Kilgorman: A Story of Ireland in 1798Reed, Talbot Baines
History
Kilgorman: A Story of Ireland in 1798
Reed, Talbot Baines
France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Juvenile fiction; Ireland -- Juvenile fiction
As we came under Kilgorman, I could see the mast of the _Cigale_ peeping
over the rocks, and wondered if she would be discovered by all the
company. His honour, to my surprise, steered straight for the creek.
The _Cigale_ flew the English flag, and very smart and trim she looked
in the morning light, with her white sails bleaching on the deck and the
brass nozzles of her guns gleaming at the port-holes. We loitered a
little to admire her, and, seaman-like, to discuss her points. Then,
when our followers began to crowd after us into the creek, we pulled to
the landing and disburdened our boat of her precious freight.
The burying-ground of Kilgorman was a little enclosure on the edge of
the cliff surrounding the ruin of the old church, of which only a few
weed-covered piles of stone remained. The graves in it were scarcely to
be distinguished in the long rank grass. The only one of note was that
in which lay Terence Gorman with his wife and child--all dead twelve
years since, within a week of one another.
With much labour we bore the coffin up the steep path, and in a shallow
grave at the very cliff's edge deposited all that remained of our
English mother.
As his reverence had said, she never took root in Donegal. She had been
a loyal servant to her master, a loyal wife to her husband, and a loyal
mother to us her sons. Yet she always pined for her old Yorkshire
village home; a cloud of trouble, ever since we remembered her, had
hovered on her brow. She had wept much in secret, and had lived, as it
were, in a sort of dread of unseen evil.
Folks said the shock of the tragedy at Kilgorman, at the time when she
too lay ill in the house with her twin babies, had unnerved her and
touched her brain. But in that they were wrong; for she had taught Tim
and me to read and write better than any schoolmaster could have done,
and had read books and told stories to us such as few boys of our age
between Fanad and Derry had the chance to hear.
Yet, though her brain was sound, it was not to be denied that she had
been a woman of sorrow. And the strange words she had spoken when she
was near her end added a mystery to her memory which, boy as I was, I
took to heart, and resolved, if I could, to master.
That afternoon, when the mourners had gone their several ways, and the
short daylight was already beginning to draw in, Tim and I lay at the
cliff's edge, near our mother's grave, watching the _Cigale_ as, with
all her canvas flying and my father's dexterous hand at the helm, she
slipped out of the lough and spread her wings for the open sea. Even in
the feeble breeze, which would scarcely have stirred one of our
trawlers, she seemed to gather speed; and if we felt any anxiety as to
her being chased by one of his Majesty's cutters, we had only to watch
the way in which she slid through the water to assure us that she would
need a deal of catching.
I told Tim all I knew about her, and of my errand to Derry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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