The Charm Of Ireland Part 10

"They're saying," explained Minogue, "that if your honour will toss a penny amongst them, they will fight for it; or, if you'd rather, they will put up a prayer for you, so that you will get safe home again. They don't consider that begging, you see, since they offer some return for the money."

And then, as they hustled us more closely, he turned and shouted something at them--some magic incantation, I fancy, for they scurried away as though the devil was after them. I regretted, afterwards, that I had not asked him for the formula--but in the end, we found one of our own, as you shall hear.

Our guide insisted that we go down with him to his house and see his books, and write our names in his alb.u.m, and have a cup of tea. He lived in an ivy-covered cottage, just under the Rock, and his old wife came out to welcome us; and we sat and talked and wrote our names and looked at his books--one had been given him by Stephen Gwynne, and others by other writers whose names I have forgotten; but the treasure of his library was a huge volume, carefully wrapped against possible soiling, which, when unwrapped, proved to be a copy of Arthur Champneys' "Irish Ecclesiastical Architecture," and with gleaming face our host turned to the preface and showed us where Champneys acknowledged his indebtedness for much valuable a.s.sistance to John Minogue, of the Rock of Cashel.

We bade him good-bye, at last, and made our way down through the quaint little town, which snuggles against one side of the Rock--a town of narrow, crooked streets, and thatched houses, and friendly women leaning over their half-doors, and mult.i.tudinous children; but the most vivid memory I have of it, is of the pleasant tang of turf smoke in the air.

And presently we came out again upon the road leading to the station.

From the top of the Rock we had seen, in the middle of a field not far away, a ruin which seemed very extensive, and Minogue told us that it was h.o.r.e Abbey, a Cistercian monastery built about 1272, but had added that it was scarcely worth visiting after Cashel. That was perhaps true--few ruins can compare with Cashel--but when we saw the grey bulk of the old abbey looming above the wall at our left, we decided to get to it, if we could.

It required some resolution, for the way thither lay across a very wet and muddy pasture, with gra.s.s knee-high in places, and Betty would probably have declined to venture but for the a.s.surance that there are no snakes in Ireland. The nearer we got to the ruin, the worse the going grew, but we finally scrambled inside over a broken wall, and sat down on a block of fallen masonry to look about us.

The mist, which had been thickening for the last half hour, had, almost imperceptibly, turned to rain, and this was mizzling softly down, shrouding everything as with a pearly veil, and adding a beauty and sense of mystery to the place which it may have lacked at other times.

But it seemed to us singularly impressive, with its narrow lancet windows, and plain, square pillars. Such vaulting as remains, at the crossing and in the chapels, is very simple, and the whole church was evidently built with a dignity and severity of detail which modern builders might well imitate. It seems a shame that it is not kept in better order and a decent approach built to it; but I suppose the Board of Works, whose duty it is to care for Irish ruins, finds itself overburdened with the multiplicity of them.

We sat there absorbing the centuries-old atmosphere, until a glance at my watch told me that we must hurry if we would catch our train. We _did_ hurry, though with many a backward glance, for one is reluctant to leave a beautiful place which one may never see again; but we caught the train, and the last glimpse we had of Cashel was as of some gigantic magic palace, suspended in air and shrouded in mist.

CHAPTER VIII

ADVENTURES AT BLARNEY

IT was getting on toward evening when we caught our train on the main line at Goold's Cross. The storm had swept southward, and the hills there were masked with rain, but the Golden Vale had emerged from its baptism more lush, more green, more dazzling than ever. We left it behind, at last, plunged into a wood of lofty and magnificent trees, and paused at Limerick Junction, with its great echoing train-shed and wide network of tracks and switches. Beyond the Junction, one gets from the train a splendid view of the picturesque Galtees, the highest mountains in the south of Ireland, fissured and gullied and folded into deep ravines in the most romantic way.

The train had been comparatively empty thus far, and we had rejoiced in a compartment to ourselves; but as we drew into the station at Charleville, we were astonished to see a perfect mob of people crowding the platform, with more coming up every minute. The instant the train stopped, the mob s.n.a.t.c.hed open the doors and swept into it like a tidal wave. When the riot subsided a bit, we found that four men and two girls were crowded in with us, and the corridor outside was jammed with people standing up. We asked the cause of the excitement, and were told that there had been a race-meeting at Charleville, which had attracted a great crowd from all over the south-eastern part of Ireland, especially from Cork, thirty-five miles away.

