‘We’ll carry our shoes and stockings with us,’ they said, ‘and then explore the island. Perhaps there is a hermit there still, or a primitive lake-dweller. What is a primitive lake-dweller, Mr. Conneally?’
Hyacinth was uncertain, but hazarded a suggestion that the lake-dwellers were the people who buried each other in raths. The Canon, whose archaeology did not go back beyond St. Patrick, offered no correction.
Tea was made later on in yet another bay, this time on the eastern shore of the lake. An oak wood grew down almost to the water’s edge, and the branches overhung a sandy beach, more golden than any sea-strand. The whole party collected dead wood and broken twigs for the fire. Then, while the girls unpacked the baskets and secured the kettle amidst the smoke, Hyacinth lay back luxuriously and watched the sun set behind the round-shouldered mountain opposite. The long, steep slope shone bright green while the sun still rested in view above the summit; then suddenly, when the topmost rim of it had dipped out of sight, the whole mountainside turned purple, and a glory of gold and crimson hung above it on the motionless streaks of cloud. Slowly the splendour faded, the purple turned gray, and a faint breeze fluttered across the lake.
The day was the first of many which Hyacinth gave to such expeditions. The work of Mr. Quinn’s office was not so pressing as to necessitate his spending every day there when he was in Ballymoy, and a holiday was always obtainable. The lake scenery remained vivid in his memory in after-years, and had its influence upon him even while he enjoyed it, unconscious of anything except the present pleasure. There was something besides the innocent gaiety of the girls and the simple sincerity of the Canon’s platitudes, something about the lake itself, which removed him to a spiritual region utterly remote from the fiery atmosphere of Miss Goold’s patriotism. Many things which once loomed very large before him sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers. A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences of present activity. Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland from the boggy shore. Otherwise there were no signs of human life. A deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth. He came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings of soul. But the curse was upon him--the inevitable curse of feeling too keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish--it was vanishing from him, as he knew well--and leave him, not indeed content with common life, but patient of it, and to the very end sad with the sense of possibilities unrealized.