The fair-weather promise of the crimson sunset was not kept. The morning broke bloodshot and threatening, with dark, jagged storm-clouds scudding angrily across the sky, and a truculent unrest moving the waters of the bay to lash out at the rocks, and snarl in rising murmurs among themselves.
Every soul in Muirisc came soon enough to share this disquietude with the elements. Such evil tidings as these, that The O’Mahony was quitting the country, seemed veritably to take to themselves wings. The village, despite the fact that the fishing season had not yet arrived, and that there was nothing else to do, could not lie abed on such a morning, much less sleep. Even the tiniest children, routed out from their nests of straw close beside the chimney by the unwonted bustle, saw that something was the matter.
Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony heard the intelligence at a somewhat later hour, even as she dallied with that second cup of coffee, which, in her own phrase, put a tail to the breakfast. It was brought to her by a messenger from the convent, who came to say that the Ladies of the Hostage’s Tears desired her immediate presence upon an urgent matter. Mrs. Fergus easily enough put two and two together, as she donned her bonnet and broché shawl. It was The O’Mahony’s departure that was to be discussed, and the nuns were right in calling that important. She looked critically over the irregular walls of the castle, as she passed it on her way to the convent. Here she had been born; here she had lived in peace and plenty, after her brother’s death, until the heir from America came to turn her out. Who knew? Perhaps she was to go back again, after all. Mrs. Fergus agreed that the news was highly important.
The first glance which she threw about her, after she had been ushered in the reception-hall, revealed to her that not even she had guessed the full importance of what was toward.
The three nuns sat on their accustomed bench at one side of the fire, and behind them, in his familiar chimney-corner, palsied old Father Harrington lolled and half-dozed over the biscuit he was nibbling to stay his stomach after mass. At the table, before a formidable array of papers, was seated Cormac O’Daly, and at his side sat the person whose polite name seemed to be Diarmid MacEgan, but whom Muirisc knew and delighted in as Jerry. Mrs. Fergus made a mental note of surprise at seeing him seated in such company, and then carried her gaze on to cover the principal personage in the room. It was The O’Mahony, looking very grave and preoccupied, and who stood leaning against the chimney-mantel like a proprietor, who welcomed her with a nod and motioned her to a seat.
It was he, too, who broke the silence which solemnly enveloped the conference.
“Cousin Maggie,” he said, in explanation, to her, “we’ve got together this little family party so early in the mornin’ for the reason that time is precious. I’m goin’ away—for my health—in an hour or two, an’ there are things to be arranged before I go. I may be away for years; maybe I sha’n’t ever come back.”
“Sure the suddenness of it’s fit to take one’s breath away!” Mrs. Fergus exclaimed, and put her plump white hand to her bosom. “I’ve nerves that bad, O’Mahony,” she added.
“Yes, it is a sudden sort of spurt,” he assented.
“And it’s your health, you say! Sure, I used to look on you as the mortial picture of a grand, strong man.”
“You can’t always tell by looks,” said The O’Mahony, gravely. “But—the point’s this. I’m leaving O’Daly and Jerry here, as sort o’ joint bosses of the circus, during my absence. Daly is to be ringmaster, so to speak, while Jerry’ll be in the box-office, and kind o’ keep an eye to the whole show, generally.”
“I lamint, sir, that I’m not able to congratulate you on the felicity of your mettyphor,” said Cor-mac O’Daly, whose swart, thin-visaged little face wore an expression more glum than ever.
“At any rate, you git at my meaning. I have signed two powers of attorney, drawn up by O’Daly here as a lawyer, which gives them power to run things for me, while I’m away. Everything is set out in the papers, straight and square. I’m leaving my will, too, with O’Daly, an’ that I wanted specially to speak to you about. I’ve got just one heir in this whole world, an’ that’s your little gal, Katie. P’r’aps it’ll be as well not to say anything to her about it, but I want you all to know. An’ I want you an’ her to move back into my house, an live there jest as you did afore I come. I’ve spoken to Mrs. Sullivan about it—she’s as good as a farrow cow in a family—an’ she’ll stay right along with you, an’ look after things. An’ Jerry here, he’ll see that your wheels are kept greased—financially, I mean—an’—I guess that’s about all. Only lookout for that little gal o’ yours as well as you know how—that’s all. An’ I wish—I wish you’d send her over to me, to my house, in half an hour or so—jest to say good-bye.”
The O’Mahony’s voice had trembled under the suspicion of a quaver at the end. He turned now, abruptly, took up his hat from the table, and left the room, closely followed by Jerry. O’Daly rose as if to accompany them, hesitated for a moment, and then seated himself again.
The mother superior had heretofore preserved an absolute silence. She bent her glance now upon Mrs. Fergus, and spoke slowly:
“Ah, thin, Margaret O’Mahony,” she said, “d’ye mind in your day of good fortune that, since the hour you were born, ye’ve been the child of our prayers and the object of our ceaseless intercessions?”
Mrs. Fergus put out her rounded lower lip a little and, rising from her chair, walked slowly over to the little cracked mirror on the wall, to run a correcting finger over the escalloped line of her crimps.
