The Lake | Page 7

fifteen at the time, yet she spoke out of her own
mind. At the time they thought she had been thinking on the
matter--considering her future. A child of fifteen doesn't consider, but a
child of fifteen may know, and after he had seen the look which greeted
his mother's remarks, and heard Eliza's simple answer, 'I've decided to
be a nun,' he never doubted that what she said was true. From that day
she became for him a different being; and when she told him, feeling,
perhaps, that he sympathized with her more than the others did, that
one day she would be Reverend Mother of the Tinnick Convent, he felt
convinced that she knew what she was saying--how she knew he could
not say.
His childhood had been a slumber, with occasional awakenings or half
awakenings, and Eliza's announcement that she intended to enter the
religious life was the first real awakening; and this awakening first took
the form of an acute interest in Eliza's character, and, persuaded that
she or her prototype had already existed, he searched the lives of the
saints for an account of her, finding many partial portraits of her;
certain typical traits in the lives of three or four saints reminded him of
Eliza, but there was no complete portrait. The strangest part of the
business was that he traced his vocation to his search for Eliza in the
lives of the saints. Everything that happened afterwards was the
emotional sequence of taking down the books from the shelf. He didn't
exaggerate; it was possible his life might have taken a different turn, for
up to that time he had only read books of adventure--stories about
robbers and pirates. As if by magic, his interest in such stories passed
clean out of his mind, or was exchanged for an extraordinary
enthusiasm for saints, who by renouncement of animal life had

contrived to steal up to the last bounds, whence they could see into the
eternal life that lies beyond the grave. Once this power was admitted,
what interest could we find in the feeble ambitions of temporal life,
whose scope is limited to three score and ten years? And who could
doubt that saints attained the eternal life, which is God, while still
living in the temporal flesh? For did not the miracles of the saints prove
that they were no longer subject to natural laws? Ancient Ireland,
perhaps, more than any other country, understood the supremacy of
spirit over matter, and strove to escape through mortifications from the
prison of the flesh. Without doubt great numbers in Ireland had fled
from the torment of actual life into the wilderness. If the shore and the
islands on this lake were dotted with fortress castles, it was the Welsh
and the Normans who built them, and the priest remembered how his
mind took fire when he first heard of the hermit who lived in Church
Island, and how disappointed he was when he heard that Church Island
was ten miles away, at the other end of the lake.
For he could not row himself so far; distance and danger compelled
him to consider the islands facing Tinnick--two large islands covered
with brushwood, ugly brown patches--ugly as their names, Horse
Island and Hog Island, whereas Castle Island had always seemed to
him a suitable island for a hermitage, far more so than Castle Hag.
Castle Hag was too small and bleak to engage the attention of a
sixth-century hermit. But there were trees on Castle Island, and out of
the ruins of the castle a comfortable sheiling could be built, and the
ground thus freed from the ruins of the Welshman's castle might be
cultivated. He remembered commandeering the fisherman's boat, and
rowing himself out, taking a tape to measure, and how, after much
application of the tape, he had satisfied himself that there was enough
arable land in the island for a garden; he had walked down the island
certain that a quarter of an acre could grow enough vegetables to
support a hermit, and that a goat would be able to pick a living among
the bushes and the tussocked grass: even a hermit might have a goat,
and he didn't think he could live without milk. He must have been a
long time measuring out his garden, for when he returned to his boat
the appearance of the lake frightened him; it was full of blustering
waves, and it wasn't likely he'd ever forget his struggle to get the boat

back to Tinnick. He left it where he had found it, at the mouth of the
river by the fisherman's hut, and returned home thinking how he would
have to import a little hay occasionally for the goat. Nor would this be
all; he