We turn over now a score of those fateful pages on which Father Time keeps his monthly accounts with mankind, passing from sunlit June, with its hazy radiance lying softly upon smooth waters, to bleak and shrill February—the memorable February of 1867.
A gale had been blowing outside beyond the headlands all day, and by nightfall the minor waters of Dunmanus Bay had suffered such prolonged pulling and hauling and buffeting from their big Atlantic neighbors that they were up in full revolt, hurling themselves with thunderous roars of rage against the cliffs of their coast line, and drenching the darkness with scattered spray. The little hamlet of Muirisc, which hung to its low, nestling nook under the rocks in the very teeth of this blast, shivered, soaked to the skin, and crossed itself prayerfully as the wind shrieked like a banshee about its roofless gables and tower-walls and tore at the thatches of its clustered cabins.
The three nuns of the Hostage’s Tears, listening to the storm without, felt that it afforded an additional justification for the infraction of their rules which they were for this evening, by no means for the first time, permitting themselves. Religion itself rebelled against solitude on such a night.
Time had been when this convent, enlarged though it was by the piety of successive generations of early lords of Muirisc, still needed more room than it had to accommodate in comfort its host of inmates. But that time, alas! was now a musty tradition of bygone ages. Even before the great sectarian upheaval of the mid-Tudor period, the ancient family order of the Hostage’s Tears had begun to decline. I can’t pretend to give the reason. Perhaps the supply of The O’Mahony’s daughters fell off; possibly some obscure shift of fashion rendered marriage more attractive in their eyes. Only this I know, that when the Commissioners of Elizabeth, gleaning in the monastic stubble which the scythe of Henry had laid bare, came upon the nuns at Muirisc, whom the first sweep of the blade had missed, they found them no longer so numerous as they once had been. Ever since then the order had dwindled visibly. The three remaining ladies had, in their own extended cloistral career, seen the last habitable section of the convent fall into disuse and decay, until now only their own gaunt, stone-walled trio of cells, the school-room, the tiny chapel, and a chamber still known by the dignified title of the “reception hall,” were available for use.
Here it was that a great mound of peat sparkled and glowed on the hearth, under a capricious draught which now sucked upward with a whistling swoop whole clods of blazing turf—now, by a contradictory freak, half-filled the room with choking bog-smoke. Still, even when eyes were tingling and nostrils aflame, it was better to be here than outside, and better to have company than be alone.
Both propositions were shiningly clear to the mind of Corinac O’Daly, as he mixed a second round of punch, and, peering through the steam from his glass at the audience gathered by the hearth, began talking again. The three aged nuns, who had heard him talk ever since he was born, sat decorously together on a bench and watched him, and listened as attentively as if his presence were a complete novelty. Their chaplain, a snuffy, half-palsied little old man, Father Harrington to wit, dozed and blinked and coughed at the smoke in his chair by the fire as harmlessly as a house-cat on the rug. Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony, a plump and buxom widow in the late twenties, with a comely, stupid face, framed in little waves of black, crimped hair pasted flat to the skin, sat opposite the priest, glass in hand. Whenever the temptation to yawn became too strong, she repressed it by sipping at the punch.
“Anny student of the ancient Irish, or I might say Milesian charachter,” said O’Daly, with high, disputatious voice, “might discern in our present chief a remarkable proof of what the learned call a reversion of toypes. It’s thrue what you say, Mother Agnes, that he’s unlike and teetotally different from anny other O’Mahony of our knowledge in modhern times. But thin I ask mesilf, what’s the maning of this? Clearly, that he harks back on the ancesthral tree, and resimbles some O’Mahony we don’t know about! And this I’ve been to the labor of thracing out. Now attind to me! ’Tis in your riccords, that four ginerations afther your foundher, Diarmid of the Fine Steeds, there came an O’Mahony of Muirisc called Teige, a turbulent and timpistuous man, as his name in the chronicles, Teige Goarbh, would indicate. ’Tis well known that he viewed holy things with contimpt. ’Twas he that wint on to the very althar at Rosscarbery, in the chapel of St. Fachnau Mougah, or the hairy, and cudgeled wan of the daycons out of the place for the rayson that he stammered in his spache. ’Twas he that hung his bard, my ancestor of that period, up by the heels on a willow-tree, merely because he fell asleep over his punch, afther dinner, and let the rival O’Dugan bard stale his new harp from him, and lave a broken and disthressful old insthrumint in its place. Now there’s the rale ancestor of our O’Mahony. ’Tis as plain as the nose on your face. And—now I remimber—sure ’twas this same divil of a Teige Goarbh who was possessed to marry his own cousin wance removed, who’d taken vows here in this blessed house. ‘Marry me now,’ says he. ‘I’m wedded to the Lord,’ says she. ‘Come along out o’ that now,’ says he. ‘Not a step,’ says she. And thin, faith, what did the rebellious ruffian do but gather all the straw and weeds and wet turf round about, and pile ’em undernayth, and smoke the nuns out like a swarm o’ bees. Sure, that’s as like our O’Mahony now as two pays in a pod.”
As the little man finished, a shifty gust blew down the flue, and sent a darkling wave of smoke over the good people seated before the fire. They were too used to the sensation to do more than cough and rub their eyes. The mother-superior even smiled sternly through the smoke.
