He established a trade between the villagers and the fishmongers of Manchester. The price of lobsters rose to the unprecedented figure of four shillings a dozen, and it was supposed that even so the promoter of the scheme secured a profit.
To Æneas Conneally, growing quietly old, the changes meant very little. The coastguards, being bound by one of the articles of the British Constitution, came to church on Sunday mornings with exemplary regularity, and each man at fixed intervals brought a baby to be christened and a woman to be churched. Otherwise they hardly affected Mr. Conneally’s life. The great officials who visited Carrowkeel to survey the benignant activities of the Congested Districts Board were men whose magnificent intellectual powers raised them above any recognised form of Christianity. Neither Father Moran’s ministrations nor Mr. Conneally’s appealed to them.
The London committee of the mission to Roman Catholics made no inquiry about what was going on at Carrowkeel. They asked for no statistics, expected no results, but signed quarterly cheques for Mr. Conneally, presuming, one may suppose, that if he had ceased to exist they would somehow have heard of it.
By far the most important event for Hyacinth and his father was the death of their old housekeeper. In the changed state of society in Carrowkeel it was found impossible to secure the services of another. Hyacinth, at this time about fifteen years old, took to the housework without feeling that he was doing anything strange or unmanly. He was familiar with the position of ‘bachelor boys’ who, having grown elderly under the care of a mother, preferred afterwards the toil of their own kitchens to the uncertain issue of marrying a girl to ‘do for them.’ Life under their altered circumstances was simplified. It seemed unnecessary to carry a meal from the room it was cooked in to another for the purpose of eating it, so the front rooms of the house, with their tattered furniture, were left to moulder quietly in the persistent damp. One door was felt to be sufficient for the ingress and egress of two people from a house. The kitchen door, being at the back of the house, was oftenest the sheltered one, so the front door was bolted, and the grass grew up to it. One by one, as Hyacinth’s education required, the Latin and Greek books were removed from the forsaken study, and took their places among the diminishing array of plates and cups on the kitchen dresser. The spreading and removal of a tablecloth for every meal came to be regarded as foolish toil. When room was required on the table for plates, the books and papers were swept on one side. A pile of potatoes, and the pan, with bacon or a fish perhaps still frizzling in it, was set in the place left vacant.
Morning and evening Æneas Conneally expected his son to join with him in prayer. The two knelt together on the earthen floor facing the window, while the old man meditated aloud on Divine things. There were breaks in his speech and long silences, so that sometimes it was hard to tell when his prayer had really ended. These devotions formed a part of his father’s life into which Hyacinth never really entered at all. He neither rebelled nor mocked. He simply remained outside. So when his father wandered off to solitary places on the seashore, and sat gazing into the sunset or a gathering storm, Hyacinth neither followed nor questioned him. Sometimes on winter nights when the wind howled more fiercely than usual round the house, the old man would close the book they read together, and repeat aloud long passages from the Apocalypse. His voice, weak and wavering at first, would gather strength as he proceeded, and the young man listened, stirred to vague emotion over the fall of Babylon the Great.
For the most part Hyacinth’s time was his own. Even the hours of study were uncertain. He read when he liked, and his father seemed content with long days of idleness followed by others of application. It was, indeed, only owing to his love of what he read that the boy learned at all. Often while he tramped from his home to the village at midday his heart was hot within him with some great thought which had sprung to him from a hastily construed chorus of Euripides. Sometimes he startled the fishermen when he went with them at night by chanting Homer’s rolling hexameters through the darkness while the boat lay waiting, borne gunwale down to the black water with the drag of the net that had been shot.
There was a tacit understanding that Hyacinth, like his father, was to take Holy Orders. He matriculated in Trinity College when he was eighteen, and, as is often done by poorer students, remained at home, merely passing the required examinations, until he took his degree, and the time came for his entering the divinity school. Then it became necessary for him to reside in Dublin, and the first great change in his life took place.
The night before he left home he and his father sat together in the kitchen after they had finished their evening meal. For a long time neither of them spoke. Hyacinth held a book in his hand, but scarcely attempted to read it. His thoughts wandered from hopeful expectation of what the future was to bring him and the new life was to mean, to vague regrets, weighted with misgivings, which would take no certain shape. There crowded upon him recollections of busy autumn days when the grain harvest overtook the belated hay-making, and men toiled till late in the fields; of long nights in the springtime when he tugged at the fishing-nets, and felt the mackerel slipping and flapping past his feet in the darkness; of the longer winter nights when he joined the gatherings of the boys and girls to dance jigs and reels on the earthen floor of some kitchen. It seemed now that all this was past and over for him. Holiday time would bring him back to Carrowkeel, but would it be the same? Would he be the same?
He looked at his father, half hoping for sympathy; but the old man sat gazing—it seemed to Hyacinth stupidly—into the fire. He wondered if his father had forgotten that this was their last evening together. Then suddenly, without raising his eyes, the old man began to speak, and it appeared that he, too, was thinking of the change.
‘I do not know, my son, what they will teach you in their school of divinity. I have long ago forgotten all I learned there, and I have not missed the knowledge. It does not seem to me now that what they taught me has been of any help in getting to know Him.’