My New Curate Part 3

I took him through the village, where he met salaams and genuflections enough; and was stared at by the men, and blessed by the women, and received the mute adoration of the children. We pa.s.sed along the bog road, where on either side were heaps of black turf drying, and off the road were deep pools of black water, filling the holes whence the turf was cut. It was lonely; for to-day we had not even the pale sunshine to light up the gloomy landscape, and to the east the bleak mountains stood, clear-cut and uniform in s.h.a.gginess and savagery, against the cold, gray sky. The white b.a.l.l.s of the bog cotton waved dismally in the light breeze, which curled the surface of a few pools, and drew a curlew or plover from his retreat, and sent him whistling dolefully, and beating the heavy air, as he swept towards mountain or lake. After half an hour's walking, painful to me, the ground gently rose, and down in the hollow a nest of poplars hid from the western gales. I took Father Letheby through a secret path in the plantation. We rested a little while, and talked of many things. Then we followed a tiny path, strewn with withered pine needles, and which cut upward through the hill. We pa.s.sed from the shelter of the trees, and stood on the brow of a high declivity. I never saw such surprise in a human face before, and such delight. Like summer clouds sweeping over, and dappling a meadow, sensations of wonder and ecstasy rolled visibly across his fine mobile features. Then, he turned, and said, as if not quite sure of himself:--

"_Why! 't is the sea!_"

So it was. G.o.d's own sea, and his retreat, where men come but seldom, and then at their peril. There the great ball-room of the winds and spirits stretched before us, to-day as smooth as if waxed and polished, and it was tessellated with bands of blue and green and purple, at the far horizon line, where, down through a deep mine shaft in the clouds, the hidden sun was making a silent glory. It was a dead sea, if you will. No gleam of sail, near or afar, lit up its loneliness. No flash of sea bird, poised for its prey, or beating slowly over the desolate waste, broke the heavy dulness that lay upon the breast of the deep. The sky stooped down and blackened the still waters; and anear, beneath the cliff on which we were standing, a faint fringe of foam alone was proof that the sea still lived, though its face was rigid and its voice was stilled, as of the dead.

Father Letheby continued gazing in silence over the solemn scene for some time. Then lifting his hat he said aloud:--

"Mirabiles elationes maris; Mirabilis in altis Dominus!"

"Not very many 'upliftings' to-day," I replied. "You see our great friend at a disadvantage. But you know she has moods: and you will like her."

"Like her!" he replied. "It is not liking. It is worship. Some kind of Pantheism which I cannot explain. Nowhere are the loneliness and grandeur of G.o.d so manifested. Mind, I don't quite sympathize with that comparison of St. Augustine's where he detects a resemblance between yon spectra of purple and green and the plumage of a dove. What has a dove to do with such magnificence and grandeur? It was an anti-climax, a bathos, of which St. Augustine is seldom guilty. 'And the Spirit of G.o.d moved upon the face of the waters.' There's the sublime!"

"It is desolate," said I. "Not even a seamew or a gull."

"Quite so," he replied. "It is limitless and unconditioned. There is its grandeur. If that sea were ploughed by navies, or disfigured by the hideous black hulks of men-of-war, it would lose its magnificence. It would become a poor limited thing, with pygmies sporting on its bosom.

It is now unlimited, free, unconditioned, as s.p.a.ce. It is the infinite and the eternal in it that appeals to us. When we were children, the infinite lay beyond the next mountain, because it was the unknown. We grew up and we got knowledge; and knowledge destroyed our dreams, and left us only the commonplace. It is the unknown and unlimited that still appeals to us,--the _something_ behind the dawn, and beyond the sunset, and far away athwart the black line of that horizon, that is forever calling, calling, and beckoning to us to go thither. Now, there is something in that sombre glory that speaks to you and me. It will disappear immediately; and we will feel sad. What is it? Voiceless echoes of light from the light that streams from the Lamb?"

"I hope," I said demurely, for I began to fear this young enthusiast, "that you don't preach in that tone to the people!"

"Oh dear, no," he said, with a little laugh, "but you must forgive my nonsense. You gave me such a shock of surprise."

"But," he said, after a pause, "how happy your life must have been here!

I always felt in Manchester that I was living at the bottom of a black chimney, in smoke and noise and fetor, material and spiritual. Here, you have your holy people, and the silence and quiet of G.o.d. How happy you must have been!"

