Martin Ross

“ Martin had a very special gift of encouraging people to talk to her. There was something magnetic about her, some power of sympathy and extraction combined. Together with this she had a singular gift of toleration for stupid people, even of enjoyment of stupidity, if sincerity, and a certain virtuous anxiety, accompanied it. She was wont to declare that the personal offices of a good and dull person were pleasing to her. The fumbling efforts, the laboured breathing of one endeavouring—let us say—to untie her veil; a man, for choice, frightened, but thoroughly well-intentioned and humble. ”

“ Lambert can’t keep up. That’s a dreadfully wild horse he’s riding.”
“Are we?” said Christopher vaguely. “Shall we pull up? Here, woa, you brute!” He pulled the carriage-horse into a walk, and looked at Francie with a laugh. “I’m beginning to hope you’re as bad a rider as I am,” he said sympathetically. “Let me hold your reins, while you’re pinning up that plait.”
“Oh, botheration take it! Is my hair down again? It always comes down if I trot fast,” bewailed Francie, putting up her hands to her dishevelled hair, that sparkled like gold in the sun. ”

“ In March, 1844, they were married in Dublin, and a month later their carriage was met a couple of miles from Ross by the tenants, and was drawn home by them, while the bonfires blazed at the gates and at the hall door, and the bagpipes squealed their welcome. Bringing with her a great deal of energy, both social and literary, a kicking pony, and a profound ignorance of household affairs, my mother entered upon her long career at Ross. That her sister-in-law, Marian Martin, held the reins of office was fortunate for all that composite establishment ”

“ Sure he’s asking for him the whole day. He’s very unaisy in his mind. He’s roaming, roaming through the house all the day, and he’s give ordhers to have his dinner sent to his own room. He wasn’t best pleased when he found Masther Willy had locked up the room that’s next your own, and twice, an’ I coming upstairs, I seen him sthriving to open the door.”
“Master Willy did that to prevent Moll{203} getting in there,” I explained. “I will tell the master so myself.”
“Don’t say a word to him, miss, good nor bad,” said Roche, shaking his knotted forefinger at me expressively. ”

“ Ross could not understand why that notion came as a shock to him. Naturally, the man under the sofa had a name; every one had. Yet, directly he thought of that figure as “Martin Ives,” instead of “the man,” the whole affair grew ten times more tragic and horrible—and ten times more dangerous.
“A man” might disappear, but not Martin Ives. Martin Ives was real, he had friends; he must have lived somewhere. He would be sought for—and found.
“This Donnelly—” thought Ross. “He’s got this far already. And he’ll keep on.” ”

“ Martin had a very special gift for friendship, both with women and with men. Her sympathies were wide, and her insight into character and motive enabled her to meet each of her many friends on their own ground, and to enter deeply and truly into their lives, and give them a share in hers. ”

“ I can see Rickeen on a fair May morning pulling off his black slouch hat to Martin and me, with the shine of the sun on his high forehead, on which rings of sparse black hair straggled, his dark eyes beaming, and I can hear his soft-tuned Galway voice saying:
“Well, glory be to God, Miss Wilet, this is a grand day! And great growth entirely in the weather! Faith, I didn’t think to see it so good at all to-day, there was two o’ thim planets close afther the moon last night!” ”

“ Sarsfield. I told you you were good at games as soon as I looked at your hand.”
“Why, have you had your fortune told, Willy?” I said.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “Are you quite sure you’ve told me everything?”—turning from me to Miss Watson.
“Oh dear, no! not more than half. I shall think about your hand, and tell you the rest another day,” said Miss Watson, with great suavity. “Irishmen’s hands{228} are so puzzling—so contradictory, you know; but I suppose all Irish people are that, aren’t they?”
“Never mind, Mr. Barrett,” I heard Connie saying; “we will play them again some other time. ”

“ Lady Susan called out, “I want you to talk sense to your friend, Danny-O. The old pig refuses to draw that gorse above the railway—you know,” turning to Glasgow, “that place where the cutting is; he said it was an unlucky place, and that the fox there was a witch! Such rot!”
Slaney did not answer at once. There are some people for whom the limits of the possible seem to be set farther out than for the rest of the world. They see and hear things inexplicable; for them the darkened glass is less dark, to them all things are possible. ”

