Jim Daly's Repentance.

When the story was told to me, I thought it infinitely sad and pathetic. I wish I could tell it as I heard it, but having scant skill as a narrator, I fear I cannot. I can only set down the facts as they happened, and in my halting words they will read, I fear, but baldly and barely; and if in the reading will be found no trace at all of the tears which awoke in me for this little human tragedy, I am sorry, more sorry than I can say, for my want of skill. Indeed, I would need to write of it with a pen steeped in tears. It is the story of a hard and futile repentance,—futile, in that amends could never be made to those who had been sinned against; but surely, surely not futile, inasmuch as no hour of human pain is ever wasted that is laid before our Lord, but rather is gathered by Him in His pitiful hands, to be given back one day as a harvest of joy.

"Whisht, achora, whisht! sure I know you never meant to hurt me or the child." The woman, childishly young and slight, who spoke was half sitting, half lying in a low rush-bottomed chair, in the poor kitchen of a small Irish farmhouse. Her small, pretty face was marked with premature lines of pain and care, and now it was paler than usual, for across eyebrow and cheek extended a livid, dark bruise, as if from a blow of a heavy fist, and over the pathetic, drooping mouth there was a cruel, jagged cut, this evidently caused by a fall against something with a sharp, projecting point. By her side, in a wattled cradle, lay a puny, small baby, about a year old, with its small blue fingers, claw-like in their leanness, clutched closely, and with such a gray shade over its pinched features that one might have thought it dying. The young husband and father was cast down in an attitude bespeaking utter abasement at his wife's knees, and his face was hidden in her lap; but over the nut-brown hair her thin hands went softly, with caressing tender strokings, and as the great heart-breaking sobs burst from him the tears rolled one after another down her wan little face, while her low, soft voice went on tenderly, "Whisht, alanna machree, whisht! sure it's breakin' my heart ye are! Sure, how can I bear at all, at all, to listen to ye sobbin' like that?"

All the weary months of unkindness and neglect were forgotten, and she only remembered that her Jim was in sore trouble—Jim Daly that courted her, her husband, and her baby's father; not Jim Daly the good fellow at the public-house, always ready to take a treat or stand one; always the first in every scheme of conviviality, drowning heart and mind and conscience in cheap and bad whisky; while at home, on the little hillside farm, crops were rotting, haggard lying empty, land untilled, and poverty and hunger threatening the little home, and day after day the meek, uncomplaining young wife was growing thinner and paler, and the lines deepening in her face where no lines should be. Three years had gone by since the wedding-day that seemed but the gate of a happy future for those two young things who loved each other truly, and almost since that wedding-day Jim Daly had been going steadily downhill. Not that he was vicious at all; he was only young and gay and good-natured, and so sought after for those things, and he had a fine baritone voice that could roll out "Colleen dhas cruitheen na mo" with rare power and tenderness, and when the rare spirits who held their merry-makings in the Widow Doolan's public-house nightly would come seeking to draw him thither with many flattering words, he was not strong enough to resist the temptation; and the young wife—they were the merest boy and girl—was too gentle in her clinging love to stay him. So things had gone steadily from bad to worse, and instead of only the nights, much of the days as well were spent in the gin-shop, and at last the time came when people began to shake their heads over bonny Jim Daly as a confirmed drunkard, and the handsome boyish face was getting a sodden look, and the once frank, clear eyes refused to look at one either frankly or clearly, but shuffled from under a friend's gaze uneasily and painfully. Last night, however, the climax had come when, reeling home after midnight, the tender little wife, with her baby on her breast, had opened the door for him, and had stood in the door-way with some word of pain on her lips, and he feeling his progress barred, but with no sense of what stood there, had struck out fiercely with his great fist, and stricken wife and child to the ground. And Winnie's mouth had come with cruel force against a projecting corner of the dresser, and his hand had marked darkly her soft face, and she and the little son were both bruised and injured by the fall. We have seen how bitter poor Jim's repentance was when he came to himself out of his drunken sleep, and in presence of it his wife, womanlike, forgot everything but that he needed her utmost love and tenderness. But if she was forbearing to him out of her great love, his little brown old mother, who had been sent for hastily to her farm two miles away, spared not at all to give him what she called the rough side of her tongue; and when the doctor came from his home across the blue mountains, and shook his head ominously over the baby, and dressing Winnie's wan face, said that the blow on the forehead by just missing the temple had escaped being a deathblow, the old woman's horror and indignation against her son were great. But the doctor had gone now, with a kindly word of cheer at parting to the poor sinner, and with an expressed hope of pulling the baby through by careful attention and nursing. These it was sure to have, because Jim Daly's mother was the best nurse in all fair Tipperary, and, despite the very rough side to her tongue on occasion, the gentlest and most kind-hearted.

