The road was bare of the
shelter of hedge or ditch, bush or tree.
It was late; he was coming home
alone, his police escort for some reason were not with him that
particular night. Lord Mountmorris was murdered, and some one has a mark
on his hand that all the water of the Lough will not wash off.
We drove along the road, a bleak and bare road, with a hill on one side
of it and a steep slope down on the other, until we came to a small
plantation, a lodge gate, and drove up an avenue with small plantations
of young trees here and there, some grass lands, a few beasts grazing
about, some signs of where flower beds and flower borders had been
better cared for once on a time than now, and came to a comfortable,
roomy square house finished in plaster. This was castle something, the
residence of the late Lord Mountmorris. With a blessing, content and
three hundred a year one could fancy that person sung of by Moore, "With
the heart that is humble," being able to make out life nicely here. When
a man has a title to his name with all the requirements which it implies
and demands, one could imagine a constant and wearing struggle going on.
I have earnestly and constantly sought to find a reason that could
possibly irritate an ignorant and exasperated peasant to the point of
taking the life of this man, I have found none. He was unhappily
addicted to drink, it is said, but he must have had a large majority of
the inhabitants of Ireland of all creeds and classes on the same side
with him in this, to judge by the number of houses licensed to sell
liquor to be drunk on the premises which are required for the drouthy
part of the population. He is accused of having warped justice to favor
his friends in his capacity of magistrate. I have heard that accusation
brought against other magistrates again and again, who were not
molested. He is said to have boasted when _fou_ that he was a spy
for the castle authorities, and could have any of them he chose to point
at taken up. This was mere bluster, I suppose. There does seem no reason
why the poor man should be cut off in the midst of his days by a guilty
hand, for there is no record of any tangible injury which he had done to
any man. Here on the spot where he fell, among the common people, I did
not hear anything that seemed to give a reason for any hatred that would
lead to murder being entertained against the deceased nobleman.
We turned away from the house and grounds, and I felt sad enough when we
passed the place where he lay in the dark night amid bare, barren
loneliness until the alarm was given. Heath in full blossom of purple
clung to the ditch back, foxglove in stately array nodded at us from
above, flowers that creep and flowers that wave were springing
everywhere, the rains of heaven had washed off the red stain, but I
could not shut my eyes to it. I saw the human body, dignified into
something awful by the presence of death, lying there waiting for the
hands that were to take it up reverently, and bear it away for
investigation and burial. I saw the dyed stones of the road that will
never lose the mark of guilt that colored them with the blood shed
there.
Lord Mountmorris' residence was a nice, roomy house. All these houses
are called castles, and castles they are compared with the cabins. The
land around it did not seem very good. There was something pathetic in
the evident attempt to keep up lordly state on a poor income and off
poor soil. Happy America, whose people are not compelled by the
inexorable logic of circumstances to be lords, but can be plain farmers.
It is really a hard thing to be a lord sometimes, when a place is sunk
with mortgages, and burdened with legacies and annuities, and no means
of redemption but the rents and these stopped.
We drove back the way we came. Ascending the hill we met a little beast,
so small, so black and shaggy, that I thought at first it was one of our
Canadian black bears. I asked what it was, and - laughing at my
ignorance - the man told me that it was a Highland Kyloe, one of the
famous black cattle that I have heard so much about, but had never seen
a specimen of the breed before. It would have been big for a bear, but
certainly was small for a cow, while a goat has the appearance of giving
as much milk.
XLIII.
CONG
The land as we neared Cong, between Cong and Lough Mask, as seen from
the rather roundabout road we travelled, has a very peculiar appearance.
It is stony with a very different stoniness from any part of Ireland
which I had seen before. In some places the earth, as far as the eye
could reach, was literally crusted with stone. The stone was worn into
rounded tops and channelled hollows, as if it was once molten, like red
hot potash, and every bubbling swell had become suddenly petrified, or
as if it had once been an uptilted hillside over which a rapid river had
fallen, wearing little hollows, and sparing rounded heights as it dashed
over in boiling fury for ages, accomplishing which result it deserted
this channel; and through some internal movement the bed of the torrent
was levelled into a plain. Some agency or other has worn this solid rock
into a truffle pattern that is very wonderful to see. Over all this part
the stony formation recurs again and again. A person remarked to me that
it looked like the bottom of a former ocean.
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