by George Moore
What happened to them, your honour? You may guess that when I tell you that in the morning they were waked by the little boy crying to them, saying: look now at the trouble you’ve shoved me into, for yonder is our father cutting a stick in the hazel copse to beat me if I refuse to tell him the truth. But you’ll be helping me out of this trouble, for the one that gets the pleasure should get the pain. Before Curithir could answer him, the door was opened by the hermit, who began to read their faces, and being almost sure he had read them truly, he turned to the boy, saying: you see this stick? This stick is for you, and not a whole inch of hide will I leave on your back unless you tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, for I think there was bad work done in this place last night. Cummins was, as I’ve said, seventy at this time, and the boy could have cast him to the ground, but there isn’t a boy in Ireland, God be praised, that would raise his hand to a priest, for one is never sure that he mayn’t have the sacred elements about him somewhere. It matters little to him if he tells you the truth, Curithir said, for if he opens his lips to tell lie or truth I will have his life. At this the boy began to weep, and Cummins answered that he should not have put this great trial upon them, but what has happened cannot be undone, he said, and the fault is with the man; so come with me, Curithir, and I’ll put you on the shore with a letter in your pocket that you’ll take to the holy father in Rome; he may be able to shrive you for the sins you’ve committed last night, which is more than I can do for you. Go to him at once with all speed, make your way to Rome lest God take you in your sin and plunge you into hell for the entertainment of the big devils that dwell below. And while you’re walking to him I will be praying for your soul and for the soul of the poor woman beside us the way she won’t be lost for ever if she repents and if you repent of your deceiving ways. Sorra deceiving, said Curithir, and you might have known what would happen. We won’t argue that, said Cummins: get you into the boat. And you, he said to the altar-boy, stay here with the woman until I return. Get you into the boat, he said again, for Curithir was loth to leave Liadin. But he dare not disobey the hermit, and Cummins laying himself to the oars like a young man, God putting a strength into him that wasn’t natural, so that in a few minutes the keel was grating on the sand beyond. Out of my boat with you now, and do penance for your sins and pray that the holy father may shrive you, but never let me see your face on this island again, not till your beard be whitened and all the wickedness gone out of your heart.
Cummins took up his oars again and in a few minutes he was back to the island, and what do you think was the first thing he saw? Liadin lying in the lake, dead and drowned, where she had fallen from a rock, she having climbed it to try to see the last of Curithir. This is a bad day for all of us, the hermit murmured to himself, and taking the boy by the scruff of the neck he beat him severely, saying: take this and take that, for it’s through your fault the woman is dead and drowned and maybe in hell at this moment, unless the great God in his mercy knows that she repented before she tumbled into the water. Now be off with you, you limb, he said, and all the rest of the day he was busy digging a grave.
And it is in that grave that Liadin is lying to this day, with the rowan-tree growing over her, for all that man could say to the differ. And for the hind end of the story I’ve to tell that long after Cummins was dead Curithir came back, old and broken with travelling the world. As he came through the great woods to the lake the people didn’t know him, and nobody in all Ireland knew him to be the great poet Curithir who had gained such glory for himself in the courts of kings. He was white and ragged, for age and wolves had hunted him, and he had barely escaped with his life, and would not have done that if maybe the God above him had not wished him to stand at Liadin’s grave. Is there no hermit at all on the island? he asked. Not a one at all, they told him; that island is as empty as a tin can with a hole in it, but the hermit’s boat is beyond still. He got into the boat and laid to the oars, and he found the grave after much searching for it, and when he did find it he lay down beside it, saying: well, I’ve come to my meering. There he breathed his soul away, and the hermit, looking down, prayed such a prayer for him that God could not choose but hear. As he did not come back the villagers sought him out on the island, and they dug a grave and stretched him in it, and not many years afterwards the rowan-trees planted above the grave reached across one to the other, their branches getting together and intertwining as a token of the great love that was lying under their berries, that were red as Liadin’s lips. Her lips were like that, as red as the rowan berry. That is the end of my story, maybe it wasn’t too long, your honour. Your story, Alec, I said, is to my mind a beautiful relic of the Middle Ages, as lovely as the Tara Brooch, and like the brooch it brings back Ireland to me, the vanished Ireland, the Ireland of my dreams. How long ago do you think it was that Liadin met Curithir by this stone? I’ve often asked myself that question, your honour, but from what I remember, and from what my father used to be saying that his father said, it was long ago indeed. It might be a thousand years ago.
And then in the pleasant, resinous odour of the larch-trees, that a random breeze flying in and out of the wood carried towards us, and in the hum of the bees making for their hive, and in a consciousness of the beauty of the long grass waving in the wind, Trusselby and I talked of ancient Ireland as well as we knew how, myself prompting him with memories of what I had picked up in conversation with Kuno Meyer and Trusselby falling back on what he heard from his father and his grandfather of what Ireland had been.
