an unusual proceeding on the part of The Macnamara.
“It's only The Mac himsilf that sames to know—. knock the ashes well about the hale, ma'am—for Masther Standish was as much put out as mesilf whin The Mac says—nivir moind the toes, ma'am, me fut'll nivir go more nor halfways up the sowl—says he, 'Git on yer boots;' as if it was the ordinarist thing in the world;—now I'll thry an' squaze me fut in.” And he took the immense boot so soon as the fiery ashes had been emptied from its cavity.
“The Mac's pride'll have a fall,” remarked the old man in the corner sagaciously.
“I shouldn't wondher,” said Eugene, pulling on one of the boots. “The spring is patched with hemp, but it's as loikely to give way as not—holy Biddy, ye've left a hot coal just at the instep that's made its way to me bone!” But in spite of this catastrophe, the boy trudged off to the car, his coat's tails flapping like the foresail of a yacht brought up to the wind. Then he cautiously mounted his seat in front of the car, letting a boot protrude effectively on each side of the narrow board. The Macnamara and his son, who had exchanged no word during the short absence of Eugene in the kitchen, then took their places, the horse was aroused from its slumber, and they all passed down the long dilapidated avenue and through the broad entrance between the great mouldering pillars overclung with ivy and strange tangled weeds, where a gate had once been, but where now only a rough pole was drawn across to prevent the trespass of strange animals.
Truly pitiful it was to see such signs of dilapidation everywhere around this demesne of Innishdermot. The house itself was an immense, irregularly built, rambling castle. Three-quarters of it was in utter ruin, but it had needed the combined efforts of eight hundred years of time and a thousand of Cromwell's soldiers to reduce the walls to the condition in which they were at present. The five rooms of the building that were habitable belonged to a comparatively new wing, which was supported on the eastern side by the gable of a small chapel, and on the western by the wall of a great round tower which stood like a demolished sugar-loaf high above all the ruins, and lodged a select number of immense owls whose eyesight was so extremely sensitive, it required an unusual amount of darkness for its preservation.
This was the habitation of The Macnamaras, hereditary kings of Munster, and here it was that the existing representative of the royal family lived with his only son, Standish O'Dermot Macnamara. In front of the pile stretched a park, or rather what had once been a park, but which was now wild and tangled as any wood. It straggled down to the coastway of the lough, which, with as many windings as a Norwegian fjord, brought the green waves of the Atlantic for twenty miles between coasts a thousand feet in height—coasts which were black and precipitous and pierced with a hundred mighty caves about the headlands of the entrance, but which became wooded and more gentle of slope towards the narrow termination of the basin. The entire of one coastway, from the cliffs that broke the wild buffet of the ocean rollers, to the little island that lay at the narrowing of the waters, was the property of The Macnamara. This was all that had been left to the house which had once held sway over two hundred miles of coastway, from the kingdom of Kerry to Achill Island, and a hundred miles of riverway. Pasturages the richest of the world, lake-lands the most beautiful, mountains the grandest, woods and moors—all had been ruled over by The Macnamaras, and of all, only a strip of coastway and a ruined castle remained to the representative of the ancient house, who was now passing on a jaunting-car between the dilapidated pillars at the entrance to his desolate demesne.
On a small hill that came in sight so soon as the car had passed from under the gaunt fantastic branches that threw themselves over the wall at the roadside, as if making a scrambling clutch at something indefinite in the air, a ruined tower stood out in relief against the blue sky of this August day. Seeing the ruin in this land of ruins The Macnamara sighed heavily—too heavily to allow of any one fancying that his emotion was natural.
“Ah, my son, the times have changed,” he said. “Only a few years have passed—six hundred or so—since young Brian Macnamara left that very castle to ask the daughter of the great Desmond of the Lake in marriage. How did he go out, my boy?”
“You don't mean that we are now——”
“How did he go out?” again asked The Macnamara, interrupting his son's words of astonishment. “He went out of that castle with three hundred and sixty-five knights—for he had as many knights as there are days in the year.”—Here Eugene, who only caught the phonetic sense of this remarkable fact regarding young Brian Macnamara, gave a grin, which his master detected and chastised by a blow from his stick upon the mighty livery coat.