“Is your maning that O’Mahony is at present on the roof, striving to smoke us out?” she asked, with iron clad sarcasm.
“Awh, get along wid ye, Mother Agnes,” wheezed the little priest, from his carboniferous corner.
“Who would he be afther demanding in marriage here?”
O’Daly and the nuns looked at their aged and shaky spiritual director with dulled apprehension. He spoke so rarely, and had a mind so far removed from the mere vanities and trickeries of decorative. conversation, that his remark puzzled them. Then, as if through a single pair of eyes, they saw that Mrs. Fergus had straightened herself in her chair, and was simpering and preening her head weakly, like a conceited parrot.
The mother-superior spoke sharply.
“And do you flatther yoursilf, Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony, that the head of our house is blowing smoke down through the chimney for you?” she asked. “Sure, if he was, thin, ’twould be a lamint-able waste of breath. Wan puff from a short poipe would serve to captivate you!”
Cormac O’Daly made haste to bury his nose in his glass. Long acquaintance with the attitude of the convent toward the marital tendencies of Mrs. Fergus had taught him wisdom. It was safe to sympathize with either side of the long-standing dispute when the other side was unrepresented. But when the nuns and Mrs. Fergus discussed it together, he sagaciously held his peace.
“Is it sour grapes you’re tasting, Agnes O’Mahony?” put in Mrs. Fergus, briskly. In new matters, hers could not be described as an alert mind. But in this venerable quarrel she knew by heart every retort, innuendo and affront which could be used as weapons, and every weak point in the other’s armor.
“Sour grapes! me!” exclaimed the mother-superior, with as lively an effect of indignation as if this rejoinder had not been flung in her face every month or so for the past dozen years. “D’ye harken to that, Sister Blanaid and Sister Ann! It’s me, after me wan-and-fifty years of life in religion, that has this ojus imputation put on me! Whisht now! don’t demane yourselves by replyin’! We’ll lave her to the condimnation of her own conscience.”
The two nuns had made no sign of breaking their silence before this admonition came, and they gazed now at the peat fire placidly. But the angered mother-superior ostentatiously took up her beads, and began whispering to herself, as if her thoughts were already millions of miles away from her antagonist with the crimped hair and the vacuous smile.
“It’s persecuting me she’s been these long years back,” Mrs. Fergus said to the company at large, but never taking her eyes from the mother-superior’s flushed face; “and all because I married me poor desaysed husband, instead of taking me vows under her.”
“Ah, that poor desaysed husband!” Mother Agnes put in, with an ironical drawl in the words. “Sure, whin he was aloive, me ears were just worn out with listening to complaints about him! Ah, thin! ’Tis whin we’re dead that we’re appreciated!”
“All because I married,” pursued Mrs. Fergus, doggedly, “and wouldn’t come and lock mesilf up here, like a toad in the turf, and lave me brothers free to spind the money in riot and luxurious livin’. May be, if God’s will had putt a squint on me, or given me shoulders a twist like Danny at the fair, or otherwise disfigured me faytures, I’d have been glad to take vows. Mortial plainness is a great injucement to religion.”
The two nuns scuffled their feet on the stone floor and scowled at the fire. Mother Agnes put down her beads, and threw a martyr-like glance upward at the blackened oak roof.
“Praise be to the saints,” she said, solemnly, “that denied us the snare of mere beauty without sinse, or piety, or respect for old age, or humility, or politeness, or gratitude, or—”
“Very well, thin, Agnes O’Mahony,” broke in Mrs. Fergus, promptly. “If ye’ve that opinion of me, it’s not becomin’ that I should lave me daughter wid ye anny longer. I’ll take her meself to Kenmare next week—the ride over the mountains will do me nervous system a power o’ good—and there she’ll learn to be a lady.”
Cormac O’Daly lifted his head and set down his glass. He knew perfectly well that with this familiar threat the dispute always came to an end. Indeed, all the parties to the recent contention now of their own accord looked at him, and resettled themselves in their seats, as if to notify him that his turn had come round again.
“I’m far from denying,” he said, as if there had been no interruption at all, “that our O’Mahony is possessed of qualities which commind him to the vulgar multichude. It’s thrue that he rejewced rints all over the estate, and made turbary rights and the carrigeens as free as wather, and yet more than recouped himself by opening the copper mines beyant Ardmahon, and laysing thim to a company for a foine royalty. It’s thrue he’s the first O’Mahony for manny a gineration who’s paid expinses, let alone putting money by in the bank.”
“And what more would ye ask?” said Mrs. Fergus. “Sure, whin he’s done all this, and made fast frinds with every man, women and child roundabout into the bargain, what more would ye want?”
“Ah, what’s money, Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony,” remonstrated O’Daly, “and what’s popularity wid the mere thoughtless peasanthry, if ye’ve no ancesthral proide, no love and reverence for ancient family thraditions, no devout desoire to walk in the paths your forefathers trod?”
“Faith, thim same forefathers trod thim with a highly unsteady step, thin, bechune oursilves,” commented Mrs. Fergus.
“But their souls were filled with blessid piety,” said Mother Agnes, gravely. “If they gave small thought to the matter of money, and loike carnal disthractions, they had open hands always for the needs of the church, and of the convint here, and they made holy indings, every soul of ’em.”
