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Updated: June 25, 2025
For the Parson, finding him intensely puzzled, had partially explained to him that morning. Questions of legitimacy, and any reflection on his mother, Boase had omitted for the time being, merely telling him that when he was grown up Cloom would be his because his father had willed it so.
Boase held out a thin hand to him, laying down the book he had been reading, after slipping a marker in the place. Ishmael saw it was a new book from the library. "Robert Elsmere" was the name upon its cover. "What good thing has happened?" asked Boase, watching Ishmael's face. "Padre, you are too clever; if you had lived a few centuries earlier you would certainly have been burned alive!
But what Lissa and Ruth did not yet realise as he did was that the day would come when children born in the new century would look upon them with a gentle pity. On the day the letter came from Nicky, nearly two years after he had gone away, Ishmael went over to see Boase and tell him the news.
He knew it, but not yet for him did the knowledge hold any peace rather it sent a chill of helplessness to his heart. He still wanted something in this world, and not in the next, to make the inner joy by which he lived. With autumn Boase died.
He was sitting in the parlour with Vassie, but his whole soul was with a letter he had had from Ireland telling of a disastrous case where the new Irish Land Act, of which even Dan had hoped great things, had failed more signally than usual. "Listen to this," he burst forth almost as soon as Boase was seated, "and tell me if that fool Government doesn't want hanging as high as those poor Fenians!
He went on and down to his house; but all the while he knew that this was not his real habitation, that the house Boase was building daily, stone by stone, was for him too the ultimate bourne, that house which, in some other dimension, only glimpsed here to the dazzling of the mind, is straightened by neither time nor place as we understand them.
He felt more alive because more conscious of himself and his surroundings than ever before, eager and ready to take up the remainder of his time at St. Renny. He stirred a little by the Parson's side. Boase brought his thought to an ending with the rest of the quotation: "So is everyone that is born of the Spirit...."
Boase came over after supper, and when Phoebe, piqued by a conversation which she could not share and what she resented still more by the efforts of the two men to include her in it, had gone upstairs, then Ishmael and the Parson sat and smoked and chatted, and for the first time all the past month lifted its deadweight and life seemed more as it had been in the old days.
To Boase and Vassie those two so different beings came the swift reflection "That would not be at all a bad thing. It would remove a danger." Killigrew was interested, as an onlooker, in the idea of the alliance his own words had suggested. Ishmael felt an irrational little pang.
On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon the grass of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Vassie's wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through the dark underground "rooms" of a dead people.
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