The Lake | Page 9

parish priest of Tinnick. The parish was one of the best in the
diocese. Not a doubt of it, she was thinking at that moment of the
advantage this arrangement would be to her when she was directing the
affairs of the convent.
If there was no other, there was at least one woman in Ireland who was
interested in things. He had never met anybody less interested in
opinions or in ideas than Eliza. They had walked home together in
silence, at all events not saying much, and that very evening she left the
room immediately after supper. And soon after they heard sounds of
trunks being dragged along the passage; furniture was being moved,
and when she came downstairs she just said she was going to sleep
with Mary.
'Oliver is going to have my room. He must have a room to himself on
account of his studies.'
On that she gathered up her sewing, and left him to explain. He felt that
it was rather sly of her to go away like that, leaving all the explanation
to him. She wanted him to be a priest, and was full of little tricks. There
was no time for thinking it over. There was only just time to prepare for
the examination. He worked hard, for his work interested him,
especially the Latin language; but what interested him far more than his
aptitude for learning whatever he made up his mind to learn was the
discovery of a religious vocation in himself. Eliza feared that his
interest in hermits sprang from a boyish taste for adventure rather than
from religious feeling, but no sooner had he begun his studies for the
priesthood, than he found himself overtaken and overpowered by an
extraordinary religious fervour and by a desire for prayer and discipline.
Never had a boy left home more zealous, more desirous to excel in
piety and to strive for the honour and glory of the Church.
An expression of anger, almost of hatred, passed over Father Oliver's
face, and he turned from the lake and walked a few yards rapidly,
hoping to escape from memories of his folly; for he had made a great
fool of himself, no doubt. But, after all, he preferred his enthusiasms,
however exaggerated they might seem to him now, to the
commonplace--he could not call it wisdom--of those whom he had

taken into his confidence. It was foolish of him, no doubt, to have told
how he used to go out in a boat and measure the ground about Castle
Island, thinking to build himself a beehive hut out of the ruins. He
knew too little of the world at that time; he had no idea how incapable
the students were of understanding anything outside the narrow
interests of an ecclesiastical career. Anyhow, he had had the
satisfaction of having beaten them in all the examinations; and if he had
cared to go in for advancement, he could have easily got ahead of them
all, for he had better brains and better interest than any of them. When
he last saw that ignorant brute Peter Fahy, Fahy asked him if he still put
pebbles in his shoes. It was to Fahy he had confided the cause of his
lameness, and Fahy had told on him; he was ridiculously innocent in
those days, and he could still see them gathered about him, pretending
not to believe that he kept a cat-o'-nine-tails in his room, and scourged
himself at night. It was Tom Bryan who said that he wouldn't mind
betting a couple of shillings that Gogarty's whip wouldn't draw a squeal
from a pig on the roadside. The answer to that was: 'A touch will make
a pig squeal: you should have said an ass!' But at the moment he
couldn't think of an answer.
No doubt everyone looked on him as a ninny, and they persuaded him
to prove to them that his whip was a real whip by letting Tom Bryan do
the whipping for him. Tom Bryan was a rough fellow, who ought to
have been driving a plough; a ploughman's life was too peaceful an
occupation for him--a drover's life would have suited him best,
prodding his cattle along the road with a goad; it was said that was how
he maintained his authority in the parish. The remembrance of the day
he bared his back to that fellow was still a bitter one. With a gentle
smile he had handed the whip to Tom Bryan, the very smile which he
imagined the hermits of old time used to wear. The first blow had so
stunned him that he couldn't cry out, and this blow was followed by a
second which sent the blood flaming through his veins, and then by