The Charm Of Ireland Part 46

"Why of course I would!" I cried; "and thank you a thousand times for thinking of it!"

Whereupon, her face beaming, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the blueing bag from her daughter, who had it ready, and gave it to me, and I sloshed it around in the basin until the water was quite blue, and bathed my face in it; and whether it was the heat of the water or the blueing I don't know, but the sting bothered me very little after that, except for the swelling, and that was not so bad as I had feared it would be.

I sat down finally to a delightful lunch of tea and bread and b.u.t.ter and cold meat and jam; and then I got out my pipe and joined my hostess on the bench in front of the house, and her daughter stood in the door and listened, and we had a long talk. As usual, it was first about herself, and then about myself. Her husband was dead and she suffered a great deal from rheumatism, which seems to be the bane of the Irish; but she had her little place, glory be to G.o.d, and she picked up a good many shillings in the summer time from visitors to the ruins, though many that came to see them cared nothing for them nor understood them.

Indeed, many just came and looked at them over the gate, and then went away again.

And just then I witnessed a remarkable confirmation of this; for a motor-car, with two men and two or three women in it, whirled up the road below and stopped at the gate outside the ruins. My hostess caught up her keys and started hastily down to open it, but before she had taken a dozen steps, the man on the front seat spoke to the chauffeur, and he spun the car around and in another moment it had disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust. I confess that I was hot with anger when my hostess, with a sad little smile, came back and sat down again beside me, for I felt somehow as though she had been affronted.

I went back to the ruins presently, and my new friend came along, finding I was interested, and we spent half an hour wandering about them, while she pointed out various details which I might otherwise have missed. Next to the lavatory, the most interesting feature of the place is a beautiful pavement of decorated tiles which is preserved in St. Bernard's chapel. The whole church was at one time floored with these tiles, and a few detached ones may still be seen at the base of the pillars. There also remain many details of sculpture which show the loving labour lavished on the place when it was built--the individual work of the artisan, embodying something of his own soul, which gives these old churches a life and beauty sadly wanting in most new ones.

The cemetery is near the bank of the river; but potatoes are raised there now, in a soil made fertile by royal as well as sacred dust; for here Dervorgilla, the false wife of Tiernan O'Rourke, chose to be laid to rest, in the hope, perhaps, that in the crowd of holy abbots and monks which would rise from this place, she might slip into heaven un.o.bserved.

Three miles away from Mellifont stand the ruins of another abbey, centuries older and incomparably greater in its day--an abbey absolutely Irish, with rude, small buildings, but with a giant round-tower and two of the loveliest sculptured crosses in existence on this earth.

Monasterboice it is called--Mainister Buithe, the abbey of Boetius--and the way thither lies along a pleasant road, through a wooded valley--which, fertile as it is, is not without its traces of desolation, for we pa.s.sed more than one vast empty mill, falling to decay. Then, on the slope of a hillside away ahead, we saw the round tower, or what is left of it, for the top of it is broken off, struck by lightning, perhaps. But the fragment that remains is 110 feet high! And seeing it thus, across the valley, with the low little church nestling at its base, one is inclined to think that Father Dempsey was not altogether wrong when he said he cared nothing about the theories of antiquarians concerning the round towers, for he knew what they were--the forefingers of the early church pointing us all to G.o.d.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROUND TOWER, MONASTERBOICE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HIGH CROSS, MONASTERBOICE]

My companion and I were discussing these theories, when our jarvey saw the opportunity to spring a joke, which I have since discovered to be a time-honoured one.

"Your honours are all wrong," he said, "if you will excuse my sayin' so.

It has been proved that the round towers was built by the government."

"Built by the government?" repeated my companion. "How can you prove that?"

"Easy enough, your honour. Seein' they're no manner of use and cost a lot of money, who else could have built them?"

And this, I take it, was his revenge for the Boyne battlefield.

We stopped presently beside a stile leading over the stone wall at the side of the road, and here there was waiting another old woman, to unlock the entrance to the tower. We clambered over the stile and made our way up through the gra.s.s-grown, unkempt graveyard, first to the tower--one of the mightiest of these monuments of ancient Erin, for it is seventeen yards around at the base, and tapers gradually toward the top, and the only entrance is a small doorway six feet above the ground; and it takes no great effort of imagination to fancy the monks clambering wildly up to it, clutching the treasures of the monastery to their bosoms, whenever word came that the raiding Danes were in the neighbourhood. Ladders have been fixed so that one can climb to the top, but we did not essay them.

No trace remains of the monastic buildings which cl.u.s.tered at the tower foot; for, unlike those at Mellifont and in England and on the continent, these were not wrought of stone, but were mere shacks, as in every truly Irish abbey, scarcely strong enough to screen from wind and weather the groups of scholars who gathered to study here. They lived a strait and austere life, and the only permanent structures they built were the churches. Here, as usual, they were small, the largest one being only forty feet in length; and the walls that remain prove how bare and mean they must have looked beside the carved and columned splendours of Mellifont.