“ Why, it’s as bad as the Land League, not being allowed to draw one of the nicest coverts in the country,{55} for rubbish of that kind. Hughie, if you don’t kill that old white fox I shall think you’re in a funk too. You Irish people are all the same. I don’t care, Mr. Glasgow and I will take the hounds to Cahirdreen, and we’ll have that white brush! I want it awfully to show to the people at home, and tell them I got a witch’s brush!”
“You could say it was an evolution of the broomstick,” said Slaney. ”

“ Rooks in the tall elms behind the stables, feeding their young ones, made a pleasing undercurrent of accompaniment to the Puppet’s soprano solo. There was a bloom of green over the larches; scraps of silver glinting between the tree stems represented the lake. The languor of spring was in the air, and it seemed exercise enough to watch Rickeen’s wondrous deftness in marking, cutting, and lifting the scraws on the blade of his narrow spade, and tossing them accurately on to their appointed spot on the rising wall.
Martin had a Maltese charm against the “Mal Occhio” ”

“ What on earth do you do with yourself at Letter Kyle, Slaney?”
“Do you grow a beard, Slaney?” shouted Lady Susan, with her mouth full of biscuit. “If I’m bored over there I shall just dye my hair again. How do you like it now, Bunny? I got it done in Paris on our way through. I think it might be a bit redder.”
“Why, it’s as red as a fox now,” said Major Bunbury, regarding it critically.
“Talking of foxes,” put in Slaney, endeavouring to be genial, “they all expect Hugh to start the hounds again when he comes over. That will give you something to do, Hugh.” ”

“ It is long now since I have been in Galway, and I know that many of the poor people with whom Martin and I used to talk, endlessly, and always, for us, interestingly, have gone over to that other world where she now is. Of them all, I think the one most beloved by her was the little man of whom she discoursed in one of the chapters of “Some Irish Yesterdays” as “Rickeen.” This was not his name, but it will serve. Rickeen was of the inmost and straitest{174} sect of the Ross tenants. His farm, which was a very small one, was, I imagine, run by his wife and children ”

“ The rough, young chestnut was filled with a vain-glory that scorned to trot, and after a great deal of brilliant ramping and curveting he fell into a kind of heraldic action, half-canter, half-walk, that left him more and more hopelessly in the rear, and raised Lambert’s temper to boiling point.
“We’re going very fast, aren’t we?” panted Francie, trying to push down her rebellious habit-skirt with her whip, as they sped along the flat road between Lismoyle and Bruff. ”

“ I have heard at a garden party a lady thus compliment the proprietor of the decoration.
“I know,” she turned to me, “that you’re delighting in it! What a pity you haven’t your easel with you!” (Nothing else, presumably, was required.) The attitude of mind is the same, but there is much in the way a thing is said.
A special joy was imparted to Martin’s and my wanderings about Ross by the presence of the Puppet. I had brought him to Paris (and Martin and I had{172} together smuggled him home under the very nose of the Douane) ”

“ Lambert leaned back as if to consider the question, and began to fill his pipe for the second time.
“Well,” he said slowly, “if it makes no difference to you, Lucy, I’d be rather glad if you did. As a matter of fact I have to ride out to Gurthnamuckla to-morrow, on business, and I thought I’d take Francie Fitzpatrick with me there on the black mare. She’s no great shakes of a rider, and the black mare is the only thing I’d like to put her on. But, of course, if it was for your own sake and not Charlotte’s that you wanted to go to the Waller’s, I’d try and manage to take Francie some other day. ”

“ As I struggled into my boots the following morning, I felt that Sir Valentine's acid confidences on cub-hunting, bestowed on me at midnight, did credit to his judgment. "A very moderate amusement, my dear Major," he had said, in his dry little voice; "you should stick to shooting. No one expects you to shoot before daybreak."
It was six o'clock as I crept downstairs, and found Lady Knox and Miss Sally at breakfast, with two lamps on the table, and a foggy daylight oozing in from under the half-raised blinds. ”