“Ay,” she said at last, “I mind many things bechune me and you—not all of thim prayers either.”
While Mrs. Sullivan and Jerry were hard at work packing the scant wardrobe and meager personal belongings of the master for his journey, and the greater part of the population of Muirisc stood clustered on the little quay, watching the Hen Hawk, bemoaning their own impending bereavement, and canvassing the incredible good luck of Malachy, who was to be the companion in this voyage to unknown parts—while the wind rose outside, and the waters tumbled, and the sky grew overcast with the sullen menace of a winter storm—The O’Mahony walked slowly, hand in hand with little Kate, through the deserted churchyard.
The girl had been weeping, and the tears still blurred her eyes and stained her red cheeks with woe-begone smudges. She clung to her companion’s hand, and pressed her head ever and again against his arm, but words she had none. The man walked with his eyes bent on the ground and his lips tightly closed together. So the two strolled in silence till they had passed out from the place of tombs, and, following a path which wound its way in ascent through clumps of budding furze and miniature defiles among the rocks, had gained the summit of the cliff-wall, under whose shelter the hamlet of Muirisc had for ages nestled. Here they halted, looking down upon the gray ruins of castle, church and convent, upon thatched cottage roofs, the throng on the quay, the breakers’ line of foam against the rocks, and the darkened expanse of white-capped waters beyond.
“Don’t take on so, sis, any more; that’s a good gal,” said The O’Mahony, at last, drawing the child’s head to his side, and gently stroking her black hair. “It ain’t no good, an’ it breaks me all up. One thing I’m glad of: It’s going to be rough outside. It seems to me I couldn’t ‘a’ stood it to up an’ sail off in smooth, sunshiny weather. The higher she rolls the better I’ll like it. It’s the same as havin’ somethin’ to bite on, when you’ve got the toothache.”
Kate, for answer, rubbed her head against his sleeve, but said nothing.
After a long pause, he went on: “’Tain’t as if I was goin’ to be gone forever an’ a day. Why, I may be poppin’ in any minit, jest when you least expect it. That’s why I want you to study your lessons right along, every day, so ’t when I turn up you’ll be able to show off A number one. Maybe you’re bankin’ on my not bein’ able to tell whether your book learnin’ is ‘all wool an’ a yard wide’ or not. I didn’t get much of a show at school, I know. ’Twas ‘root hog or die’ with me when I was a boy. But I’m jest a terror at askin’ questions. Why, I’ve busted up whole schools afore now, puttin’ conundrums to ’m that even the school-ma’ams couldn’t answer. So you look out for me when I come.” The gentle effort at cheerfulness bore fruit not after its kind. Kate’s little breast began to heave, and she buried her face against his coat.
The O’Mahony looked wistfully down upon the village and the bay, patting the child’s shoulder in silent token of sympathy. Then an idea occurred to him. With his finger under her chin, he lifted Kate’s face till her glance met his.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, with animation, “have you got so you can write pritty good?”
The girl nodded her head, and looked away.
“Why, then, look here,” he exclaimed, heartily, “what’s the matter with your writin’ me real letters, say every few weeks, tellin’ me all that’s goin’ on, an’ keepin’ me posted right up to date? Why, that’s jest splendid! It’ll be almost the same as if I wasn’t away at all. Eh, won’t it, skeezucks, eh?” He playfully put his arm around her shoulder, and they began the descent of the path. The suggestion had visibly helped to lighten her little heart, though she had said not a word.
“Oh, yes,” he went on, “an’ another thing I wanted to say: It ain’t a thing that you must ever ask about—or ought to know anything about it—but we went out yisterday an’ made fools of ourselves, an’ if I hadn’t had the luck of a brindled heifer, we’d all been in jail to-day. Of course, I don’t know for certain, but I shouldn’t wonder if my luck had something to do with a—what d’ye call it?—yes, cathach—that we toted along with us. Well, I’m goin’ to turn that box over for you to keep, when we git down to the house. I wouldn’t open if it I was you—it ain’t a pritty sight for a little gal—just a few dead men’s bones—but the box itself is all right, an’ it can’t do you no harm, to say the least. An’, moreover—why, here it is in my pocket—here’s a ring we found on his thumb—cur’ous enough—that you must keep for me, too. That makes it like what we read about in the story-books, eh? A ring that the beauteous damsel, with the hay-colored hair, sends to Alonzo when she gets in trouble, eh, sis?”
The child took the ring—a quaintly shaped thin band of gold, with a carved precious stone of golden-brownish hue—and put it in her pocket. Still she said nothing.
At ten in the forenoon, in the presence of all Muirisc, The O’Mahony at last gently pushed his way through the throng of keening old women and excited younger friends, and stepped over the gunwale upon the deck, and Jerry and O’Daly restrained those who would have followed him. He had forced his face into a half-smile, to which he clung resolutely almost to the end. He had offered many parting injunctions: to work hard and drink little; to send the children to school; to keep an absolute silence to all outsiders, whether from Skull, Goleen, Crookhaven, or elsewhere, concerning him and his departure—and many other things. He had shaken hands a hundred times across the narrow bar of water between the boat and pier; and now the men in the dingey out in front had the hawser taut, and the Hen Hawk was moving under its strain, when a shrill cry raised itself above the general clamor of lamentation and farewells.
