Chapter XXI

DEAD MAN'S ISLAND.

There was one person in Ballybay at least who envied the woman that lay forever free from life's fitful fever. The day's demonstration in the town had brought no joy to Mat's heart. He had not yet learned to make any distinction between the agitators who had broken his own life and murdered the hopes of his country, and the very different class of men who had brought new life and hope to the Irish nation. The whole business of the meeting to him, therefore, appeared nothing but gabble, treason, and folly. He spent his hours, after a scornful look or two at the preparations for the speeches of the day, in wandering through the fields and streets which he had known in boyhood, and appeared to have left so very, very long ago. Every sight deepened his depression. He thought of the first day he had spent in the town long ago, when he visited Ballybay for the first time after years of absence. Then he thought that he had exhausted the possibilities of grief over the waste of a nation's life; but he now found that there were deeper depths and larger possibilities of suffering in the Irish tragedy. Famine, plague, a whirlwind, or an earthquake could not, as he thought, have worked mischief more deadly, more appalling, more complete. He saw, with a curious sinking of the heart and an overwhelming sadness, that nearly every well-remembered spot of his boyhood was marked by the ruins of a desolated home. Here was the corner where he used to turn from the one to the two mile round—as two of the walks around Ballybay were called—but where was the house with its crowd of noisy children, which he saw every morning with the same confident familiarity as a well-remembered piece of furniture in his own house? Yes: there was the little road where he remembered to have stood one day so many years ago. It was a bright, beautiful day in summer, the sky was blue, and the roses bloomed; but everything was dark to him, for Betty, his first nurse, the strongest affection of his childhood, had retired to her mother's home the day before. And as he recalled how all the world seemed to be over for him on that day, he felt the full brotherhood of sorrow, and in one moment understood all the tragic significance of the separation which emigration had caused in more than a million Irish homes. The road had changed as though the country had been turned from a civilized to a savage land. The grass was growing thick and rank, the roses had gone, thick weeds choked festering pools, and of the little cottage in which Betty had dwelt there was not even a vestige.

And so, alas, in the town. At its entrance a whole street had disappeared, black and charred the walls stood—silent and deserted. This constant recurrence of the symbols of separation, desertion, silence, death, produced a strange numbness in his mind, and he walked along in a dream that became deeper and deeper. But he saw everything with the obscurity, and still with the strange, piercing look, of the dreamer. Turning from the houses to the people, he saw as it were in a flash the true meaning of that weary look which he had first observed as the prevalent expression of most faces; he loathed and at the same time he understood the prematurely bloated and blotched faces of so many of the young men whom he met everywhere, and read the story of the hopeless struggle against daily deepening gloom which had sought desperate relief in whiskey. He understood the procession of sad, and, as in his exalted mood he thought, spectral, men and women, that flowed in a noiseless stream to the chapel. It was May, "the month of Mary," as it is so touchingly called in Ireland, and in that month there are devotions every night in honor of the Mother of God. It was with difficulty he restrained his tears as there rose from the voices of the congregation the well-known and well-remembered hymn to the Blessed Virgin—the fitting wail of a people who dwell in a land of sorrows.

"Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Our Life, Our Sweetness, and Our Hope, to thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears." How well he recalled the evening long ago, when the hymn first struck him as the wail from the helpless agony of a dying nation.

Then Mat went home, and, as he entered the house, he noticed with the new-born light in his eyes many things that had escaped his attention when he first entered there in the morning. His father, as he answered the door, seemed to him to have aged ten years since he had looked at him in the morning, and he saw with a pang that seemed to squeeze his heart as in a vice that his clothes were shabby, and that even his boots were patched and broken. Then he went upstairs, and, entering the parlor noiselessly, caught sight of his mother. She turned sharply around, and to his horror and surprise he saw a fierce, violent blush overspread her pale cheek. He could not help looking at the table, and there he saw the same dread sight that had met him at so many painful crises in his life, for his mother was examining bank bills and pawn tickets. Then he rushed back in memory to the days of his own childhood, when he had wondered why it was that his mother occasionally wept as she turned over these mysterious slips of blue paper and small pieces of stiff card. The abject failure of his life never appeared to him so clearly as it did at that moment, and the sense of complete disaster was aggravated by the awful feeling that he had made others suffer even more bitterly than himself. And for a moment it seemed, too, as if his mother were resolved that he should taste the full bitterness of the moral, for she looked at him fixedly as the blush died from her cheeks; but her heart was too touched by his look of pain, and in a moment she had kissed him on the cheek, after the frigid and self-restrained fashion of Ballybay.

