The Star of the Sea Read Online Free PDF

embarking on the Star of the Sea , Merridith had locked up the house in which he and his father and grandfather had been born, shuttered up its shattered windows, closed it and locked it for the last time. He had handed the keys to the valuer from Galway and walked around the empty stables for a while. Not a single former tenant had turned up to see him off. He had waited until dusk but nobody had come.
    Accompanied by his bodyguard – the man had insisted – he had ridden out from Kingscourt to visit his father’s grave at Clifden, only to find that it had been desecrated again. The granite sea-angel had been smashed in two, the words ROTTIN BASTARD whitewashed across the tombstone, along with the emblem of those who had put them there. His grandfather’s grave and those of the ancestors had all been marked with the splattered badge of their loathing. Merridith’s own name appeared on several of the stones, and those ones, too, had been defaced. His mother’s tomb alone had not been touched, a pardoning which had merely made the despoliation around it seem starker. But looking at the scene, he had been able to feel nothing. Only the misspelled words had truly taken his attention. Did they mean that his father was rotten or rotting?
    He wondered about that now: the awful inadequacy of his response. And what precisely had they meant to say, these men who had ruined his father’s grave? Their symbol was an H enclosed in aheart, but what heart was it that could violate the dead? ‘Hibernian Defenders’, his bodyguard had explained; the name the local troublemakers gave to themselves. Another name they went by was ‘the Liable Men’, primarily because they dealt out liability; also they were gruesomely reliable in doing so. And Merridith had quietly pretended not to know these etymologies already, had feigned his usual interest in the customs of the indigenous, as though the constable had been enlightening him about jig steps or fairytales. Had they truly hated his father quite so much? What had he done to deserve their repugnance? Yes, he had been an inflexible landlord, in the latter years especially; that was undeniable. But so had most other landlords in Ireland, and in England too, and everywhere else: some far worse and many more cruel. Didn’t they know, these night-stalking mutilators, how much his father had tried to do for them? Couldn’t they understand he was a man of his time, a conservative by instinct as well as politics? That politics and instinct were often the same thing, in the pebbled fields of Galway, in the statued halls of Westminster. Probably in every other place, too. ‘Politics’ the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.
    For some reason Merridith found himself thinking about his children: a memory of his younger son as a baby, sobbing in the night with the pain of teething. The puppet-stuffed nursery in the London house. Stroking the child’s head. Holding his hand. A blackbird hopping on the rain-spattered windowsill. The tiny fingers tendrilling around his own, as though mutely to plead, ‘stay with me’. Like Christ in the garden. Watch with me one hour. The heartrending smallnesses we finally want. Strange thought that Merridith’s father had been a baby once. And in the minutes before he died he had seemed so again; that vast, indignant, iron-hearted seaman whose portrait hung in galleries all over the empire. He had reached out his frail, white hand to David Merridith and squeezed his thumb as though trying to break it. There was fear in his eyes; gleaming terror. And David Merridith had wanted to say, It’s all right. I’ll stay with you. Don’t be afraid. But he had not been able to say anything.
    As though waking from a sleep that has lasted too long, he realised the people around him were talking about the Famine.
    The Mail Agent was loudly contending with Dixon. ‘The landlords aren’t all bad, you know, dear boy.