At that moment of the vessel’s stirring, little Kate O’Mahony broke from the group in which her mother and the nuns stood dignifiedly apart, and ran wildly to the pier’s edge, where Jerry caught and for the moment held her, struggling, over the widening chasm between the boat and the quay. Her power to speak had come at last.
“Take me with you, O’Mahony!” she cried, fighting like a wild thing to free herself. “Oh, take me with you! You promised! You promised! Take me with you!”
It was then that The O’Mahony’s face lost, in a flash, its perfunctory smile. He half stretched out his hand—then swung himself on his heel and marched to the prow of the vessel. He did not look back again upon Muirisc.
An hour later a police-car, bearing five armed men, halted at the point on the mountain-road from Durrus where Muirisc comes first in view. The constables, gazing out upon the broad expanse of Dunmanus Bay, saw on the distant water-line a yawl-rigged coasting vessel, white against the stormy sky. Some chance whim suggested to their minds an interest in this craft.
But when they descended into Muirisc they could not find a soul who had the remotest notion of what a yawl-rig meant, much less of the identity of the lugger which, even as they spoke, had passed out of sight.
In the parish of Kilmoe—which they pronounce with a soft prolonged “moo-h,” like the murmuring call of one of their little bright-eyed, black-coated cows—the inhabitants are wont to say that the next parish is America.
It is an ancient and sterile and storm-beaten parish, this Kilmoe, thrust out in expiation of some forgotten sin or other to exist beyond the pale of human companionship. Its sons and daughters, scattered in tiny, isolated hamlets over its barren area, hear never a stranger’s voice—and their own speech is slow and low of tone because the real right to make a noise there belongs to the shrieking gulls and the wild, west wind and the towering, foam-fanged waves, which dashed themselves, in tireless rivalry with the thunder, against its cliffs.
Slow, too, in growth and ripening are the wits of the men of Kilmoe. They must have gray hairs before they are accounted more than boys; and when, from sheer old age they totter into the grave, the feeling of the parish is that they have been untimely cut off just as they were beginning to get their brains in fair working: order. Very often these aged men, if they dally and loiter on the way to the tomb in the hope of becoming still wiser, are given a sharp and peremptory push forward by starvation. It would not do for the men of Kilmoe to know too much. If they did, they would all go somewhere else to live—and then what would become of their landlord?
Kilmoe once had a thriving and profitable industry, whereby a larger population than it now contains kept body and soul together in more intimate and comfortable relations than at present exist. The outlay involved in this industry was very small, and the returns, though not governed by any squalid, modern law of percentages, were, on the whole, large.
It was all very simple. Whenever a stormy, wind-swept night set in, the men of Kilmoe tied a lighted lantern on the neck of a cow, and drove the animal to walk along the strand underneath the sea-cliffs. This light, rising and sinking with the movements of the cow, bore a quaint and interesting resemblance to the undulations of an illuminated buoy or boat, rocked on gentle waves; and strange seafaring crafts bent their course in confidence toward it, until they were undeceived. Then the men of Kilmoe would sally forth, riding the tumbling breakers with great bravery and address, in their boats of withes and stretched skin, and enter into possession of all the stranded strangers’ goods and chattels. As for such strangers as survived the wreck, they were sometimes sold into slavery; more often they were merely knocked on the head. Thus Kilmoe lived much more prosperously than in these melancholy latter days of dependence upon a precarious potato crop.
In every family devoted to industrial pursuits there is one member who is more distinguished for attention to the business than the others, and upon whom its chief burdens fall. This was true of the O’Mahonys, who for many centuries controlled and carried on the lucrative occupation above described, on their peninsula of Ivehagh. There were branches of the sept stationed in the more inland sea-castles of Rosbrin, Ardintenant, Leamcon and Ballydesmond on the one side, and of Dunbeacon, Dunmanus and Muirisc on the other, who did not expend all their energies upon this, their genuine business, but took many vacations and indefinitely extended holiday trips, for the improvement of their minds and the gratification of their desire to whip the neighboring O’Driscolls, O’Sullivans, O’Heas and O’Learys out of their boots. The record of these pleasure excursions, in which sometimes the O’Mahonys returned with great booty and the heads of their enemies on pikes, and some other times did not come home at all, fills all the pages of the Psalter of Rosbrin, beside occupying a good deal of space in the Annals of Innisfallen and of the Four Masters, and needs not be enlarged upon here.
But it is evident that that gentleman of the family who, from choice or sense of duty, lived in Kilmoe, must, have pursued the legitimate O’Mahony vocation very steadily, without any frivolous interruptions or the waste of time in visiting his neighbors. The truth is that he had no neighbors, and nothing else under the sun with which to occupy his mind but the affairs of the sea. This the observer will readily conclude when he stands upon the promontory marked on the maps as Three-Castle Head, with the whole world-dividing Atlantic at his feet, and looks over at the group of ruined and moss-grown keeps which give the place its name.