A country of great loneliness; of monks who had monasteries everywhere, and who sat in their cells beautifying the gospels with ornamented scrolls, filling them in with strange, wonderfully drawn patterns, garlands of leaves and wreaths, with nooks and corners for the birds and the squirrels. That part of the story, Trusselby, in which the hermit tells Liadin and Curithir how he will sit in his cell continuing the illumination of the gospels, as patiently as his cat waits for the mice, is delightful. May God rest his soul, father used to tell it the same as I am after telling it to you, and he got it from his father, Trusselby answered.
It may have been the perfumed shade of the larches and the murmur of the long grass that won my thoughts out of the present till I looked into the Ireland that was before the Danes came — a quiet, sunny land, with trees emerging like vapours, with long herds wandering through the haze, watched over by herdsmen. In that land all was a dream for beast and herdsmen and for the monks who in their cells patiently illuminated the gospels with strange device while their cats waited patiently for the mice behind the wainscoting. A brooding, sacred peace reigned over the land that I looked into; and I understood that in those halcyon days Ireland lay immersed in a religious dream that the world never knew before or since, without stirs or sign of danger except when a galley’s prow showed in the estuaries. And for a long time the Danish pirates ravaged only the coast-lands. A land of forests and of marshes with green uplands, I said aloud, and Trusselby, as though he had been dreaming my dream, answered: one half of this land must have been no better than a big bog, and worse than a bog, sir, a marsh full of reeds and bitterns with ducks by the million. And snipe, I said. And we fell to talking of the great snipe-shooting in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Trusselby could tell of many great shots. The best was a Mr. Keyes, the same gentleman that had two thoroughbred stallions snorting round the country in your own time, your honour. It was a bad day he didn’t bring home his forty or fifty brace. My father, Trusselby, was a good snipe shot, and he told me that many a time he brought home fifty-nine and a half birds, but he could never get the thirty brace. I wouldn’t be saying a word against your own father, God be his rest, Mr. Moore, but I’ve heard from my father that Mr. Keyes often brought back fifty. There isn’t much left of our forests now, and one time they covering all the Burran mountains. It was Cromwell, bad cess to him, that downed the timber, for it gave shelter to the ones that would be rising and striking a bl
ow for Ireland. I don’t know, Trusselby, when the last wolf was shot in Ireland; somewhere in the seventeenth century, wasn’t it? Aye, the wolves went off when the trees went off. In those days Ireland was the land of trees, I’ve heard my father say, and his father before him told the same story. There was many a strip left here and there of the old forests in his time, but there’s not much left of them now.
We fell to talking of the wolves, and how hard it must have been for the ancient folk to protect their flocks. Sure they hadn’t that trouble: hadn’t we the finest wolfhounds in the world, your honour, and plenty of them too?
The Irish wolf-hound is a subject on which we were both eager to talk, myself having heard that the last of the true breed were seen at Westport House about 1825 or 1830. After that the breed was allowed to die out, and what they have been doing since to revive it is but a mockery. Great Danes crossed with Russian deerhounds; there might be a touch of the mastiff too, and very like in appearance to the old wolf-hound they be, your honour, but I wouldn’t trust them to go against a wolf — no, nor against a good strong fox. How did we get the wolf-hound? Did we breed him ourselves? We did that, but I’m not saying that we didn’t help the strain by blood from beyond in the Pyrenees, where wolves are as plentiful as nuts. For another thing, my father used to be saying that the monks that lived at Bregen were fair destroyed by the wolves. I mean their flocks, your honour, not themselves, for the wolf is a cowardly creature, and unless he’s got the other ones with him he wouldn’t dare look at a man. It’s the innocent sheep them fellows do be digging their jaws into, and it isn’t until the whole flock be torn and mangled that they get off with themselves into the forests, and up and away among the hills that you see around us now. The same hills used to be all scrub and forest, and there’s plenty of hiding in the holes of the rocks for them fellows, and they with tails like a pot-hook, and with pointy ears and long, snouty chaps to their jaws, and up and down them jaws teeth, be God, that would give you the jigs to look at, all sizes and sorts, terrible once they get inside the flesh, like Micky Murphy’s big cross-saw when himself and his brother do be pulling at it, Micky in the pit and Pat above on the balk: only the saw cuts cleaner; the wolves snap and snatch away, that’s the way they fight, snatching and tearing until the bit comes out, not like the dog, that holds on to his bite. But the dog is quick to learn, and what made the Irish hound a great fighter was the same snapping trick that he got off the wolves.
You were telling, Alec, about some hounds that came over from the Pyrenees. I’ll be at the story presently, your honour, or maybe it would do me as well to go on where I left off. And where was that? I disremember it now. You were telling about the destruction of the flocks belonging to the monks that lived at Bregen.
I was, indeed, your honour; they were terribly cut about by the wolves, and the monks lost their best hounds in the fighting that was always going on. There was only an old bitch left, and they without a dog to line her on account of a falling out they had with the king about a piece of land. While they were telling each other about their losses, and planning snares and pitfalls, what do you think but there came into the Abbot’s mind the thought of a young Irish monk who had left Ireland a while before that to teach Latin and Greek to the folk beyond there in the Pyrenees. I wouldn’t give a rotten nut, says he, for the snares they do be setting. There isn’t a wolf will go into them, except an odd one, and it blind with old age or hard of the hearing, or without a smell in his nose. Ear better it would be to send a letter to the Pyrenees asking the Abbot beyond if he has a few hounds he could be sparing, or a pup maybe. He won’t like to part with his dogs, though he had them from us a matter of ten years ago, so it’s only fair if he gives us a few of the pups to pull us through. He did that. The French Abbot told them in a letter that he was sending three dogs to Bregen bred from the stock that had come to them from Ireland; each of the three, he said, was a match for a wolf. Mind you, it’s a good dog will face the wolf and the pair of them all alone.
