"That happened when she took him out to gather blackberries. It doesn't seem to have been her fault. He said he slipped and rolled down a bank."
"Bishops ought not to be taken near banks of that sort," said Ronald. "And yesterday I found him reading 'On the Edge of a Precipice.' If he tells my mother that he got that book in my house I shall never hear the end of it."
"He won't tell her. He has too much sense."
"He has very little sense—less sense than any bishop I ever heard of. Good Lord! Look at him now!"
The bishop and Minnie emerged from the shrubbery at the far end of the lawn. Their appearance justified an exclamation. Minnie had grasped the bishop's wrists and was towing him towards the house. He was hanging back; but every now and then Minnie, exerting herself her full strength, succeeded in breaking into a trot. The bishop appeared to be a good deal embarrassed. Ronald took his pipe out of his mouth and laid it on the ground beside him.
"Congratulate me at once," said Minnie, breathlessly, "both of you, without an instant's delay. The bishop and I are engaged to be married."
"If this is any kind of a joke," said Ronald, "it strikes me as being in remarkably bad taste."
"It's not a joke," said Minnie. "It's quite true. Isn't it, Harold? Didn't you say your name was Harold?"
"Harold Cyril," said the bishop.
"I shall probably call you Hal after we are married," said Minnie.
"No bishop," said Ronald, "would marry a girl like you, Minnie."
"I assure you," said the bishop, "that if Miss Mendel—I mean to say—Minnie—can only bring herself to—— You know I'm only a missionary bishop."
"That's just it," said Minnie. "You don't understand in the least, Ronald. What the bishop says is that I'll be a help to him in his work. You said that, didn't you, Harold?"
"Yes," said the bishop, bravely.
"You'd be a help!" said Ronald. "Oh, hang it all, Minnie, that's a bit too thick!"
"Not at all," said Minnie. "My manners and general gaiety of disposition are just what are wanted to attract the heathen. Isn't that what you meant, Harold?"
"Not exactly," said the bishop. "What I feel is——"
"Still, I shall attract them. You can't deny that. After all, I attracted you."
II.—SONNY
IT WAS late in November and it had been raining without cessation for more than three weeks—not vigorously, as I have seen it rain in New York and Philadelphia, but with a dull persistence, as it rains nowhere else except in the West of Ireland. Rain there seems—at certain, indeed at most seasons of the year—to be the normal thing, as if the genius that presides over the weather had turned on rain and then gone to sleep. The country was saturated, and I, though well inured to the climate of Connaught, felt that the pervading damp was getting on my nerves. I was dry in bed at night—I did not seem to be dry anywhere else. I confess that my temper was bad.
John Cassidy met me on the road a mile from my house at four o'clock one afternoon. He was standing at the bottom of a muddy lane that leads up to the wretchedly poor cabin in which he lives. I realised at once that he was waiting for me. I sighed.
John Cassidy is an excellent fellow—what we call a decent poor man—and I would do a good deal for him; but I did not want to do anything for him just then. I wanted to get home and change my sodden clothes. I had been tramping through the rain all day. I wanted hot tea. I wanted tobacco. I wanted a deep chair in front of a fire.
John Cassidy also wanted something—something from me. Therefore I sighed.
"I'd be glad," he said, "if your reverence would step up and take a look at herself—and maybe say a word to her that would do her good."
Herself was, of course, Mrs. Cassidy. It is in this way that we speak of our wives in the West of Ireland. It is, I think, a beautiful and respectful way of speaking of them. The use of the pronoun in this absolute fashion suggests that for each of us there is no other woman in the world, but only the one; and that is as it should be.
"There's a kind of weakness on her," said John Cassidy; "and it's worse she's getting instead of better."
I grasped at a ray of hope. I am, after all, a clergyman—not a doctor. A weakness is a physical rather than a spiritual malady. I could scarcely be expected to cure her.
"Why don't you get the doctor if she's ill?" I asked.
I was standing in a pool of water, but that made very little difference to me. My boots had been soaked through for hours.
"I had the doctor," said Caasidy. "I had him four times and I paid him twice, and it's very little good he did her."
Doctors are not of much use if you take them off the beaten track. In the face of a recognised disease—measles, pneumonia, or appendicitis, something they can look up in a book—they make some kind of fight. When they come up against anything as vague and formless as a weakness they can very rarely do anything.
"He gave her a bottle, I suppose," I said bitterly.
In Ireland we describe every medicine as a bottle and we are beginning to lose faith in bottles.
"For all the good it did her," said Cassidy, "it might as well have been water that was in it; though I will say for that bottle it smelt powerful bad when you took the cork out of it."
"I don't see," I said, "that I'm likely to be of much use."
"It could be," said Cassidy, "that if your reverence was to speak a word to her it might comfort her."
This was, of course, possible. I followed John Cassidy up the lane.
On the way to the cabin he explained more fully the nature of the weakness.
"It's been coming on her," he said, "ever since the young lad went from us. Two years ago he took the notion into his head that he'd go to America—and he went."
I knew that. We had all discussed the departure of the Cassidys' son; but he had been gone two years and I had seen Mrs. Cassidy many times since. She seemed none the worse. Cassidy read my thoughts with that uncanny intuition which you often find among west of Ireland peasants.
"At the first go off," he said, "you wouldn't have thought she minded—no more than another would anyway; but the weakness was within, in the inside of her, and it's lately that it has begun to come out."
I listened to a list of symptoms. It seemed that Mrs. Cassidy had lost heart and no longer took any pleasure in life. She baked bread; she washed clothes; she fed the pig—but she did these things without zest.
"It's seldom ever I can get her to go as far as the town on a market day," said Cassidy; "and she doesn't care if she never saw a neighbour woman or heard a word of what's going on.
"You couldn't get her to put a shawl over her head and go as far as the road—not if you was to offer her a fistful of gold for doing it."
This was plainly an evil case; but it seemed scarcely likely that my words would charm away so lethal an apathy.
"You'd think now," said Cassidy, "that she was no more than able just to put the one foot in front of the other."
He whispered these words in my ear, for we had reached the door of the cottage and it stood open. I went in and Cassidy followed me.
Mrs. Cassidy was sitting on a stool in the chimney corner, crouching over a fire that had burned low. There was a great round pot at her feet, with glowing cinders underneath it and grey, ash-covered coals piled on its lid. In such pots the west of Ireland people bake their bread, and