The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 29 April 1915, Page 3

The Storyteller

A TEMPTATION Mary Ann Welsh had been made a widow at the big jam at the Cascades, a few miles distant from her home. Weary years had elapsed since then. She was thinking of them now as she stood upon the shore, looking out with wrinkled brows over the water. The river glided along in a quiet, ghostly fashion, that told nothing of the treacherous current which at certain points it was almost beyond the power of man to stem. A quarter of a mile higher up were rapids churning over hidden rocks ; a few miles below here those other rapids in the fierce swirl of which Tom Welsh had met his death. On the surface of the stream floated logs of every conceivable size and shape, some placidly, others violently. Mary Welsh regarded them dreamily—she had long been accustomed to the sight. Year after year, she had seen them with almost intolerable monotony, as set adrift from the lumber camps above, marked with the owner’s name, they were driven to Hull or Ottawa, where they were secured and consigned to their several purchasers. Sometimes they gathered in a jam,’ which gave the river men considerable trouble, or the laggards among them floated in shoreward and the drivers had to chase out the sluggards. All that would have been picturesque to a stranger had become familiar to Mary Welsh, so it was not of any of those things she was thinking as she drew her shawl tightly about her— for the night was chill. Her tall figure motionless, her print dress blowing about her, her hair loosened in strands from her uncovered head, gave her the appearance of some prophetess who dreamed dreams and saw visions in the light of the moon. Up in the village a group of ‘the lads’ employed in the quarries and on the river were waking the echoes with their favorite song, ‘ The fate of young Monroe.’ In their untrained voices there was a certain melody, and a certain pathos, for the fate which the long-drawn-out ballad described was such as might befall any of them. The notes fell on Mary Welsh’s ears with a special significance and she shivered. She recalled that as a girl she used to thrill to the rude doggerel telling ‘ the night was dark and dreary, and he was far from home.’ Then had come the time when she had been unable to endure that song, and had gone into the house and put her shawl over her ears to deaden the sounds, bursting into passionate weeping. For the story was no longer, a shadowy abstraction, but precisely her story ; only, the legendary young Monroe had not been the husband of the heroine or the father of her children. He, too, had fallen under the logs and been carried away in the foam of the rapids before any help was possible. Often her Tom, the most fearless and masterful of all the river drivers, had led to some perilous enterprise a gang of those turbulent spirits, sometimes harder to control than the waters of the Gatineau. And they all loved him, but were powerless to save him. A hint of Mary’s state of mind had been somehow conveyed to the singers, and for a considerable time, delicately and chivalrously, that ballad had been omitted from their repertory. But the ballad had begun of late to resume its time-honored place, since the limit of human grief was supposed to be reached in a year or at most two. And it was now five years since Tom Welsh had been found down below at Ironsides, and had been laid, with deep thankfulness on Mary’s part, in consecrated earth, in a quiet that the man’s strenuous life had never - known. To-night, the old air caused the old wound to re-open and to throb fiercely in Mary’s heart. There was sob in her throat and the muscles of her face worked. Yet she no longer ran away from that plaintive strain, rather with a curious fascination she desired to catch every word. ‘ For now,’ sang the rough voices, ‘ her wish is granted, for she sleeps hear young Monroe.’

Mary Welsh was face to face with a great temptation,-. She had married young, being only eighteen when Tom Welsh had led her to the altar. He had lived ten, years and she had now been a widow five. So that, long as life seemed to her, she was only thirty-three. And that evening, since she had come out of her house, she had received a proposal of marriage. It had come as a surprise, and she had felt it to be almost an insult at first, as though Tom had been still living and the worn wedding ring she had on her third finger l united him visibly to her. Her first impulse had been one of anger. Then the sudden, bewildering thought had occurred to her that she was really free to listen to ‘ such talk/ and that Billy Derham meant no disrespect when he began with some of the old nonsense that she had listened to as a girl. He told her how he had long admired her blue eyes, her brown hair, and figure. She had counselled him in the rude vernacular which the man would best understand to ‘Quit his fooling.’ Half inclined to laugh and half to cry, she had been carried to the misty land of youth, far off and unreal now as some region beyond the encircling chain of the Chelsea hills. Billy Derham was a big fellow of thirty-five or six, healthy and strong, \vith good looks which had made many a girl of the village sigh for him, in vain, but which Mary Welsh had never noticed. He was rich, too, as the ideas of that rural community went. He had been the only child of a well-to-do father, who at his death had left him a competency, and this had been increased by the substantial bequest of a bachelor ancle. Billy had continued to be a ‘ boss ’ amongst the shantymen and to draw his pay regularly, for the love of the forest and the hardy adventurous life he led there was deep down in his heart. He could not change even when the necessity for such strenuous labor was past. But he had been careful to invest his money, and ever to speculate with some of it, so that he was really wealthy. He owned a comfortable house, large and quite grand for that village, at a very pretty corner near the red bridge, and he had plenty of good furniture which had descended to him from more than one generation. It was these advantages that had constituted Mary’s temptation. After the first distaste, and even repulsion, to an idea that had disturbed the placid depths of a widowhood which she had never dreamed of malting anything else than perpetual, there came stealing softly, almost imperceptibly, that second thought. If she could make up her mind to such a course of action as Billy wished, then the worries that had been like thorns and briars all along her way would be at an end. The house in which she lived, the worst in the village, was falling into ruins, for the hard toil which she had never relaxed had been insufficient for repairs or improvements. Then the needs of the children—the eldest, twin boys, were only fourteen—were growing ever more insistent. She had been striving for some time to put aside a little money which would enable her to send these elder boys to some cheap Catholic college. Bor she herself had been able to teach them nothing more than the catechism. A charitable summer visitor had taught them how to read and write, but that was all. Mrs. Welsh was determined at any cost to keep them away from the local Protestant school, where bigotry was said to be rampant. When Billy Derham saw that she shrank from his rudely expressed protestation of love and admiration, he had artfully dwelt instead upon all that he would do for the boys; what a large fine house there would be, with plenty of room for all the children, and good clothes for the girls when they began to grow up. All that had touched the maternal heart deeply. The man had spoken honestly and fairly. He was steady and sober, qualities that were rarer in that locality than might have been desired. He was roughly kindhearted, and no doubt he would make as men went, a good husband. And it must be owned she counted among the advantages that he would be away for a certain part of each year at the shanties and leave her and the children with the house to herself.

