All that Swagger

Memory recaptures a song or two echoing wistfully through the generations
of Delacy in the voice of old Fearless Danny. He was wont to rune to
himself as he sat alone, thrust aside by his sons as childish, his eyes
glazed with absence--that retreat of the aged when time has wrung the
colours from the present and left the rose and green only on the distant
fields of youth.

"Oh, moi! Oh, moi!" he would ejaculate, conversing to himself. Rarely was
there an understanding listener. When there was, he would gaze backward
into what long ago had been the future, and belatedly indulge in
nostalgia. He would linger on the picture of his mother taking her
farewell of him, and his father lacking the courage to see young Danny
being picked up by the coach that was to bear him away for ever.

The wild Murrumbidgee sinking into the bunyip hole, and tumbling
therefrom into Delacy's Crossing, would vanish, the Shannon take its
place, graciously traversing its ancient plain by Limerick, the beauteous
city. The road ran by Sarsfield Bridge to old Ennis in County Clare, to
the ruined Abbey where the boys played, and to Clare Castle. The day
would be in May with the whinchats merry in the furze, the larks high in
the air, such a day as the Isle of Destiny knows, a cajoling day, a day
to caress the heart of a youth to water in the presence of a maid, and to
turn a maid's heart to a man; and the era was a hundred years from now,
for young Daniel Brian Robert M. Delacy, born in the year of Waterloo,
was stretching towards eighteen.

His home was on the rise by Ennis that looks north-east to the Slieve
Aughty Mountains, and north-west to the Aran Isles and the Atlantic,
which had expatriated or swallowed entirely so many Clare and Galway
lads. He stood in the road, not that he was at that date given to
meditation, but the ancient legendary of the scene, the acknowledged
presence of the fairies in the glens and raths, was as saturating to his
inner consciousness as the sun to his outer. The sunshine spread a
benediction full away to Kilrush and Liscannor Bay, to Kilkee and
Killaloe, to lilting Kildare and hilarious Kilkenny and Tipperary, to
Ennistymon and Crusheen, and Rathdrum and Carrickmore, to Enniskillen,
and Trillick and Letterkenny and Ballysodare, and Tara, and Tralee, and
Mallow, and Bantry, and Bandon. The darling loves and doves of names that
swell in the heart of Erin's inheritor, until he is thrappled! A presence
grown palpable through centuries of articulate myth and poesy had
nurtured young Delacy's spirit. He loved the open view of the thatched
white cabins on the treeless hillsides with the sociable roads across
them. Roads excited him, packed as they were with history, glamorous with
fable, with chivalry and romance and liberation in the way they ran
through the winds and rains of all the seasons of all the generations, a
foe to stagnation, a hostage to adventure.

He had a sense of deprivation that none of the green land was his. The
only soil he could dig his spade into was the paltry acreage of his
father's college, where there were prior rights of a playground for the
scholars, and a plot for the goat.