Penelope's Irish ExperiencesWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Penelope's Irish Experiences
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Ireland -- Fiction
At tea-time day before yesterday, Salemina suggested that Francesca and
I find the heart of Aunt David's labyrinth, the which she had discovered
in a less than ten minutes' search that morning, leaving her Gaelic
primer behind her that we might bring it back as a proof of our success.
You have heard in Pearla's Celtic fairy tale the outcome of this little
expedition, and now know that Ronald Macdonald and Himself planned the
joyful surprise for us, and by means of Salemina's aid carried it out
triumphantly.
Ronald crossing to Ireland from Glasgow, and Himself from Liverpool,
had met in Dublin, and travelled post-haste to the Shamrock Inn in
Devorgilla, where they communicated with Salemina and begged her
assistance in their plot.
I was looking forward to my husband's arrival within a week, but Ronald
had said not a word of his intended visit; so that Salemina was properly
nervous lest some one of us should collapse out of sheer joy at the
unexpected meeting.
I have been both quietly and wildly happy many times in my life, but I
think yesterday was the most perfect day in all my chain of years. Not
that in this long separation I have been dull, or sad, or lonely. How
could I be? Dull, with two dear, bright, sunny letters every week,
letters throbbing with manly tenderness, letters breathing the sure,
steadfast, protecting care that a strong man gives to the woman he has
chosen. Sad, with my heart brimming over with sweet memories and
sweeter prophecies, and all its tiny crevices so filled with love that
discontent can find no entrance there! Lonely, when the vision of the
beloved is so poignantly real in absence that his bodily presence adds
only a final touch to joy! Dull, or sad, when in these soft days of
spring and early summer I have harboured a new feeling of companionship
and oneness with Nature, a fresh joy in all her bounteous resource
and plenitude of life, a renewed sense of kinship with her mysterious
awakenings! The heavenly greenness and promise of the outer world seem
but a reflection of the hopes and dreams that irradiate my own inner
consciousness.
My art, dearly as I loved it, dearly as I love it still, never gave
me these strange, unspeakable joys with their delicate margin of pain.
Where are my ambitions, my visions of lonely triumphs, my imperative
need of self-expression, my ennobling glimpses of the unattainable, my
companionship with the shadows in which an artist's life is so rich? Are
they vanished altogether? I think not; only changed in the twinkling
of an eye, merged in something higher still, carried over, linked on,
transformed, transmuted, by Love the alchemist, who, not content with
joys already bestowed, whispers secret promises of raptures yet to come.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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