“Oh-h! Look there now, Murphy!” cried a tall and beautiful young woman, who stood for the first time on this lofty sea-wall, viewing the somber line of connected castles. “Sure, here lived the true O’Mahony of the Coast of White Foam! Why, man, what were we at Muirisc but poor crab-catchers compared wid him?”
She spoke in a tone of awed admiration, between long breaths of wonderment, and her big eyes of Irish gray glowed from their cover of sweeping lashes with surprised delight. She had taken off her hat—a black straw hat, with a dignifiedly broad brim bound in velvet, and enriched by a plume of the same somber hue—to save it from the wind, which blew stiffly here; and this bold sea-wind, nothing loth, frolicked boisterously with her dark curls instead. She put her hand on her companion’s shoulder for steadiness, and continued the rapt gaze upon this crumbling haunt of the dead and forgotten sea-lords.
Twelve years had passed since, as a child of eight, Kate O’Mahony had screamed out in despair after the departing Hen Hawk. That vessel had never cleft the waters of Dunmanus since, and the fleeting years had converted the memory of its master, into a kind of heroic legendary myth, over which the elders brooded fondly, but which the youngsters thought of as something scarcely less remote than the Firbolgs, or the builders of the “Danes’ forts” on the furze-crowned hills about.
But these same years, though they turned the absent into shadows, had made of Kate a very lovely and complete reality. It would be small praise to speak of her as the most beautiful girl on the peninsula, since there is no other section of Ireland so little favored in that respect, to begin with, and for the additional reason that whatever maidenly comeliness there is existent there is habitually shrouded from view by close-drawn shawls and enveloping hoods, even on the hottest of summer noon-days. For all the stray traveller sees of young and pretty faces in Ivehagh, he might as well be in the heart of the vailed (sp.) Orient.
And even with Kate, potential Lady of Muirisc though she was, this fashion of a hat was novel. It seemed only yesterday since she had emerged from the chrysalis of girlhood—girlhood with a shawl over its head, and Heaven only knows what abysses of ignorant shyness and stupid distrust inside that head. And, alas! it seemed but a swiftly on-coming to-morrow before this new freedom was to be lost again, and the hat exchanged forever for a nun’s vail.
If Kate had known natural history better, she might have likened her lot to that of the May-fly, which spends two years underground in its larva state hard at work preparing to be a fly, and then, when it at last emerges, lives only for an hour, even if it that long escapes the bill of the swallow or the rude jaws of the trout. No such simile drawn from stonyhearted Nature’s tragedies helped her to philosophy. She had, perhaps, a better refuge in the health and enthusiasm of her own youth.
In the company of her ancient servitor, Murphy, she was spending the pleasant April days in visiting the various ruins of The O’Mahony’s on Ivehagh. Many of these she viewed now for the first time, and the delight of this overpowered and kept down in her mind the reflection that perhaps she was seeing them all for the last time as well.
“But how, in the name of glory, did they get up and down to their boats, Murphy?” she asked, at last, strolling further out toward the edge to catch the full sweep of the cliff front, which rises abruptly from the beach below, sheer and straight, clear three hundred feet.
“There’s never a nearer landing-place, thin, than where we left our boat, a half-mile beyant here,” said Murphy. “Faith, miss, ’tis the belafe they went up and down be the aid of the little people. ’T is well known that, on windy nights, there do be grand carrin’s-on hereabouts. Sure, in the lake forninst us it was that Kian O’Mahony saw the enchanted woman with the shape on her of a horse, and died of the sight. Manny’s the time me own father related to me that same.”
“Oh, true; that would be the lake of the legend,” said Kate. “Let us go down to it, Murphy. I’ll dip me hand for wance in water that’s been really bewitched.”
The girl ran lightly down the rolling side of the hill, and across the rock-strewn hollows and mounds which stretched toward the castellated cliff. The base of the third and most inland tower was washed by a placid fresh-water pond, covering an area of several acres, and heavily fringed at one end with rushes. As she drew near a heron suddenly rose from the reeds, hung awkwardly for a moment with its long legs dangling in the air, and then began a slow, heavy flight seaward. On the moment Kate saw another even more unexpected sight—the figure of a man on the edge of the lake, with a gun raised to his shoulder, its barrel following the heron’s clumsy course. Involuntarily she uttered a little warning shout to the bird, then stood still, confused and blushing. Stiff-jointed old Murphy was far behind.
The stranger had heard her, if the heron had not. He lowered his weapon, and for a moment gazed wonderingly across the water at this unlooked-for apparition. Then, with his gun under his arm, he turned and walked briskly toward her. Kate cast a searching glance backward for Murphy in vain, and her intuitive movement to draw a shawl over her head was equally fruitless. The old man was still somewhere behind the rocks, and she had only this citified hat and even that not on her head. She could see that the advancing sportsman was young and a stranger.
