But it is evident that that gentleman of the family who, from choice or sense of duty, lived in Kilmoe, must, have pursued the legitimate O’Mahony vocation very steadily, without any frivolous interruptions or the waste of time in visiting his neighbors. The truth is that he had no neighbors, and nothing else under the sun with which to occupy his mind but the affairs of the sea. This the observer will readily conclude when he stands upon the promontory marked on the maps as Three-Castle Head, with the whole world-dividing Atlantic at his feet, and looks over at the group of ruined and moss-grown keeps which give the place its name.
“Oh-h! Look there now, Murphy!” cried a tall and beautiful young woman, who stood for the first time on this lofty sea-wall, viewing the somber line of connected castles. “Sure, here lived the true O’Mahony of the Coast of White Foam! Why, man, what were we at Muirisc but poor crab-catchers compared wid him?”
She spoke in a tone of awed admiration, between long breaths of wonderment, and her big eyes of Irish gray glowed from their cover of sweeping lashes with surprised delight. She had taken off her hat—a black straw hat, with a dignifiedly broad brim bound in velvet, and enriched by a plume of the same somber hue—to save it from the wind, which blew stiffly here; and this bold sea-wind, nothing loth, frolicked boisterously with her dark curls instead. She put her hand on her companion’s shoulder for steadiness, and continued the rapt gaze upon this crumbling haunt of the dead and forgotten sea-lords.
Twelve years had passed since, as a child of eight, Kate O’Mahony had screamed out in despair after the departing Hen Hawk. That vessel had never cleft the waters of Dunmanus since, and the fleeting years had converted the memory of its master, into a kind of heroic legendary myth, over which the elders brooded fondly, but which the youngsters thought of as something scarcely less remote than the Firbolgs, or the builders of the “Danes’ forts” on the furze-crowned hills about.
But these same years, though they turned the absent into shadows, had made of Kate a very lovely and complete reality. It would be small praise to speak of her as the most beautiful girl on the peninsula, since there is no other section of Ireland so little favored in that respect, to begin with, and for the additional reason that whatever maidenly comeliness there is existent there is habitually shrouded from view by close-drawn shawls and enveloping hoods, even on the hottest of summer noon-days. For all the stray traveller sees of young and pretty faces in Ivehagh, he might as well be in the heart of the vailed (sp.) Orient.
And even with Kate, potential Lady of Muirisc though she was, this fashion of a hat was novel. It seemed only yesterday since she had emerged from the chrysalis of girlhood—girlhood with a shawl over its head, and Heaven only knows what abysses of ignorant shyness and stupid distrust inside that head. And, alas! it seemed but a swiftly on-coming to-morrow before this new freedom was to be lost again, and the hat exchanged forever for a nun’s vail.
If Kate had known natural history better, she might have likened her lot to that of the May-fly, which spends two years underground in its larva state hard at work preparing to be a fly, and then, when it at last emerges, lives only for an hour, even if it that long escapes the bill of the swallow or the rude jaws of the trout. No such simile drawn from stonyhearted Nature’s tragedies helped her to philosophy. She had, perhaps, a better refuge in the health and enthusiasm of her own youth.
In the company of her ancient servitor, Murphy, she was spending the pleasant April days in visiting the various ruins of The O’Mahony’s on Ivehagh. Many of these she viewed now for the first time, and the delight of this overpowered and kept down in her mind the reflection that perhaps she was seeing them all for the last time as well.
“But how, in the name of glory, did they get up and down to their boats, Murphy?” she asked, at last, strolling further out toward the edge to catch the full sweep of the cliff front, which rises abruptly from the beach below, sheer and straight, clear three hundred feet.