THE
MANUSCRIPT
MAN.
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CHAPTER I.
The country through which Major Bryan was riding had a peculiar aspect. Lofty downs, unmarked by hedge or tree, stretched and swelled from the foot of a wild mountain range, till they were suddenly cut across and ended by an irregular line of precipices standing in the sea; and, as if a fragment had been pushed forth some miles from the mainland, an island of the same construction appeared in the distance, having one promontory crowned with a snow-white light-house.
Almost as solitary as that sea appeared that land. Houses there were at intervals in the hollows, where a little tillage might prosper; but the absence of trees gives a singularly lifeless look to a country. The road, an excellent one seemed to have no passengers; Major Bryan did not for some time see any person of whom he could ask his way, so he proceeded at a foot pace and drew mental contrasts between this wild western peninsula set in the Atlantic, and the garden-like English country where he had lately resided.
A year ago, he had become owner of the family estate in this part of Ireland, by the decease of an elder brother. This gentleman had never lived on his property since he was a boy; and considerable excuse could be made for his absenteeism, inasmuch as his father had been shot by Ribbonmen for exercising some of his landlord rights. And Mr. Bryan never could be persuaded that such crimes belonged to a by-gone day in Ireland; he would shrug his shoulders, and declare a preference for club life in London.
The younger brother had entered the army, and spent a long term of service with his regiment in India. There he had been led to think more seriously of the responsibilities of life as life, than many men in his position; he began to learn his duty to God. Coming home with this new allegiance in his heart, he was known as a religious man in the social circle where he lived. For he believed that with the lips and with the conduct confession of Christ must be made unto salvation; that the question addressed long ago to the disciples has a practical echo for their followers even now: “What do ye more than others?”
When Major Bryan found himself an Irish landowner, he felt it his duty to reside on his estate, having no superior reason indicating any other residence. Truly the reception he met with was the proverbial “hundred thousand welcomes.” Bonfires blazed far and near on the hills; a cavalcade of mounted tenants met the carriage as escort, and applause rent the air, specially at the appearance of the little English lady who was coming to take her place among them as mistress. Mrs. Bryan had been somewhat faint-hearted at carrying out her husband’s resolve; but when she looked at the eager faces of the crowd expanded into a universal smile, and heard the blessings on her children, she felt rather royal, and quite resigned to residence in her new dominions.
This was no longer than a month since; and of course the glory of that first reception had become dim, and Major Bryan had discovered that the duties of a landowner are not always such as win applause. But the people were so poor, so very poor! and he was to them as a superior being, having power (in their thinking) to rectify nearly all the evils they felt or feared; and they were so grateful, touchingly grateful for kindness, that every day he could have the satisfaction of giving pleasure and doing good at a smaller cost than his preconceived ideas could have deemed possible.
One circumstance he found a drawback to free communication with his tenants; with some of them he could speak only at secondhand, because they understood no language except Irish; and the majority of the others, while uttering English words, were translating their thoughts from the dearly-loved mother-tongue into what was to them alien speech. Major Bryan wanted to get at the hearts of these men who so looked up to him; he wanted to love them and to be loved, that he might fulfill his duty toward them in the hearty way that love only can. Perhaps he had Utopian views, and went further than was necessary inthe paternal sense of his position; but Christianity largely widens a man’s sensibility as to such matters; and his thoughts turned to the subject again as he slowly rode his horse among the swelling downs, where only one other wayfarer came in sight.
It was an elderly woman, with the blue hood of her cloak drawn over her white cap, making a framework to the yellow, wizened face; she dropped a deep courtesy on coming near enough. “Can you tell me,” said the gentleman, reining his horse, “where in this direction a man named Donat Clare lives? They call him the Manuscript Man, I am told.”
What piercing brown eyes she had! and they studied Major Bryan’s face for some seconds before answering.
“Is it the Manuscript Man, yer honor? Well, I don’t b’lieve any body ought to know better than mysel’, by rason of bein’ his wife; an’ I’ll show you the way, plase yer honor.”
She stooped to disencumber herself of the heavy shoes which she had indeed put on for respectability’s sake when she spied the gentleman in the distance, and carrying them in her hands, sped along with wonderful rapidity, as light as a lapwing; making presently a short cut across the fields, toward a low thatched roof.
“He’s out, sir,” she was ready to say when the rider arrived by the road. “The school’s over for the childer to ate their dinners, and himself is walked up to them ould ruins, yonder, I’ll be bound. He’s a regular fule about oul’ papers an’ oul’ stones, yer honor. But maybe you’d wait, Major, dear, till I bring him word?” she added in a wheedling tone.
