An Isle in the Water Part 1

An Isle in the Water.

by Katharine Tynan.

I

THE FIRST WIFE

The dead woman had lain six years in her grave, and the new wife had reigned five of them in her stead. Her triumph over her dead rival was well-nigh complete. She had nearly ousted her memory from her husband's heart. She had given him an heir for his name and estate, and, lest the bonny boy should fail, there was a little brother creeping on the nursery floor, and another child stirring beneath her heart. The twisted yew before the door, which was heavily b.u.t.tressed because the legend ran that when it died the family should die out with it, had taken another lease of life, and sent out one spring green shoots on boughs long barren. The old servants had well-nigh forgotten the pale mistress who reigned one short year; and in the fishing village the lavish benefactions of the reigning lady had quite extinguished the memory of the tender voice and gentle words of the woman whose place she filled. A new era of prosperity had come to the Island and the race that long had ruled it.

Under a high, stately window of the ruined Abbey was the dead wife's grave. In the year of his bereavement, before the beautiful brilliant cousin of his dead Alison came and seized on his life, the widower had spent days and nights of stony despair standing by her grave. She had died to give him an heir to his name, and her sacrifice had been vain, for the boy came into the world dead, and lay on her breast in the coffin. Now for years he had not visited the place: the last wreaths of his mourning for her had been washed into earth and dust long ago, and the grave was neglected. The fisherwives whispered that a despairing widower is soonest comforted; and in that haunted Island of ghosts and omens there were those who said that they had met the dead woman gliding at night along the quay under the Abbey walls, with the shape of a child gathered within her shadowy arms. People avoided the quay at night therefore, and no tale of the ghost ever came to the ears of Alison's husband.

His new wife held him indeed in close keeping. In the first days of his remarriage the servants in the house had whispered that there had been ill blood over the man between the two women, so strenuously did the second wife labour to uproot any trace of the first. The cradle that had been prepared for the young heir was flung to a fishergirl expecting her base-born baby: the small garments into which Alison had sewn her tears with the st.i.tches went the same road. There was many an honest wife might have had the things, but that would not have pleased the grim humour of the second wife towards the woman she had supplanted.

Everything that had been Alison's was destroyed or hidden away. Her rooms were changed out of all memory of her. There was nothing, nothing in the house to recall to her widower her gentleness, or her face as he had last seen it, snow-pale and pure between the long ashen-fair strands of her hair. He never came upon anything that could give him a tender stab with the thought of her. So she was forgotten, and the man was happy with his children and his beautiful pa.s.sionate wife, and the constant tenderness with which she surrounded every hour of his life.

Little by little she had won over all who had cause to love the dead woman,--all human creatures, that is to say: a dog was more faithful and had resisted her. Alison's dog was a terrier, old, s.h.a.ggy and blear-eyed: he had been young with his dead mistress, and had seemed to grow old when she died. He had fretted incessantly during that year of her husband's widowhood, whimpering and moaning about the house like a distraught creature, and following the man in a heavy melancholy when he made his pilgrimages to the grave. He continued those pilgrimages after the man had forgotten, but the heavy iron gate of the Abbey clanged in his face, and since he could not reach the grave his visits grew fewer and fewer. But he had not forgotten.

The new mistress had put out all her fascinations to win the dog too, for it seemed that while any living creature clung to the dead woman's memory her triumph was not complete. But the dog, amenable to every one else, was savage to her. All her soft overtures were received with snarling, and an uncovering of the strong white teeth that was dangerous. The woman was not without a heart, except for the dead, and the misery of the dog moved her--his restlessness, his whining, the channels that tears had worn under his faithful eyes. She would have liked to take him up in her arms and comfort him; but once when her pity moved her to attempt it, the dog ran at her ravening. The husband cried out: 'Has he hurt you, my Love?' and was for stringing him up.

But some compunction stirred in her, and she saved him from the rope, though she made no more attempts to conciliate him.

After that the dog disappeared from the warm living-rooms, where he had been used to stretch on the rug before the leaping wood-fires. It was a cold and stormy autumn, with many shipwrecks, and mourning in the village for drowned husbands and sons, whose little fishing boats had been sucked into the boiling surges. The roar of the wind and the roar of the waves made a perpetual tumult in the air, and the creaking and lashing of the forest trees aided the wild confusion. There were nights when the crested battalions of the waves stormed the hill-sides and foamed over the Abbey graves, and weltered about the hearthstones of the high-perched fishing village. When there was not storm there was bitter black frost.

