An Isle in the Water

by Katharine Tynan

The house was by the roadside, only shut off by its own garden-wall and a high gate, which it was comfortable to lock of winter evenings. There were two small rooms in it beside the kitchen and the dairy, and a loft reached by a ladder, wherein to store many a sack of potatoes, or wood for the winter firing. The kitchen was very pleasant, with its two square windows full of geraniums in bloom, the pictures of saints on its white-washed walls, the chimney-piece with its china shepherdesses and dogs, and the dresser with a very fine show of crockery. There was always a sweet smell of cream there from the dairy, which opened on one side. The two rooms went off each side of the fire-place. The walls were cleanly white-washed, the tiled floor ochred; altogether it was a charming little house for love to build a home in.

Little Katie, precious as she was, roamed at her own sweet will. No harm could come to her in the fields where she strayed. She was home-keeping, and never went far from her own doorstep; nor need she for variety. On one side of the field there was a violet bank, mossy, and hung over with thorn trees. Under the thorns it was possible to hide as within a greenhouse, and children love such make-believe. On the other side of the bank was a steep descent to a tiny stream prattling over shining stones; and fox-gloves grew in the water with the meadow orchis, and many other water-loving flowers. That field was a meadow every year, and once hidden between the hedge and the meadow-grasses a child was invisible to all but the bright-eyed birds, who themselves have a taste for such mysteries, and the corn-crake, which one thinks of as only half bird, that scuttled on Katie's approach down one of a million aisles of seeding brown grasses.

Then on the other side of the field there was a deep, dry ditch under great curtains of blackberry bushes, which in autumn bore luscious fruit. And by Katie's door, if she would sit in the sun, was a primrose bank, about which the hens stalked and clucked with their long-legged chickens or much prettier ducklings. Katie did not want for playmates. She had none of her own kind, but was sociable to the fowl and the pig in his stye, and the white and red cattle that browsed in the pastures. She held long colloquies with the creatures all day, and if it rained would fetch her stool into an out-house which the hens frequented.

But her grand playmate, the confidant and abettor of all her games, was a placid motherly cat, which had grown up with Katie. A good-natured workman had fetched the pretty brindled kitten from the city, and had made an offering of it at the baby's cradle. Katie with almost her first words called the cat after him. Pussy Hogan was the brindle's name to her dying day. When I hear people say that cats have no attachment for people I always make a mental reservation in Pussy Hogan's favour. No dog could have shown a more faithful and moving devotion. Katie's instincts in the direction of cleanliness led her to wash Pussy Hogan in her kittenish days, till she was come to an age for performing her own ablutions with the requisite care. Many a time have I seen the child washing the kitten in soap-suds, and setting her to dry on the primrose bank, which was in the face of the southern sun, and there with admirable patience the creature would lie, paws extended, till her little mistress deemed she was dry enough to get up from her bleaching.

But Pussy Hogan grew a handsome, stately, well-furred cat, despite her washings; and it was pretty to see her stalking at the child's heels everywhere, with much the same responsible air that a serious dog might assume. For all her gravity, she was not above understanding and enjoying those games under the hedgerows, when Katie set up house, and made banquets with broken bits of crockery, to which she entertained her admiring friend. Even in the winter the cat trotted about over snow and leaped roaring gullies, in attendance on her hardy little mistress; as in summer she followed her to the evening milking, where as a special favour Katie was permitted, with her dimpled fingers, to draw a few spirts of the sweet-smelling milk.

They were beginning to discuss Katie's schooling when she fell ill. The grown people thought school would come hard upon her, she had been so used to a life in the open air. She was very babyish too, even for her age, though there were many younger than she perched on that platform of steps in the Convent Infant School—pupils, so little and drowsy-headed that two or three special couches had to be retained close by to receive those who from time to time toppled off their perch. I remember asking if Katie would take the cat to school, after the manner of Mary and her lamb in the rhyme. I make no doubt Pussy Hogan would have attempted the Irish mile of distance to the school every day, if there were not pressure brought to bear to keep her at home. However, the child was attacked by that horrible dread of mothers, the croup. She was just the one to succumb, being a little round ball of soft flesh. She only fought it a day and night, lifting up her poor little hands to her straining throat incessantly. In less than thirty-six hours Katie was dead.

Her mother took it in a blank stupor. She scarcely seemed to heed the friends who came and went, the Sisters of Mercy, in their black bonnets and cloaks, the priest with his attempts at comfort. Her husband sat by her those days, his eyes turning from the heart-breaking face of his wife to the brown baby on the bed, as piteous as a frozen robin. After the funeral the mother went about her usual occupations. She milked the cow, fed the hens, churned, swept, and baked as of old. Yet she did all those things as with a broken heart, and it would have been less dreadful in a way to see her sitting with folded hands. She was incessantly weeping in those months that followed Katie's death. One would have thought that her eyes would be drained dry, but still the tears followed each other all day long, and no one seemed able to comfort her. It was wretched enough for her husband, poor fellow, coming home of an evening from his work, but he did all unwearying patience could do to comfort her.

The only desire she seemed to have in those days was that she might keep Katie's pussy with her, but that was not gratified. The cat had moped and fretted greatly during the child's short illness, and had cried distressingly about the house when Katie lay dead. Then after the funeral had gone she had turned her back on the desolate house, and had walked across the couple of fields that separated it from the farmhouse. She came into the big airy kitchen that July day with so evident an intention of remaining that no one disputed her right. Once she had a sudden impulse to go and seek her little mistress, and went running and leaping over the long pastures to the low white house. They said it was the thing that wakened Katie's mother from the first merciful stupor of her bereavement, the cat running in and moaning piteously about the empty rooms, and the places where they had played their jolly games. They said she inspected every possible place where the child might be hiding, turning again and again, after moments of disappointed bewilderment, to a new search. At last she gave it up, and seemed to realise that Katie was gone. She turned then and trotted back quickly to the farmhouse, from whence no one's coaxing afterwards could bring her. Every one wanted that the poor mother should have her as she seemed to crave, but the cat would not; she escaped over and over from her captors, and at last we gave up trying to constrain her, though her desertion seemed a new cruelty to the stricken woman across the fields.

I don't know how many months the mother's weeping went on. It was a day close upon Christmas when I opened the half-door and went in and saw, for the first time since the child's death, that her eyes were dry. She was making bread at a table under the window, and her face had grown wonderfully calm since I had last seen her. I made no remark, but she led up to the subject herself, with a pathetic, wintry smile.

'You remember the poem you read to me one day, miss,' she said, 'about the dead child that couldn't be glad in heaven because its mother's crying wet its fine dress?' I remembered perfectly; it was my poor little way of trying to insinuate some comfort, for like many of her class in Ireland, she loved poetry. 'Well,' she went on, 'I've been thinking a power over it since. Who knows but that there might be the truth behind it?' I nodded assent. 'Now there's Christmas coming,' she said, 'and I think that would be a fine time for the children in heaven, so I'm not going to spoil Katie's glory among them.'