But Monasterboice has one glory, or rather two, beside which those that remain at Mellifont are as nothing; and these are the huge Celtic crosses, the most perfect and beautiful in the land. One of them is tall and slender and the other is short and st.u.r.dy, and both are absolute masterpieces.

The high cross, as the tall one is called, stands near the tower-foot and close beside the crumbling wall of one of the old churches. It is twenty-seven feet high, and is composed of three stones, the shaft, the cross with its binding circle, and the cap. The shaft, which is about two feet square and eighteen feet high, is divided into seven compartments on either face, and in each of them is an elaborately-sculptured representation of some Bible scene, usually with three figures.

Although much worn, it is still possible easily to decipher some of them, for there is Eve accepting the apple from the serpent while Adam looks mildly on, and here they are fleeing from Paradise before the angel with the flaming sword, and next Cain is. .h.i.tting Abel on the head with a club while a third unidentified person watches the scene without offering to interfere. At the crossing there is a splendid crucifixion, with the usual crowded heaven and h.e.l.l to left and right; the binding circle is beautifully ornamented with an interlacing design; and the cap-stone represents one of those high-pitched cells or churches, such as we saw at Killaloe and Glendalough.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MUIREDACH'S CROSS, MONASTERBOICE]

Beautiful as this cross is, it is surpa.s.sed by the other one, Muiredach's Cross, from the inscription about its base: "A prayer for Muiredach for whom this cross was made." That inscription gives us its date, at least within a century, for two Muiredachs were abbots here.

One of them died in 844 and the other in 924, and as the latter was the richer and more distinguished, it is presumed that the cross is his.

That would make its age almost exactly ten centuries.

And yet, in spite of those ten centuries, the sculptures which enrich it from top to bottom are as beautiful to-day as they ever were. Look at the picture opposite this page--it is not my picture, though I took one, but there is an iron fence about the cross now which spoils every recent photograph--and you will see what a wonderful thing it is. It is a monolith--one single stone, fifteen feet high and six feet across the arms--and every inch of it is covered with ornamentation. It is the western face the picture shows, with the crucifixion occupying its usual position. Below it are three panels of extraordinary interest, for they show Irish warriors and clerics in the costumes of the period, all of them wearing fierce mustachios. In the upper panel are three clerics in flowing robes, the central one giving a book to one of his companions and a staff to the other; in the central panel are three ecclesiastics each holding a book; and in the lower panel a cleric in a long cloak, caught together at the throat with a brooch, stands staff in hand between two soldiers armed with Danish swords. At the foot of the shaft two dogs lie head to head.

On the other side, the central panel shows Christ sitting in judgment, with a joyous devil kicking a d.a.m.ned soul into an already-crowded h.e.l.l.

The method of separating the blessed from the d.a.m.ned is shown just below, where a figure is carefully weighing souls in a pair of scales--a subject familiar to every one who has visited the Gothic cathedrals of France, where almost invariably a devil is trying to cheat by crouching below the scales and pulling down one side. The lower panels in the cross represent the usual Scriptural subjects--the fall of man, the expulsion from Eden, the adoration of the magi, and so on; and again at the base there are two dogs, only this time they are playing, and one is holding the other by the ear. All of this sculpture is done with spirit, with taste and with fine artistry; and another glory of the cross is the elaborate tracery of the side panels, and of the front, back, inside and outside of the circle. Of this, the photograph gives a better notion than any description could.

Who was he? Was he sad or glad Who knew to carve in such a fashion?

Those questions we may never answer. All we can say certainly is that he was a great artist; and his is the artist's reward:

But he is dust; we may not know His happy or unhappy story: Nameless, and dead these centuries, His work outlives him,--there's his glory!

We tore ourselves away at last from the contemplation of this consummate masterpiece, and drove slowly back to Drogheda, through a beautiful and fertile country, which, save for the thatched cottages, and gorse-crowned walls and hedges, did not differ greatly in appearance from my own. And I was very happy, for it had been a perfect day.

Nowhere else in Ireland is it possible to crowd so much of loveliness and interest into so short a s.p.a.ce. All unwittingly, I had saved the best for the last.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE END OF THE PILGRIMAGE

I CAN imagine no greater contrast to the quiet and peaceful valley of the Boyne than was Belfast that night. The Orangemen had already begun to celebrate King Billy's victory, and were practising for the great demonstration of the twelfth, when England was to be shown, once for all and in a manner unmistakable, that Ulster was in earnest.

As I came up on the tram from the station, we ran into a mob of people, marching along in the middle of the street and yelling at the tops of their voices, and we had to wait until they had pa.s.sed. I asked a fellow-pa.s.senger what was going on, and he answered with a little smile that the Orange societies had all been given new banners that night and were flinging them to the breeze for the first time. I asked him who had given the banners, and he said he didn't know.

At the hotel, I found that Betty had sought the sanctuary of our room, and was watching the tumult from the window. She said it reminded her of the French Revolution, and the comparison was natural enough. The especial scene she had in mind, I think, was that draggled procession of shrieking fishwives which escorted the king and his family in from Versailles.