These two were alone now, and the room was quite silent except for the man's occasional great sobs, and the low, sweet, comforting voice of the woman.

Presently the door opened again, this time to admit a priest, a hale, ruddy-faced man of fifty or so, spurred and gaitered as if for riding, who, coming to them quickly, with a keen look of concern and pain in his clear eyes, and drawing a chair closer, laid one large hand on Jim's bent head, while the other went out warmly to take Winnie's little, cold fingers. "My poor, poor children!" he said, and under that true, loving pity Winnie's tears began to flow anew. He was sorely troubled for these; he had baptized them, had admitted both to the Sacraments, had joined their hands in marriage, and he had tried vainly to stop this poor boy's easy descent to evil; and now it had ended so. In the new silence he was praying rapidly and softly, asking his Lord to make this a means of bringing back the strayed lamb to His fold. Then he spoke again:—

"Look up, Jim, my child; you needn't tell me anything about it, I know all. Look up, and tell me you are going to begin a new life; that you are going with me now to the altar of God, to kneel there and ask His forgiveness, and to promise Him that you will never again touch the poison that has so nearly made you the murderer of your wife and child. It is His great mercy that both are spared to you to-day, and the doctor tells me that he hopes to bring the baby through safely, so you must cheer up. And it will be a new life, will it not, my poor boy, from this day, with God's good help."

And so Jim lifted his head, and said brokenly:—

"God bless you, father, for the kindly word. Yis, I'm comin' back to my duty with His help, and I thank Him this day, and His blessed Mother, and blessed St. Patrick, that they held my hand. Oh, sure, father, to think of me layin' a hand on my purty colleen that I love better nor my life, and the little weany child that laughed up in my face with his two blue eyes, and crowed for me to lift him out of his cradle! But with the help of God, I'm going to make up to them for it wan day. But, father, I won't stay here where my family was always respectable and held up their heads, to have it thrown into my face every day that I had nigh murdered my wife and child. Sure I could never rise under such a shame as that. Give me your blessin', father, for me and Winnie has settled it. I'm goin' to Australia to begin a new life, and the mother's snug, and'll keep Winnie and the child till I send for them, or make money enough to come for them."

The priest looked at him gravely, and pondered a few minutes before his reply.

"Well, I don't know but you're right. God enlighten you to do what is for the best. It will be a complete breaking of the old evil ties and fascinations, at all events, and, as you say, the mother'll be glad to have Winnie and her grandson."

And a week later, wife and child being on the high road to convalescence, Jim Daly sailed for Australia.

This was in February, and outside the little golden-thatched farmhouse the birds were calling to one another, wildly, clearly, making believe, the little mad mummers—because spring was riotous in their blood—that each was not quite visible to the other under his canopy of interlaced boughs, bare against the sky, but that rather it was June, and the close, leafy bowers let through only a little blue sky, and a breath of happy wind, and a blent radiance of gold and green, and that so they must perforce signal to each other their whereabouts. Some in the thatch were nest-building, but these little merry drones were swaying to and fro on the bare boughs, delirious with the new delight that had come to them, for spring was here, and there was a subtle fragrance of her breath on the air; and all over the land, for the sound of her feet passing, there was a strange stirring of unborn things somewhere out of sight, and where she had trodden were springing suddenly rings and clusters of faint snowdrops, and tender, flame-colored crocuses, and double garden primroses, and the dear, red-brown velvet of the wall-flowers lovely against the dark leaves.