Argue as she would, however, it was certain that, like the - placid river occasionally lashed ; to violent storms, her whole nature was in revolt against the-sug-gestion. Mary remembered how her mother, long dead, had described the women of Ireland, of that generation at least, as looking upon second marriages for women with the strongest disfavor. Also, through the strains of that foolish old ballad, with its rude pathos, the old love, the one love of Mary’s life, was rising up and fiercely protesting. She had always intended to meet Tom Welsh some day, in that life beyond which her Celtic eyes perceived so clearly, a widow indeed, .still faithful to his memory. In fact, in that sense, her late husband had never seemed dead to her. She had regarded herself bound to him as on that day when, coming down from the altar, the full solemnity of the marriage vows had taken possession of her girlish heart. ‘Till death do us part,’—aye and after, through all eternity. That was how she had felt. ..Her heart throbbed with a pain it had not felt for many days, and that had simply been forced back into dim recesses by the hard struggle of ‘ bringing up the children.’ She was still keenly conscious of the desolation that had fallen upon her beside Tom’s grave. For the brave, strong man, with his faults of temper and his occasional roughness, had been all in all to her. No! no! she could not do that terrible thing and prove faithless to that cherished memory. It would almost seem to her like those light women, of whom in her busy life she had heard but dimly, who saw no sacredness in the marriage tie itself. And yet many people, most people, perhaps even the priest himself, would cry shame on her for refusing thus to benefit her children. It was with a poignant feeling of relief that she suddenly bethought herself of another and weighty reason which must convince the priest and herself at least that she could not entertain her suitor’s proposal. For Billy was an Orangeman. Had she not herself seen him hastening to the lodge, when the drum beat through all the hills, to summon the surrounding members to * the monthly meetings. Had not, also, her own two eyes watched him, on the last 12th of July, impersonating, as one of the tallest lads in the village, King William, when the local contingent in their costumes marched through the village to the train to take part in the metropolitan celebration. Mary Welsh remembered how her Irish heart had flamed out into indignation, for those anachronistic mummers were stepping out blithely to the strains of Croppies, lie down.’ Mary had tartly ordered the children, who were innocently pleased with the pageant, to ‘ Come in out of that*,’ and had closed down the window with a bang. But just as those men who indulged upon that day of fateful memories in execration of the Pope and of Papists in general settled down upon the morrow to peace and amity with their few Catholic neighbors, so the flame had died out of Mary Welsh’s heart and she had thought no more about the matter until the next 12th of July. But she knew quite well that were she to * put Billy or any other Orangeman over her childer ’ as successor to Tom Welsh, that flame of indignation would burst out very often. Billy’s ‘ doing for the boys ’ would be, no doubt, to insist upon their being sent to a Protestant school. For she felt ,an inward assurance that when once Billy had the upperhand her dream of putting the lads at a. Catholic college would never be realised. She could see, as in a clear vision, Billy protesting against her walk to church on Sunday mornings, Billy interfering here and interfering there, and talking ‘ forenenst the little ones against that religion which he had been taught to hate. Mary knew for a certainty that her own fighting spirit, inherited from both sides of the house, would rise up then to the detriment of domestic peace. More grievous still, she felt would it be, to see that other influence work against her own, especially with the boys, and weaken, perhaps destroy, their attachment to that old faith to which she herself clung with such passionate loyalty. ‘ Oh, no! no!’ she cried, * better poverty, even starvation itself, than to be putting the little ones in danger.’ , ' . ' ’ ,

- Wi -• .r -* • - -• ; v k- ,-. ■. ■ " She drew a long breath and looked around her at the Chelsea hills, with their almost infinite variety of shapes, bathed in a glory of moonlight, at the water, with its logs, down hurryingthat dear stream of the Gatineau with all its ./tender associations and those peaceful shores that had witnessed her love idyll with Tom Welsh. Stretching forth her arms, for there was none tp hear, she cried aloud; Ah, then, Tom darlin’, no other man will ever put a ring on my finger. It’s your wife I’ll be always till we meet up above.’ The echo caught up her words and repeated them weirdly; while a distant whip-poor-will emphasised by its lonely note the cold stillness of the atmosphere, contrasting with the hot, passionate heart of love and loyalty that was beating in the woman’s breast. She walked homeward with her head high in the air, looking proudly, defiantly at Billy Derham’s house as it lay silent in the moonlight. Joyfully she entered that half-ruined dwelling where her children, even the boys, lay sleeping. She passed from bed to bed, looking down upon them with a blessing on her lips. When she reached the crib of the youngest, she bent over it, pressing her lips to the tiny sleeper’s forehead, and crying: Oh, my fatherless little ones! I’ll put no man over you, and least of all one that hasn’t the faith in his heart.’ —The Magnificat.