“And they respected the hereditary functions of their bards,” put in O’Daly, with a conclusive air.
At the moment, as there came a sudden lull in the tumult of the storm outside, those within the reception-room heard a distinct noise of knocking, which proceeded from beneath the stone-flags at their feet. Three blows were struck, with a deadened thud as upon wet wood, and then the astounded listeners heard a low, muffled sound, strangely like a human voice, from the same depths.
The tempest’s furious screaming rose again without, even as they listened. All six crossed themselves mechanically, and gazed at one another with blanched faces.
“It is the Hostage,” whispered the mother-superior, glancing impressively around, and striving to dissemble the tremor which forced itself upon her lips. “For wan-and-fifty years I’ve been waiting to hear the sound of him. My praydecessor, Mother Ellen, rest her sowl, heard him wance, and nixt day the roof of the church fell in. Be the same token, some new disasther is on fut for us, now.”
Cormac O’Daly was as frightened as the rest, but, as an antiquarian, he could not combat the temptation to talk.
“’Tis now just six hundred and seventy years,” he began, in a husky voice, “since Diarmid of the Fine Steeds founded this convint, in expiation of his wrong to young Donal, Prince of Connaught. ’Twas the custom thin for the kings and great princes in Ireland to sind their sons as hostages to the palaces of their rivals, to live there as security, so to spake, for their fathers’ good behavior and peaceable intintions. ’Twas in this capacity that young Donal O’Connor came here, but Diarmid thrated him badly—not like his father’s son at all—and immured him in a dungeon convanient in the rocks. His mother’s milk was in the lad, and he wept for being parted from her till his tears filled the earth, and a living well sprung from thim the day he died. So thin Diarmid repinted and built a convint; and the well bubbled forth healing wathers so that all the people roundabout made pilgrimages to it, and with their offerings the O’Mahonys built new edifices till ’twas wan of the grandest convints in Desmond; and none but fay-males of the O’Mahony blood saying prayers for the sowl of the Hostage.”
The nuns were busy with their beads, and even Mrs. Fergus bent her head. At last it was Mother Agnes who spoke, letting her rosary drop.
“’Twas whin they allowed the holy well to be choked up and lost sight of among fallen stones that throuble first come to the O’Mahonys,” she said solemnly. “’Tis mesilf will beg The O’Mahony, on binded knees, to dig it open again. Worse luck, he’s away to Cork or Waterford with his boat, and this storm’ll keep him from returning, till, perhaps, the final disasther falls on us and our house, and he still absinting himsilf. Wirra! What’s that?”
The mother-superior had been forced to lift her voice, in concluding, to make it distinct above the hoarse roar of the elements outside. Even as she spoke, a loud crackling noise was heard, followed by a crash of masonry which deafened the listeners’ ears and shook the walls of the room they sat in.
With a despairing groan, the three nuns fell to their knees and bowed their vailed heads over their beads.
The good people of Muirisc had shut themselves up in their cabins, on this inclement evening of which I have spoken, almost before the twilight faded from the storm-wrapt outlines of the opposite coast. If any adventurous spirit of them all had braved the blast, and stood out on the cliff to see night fall in earnest upon the scene, perhaps between wild sweeps of drenching and blinding spray, he might have caught sight of a little vessel, with only its jib set, plunging and laboring in the trough of the Atlantic outside. And if the spectacle had met his eyes, unquestionably his first instinct would have been to mutter a prayer for the souls of the doomed men upon this fated craft.
On board the Hen Hawk a good many prayers had already been said. The small coaster seemed, to its terrified crew, to have shrunk to the size of a walnut shell, so wholly was it the plaything of the giant waters which heaved and tumbled about it, and shook the air with the riotous tumult of their sport. There were moments when the vessel hung poised and quivering upon the very ridge of a huge mountain of sea, like an Alpine climber who shudders to find himself balanced upon a crumbling foot of rock between two awful depths of precipice; then would come the breathless downward swoop into howling space and the fierce buffeting of ton-weight blows as the boat staggered blindly at the bottom of the abyss; then again the helpless upward sweep, borne upon the shoulders of titan waves which reared their vast bulk into the sky, the dizzy trembling upon the summit, and the hideous plunge—a veritable nightmare of torture and despair.
Five men lay or knelt on deck huddled about the mainmast, clinging to its hoops and ropes for safety. Now and again, when the vessel was lifted to the top of the green walls of water, they caught vague glimpses of the distant rocks, darkling through the night mists, which sheltered Muirisc, their home—and knew in their souls that they were never to reach that home alive. The time for praying was past. Drenched to the skin, choked with the salt spray, nearly frozen in the bitter winter cold, they clung numbly to their hold, and awaited the end.
One of them strove to gild the calamity with cheerfulness, by humming and groaning the air of a “come-all-ye” ditty, the croon of which rose with quaint persistency after the crash of each engulfing wave had passed. The others were, perhaps, silently grateful to him—but they felt that if Jerry had been a born Muirisc man, he could not have done it.
At the helm, soaked and gaunt as a water-rat, with his feet braced against the waist-rails, and the rudder-bar jammed under his arm and shoulder, was a sixth man—the master and owner of the Hen Hawk. The strain upon his physical strength, in thus by main force holding the tiller right, had for hours been unceasing—and one could see by his dripping face that he was deeply wearied. But sign of fear there was none.
