he had resigned himself to the prospect of never being married. But still he venerated human love, the marital love that brought these blocks and clods and smooth white curves to the studio of his schoolroom where he worked for years to shape each intractable lump into a young man or a young woman. Each finished form varied in degree of perfection. Most were rough, unprepossessing figures that the elements would go on fashioning long after Liam had released them to the heat and cold and storms of life. But Nora was special. No other work of his had looked so finished, so polished, so beautiful in form, in spirit, in the mysterious essence of soul that shines from that rare art that is divinely inspired.
Liam lavished more of his free time on Nora Carrick than he ever had on any other pupil. Often he would take his books up to the big farmhouse where Nora lived and give her private lessons at the old rosewood table in the dining room, while her parents sat by the fire in the kitchen. He realised he did this not just to help Nora but to spite her mother. He could not understand Caitlin anymore. She had devoted so much time and patience to the education of Padraig, the abandoned young boy from Scotland whom Caitlin’s father, Finn MacLir, had adopted as his son and who grew up to become a priest. She had even tried, though hardly with the same remarkable results, to instil some learning into the igneous skull of Michael Carrick. And yet she gave no time at all to her own daughter who was so quick to learn and so rewarding to teach.
‘You forget that Padraig and Michael had no formal schooling, Liam,’ Caitlin once said. ‘They needed a teacher—any teacher—who would help them. Nora doesn’t. She has you. And you are good. I couldn’t improve on what you are giving her.’ Caitlin’s gaze had drifted away for a moment to some vision recalled from the past and then returned to Liam’s serious but ardent face. ‘And things are different for me now. I don’t have the time I used to have. I’m a full-time housewife with a husband and a daughter to care for and work to do around the farm. I have no Mother Ross to help me now around the house. These are not easy times, Liam.’
Liam’s attentiveness to Nora’s education bore unexpected fruit. Against much opposition, he succeeded in having her appointed his assistant teacher at the small but growing school for Roman Catholic children in the village. Against the charge of Nora’s epilepsy raised by Father Hugh Devenny of Lisnaglass at a local school-board meeting in the county town of Ardross, Liam argued her intelligence, her first-hand knowledge of the children and their families, and her undoubted abilities as a teacher,
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Hellenic Canadian Literature 