"What would you think if we returned," I said. "It's almost our dinner hour."

It was not so late, however, but that I was able to take a ten minutes'

stroll through the village, and bid "good day" to some of my parishioners.

I suppose there was a note of interrogation hidden away somewhere under my greeting, for I was told in different tones and degrees of enthusiasm:--

"Yerra, your reverence, he's a nate man."

"Yerra, we never saw his likes before."

"He spakes almost as plain and common as yourself."

"They say, your reverence, that he's the son of a jook."

Some old cronies, who retained a lingering grat.i.tude for Father Laverty's snuff, diluted their enthusiasm a little.

"He is, indeed, a rale nice man. But G.o.d be with poor Father Tom wherever he is. Sure 't was he was kind to the poor."

There was a deputation of young men waiting at my house. I have been pestered from deputations and speeches since the Land League. A s.h.a.ggy giant stepped forward and said:--

"We have preshumed, your reverence, to call upon you to ascertain whether you'd be agreeable to our what I may call unanimous intinsion of asking the new cojutor to be prisident of the Gaelic a.s.sociation of Kilronan, called the 'Holy Terrors.'"

I said I was agreeable to anything they wished: and Father Letheby became president of the "Holy Terrors."

After dinner something put me into better humor. I suppose it was the mountain mutton, for there's nothing like it in Ireland,--mutton raised on limestone land, where the gra.s.s is as tender to the lips of the sheep, as the sheep to the lips of men. I thought I had an excellent opportunity of eliciting my curate's proficiency in his cla.s.sics. With a certain amount of timidity, for you never know when you are treading on a volcano with these young men, I drew the subject around. I have a way of talking enigmatically, which never fails, however, to reveal my meaning. And after a few clever pa.s.ses, I said, demurely, drawing out my faded and yellow translation, made nearly thirty years ago:--

"I was once interested in other things. Here is a little weak translation I once made of a piece of Greek poetry, with which you are quite familiar. Ah me! I had great notions at the time, ideas of corresponding with cla.s.sical journals, and perhaps, sooner or later, of editing a cla.s.sic myself. But _Cui bono?_ paralyzed everything. That fatal _Cui bono?_ that is the motto and watchword of every thinking and unthinking man in Ireland. However, now that you have come, perhaps--who knows? What do you think of this?"

I read solemnly:--

"I have argued and asked in my sorrow What shall please me? what manner of life?

At home am I burdened with cares that borrow Their color from a world of strife.

The fields are burdened with toil, The seas are sown with the dead, With never a hand of a priest to a.s.soil A soul that in sin hath fled.

I have gold: I dread the danger by night; I have none: I repine and fret; I have children: they darken the pale sunlight; I have none: I'm in nature's debt.

The young lack wisdom; the old lack life; I have brains; but I shake at the knees; Alas! who could covet a scene of strife?

Give me peace in this life's surcease!"

"What do you think of this? It is a loose translation from Posidippus."

"It swings well," said Father Letheby. "But who was he?"

"One of the gnomic, or sententious poets," I replied.

"Greek or Latin?" he asked.

Then I succ.u.mbed.

"You never heard his name before?" I said.

"Never," said he emphatically.

I paused and reflected.

"The Bishop told me," said I, "that you were a great Greek scholar, and took a medal in Greek composition?"

"The Bishop told me," said he, "that you were the best Greek scholar in Ireland, with the exception, perhaps, of a Jesuit Father in Dublin."

We looked at each other. Then burst simultaneously into a fit of laughter, the likes of which had not been heard in that room for many a day.

"I am not sure," said I, "about his Lordship's cla.s.sical attainments; but he knows human nature well."

Father Letheby left next morning to see after his furniture. He had taken a slated, one-storied cottage in the heart of the village. It was humble enough; but it looked quite aristocratic amongst its ragged neighbors.

CHAPTER IV

THE PANTECHNICON

The usual deadly silence of a country village in Ireland, which is never broken but by the squeal of a pig, or the clucking of chickens, or a high voice, heard occasionally in anger, was rudely shocked on the following Thursday evening. The unusual commotion commenced with a stampede of sans-culottish boys, and red-legged, wild-eyed girls, who burst into the village streets with shouts of