Only a man brought up in the interior of a country, and who had come to the sea late in life, would have dared bring this tiny cockle-shell of a coaster into such waters upon such a coast. The O’Ma-hony might himself have been frightened had he known enough about navigation to understand his present danger. As it was, all his weariness could nor destroy the keen sense of pleasurable excitement he had in the tremendous experience. He forgot crew and cargo and vessel itself in the splendid zest of this mad fight with the sea and the storm. He clung to the tiller determinedly, bowing his head to the rush of the broken waves when they fell, and bending knees and body this way and that to answer the wild tossings and sidelong plung-ings of the craft—always with a light as of battle in his gray eyes. It was ever so much better than fighting with mere men.
The gloom of twilight ripened into pitchy darkness, broken only by momentary gleams of that strange, weird half-light which the rushing waves generate in their own crests of foam. The wind rose in violence when the night closed in, and the vessel’s timbers creaked in added travail as huge seas lifted and hurled her onward through the black chaos toward the rocks. The men by the mast could every few minutes discern the red lights from the cottage windows of Muirisc, and shuddered anew as the glimmering sparks grew nearer.
Four of these five unhappy men were Muirisc born, and knew the sea as they knew their own mothers. The marvel was that they had not revolted against this wanton sacrifice of their lives to the whim or perverse obstinacy of an ignorant landsman, who a year ago had scarcely known a rudder from a jib-boom. They themselves dimly wondered at it now, as they strained their eyes for a glimpse of the fatal crags ahead. They had indeed ventured upon some mild remonstrance, earlier in the day, while it had still been possible to set the mainsail, and by long tacks turn the vessel’s course. But The O’Mahony had received their suggestion with such short temper and so stern a refusal, that there had been nothing more to be said—bound to him as Muirisc men to their chief, and as Fenians to their leader, as they were. And soon thereafter it became too late to do aught but scud bare-poled before the gale; and now there was nothing left but to die.
They could hear at last, above the shrill clamor of wind and rolling waves, the sullen roar of breakers smashing against the cliffs. They braced themselves for the great final crash, and muttered fragments of the Litany of the Saints between clenched teeth.
A prodigious sea grasped the vessel and lifted it to a towering height, where for an instant it hung trembling. Then with a leap it made a sickening dive down, down, till it was fairly engulfed in the whirling floods which caught it and swept wildly over its decks. A sinister thrill ran through the stout craft’s timbers, and upon the instant came the harsh grinding sound of its keel against the rocks. The men shut their eyes.
A dreadful second—and lo! the Hen Hawk, shaking herself buoyantly like a fisher-fowl emerging after a plunge, floated upon gently rocking waters—with the hoarse tumult of storm and breakers comfortably behind her, and at her sides only the sighing-harp music of the wind in the sea-reeds.
“Hustle now, an’ git out your anchor!” called out the cheerful voice of The O’Mahony, from the tiller.
The men scrambled from their knees as in a dream. They ran out the chain, reefed the jib, and then made their way over the flush deck aft, slapping their arms for warmth, still only vaguely realizing that they were actually moored in safety, inside the sheltered salt-water marsh, or muirisc, which gave their home its name.
This so-called swamp was at high tide, in truth, a very respectable inlet, which lay between the tongue of arable land on which the hamlet was built and the high jutting cliffs of the coast to the south. Its entrance, a stretch of water some forty yards in width, was over a bar of rock which at low tide could only be passed by row-boats. At its greatest daily depth, there was not much water to spare under the forty-five tons of the Hen Hawk. She had been steered now in utter darkness, with only the scattered and confusing lights of the houses to the left for guidance, unerringly upon the bar, and then literally lifted and tossed over it by the great rolling wall of breakers. She lay now tossing languidly on the choppy waters of the marsh, as if breathing hard after undue exertion—secure at last behind the cliffs.
The O’Mahony slapped his arms in turn, and looked about him. He was not in the least conscious of having performed a feat which any yachtsman in British waters would regard as incredible.
“Now, Jerry,” he said, calmly, “you git ashore and bring out the boat. You other fellows open the hatchway, an’ be gittin’ the things out. Be careful about your candle down-stairs. You know why. It won’t do to have a light up here on deck. Some of the women might happen to come out-doors an see us.”
Without a word, the crew, even yet dazed at their miraculous escape, proceeded to carry out his orders. The O’Mahony bit from his plug a fresh mouthful of tobacco, and munched it meditatively, walking up and down the deck in the darkness, and listening to the high wind howling overhead.
The Hen Hawk had really been built at Barnstable, a dozen years before, for the Devon fisheries, but she did not look unlike those unwieldy Dutch boats which curious summer visitors watch with unfailing interest from the soft sands of Scheveningen.
Her full-flushed deck had been an afterthought, dating back to the time when her activities were diverted from the fishing to the carrying industry. The O’Mahony had bought her at Cork, ostensibly for use in the lobster-canning enterprise which he had founded at Muirisc. Duck-breasted, squat and thick-lined, she looked the part to perfection.
The men were busy now getting out from the hold below a score of small kegs, each wrapped in oil skin swathings, and, after these, more than a score of long, narrow wooden cases, which, as they were passed up the little gangway from the glow of candlelight into the darkness, bore a gloomy resemblance to coffins. An hour passed before the empty boat returned from shore, having landed its finishing load, and the six men, stiff and chilled, clumsily swung themselves over the side of the vessel into it.