He came up close to where she stood, and lifted his cap for an instant in an off-hand way. Viewed thus nearly, he was very young, with a bright, fresh-colored face and the bearing and clothes of a gentleman, “I’m glad you stopped me, now that I think of it,” he said, with an easy readiness of speech. “One has no business to shoot that kind of bird; but I’d been tying about here for hours, waiting for something better to turn up, till I was in a mood to bang at anything that came along.”
He offered this explanation with a nonchalant half-smile, as if confident ol its prompt acceptance. Then his face took on a more serious look, as he glanced a second time at her own flushed countenance.
“I hope I haven’t been trespassing,” he added, under the influence of this revised impression.
Kate was, in truth, frowning at him, and there were no means by which he could guess that it was the effect of nervous timidity rather than vexation.
“’Tis not my land,” she managed to say at last, and looked back again for Murphy.
“No—I didn’t think it was anybody’s land,” he remarked, essaying another propitiatory smile. “They told me at Goleen that I could shoot as much as I liked. They didn’t tell me, though, that there was nothing to shoot.”
The young man clearly expected conversation; and Kate, stealing further flash-studies of his face, began to be conscious that his manner and talk were not specialty different from those of any nice girl of her own age. She tried to think of something amiable to say.
“’Tis not the sayson for annything worth shooting,” she said, and then wondered if it was an impertinent remark.
“I know that,” he replied. “But I’ve nothing else to do, just at the moment, and you can keep yourself walking better if you’ve got a gun, and then, of course, in a strange country there’s always the chance that something curious may turn up to shoot. Fact is, I didn’t care so much after all whether I shot anything or not. You see, castles are new things to me—we don’t grow ’em where I came from—and it’s fun to me to mouse around among the stones and walls and so on. But this is the wildest and lonesomest thing I’ve run up against yet. I give you my word, I’d been lying here so long, watching those mildewed old towers there and wondering what kind of folks built ’em and lived in ’em, that when I saw you galloping down the rocks here—upon my word, I half thought it was all a fairy story. You know the poor people really believe in that sort of thing, here. Several of them have told me so.”
Kate actually felt herself smiling upon the young man. “I’m afraid you can’t always believe them,” she said. “Some of them have deludthering ways with strangers—not that they mane anny harm by it, poor souls!”
“But a young man down below here, to-day,” continued the other—“mind you, a young-man—told me solemnly that almost every night he heard with his own ears the shindy kicked up by the ghosts on the hill back of his house, you know, inside one of those ringed Danes’ forts, as they call ’em. He swore to it, honest Injun.”
The girl started in spite of herself, stirred vaguely by the sound of this curious phrase with which the young man had finished his remarks. But nothing definite took shape in her thoughts concerning it> and she answered him freely enough:
“Ah, well, I’ll not say he intinded desate. They’re a poetic people, sir, living here alone among the ruins of what was wance a grand country, and now is what you see it, and they imagine visions to thimselves. ’Tis in the air, here. Sure, you yourself”—she smiled again as she spoke—“credited me with being a fairy. Of course,” she added, hastily, “you had in mind the legend of the lake, here.”
“How do you mean—legend?” asked the young man, in frank ignorance.
“Sure, here in these very waters is a woman, with the shape of a horse, who appears to people, and when they see her, they—they die, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s a good deal, I should think,” he responded, lightly. “No, I hadn’t heard of that before; and, besides, you—why, you came down the hill, there, skipping like a lamb on the mountains, not a bit like a horse.”
The while Kate turned his comparison over in her mind to judge whether she liked it or not, the young man shifted his gun to his shoulder, as if to indicate that the talk had lasted long enough. Then she swiftly blamed herself for having left this signal to him.
“I’ll not be keeping you,” she said, hurriedly.
“Oh, bless you—not at all!” he protested. “Only I was afraid I was keeping you. You see, time hangs pretty heavy on my hands just now, and I’m tickled to death to have anybody to talk to. Of course, I like to go around looking at the castles here, because the chances are that some of my people some time or other helped build ’em. I know my father was born somewhere in this part of County Cork.”
Kate sniffed at him.
“Manny thousands of people have been born here,” she said, with dignity, “but it doesn’t follow that they had annything to do with these castles.” The young man attached less importance to the point.
“Oh, of course not,” he said, carelessly. “All I go by is the probability that, way back somewhere, all of us O’Mahonys were related to one another. But for that matter, so were all the Irish who—”
“And are you an O’Mahony, thin?”
Kate was looking at him with shining eyes—and he saw now that she was much taller and more beautiful than he had thought before.
“That’s my name,” he said, simply.
“An O’Mahony of County Cork?”
“Well—personally I’m an O’Mahony of Houghton County, Michigan, but my father was from around here, somewhere.”
“Do you hear that, Murphy?” she said, instinctively turning to the faithful companion of all her out-of-door life. But there was no Murphy in sight.
Kate stared blankly about her for an instant, before she remembered that Murphy had never rejoined her at the lakeside. And now she thought she could hear some vague sound of calling in the distance, rising above the continuous crash of the breakers down below.