“I think I’ll go and look for him myself,” said the gentleman, alighting, “if you’ll have the goodness to hold my horse, Mrs. Clare. There seems to be an old-burial ground on the hill?”
“O yes, yer honor, an’ plenty other quare stones an’ buildin’s, that mostly drives my Donat half mad wid thinking of oul’ times. An’ ‘twould be better for him if he thought more of the times that’s present, an’ dug his pratie-garden like any other honest man; for never a farden-piece did all his larnin’ put in his pocket, barrin’ the few ha’pence from the scholars, an’ thim mostly paid in turf an’ oaten-meal, sir, that’s not to be called money at all.”
Indeed, there was every symptom of poverty about the cottage; and the potato-ground, to which she alluded, lay bristling with weeds thick over last year’s ridges; but Major Bryan did not admire this early display of necessities on the part of the Manuscript Man’s wife and felt his benevolence getting a chill. The ruined church, represented now by two mossy gables and low, broken, connecting walls, might be a quarter of a mile away toward the sea, whose unseen surges heaved up a grand sound through the noonday silence of that land, bathed in sunshine. No person was visible till he came to the farther side of the ruin, where, among the many tombstones paving the earth, and many less illustrious mounds, he saw the figure of the Manuscript Man, apparently copying something from an upright block of stone.
This occupation Major Bryan discerned when he drew nearer; also that the stone bore not an ordinary epitaph, but certain curious marks set along one of its edges among the orange and gray lichens with which the weather had spotted its surface.So engrossed was Donat Clare with his attempt, that he neverheard the footsteps of the new-comer until his salutation.
“Major Bryan!” He stood up with almost a scared look.
“How did you know me?”
“Sir,” was the half-confused answer, “yer honor’s so like” —he hesitated— “like members of yer honored family that I’ve seen.’
“He recollects my poor father,” thought the gentleman; but not choosing to particularize on that point, he turned to the stone. “What are you doing?”
“Sir, that’s an Ogham; them letters used to be cut on the staves or wands of poets long ago, when the bards walked before kings, dressed in white flowing robes. Sir, Tim Collins is a tenant of yer honor’s?”
“Yes,” said Major Bryan, scarcely able to repress a smile at this seeming bathos. “What about him?”
“He took the fellow of this Ogham stone for his gate-post last week. An’ as he might make a hearthstone of the other, maybe, if the fancy took him, I was just doin’ a drawing of the auncient characthers before they’d be lost forever!”
“I must speak to Collins,” said the Major, making a note in his pocket-book. The Manuscript Man was profuse of thanks; and, in the conversation that followed, his enthusiasm for the antiquities of his country was very apparent.
“Since you are so skilled in the original Celtic dialects, what would you think of trying to teach me Irish?” asked the gentleman.
“Sir,” I’m in dread it couldn’t ever come natural to yer mouth,” he replied with some stiffness.
“You ought to be a good Irish teacher, and I have a plan for giving you some work in that line. Come over to Rienvella to-morrow evening — you wont mind the distance?”
So it was settled, though not without a certain unwillingness on the Manuscript Man’s part which rather surprised his employer.
Going away, Major Bryan glanced around the crowded graveyard. On all sides the headstones bore such inscriptions as —”Of your charity pray for the repose of the soul of Michael Quin.” “May he rest in peace, Amen.” The epitaph was invariably headed with the monogram I. H. S. under a cross; and invariably ended with the initials R. I. P., for “Requiescat in Pace.”
“A short life we have of it at longest, sir,” remarked the Manuscript Man.
“Yes, if our Lord Jesus Christ had not ‘abolished death!’ ”
“ ‘Abolished death!’ is it to make an end of it yer honor manes? Sure the world knows every one of us has to die! There’s the grave over there that my poor boy is buried in, and where I’ll lie myself some day, nothing surer!”
“Only a gate to everlasting life if you trust in our blessed Saviour, my friend; for he says that those who do so shall never taste of death, but be carried by the angels into heavenly placed to behold and share his glory.”
“Sir, that’s for the blessed saints alone,” said Donat Clare, crossing himself. “But the likes of us poor misguided sinners” — he stopped short. “Sir, yer honor is a Protestan’ and I’m a Catholic.”
“But we have the same Saviour;” and Major Bryan spoke more about Him and His great salvation before they parted, with the spirit of one to whom it was verily the most important fact in all the cycles of the events of time. But the words which remained firm in the Manuscript Man’s memory were, “Who hath abolished death.” They seemed a paradox pronounced among all those graves.
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