“Sure, it’s a new layse of life, I’m beginnin’,” murmured one of them, Dominic by name, as he clambered out upon the stone landing-place. “It’s dead I was intoirely—an’ restricted agin, glory be to the Lord!”
“Sh-h! You shall have some whisky to make a fresh start on when we’re through,” said The O’Mahony. “Jerry, you run ahead an’ open the side door. Don’t make any noise. Mrs. Sullivan’s got ears that can hear grass growin’. We’ll follow on with the things.”
The carrying of the kegs and boxes across the village common to the castle, in which the master bore his full share of work, consumed nearly another hour. Some of the cottage lights ceased to burn. Not a soul stirred out of doors.
The entrance opened by Jerry was a little postern door, access to which was gained through the deserted and weed-grown church-yard, and the possible use of which was entirely unsuspected by even the housekeeper, let alone the villagers at large. The men bore their burdens through this, traversing a long, low-arched passage-way, built entirely of stone and smelling like an ancient tomb. Thence their course was down a precipitous, narrow stairway, winding like the corkscrew stairs of a tower, until, at a depth of thirty feet or more, they reached a small square chamber, the air of which was mustiness itself. Here a candle was fastened in a bracket, and the men put down their loads. Here, too, it was that Jerry, when the last journey had been made, produced a bottle and glasses and dispensed his master’s hospitality in raw spirits, which the men gulped down without a whisper about water.
“Mind!—day after to-morrow; five o’clock in the morning, sharp!” said The O’Mahony, in admonitory tones. Then he added, more softly: “Jest take it easy to-morrow; loaf around to suit yourselves, so long’s you keep sober. You’ve had a pritty tough day of it Good-night. Jerry’n me’ll do the rest. Jest pull the door to when you go out.”
With answering “Good nights,” and a formal hand-shake all around, the four villagers left the room. Their tired footsteps were heard with diminishing distinctness as they went up the stairs.
Jerry turned and surveyed his master from head to foot by the light of the candle on the wall.
“O’Mahony,” he said, impressively, “you’re a divil, an’ no mistake!”
The other put the bottle to his mouth first. Then he licked his lips and chuckled grimly.
“Them fellows was scared out of their boots, wasn’t they? An’ you, too, eh?” he asked.
“Well, sir, you know it as well as I, the lives of the lot of us would have been high-priced at a thruppenny-bit.”
“Pshaw, man! You fellows don’t know what fun is. Why, she was safe as a house every minute. An’ here I was, goin’ to compliment you on gittin’ through the hull voyage without bein’ sick once—thought, at last, I was really goin’ to make a sailor of you.”
“Egor, afther to-day I’ll believe I’ve the makin’ of annything under the sun in me—or on top of it, ayther. But, sure, sir, you’ll not deny ’twas timptin’ providence saints’ good-will to come in head over heels under wather, the way we did?”
“We had to be here—that’s all,” said The O’Mahony, briefly. “I’ve got to meet a man tomorrow, at a place some distance from here, sure pop; and then there’s the big job on next day.” Jerry said no more, and The O’Mahony took the candle down from the iron ring in the wall.
“D’ye know, I noticed somethin’ cur’ous in the wall out on the staircase here as we come down?” he said, bearing the light before him as he moved to the door. “It’s about a dozen steps up. Here it is! What d’ye guess that might a-been?”
The O’Mahony held the candle close to the curved wall, and indicated with his free hand a couple of regular and vertical seams in the masonry, about two feet apart, and nearly a man’s height in length.
“There’s a door there, or I’m a Dutchman,” he said, lifting and lowering the light in his scrutiny.
The mediæval builders could have imagined no sight more weird than that of the high, fantastic shadows thrown upon the winding, well-like walls by this drenched and saturnine figure, clad in oilskins instead of armor, and peering into their handiwork with the curiosity of a man nurtured in a log-cabin.
“Egor, would it be a dure?” exclaimed the wondering Jerry.
His companion handed the candle to him, and took from his pocket a big jack-knife—larger, if anything, than the weapon which had been left under the window of the little farm-house at Five Forks. He ran the large blade up and down the two long, straight cracks, tapping the stonework here and there with the butt of the handle afterward. Finally, after numerous experiments, he found the trick—a bolt to be pushed down by a blade inserted not straight but obliquely—and a thick, iron-bound door, faced with masonry, but with an oaken lining, swung open, heavily and unevenly, upon some concealed pivots.
The O’Mahony took the light once more, thrust it forward to make sure of his footing, and then stepped over the newly-discovered threshold, Jerry close at his heels. They pushed their way along a narrow and evil-smelling passage, so low that they were forced to bend almost double. Suddenly, after traversing this for a long distance, their path was blocked by another door, somewhat smaller than the other. This gave forth a hollow sound when tested by blows.
“It ain’t very thick,” said The O’Mahony. “I’ll put my shoulder against it. I guess I can bust her open.”
The resistance was even less than he had anticipated. One energetic shove sufficed; the door flew back with a swift splintering of rotten wood. The O’Mahony went stumbling sidelong into the darkness as the door gave way. At the moment a strange, rumbling sound was heard at some remote height above them, and then a crash nearer at hand, the thundering reverberation of which rang with loud echoes through the vault-like passage. The concussion almost put out the candle, and Jerry noted that the hand which he instinctively put out to shield the flame was trembling.
