The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 12 May 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O'Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXll.—(Continued.) Little did the guilty company at the Holy Well anticipate what an all-searching eye was upon their evil doings. Miss Westropp saw one thing clear enough— the misery of Irish society was that its elements obstinately declined to fuse. The two races were two excellent metals brazed together for ages in the same crucible, and still there is no more sign of their running' into combination than if they had been cold iron and cold stone. Was she the first childish philosopher who dreamed of seeing yellow gold gleaming at the bottom of the melting-pot some morning under the spell of some yet to be discovered alchemy of the heart ? And'hjpw was she to know that those innocentlooking precipitates she was bringing together would cause such a terrific blow-up in her little laboratory? For the moment her pretty sorcery worked famously. Artful old Jesuit and recreant Parson young Guardsman with the subtle perfume of the Chrysanthemum Club, and Ken Rohan with the dust of his meal bags—the miller's little shrinking wild rose, and the rich blossoms from the Winspurleigh conservatoriesiron Englishman, mercurial Frenchman, and fuliginous American, made as harmonious a picture under her smile as the gay kiss of the sun made of the old saint's crumbling cloister and Mr. Hans Harman's shooting box— the fresh green islet in the lake and the darkling clefts in which the eagles nested. The Artful old Jesuit was master of all the guileless lore of the hermitage—where the saints' knees had left their print in the rock—where the eagles from Mullagh used to hide his dinnerwhere his penitential tears one morning suddenly gathered into a holy well, whose limpid waters were red ever since, no man knew whence— by angels in the night-time—who knew?

"You know Ave don't want the Rector to believe all these things," said Father Phil, smilingly. "He'd better not," said Mrs. Motherwell, tapping her husband pleasantly with an ancient sunshade of shot silk. "Upon my word, Jane, it puts me to the pin of my collar to believe all I've got to believe as an honest Protestant Clerk without* adding St. Finn Barr's eagles to the Thirty-nine Articles," said the Rector. "At the same time I think the angels are just as likely to come down and fill the peasants' Holy Well as they are to fill the philosophers' inkbottles. Our saucy century might do worse than cool its brows by a dip in the Holy Wells.''' "Do you think the angels do really sometimes come here still, sir?" seriously asked Mabel, gently laying a hand on the old priest's arm. "If she asked me I should say they do—decidedly," blurted out the Rector in an enthusiastic aside, which brought him another rap from the. shot-silk sunshade. Father Phil's faded old eyes filled with wondrous merry kindness as they rested on the bright face so earnestly upheld to his. "How should I know, my dear young lady? It would take wiser heads than mine to tell. Maybe the angels are sometimes nearer to us than we think." "I wonder are they all as kind to silly girls as you are, sir— was so good of you to come to-day!" she murmured fervently, her tiny gloved hand still resting on the old man's rusty, shrunken sleeve, where they, stood on the lonely islet in the lake amidst the storm-scourged hills. "Heigho! a girl can never be a saint, nor anything else that is great or brave. Fancy one of us women shivering alone here of a winter's night, like St. Finn Barr, when all these black hills were moaning under the storms and lightning! What a coward I should be!" - "I don't see any harm in seeing the place by daylight, with a fresh young face or two round, and a little luncheon," said Mrs. Motherwell. "We're not all made for saints. Somebody' must be left to look after the hampers. Don't you think it is about time to be unpacking them, dear?" : - . >"-'■-; " '(• " v '; ' ' V , "What should -'l'.' ever have done without you, my dear Mrs. Motherwell?" cried Mabel, imprinting a , sunny

little kiss on that lady's pleasant matronly cheek. ■ "Nonsense, child!" The Rector's wife did feel that she had risked something for her young friend in braving Miss Deborah Harman's celestial vengeance to render this little Gougaun Barra party possible. As a matter of fact that exemplary young lady organised a demonstration of the Church Mission people and dependents at Stone Hall to bustle out of church the following Sunday when the Rector was beginning his sermon, and stopped a week's wages from the old man at the lodge gate because the withered little lady, his wife, did not gather up her old legs fast enough to join in the manifestation. Mrs. Motherwell's bosom did gently swell with the dignity of being the most important member of the party—the oxygen of the Gougaun Barra air for the occasion—the salt which lent to the contents of the hampers their irreproachable matronly savour. "Nonsense, child! what would you do without me Rather tell me what Tom, and Bob, and Emma, and that awful little urchin Wppsy, are doing without me at the Rectory! Falling into the fire, or stealing the jam, or skating down the banisters as usual, I'll be bound."

"Just as sensibly employed as if they were a synod of scientists. Jane, thou carnally-minded woman, get thee to the hampers," sang out the Rector.

"That," said Ken Rohan to a pretty semicircle of the Neville girls, "that is the oldest stone monastery in Western Europe."

"What! these funny little things!" observed N. G. No. 1, poking her parasol at the cramped, lichen-eaten stone niches on whose hard pillows St. Finn Barr's monks expiated the sins of their days of nature. "How uncomfortable! Just think how tiny they would look in the middle of that awful place we saw in Rome. Don't yon remember; that night by moonlight, Carrie? It was all so vast, and I think they told us it was ever so much older than this."

"The Coliseum is not the same thing, dear," said N. G. No. 2, severly.

"No, of course, it is not the same thing," assented No. 1, cheerfully.