The old house had attics in the gables, seldom visited. You went up from the inhabited portions by a corkscrew staircase, steep as a ladder. The servants did not like the attics. There were creaking footsteps on the floors at night, and sometimes the slamming of a door or the stealthy opening of a window. They complained that locked doors up there flew open, and bolted windows were found unbolted. In storm the wind keened like a banshee, and one bright snowy morning a housemaid, who had business there, found a slender wet footprint on the floor as of some one who had come barefoot through the snow;--and fled down shrieking.

In one of the attics stood a great hasped chest, wherein the dead woman's dresses were mouldering. The chest was locked, and was likely to remain so for long, for the new mistress had flung away the key.

From the high attic windows there was a glorious view of sea and land, of the red sandstone valleys where the deer were feeding, of the black tossing woods, of the roan bulls grazing quietly in the park, and far beyond, of the sea, and the fishing fleet, and in the distance the smoke of a pa.s.sing steamer. But none observed that view. There was not a servant in the house who would lean from the cas.e.m.e.nt without expecting the touch of a clay-cold finger on her shoulder. Any whose business brought them to the attic looked in the corners warily, while they stayed, but the servants did not like to go there alone. They said the room smelt strangely of earth, and that the air struck with an insidious chill: and a gamekeeper being in full view of the attic window one night declared that from the window came a faint moving glow, and that a wavering shadow moved in the room.

It was in this cold attic the dog took up his abode. He followed a servant up there one morning, and broke out into an excited whimpering when he came near the chest. After a while of sniffing and rubbing against it he established himself upon it with his nose on his paws.

Afterwards he refused to leave it. Finally the servants gave up the attempt to coax him back into the world, and with a compunctious pity they spread an old rug for him on the chest, and fed him faithfully every day. The master never inquired for him: he was glad to have the brute out of his sight: the mistress heard of the fancy which possessed him, and said nothing: she had given up thinking to win him over. So he grew quite old and grizzled, and half blind as summers and winters pa.s.sed by. It grew a superst.i.tion with the servants to take care of him, and with them on their daily visits he was so affectionate and caressing as to recall the days in which some of them remembered him when his mistress lived, and he was a happy dog, as good at fighting and rat-hunting and weasel-catching as any dog in the Island.

But every night as twelve o'clock struck the dog came down the attic stairs. He was suddenly alert and cheerful, and trotted by an invisible gown. Some said you could hear the faint rustle of silk lapping from stair to stair, and the dog would sometimes bark sharply as in his days of puppyhood, and leap up to lick a hand of air. The servants would shut their doors as they heard the patter of the dog's feet coming, and his sudden bark. They were thrilled with a superst.i.tious awe, but they were not afraid the ghost would harm them.

They remembered how just, how gentle, how pure the dead woman had been. They whispered that she might well be dreeing this purgatory of returning to her dispossessed house for another's sake, not her own.

Husband and wife were nearly always in their own room when she pa.s.sed. She went everywhere looking to the fastenings of the house, trying every door and window as she had done in the old days, when her husband declared the old place was only precious because it held her.

Presently the servants came to look on her guardianship of the house as holy, for one night some careless person had left a light burning where the wind blew the curtains about, and they took fire, and were extinguished, by whom none knew; but in the morning there was the charred curtain, and Molly, the kitchenmaid, confessed with tears how she had forgotten the lighted candle.

The husband was the last of all to hear of these strange doings, for the new wife took care that they should never be about the house at midnight. But one night as he lay in bed he had forgotten something and asked her to fetch it from below. She looked at him with a disdain out of the mists of her black hair, which she was combing to her knee.

Perhaps for a minute she resented his unfaithfulness to the dead.

'No,' she said, with deliberation, 'not till that dog and his companion pa.s.s.' She flung the door open, and looked half with fear, half with defiance, at the black void outside. There was the patter of the dog's feet coming down the stairs swiftly. The man lifted himself on his elbow and listened. Side by side with the dog's feet came the swish, swish of a silken gown on the stairs. He looked a wild-eyed inquiry at his second wife. She slammed the door to before she answered him. 'It has been _so_ for years,' she said; 'every one knew but you. She has not forgotten as easily as you have.'

One day the dog died, worn out with age. After that they heard the ghost no longer. Perhaps her purgatory of seeing the second wife in her place was completed, and she was fit for Paradise, or her suffering had sufficed to win another's pardon. From that time the new wife reigned without a rival, living or dead, near her throne.

II

THE STORY OF FATHER ANTHONY O'TOOLE

On the wall of the Island Chapel there is a tablet which strangers read curiously. The inscription runs:

FATHER ANTHONY O'TOOLE

FOR THIRTY YEARS THE SHEPHERD OF HIS FLOCK

_Died 18th December 1812_ Aged 80 years.