“Show a light in here, can’t ye?” called out The O’Mahony from the black obscurity beyond the broken door. “Sounds as if the hull darned castle ’d been blown down over our heads.”
Jerry timorously advanced, candle well out in front of him. Its small radiance served dimly to disclose what seemed to be a large chamber, or even hall, high-roofed and spacious. Its floor of stone flags was covered with dry mold. The walls were smoothed over with a gray coat of plastering, whole patches of which had here and there fallen, and more of which tumbled even now as they looked. They saw that this plastering had been decorated by zigzag, saw-toothed lines in three or four colors, now dulled and in places scarcely discernible. The room was irregularly shaped. At its narrower end was a big, roughly built fireplace, on the hearth of which lay ashes and some charred bits of wood, covered, like the stone itself, by a dry film of mold. The O’Mahony held the candle under the flue. The way in which the flame swayed and pointed itself showed that the chimney was open.
Cooking utensils, some of metal, some of pottery, but all alike of strange form, were bestowed on the floor on either side of the hearth. There was a single wooden chair, with a high, pointed back, standing against the wall, and in front of this lay a rug of cowskin, the reddish hair of which came off at the touch. Beside this chair was a low, oblong wooden chest, with a lifting-lid curiously carved, and apparently containing nothing but rolls of parchment and leather-bound volumes.
At the other and wider end of the room was an archway built in the stone, and curtained by hangings of thick, mildewed cloth. The O’Mahony drew these aside, and Jerry advanced with the light.
In a little recess, and reaching from side to side of the arched walls, was built a bed of oaken beams, its top the height of a man’s middle. Withered and faded straw lay piled on the wood, and above this both thick cloth similar to the curtains and finer fabrics which looked like silk. The candle shook in Jerry’s hand, and came near to falling, at the discovery which followed.
On the bed lay stretched the body of a bearded and tonsured man, clad in a long, heavy, dark woolen gown, girt at the waist with a leathern thong—as strangely dried and mummified as are the dead preserved in St. Michan’s vaults at Dublin or in the Bleikeller of the Dom at Bremen. The shriveled, tan-colored face bore a weird resemblance to that of the hereditary bard.
The O’Mahony looked wonderingly down upon this grim spectacle, the while Jerry crossed himself.
“Guess there won’t be much use of callin’ a doctor for him,” said the master, at last.
Then he backed away, to let the curtains fall, and yawned.
“I’m about tuckered out,” he said, stretching his arms. “Let’s go up now an’ take somethin’ warm, and git to bed. We’ll keep mum about this place. P’rhaps—I shouldn’t wonder—it might come in handy for O’Daly.”
The sun was shining brightly in a clear sky next morning, when the people of Muirisc finally got up out of bed, and, still rubbing their eyes, strolled forth to note the ravages of last night’s storm, and talk with one another about it.
There was much to marvel at and discuss at length in garrulous groups before the cottage doors. One whole wing of the ancient convent structure—that which tradition ascribed to the pious building fervor of Cathal an Diomuis, or “the Haughty”—had been thrown down during the night, and lay now a tumbled mass of stones and timber piled in wild disorder upon the débris of previous ruins. But inasmuch as the fallen building had long been roofless and disused, and its collapse meant only another added layer of chaos in the deserted convent-yard, Muirisc did not worry its head much about it, and even yawned in Cormac O’Daly’s face as he wandered from one knot of gossips to another, relating legends about Cathal the Proud.
What interested them considerably more was the report, confirmed now by O’Daly himself, that just before the crash came, six people in the reception hall of the convent had distinctly heard the voice of the Hostage from the depths below the cloistral building. Everybody in Muirisc knew all about the Hostage. They had been, so to speak, brought up with him. Prolonged familiarity with the pathetic story of his death in exile, here at Muirisc, and constant contact with his name as perpetuated in the title of their unique convent, made him a sort of oldest inhabitant of the place. Their lively imaginations now quickly built up and established the belief that he was heard to complain, somewhere under the convent, once every fifty years. Old Ellen Dumphy was able to fix the period with exactness because when the mysterious sound was last heard she was a young woman, and had her face bound up, and was almost “disthracted wid the sore teeth.”
But most interesting of all was the fact that there, before their eyes, riding easily upon the waters of the Muirisc, lay the Hen Hawk, as peacefully and safely at anchor as if no gale had ever thundered upon the cliffs outside. The four men of her crew, when they made their belated appearance in the morning sunlight out-of-doors, were eagerly questioned, and they told with great readiness and a flowering wealth of adjectives the marvelous story of how The O’Mahony aimed her in pitch darkness at the bar, and hurled her over it at precisely the psychological moment, with just the merest scraping of her keel. To the seafaring senses of those who stood now gazing at the vessel there was more witchcraft in this than in the subterranean voice of the Hostage even.
“Ah, thin, ’tis our O’Mahony’s the grand divil of a man!” they murmured, admiringly.