“Oh, something has happened to him!” she cried, and started running wildly back again. The young man followed close enough to keep her in sight, and at a distance of some three hundred yards came up to her, as she knelt beside the figure of an old peasant seated with his back against a rock.
Something had happened to Murphy. His ankle had turned on a stone, and he could not walk a step.
Oh, what’s to be done now?” asked Kate, rising to her feet and casting a puzzled look about her. “Sure, me wits are abroad entirely.”
No answer seemed forthcoming. As far inland as the eye could stretch, even to the gray crown of Dunkelly, no sign of human habitation was to be seen. The jutting headland of the Three Castles on which she stood—with the naked primeval cliffs; the roughly scattered boulders framed in scrub-furze too stunted and frightened in the presence of the sea to venture upon blossoms; the thin ashen-green grass blown flat to earth in the little sheltered nooks where alone its roots might live—presented the grimmest picture of desolation she had ever seen. An undersized sheep had climbed the rocks to gaze upon the intruders—an animal with fleece of such a snowy whiteness that it looked like an imitation baa-baa from a toy-shop—and Kate found herself staring into its vacuous face with sympathy, so helplessly empty was her own mind of suggestions.
“’Tis two Oirish miles to the nearest house,” said Murphy, in a despondent tone.
Kate turned to the young man, and spoke wistfully:
“If you’ll stop here, I’ll go for help,” she said.
The young man from Houghton County laughed aloud.
“If there’s any going to be done, I guess you’re not the one that’ll do it,” he answered. “But, first of all, let’s see where we stand exactly. How did you come here, anyhow?”
“We rowed around from—from our home—a long way distant in that direction,” pointing vaguely toward Dunmanus Bay, “and our boat was left there at the nearest landing point, half a mile from here.”
“Ah, well, that’s all right,” said the young man. “It would take an hour to get anybody over here to help, and that would be clean waste of time, because we don’t need any help. I’ll just tote him over on my back, all by my little self.”
“Ah—you’d never try to do the likes of that!” deprecated the girl.
“Why not?” he commented, cheerfully—and then, with a surprise which checked further protest, she saw him tie his game-bag round his waist so that it hung to the knee, get Murphy seated up on the rock against which he had learned, and then take him bodily on his back, with the wounded foot comfortably upheld and steadied inside the capacious leathern pouch.
“‘Why not,’ eh?” he repeated, as he straightened himself easily under the burden; “why he’s as light as a bag of feathers. That’s one of the few advantages of living on potatoes. Now you bring along the gun—that’s a good girl—and we’ll fetch up at the boat in no time. You do the steering, Murphy. Now, then, here we go!”
The somber walls of the Three Castles looked down in silence upon this strange procession as it filed past under their shadows—and if the gulls which wheeled above and about the moss-grown turrets described the spectacle later to the wraiths of the dead-and-gone O’Mahonys and to the enchanted horse-shaped woman in the lake, there must have been a general agreement that the parish of Kilmoe had seen never such another sight before, even in the days of the mystic Tuatha de Danaan.
The route to the boat abounded to a disheartening degree in rough and difficult descents, and even more trying was the frequent necessity for long détours to avoid impossible barriers of rock. Moreover, Murphy turned out to be vastly heavier than he had seemed at the outset. Hence the young man, who had freely enlivened the beginning of the journey with affable chatter, gradually lapsed into silence; and at last, when only a final ridge of low hills separated them from the strand, confessed that he would like to take off his coat. He rested for a minute or two after this had been done, and wiped his wet brow.
“Who’d think the sun could be so hot in April?” he said. “Why, where I come from, we’ve just begun to get through sleighing.”
“What is it you’d be slaying now?” asked Kate, innocently. “We kill our pigs in the late autumn.”
The young man laughed aloud as he took Murphy once more on his back.
“Potato-bugs, chiefly,” was his enigmatic response.
She pondered fruitlessly upon this for a brief time, as she followed on with the gun and coat. Then her thoughts centered themselves once more upon the young stranger himself, who seemed only a boy to look at, yet was so stout and confident of himself, and had such a man’s way of assuming control of things, and doing just what he wanted to do and what needed to be done.
Muirisc did not breed that sort of young man. He could not, from his face, be more than three or four and twenty—and at that age all the men she had known were mere slow-witted, shy and awkward louts of boys, whom their fathers were quite free to beat with a stick, and who never dreamed of doing anything on their own mental initiative, except possibly to “boo” at the police or throw stones through the windows of a boycotted shop, Evidently there were young men in the big unknown outside world who differed immeasurably from this local standard.
Oh, that wonderful outside world, which she was never going to see! She knew that it was sinful and godless and pressed down and running over with abominations, because the venerable nuns of the Hostage’s Tears had from the beginning told her so, but she was conscious of a new and less hostile interest in it, all the same, since it produced young men of this novel type. Then she began to reflect that he was like Robert Emmett, who was the most modern instance of a young man which the limits of convent literature permitted her to know about, only his hair was cut short, and he was fair, and he smiled a good deal, and—And lo, here they were at the boat! She woke abruptly from her musing day-dream.
