The Secret Scripture Read Free

perpetual spanner thrown into her works. For my mother never made miniature legends of her life, and was singularly without stories, though I am sure there were things there to tell as good as my father's.
    It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.
    My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.
    Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
     
    The principal room in our little house, while already of narrow dimensions, we shared with two large objects, viz. the aforementioned motorbike which had to be kept out of the rain. It lived in our living room a quiet life as one might say, my father being able from his chair idly to run a chamois leather over the chrome when he wished. The other object which I want to mention is the little cottage upright piano, which had been bequeathed him by a grateful widower, as my father had dug a hole for this man's wife at no charge, because the circumstances of the bereaved family had been straitened. So one summer night, soon after the burial, the piano had arrived on a donkey and cart, and was carried in with smiles and embarrassed happiness by the widower and his two sons, and placed in our tiny room. The piano had possibly never been worth a great sum, but it had a most beautiful tone for all that, and had never been played before it reached us, in as much as one could surmise that history from the state of the keys, which were pristine. There were scenes painted on the side panels, of places which were not Sligo as such, most likely being scenes of an imaginary Italy or the like, but might have been all the same, being of mountains and rivers, with shepherds and shepherdesses standing about with their patient sheep. My father, having grown up in his own father's ministry, was able to play this lovely instrument, and his delight as I have said was in the old operettas of the previous century. He considered Balfe a genius. As there was room for me beside him on the stool I soon by grace of my love for him and my own great joy in his ability began to pick up the rudiments of playing, and slowly progressed to some real accomplishment, without in any way feeling it was an effort or a trial.
    Then I could play for him as he stood out in the centre of the floor, such as it was, with his hand idly perchance on the seat of his motorbike, the other hand in his jacket like an Irish Napoleon, and sing with utmost perfection, or so it seemed to me, 'Marble Halls', or the other gems of his repertoire – and, for that matter, those little songs called Neapolitan, which of course were not as I thought in memory of Napoleon, but songs invented in the streets of Naples – songs now in exile in Sligo! His voice entered my head as a sort of honey, that lingered there potently, buzzingly, banishing all the fears of childhood. As the voice rose up, so did all of him, arms, whiskers, one foot swinging a little over the old carpet with its pattern of repeating dogs, his eyes brimming with a strange merriment. Even Napoleon might not have scorned him as a man of elevated qualities. At such moments he exhibited a most beautiful timbre in the quieter passages of songs that to this day I have never heard outmatched. Many fine singers made their way to Sligo when I was a young woman and sang