I do not know how many Orange societies there are at Belfast, but we saw at least a dozen march past that night, each of them headed by a band or drum-corps, and each with a bright new Orange banner flaunting proudly in the breeze. Each banner bore a painted representation of some Orange victory; King Billy on his white horse fording the Boyne being a favourite subject; and the banners were very large and fringed with gold lace and most expensive-looking; and before them and beside them and behind them trailed a mob of shrieking girls and women and ragam.u.f.fin boys, locked arm and arm half across the street, breaking into a clumsy dance now and then, or shouting the lines of some Orange ditty. There were many men in line, marching along more or less soberly; but these bacchantes outnumbered them two to one. They blocked the street from side to side, stopped traffic, and conducted themselves as though they had suddenly gone mad.

Presently all the societies, which had been collecting at some rendezvous, marched back together, with the mob augmented a hundred-fold, so that, looking down from our window, we could see nothing but a ma.s.s of heads filling the street from side to side--thousands and thousands of women and girls and boys, all vociferous with a frenzied intoxication--and in the midst of them the thin stream of Orangemen trudging along behind their banners.

I went down into the street to view this demonstration more closely, for it was evident that here at last was the spirit of Ulster unveiled for all to see; but at close quarters much of its impressiveness vanished, for the mob was composed largely of boys and girls out for a good time, and rejoicing in the unaccustomed privilege of yelling and hooting to their hearts' content. A few policemen would have been quite capable of dealing with that portion of it. But the men marching grimly along behind their banners were of different stuff; they were ready, apparently, for any emergency, ready for a holy war; and I wondered if their leaders, who had sown the wind so blithely as part of the game of politics, were quite prepared to reap the whirlwind which might follow.

A man with whom I fell into talk said there would be a procession like this every evening until the twelfth; but I should think the drummers would be exhausted long before that. I have described the contortions of the Dublin drummers, but they are nowhere as compared with the drummers of Belfast. And, though about a fourth of Belfast's population is Catholic, you would never have suspected it that night, for there was no disorder of any kind, except the wild disorder of the Orangemen and their adherents. I suspect that, in Belfast, wise Catholics spend the early evenings of July at home.

We went out, next morning, to Ardoyne village, to see one of the few establishments where linen is still woven by hand. A beautiful old factory it is, with the work-rooms grouped around an open court which reminded us of the Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp; and the Scotchman in charge of it took us through from top to bottom. I have forgotten how many looms there are--some thirty or forty; and it was most interesting to watch the weavers as they shot the shuttle swiftly back and forth with one hand and worked the heavy beam with the other, while with their feet they controlled the pattern. Nearly all the weavers were old men, and our guide told us it was growing more and more difficult to replace them, because hand-weaving had been so largely displaced by machine-work that it was rapidly becoming a lost art. Few young men were willing to undertake the long apprenticeship which was necessary before they could become expert weavers, and he foresaw the time when hand-weaving would cease altogether.

Then we went upstairs, where the pattern mechanism is mounted above each loom; and though I understood it, in a way, after long and careful explanation, I am quite incapable of explaining it to anybody else, except to say that the threads which run down to the loom below are governed by a lot of stiff cards laced together into a long roll, and cut with many perforations, so that the roll looks something like the music-rolls used in mechanical piano-players.

Last of all we were shown some of the finished product, and very beautiful it was, strong as iron--far stronger than machine-woven linen, for the shuttle can be thrown by hand more often to the inch than is possible by machine; and some of the patterns, too, were very lovely; one, in especial, from the Book of Kells, the interwoven Celtic ornamentation, the symbol of eternity.

Of course we talked about Home Rule, and our Scotch host, who was evidently a devoted Orangeman, was very certain Ulster would fight before she would acquiesce. If the fight went against her, he prophesied that no Protestant industry which could get out of Ireland would stay to be taxed out of existence by a Dublin Parliament, and he said that many of the great factories had already secured options on English sites, and were prepared to move at any time.

I remarked that it seemed to me the wiser plan would be to wait and see how Home Rule worked before plunging into revolution; then, if it was found that Ulster was really oppressed, it would be time enough for her army to take the field. And I told him something of what I had seen and heard in the south and west of Ireland--that, among all the people I had talked with, not one had expressed himself with any bitterness toward Ulster, and that many had said frankly that the leaders of the Irish people would be largely Protestant in the future, just as they had been in the past. But he was unconvinced, and very gloomy over the outlook.

We came away finally, and took a last look about Belfast--at the busy streets, the bright shops, the humming factories, the clattering foundries; and then the hour of departure came. The jarvey who drove us to the boat was a jovial, loquacious son of the Church, with good-natured laughter for Orange excesses.

"Why should we Catholics interfere wid them?" he asked. "We'd only be gettin' our heads broke, and all the papers would be full of the riots in Ulster. Sure, haven't I seen them before this treatin' a small fight at the corner as though it was a revolution? No, no; we'll just stay quiet and let them have their fun. It does good to them and no harm to us. They'll settle down again when the Home Rule bill is pa.s.sed, and then we'll be Irishmen all, please G.o.d!"

From the bottom of my heart I said I hoped so. Indeed, I can think of no better watch-word to replace "No Surrender!" and curses on King Billy and the Pope than "Irishmen All!"