Our companions soon got to chaffing each other, and it developed that all of them, even the two girls, had been betting on the races, and I inferred that they had all lost every cent they had. It was a.s.sumed, as a matter of course, that n.o.body would go to a race-meeting without putting something on the horses; it was also a.s.sumed that every normal man and woman would make almost any sacrifice to get to a meeting; and there was a lively discussion as to possible ways and means of attending another meeting which was to be held somewhere in the neighbourhood the following week. And finally, it was apparent that everybody present had contemplated the world through the bottom of a gla.s.s more than once that day. As I looked at them and listened to them, I began to understand the cause of at least a portion of Irish poverty.

It was a good-humoured crowd, in spite of its reverses, and when a girl with a tambourine piped up a song, she was loudly encouraged to go on and even managed to collect a few pennies, found unexpectedly in odd pockets. Then one of the men in our compartment told a story; I have forgotten what it was about, but it was received uproariously; and then everybody talked at once as loud as possible, and the clatter was deafening.

We were glad when we got to Cork.

Cork is superficially a sort of smaller Dublin. It has one handsome thoroughfare, approached by a handsome bridge, and the rest of the town is composed for the most part of dirty lanes between ugly houses. In Dublin, the princ.i.p.al street and bridge are dedicated to O'Connell; in Cork both bridge and street are named after St. Patrick--that is about the only difference, except that Cork lacks that atmosphere of charm and culture which makes Dublin so attractive.

We took a stroll about the streets, that Sat.u.r.day night after dinner, and found them thronged with people, as at Dublin; but here there was a large admixture of English soldiers and sailors, come up from Queenstown to celebrate. Many of them had girls on their arms, and those who had not were evidently hoping to have, and the impression one got was that Cork suffers a good deal from the evils of a garrison town. There is a tradition that the girls of Cork are unusually lovely; but I fear it is only a tradition. Or perhaps the lovely ones stay at home on Sat.u.r.day night.

Sunday dawned clear and bright, and as soon as we had breakfasted, we set out for the most famous spot in the vicinity of Cork, and perhaps in all Ireland, Blarney Castle. Undoubtedly the one Irish tradition which is known everywhere is that of the blarney stone; "blarney" itself has pa.s.sed into the language as a noun, an adjective, and a verb; and the old tower of which the stone is a part has been pictured so often that its appearance is probably better known than that of any other ruin in Europe. Blarney is about five miles from Cork, and the easiest way of getting there is by the light railway, which runs close beside a pretty stream, in which, this bright morning, many fishermen were trying their luck. And at last, high above the trees, we saw the rugged keep which is all that is left of the old castle. Almost at once the train stopped at the station, which is just outside the entrance to the castle grounds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BLARNEY CASTLE]

"The Groves of Blarney" are still charming, though they have changed greatly since the day when Richard Milliken wrote his famous song in praise of them. There were grottoes and beds of flowers, and terraces and rustic bowers there then, and statues of heathen G.o.ds and nymphs so fair all standing naked in the open air; but misfortune overtook the castle's owner and

The muses shed a tear when the cruel auctioneer, With his hammer in his hand, to sweet Blarney came.

So the statues vanished, together with the grottoes and the terraces; but the sweet silent brook still ripples through the grounds, and its banks are covered with daisies and b.u.t.tercups, and guarded by giant beeches. Very lovely it is, so that one loiters to watch the dancing water, even with Blarney Castle close at hand.

Approached thus, the ma.s.sive donjon tower, set on a cliff and looming a hundred and twenty feet into the air, is most impressive. To the left is a lower and more ornamental fragment of the old castle, which, in its day, was the strongest in all Munster. Cormac McCarthy built it in the fifteenth century as a defence against the English, and it was held by the Irish until Cromwell's army besieged and captured it. Around the top of the tower is a series of machicolations, or openings between supporting corbels, through which the besieged, in the old days, could drop stones and pour molten lead and red-hot ashes and such-like things down upon the a.s.sailants, and it is in the sill of one of these openings that the famous Blarney stone is fixed.

Legend has it that, once upon a time, in the spring of the year when the waters were running high, Cormac McCarthy was returning home through the blackness of the night, and when he put his horse at the last ford, he thought for a moment he would be swept away, so swift and deep was the current. But his horse managed to keep its feet, and just as it was scrambling out upon the farther bank, McCarthy heard a scream from the darkness behind him, and then a woman's voice crying for help. So he dashed back into the stream, and after a fearful struggle, dragged the woman to safety.

In the dim light, McCarthy could see only that she was old and withered; but her eyes gleamed like a cat's when she looked at him; and she called down blessings upon him for his courage, and bade him, when he got home, go out upon the battlement and kiss a certain stone, whose location she described to him. Thereupon she vanished, and so McCarthy knew it was a witch he had rescued. Next morning, he went out upon the battlement and found the stone and kissed it, and thereafter was endowed with an eloquence so sweet and persuasive that no man or woman could resist it.