“ There, outside the Coolahan door, was the Dean’s inside car, resting on its shafts; while the black horse, like his driver, restored himself elsewhere beneath the Coolahan roof. Robert paid no heed to its silent warning.
“I must go myself. If I had forty pencils I couldn’t explain to Julia the flies that I want!”
There comes, with the most biddable of men, a moment when argument fails, the moment of dead pull, when the creature perceives his own strength, and the astute will give in, early and imperceptibly, in order that he may not learn it beyond forgetting. ”

“ I could only feel illogically sorry at this utter break and severance in the old relations between Willy and me. I was still dawdling over my tea when Roche came in to clear away the breakfast-things. His professional eye at once detected my unused plate.
“Will I get another egg biled for you, miss? Them’s cold.”
“No, thank you, Roche. I am not very hungry this morning.”
Roche turned a shrewd eye, like a parrot’s, upon me.
“Fie, fie, miss! That’s no way for a young lady to be. ”

“ It was not until Martin and I began to write “The Real Charlotte” that I understood how wide and varied a course of instruction was to be obtained in a Dublin Sunday school. Judging by a large collection of heavily-gilded books, quite unreadable (and quite unread) , each of which celebrates proficiency in some branch of scriptural learning, Martin took all the available prizes. In addition to these trophies and the knowledge they implied, she learnt much of that middle sphere of human existence that has practically no normal points of contact with any other class, either above or below it. ”

“ Obviously he must at once proceed to Mount Music.
There is a saying among Larry's countrymen: "If a man want a thing he mus' have it!" Fortune had, so far, been kind to Larry, and those things that he had wanted sufficiently, he had had. It now remained to be proved if the rule were to have an exception.
"I'm going over to Mount Music just now," he said to Frederica at tea time. "I want to see them all. Will you come, Aunt Freddy?"
Aunt Freddy looked perturbed.
"You haven't seen Cousin Dick yet, have you?"
"No. How could I? He wasn't out. I've seen no one yet but Christian." ”

“ Through a line of Jaspers, Nicholases and Roberts, the story of Ross moved prosperously on from Robert of Elizabeth’s times, untouched even by the hand of Cromwell, unshaken even when the gates of Galway, twelve miles away, opened at length to Ireton. Beyond the town of Galway, the Cromwellian did not set his foot; Connemara was a dark and barren country, and the Martins, Roman Catholic and Royalists to the core, as were all the other Tribes of Galway, held the key of the road. ”

“ What horse is that he’s on?” her eyes taking in with unwilling admiration the swaggering ease of seat and squareness of shoulder that had so often captivated her taste, as Lambert, not unaware of spectators at the window, overcame much callow remonstrance on the part of the young horse he was riding, at being asked to stand at the door till a boy came round to take him.
“Oh, that’s the new four-year-old that Roddy had taken in off Gurthnamuckla while we were away,” said Francie, leaning her elbow against the shutter and looking out too. “He’s an awful wild young brat of a thing! ”

“ It was in the sixteenth century that Robert Martin, one of the long and powerful line of High Sheriffs and Mayors of Galway, became possessed of a large amount of land in West Galway, and in 1590 Ross was his country place. From this point the Martins began slowly to assimilate West Galway; Ross, Dangan, Birch Hall, and Ballinahinch, marked their progress, until Ballinahinch, youngest and greatest of the family strongholds, had gathered to itself nearly 200,000 acres of Connemara. ”

“ It was eight o’clock that evening when, after five or six hours’ driving, we came down the long slope of the moor outside Oughterard. The mountains of Connemara were all behind us, in the pale distant guise in which we had first known them, and the only things that remained to us of our wanderings in their valleys were the governess-cart and the tired, but still dauntless, Sibbie. Even these would not be ours much longer; the door of Murphy’s hotel would soon witness our final separation, and to-morrow we should be, like any other tourists, swinging into Galway on the mail-car. ”