The tide had gone out somewhat, and left the dingey stranded on the dripping sea-weed. The young man seated Murphy on a rock, untied the game-bag and put on his coat, and then in the most matter-of-fact way tramped over the slippery ooze to the boat, pushed it off into the water and towed it around by the chain to the edge of a little cove, whence one might step over its side from a shore of clean, dry sand. He then, still as if it were all a matter of course, lifted Murphy and put him in the bow of the boat, and asked Kate to sit in the stern and steer.
“I can talk to you, you know, now that your sitting there,” he said, with his foot on the end of the oar-seat, after she had taken the place indicated. “Oh—wait a minute! We were forgetting the gun and bag.”
He ran lightly back to where these things lay upon the strand, and secured them; then, turning, he discovered that Murphy had scrambled over to the middle seat, taken the oars, and pushed the boat off. Suspecting nothing, he walked briskly back to the water’s edge.
“Shove her in a little,” he said, “and I’ll hold her while you get back again into the bow. You mustn’t think of rowing, my good man.”
But Murphy showed no sign of obedience. He kept his burnt, claw-shaped hands clasped on the motionless, dipped oars, and his eager, bird-like eyes fastened upon the face of his young mistress. As for Kate, she studied the bottom of the boat with intentness, and absently stirred the water over the boat-side with her finger-tips.
“Get her in, man! Don’t you hear?” called the stranger, with a shadow of impatience, over the six or seven feet of water which lay between him and the boat. “Or you explain it to him,” he said to Kate; “perhaps he doesn’t understand me—tell him I’m going to row!”
In response to this appeal, Kate lifted her head, and hesitatingly opened her lips to speak—but the gaunt old boatman broke in upon her confused silence:
“Ah, thin—I understand well enough,” he shouted, excitedly, “an’ I’m thankful to ye, an’ the longest day I live I’ll say a prayer for ye—an’ sure ye’re a foine grand man, every inch of ye, glory be to the Lord—an’ it’s not manny w’u’d ’a’ done what ye did this day—and the blessin’ of the Lord rest an ye; but—” here he suddenly dropped his high shrill, swift-chasing tones, and added in quite another voice—“if it’s the same to you, sir, we’ll go along home as we are.”
“What nonsense!” retorted the young man. “My time doesn’t matter in the least—and you’re not fit to row a mile—let alone a long distance.”
“It’s not with me fut I’ll be rowin’,” replied Murphy, rounding his back for a sweep of the oars.
“Can’t you stop him, Miss—eh—young lady!” the young man implored from the sands.
Hope flamed up in his breast at sight of the look she bent upon Murphy, as she leaned forward to speak—and then sank into plumbless depths. Perhaps she had said something—he could not hear, and it was doubtful if the old boatman could have heard either—for on the instant he had laid his strength on the oars, and the boat had shot out into the bay like a skater over the glassy ice.
It was a score of yards away before the young man from Houghton County caught his breath. He stood watching it—be it confessed—with his mouth somewhat open and blank astonishment written all over his ruddy, boyish face. Then the flush upon his pink cheeks deepened, and a sparkle came into his eyes, for the young lady in the boat had risen and turned toward him, and was waving her hand to him in friendly salutation. He swung the empty game-bag wildly about his head in answer, and then the boat darted out of view behind a jutting ridge of umber rocks, and he was looking at an unbroken expanse of gently heaving water—all crystals set on violet satin, under the April sun.
He sent a long-drawn sighing whistle of bewilderment after the vanished vision.
Not a word had been exchanged between the two in the boat until after Kate, yielding at the last moment to the temptation which had beset her from the first, waved that unspoken farewell to her new acquaintance and saw him a moment later abruptly cut out of the picture by the intervening rocks. Then she sat down again and fastened a glare of metallic disapproval, so to speak, upon Murphy. This, however, served no purpose, since the boatman kept his head sagaciously bent over his task, and rowed away like mad.
“I take shame for you, Murphy!” she said at last, with a voice as full of mingled anguish and humiliation as she could manage to make it.
“Is it too free I am with complete strangers?” asked the guileful Murphy, with the face of a trusting babe.
“’Tis the rudest and most thankless old man in all West Carbery that ye are!” she answered, sharply.
“Luk at that now!” said Murphy, apparently addressing the handles of his oars. “An’ me havin’ the intintion to burnin’ two candles for him this very night!”
“Candles is it! Murphy, once for all, ’t is a bad trick ye have of falling to talking about candles and ‘Hail Marys’ and such holy matters, whinever ye feel yourself in a corner—and be sure the saints like it no better than I do.”
The aged servitor rested for a moment upon his oars, and, being conscious that evasion was of no further use, allowed an expression of frankness to dominate his withered and weather-tanned face.
“Well, miss,” he said, “an’ this is the truth I’m tellin’ ye—‘t was not fit that he should be sailin’ in the boat wid you.”
Kate tossed her head impatiently.
“And how long are you my director in—in such matters as these, Murphy?” she asked, with irony.
