with others? But how should such going forth be
managed? And then,—were there not
dangers, terrible dangers,—dangers specially
terrible to one so friendless as her child? Had
not she herself been wrecked among the rocks, trusting
herself to one who had been utterly unworthy,—loving
one who had been utterly unlovely? Men so often
are as ravenous wolves, merciless, rapacious, without
hearts, full of greed, full of lust, looking on female
beauty as prey, regarding the love of woman and her
very life as a toy! Were she higher in the world
there might be safety. Were she lower there might
be safety. But how could she send her girl forth
into the world without sending her certainly among
the wolves? And yet that piteous question was
always sounding in her ears. “Mother, is
it always to be like this?”
Then Lieutenant Neville had appeared upon the scene,
dressed in a sailor’s jacket and trowsers, with
a sailor’s cap upon his head, with a loose handkerchief
round his neck and his hair blowing to the wind.
In the eyes of Kate O’Hara he was an Apollo.
In the eyes of any girl he must have seemed to be
as good-looking a fellow as ever tied a sailor’s
knot. He had made acquaintance with Father Marty
at Liscannor, and the priest had dined with him at
Ennis. There had been a return visit, and the
priest, perhaps innocently, had taken him up on the
cliffs. There he had met the two ladies, and
our hero had been introduced to Kate O’Hara.
I’ll go bail she likes
it.
It might be that the young man was a ravenous wolf,
but his manners were not wolfish. Had Mrs. O’Hara
been a princess, supreme in her own rights, young
Neville could not have treated her or her daughter
with more respect. At first Kate had wondered
at him, but had said but little. She had listened
to him, as he talked to her mother and the priest about
the cliffs and the birds and the seals he had shot,
and she had felt that it was this, something like
this, that was needed to make life so sweet that as
yet there need be no longing, no thought, for eternity.
It was not that all at once she loved him, but she
felt that he was a thing to love. His very appearance
on the cliff, and the power of thinking of him when
he was gone, for a while banished all tedium from her
life. “Why should you shoot the poor gulls?”
That was the first question she asked him; and she
asked it hardly in tenderness to the birds, but because
with the unconscious cunning of her sex she understood
that tenderness in a woman is a charm in the eyes
of a man.
“Only because it is so difficult to get at them,”
said Fred. “I believe there is no other
reason,—except that one must shoot something.”
“But why must you?” asked Mrs. O’Hara.
“To justify one’s guns. A man takes
to shooting as a matter of course. It’s
a kind of institution. There ain’t any tigers,
and so we shoot birds. And in this part of the
world there ain’t any pheasants, and so we shoot
sea-gulls.”
