Penelope's Irish Experiences. Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith
off, and departed on the most decrepit sidecar that ever rolled on two wheels, being wished a safe journey by a slatternly maid who stood in the doorway, by the wide Mrs. Duddy herself, who realised in her capacious person the picturesque Irish phrase, ‘the full-of-the-door of a woman,’ and by our friend the head waiter, who leaned against Mrs. Duddy’s ancestral pillars in such a way that the morning sun shone full upon his costume and revealed its weaknesses to our reluctant gaze.
The driver said it was eleven miles to Cappoquin, the guide-book fourteen, but this difference of opinion, we find, is only the difference between Irish and English miles, for which our driver had an unspeakable contempt, as of a vastly inferior quality. He had, on the other hand, a great respect for Mrs. Duddy and her comfortable, cleanly, and courteous establishment (as per advertisement), and the warmest admiration for the village in which she had appropriately located herself, a village which he alluded to as ‘wan of the natest towns in the ring of Ireland, for if ye made a slip in the street of it, be the help of God ye were always sure to fall into a public-house!’
“We had better not tell the full particulars of this journey to Salemina,” said Francesca prudently, as we rumbled along; “though, oddly enough, if you remember, whenever any one speaks disparagingly of Ireland, she always takes up cudgels in its behalf.”
“Francesca, now that you are within three or four months of being married, can you manage to keep a secret?”
“Yes,” she whispered eagerly, squeezing my hand and inclining her shoulder cosily to mine. “Yes, oh yes, and how it would raise my spirits after a sleepless night!”
“When Salemina was eighteen she had a romance, and the hero of it was the son of an Irish gentleman, an M.P., who was travelling in America, or living there for a few years,—I can’t remember which. He was nothing more than a lad, less than twenty-one years old, but he was very much in love with Salemina. How far her feelings were involved I never knew, but she felt that she could not promise to marry him. Her mother was an invalid, and her father a delightful, scholarly, autocratic, selfish old gentleman, who ruled his household with a rod of iron. Salemina coddled and nursed them both during all her young life; indeed, little as she realised it, she never had any separate existence or individuality until they both died, when she was thirty-one or two years old.”
“And what became of the young Irishman? Was he faithful to his first love, or did he marry?”
“He married, many years afterward, and that was the time I first heard the story. His marriage took place in Dublin, on the very day, I believe, that Salemina’s father was buried; for Fate has the most relentless way of arranging these coincidences. I don’t remember his name, and I don’t know where he lives or what has become of him. I imagine the romance has been dead and buried in rose-leaves for years; Salemina never has spoken of it to me, but it would account for her sentimental championship of Ireland.”
Chapter IX. The light of other days
‘Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me.’
If you want to fall head over ears in love with Ireland at the very first sight of her charms, take, as we did, the steamer from Cappoquin to Youghal, and float down the vale of the Blackwater—
‘Swift Awniduff, which of the Englishman
Is cal’ de Blackwater.’
The shores of this Irish Rhine are so lovely that the sail on a sunny day is one of unequalled charm. Behind us the mountains ranged themselves in a mysterious melancholy background; ahead the river wended its way southward in and out, in and out, through rocky cliffs and well-wooded shores.
The first tributary stream that we met was the little Finisk, on the higher banks of which is Affane House. The lands of Affane are said to have been given by one of the FitzGeralds to Sir Walter Raleigh for a breakfast, a very high price to pay for bacon and eggs, and it was here that he planted the first cherry-tree in Ireland, bringing it from the Canary Islands to the Isle of Weeping.
Looking back just below here, we saw the tower and cloisters of Mount Melleray, the Trappist monastery. Very beautiful and very lonely looked ‘the little town of God,’ in the shadows of the gloomy hills. We wished we had known the day before how near we were to it, for we could have claimed a night’s lodging at the ladies’ guest-house, where all creeds, classes, and nationalities are received with a cead-mile-failte,3 and where any offering for food or shelter is given only at the visitors pleasure. The Celtic proverb, ‘Melodious is the closed mouth,’ might be written over the cloisters; for it is a village of silence, and only the monks who teach in the schools or who attend visitors are absolved from the vow.
Next came Dromana Castle, where the extraordinary old Countess of Desmond was born,—the wonderful old lady whose supposed one hundred and forty years so astonished posterity. She must have married Thomas, twelfth Earl of Desmond, after 1505, as his first wife is known to have been alive in that year. Raleigh saw her in 1589, and she died in 1604: so it would seem that she must have been at least one hundred and ten or one hundred and twelve when she met her untimely death,—a death brought about entirely by her own youthful impetuosity and her fondness for athletic sports. Robert Sydney, second Earl of Leicester, makes the following reference to her in his Table-Book, written when he was ambassador at Paris, about 1640:—
‘The old Countess of Desmond was a marryed woman in Edward IV. time in England, and lived till towards the end of Queen Elizabeth, so she must needes be neare one hundred and forty yeares old. She had a new sett of teeth not long afore her death, and might have lived much longer had she not mett with a kinde of violent death; for she would needes climbe a nut-tree to gather nuts; so falling down she hurt her thigh, which brought a fever, and that fever brought death. This my cousin Walter Fitzwilliam told me.’
It is true that the aforesaid cousin Walter may have been a better raconteur than historian; still, local tradition vigorously opposes any lessening of the number of the countess’s years, pinning its faith rather on one Hayman, who says that she presented herself at the English court at the age of one hundred and forty years, to petition for her jointure, which she lost by the attainder of the last earl; and it also prefers to have her fall from the historic cherry-tree that Sir Walter planted, rather than from a casual nut-tree.
Down the lovely river we went, lazily lying back in the sun, almost the only passengers on the little craft, as it was still far too early for tourists; down past Villierstown, Cooneen Ferry, Strancally Castle, with its ‘Murdering Hole’ made famous by the Lords of Desmond, through the Broads of Clashmore; then past Temple Michael, an old castle of the Geraldines, which Cromwell battered down for ‘dire insolence,’ until we steamed slowly into the harbour of Youghal—and, to use our driver’s expression, there is no more ‘onderhanded manin’’ in Youghal than the town of the Yew Wood, which is much prettier to the eye and sweeter to the ear.
Here we found a letter from Salemina, and expended another eighteenpence in telegraphing to her:—
PEABODY, Coolkilla House, near Mardyke Walk, Cork.
We are under Yew Tree at Myrtle Grove where Raleigh and Spenser smoked, read manuscript Faerie Queene, and planted first potato. Delighted Benella better. Join you to-morrow. Don’t encourage archaeologist.
We had a charming hour at Myrtle Grove House, an unpretentious, gabled dwelling, for a time the residence of the ill-fated soldier captain, Sir Walter Raleigh. You remember, perhaps, that he was mayor of Youghal in 1588. After the suppression of the Geraldine rebellion, the vast estates of the Earl of Desmond and those of one hundred and forty of the leading gentlemen of Munster, his adherents, were confiscated, and proclamation was made all through England inviting gentlemen to ‘undertake’ the plantation of this rich territory. Estates were offered at two or three pence an acre, and no rent was to be paid for the first five years. Many of these great ‘undertakers,’ as they were called, were English
A hundred thousand welcomes.