The old man’s eyes glistened with the emotions which a sudden swift thought conjured up.
“How long?” he asked, with dramatic effect.
“Sure, the likes of me c’u’d be no directhor at all—but ’tis a dozen years since I swore to his honor, The O’Mahony himself, that I’d watch over ye, an’ protect ye, an’ keep ye from the lightest breath of harrum—an’ whin I meet him, whether it be the Lord’s will in this world or the nixt, I’ll go to him an’ I’ll take off me hat, an’ I’ll say: ‘Yer honor, what old Murphy putt his word to, that same he kep!’ An’ is it you, Miss Katie, that remimbers him that well, that ’u’d be blamin’ me for that same?”
“I don’t know if I’m so much blaming you, Murphy,” said Kate, much softened by both the matter and the manner of this appeal, “but ’tis different, wit’ this young man, himself an O’Mahony by name.”
“Faith, be the same token, ’tis manny thousands of O’Mahonys there are in foreign parts, I’m tould, an’ more thousands of ’em here at home, an’ if it’s for rowin’ ’em all on Dunmanus Bay ye’d be, on the score of their name, ’tis grand new boats we’d want.”
Kate smiled musingly.
“Did you mind, Murphy,” she asked, after a pause, “how like the sound of his speech was to The O’Mahony’s?”
“That I did not!” said Murphy, conclusively.
“Ah, ye’ve no ears, man! I was that flurried at the time, I couldn’t think what it was—but now, whin it comes back to me, it was like talking to The O’Mahony himself. There was that one word, ‘onistinjun,’ that The O’Mahony had forever on his tongue. Surely you noticed that!”
“All Americans say that same,” Murphy explained carelessly. “’T is well known most of ’em are discinded from the Injuns. ’Tis that they m’ane.” It did not occur to Kate to question this bold ethno-philological proposition. She leant back in her seat at the stern, absent-mindedly toying with the ribbons of her hat, and watching the sky over Murphy’s head.
“Poor, dear old O’Mahony!” she sighed at last.
“Amin to that miss!” murmured the boatman, between strokes.
“’T is a year an’ more now, Murphy, since we had the laste sign in the world from him. Ah, wirra! I’m beginnin’ to be afraid dead ’tis he is!”
“Keep your heart, miss; keep your heart!” crooned the old boatman, in what had been for months a familiar phrase on his lips. “Sure no mortial man ever stepped fut on green sod that ’ud take more killin’ than our O’Mahony. Why, coleen asthore, wasn’t he foightin’ wid the French, against the Prooshians, an’ thin wid the Turkeys against the Rooshians, an’ bechune males, as ye’d say, didn’t he bear arms in Spain for the Catholic king, like the thunderin’ rare old O’Mahony that he is, an’ did ever so much as a scratch come to him—an’ him killin’ an’ destroyin’ thim by hundreds? Ah, rest aisy about him, Miss Katie!”
The two had long since exhausted, in their almost daily talks, every possible phase of this melancholy subject. It was now April of 1879, and the last word received from the absent chief had been a hastily scrawled note dispatched from Adrianople, on New Year’s Day of 1878—when the Turkish army, beaten finally at Plevna and decimated in the Schipka, were doggedly moving backward toward the Bosphorus. Since that, there had been absolute silence—and Kate and Murphy had alike, hoping against hope, come long since to fear the worst. Though each strove to sustain confidence in the other, there was no secret between their hearts as to what both felt.
“Murphy,” said Kate, rousing herself all at once from her reverie, “there’s something I’ve been keeping from you—and I can’t hold it anny longer. Do ye mind when Malachy wint away last winter?”
“Faith I do,” replied the boatman. (Malachy, be it explained, had followed The O’Mahony in all his wanderings up to the autumn of 1870, when, in a skirmish shortly after Sedan, he had lost an arm and, upon his release from the hospital, had been sent back to Muirisc.) “I mind that he wint to Amerriky.”
“Well, thin,” whispered Kate, bending forward as if the very waves had ears, “it’s just that he didn’t do. I gave him money, and I gave him the O’Mahony’s ring, and sint him to search the world over till he came upon his master, or his master’s grave—and I charged him to say only this: ‘Come back to Muirisc! ’Tis Kate O’Mahony wants you!’ And now no one knows this but me confessor and you.”
The boatman gazed earnestly into her face.
“An’ why for did ye say: ‘Come back?’” he asked.
“Ah thin—well—‘tis O’Daly’s hard d’alin’s wid the tinants, and the failure of the potatoes these two years and worse ahead and the birth of me little step-brother—and—”
“Answer me now, Katie darlint?” the old man adjured her, with glowing eyes and solemn voice. “Is it the convint ye’re afraid of for yoursilf? Is it of your own free will you’re goin’ to take your vows?”
The girl had answered this question more than once before, and readily enough. Now, for some reason which she could not have defined to herself, she looked down upon the gliding water at her side, and meditatively dipped her fingers into it, and let a succession of little waves fling their crests up into her sleeve—and said nothing at all.