February again—but now far away from the mountain-side. In the city, where no sweet premonition of spring comes with those first days of her reign, and in the slums that crouch miserably about the stately cathedral of St. Patrick's, huddling squalidly around its feet, while the lovely tower of it soars far away into the blue heart of the sky. It is a blue sky—as blue as it can be over any spreading range of solemn hills, for poor Dublin has few tall factory chimneys to defile it with smoke—and there are little feathery wisps of white cloud on the blue, that lie quite calm and motionless, despite the fact a bright west wind is flying.

It is so warm that the window of one room in one of the most squalid tenement houses of the Coombe is a little open, and the wind steals in softly, and sways to and fro the clean, white curtains; for this room is poor, but not squalid and grimed as the others are. The two small beds are covered with spotlessly white quilts, and the wooden dresser behind the door is spotless, with its few household utensils shining in the leaping firelight; and opposite the window is a small altar, carefully and neatly tended, whereon are two pretty statuettes of the Sacred Heart and our Blessed Lady, and at the foot of these, no gaudy, artificial flowers, but a snowdrop or two and a yellow crocus, laid lovingly in a wineglass of water.

It is all very clean and pure, but, alas! it is a very sad room now, despite all that, because—oh, surely the very saddest thing in all the sad world! there is a little child dying there in its mother's arms. And the mother is poor little Winnie Daly, far from kindly Tipperary and the good priest, and the pleasant neighbors who would have been neighborly to her, and here, in the cruel city, she is watching her one little son die. He is lying on his small bed, with his eyes closed—a little, pretty, fair boy of seven—his breath coming very faintly, and the golden curls, dank with the death-dew, pushed restlessly off his forehead, and the two gentle little hands crossed meekly on each other on his breast. His mother, her face almost as deathly in its pallor and emaciation as his, is kneeling by the bed, her yellow hair wandering over the pillow, her head bent low beside his, and her eyes drinking thirstily every change that passes over the small face, where the gray shadows are growing grayer. They have lain so for a long time, with no movement disturbing the solemn silence, except once, when her hand goes out tenderly to gather into it the little, cold, damp one. But she is not alone in her agony. Two Sisters of Mercy, in their black serge robes, are kneeling each side of the bed, and their sad, clear eyes are very tender and watchful; they will be ready with help the moment it is needed, but now the great beads of the brown rosary at each one's girdle are dropping noiselessly through the white fingers, and their lips are moving in prayer. One is strangely beautiful, with a stately, imperial beauty; but it is etherealized, spiritualized to an unearthly degree, and the flowing serge robes throw out that noble face into fairer relief than could any empress's purple and gold brocade. Both women are wonderfully sweet-faced: these nuns are always so pitying and tender, because their daily and hourly contact with human pain and sin and misery must keep, I think, the warm human sympathies in them alive and throbbing always. Now there is a faint movement over the child's face and limbs, and the tall, beautiful nun rises quickly, because, well-skilled in death-bed lore, she sees that the end cannot be very far off. His eyes open slowly, and wander a little at first; then they come back to rest on his mother's face, and raising one small hand with difficulty he touches her thin cheek caressingly, and then his hand falls again, and he says weakly, "Mammy, lift me up."

"Yes, my lamb," poor Winnie answers brokenly, gathering him up in her arms and laying the little golden head on her breast. He closes his eyes again for a minute, then reopens them, and his gaze wanders around the room as if seeking something, and one of the nuns, understanding, goes gently and brings the few spring flowers to the bedside; this morning tender Sister Columba had carried them to him, knowing what a wonder and happiness flowers always were to the little crippled child,—for Jim's little lad was crippled from that fall in his babyhood. He lies contentedly a moment, and then says weakly, the words dropping with painful pauses between each,—

"Mammy, will there—be green fields in heaven—an' primroses—an' will I be able—to run then? I wouldn't go to Crumlin last summer—with the boys—'kase I was lame—but they got primroses—an' gev me some."

And it is the nun who answers, for the mother's agonized white lips only stir dumbly: "Yes, Jimmy, darling little child, there will be green fields in heaven, and primroses, and you will run and sing; and our dear Lord will be there and His Blessed Mother, and He will smile to see you playing about His feet."