The monk he was sending with the dogs was Marban, a young fellow of the Gael that had gone to the Pyrenees with his share of the Latin and the Greek the way he’d be teaching. The Abbot had to send him, for nobody could travel easy in Ireland, and they not knowing the language of the country. How long would your honour say it would be from this place to the Pyrenees? About a thousand miles, Alec, I’m thinking. And a thousand miles, with three dogs under your hand, Alec answered, would be a journey of about a couple of months if he came through the Frenchmen’s country. Which is not at all likely, I rapped out. It’s more likely he took ship at Bordeaux and landed at Waterford. Waterford itself is a good step from the county of Mayo. Alec interjected: it is; it’s a long, weary walk, and it’s full of dangers. A man might easily lose himself in the forests at that time. My grandfather was never tired of talking of Ireland in the days gone by, and of the forests that were everywhere except where there were bogs. Some of the hills were free from trees, of course, or the people wouldn’t have been able to live at all, for they hadn’t a thing barring the sheep and the cattle, just like now.
Perhaps there’s no part of the world that is changed less than Ireland herself. In those times there were four great roads, one running from north to south, and another going from east to west, and the people were divided between the ones that lived in the monasteries and the ones that drove the cattle from this pasture to the next one. Over the lot of them were a few warriors who rode in chariots. The houses were made of wood, and that’s why there’s none of them left now. They were all burned or battered down by the foreigner. Has your honour ever been to the Arran Islands to see the big fort? And, mind you, that was built before Patrick came, when the men were pagans.
Well, putting it all together, it was no easy time young Marban had, doing his twenty miles a day, for if he did less than that the wolves wouldn’t have left a sheep in the county of Mayo. So he struggled on, thinking about the monks that were losing their flocks, asking his way from this monastery to the next one, and sometimes holloing for an advice to the wild lads on the hills, and getting, perhaps, only half an answer from them. Many’s the time he must have lost himself between forest and bog, and it was only the best of good luck or the providence of God itself that got him across the Shannon. After crossing it he had to ask his way through the county of Roscommon, a fine big county, and Mayo is a fine big county too, and Bregen wasn’t many miles from where we are now sitting. He must have had a hard time, eating berries out of his hand, and the dogs themselves picking up whatever was going in the way of a stray rabbit or a hare, and in that way Marban and his dogs came out at day-fall from a great wood in West Mayo. In front of him there was a marsh covered with wild-fowl, and more coming in at every minute: every kind of duck; gulls would be there too. Faith, they’re in it still and plenty of them, but there was more then, and herons and bitterns were as common as children are now. ’Tis a lonesome place a marsh at the close of day, and the boom of the bittern would put a traveller’s heart crossways, and he listening to it in the dusk. I believe there were bears, too, in Ireland; and ’tis said the hug of a bear makes pudding of a man’s insides. Bears are not partial to flesh, they like berries better, and that’s a queer thing for such a bulky lad, but there isn’t an animal that came out of Noah’s Ark that dislikes being interfered with or meddled with more than a bear does. At the time of Marban’s arrival, I’ll be bound the deer were skipping down to the rivers to drink, but I needn’t be wasting my breath on these things, it’s only that I’d like you to hear the story the way I heard it.
Well, as Marban was going back to the wood, wishing to tie up his dogs to a tree and make himself as easy as he could up in the fork of a bough, he saw a light, and after following it for some time he said: maybe that isn’t a natural light at all. Maybe that is a will-o’-the-wisp that will lead me to my destruction. He was wrong there; it wasn’t to his destruction the will-o’-the wisp led him, but to his safety, if you can call it that when you’ve hear
d the story out, but God knows what might have happened to him if he had done the night in that wood.
When he was going back into it he caught sight of another light, and he said: that looks a better one, that’s a fine steady light; that’s the light from a window, and wherever there’s a window there’s a door, and wherever there’s a door there’s a roof, and wherever there’s a roof there’s a bed; and for this night any sort of bed will do me. But the poor man didn’t know the sort of bed he was going to, he was that full of hope, and every step he took he said to himself: no doubt at all but it’s a house I’m walking to this minute, or it’s a monastery, or maybe it’s the court of a king. He tried to remember who were the kings in Mayo, but he had been so long out of the country that he couldn’t think of their names. Well, said he, small the thing whether I sleep in a castle or a nunnery, or the court of a king this night, if only I can put a bit into my own mouth and the mouths of the pups here; and if I get a pillow underneath my head I’ll be well contented. I need no more and ask no more. God be praised, I’m saved; I am so, glory be to God, he cried, and he hit a thump on the gate.