'He will avenge the blood of his servants, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.'

Many a time has a summer visitor asked me the meaning of the Old Testament words on the memorial tablet of a life that in all probability pa.s.sed so quietly.

Any child in the Island will tell you the story of Father Anthony O'Toole. Here and there an old man or woman will remember to have seen him and will describe him--tall despite his great age, with the frost on his head but never in his heart, stepping down the cobbles of the village street leaning on his gold-headed cane, and greeting his spiritual children with such a courtesy as had once been well in place at Versailles or the Little Trianon. Plainly he never ceased to be the finest of fine gentlemen, though a less inbred courtesy might well rust in the isolation of thirty years. Yet he seems to have been no less the humblest and simplest of priests. Old Peter Devine will tell you his childish memory of the old priest sitting by the turf fire in the fisherman's cottage, listening to the eternal complaint of the winds and waters that had destroyed the fishing and washed the potato-gardens out to sea, and pausing in his words of counsel and sympathy to take delicately a pinch of the finest snuff, snuff that had never bemeaned itself by paying duty to King George.

But that was in the quite peaceful days, when the country over there beyond the shallow water lay in the apathy of exhaustion--helpless and hopeless. That was years after Father Anthony had flashed out as a man of war in the midst of his quiet pastoral days, and like any Old Testament hero had taken the sword and smitten his enemies in the name of the Lord.

Father Anthony was the grandson of one of those Irish soldiers of fortune who, after the downfall of the Jacobite cause in Ireland, had taken service in the French and Austrian armies. In Ireland they called them the Wild Geese. He had risen to high honours in the armies of King Louis, and had been wounded at Malplaquet. The son followed in his father's footsteps and was among the slain at Fontenoy. Father Anthony, too, became a soldier and saw service at Minden, and carried away from it a wound in the thigh which made necessary the use of that gold-headed cane. They said that, soldier as he was, he was a fine courtier in his day. One could well believe it looking at him in his old age. From his father he had inherited the dashing bravery and gay wit of which even yet he carried traces. From his French mother he had the delicate courtesy and _finesse_ which would be well in place in the atmosphere of a court.

However, in full prime of manhood and reputation, Father Anthony, for some reason or other, shook the dust of courts off his feet, and became a humble aspirant after the priesthood at the missionary College of St. Omer. He had always a great desire to be sent to the land of his fathers, the land of faith and hope, of which he had heard from many an Irish refugee, and in due time his desire was fulfilled.

He reached the Island one wintry day, flung up out of the teeth of storms, and was in the Island thirty years, till the _reveille_ of his Master called him to the muster of the Heavenly host.

Father Anthony seems to have been innocently ready to talk over his days of fighting. He was not at all averse from fighting his battles over again for these simple children of his who were every day in battle with the elements and death. Peter Devine remembers to have squatted, burning his shins by the turf fire, and watching with fascination the lines in the ashes which represented the entrenchments and the guns, and the troops of King Frederick and the French line, as Father Anthony played the war-game for old Corney Devine, whose gra.s.s-grown grave is under the gable of the Island Chapel.

Now and again a fisherman was admitted by special favour to look upon the magnificent clothing which Father Anthony had worn as a colonel of French Horse. The things were laid by in lavender as a bride might keep her wedding-dress. There were the gold-laced coat and the breeches with the sword-slash in them, the sash, the belt, the plumed hat, the high boots, the pistols, and glittering among them all, the sword. That chest of Father Anthony's and its contents were something of a fairy tale to the boys of the Island, and each of them dreamt of a day when he too might behold them. The chest, securely locked and clamped, stood in the sacristy; and Father Anthony would have seen nothing incongruous in its neighbourhood to the sacred vessels and vestments. He generally displayed the things when he had been talking over old fighting days, to the Island men mostly, but occasionally to a French captain, who with a cargo, often contraband, or wines and cigars, would run into the Island harbour for shelter. Then there were courtesies given and exchanged; and Father Anthony's guest at parting would make an offering of light wines, much of which found its way to sick and infirm Island men and women in the days that followed.

Father Anthony had been many placid years on the Island when there began to be rumours of trouble on the mainland. Just at first the United Irish Society had been quite the fashion, and held no more rebellious than the great volunteer movement of a dozen years earlier.