Then she lifts the great crucifix of her rosary, and lays it for a moment against the wan baby lips that smile gently at her, and the white eyelids fall over the pansy eyes, and gradually the soft sleep passes imperceptibly and painlessly into death. And one nun takes him out of his mother's arms, and lays him down softly on the pillows and smooths the little fair limbs, and passes a loving hand over the transparent eyelids; and the other nun gathers poor Winnie into her tender arms, with sweet comforting words that will surely help her by and by, but now are unheeded, because God has mercifully given her a short insensibility. And the nun turns to the other, with a little soft fluttering sigh stirring her wistful mouth, and says, "Poor darling! the separation will not be for long. Our dear Lord will very soon lay her baby once more in her arms."

A fortnight later a bronzed and bearded man landed on the quay of Dublin. It was Jim Daly—a new, grave, strong Jim Daly, coming home now comparatively a wealthy man, with the money earned by steady industry, in the gold-fields. There he had worked steadily for three years, with always the object coloring his life of atoning for the past, and making fair the future to wife and child and mother, and the object had been strong enough to keep him apart from the sin and riotousness and drunkenness of the camp. He would have been persuasive-tongued, indeed, among the wild livers who could have persuaded Jim Daly to join in a carousal. But the worst living among the diggers knew how to come to him for help and advice when they needed it; and many a gentle, kindly act was done by him in his quiet unobtrusive manner, with no consciousness in his own mind that he was doing more than any other man would have done.

He had never written home in all those years, though the thought of those beloved ones was always with him—at getting up and lying down, in his dreams and during the hours of the working day. At first times were hard with him, and for three years it was a dreary struggle for existence; and he could not bear to write while every day his feet were slipping backward. Then came the rush to the gold-fields, and he, coming on a lucky vein, found himself steadily making "a pile," and so determined that when a certain sum was amassed he would turn his steps homeward; and because postal arrangements in those days were so precarious, and the time occupied by the transit of a letter so long, he had then given up the thought of writing at all, watching eagerly the days drifting by that were bringing him each day nearer home. In his wandering life no letter had ever reached him; but he never doubted that they were all quite safe; in that little peaceful hillside village, and cluster of farmsteads, life passed so innocently and safely; the people were poor, but the landlord was lenient, and they managed to pay the rent he asked without the starvation and misery that existed on other estates; and apart from the pain and destitution and sin of the towns, the little colony seemed also to be exempt from their diseases, and the little graveyard was long in filling up; the funerals were seldom, unless when sometimes an old man or woman, come to a patriarchal age, went out gladly to lay their weary old bones under the long grasses and the green sorrel and the daisy stars.

This had all been in his day, and he did not know at all how things had changed. First, after he sailed, things had gone fairly; Winnie had grown strong again, and even when his silence grew obstinate, no shadow of doubt crossed her mind; she was so sure he loved her, and she knew he would come back some day to her. The first cloud on the sky came when the baby developed some disease of the hip, the result of the fall, and it refused to yield to all the doctor's treatment; indeed it became worse with time, and as the years slipped by, the ailing, puny babe grew into a delicate, gentle child, fair and wise and grave, but crippled hopelessly. Then, the fourth year after Jim went, there came a bad season, crops failed, and the cow died; and then, fast on those troubles, the kind old landlord died, and his place was taken by a schoolboy at Eton, and, alas! the agency of his estates placed in the hands of a certain J. P. and D. L., tales of whose evictions on the estates already under his charge had made those simple peasants shiver by their firesides in the winter evenings. Then to this peaceful mountain colony came raising of rents like a thunder-clap, followed soon by writs, and then the Sheriff and the dreadful evicting parties. And one of the first to go was old Mrs. Daly; and when she saw the little brown house whereto her young husband, dead those twenty years, had brought her as a bride, where her children were born, and from whose doors one after the other the little frail things, dead at birth, had been carried, till at last her strong, hearty Jim came—when she saw the golden thatch of it given to the flames, the honest, proud old heart broke, and from the house of a kindly neighbor, where neighbor's hands carried her gently, she also went out, a few days later, to join husband and babes in the churchyard house, whence none should seek to evict them. And the troubles thickened, and famine and fever and death came; and then the good priest died too—of a broken heart, they said. And so the last friend was gone—for the people, with pain and death shadowing every hearthstone, were overwhelmed with their own troubles—and poor Winnie and the little crippled son drifted away to the city.

