Part 20 (1/2)

CHAPTER XV

THE RUINS AT ADARE

WE threw back the shutters, next morning, to a cold and dreary day of misting rain; and after a look at it, Betty elected to spend it before a cosy fire in our great, high-ceilinged room. I have wondered since if our hotel at Limerick was not one of those handsome eighteenth-century mansions, brought by the hard necessities of time to the use of pa.s.sing travellers. It is difficult to explain the gorgeousness of some of its rooms on any other theory. Ours was a very large one, with elaborate ceiling-mouldings and panelled walls and a mantel of carved marble, which Betty inspected longingly. She could see it, I fancy, in her own drawing-room, and perhaps its beauties had something to do with her decision to spend the day in front of it.

There were two or three pictures I wanted to take--one of the old castle and another of the crooked little lane I had wandered through the night before; so I set forth to get them, along busy George Street, with its bright shops, and then across the river to English Town, and so to the castle front. I found it very hard to get anything like a satisfactory picture of it, because the parapet of the new bridge is in the way, and because the angle of my lens was not wide enough to take in both the towers. I did the best I could, took a last look at the treaty stone, but forbore to add to its fame by photographing it; and then traversed again the quaint old streets, with their ramshackle houses, and so came to the little lane.

The town, as I came through it, had been full of market-carts drawn by ragged donkeys and driven by shawled women, and I loitered about for a time, hoping that one of them would come this way and so add a touch of human interest to my picture. A painter was busy giving one of the thatched houses a coat of white-wash; only it wasn't white-wash, properly speaking, because a colouring-matter had been added to it which made it a vivid pink. This pink wash is very popular in Ireland, and, varied sometimes by a yellow wash, adds a high note to nearly every landscape. I talked with the man awhile, and then, the rain coming down more heavily, I slipped into a cobbler's shop for shelter.

It would be difficult to imagine anything more comfortless and primitive than that interior. The shop occupied one of the two rooms of the family home--bare little rooms with dirt floors and tiny windows and no furniture except the most necessary. Somebody has said that there are two pieces of furniture always worthy of veneration--the table and the bed; but I doubt if even that philosopher could have found anything to venerate in the specimens which this house contained. The table was a rude affair of rough boards, with one corner supported by a box in lieu of a leg, and the bed was a mere pile of rags on a sort of low shelf in one corner. What sort of fare was set forth upon that table, and what sort of rest the bed afforded, was not difficult to imagine.

The cobbler was tapping away at a pair of shoes, trying to mend them, and sadly they needed it. Indeed, they were such shoes as no self-respecting tramp would wear in America, and I could not but suspect that the cobbler had fished them from a garbage heap somewhere, and was trying, as a sort of speculation, to make them worth a few pennies. Two or three blocks of turf smoked and flared in a narrow fire-place, and, as always, a black pot hung over them, with some sort of mess bubbling inside it. The cobbler's wife sat on a stool before the fire contemplating the boiling pot gloomily, and a dirty child, of undeterminable s.e.x, played with the sc.r.a.ps of leather on the floor.

I apologised for my intrusion; but the atmosphere of the place was not genial. I fancied they resented my presence,--as I should have done, had our positions been reversed--and so, as soon as the downpour slackened a bit, I pressed a penny into the baby's fist and took myself off. The cobbler, suddenly softened, followed me outside to see me take the picture, and perhaps to be in it; but that picture was a failure, all spotted by the rain.

I intended going to Adare, a little town not far away, said to possess a most remarkable collection of ruins, but it was yet an hour till train time, and I spent it exploring the town back of the railway station. I found it a most picturesque collection of crooked streets and quaint houses, and my advent was frankly treated as a great event by the gossips leaning over their half-doors. How eager they were to talk; I should have liked to stop and talk to all of them; but when I got ready to take a picture of the very crookedest street, their interest in my proceedings was so urgent and humorously-expressed that I lost my head and forgot to pull the slide--a fact I didn't realise until I had bade them good-bye and was walking away; and then I was ashamed to go back and take another.

The train for Adare was waiting beside the platform when I got to the station, and I carefully selected a vacant compartment and clambered aboard. And then a guard came along and laughingly told me I would have to get out, because that car was reserved for a ”Mothers' Union,” which was going to Adare to hold a meeting. So I got out and waited on the platform till the Union arrived--some twenty or thirty comfortable-looking matrons, in high spirits, which the miserable weather did not dampen in the least. Irish meetings are held, I suppose, just the same rain or s.h.i.+ne. It was Simeon Ford who remarked that if the Scotch knew enough to go in when it rained, they would never get any outdoor exercise. This is equally true of the Irish--only in Ireland, one doesn't need to go in, for sure 'tis a soft rain that does n.o.body any harm!

Adare is about ten miles from Limerick and the road thither runs along the valley of the Shannon, with its lush meadows and lovely woods, veiled that day in a pearly mist of rain. As usual, the station is nearly a mile from the town, and as I started to walk it, I saw a tall old man coming along behind me, and I waited for him.

”'Tis a bad day,” I said.

”It is so,” he agreed; ”and it's a long walk I have before me, for my house would be two miles beyont the village.”

”They tell me there are some fine ruins in the village.”

”There are so;” and then he looked at me more attentively. ”You're not a native of these parts?” he asked, at last.

”No,” I said; ”I'm from America.”

”From America!” he echoed, incredulously.

”Yes; from the state called Ohio.”

”Think of that, now!” he cried. ”And I can understand every word you say! Why, glory be to G.o.d, you speak fairer than the old woman up here along who has never crossed the road!”

I should have liked to hear more about this remarkable old woman, but he gave me no chance with his many questions about America. He had a son in New Jersey, he said, and the boy was doing well, and sent a bit of money home at Christmas and such like. It was a wonderful place, America. Ah, if he were not so old--

So, talking in this manner, we came to the town, and he pointed out the inn to me, opposite a picturesque string of thatched cottages nestling among the trees, and bade me G.o.dspeed and went on his way; and I suppose that night before the fire he told of his meeting with the wanderer from far-off America, and how well he could understand his language!

I went on to the inn, which was a surprisingly pretty one, new and clean and well-kept; and I took off my wet coat and sat down in the cosy bar before a lunch which tasted as good as any I have ever eaten; and then I lit my pipe and drew up before the fire and asked the pretty maid who served me how to get to the ruins. They were all, it seemed, inside the demesne of the Earl of Dunraven, the entrance to which was just across the road, and it was necessary that I should have an entrance ticket, which the maid hastened to get for me from the proprietor of the inn.

When she gave it to me, I asked the price, and was told there was no charge, as the Earl of Dunraven was always glad for people to come to see the ruins.

All honour to him for that!

So it was with a very pleasant feeling about the heart that I presently crossed the road and surrendered a portion of my ticket to a black-eyed girl at the gate-house, and she told me how to go to get to the ruins, and hoped I wouldn't be soaked through. But I didn't mind the rain; it only added to the beauty of the park. Besides, I was thinking of ”Silken Thomas.”

Have you ever heard of ”Silken Thomas,” tenth Earl of Kildare? Probably not; yet he was a great man in his day--not so great as his grandfather, that greatest of the Geraldines, whose trial for treason before Henry VII is a thing Irishmen love to remember.