"The men who built these cells sang matins in Gougaun Barra when Charlemagne was a little barbarian. Young King Alfred came here to them to learn his alphabet," said the young miller rudely. In his present heart-sore condition he exulted in showing what mindless gadding fireflies woman —all except his mother and little sister Katie. He had joined this party of pleasure specially to show how lightly their stings and arrows glanced off his armour. He rejoiced that Miss Neville the First mistook the Coliseum for a Christian monastery. Would Miss Neville the Second be able to tell who her King Arthur was? "So King Arthur came here to school? Well I hope they taught him not to be too hard upon ignorant strangers," said No. 2, placidly stooping to secure a maidenhair fern. If the truth must be told, the young ladies were not at all preoccupied with the young man's pallid looks or the circles round his eyes. They accepted his companionship with the same easy courtesy with which they might reply to the person sitting next them at an Interlaken table d'hote if he inquired whether they had yet been to Lauterbrunnen, and had they heard old Mere de Glace, as'they called her, who lived in ice at Meiringen, twangling her unearthly dulcimer?

"Strangers have generally fared better at our hands than we at.theirs," retorted young Rohan, sullenly. "So I have heard papa say. I am so sorry," said Miss Neville the Second, in the same tranquil way. Rudeness of speech she presumed to be, like the accent, a rustic peculiarity.

"Monks are delightful creatures. Don't you remember that dear, droll little man, who used to take us little things for a ride on old Beppo, that great St. Bernard of his?" said Miss Neville the younger, who had been searching all the memories of her life for something pleasant to say. "But don't you think the Italians rather spoil their pictures Assumptions and thingsby putting so very many monks in heaven? You know the habit is not one that you would care to be looking at always, is it?", "The monk's 'habit is the grandest human dress ever invented; what ages of hussars' jackets and Paris fashions it has seen come and go! And it comes in picturesquely anywhere— a picture, on the stage, in a cloister, at a

coronation, on a battlefield, in a Day of Judgment," cried Ken Rohan, who j was always ready to sail off into "clouds of divine obscurity" with his mystics of the Rhine, whenever the divinities of this nether world were not behaving satisfactorily. "What is there in the life of a soldier, poet, • politician, man of pleasure, or man of science, to compare with, the life of St. Finn Barr here among his mountains? What has your greatest general done but set women and children crying? Make a man prime minister to-day, and he'll be fuming over what the papers are saying of his speech to-morrow morning. The poet has a nagging wife, perhaps— if not, nags at his daughter on his own accounts-Milton did it, with all the lustrous shapes of Paradise floating round him. Science!' there are a million millions of starry worlds beckoning down at us every night, and Goldschmidt or Chacornac thinks it glory enough for the watchings of a lifetime if he discovers half a dozen trumpery little asteroids, and if he does not get abused as a thief in the astronomical journals. Pleasure! —which produces no classic, except the cookery book, and pays its worshippers with yawns and headaches! Immortality! Your human great ones enjoy it just as much as they enjoy silver breast-plates on their coffins. And, indeed, the best thing about the human chatter which we call immortality is that the immortals are not alive to listen to it. Do you suppose Shakespere would accept immortality if it condemned him to listen to bores droning into his ear for all eternity how very clever that Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is? But our brave St. Finn Barr—how different an immortality his is even as the world goes. People say—l sometimes believe myself—he walks these hills to this hour; and if he does it is not to see his name pecked at by sour-lipped critics, but to find a loving shrine glowing for him in every peasant's cabin, in women's hearts, and children's evening prayers. Nay, what a mortal life he lived!—what battles with the most puissant foe that ever encountered human valor! What shocks with the legions of the Lost Archangel, and what triumphs! Did he speak ? He had the Court of Heaven for an audience. Was he dreamy? He had the sun to paint the hills for him, the waterfalls to be his sparkling silver, the sunsets to give him gold and gems, the wild birds to chirp his operas, the wailing winds and the thunder crashes to illustrate his sombre midnight imaginings. He could not flourish his measuring-tape at the bright stars, nor blink at them through an eyeglass, forsooth— but he could mount among the stars; he could mount universe upon universe beyond them. The heavens were open to him as a pleasure-garden, angels to spread his feasts, and an endless eternity to enjoy them."

"I should say it must have been rather lonesome sometimes," said N. G. No. 2; "and don't von think a little selfish?"

Ken started and colored. His fit had carried him clean away. He had forgotten the three bright, healthy girls beside him as utterly. as St. Finn Barr could have forgotten the trammels of the flesh in one of his ecstasies. The thought crossed him (the sinner, not the saint) that these rosy-cheeked damsels in their graceful silver grey frocks and broad straw hats would fill a prettier* corner of a picture than the strapping monks from Fra Angelico's convent. But St. Finn Barr's deep burning eyes and cavernous cheeks instantly rose up to him as a type of Man—great man, and as the type of Woman— waxen, infantile, ineffectual woman, a certain peach-blossom baby face in a framework of pale yellow hair—so fair, but so unapprehensive, so faithless, so inane; and he bit his lip to think he could have been even for a moment shaken in his creed that the poor Miss Nevilles, with all their innocent bloom and finery, were an impertinence in this solemn place. "Selfish? No, I don't think so,*' he said dogmatically. "A noble life does a good deal to ennoble others, however hidden it may be. Do you see the little pool in front of us? That is the source of the River Lee. Do you see what a poor little trickling thing it looks stumbling and coaxing its way among those savage rocks That brook becomes a river, and fertilises many a mile of cornfields, and flows out of Cork Harbor with argosies on its broad bosom. St. Finn Barr's influence was like his own River Lee. It began unknown among the clouds and in the mountains; the t wee mountain streamlet-forced its brave way through' a rocky wilderness as obstinate, as the heart

of this nineteenth centuryj and .from that day to this it blesses the fields and the cities of men on its bright way to the eternal ocean." . y

"It must be very nice to be a great river—l mean a great man, and do—all sorts of fine things," said the youngest Miss Neville, a little absently;~ then with a joyous start, "I see Mabel signalling. She wants us to come to her. It must be luncheon:"

(To be continued.)