But as time went by things became more serious. Moderate and fearful men fell away from the Society, and the union between Northern Protestants and Southern Catholics, which had been a matter of much concern to the Government of the day, was met by a policy of goading the leaders on to rebellion. By and by this and that idol of the populace was flung into prison. Wolfe Tone was in France, praying, storming, commanding, forcing an expedition to act in unison with a rising on Irish soil. Father Anthony was excited in these days. The France of the Republic was not his France, and the stain of the blood of the Lord's Anointed was upon her, but for all that the news of the expedition from Brest set his blood coursing so rapidly and his pulses beating, that he was fain to calm with much praying the old turbulent spirit of war which possessed him.

Many of the young fishermen had left the Island and were on the mainland, drilling in secrecy. There were few left save old men and women and children when the blow fell. The Government, abundantly informed of what went on in the councils of the United Irishmen, knew the moment to strike, and took it. The rebellion broke out in various parts of the country, but already the leaders were in prison. Calamity followed calamity. Heroic courage availed nothing. In a short time Wolfe Tone lay dead in the Provost-Marshal's prison of Dublin; and Lord Edward Fitzgerald was dying of his wounds. In Dublin, dragoonings, hangings, pitch-capping and flogging set up a reign of terror. Out of the first sudden silence terrible tidings came to the Island.

At that time there was no communication with the mainland except by the fishermen's boats or at low water. The Island was very much out of the world; and the echoes of what went on in the world came vaguely as from a distance to the ears of the Island people. They were like enough to be safe, though there was blood and fire and torture on the mainland. They were all old and helpless people, and they might well be safe from the soldiery. There was no yeomanry corps within many miles of the Island, and it was the yeomanry, tales of whose doings made the Islanders' blood run cold. Not the foreign soldiers--oh no, they were often merciful, and found this kind of warfare bitterly distasteful. But it might well be that the yeomanry, being so busy, would never think of the Island.

Father Anthony prayed that it might be so, and the elements conspired to help him. There were many storms and high tides that set the Island riding in safety. Father Anthony went up and down comforting those whose husbands, sons, and brothers were in the Inferno over yonder.

The roses in his old cheeks withered, and his blue eyes were faded with many tears for his country and his people. He prayed incessantly that the agony of the land might cease, and that his own most helpless flock might be protected from the butchery that had been the fate of many as innocent and helpless.

The little church of gray stone stands as the vanguard of the village, a little nearer to the mainland, and the spit of sand that runs out towards it. You ascend to it by a hill, and a wide stretch of green sward lies before the door. The gray stone presbytery joins the church and communicates with it. A ragged boreen, or bit of lane, between rough stone walls runs zigzag from the gate, ever open, that leads to the church, and wanders away to the left to the village on the rocks above the sea. Everything is just the same to-day as on that morning when Father Anthony, looking across to the mainland from the high gable window of his bedroom, saw on the sands something that made him dash the tears from his old eyes, and go hastily in search of the telescope which had been a present from one of those wandering sea-captains.

As he set his gla.s.s to his eye that morning, the la.s.situde of age and grief seemed to have left him. For a few minutes he gazed at the objects crossing the sands--for it was low water--in an att.i.tude tense and eager. At last he lowered the gla.s.s and closed it. He had seen enough. Four yeomen on their horses were crossing to the island.

He was alone in the house, and as he bustled downstairs and made door and windows fast, he was rejoiced it should be so. Down below the village was calm and quiet. The morning had a touch of spring, and the water was lazily lapping against the sands. The people were within doors,--of that he was pretty well a.s.sured--for the Island was in a state of terror and depression. There was no sign of life down there except now and again the barking of a dog or the cackling of a hen.

Unconsciously the little homes waited the death and outrage that were coming to them as fast as four strong horses could carry them.

'Strengthen thou mine arm,' cried Father Anthony aloud, 'that the wicked prevail not! Keep thou thy sheep that thou hast confided to my keeping. Lo! the wolves are upon them!' and as he spoke his voice rang out through the silent house. The fire of battle was in his eyes, his nostrils smelt blood, and the man seemed exalted beyond his natural size. Father Anthony went swiftly and barred his church doors, and then turned into the presbytery. He flashed his sword till it caught the light and gleamed and glanced. 'For this, for this hour, friend,'

he said, 'I have polished thee and kept thee keen. Hail, sword of the justice of G.o.d!'

There came a thundering at the oaken door of the church. 'Open, son of Belial!' cried a coa.r.s.e voice, and then there followed a shower of blasphemies. The men had lit down from their horses, which they had picketed below, and had come on foot, vomiting oaths, to the church door. Father Anthony took down the fastenings one by one. Before he removed the last he looked towards the little altar. 'Now,' he said, 'defend Thyself, all-powerful!' and saying, he let the bar fall.