And at the time all those things were happening, Jim Daly used to stand at the door of his tent in the evening, gazing gravely away westward, his soul's eyes fixed on a fairer vision than the camp, or the gorgeous sunset panorama that passed unheeded before the eyes of his body. He saw the long, green grasses in the pastures at home in Inniskeen. And he saw Winnie—his darling colleen—coming from the little house-door with her wooden pail under her arm for the milking, and she was laughing and singing, and her step was light; and by her side the little son, with his cheeks like apples in August, and his violet eyes dancing with pleasure, and the little feet trotting, hurrying, stumbling, and the fat baby hand clutching at the mother's apron, till, with a sudden, tender laugh she swung him in her strong young arms to a throne on her shoulder, wherefrom he shouted so merrily that Cusha, the great gentle white cow, turned about, and ceased for a moment her placid chewing of the cud, to gaze in some alarm at the approaching despoilers of her milk.

Oh, how bitterly sad that dream seems to me, knowing the bitter reality! That in the squalid slums of the city, the girl-wife was setting her feet for death; that the little child, crippled by the father's drunken blow, had never played or run gladly as other children do—never would do these things unless it might be in the wide, green playing-fields of heaven.

I will tell you how he found his wife. It was evening when he landed at the North Wall, and he found then that till morning there was no train to take him home; and with what fierce impatience he thought of the hours of evening and night to be lived through before he could be on his way to his beloved ones, one can imagine. Then he remembered that by a fellow-digger, who parted with him in London, he had been intrusted with a wreath to lay on a certain grave in Glasnevin; and with a certain sense of relief at the prospect of something to be done, he unpacked the wreath from among his belongings on his arrival at the hotel, and, ordering a meal to be ready by his return, he set out for the cemetery.

It was almost dusk when he reached it, and not far from closing-time, and, the wreath deposited, he was making his way to the gate again. Suddenly his attention was caught by a sound of violent coughing, and turning in the direction from which it proceeded, he saw a woman's figure kneeling by a small, poor grave. For the dusk he could hardly see her face, which also was partly turned away from him; but he could see that her hands were pressed tightly on her breast, as if striving to repress the frightful paroxysms which were shaking her from head to foot.

Jim was tender and pitiful to women always, and now with a thought of Winnie—for the figure was slight and girlish-looking—he went over and laid his hand very gently on the woman's shoulder, saying, "Come, poor soul! God help ye; ye must come now, for it's nigh on closin'-time; and, sure, kneelin' on the wet earth in this raw, foggy evenin' is no place for ye, at all, at all."

The coughing had ceased, and as he spoke she looked up at him wildly. Then she gave a great cry that went straight through the man's heart; she sprang up, and, throwing her thin arms round his neck cried out: "Jim, Jim, me own Jim, come back to me again! Oh, thank God, thank God! Jim, Jim, don't you know your own Winnie?" for he was standing stupefied by the suddenness of it all. Then he gathered the poor, worn body into the happy harborage of his arms, and, for a minute, in the joy of the reunion, he did not even think of the strangeness of the place in which he had found her; and mercifully for those first moments the dusk hid from him how deathly was the face his kisses were falling on. Then, suddenly, with a dreadful thunderous shock, he remembered where they were standing, and I think even before he cried out to know whose was the grave, that in his heart he knew.

I cannot tell you how she broke it to him, or in my feeble words speak of this man's dreadful anguish; only I know that with the white mists enfolding them, and the little child lying at their feet, she told him all.

"An', darlin', I'm goin' too," she said, "an' even for the sake of stayin' wid you I can't stay. I'm so tired-like, an' my heart's so empty for the child; an' you'll say 'God's will be done,' won't ye, achora? And when the hawthorn's out in May, bring some of it here; an', Jim darlin', I'll be lyin' here so happy—him an' me, an' his little curly head on my breast, an' his little arms claspin' my neck."

He said, "God's will be done," mechanically, but I think his heart was broken; no other words came from his lips except over and over again, "Wife and child! wife and child! My little crippled son! my little crippled son!"

Katharine Tynan, in League of the Cross.