Mat had a battle with himself as to whether he should visit Mary on this day; but after a while he felt that it would be a sort of savage triumph if he could fill the whole day with all the pain that could be packed within its hours. He had no idea as yet what he was going to do with the morrow, but it would certainly bring some new departure; this day he was, for this reason, the more resolutely ready to abandon to the luxury of woe.

Mary was alone when he visited the house; her husband had left town, for he did not dare, with all his courage, to aggravate the popular hatred by being visible on the day of the demonstration. She came into the room and shook hands with him, to his surprise, without any appearance of embarrassment. He looked at her without a word for a few moments, while she asked a few questions in a perfectly natural tone of voice about the meeting, his imprisonment, etc. As he looked he thought he saw a strange and mournful change in her face. The features seemed to have grown not merely hard, but coarse. He remembered the time when her upper lip had appeared to his eyes short, expressive, elegant; now it seemed to have grown long and vulgar. Her dark eyes were cold and impenetrable.

For a while they talked about indifferent things, but though he had sworn to himself a thousand times that he would never utter a word about her broken troth, his nerves were still too shaken and unsteady, after his sufferings in prison and the wearing experiences through which he had passed, to allow him to maintain complete self-control.

"And so you married Cosgrave," he said, as a beginning.

She looked at him sharply, and then answered, in the same cold and perfectly collected voice, "Yes, I married Cosgrave."

"Are you happy?"

"Yes."

"You never cared for me?" he said with bitterness; and then the venom, which had been choking him from the hour when he heard that his betrothed was gone, overflowed. He went on, in a voice that grew hoarse in its vehemence: "Look! I have been four years in prison; in the company of burglars, pickpockets, murderers; I have been kept in silence and solitude and restraint; and yet in all these four years I never suffered a pang so horrible as when I heard that you had proved untrue."

"No," she answered, with a stillness that sounded strangely after the high-pitched and passionate tones of his voice; "I was not untrue, for I was faithful to my highest duty." Then she paused, and when next she spoke her voice was also passionate; but it was passion that was expressed in low and biting, and not in a loud tone. "You have known the life of a prison: but you have not passed through the hell of Irish poverty."... Then, after a pause, in which she seemed buried in an agonizing retrospect, she said—"I would marry a cripple to help my family."

She had scarcely said these words when her father entered. The father was as much changed in Mat's eyes as the daughter; he could scarcely walk; his feet seemed just able to bear him; and his hand was palsied. He did not at first recognize Mat; and when at last he knew who it was, said in the old voice, the familiar words which Mat so loathed, "Ah! the crachure! Ah! the crachure!"

Mat now had the key to the hideous tragedy which had separated him from the woman he loved, and who loved him. He looked quickly at her; but the light of momentary excitement had died out of the face, and the expression was now perfectly serene. Several reflections passed rapidly through Mat's mind. He saw clearly that the girl had not a particle of self-reproach; not a doubt of the rectitude or even the nobility of her conduct; she had immolated herself with the same inflexible resolve and unquestioning faith as the sublime murderer of Marat. Then passing rapidly in mental review the history of so many self-murdered hearts, he asked which was the more cruel—the Irish or the Indian suttee. Perhaps in that moment Mat gained more knowledge than is given to other men in years of that strangest of all, even feminine, problems—an Irish girl's heart.

For a moment the two were left alone, for the first and only time in all their lives.

"What?" said Mat, in an audible soliloquy, "is Irish life?" And then he answered the question himself as she remained silent. "A tragedy, a squalid tragedy!" But she looked at him cold, irresponsive, defiant, and he rushed away before the old man came back with the whiskey.

The wreck of this girl's nature; her acceptance in full faith of the sordid and terrible gospel of loveless marriage; the omnipotence of even a little money in a land of abject and hopeless and helpless poverty, brought the realities of Irish life with a clearness to his mind more terrible than even uprooted houses and echoless streets.

He accepted the invitation of a friend to take a row up the river, beautiful with its eternal and changeless beauty amid all this wreck of hopes and blasting of lives.

They passed a small island.

"What is that called," asked Mat of the boatman.

"Dead Man's Island."

"What did you say?"

"Dead Man's Island."

"A——h,——Dead—Man's—Island!"

The End.

Going on Foot to Rome.—In these days, when pilgrims go to Rome and Jerusalem by railway and steamer, it is refreshing to hear that the old-fashioned pilgrim may still be found. The last of these appears to be Ignacio Martinez, a native of Valladolid, who has nearly completed his pilgrimage to the Holy Place begun two years ago.