No work was to be expected, clearly, on the day after such an achievement as this. The villagers stood about, and looked at the squat coaster, snugly raising and sinking with the lazy movement of the tide, and watched for the master of Muirisc to show himself. They had never before been conscious of such perfect pride in and affection for this strange Americanized chieftain of theirs. By an unerring factional instinct, they felt that this apotheosis of The O’Mahony in their hearts involved the discomfiture of O’Daly and the nuns, and they let the hereditary bard feel it, too.
“Ah, now, Cormac O’Daly,” one of the women called out to the poet, as he hung, black-visaged and dejected, upon the skirts of the group, “tell me man, was it anny of yer owld Diarmids and Cathals ye do be perplexin’ us wid that wud a-steered that boat beyond over the bar at black midnight, wid a gale outside fit to blow mountains into the say? Sure, it’s not botherin’ his head wid books, or delutherin’ his moind wid ancestral mummeries, or wearyin’ the bones an’ marrow out of the saints wid attendin’ their business instead of his own, that our O’Mahony do be after practicin’.”
The bard opened his lips to reply. Then the gleam of enjoyment in the woman’s words which shone from all the faces roundabout, dismayed him. He shook his head, and walked away in silence. Meanwhile The O’Mahony, after a comfortable breakfast, and a brief consultation with Jerry, had put on his hat and strolled out through the pretentious arched doorway of his tumble-down abode. From the outer gate he saw the clustered villagers upon the wharf, and guessed what they were saying and thinking about him and his boat. He smiled contentedly to himself, and lighted a cigar. Then, sucking this with gravity, hands in pockets and hat well back on head, he turned and sauntered across the turreted corner of his castle into the ancient church-yard, which lay between it and the convent. The place was one crowded area of mortuary wreckage—flat tombstones sunken deep into the earth; monumental tablets, once erect, now tipping at every crazy angle; pre-historic, weather-beaten runic crosses lying broken and prone; more modern and ambitious sarcophagi of brick and stone, from which sides or ends had fallen away, revealing to every eye their ghostly contents; the ground covered thickly with nettles and umbrageous weeds, under which the unguided foot continually encountered old skulls and human bones—a grave-yard such as can be seen nowhere in the world save in western Ireland.
The O’Mahony picked his way across this village Golgotha, past the ruins of the ancient church, and into the grounds to the rear of the convent buildings, clambering as he went over whole series of tumbled masonry heaped in weed-grown ridges, until he stood upon the edge of the havoc wrought by this latest storm.
No rapt antiquary ever gazed with more eagerness upon the remains of a pre-Aryan habitation than The O’Mahony now displayed in his scrutiny of the destruction worked by last night’s storm, and of the group of buildings its fury had left unscathed. He took a paper from his pocket, and compared a rude drawing upon it with various points in the architecture about him which he indicated with nods of the head. People watching him might have differed as to whether he was a student of antiquities, a builder or an insurance agent. Probably none would have guessed that he was striving to identify some one of the numerous chimneys-before him with a certain fireplace which he knew of, five-and-twenty feet underground.
As he stood thus, absorbed in calculation, he felt a little hand steal into his big palm, and nestle there confidingly. His face put on a pleased smile, even before he bent it toward the intruder.
“Hello, Skeezucks, is that you?” he said, gently. “Well, they’ve gone an’ busted your ole convent up the back, here, in great shape, ain’t they?”
Every one of the score of months that had passed since these two first met, seemed to have added something to the stature of little Kate O’Mahony. She had grown, in truth, to be a tall girl for her age—and an erect girl, holding her head well in air, into the bargain. Her face had lost its old shy, scared look—at least in this particular company. It was filling out into the likeness of a pretty face, with a pleasant glow of health upon the cheeks, and a happy twinkle in the big, dark eyes.
For answer, the child lifted and swung his hand, and playfully butted her head sidewise against his waist.
“’Tis I that wouldn’t mind if it all came down,” she said, in the softest West Carbery brogue the ear could wish.
“What!” exclaimed the other, in mock consternation. “Well, I never! Why, here’s a gal that don’t want to go to school, or learn now to read an’ cipher or nothin’! P’r’aps you’d ruther work in the lobster fact’ry?”
“No, I’d sail in the boat with you,” said Kate, promptly and with confidence.
The O’Mahony laughed aloud.
“I guess you’d a got your fill of it yisterday, sis,” he remarked.
“It’s that I’d have liked best of all,” she pursued. “Ah! take me with you, O’Mahony, whin next the waves are up and the wind’s tearin’ fit to bust itsilf. I’ll not die till I’ve been out in the thick of it, wance for all.”
“Why, gal alive, you’d a-be’n smashed into sausage-meat!” chuckled the man. “Still, you’re right, though. They ain’t nothin’ else in the world fit to hold a candle to it. Egad! Some time I will take you, sis!”
The child spoke more seriously:
“Sure, we’re the O’Mahonys of the Coast of White Foam, according to O’Heerin’s old verse, and it’s in my blood as well as yours.”
“Right you are, sis!” he responded, smiling, as he added under his breath: “an’ mebbe a trifle more.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he changed the subject.
“See here; you’re up on these things—in fact, they don’t seem to learn you anything else—hain’t I heerd O’Daly tell about the old O’Mahonys luggin’ round a box full o’ saints’ bones when they went on a rampage, to sort o’ give ’em luck! I got to thinkin’ about it last night after I went to bed, but I couldn’t jest git it straight in my head.”
