‘Of course I do,’ said Hyacinth, who had learnt the tale of Lir’s daughter as other children do Jack the Giant-Killer. ‘And who is Miss O’Dwyer?’
‘Oh, she writes verses. Surely you know them?’
Hyacinth shook his head.
‘What a pity! We all admire them immensely. She has something nearly every week in the Croppy. She has just brought out a volume of lyrics. Her brother worked the publishing of it in New York. He is mixed up with literary people there. You must have heard of him at all events. He’s Patrick O’Dwyer, one of the few who stood by O’Neill when he fought the priests. He gave up the Parliamentary people after that. No honest man could do anything else.’
He conducted Hyacinth to one of the old squares on the north side of the city. When the tide of fashion set southwards, spreading terraces and villas from Leeson Street to Killiney, it left behind some of the finest houses in Dublin. Nowadays for a comparatively low rent it is possible to live in a splendid house if you do not aspire to the glory of a smart address. Miss O’Dwyer’s house, for instance, boasted a spacious hall and lofty sitting-rooms, with impressive ceilings and handsome fireplaces; yet she paid for it little more than half the rent which a cramped villa in Clyde Road would have cost her. Even so, it was somewhat of a mystery to her friends how Miss O’Dwyer managed to live there. A solicitor who had his offices on the ground-floor probably paid the rent of the whole house; but the profits of verse-making are small, and a poetess, like meaner women, requires food, clothes, and fire. Indeed, Miss O’Dwyer, no longer ‘M. O’D.,’ whose verses adorned the Croppy, but ‘Miranda,’ served an English paper as Irish correspondent. It was a pity that a pen certainly capable of better things should have been employed in describing the newest costume of the Lord Lieutenant’s wife at Punchestown, or the confection of pale-blue tulle which, draped round Mrs. Chesney, adorned a Castle ball. Miss O’Dwyer herself was heartily ashamed of the work, but it was, or appeared to her to be, necessary to live, and even with the aid of occasional remittances from Patrick in New York, she could scarcely have afforded her friends a cup of tea without the guineas earned by torturing the English language in a weekly chronicle of Irish society’s clothes. Even with the help of such earnings, poverty was for ever tapping her on the shoulder, and no one except Mary herself and her one maid-servant knew how carefully fire and light had to be economized in the splendid rooms where an extinct aristocracy had held revels a century before.
Hyacinth and his friend advanced past the solicitor’s doors, and up the broad staircase as far as the drawing-room. For a time they got no further than the threshold. The opening of the door was greeted with a long-drawn and emphatic ‘Hush!’ from the company within. Maguire laid his hand on Hyacinth’s arm, and the two stood still looking into the room. What was left of the feeble autumn twilight was almost excluded by half-drawn curtains. No lamp was lit, and the fire cast only fitful rays here and there through the room. It was with difficulty that Hyacinth discerned figures in a semicircle, and a slim woman in a white dress standing apart from the others near the fire. Then he heard a voice, a singularly sweet voice, as it seemed to him, reciting with steady emphasis on the syllables which marked the rhythm of the poem:
‘Out there in the West, where the heavy gray clouds are
insistent,
Where the sky stoops to gather the earth into mournful
embraces,
Where the country lies saturate, sodden, round saturate
hamlets—
‘Out there in the sunset where rages and surges Atlantic,
And the salt is commingled with rain over desolate beaches,
Thy heart, O beloved, is still beating—fitfully, feebly.
‘Is beating—ah! not as it beat in the squadrons of Sarafield,
Exultantly, joyously, gladly, expectant of battle,
With throbs like the notes of the drums when men gather for
fighting.
‘Beats still; but, ah! not as it beat in the latest Fitzgerald,
Nobly devote to his race’s most noble tradition;
Or in Emmet or Davis, or, last on their list, in O’Brien.
‘Beats fitfully, feebly. O desolate mother! O Erin!
When shall the pulse of thy life, which but flutters in
Connaucht,
Throb through thy meadows and boglands, and mountains and
cities?’
A subdued murmur of applause greeted the close of the recitation, and praise more sincere than that with which politeness generally greets the drawing-room performances of minor poets. Hyacinth joined in neither. It seemed to him that the verses were too beautiful to speak about, so sacred that praise was a kind of sacrilege. Perhaps some excuse may be found for his emotion in the fact that for weeks he had heard no poetry except the ode about ‘wiping something off a slate.’ The violence of the contrast benumbed his critical faculty. So a man who was obliged to gaze for a long time at the new churches erected in Belfast might afterwards catch himself in the act of admiring the houses which the Congested Districts Board builds in Connaught.
‘I am afraid I must have bored you.’ It was Miss O’Dwyer who greeted him. ‘I didn’t see you and Mr. Maguire come in until I had commenced my poor little poem. I ought to have given you some tea before I inflicted it on you.’
‘Oh,’ said Hyacinth, ‘it was beautiful. Is it really your own? Did you write it?’