'Why should she have selected that cottage, the only pretty one in the county? Wouldn't any other do just as well for her foolish experiment?'
VI
The flowered cottage on the road to Tinnick stood in the midst of trees, on a knoll some few feet above the roadway, and Father Oliver, when he was a boy, often walked out by himself from Tinnick to see the hollyhocks and the sunflowers; they overtopped the palings, the sunflowers looking like saucy country girls and the hollyhocks like grand ladies, delicate and refined, in pink muslin dresses. He used to stand by the gate looking into the garden, delighted by its luxuriance, for there were clumps of sweet pea and beds of red carnations and roses everywhere, and he always remembered the violets and pansies he saw before he went away to Maynooth. He never remembered seeing the garden in bloom again. He was seven years at Maynooth, and when he came home for his vacations it was too late or too early in the season. He was interested in other things; and during his curacy at Kilronan he rarely went to Tinnick, and when he did, he took the other road, so that he might see Father Peter.
He was practically certain that the last time he saw the garden in bloom was just before he went to Maynooth. However this might be, it was certain he would never see it in bloom again. Mary had left the cottage a ruin, and it was sad to think of the clean thick thatch and the whitewashed walls covered with creeper and China roses, for now the thatch was black and mouldy; and of all the flowers only a few stocks survived; the rose-trees were gone—the rabbits had eaten them. Weeds overtopped the currant and gooseberry bushes; here and there was a trace of box edging. 'But soon,' he said, 'all traces will be gone, the roof will fall in, and the garden will become part of the waste.' His eyes roved over the country into which he was going—almost a waste; a meagre black soil, with here and there a thorn-bush and a peasant's cabin. Father Oliver knew every potato field and every wood, and he waited for the elms that lined the roadway a mile ahead of him, a long, pleasant avenue that he knew well, showing above the high wall that encircled a nobleman's domain. Somewhere in the middle of that park was a great white house with pillars, and the story he had heard from his mother, and that roused his childish imaginations, was that Lord Carra was hated by the town of Tinnick, for he cared nothing for Ireland and was said to be a man of loose living, in love with his friend's wife, who came to Tinnick for visits, sometimes with, sometimes without, her husband. It may have been his Lordship's absenteeism, as well as the scandal the lady gave, that had prompted a priest to speak against Lord Carra from the altar, if not directly, indirectly. 'Both are among the gone,' Father Oliver said to himself. 'No one speaks of them now; myself hasn't given them a thought this many a year—' His memories broke off suddenly, for a tree had fallen, carrying a large portion of the wall with it, but without revealing the house, only a wooded prospect through which a river glided. 'The Lord's mistress must have walked many a time by the banks of that river,' he said. But why was he thinking of her again? Was it the ugly cottage that put thoughts of her into his mind? for she had done nothing to alleviate the lives of the poor, who lived without cleanliness and without light, like animals in a den. Or did his thoughts run on that woman, whom he had never seen, because Tinnick was against her and the priest had spoken slightingly of the friends that Lord Carra brought from England? The cause of his thoughts might be that he was going to offer Nora Glynn to his sister as music-mistress. But what connection between Nora Glynn and this dead woman? None. But he was going to propose Nora Glynn to Eliza, and the best line of argument would be that Nora would cost less than anyone as highly qualified as she. Nuns were always anxious to get things cheap, but he must not let them get Nora too cheap. But the question of price wouldn't arise between him and Eliza. Eliza would see that the wrong he did to Nora was preying on his conscience, and that he'd never be happy until he had made atonement—that was the light in which she would view the matter, so it would be better to let things take their natural course and to avoid making plans. The more he thought of what he should say to Eliza, the less likely was he to speak effectively; and feeling that he had better rely on the inspiration of the moment, he sought distraction from his errand by noting the beauty of the hillside. He had always liked the way the road dipped and then ascended steeply to the principal street in the town. There were some pretty houses in the dip—houses with narrow doorways and long windows, built, no doubt, in the beginning of the nineteenth century—and his ambition was once to live in one of these houses.
The bridge was an eighteenth-century bridge, with a foaming weir on the left, and on the right there was a sentimental walk under linden-trees, and there were usually some boys seated on the parapet fishing. He would have liked to stop the car, so remote did the ruined mills seem—so like things of long ago that time had mercifully weaned from the stress and struggle of life.
At the corner of the main street was the house in which he was born. The business had passed into other hands, but the old name—'Gogarty's Drapery Stores'—remained. Across the way were the butcher and the grocer, and a little higher up the inn at which the commercial travellers lodged. He recalled their numerous leather trunks, and for a moment stood a child again, seeing them drive away on post-cars. A few more shops had been added—very few—and then the town dwindled quickly, slated roofs giving way to thatched cottages, and of the same miserable kind that was wont to provoke his antipathy when he was a boy.
This sinful dislike of poverty he overcame in early manhood. A high religious enthusiasm enabled him to overcome it, but his instinctive dislike of the lowly life—intellectual lowliness as well as physical—gathered within these cottages, seemed to have returned again. He asked himself if he were wanting in natural compassion, and if all that he had of goodness in him were a debt he owed to the Church. It was in patience rather than in pity maybe that he was lacking; and pursuing this idea, he recalled the hopes he entertained when he railed off a strip of ground in front of Bridget Clery's house. But that strip of garden had inspired no spirit of emulation. Eliza was perhaps more patient than he, and he began to wonder if she had any definite aim in view, and if the spectacle of the convent, with its show of nuns walking under the trees, would eventually awaken some desire of refinement in the people, if the money their farms now yielded would produce some sort of improvement in their cottages, the removal of those dreadfully heavy smells, and a longing for colour that would find expression in the planting of flowers.
They gave their money willingly enough for the adornment of their chapel, for stained glass, incense, candles, and for music, and were it not for the services of the Church he didn't know into what barbarism the people mightn't have fallen: the tones of the organ sustaining clear voices of nuns singing a Mass by Mozart must sooner or later inspire belief in the friendliness of pure air and the beauty of flowers. Flowers are the only beautiful things within the reach of these poor people. Roses all may have, and it was pleasant to think that there is nothing more entirely natural or charming in the life of man than his love of flowers: it preceded his love of music; no doubt an appreciation of something better in the way of art than a jig played on the pipes would follow close on the purification of the home.