“It’s the cathach” (she pronounced it caha) “you mane,” Kate answered. “Sometimes it contained bones, but more often ’twas a crozieror a holy book from the saint’s own pen, or a part of his vest-mints.”
“No; I like the bones notion best," said The O’Mahony. “There’s something substantial an’ solid about bones. If you’ve got a genuine saint’s bones, it’s a thing he’s bound to take an interest in, an’ see through; whereas, them other things—his books an’ his clo’se an’ so on—why, he may a-been sick an’ tired of ’em years ’fore he died.”
It was the girl’s turn to laugh.
“It’s a strange new fit of piety ye’ve on yeh, O’Mahony,” she said, with the familiarity of a spoiled pet. “Sure, when I tell the nuns, they’ll be lookin’ to see you build up a whole foine new convint for ‘em without delay.”
“No; I’m savin’ that till you git to be the boss nun,” said The O’Mahony, dryly, and with a grin.
“’Tis older than Methusalem ye’ll be thin!” asked the child, laughingly. And with that she seized his hand once more and dragged him forward to a closer inspection of the ruins.
Some hours later, having been driven across country to Dunmanway by Malachy, and thence taken the local train onward, The O’Mahony found himself in the station at Ballineen, with barely time enough to hurry across the tracks and leap into the train which was already starting westward. In this he was borne back over the road he had just traversed, until a stop was made at Manch station. The O’Mahony alighted here, much pleased with the strategy which made him appear to have come from the east. He took an outside car, and was driven some two miles into the bleak, mountainous country beyond Toome, to a wayside inn known as Kearney’s Retreat. Here he dismounted, bidding the carman solace himself with drink, and wait.
Entering the tavern, he paused at the bar and asked for two small bottles of porter to be poured in one glass. Two or three men were loitering about the room, and he spoke just loud enough to make sure that all might hear him. Then, having drained the glass, and stood idly conversing for a minute or two with the woman at the bar, he made his way through a side door into the adjoining ball alley, where some young fellows of the neighborhood chanced to be engaged in a game.
He stood apart, watching their play, for only a few moments. Then one of the men whom he had seen but not looked closely at in the bar, came up to him, and said from behind, in an interrogative whisper:
“Captain Harrier, I believe?”
“Yes,” said The O’Mahony, “Captain Harrier—” with a vague notion of having heard that voice before.
Then he turned, and in the straggling roof-light of the alley beheld the other’s face. It taxed to the utmost every element of self-possession in him to choke down the exclamation which sprang to his lips.
The man before him was Linsky!—Linsky risen from the dead, with the scarred gash visible on his throat, and the shifty blue-green eyes still bloodshot, and set with reddened eyelids in a freckled face.
“Yes—Captain—Harrier,” he repeated, lingering upon each word, as his brain fiercely strove to assert mastery over amazement, apprehension and perplexity.
The new-comer looked full into the The O’Mahony’s face without any sign whatever of recognition.
“Thin I’m to place mesilf at your disposal,” he said, briefly. “You know more of what’s in the air than I do, no doubt. Everything is arranged, I hear, for rising in both Cork an’ Tralee to-morrow, an’ in manny places in both counties besides. Officially, however, I know nothing of this—an’ have no right to know. I’m just to put mysilf at your command, and deliver anny messages you desire to sind to other cinters in your district. Here’s me papers.”
The O’Mahony barely glanced at the inclosures of the envelope handed him. They took the familiar form of a business letter of introduction, and a commercial contract, signed by a firm-name which to the uninitiated bore no significance. He noted that the name given was “Major Lynch.” He observed also, with satisfaction, that his hand, as it held the papers, was entirely steady. “Everybody’s been notified,” he said, after a time, instinctively assuming a slight hoarseness of speech. “I’ve been all over the ground, myself. You can meet me—let’s see—say at the bottom of the black rock jest overlookin’ the marteller tower at——at eleven o’clock, sharp, to-morrow forenoon. The rocks behind the tower, mind—t’other side of the coast-guard houses. You’ll see me land from my boat.”
“I’ll not fail,” said the other. “I can bring a gun—moryah, I’m shooting at say-gulls.”
“They ain’t much need of that,” responded The O’Mahony. “You might git stopped an’ questioned. There’ll be guns enough. Of course, the takin’ of the tower’ll be as easy as rollin’ off a log. The thing’ll be to hold it afterward.”
“We’ll howld whatever we take, sir, all Ireland over,” said Major Lynch, with enthusiasm.
“I hope so! Good-bye. Mind, eleven sharp,” was the response, and the two men separated.
The O’Mahony did not wait for the finish of the game of ball, but sauntered out of the alley through the end door, walked to his car, and set off direct for Toome. At this place he decided to drive on to Dunmanway station. Dismissing the carman at the door, and watching his departure, he walked over to the hotel, joined the waiting Malachy, and soon was well on his jolting way back to Muirisc.
Curiously enough, the bearing of Linsky’s return upon his own personal fortunes and safety bore a very small part in The O’Mahony’s meditations, as he clung to his seat over the rough homeward road. All that might take care of itself, and he pushed it almost contemptuously aside in his mind. What he did ponder upon unceasingly, and with growing distrust, was the suspicion with which the manner of the man’s offer to deliver messages had inspired him.