Such is the legend, and it may have had its origin in the soft, delutherin speeches with which Dermot McCarthy put off the English, when they called upon him to surrender his castle. Certain it is that it was fixed finally and firmly in the popular mind by the stanza which Father Prout added to Milliken's song:

There is a stone there, that whoever kisses Oh! he never misses to grow eloquent.

'Tis he may clamber to a lady's chamber, Or become a member of Parliament.

A clever spouter he'll sure turn out, or An out and outer, to be let alone; Don't hope to hinder him, or to bewilder him, Sure he's a pilgrim from the Blarney Stone.

And ever since then, troops of pilgrims have thronged to Blarney to kiss the stone.

The top of the tower is reached by a narrow staircase which goes round and round in the thickness of the wall, with narrow loopholes of windows here and there looking out upon the beautiful country, and a door at every level giving access to the great, square interior. The floors have all fallen in and there is only the blue sky for roof, but the graceful old fireplaces still remain and some traces of ornamentation, and the ancient walls, eighteen feet thick in places, and with mortar as hard as the rock, are wonderful to see; and finally you come out upon the battlemented parapet, with miles and miles of Ireland at your feet.

But it wasn't to gaze at the view we had come to Blarney Castle, it was to kiss the stone, and we went at once to look for it. It was easy enough to find, for, on top of the battlement above it, a row of tall iron spikes has been set, and the stone itself is tied into the wall by iron braces, for one of Cromwell's cannon-b.a.l.l.s almost dislodged it, and it is worn and polished by the application of thousands of lips. But to kiss it--well, that is another story!

For the sill of which the stone forms a part is some two feet lower than the level of the walk around the parapet, and, to get to it, there is a horrid open s.p.a.ce some three feet wide to span, and below that open s.p.a.ce is a sheer drop of a hundred and twenty feet to the ground below.

When one looks down through it, all that one can see are the waving tree-tops far, far beneath. There is just one way to accomplish the feat, and that is to lie down on your back, while somebody grasps your ankles, and then permit yourself to be shoved backward and downward across the abyss until your mouth is underneath the sill.

Betty and I looked at the stone and at the yawning chasm and then at each other; and then we went away and sat down in a corner of the battlement to think it over.

We had supposed that there would be some experienced guides on hand, anxious to earn sixpence by a.s.sisting at the rite, as there had been at St. Kevin's bed; but the tower was deserted, save for ourselves.

"Well," said Betty, at last, "there's one thing certain--I'm not going away from here until I've kissed that stone. I'd be ashamed to go home without kissing it."

"So would I," I agreed; "but I'd prefer that to hanging head downward over that abyss. Anyway, I won't take the responsibility of holding you by the heels while you do it. Perhaps some one will come up, after awhile, to help."

So we looked at the scenery and talked of various things; but all either of us thought about was kissing the stone, and we touched on it incidentally now and then, and then s.h.i.+ed away from it, and pretended to think of something else. Presently we heard voices on the stair, and a man and two women emerged on the parapet. We waited, but they didn't approach the stone, they just looked around at the landscape; and finally Betty inquired casually if they were going to kiss the Blarney stone.

"Kiss the Blarney stone?" echoed the man, who was an Englishman. "I should think not! It's altogether too risky!"

"But it seems a shame to go away without kissing it," Betty protested.

"Yes, it does," the other agreed; "but I was here once before, and I fought that all out then. It's really just a silly old legend, you know--n.o.body believes it!"

Now to my mind silly old legends are far more worthy of belief than most things, but it would be folly to say so to an Englishman. So the conversation dropped, and presently he and his companions went away, and Betty and I sat down again and renewed our conversation.

And then again we heard voices, and this time it was two American women, well along in years. They asked us if we knew which was the Blarney stone, and we hastened to point it out to them, and explained the process of kissing it. There were postcards ill.u.s.trating the process on sale at the entrance, and we had studied them attentively before we came in, so that we knew the theory of it quite well.

"We were just sitting here trying to screw up courage to do it," Betty added.

The newcomers looked at the stone, and then at the abyss.

"Well, _I'll_ never do it!" they exclaimed simultaneously, and they contented themselves with throwing a kiss at it; and then _they_ went away, and Betty and I, both rather pale around the gills, continued to talk of s.h.i.+ps and shoes and sealing-wax. But I saw in her eyes that somehow or other she was going to kiss the stone.